But when Philip was dead and Alexander had come to the throne, Demosthenes again put on prodigious airs and caused a shrine to he dedicated to Pausanias1 and involved the senate in the charge of having offered sacrifice of thanksgiving as for good news. And he nicknamed Alexander “Margites”;2 and had the effrontery to say that Alexander would never stir out of Macedonia, for he was content, he said, to saunter around3 in Pella, and keep watch over the omens; and he said this statement was not based on conjecture, but on accurate knowledge, for valor was to be purchased at the price of blood. For Demosthenes, having no blood himself, formed his judgment of Alexander, not from Alexander's nature, but from his own cowardice.
1 Pausanias was the man who assassinated Philip.
2 Margites was the name of a caricature of Achilles in a poem that passed under the name of Homer. “Demosthenes asserted, then that Alexander, in his aspiration to be a second Achilles, would never get farther that to become a caricature of him.” (Richardson.)
3 Perhaps a sneer at Alexander's studies under Aristotle, the “Peripatetic.”
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