Among Greeks at Pella, Alexander made friends for a lifetime with Nearchus the Cretan, well versed in the ways of the sea, and with Laomedon from Lesbos, who could speak an Oriental language, while from the western end of the Greek world the old family friend Demaratus returned from Sicily with stories of the Greeks' recent fight for freedom. Six of the fourteen Greeks known as Alexander's Companions first came to Macedonia in Philip's reign, and there were others, less talented in war, with whom he retained a lasting friendship. Aristonicus, for example, his father's flute-player who later died in Afghanistan 'fighting not as a musician might, but as a brave man' and whose statue Alexander set up at Delphi, or Thettalus the tragic actor, whose playing of Oedipus had won him prizes at Athens and who remained a close friend from boyhood to death.

This Greek class of king's friends were chosen for merit; the Macedonian aristocracy of King's Companions were assured by birth, and the growing pressure of Greek outsiders was one of the uneasier currents at the court of Philip and Alexander. Under Alexander, Macedonians defined themselves sharply as a distinct class against the Greeks, not in terms of race, for the Macedonians claimed to be of Greek ancestry and immigrant Greeks like Nearchus the Cretan or Androsthenes, son of an exiled Athenian politician, became recognized as Macedonians when they received estates near the lowland coast. The distinction was one of status and all the sharper for being so; Eumenes the secretary, Critobulus the doctor, Medeius the cavalryman remained mere Greeks against whom a mood of Macedonian superiority was never far from the surface. So Alexander was growing up a Macedonian in a rough Macedonian world, the more so as his father had brought the life of Macedonia's highlands directly into his daily circle: he had decreed that the sons of highland nobles should serve and be educated as pages at Pella. The plan was greatly to Philip's advantage, for the pages were a valuable hostage for the conduct of their baronial fathers, and as they grew up, they were given new estates and revenues from newly conquered farms in the lowlands to endear them to their second home. Alexander profited too; men of two worlds, the pages became officers more likely to be loyal, for they arrived in the lowlands at the age of fourteen and naturally, they turned to a prince of their own age for friendship. In four known cases, sons of the highland nobility rehoused at Pella are future members of Alexander's bodyguard, that intimate clique of seven or eight of his most trusted friends. This bridging of Macedonia's contrasts was of the greatest consequence for the age that followed.

As royal pages, they were educated and set at the centre of affairs. They dined and listened at the king's dinner table, guarded his bedroom, helped him astride his horse and accompanied him out hunting or in war; in return, only the king was allowed to flog them. Their life was still rough and uninhibited, but there was a new side to it: Even in the towns which Philip was building in the highlands there were none of the signs of cultured life, but at Pella the sons of Upper Macedonia could take the plot of a Greek play in their stride, learn a Greek poem, listen to Greek orators, move among Greek paintings and sculptures, discuss modern strategy and know of its history and theory, attend a Greek doctor and watch Greek engineers at work. Like the warlords of Heian Japan who absorbed all their skills from China, the Macedonian barons owed their broader horizons to Greece. There had been highlanders of note before, a diplomat, for example, or a vigorous leader of cavalry, and against the long tradition of Greek culture. Macedonians of another age had already distinguished themselves; Antipater, Alexander's elderly viceroy, wrote a military history and edited his own correspondence, and Philip himself was a fluent public speaker. But Alexander's age-group grew to a new variety. Ptolemy, like Nearchus the Cretan, wrote an artful history, more notable for its attitude to Alexander than its rough literary style and Marsyas, brother of Antigonus the one-eyed, produced three books on Macedonian affairs. To Hephaistion, Alexander's favourite, two Greek philosophers dedicated volumes of letters, while Lysimachus listened attentively to a Brahmin guru in India and took an interest in botany and trees. Whereas Philip's mother had not learnt to read or write until middle age, Peucestas learnt to speak Persian and showed a marked favour for the customs and dress of the Persians he came to govern. As befitted the new generation that planned to invade Persia, Herodotus's great history of the Persian wars was read and enjoyed by Alexander's friends; one of Philip's Greek visitors had produced a shortened version, perhaps at Philip's request, and Alexander knew it enough to quote and follow its stories; both Ptolemy and Nearchus were influenced by Herodotus's way of seeing the foreign tribes of the north and east, although they could not aspire to his style. Whereas their highland fathers had owned rough pottery, primitive bone bracelets and archaic swords with gold-plated handles, this new generation had the money and taste for paintings and mosaic floors; their mothers had worn gold jewellery in rough and primitive styles and joined in battles against barbarians, but Alexander's friends maintained Athenian mistresses and introduced their women to bracelets and necklaces of oriental elegance and their artists to Iranian carpets whose patterns they copied in painted friezes. The tough life of drinking, hunting and war persisted, but there was more to Alexander's officers than is usually credited; out in Babylonia, Harpalus would help to supervise the largest treasury in the world and see to new plants for an oriental garden, while one of Antipater's sons became a drop-out and founded a community on Mount Athos with an alphabet of its own. Nothing could be further from the highland customs of his father's contemporaries; again Alexander escaped a purely Macedonian life.

Alexander, therefore, was finding his feet among adventurous friends in a widening world. His father Philip could do little more than guide the process, for in the years while he marched between the Dardanelles and the Dalmatian coast, fighting, founding towns and always negotiating for control in the Greek cities to the south, he could only appoint the most suitable Greek tutor for a son who had already outgrown his boyhood attendants. The post was enviable, and the candidates who hoped for it were a measure of Philip's new influence. He had long had close links with Plato's pupils, both as a boy- and as a politician, and in Athens the most famous teacher and speaker of the age had been his continual correspondent and might expect, in return for his flattering letters, that the tutor's job should go to one of his many former students. Candidates were canvassed from far Aegean islands and Ionian cities of Asia with the usual academic warring, but while praises of Philip were being sounded by the hopeful the king made up his mind; from the island of Lesbos, he sent for Plato's most brilliant pupil, Aristotle son of Nicomachus, 'thin legged and small-eyed' and as yet unknown for his philosophical publications.

'He taught him writing, Greek, Hebrew, Babylonian and Latin. He taught him the nature of the sea and the winds; he explained the course of the stars, the revolutions of the firmament and the life-span of the world. He showed him justice and rhetoric: he warned him against the looser sorts of women.' That, however, is only the opinion of a medieval French poet, for in his surviving works, Aristotle never mentions Alexander nor alludes directly to his stay in Macedonia. According to Bertrand Russell, Alexander 'would have been bored by the prosy old pedant', but that, too, is only a fellow philosopher's guess.