Having retired to Mitylene, he soon afterward received an invitation from Philip of Macedonia to undertake the education of his son Alexander, then thirteen years old.  Aristotle willingly obeyed this summons; and retiring with his royal pupil to Mieza, a town southwest of Pella, imparted his instruction in the Nymphaeum, which he had arranged in imitation of Plato’s garden school.  Alexander remained with him three years, and was then called by his father to assume important State duties.  Whether Aristotle’s instruction continued after that is uncertain; but the two men remained fast friends, and there can be no doubt that much of the nobility, self-control, largeness of purpose, and enthusiasm for culture, which characterized Alexander’s subsequent career, were due to the teaching of the philosopher.  What Aristotle was in the world of thought, Alexander became in the world of action.

[Illustration:  ARISTOTLE.]

Aristotle remained in Macedonia ten years, giving instruction to young Macedonians and continuing his own studies.  He then returned to Athens, and opened a school in the peripatos, or promenade, of the Lyceum, the gymnasium of the foreign residents, a school which from its location was called the Peripatetic.  Here he developed a manifold activity.  He pursued all kinds of studies, logical, rhetorical, physical, metaphysical, ethical, political, and aesthetic, gave public (exoteric) and private (esoteric) instruction, and composed the bulk of the treatises which have made his name famous.  These treatises were composed slowly, in connection with his lectures, and subjected to frequent revision.  He likewise endeavored to lead an ideal social life with his friends and pupils, whom he gathered under a common roof to share meals and elevated converse in common.

Thus affairs went on for twelve fruitful years, and might have gone on longer, but for the sudden death of Alexander, his friend and patron.  Then the hatred of the Athenians to the conqueror showed itself in hostility to his old master, and sought for means to put him out of the way.  How hard it was to find a pretext for so doing is shown by the fact that they had to fix upon the poem which he had written on the death of his friend Hermias many years before, and base upon it—­as having the form of the paean, sacred to Apollo—­a charge of impiety.  Aristotle, recognizing the utter flimsiness of the charge, and being unwilling, as he said, to allow the Athenians to sin a second time against philosophy, retired beyond their reach to his villa at Chalcis in Euboea, where he died of stomach disease the year after (322).  In the later years of his life, the friendship between him and his illustrious pupil had, owing to certain outward circumstances, become somewhat cooled; but there never was any serious breach.  His body was carried to Stagira, which he had induced Philip to restore after it had been destroyed, and whose inhabitants therefore looked upon him as the founder of the city.  As such he received the religious honors accorded to heroes:  an altar was erected to him, at which an annual festival was celebrated in the month named after him.