person
Ephesiis ... Alexandri
also: Ephesians ... Alexander
Alexander III of Macedon (356–323 BC), king from 336 and conqueror of the Persian empire. Cicero invokes him in the Verrines (2.4) for his refusal to remove the works of art at Ephesus — a contrast with Verres's plunder of the same Asian shrines.
Reading notes
- Ad Atticum 13.28 §2 those exhortations to Alexander
The genre of the protreptic 'letter to Alexander the Great,' a stock rhetorical exercise (e.g. Isocrates and the so-called Aristotle) advising the young conqueror. Cicero invokes it as the impossible model his own letter of advice to Caesar would have had to match.
- Ad Atticum 13.28 §3 the very pupil of Aristotle
Alexander the Great, tutored in his youth by Aristotle, who (Cicero says) grew arrogant and cruel once he was hailed as king --- a pointed warning about Caesar.
- On the Best Kind of Orators §22 Alexander already held Asia
Dates the trial to 330 BC, after Alexander's conquest of the Persian empire in Asia and four years after the death of his father Philip II of Macedon; Cicero notes that all Greece gathered to hear the two greatest orators contend.