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Now in all Aristotle’s works there is not a single sentence in praise of Alexander and there is some evidence that the two had become estranged. In support of this we may quote Plutarch (c. a. d. 100) who gives a detailed description of a conspiracy in 327 b. c. against Alexander by Callisthenes, a pupil of Aristotle who appears to have kept up a correspondence with his master.[17] Alexander himself wrote of Callisthenes, according to Plutarch: ‘I will punish this sophist, together with those who sent him to me and those who harbour in their cities men who conspire against my life’ and Plutarch adds that Alexander ‘directly reveals in these words a hostility to Aristotle in whose house Callisthenes ... had been reared, being a son of Hero who was a niece of Aristotle’.[18] Yet the Alexandrian conquests, bringing Greece into closer contact with a wider world and extending Greek knowledge of the Orient, must have had their influence in stimulating interest in rare and curious creatures and in a general extension of natural knowledge. That the interest in these topics extended beyond the circle of the Peripatetics is shown by the fact that Speusippus, the pupil of Plato and his successor as leader of his school, occupied himself with natural history and wrote works on biological topics and especially on fish.