Mieza

Now back to Pella, where the boy who wanted to know about the roads was about to be handed a teacher.

There was a place a few hours' ride from Pella called Mieza, with shaded walks and cold springs, and a boy of about 13 was sent out there to be taught.

He went with a small circle of well-born boys his own age, sons of the Companions, and they stayed some years.

The man Philip had brought in to teach them had grown up on the northeastern edge of the Greek world and had studied twenty years in Athens, and his name was Aristotle.

What passed between the two of them out there is mostly guesswork now.

The letters people later claimed to have are forgeries.

What can be said is that the boy came back out of Mieza with a particular habit of mind, and it stayed with him.

He wanted to know how things actually worked, and he wanted specimens.

Yet another important figure of Alexander's generation was Cassander, who would reign over Macedon for twenty years after Alexander's death.

And there were other young nobles educated around Alexander at Mieza, where Aristotle's school worked almost like a kind of boarding school for the Macedonian elite.

Alexander is taught about many fields: philosophy, history, morals, logic, medicine, art, as well as mythology and literature.

He would have developed a passion for the works of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, which he knew very well.