ALEXANDER. 167

city Stagira, which he had caused to he demolished a little before, and restored all the citizens who were in ex- ile or slavery, to their habitations. As a place for the pursuit of their studies and exercises, he assigned the temple of the Nymphs, near Mieza, where, to this very day, they show you Aristotle's stone seats, and the shady walks which he was wont to frequent. It would appear that Alexander received from him not only his doctrines of Morals, and of Politics, but also something of those more abstruse and profound theories which these philoso- phers, by the very names they gave them,* professed to reserve for oral communication to the initiated, and did not allow many to become acquainted with. For when he was in Asia, and heard Aristotle had published some treatises of that kind, he wrote to him, using very plain language to him in behalf of philosophy, the following letter. " Alexander to Aristotle greeting. You have not done well to publish your books of oral doctrine ; for what is there now that we excel others in, if those things which we have been particularly instructed in be laid open tp all ? For my part, I assure you, I had rather ex- cel others in the knowledge of what is excellent, than in the extent of my power and dominion. Farewell." And Aristotle, soothing this passion for preeminence, speaks, in his excuse for himself, of these doctrines, as in fact both published and not published : as indeed, to say the truth, his books on metaphysics are written in a style which makes them useless for ordinary teaching, and in- structive only, in the way of memoranda, for those who have been already conversant in that sort of learning. Doubtless also it was to Aristotle, that he owed the in- clination he had, not to the theory only, but likewise to

• Acroamatica and Epoptica, Oral, call Esoteric doctrines. The Epop-

and Secret, were terras applied by tes was one who had been adtnitled

the Peripatetics to what we shonld to the Greater Mysteries.