The words are not those of the great king himself: they are at the best a paraphrase of the ideas expressed by him on the occasion; at the worst they are the free invention of an historian concerned only with having Alexander say what the situation seemed to him to demand. However that may be, they are a good account of the wonderful work which Alexander, as a boy and young man, saw his father accomplish for Macedon. "What a man we had to fight," said Demosthenes,[59] his great enemy. "For the sake of power and dominion he had an eye put out, his shoulder broken, an arm and a leg injured. Whatever limb fortune demanded, that he gave up, so that the remnant of his body might live in glory and honor." "Taking everything into account," says Theopompus,[60] the far from generous contemporary historian of his achievements, "Europe has never produced the like of Philip, the son of Amyntas." The court of Philip was rough and boorish. Revels, disgraced by drunkenness and debauchery, interrupted the king's wars and amours. In Pella men behaved like Centaurs and Læstrygonians, sneered the fastidious Athenians; and the frenzy which wine inspired in Philip, religion inspired in Olympias. In wild abandon she let herself be possessed with the spirit of the god, Dionysus, and roamed the hills at night in the company of other women equally intoxicated, brandishing the thyrsus and the "wreathèd snake," shouting with ecstasy. Hers was the religion which William Vaughn Moody, with poetic license, singled out in the splendid _Prelude_ to his _Masque of Judgment_ as characteristic of the world into which Christ was born. It was really abhorrent to the best Greek feeling, and was repressed with stern cruelty by Rome. Passion, fierce and generous, the main source of heroic action, was bred in the bone of Alexander. His imagination, naturally fervent, was fed by tales of his ancestor Achilles which he heard at his mother's knee, and fired by the vistas opened out to it by the exploits of his father. At thirteen Philip gave him Aristotle as his tutor, and during the formative years of his youth he studied poetry with this great teacher. The poetry was Greek, not Macedonian. In it were found the ideals of the people to which Alexander belonged in spirit and in blood, if not in nationality; thence came the ideas tinged with emotion which fasten themselves like barbed arrows in the memory of the learner--the ideas of right and wrong, of heroism and tenderness, of regard for parents and for duties; as Plato would say, of justice, wisdom, temperance, and courage--which color all subsequent thinking and constitute character. The Greeks have still something to teach us as to the educative power of great poetry.