It was during the residence of the king at Bactra in the spring of 327 BC, that a circumstance occurred which led him, in conjunction with some of his fellow pages, to form a conspiracy against the life of Alexander.
Among the duties of the pages, who were in almost constant attendance on the king's person, was that of accompanying him when hunting, and it was one of these occasions that Hermolaus gave offence by slaying a wild boar without waiting to allow Alexander the first blow.
Hermolaus, a lad of high spirit, already verging on manhood, could not brook this indignity: his resentment was inflamed by the exhortations of the philosopher Callisthenes, his former tutor, and by the sympathy of his most intimate friend and eromenos among his brother pages, Sostratus.
Together the two youths eventually formed a scheme to assassinate the king while he slept, the duty of guarding his bed chamber devolving upon the different pages in rotation.
It appears, however, that they had been previously submitted to examination by torture, when, according to one account, they implicated Callisthenes also in their conspiracy ; according to another, and on the whole a more probable one, they maintained that the plot had been wholly of their own devising.