Form: Quote Commentary

ARISTOTLE: THOSE WITHOUT AGENCY ARE BEASTS TO BE RULED

From Alexander of Macedon by Peter Green

“He had the whole body of Greek civilized opinion

behind him. Euripides held that it was proper (eikos) for

‘barbarians’ to be subject to Greeks. Plato and Isocrates

both thought of all non-Hellenes as natural enemies who

could be enslaved or exterminated at will. Aristotle himself

regarded a war against barbarians as essentially j ust.48 Such

theories may well be dismissed as grotesque; but they are no

more grotesque than de Gobineau’s concept of the Aryan

superman. And grotesque or not, they have the power to

compel belief, and thus to affect men’s lives in the most

fundamental way. When Hitler exterminated the European

Jews, he based his actions, precisely, on the belief that

certain categories of mankind could be dismissed as sub-

human — that is, like Aristotle, he equated them with

beasts or plants.

For Aristotle, however, the brute or vegetable nature of

barbarians had a special quality, which must have struck a

responsive chord in his pupil. ‘No one,’ he wrote, ‘would

value existence for the pleasure of eating alone, or that of

sex . . . unless he were utterly servile’ (i.e. slave or bar-

barian). To such a person, on the other hand, it would

make no difference whether he were beast or man. The key example he cites is the Assyrian voluptuary Sardanapalus

(Assurbanipal): barbarians, it is clear, are to be despised

above all because they live exclusively through and for the senses.

The purely hedonistic life, in fact, was something which

Aristotle taught his pupil to regard as beneath contempt.

Such a doctrine must have had a strong appeal for Alex-

ander, who always placed a premium on self-control and

self-denial (at least during the earlier stages of his career),

and whose enthusiastic, impressionable nature reveals a

strong hero-worshipping streak. (It made no odds to him

whether his hero was mythical or contemporary: he may

have modelled himself on Achilles, but he was equally

ready to adopt the quick-stepping gait of his old tutor

Leonidas.) The Alexander who ate so sparingly, who gave

away the spoils of war with such contemptuous generosity,

keeping little for himself, and who said he was never more

conscious of his own mortality than ‘during the time he lay

with a woman or slept’50 — this, surely, was a man whose

debt to Aristotle’s teaching and influence was fundamental.

For good or ill, the years at Mieza left a permanent mark

on him.

Aristotle’s advice on the respective treatment of Greeks

and barbarians is, of course, capable of a more mundane

interpretation: that in order to get the best out of those

whom one intends to exploit, one must humour them far

enough to win their cooperation. Greeks required to be

treated as equals, to have their sense of independence –

however illusory -— fostered with the greatest care. Asiatics,

on the other hand, would only respond to, or respect, a

show of rigorous authoritarianism — the Victorian district

officer’s creed. Whether Aristotle intended this lesson or not,

it was one that Alexander learnt all too well. As we shall

see, he applied it to every individual or group with whom he

subsequently came in contact.