IV. ARISTOTLE
1. Wander-Years
When Plato died Aristotle built an altar to him, and gave him almost divine honors; for he had loved Plato even if he could not like him. He had come to Athens from his native Stageirus, a small Greek settlement in Thrace. His father had been court physician to Philip’s father, Amyntas II, and (if Galen was not mistaken) had taught the boy some anatomy before sending him to Plato.141 The two rival strains in the history of thought—the mystical and the medical—met and warred in the conjunction of the two philosophers. Perhaps Aristotle would have developed a thoroughly scientific mind had he not listened so long to Plato (some say for twenty years); the doctor’s son struggled in him with the Puritan’s pupil, and neither side won; Aristotle never quite made up his mind. He gathered about him scientific observations sufficient for an encyclopedia, and then tried to force them into the Platonic mold in which his scholastic mind had been formed. He refuted Plato at every turn because he borrowed from him on every page.
He was an earnest student, and soon caught the eye of his master. When Plato read at the Academy his treatise on the soul, Aristotle, says Diogenes Laertius, “was the only person who sat it out, while all the rest rose up and went away.”142 After Plato’s death (347) Aristotle went to the court of Hermeias, who had studied with him at the Academy and had raised himself from slavery to be the dictator of Atarneus and Assus in upper Asia Minor. Aristotle married Hermeias’ daughter Pythias (344), and was about to settle in Assus when Hermeias was assassinated by the Persians, who suspected him of planning to help Philip’s proposed invasion of Asia.143 Aristotle fled with Pythias to near-by Lesbos, and spent some time there in studying the natural history of the island.144Pythias died after giving him a daughter. Later Aristotle married, or lived with, the hetaira Herpyllis;145 but he maintained to the end a tender devotion to the memory of Pythias, and at his death asked that his bones be laid beside hers; he was not quite the emotionless bookworm that one might picture from his works. In 343 Philip, who probably had known him as a youth at Amyntas’ court, invited him to undertake the education of Alexander, then a wild lad of thirteen. Aristotle came to Pella and labored at the task for four years. In 340 Philip commissioned him to direct the restoration and repeopling of Stageirus, which had been laid waste in the war with Olynthus, and to draw up a code of laws for it; all of which he accomplished to the satisfaction of the city, which commemorated its re-establishment by him in an annual holiday.146
In 334 he returned to Athens, and—probably aided by funds from Alexander—opened a school of rhetoric and philosophy. He chose as its home the most elegant of Athens’ gymnasiums, a group of buildings dedicated to Apollo Lyceus (God of Shepherds), surrounded with shady gardens and covered walks. In the morning he taught advanced subjects to regular students; in the afternoon he lectured to a more popular audience, probably on rhetoric, poetry, ethics, and politics. He collected here a large library, a zoological garden, and a museum of natural history. The school came to be called the Lyceum, and the group and its philosophy were named Peripatetic from the covered walks (peripatoi) along which Aristotle liked to move with his students as he discoursed.147A sharp rivalry developed between the Lyceum, whose students were mostly of the middle class, the Academy, which drew its membership largely from the aristocracy, and the school of Isocrates, which was frequented chiefly by colonial Greeks. The rivalry was eased in time by the emphasis of Isocrates on rhetoric, of the Academy on mathematics, metaphysics, and politics, and of the Lyceum on natural science. Aristotle set his pupils to gathering and co-ordinating knowledge in every field: the customs of barbarians, the constitutions of the Greek cities, the chronology of victors in the Pythian games and the Athenian Dionysia, the organs and habits of animals, the character and distribution of plants, and the history of science and philosophy. These researches became a treasury of data upon which he drew, sometimes too confidently, for his varied and innumerable treatises.
For the layman he wrote some twenty-seven popular dialogues, which Cicero and Quintilian considered equal to Plato’s; it was chiefly by these that he was known in antiquity.148 These dialogues were among the casualties of the barbarian conquest of Rome. What remains to us is a mass of technical, highly abstract, and inimitably dull works rarely referred to by ancient scholars, and apparently composed, in the last twelve years of his life, of notes made for his lectures by himself, or from his lectures by his pupils. These technical compendiums were not known outside the Lyceum until they were published by Andronicus of Rhodes in the first century B.C.149 Forty of them survive, but Diogenes Laertius mentions 360 more—probably brief monographs. In these ashes of scholarship we must seek the once living thought that in later ages won for Aristotle the title of The Philosopher. We must approach him expecting no brilliance like Plato’s and no wit like Diogenes’, but only a rich argosy of knowledge, and such conservative wisdom as befits the friend and pensioner of kings.*