ellauri099.html on line 201: Very little is known about Aristotle’s stay in Macedonia, but it is thought that he was there for quite some time, possibly seven years, and became very friendly with powerful members of Philip’s court. In 336 B.C.E., Philip was assassinated (in a theater, of all places), and Alexander was declared king at the age of 20. Sensing the instability of political transition, the mighty city of Thebes rebelled against the new Macedonian king. In order to set an example, Alexander besieged and then wholly incinerated the city, wiping it from the map. Its citizens were either killed or sold into slavery.
ellauri099.html on line 211: Whatever the truth of the matter, Aristotle’s endowment allowed him to build a huge research and teaching facility and amass the largest and most important library in the world. During the time of Theophrastus, Aristotle’s successor as scholarch and clearly a very effective college president, there were as many as 2,000 pupils at the Lyceum, some of them sleeping in dormitories. The Lyceum was clearly the place to be, the educational destination of choice for the elites.
ellauri099.html on line 226: Very low rope barriers separated off areas that visitors were not meant to visit. I looked around for a guard, saw no one, and stepped onto the green moss and made my way quietly to the location of Aristotle’s library. On my hands and knees, I saw the ground was littered with tiny delicate snail shells, no bigger than a fingernails, scattered like empty scholars’ backpacks. My partner gave me one, and I put it in my pocket. I had it on my desk right in front of me as I was writing this. Inadvertently, I crushed it to pieces under the weight of one of Mr. Staikos’s huge tomes on the history of libraries. There’s probably a moral in this, but it escapes me. The moral is this: fucking Americans, keep your fat butts and greedy fingers off European soil!
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