168 ALEXANDER.

the practice of the art of medicine. For when any of his friends were sick, he would often prescribe them their course of diet, and medicines proper to their disease, as we may find in his epistles. He was naturally a great lover of all kinds of learning and reading ; and Onesicri- tus informs us, that he constantly laid Homer's Iliads, according to the copy corrected by Aristotle, called the casket copy, with his dagger under his pillow, declaring that he esteemed it a perfect portable treasure of all military virtue and knowledge. When he was in the upper Asia, being destitute of other books, he ordered Harpalus to send him some ; who furnished him with Philistus's History, a great many of the plays of Euripides, Sophocles, and iEschylus, and some dithyrambic odes, composed by Telestes and Philoxenus. For awhile he loved and cherished Aristotle no less, as he was wont to say himself, than if he had been his father, giving this reason for it, that as he had received life from the one, so the other had taught him to live well. But afterwards, upon some mistrust of him, yet not so great as to make him do him any hurt, his familiarity and friendly kindness .to him abated so much of its former force and affectionateness, as to make it evident he was alienated from him. How- ever, his violent thirst after and passion for learning, which were once implanted, still grew up with him, and never decayed; as appears by his veneration of Anax- archus, by the present of fifty talents which he sent to Xenocrates, and his particular care and esteem of Dan- damis and Calanus. "While Philip went on his expedition against the Byzan- tines, he left Alexander, then sixteen years old, his lieuten- ant in Macedonia, committing the charge of his seal to him; who, not to sit idle, reduced the rebellious Msedi, and having taken their chief town by storm, drove out the

barbarous inhabitants, and planting a colony of several