The archetype of Hellenistic libraries was that of the Lyceum in classical Athens. Its founder, Aristotle, had been a student, and then an associate, at Plato’s Academy. He was Plato’s star student, but as a metic, or resident foreigner (he was still Greek), he could not own property or sponsor the other metics. Consequently, after the death of Plato, not having been appointed director, he departed Athens for an educational opportunity in Mysia, which fell through when Mysia was captured by the Persians. He was subsequently hired by his boyhood companion, now Philip II of Macedon, to tutor the latter’s teen-age son, the future Alexander the Great, on whose behalf he built a school, the Nymphaeum, at Mieza.