CHAPTER ONE

THE BIOGRAPHY OF ARISTOTLE: FACTS, HYPOTHESES, CONJECTURES

1. MANY FACTS, NOT ALL OF EQUAL INTEREST

On the biography of Aristotle we have few certain facts, and there has been much conjecture. We lack information on the most important issues, whereas there is much information about matters that are ultimately of marginal significance. The most recent discussion, from Düring 1957 and onward, is largely focused on the analysis of the sources, in order to identify their standpoint. It is very important to follow this approach, known to philologists by the name Quellenforschung, which has historically been the most rigorous and reliable method; when carried to excess, however, it tends to transform itself into the attitude of those who doubt every fact and, faced with any information, ask themselves only what intention was manifested by the ancient author or authors who are its source, without ever reaching a positive reconstruction. This attitude of diffidence is certainly justified by the history of the modern discussion of Aristotle’s life (see chapter 4); but it can also lead one to focus too much on the discussion of details and lose sight of the general context.

All things considered, the certain facts that we have about Aristotle’s life, though scarce overall, are actually far more numerous than those available for the lives of many other ancient philosophers. So without falling into the errors of ancient biographers, who reconstructed the biography of the philosopher by choosing eclectically from among the various reports and available facts those that best fit with their preconceived image of Aristotle, we can try to make use of the certain facts and the most plausible information to establish, in the most precise method possible, some of the most interesting aspects of his life and of his intellectual personality. It goes without saying, certainly, that today it is no longer possible to clear up all the obscure issues, to the point of giving a complete and exhaustive description of the historical figure of Aristotle. In this sense, the modest approach of Gigon (1961, p. 27), which acknowledges that the portrait of Aristotle “is to this day visible only in indefinite outlines,” strikes me as the best one.

2. STAGIRA

“Aristotle, son of Nicomachus and Phaestis, a Stagirite” (Diogenes Laertius 5.1). “Aristotle the philosopher was of the city of Stagira, and Stagira was a polis of Thrace, near Olynthus and Methone” (Vita Marciana 1). Aristotle was a citizen of a small Greek polis, Stagira, located on the Silean Plain, in the Chalcidian peninsula, a colony of Andros (Herodotus 7.115; Thucydides 4.88.2, 5.6.1), which was an ally and tributary of Athens during the first Athenian league.¹ So Aristotle was not a “Macedonian subject,” as some say, confused about his political status.

The history of Stagira is not illustrious: in 480 BCE, the army of Xerxes passed by it while on its way to invade Greece; then, in 424, during the Peloponnesian War, Stagira abandoned Athens and allied itself with Sparta, and for this it was besieged in 422 by Cleon of Athens. In 348, Philip of Macedon invaded the Chalcidian peninsula, conquered Zereia, and destroyed or forced the independent Greek city-states of that region into submitting to him (Demosthenes, Third Philippic 26; Diodorus Siculus 16.52.9). He then conquered and destroyed Olynthus, an Athenian ally. An ancient source, the democratic orator Demochares, nephew of Demosthenes, gave a speech in 306, during a trial connected to an attempted closure of all the philosophical schools of Athens,² accusing Aristotle of having been a friend of Philip of Macedon and of having played a role in this Macedonian expedition; according to Aristocles, in his On Philosophy (fr. 2 Chiesara), Demochares “says that letters of Aristotle written against the city of the Athenians were intercepted, that he betrayed his home town of Stagira to the Macedonians, and also that, following the destruction of Olynthus, he was Philip’s informer, in the place where the booty was being sold, about the wealthiest of the Olynthians” (excerpted in Eusebius 15.2.6 = testimonium 58g Düring). On the basis of the passage quoted above and of the Neoplatonic biographies of Aristotle,³modern historians hypothesize that Stagira was destroyed by Philip of Macedon in 348 BCE, and that it was later rebuilt, during the life of Alexander the Great, by the intercession of Aristotle, who is also thought to have dictated the laws for the city.

All the same, we cannot be certain that the events described in the ancient biographies really took place; Demochares does not actually state that Stagira was destroyed; he only says that Aristotle “betrayed” Stagira, his homeland. Given the fragmentary state in which his words have come down to us, this argument from silence may not have much relevance. It is true, though, that the most reliable ancient sources do not list Stagira among the cities destroyed by Philip (see Mulvany 1926, p. 163 and Düring 1957, p. 59). It is therefore likely that the town was not destroyed, since in 322, twenty-six years after the invasion of Philip of Macedon, Aristotle’s father’s house seems to be still standing. In Aristotle’s will, in fact, Aristotle mentions the house of his father in Stagira, directing that, if Herpyllis wishes to live in Stagira, she should be given “my father’s house.”⁴ So what are we to say now about these assertions of Demochares?

When an ancient orator, during a trial held in a court in Athens, describes an event or an episode of his time to derive from it arguments in favor of one of his proposals, his method of presenting the facts is not excessively preoccupied with historical veracity. So we do not know whether Aristotle was actually in the camp of Philip of Macedon during the king’s expedition. Other sources suggest that, in the period when Philip conquered Olynthus, Aristotle was not on the Chalcidian peninsula at all but elsewhere, perhaps still in Athens or perhaps already in Assos. But this passage from Demochares attests, at least, that in all likelihood something ugly happened in Stagira in 348, and that, toward the end of the fourth century BCE, in Athens at least, Aristotle was generally considered to be a friend of the Macedonians. I shall come back to this point later.

In Aristotle’s works Stagira is never mentioned. His father’s house, which is mentioned in his will, passed to Theophrastus, who gives directions about it in his own will: “the estate in Stagira belonging to me I give and bequeath to Callinus” (Diogenes Laertius 5.52). Theophrastus, in hisResearch on Plants (4.16.3), mentions a “mouseion in Stagira.”⁵ The source of our word “museum,” the term mouseion originally designated a temple dedicated to the Muses, but it was later stretched to mean any place dedicated to cultural pursuits. We do not know whether this mouseion of Stagira was a temple of the Muses or Aristotle’s own house, converted to a philosophical school and temple of knowledge. In the time of Theophrastus in any case (he died between 288 and 284 BCE), the city does not give the impression of being abandoned. However, by the time of Strabo (first century CE), Stagira had long been little more than a heap of ruins (book 7, fr. 15 Radt).

3. A FAMILY OF NOTABLES

We are well informed about Aristotle’s family from the philosopher’s will, which gives us much more information than is usual on these matters. All biographers, both ancient and modern, starting with Hermippus⁶ (a biographer of the Aristotelian school, third century BCE), have based their works on the facts given in this will, with personal interpretations and additions. Not all the information is very interesting, but the sum of the information serves to delineate some aspects of the philosopher’s native environment.

“Aristotle was the son of Nicomachus and Phaestis, both descended from the family of Machaon, son of Asclepius [ … ] Aristotle was born under Diotrephes [384/383 BCE]” (Vita Marciana 1 and 10). “Aristotle, son of Nicomachus and Phaestis, Stagirite. Nicomachus traced his descent from Nicomachus who was the son of Machaon, who was the son of Asclepius [ … ] Apollodorus in his Chronicles says that he [Aristotle] was born in the first year of the 99th Olympiad [384]” (Diogenes Laertius 5.1 and 5.9). “Aristotle was the son of Nicomachus, who traced his family and his vocation back to Machaon, the son of Asclepius. His mother Phaestis was descended from one of the leaders of the expedition from Chalcis that colonized Stagira. He was born in the ninety-ninth Olympiad, when Diotrephes was archon at Athens, and so he was three years older than Demosthenes” (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, First Letter to Ammaeus 5.1).

All we know about Aristotle’s father is his name. According to several sources, his father died when Aristotle was young, a supposition strengthened by the fact that Neoplatonic biographies speak of his being assigned a “guardian”; I shall return to this point later. The report that he was a doctor is not confirmed in the will, where he is never mentioned. This information comes from one of Aristotle’s earliest biographers, Hermippus,⁷ who claimed that Nicomachus, Aristotle’s father, was a descendant of one of the most illustrious branches of the Asclepiads. The biographers of late antiquity, expanding on this story in order to honor Aristotle, say that Nicomachus was court physician and friend of Amyntas, king of Macedonia (Diogenes Laertius 5.1, Vita Marciana 2, Vita Vulgata1, Vita Latina 2).

All of this might seem an invention, and to a great degree perhaps, it is, but at the end of the fourth century BCE, both Epicurus and Timaeus accuse Aristotle of being dissolute and of having sold drugs or practiced medicine. The evidence that stems from Epicurus is preserved for us in four later sources: Diogenes Laertius, Aristocles, Athenaeus, and Aelian. In his biography of Epicurus, Diogenes Laertius (10.8) said that Epicurus called Aristotle “a wastrel, who after devouring his father’s fortune took to soldiering and selling drugs” (testimonium 59a). In his On Philosophy, Aristocles asked, “how could [Aristotle] have consumed all his father’s wealth, and then gone off to be a soldier, and having failed at this as well, entered the drug trade, and then joined Plato’s Peripatos, which was open to all comers, as Epicurus says in his letter On Vocations?”(excerpted in Eusebius 15.2.1 = testimonium 58b). One of the erudite speakers in Athenaeus declares (8, 354b–c), “I am well aware that Epicurus, who was very devoted to truth, has said of him, in his letter On Vocations, that after he had devoured his father’s inheritance he rushed into the army, and because he was bad at this, he got into selling drugs. Then, since the peripatos of Plato was open to everybody, he [Epicurus] said, Aristotle presented himself and sat in on the lectures, not without talent, and gradually got out of that and into the theoretical[disposition]. And I know that Epicurus is the only one to have said these things against him, not even Eubulides, nor has even Cephisodorus dared to say that kind of thing against the Stagirite, although they have published works written against the man” (testimonium 59b).⁸Aelian also reports, in his Miscellaneous Research (5.9), a short version of the story transmitted by Epicurus, but without identifying him as his source. “Aristotle wasted the property he had from his father and rushed into the army. After turning out badly at this, he showed up again as a drug seller. He insinuated himself into the Peripatos and listened to the lectures, and, since he was naturally better than many, he then acquired the disposition that he possessed after this point” (testimonium 59c).

From Timaeus of Tauromenium, historian of the late fourth century BCE, there are some other comments, preserved by Aristocles and by Polybius, that attempt to cast a discreditable light on Aristotle’s character and his involvement with medicine. Aristocles protests, “how can anyone accept what Timaeus of Tauromenium said in his Histories, that he [Aristotle] locked the doors of a disreputable medical clinic, when he was at a late age in life?” (excerpted in Eusebius 15.2.2 = testimonium 58c). The abuse hurled by Timaeus against Aristotle was evidently too much for Polybius (12.8.1–4), who says, “let’s agree that people are ignorant and raving mad if they treat their neighbors with such enmity and harshness as Timaeus treated Aristotle. He says that he was brash, rash, and reckless, and, furthermore, that he said absolutely outrageous things about the city of Locri, alleging that their colony was a colony of fugitives, servants, adulterers, and slave dealers. And he says that he tells all this with such trustworthiness that he has the air of being the numero uno of those who were on campaign and had just now defeated the Persians marshaled at the Cilician gates, by his own strength, and not instead a retarded and insatiable sophist who had just shut down an expensive medical clinic; furthermore, that he used to jump into every house and every tent, and also that he was a glutton and a chef de cuisine, always getting carried away in the direction of his mouth” (testimonium 60a; on this passage, see below, section 6.2).

Given the generally rather heavy way of engaging in polemics that is typical of ancient authors, these might even be “subtle” allusions to his father’s profession. If so, Hermippus’s assertion would appear to be confirmed. Even those who have hypothesized that the hostile tone of these reports should not be thought to go back to Epicurus himself, but rather to the polemical zeal of a former disciple of the Garden, still recognize that these statements are substantially to be attributed to Epicurus (see Sedley 1976, p. 132). The many passages in which Aristotle speaks about medicine do not give any useful indications on this point.

Aristotle’s mother, Thestis or Phaestis, on the other hand, is mentioned in his will, unlike his father.⁹ Dionysius of Halicarnassus tells us that Aristotle’s mother was a descendant of the Chalcidians who founded Stagira. Thucydides, however, claims that Stagira was founded by colonists from Andros, as we have seen, and not by Chalcidians. In antiquity, to say that someone was descended from the founders of a polis was a way of honoring them. However, it is likely that Phaestis was from Chalcis, since Aristotle went to live in that city after having left Athens the second time; and from his will it appears that he owned a house and garden there (Diogenes Laertius 5.14). Both parents were likely of Greek origin.¹⁰ Aristotle also had a brother called Arimnestus,¹¹ who died before Aristotle, without children, and was mentioned in his will. Aristotle wished to erect a statue in his memory; his executors “shall set up the bust which has been made of Arimnestus, so as to be a memorial of him, since he died without children” (Diogenes Laertius 5.15).

As was said earlier, the Neoplatonic Lives claim that Proxenus, a citizen of Atarneus,¹² adopted Aristotle on his father’s death; “after being orphaned he was raised by Proxenus of Atarneus,”¹³ and Chroust ventures a date (370–369) for this event. If this report is true, Proxenus must obviously be considered an important figure in the life of Aristotle. If it is true that Proxenus was a citizen of Atarneus, this could explain the close relationship there always was between Aristotle and the tyrant Hermias of Atarneus. Moreover, Usaibia, an Arabic translator of a version of the Neoplatonic biography of Aristotle, claims that Proxenus was a friend of Plato, and that he sent Aristotle to the Academy for that reason; “Proxenus, the mandatory of his father, handed over the young man to Plato. Some relate that he was entrusted to Plato in compliance with an oracle of God the Lord Almighty in the temple of Pythion. Others say that this so happened only because Proxenus and Plato were friends” (Usaibia, Life of Aristotle 3, tr. Düring 1957; see Gigon 1962, commentary to line 31).

So Proxenus had apparently put Aristotle in contact with several of the people who would count for the most in his life. Of this Proxenus we know almost nothing; but Aristotle in his will had statues dedicated to Proxenus, Nicanor, and Nicanor’s mother. He instructed his executors “to make sure, when the images commissioned to Gryllion are finished, that they be erected, one of Nicanor, and one of Proxenus, which I intended to commission, and one of Nicanor’s mother” (Diogenes Laertius 5.15). It is fairly clear that Proxenus is the father of this Nicanor, who was still alive at that time, and of whom we ought to speak at somewhat greater length.

It seems that this Nicanor was adopted by Aristotle, who was his stepbrother. This report seems to be confirmed beyond doubt by a very fragmentary inscription at Ephesus, published by Heberdey in 1902, in which the privilege of proxenia is extended to a “Nicanor, son of Aristotle of Stagira” (see testimonia 13a–c). In Aristotle’s will (Diogenes Laertius 5.12), Nicanor served as a testamentary executor, in second place, after the Macedonian general Antipater,¹⁴ and was supposed to marry Aristotle’s daughter “when the girl has reached the suitable age.” In the will, Nicanor appears to be the oldest male of the family and to serve as its head (see Düring 1957, p. 263); “if anything should happen to the girl before her marriage (may it not, nor will it), or after she is married but before there are children, Nicanor shall have power to administer, both concerning the child and everything else, in a manner worthy both of him and of us. Nicanor shall be responsible for the girl and the boy Nicomachus in all that concerns them, in such a way that he takes an interest in their affairs as if he were father and brother.” At the time that Aristotle died, Nicanor must have been away on a dangerous journey,¹⁵ perhaps related to his professional obligations as a general (on which see below), since in his will Aristotle makes offerings for his safe return.

Many scholars (Zeller, Wilamowitz, Berve, Plezia, Gigon, and others) believe that this Nicanor, the son of Proxenus, is the same Nicanor who served as a general under Alexander the Great;¹⁶ and if this hypothesis is right, he is certainly one of the most historically intriguing members of the whole family. I also tend to accept it, without being able to give a definitive proof of it, and from this point forward I shall take it as fact. Nicanor of Stagira (see Diodorus Siculus 18.8.3), a general in Alexander’s army, was the one who in 324 read an edict at Olympia from Alexander, in which the Macedonian king demanded that the Greek cities accord him divine tribute and recall those who had been exiled. And then after the death of Alexander, Nicanor fought in the service of Cassander (son of the Macedonian general Antipater), in the war that Cassander waged against Polyperchon (whom Antipater had named as successor instead of Cassander), a war that involved Attica directly (319–318 BCE). In that war, Nicanor was sent to command the Macedonian garrison in Athens, stationed in the port of Munychia by this same Cassander, after the death of his father Antipater (319). According to Plutarch’s Life of Phocion (31.3), when he was in Athens Nicanor made a political alliance with the moderate politician Phocion, who “met with Nicanor and conversed with him, making him in general meek and mild and favorably disposed to the Athenians,” and he became a friend of Demetrius of Phalerum, a pupil of Theophrastus.¹⁷

Nicanor was then drawn into the struggles among the various Athenian parties, which were in turn supported by the several Macedonian factions, and he occupied the entire port of Piraeus, from which he witnessed the condemnation and execution of Phocion (318). Demetrius of Phalerum, condemned in absentia from court, may have taken refuge with Nicanor and, through him, come into contact with Cassander.¹⁸ In the same year (318), Nicanor and Antigonus defeated the fleet of Polyperchon in a naval battle, and in 317 the Athenians made peace with Cassander, who set up Demetrius of Phalerum as the governor of the city. Immediately after, Cassander had Nicanor killed, perhaps because he had acquired too much power.

Demetrius of Phalerum did not share his friend’s fate, and he remained in power in Athens for ten years, during which time he had a way of favoring the philosophers: he arranged for Theophrastus to be accorded the right to own a landed estate (enktēsis) in Athens (Diogenes Laertius 5.39); and he ordered the release of Xenocrates,¹⁹ who had been arrested because he was too poor to be able to pay the tax imposed by the city of Athens on metics, that is, on foreigners residing in Athens (Diogenes Laertius, 4.14). He is also said to have intervened in favor of philosophers and people tied to the cultural life of the city, including Theodorus “the Atheist,” whom he supposedly saved from judgment before the Areopagus (Diogenes Laertius 2.101), the Cynic Crates, from whom he received little gratitude (Athenaeus 10, 422c–d), and, finally, the descendants of Aristides the Just, for whom he arranged to have a pension (Plutarch, Life of Aristides, 27.3–5).

Several of Aristotle’s relatives and pupils, then, at the end of the fourth century BCE, appear to us to have been involved in the political affairs of Athens, on the pro-Macedon side, and we can guess at close ties of friendship and acquaintance among them. We shall come back to this point later.

There were two women named Pythia in the family. The first was Aristotle’s wife, a relative of Hermias of Atarneus, a friend of Proxenus (the relationship between Hermias and Pythia is unclear: she may have been his daughter, niece, or some other relative; see below, section 6.1). The second was his daughter. Aristotle wished to be buried near his late wife Pythia; “Wherever my tomb is erected, there the exhumed bones of Pythia shall also be laid, in accordance with her instructions” (Diogenes Laertius 5.16). The ancients, stimulated by accusations of impiety, created the strangest stories about the couple’s conjugal relations. For example, according to Diogenes Laertius (5.3–4), “Aristippus in the first book of his On the Luxury of the Ancients says that Aristotle fell in love with a girl of Hermias. He came to an agreement with him and married her, and, overjoyed with the little woman, he made sacrifice to her in the way the Athenians sacrifice to Demeter of Eleusis.” And in his On Philosophy, Aristocles declared that “surpassing in foolishness all [the other accusations] are what Lyco said, the one who calls himself a ‘Pythagorean’; he actually claimed that Aristotle made sacrifice to his late wife, the same sort of sacrifice that the Athenians make to Demeter” (excerpted in Eusebius 15.2.8 = testimonium 58i). There must have been something about Aristotle’s character that excited such piquant fantasies; even in the Middle Ages great sport was made of scenes of the great thinker on all fours, straddled by a courtesan.

When Aristotle died in 322 BCE, his daughter seems to have been younger than fourteen, since she was not yet old enough to take a husband. Perhaps she was an epiklēros heir, that is, a female child who is the inheritor of the property in the absence of a male heir.²⁰ This daughter would later marry Nicanor. In the will there is no mention of her name, Pythia, which is reported to us by the Neoplatonists. Sextus Empiricus (Against the Professors 1.258), many centuries later, claimed to know that she married three husbands.²¹ “Aristotle’s daughter Pythia was married to three men, the first of whom was Nicanor of Stagira (a relative of Aristotle), the second was Procleus (a descendant of the Spartan King Demaratus) who fathered two children with her, Procleus and Demaratus,²² who both studied philosophy with Theophrastus, and the third was the doctor Metrodorus (a student of Chrysippus of Cnidus and follower of Erasistratus) to whom was born a boy called Aristotle” (testimonium 11b).²³

Aristotle also had a son, Nicomachus, who is famous because the ethical treatise entitled Nicomachean Ethics is addressed to him. It is not actually known whether he was the son of Pythia or Herpyllis, Aristotle’s second female companion, or whether he was legitimate or illegitimate, or whether he was Aristotle’s sole heir. The question is probably not worth the ink spilled on it, often large quantities, from the end of the nineteenth century until our times (see Gottschalk 1972, pp. 323–325, with bibliography and status quaestionis). It is unlikely that Nicomachus was the editor²⁴ of the ethical treatise known under the title Nicomachean Ethics, since he must have died rather young. In fact, he seems to be already dead at the time of the drafting of Theophrastus’s will, in which his father’s student Theophrastus, who was the guardian of Nicomachus for a certain period,²⁵ directed that a statue of him be made, saying “it is also my wish that a statue of Nicomachus be completed, of equal size” (Diogenes Laertius 5.52).

Now let’s enter the sphere of pure gossip. Great awkwardness, on the part of both ancient authors as well as scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was occasioned by the figure of Herpyllis, a woman who “was good” to Aristotle, and for whom he wished to ensure a quiet existence. His will reads as follows: “the executors and Nicanor shall take care also of Herpyllis, in memory of me, because she was good to me, including, if she desires to take a husband, seeing to it that she be given one not unworthy of us.” Otherwise, if she chose not to get married, Aristotle ordered that she be lodged in one of his houses, in Stagira or in the section of the house at Chalcis reserved for guests, and that these houses should be supplied with all the furnishings necessary, in the judgment of Herpyllis herself. Moreover, he set aside for her one silver talent, one servant, and two slaves (Diogenes Laertius 5.13–14). Concerning the status of Herpyllis, the sources are in disagreement; in the Greek version of Aristotle’s will, Herpyllis is treated as a free woman and not a slave (Mulvany 1926), but in the Arabic version of the will, on the other hand, she is treated as a servant; “judging from what I saw of her earnestness in rendering service to me and her zeal for all that was becoming for me, she has deserved well of me” (Usaibia, Aristotle’s Will 1e, tr. Düring 1957). It appears evident, in any case, that Herpyllis was a woman very close to Aristotle for a long period of time.

All of the ancients (Hermippus, Timaeus, Diogenes Laertius, the Suda, and Hesychius) speak of her as Aristotle’s lover (hetaira), while the Neoplatonists preserve a total silence about her. Aristocles of Messene, who wanted to protect Aristotle’s reputation in hisOn Philosophy,²⁶ said that the philosopher in the end married her. “After the death of Pythia, the daughter of Hermias, he married Herpyllis of Stagira, of whom his son Nicomachus was born.” Among modern scholars as well, some have found it inconvenient that a great thinker such as Aristotle had a companion out of wedlock, and they say that in the end the philosopher married her, or else affirm that Herpyllis was only Aristotle’s “housekeeper.”²⁷ But the provisions of the will hardly seem like the ones that are to be made for a simple housekeeper, and, on the other hand, the fact that Aristotle wanted to be entombed close to Pythia, and the general tenor of the bequest, would lead us to think that Herpyllis enjoyed a status slightly inferior to that of his first wife.

Not mentioned in the will, because he was already dead, was Aristotle’s nephew Callisthenes, an important member of the family who had followed Alexander the Great on the expedition into Asia, with the well-known and tragic (for himself) consequences. We shall return to him below, insection 7.

Even if not all the information listed above is equally reliable, the family connections of the genos of Aristotle appear to me to be wide ranging and complex, more international than was the case for a typical Athenian family, generally proud of its local ancestry, and close to the networks of families of the archaic aristocracy. This is a family that was close to various “ruling classes” of its time, with ties to the courts of the Macedonian kings and the diadochi, to the tyrant of Atarneus, to the small towns of the Chalcidian peninsula and, later, perhaps, also to the royal family of Sparta. As we shall see below, the links of discipleship and family relationship tend to intermingle; Aristotle’s most important pupil, Theophrastus, acted as the executor of his teacher’s will, and his pupil, Demetrius of Phalerum, became a friend of Aristotle’s stepbrother and adopted son Nicanor, while two of Aristotle’s grandsons, Demaratus and “young” Aristotle, were welcomed during the lifetime of Theophrastus into the community of Peripatetic philosophers (Diogenes Laertius 5.53).

4. A PROVINCIAL PUPIL

In this section, we shall focus primarily on the external events that marked the early phase of Aristotle’s life in Athens, referring the reader to other more important works for the question of his philosophical relationship with Plato and the development of his philosophy. The information that we possess concerning this period of Aristotle’s life in Athens is concerned exclusively with his activity as a philosopher and a pupil of the Academy. “Aristotle [ … ] became a pupil of Plato at the time of Nausigenes. [ … ] It is therefore not true, as these slanderers claim, that Aristotle became a follower of Plato at the age of forty, at the time of Eudoxus [ … ] according to the research of Philochorus” (Vita Marciana 10–12). “He encountered Plato and spent twenty years with him [367–347], having joined at seventeen” (Diogenes Laertius 5.9). “In the archonship of Polyzelus [367/6], after the death of his father, he came to Athens, being in his eighteenth year, and after he joined up with Plato, he spent a period of twenty years with him” (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, First Letter to Ammaeus 5.2).

Aristotle conformed to a tradition, attested to as early as the period of the Sophists,²⁸ of choosing a famous master from whom to learn philosophy. We know nothing specific about his reason for coming to Athens. As I have already noted above (p. 11), the Arabic biographer Usaibia stated that Aristotle’s guardian, Proxenus, entrusted the young man to Plato, because Proxenus and Plato were friends. Other authors make up other hypotheses.²⁹ One could hypothesize, for instance, that Aristotle decided to study with a master of philosophy because he was interested in this discipline by reading some Platonic dialogue; in fact, one of the purposes of the dialogues was exactly this, to attract the best and the brightest to philosophy.³⁰

What did Aristotle find when he arrived in Athens to study philosophy? According to H. von Arnim’s reconstruction (1898, ch. 1), the earliest Sophists were itinerant teachers, not tied to any town or city (Isocrates, Antidosis 156), and their courses did not last a long time. In the course of time, however, full-fledged schools developed, with their own fixed group of students, who attended a course of lessons for a number of years in order to acquire paideia, some with a view to becoming philosophers, others simply to get a general education.³¹ It is worth noting that in Diogenes Laertius the relationship between the masters of the lesser Socratic schools and their pupils is indicated by the term diakouein (2.111, 2.113, 2.126), which implies attending a course over time and not merely listening to a single public lecture; and the pupils of Stilpo were discussed in terms (2.113) that imply a remarkable familiarity and a long-term relationship, such as apespasen, zēlōtas esche, prosēgageto, and apheileto. Even the word hetairoi, which was sometimes used to describe the pupils of these philosophers, indicates the existence of a fixed group. And so Aristotle’s decision entailed, at the very least, a commitment to stay in Attica for a long period of time.

In Athens at that time there were various active schools, and even though there is (from a theoretical standpoint) a vast gulf separating Plato and other teachers, such as the masters of rhetoric like Alcidamas and Isocrates, from the point of view of the public, Plato and Isocrates practiced the same “profession.” The Platonic Academy appeared from the outside to be just another of the numerous residences or schools (diatribai) differing from the others only in terms of the program of study.

Aristotle very likely became one of Plato’s pupils immediately, and did not attend any other schools.³² Ancient sources attest to a certain degree of jealousy among the various masters, who struggled to keep their pupils from being taken away by others. Aristotle probably entered the Academy in 367/366 BCE, during the archonship of Polyzelus (according to Apollodorus, followed by Moraux and Düring), or in 368/367, during the archonship of Nausigenes (according to Philochorus, followed by Gigon, Berti, and Chroust), at the age of seventeen or eighteen,³³ and stayed in the school for approximately twenty years, until 347. In 367/366, Plato was not in Athens, because after the death of Dionysius he had left for Syracuse, where he would stay for three years. Somehow a legend arose that during this three-year period Plato left Eudoxus in charge of the school, but there appears to be no evidence to support this.³⁴ The most recent editor of the fragments of Eudoxus even doubts that Eudoxus was ever a member of the Academy, and thinks rather that Eudoxus had a school of his own in rivalry with Plato’s Academy.³⁵

Aristotle remained at the Platonic Academy for roughly twenty years, from 367/366 to 347 BCE. Right from the beginning, or else at some point during his stay, he decided not to limit himself to receiving a general philosophical education, but to devote, in accordance with a specifically Platonic doctrine, the rest of his life to philosophical discussions and to a way of life dedicated to the cultivation of the intellectual virtues (Republic VII 536d–540c). Therefore, unlike the students of the Sophists and the orators, Aristotle’s purpose in attending Plato’s school was not to learn a technique that would put him in a position to pursue a profession and earn his living, but rather to realize a choice of a way of life. Often, as we shall see below (section 10, p. 70), modern critics identify this decision as a professional choice, similar to the one to set out on a career as a professor in a modern university, but the comparison is not without its dangers.

In Athens, Aristotle lived as a metic, that is, an alien resident, subject like all his fellow metics to various obligations and prohibitions:³⁶ he had to pay a tax to the state, while citizens were exempt from taxes; he had to procure a prostates, an Athenian citizen who was his legal sponsor; he had to register as resident in an Attic demos (we do not know which one); he had to serve, in case of need, as a soldier in the army, or in the navy; he could not take any part in the political life of the city, nor could he hold a magistracy, nor could he own any real estate in Attica; and this last point, as we shall see, is linked to certain problems in the founding of the Peripatetic school. The condition of the metic was in no way despicable or servile, and at the beginning of Plato’s Republic, the honest metic Cephalus is treated with great respect. As for Aristotle, Whitehead has maintained that, while there is no evidence that he enjoyed any special status over other metics (as Chroust, Grayeff, and others have supposed), his writings show no trace of any particular frustrations on this account.³⁷ And, on the other hand, we should also keep in mind the fact that Aristotle’s scientific works are almost silent about his personal affairs.

Concerning the issue of the relationship between Aristotle and Plato, there are two distinct traditions: some sources maintain that relations between master and student were always cordial, while other sources claim that there was a falling out. This is in a way related to the issue of how to evaluate the philosophical distance between the positions of the two men; those who believe that there were no fundamental doctrinal disagreements usually maintain that their relations were cordial, as occurred in the Neoplatonist biographies. For example, the Neoplatonic biography of Aristotle affirms that “Aristotle did not build the Lyceum in opposition to Plato while he was living [ … ] for he remained faithful to Plato until his death” (Vita Latina 9 and 25, and Vita Marciana 9; see Düring 1957, pp. 256–258 and 357).

The reports that establish respect between Plato and Aristotle emphasize the fact that the master supposedly admired a very peculiar, and very anti-Socratic, way of doing philosophy on his student’s part. Aristotle is said to have frequently walked out on the discussions in the school to be by himself reading books,³⁸ and Plato found nothing to laugh at in that, though he tried courteously to involve the solitary young man in the school discussions. Every so often it is suggested, most recently by Düring (1966, p. 13), that the young Aristotle who is a character in Plato’s Parmenidesmight be a portrayal of the historic Aristotle.

On the other hand, those who admit that there were differences of thinking between Plato and Aristotle often think about there being a personal conflict as well. In antiquity it was thought that Aristoxenus, a student of Aristotle, had accused Aristotle of opening a school of his own before Plato’s death. To the later ancient scholar Aristocles of Messene, this was an unbelievable report. “Who could believe the things said by the musicologist Aristoxenus in his Life of Plato? During his [Plato’s] wanderings and his absence, he [Aristoxenus] says that certain people, who were foreigners, rose up against him and established a Peripatos in opposition to his. Now some people think he said these things about Aristotle, though Aristoxenus refers to him consistently with reverence” (excerpted in Eusebius 15.2.3 = testimonium 58d). “So Aristotle did not build the Lyceum in opposition to Plato, for which Aristoxenus was the first to denounce him, followed by Aristides, if he remained faithful to Plato until his death” (Vita Marciana 9 and Vita Latina 9; see also Aelius Aristides, Oration 46 (249.10) = testimonium 61a). In Diogenes Laertius (5.2), we find this famous anecdote about Aristotle: “He left Plato while he was living; so they say he remarked that ‘Aristotle kicked us out, just like colts kick out the mother who gave them birth.’ ” On these texts, see below, chapter 4, section 2 and n. 20.

It is not known how much truth there is in all this; most of these reports were invented much later by later scholars, Hellenistic or Neoplatonic, who were probably influenced by the shifting relations between the Academy and the Aristotelian Peripatos over the course of the history of the two schools (Düring 1957, pp. 315–336; Gigon 1958, pp. 160+; Gigon 1962, pp. 44+). Fortunately, we have the word of Aristotle himself on this matter. From the text of Aristotle’s works, the clear conclusion to reach is that there were doctrinal differences between Aristotle and Plato, which however did not result in personal conflict. In fact we can read, in Nicomachean Ethics I.4 (1096a11–13), that Aristotle finds it an obstacle to his examination of the notion of a Universal Good that “the men who introduced the Ideas are friends of mine,”³⁹ clearly a reference to Plato. A very cordial relationship between Aristotle and Plato is also suggested by the so-called Elegy to Eudemus (on this, see section 1.1C of chapter 4), which includes a celebration of Plato’s personality and philosophy; Aristotle speaks of his friendship for “a man whom the bad are forbidden even to praise | who proved it clearly, alone or the first of mortals | by his own way of living and his methods of reasoning | that man’s goodness and happiness come together | but now no one is able to accept this ever” (verses 3–7, fr. 673 Rose 1886 = fr. 2 Ross). It is well known that in certain parts of the Metaphysics, when Aristotle speaks of the proponents of the theory of ideas, he uses the first-person plural. This is a sign of at least a long-standing familiarity with the Academy, and a sense of community among Aristotle and the others (see Berti 1977, p. 20), though it is not really a sign of adherence to the doctrine in question; this was affirmed by Jaeger (1923, pp. 227–230) but denied by Cherniss (1935, pp. 488–494).

Compared with the no-holds-barred manner of polemic that was typical in antiquity, various instances of which have been mentioned in the preceding pages (Aristotle’s enemies said that he was a lover of pleasure, that he was a glutton, that he had devoured his father’s estate, and then chosen a military life, where he turned out unsuccessful as well, and then got involved in selling drugs, that he was a Johnny-come-lately Sophist with an insatiable appetite, greedy, devoted to serving his mouth), Aristotle’s method of debate, like that of Isocrates, appears very moderate to us, since he refrains from any use of vulgarity. This is especially true of his polemics with his colleagues in the Academy, in his engagement with whom he goes only so far as a certain ironical observation, or else a certain venomous aside. For instance, he made two sarcastic comments at the expense of Speusippus in his Metaphysics: “But nature does not seem to be episodic, to judge from appearances, like a bad tragedy!” (XIV (N).3, 1090b19–20), and “All the units become something that is good, and there is such a great abundance of goods!” (XIV (N).4, 1091b25–26). Again, earlier in the same discussion, he lashed out briefly against Xenocrates, saying that “it is evident from these considerations as well that the worst alternative is the third [sc. the one of Xenocrates], that the number of the forms is the same as the mathematical number, for this requires two errors to be combined into one opinion” (XIII.8 (M), 1083b1–3). But there are also expressions of personal esteem, all theoretical disagreements aside, such as his evident respect for Eudoxus. “His arguments were convincing because of his virtuous character rather than by themselves, for he was thought to be exceptionally self-controlled” (Nicomachean Ethics X.2, 1172b15–16). This of course does not amount to great praise on the theoretical level.

A relationship of this sort, based on personal esteem, is understandable if we consider the relationships, made up of a sense of spiritual community (koinonia) together with a commitment to independent research, that can be concluded to have existed among the members of the Academy, as well as among those of the Peripatos, in the early phase of the history of these schools. In the Academy, there was radical criticism of both the doctrine of Ideas and Plato’s doctrine of principles: Speusippus rejected the Ideas, while Xenocrates accepted the existence of ideal numbers; Aristotle harshly criticized the cosmology of the Timaeus, while Philip of Opus, on the contrary, developed its astronomical science in particular. Later, in the Peripatos, Theophrastus criticized many of Aristotle’s theological beliefs in his own Metaphysics, as well as the Aristotelian idea of “place” (fr. 146 FHSG), the use of such expressions as “per se” (to kath’ auto) and “the thing itself” (to he auto) (fr. 116 FHSG), and the Aristotelian theory of the active intellect (fr. 307a FHSG). We know from Cicero (Letters to Atticus 2.16.3) that Dicaearchus rejected the superiority of the intellectual life of study (bios theōretikos) over the political life (apparently in his Tripolitikos; see Letters to Atticus, 13.32.2), and in so doing rejected not only a view held by Theophrastus but also the very theoretical foundation that supported the existence of the Peripatetic school. But none of that resulted in any personal attacks.

In all probability, this relationship between masters and students was based on free discussion and a fundamental agreement in choosing the problems to be discussed, rather than the solutions to be espoused. This became impossible later, in the more dogmatic Hellenistic and Neoplatonic schools, where many of the stories mentioned above, about the conflicts between Aristotle and Plato, were invented. And even nowadays, theoretical differences between scholars can lead to harsh debates, fierce battles, stinging witticisms, every available way to express a reciprocal irritation, in some cases very explicitly; and at times it seems difficult for us to recover the admirable equilibrium of these early Greek masters.

Despite not wishing to talk about the issue of the development of Aristotle’s philosophical thinking, it seems within the limits of this study to make some reference to the activities of study and research that Aristotle undertook in the Academy. This is an extremely important topic about which, unfortunately, we have very scanty information. We do not really know how work was actually organized inside Plato’s school, and the hypotheses put forward have been many and varied (see the overviews by Isnardi Parente 1974 and 1986). Limiting ourselves strictly to what directly relates to Aristotle, it is in his works that we find some indications, and these indications show us Aristotle committed to amassing data in many differing fields of research: astronomy, collections of proverbs, and studies of dialectic and of rhetoric.

In a passage from his work On the Heavens, Aristotle states that he had personally observed (eōrakamen) the moon in a half-full phase pass in front of Mars, and Mars, hidden by the moon, then emerge from behind it (II.12, 292a3–6); “In certain cases this has actually been clearly visible; in fact, we have observed the moon, when it was at the half, overtaking the star of Ares [sc. the planet Mars], which was covered up by its black [shadow], but came out visible and bright.” Modern astronomical data permit a calculation of the date and time of this observation, within a small range of possibilities. It probably took place between 20:12 and 21:30 on the evening of 4 May 357 BCE, when Aristotle was twenty-seven years old and had been a member of the Academy for ten years (see Natali 1978). It might also have taken place late in the evening of 20 March 361, according to the most recent study of the question (Savoie 2003; the remaining possible date of this observation in Aristotle’s lifetime is much later, on 16 March 325, but if this was the occultation in question, Aristotle’s work On the Heavens must be among the last works he wrote.) We must assume that this was not a casual observation but rather formed part of an activity of scientific research, in which the examination of celestial motion played an important role.⁴⁰

Although Plato in Republic VII dismissed the importance of astronomical observation (529c–530b), there are records of astronomical observations by other students of Plato, besides Aristotle, such as Philip of Opus. “This is also how the observations found in Philip about atmospheric conditions were established, as well as the discoveries of the heavenly motions on the basis of astronomy” (Proclus, Commentary on Timaeus I, 103.3–6). Eudoxus of Cnidus wrote two books of astronomical observations: one, thePhainomena, containing astronomical observations that he made in Citium, and the other, the Enoptron, containing observations Eudoxus made farther south, in Athens or Cnidus, according to Lasserre (1966, p. 181).

Apparently, then, the research activity that Aristotle pursued at the Academy focused, from the beginning, on the subjects of astronomy and natural science.⁴¹ For that matter, many authors agree that, in addition to dialectical discussions, members of the Academy carried on scientific activity involving the observation of natural phenomena, and that this was accompanied by the analysis of concepts in a strictly logico-philosophical way. This is confirmed by considerable evidence, of which the most striking is a renowned fragment by the comic author Epicrates⁴² caricaturing the students of Plato, who were intent on dividing up the natures of things (i.e., the natural kinds) and were perplexed by the question of where to place a gourd within their conceptual divisions (diaereseis).⁴³ In this setting, empirical observation hardly seems separate from metaphysical analysis and dialectical discussion; rather, it seems to be part of that process, serving the role of providing the facts and the experiences that the metaphysician must “save” or, rather, which he must justify.

One report, found in Athenaeus (2, 60d–e), indicates to us another field of research that Aristotle pursued in the Academy; “Cephisodorus, a student of Isocrates,⁴⁴ in his Against Aristotle (a work in four books) criticizes the philosopher for making proverb collections of no value” (testimonium 63d). This research into proverbs is also a facet of the attention given by Aristotle to common opinion and to the phainomena, those impressions and beliefs that seem evidently true to various people. A theoretical study must take ample account of these facts, as Aristotle tells us in his Metaphysics (Book II (a).1, 993a30–b5); “the theoretical study of the truth is in a way difficult and in a way easy. An indication of this is the fact that nobody is able to reach the truth satisfactorily, nor completely misses it; but each one says something true about nature, and while individually they contribute nothing, or not much, to the truth, from the conjunction of all we get a considerable amount. ‘Who could fail to hit the doors?’ as the proverb goes.”

Popular sayings and proverbs are frequently used by Aristotle in his works (for a list of passages, see Bonitz 1870, s.v. paroimiai). He gathered them not out of ethnological interest but as a collection of information to be used in the physical sciences as well, for instance, astronomy. The collections of popular sayings are used in the cosmological research of Aristotle, in various surviving texts; for instance, in his On the Heavens I.3 (270b13+), Aristotle seeks confirmation of his theories in common beliefs and proverbs, stating that men have always, back to the earliest antiquity, called the material of which the sky is composed “ether”; and in Meteorology I.3 (b16–30), the same thing is repeated (on these passages, see Natali 1977). Aristotle, from his earliest days of activity as a scholar, shows a special interest in widely held beliefs, more than Plato ever accorded to them. This activity of learned research, of collecting the most widely varying facts, such as this collecting of the proverbs, the popular maxims, and the sayings of the ancients, for instance, will remain one of Aristotle’s distinctive traits (see Moraux 1951, pp. 128–129 and 334, and also below, section 2 of chapter 3, pp. 104–107).

Many authors, including Zeller (1897, 1:17n3), say that one of Aristotle’s first activities in the Academy was to offer a “course” in rhetoric. It seems difficult to believe, however, that there would ever have been interest within the Academy for any teaching of rhetoric that would be technical and practical, like that found in the school of Isocrates (von Arnim 1898, p. 19). There is no other student of Plato, as well, of whom we have reports of “courses” properly so called; and modern authors who write about this topic sometimes project the structure of a modern university onto the organization of Plato’s school.⁴⁵ One could rather consider it to have been a study concerning the nature of conviction, more theoretical than technical, like the one contained in Book I of the Rhetoric. The rivalry between the school of Isocrates and that of Plato, documented by many sources, as well as by the above cited text written by Cephisodorus, may have led the members of the Academy to examine more deeply the nature of persuasion and to take notice of certain fundamental claims of Isocrates; but I cannot imagine a rivalry between Aristotle and Isocrates in the narrowly technical area of the training of orators.

On the other hand, however, there are some ancient authors, such as Philodemus of Gadara, Cicero, Quintilian, Strabo (14.1.48), and Syrianus, who speak of certain “courses” of rhetoric offered by Aristotle (testimonia 32a–e and 33). They tell the story that Aristotle, at a certain point in his “career” as a teacher of philosophy, and therefore not right at the very beginning of that career, changed his theoretical opposition to rhetoric, and began to teach this technē. Philodemus goes on the attack against Aristotle on this matter, near the end of Book VIII of his treatise on rhetoric, a book written on a roll of papyrus broken into two scorched part-rolls found in Herculaneum (P.Herc.832 and P.Herc.1015), yielding mostly legible tops and bottoms of columns, but not their middle portions. (We refer to the edition of the text in the reconstruction and edition of Blank 2007, by the reconstructed column numbers as well as papyrus line numbers.) Near the beginning of this extended polemic (col. 192: P.Herc.832, 36.1–6), he mentions “what they proclaim ab[out] Aristotle, that he used to train [students] in the afternoons, commenting, ‘It’s a shame to be silent and let Isocrates speak.’ ” After a little more than a column, Philodemus sarcastically imagines one scenario where it might make sense to teach rhetoric: if someone “lacks the necessities of life but might have to a certain degree a facility for rhetoric because of certain causes⁴⁶ that go ba[ck to his yo]uth, perhaps in a way he might for a short time make a good living by teaching it to some of those who solicit him as a teacher, until he can return to his proper subject of philosophy, as he would with reading and writing and gymnastics and any subject which as a child he picked up because of his parents’ upbringing” (col. 194:P.Herc.1015, 49.1–19).

Next follow several paragraphs of criticism directed against the profession of teaching rhetoric, and then Philodemus returns to personal attack, saying, “nor was Aristotle very philosophical when he did what we hear told about him along with his rebuke. Why was it more shameful to be silent and let Isocrates speak?” (col. 196: P.Herc.832, 40.1–8). To this rhetorical question comes a rhetorical reply: “if deeds are advantageous, so is speaking, even if he didn’t exist; but if neither are, nor is giving speeches, even if there were thousands of him, so that Aristotle’s knocking him down whenever possible wouldn’t seem to be actually motivated by resentment” (col. 197: P.Herc.1015, 52.10–19). In the middle of this column some lines of text are missing, but when it resumes, the subject has not changed, and Philodemus is still attacking: “ … but not by reference to the natural goals; if he was using these, how could he fail to consider it a shame to speak from the rostrum things that make him resemble those orators who slave for wages, more than those philosophers who equal the gods? And why, along with his exhortation of the young towards the worse, did he also hazard terrible revenge and hostility on the part of the students of Isocrates, as well as the other sophists?” (cols. 197–198: P.Herc. 832, 41.5–14 + P.Herc. 1015, 53.1–6). Two columns later, Philodemus finally reaches the end of his polemic against Aristotle on rhetoric, before moving on to attacking his interest in political thought. Apparently, Aristotle opposed “the rhetoric which seemed similar to that of Isocrates, which he mocked in a variety of ways, but not political rhetoric, which he considered to be different from that other kind. If, then, he offered training for this kind, not the didactic kind, it was ridiculous for him to say that it was a shame to allow Isocrates to speak, since he was not going to speak in the same way as him. I’m not even mentioning the fact that of those who studied rhe[tor]ic with him, not one has gone down as a shin[ing example] of either of them” (cols. 199–200: P.Herc. 832, 43.1–14 + P.Herc. 1015, 55.1–3).⁴⁷

Cicero also refers to Aristotle’s rivalry with Isocrates and his witty quip at his expense (De Oratore 3.141). “Aristotle himself, when he saw Isocrates flourishing with fine students because he [Isocrates] turned his discussions from lawsuits and political cases into empty elegance of speech, altered almost the whole form of his own teaching, and quoted a verse from Philoctetes with a slight alteration; he said, ‘It’s a shame to be silent and let barbarians speak’ (but he [Aristotle] altered this to ‘let Isocrates speak’); and after that he decorated and illustrated all his erudition, and combined knowledge of facts with practice in oratory” (testimonium 32a). In other works, Cicero refers to this episode in the following terms (Tusculan Disputations 1.7; see also De Oratore 14.46): “Aristotle, a man of the greatest genius, knowledge, and resources, when motivated by the renown of Isocrates the orator, began to teach young men to speak and to join intelligence with eloquence” (testimonia 32b–c).⁴⁸

Not all of this information is 100 percent reliable. Philodemus of Gadara often makes use of very old Epicurean documents in his polemics, but here he mixed together various events that had occurred in different periods; in fact, he talks about the research into constitutions allegedly jointly conducted by Aristotle and his student Theophrastus (col. 198: P.Herc. 1015, 53.7–19).⁴⁹ “Of course, he was greatly admired for his ability, but disparaged for his subject, and that’s why he got caught like a thief collecting the laws, together with his student, as well as such a quantity of political constitutions, and legal judgements about the localities and the right times, and everything, as much of such …”

So it is difficult to say whether the information that Philodemus gives us actually has anything to do with Aristotle’s first stay in Athens in the Academy.⁵⁰ As for Cicero, it often seems that his chief purpose is to produce an argument that is rhetorically pleasing, more than to provide us with historically precise information. Employing a rhetorical device that derives distantly from the Aristotelian theory of the right mean, Cicero at times depicts characters from the cultural history of antiquity and has them evolve from opposed positions to a kind of right mean. (For a more detailed analysis of Cicero’s method of constructing anecdotes, see Natali 1985.)

What is common to many of these sources is the idea that, at a certain point, Aristotle supposedly changed some aspect of his educational practice, and declared, “It’s a shame to be silent and allow X to speak,” and decided to begin teaching rhetoric.⁵¹ It seems clear to me that these sources do not confirm the modern notion that Aristotle taught his first “course” of instruction in rhetoric in the Academy, because they maintain unanimously that Aristotle changed his educational methods and began to teach rhetoric only at a certain point in his development.⁵² They know nothing about any content of the instruction, and they connect his interest in rhetoric with his interest in political life; Philodemus naturally criticizes all of this, while Cicero predictably approves of it wholeheartedly. We know from various sources that Aristotle wrote a work, perhaps in the form of a dialogue, entitled Gryllus, to mark the death of Xenophon’s son at the battle of Mantinea (362 BCE), but we have no reliable indications about the content of this work.⁵³ The attempts so often undertaken to flesh out this ghost work, attributing to it parts or concepts of the first two books of theRhetoric, can only remain hypotheses.

We do, however, have a document that dates from the period when Aristotle was offering instruction in the Academy. In the last chapter of Sophistical Refutations, which is generally thought to be a youthful work, Aristotle summarizes the purposes of the treatise and underscores the importance of his work, in which, for the first time, the syllogism is examined. “Now then, we decided to discover some ability to make arguments (dunamin tina sullogistikēn) about what is proposed on the basis of what we started out with as being the most well reputed opinions; for this is the function of dialectic as such, of the skill of putting to the proof ” (183a37–b1). “Now then, it is evident that what we decided to do has reached a satisfactory end, and we must keep in mind what has been settled about this subject (pragmateia)” (183b15–17). “Now on the subject of rhetoric much had already been said, and a long time ago; but about making arguments (sullogizesthai), on the contrary, we had absolutely nothing earlier to tell you about, except what we have labored for a long time in searching to study (tribēi zētountes). And if it seems to those of you who are viewing us that, out of such things as existed in the beginning, the investigation is now satisfactory, more than the other subjects that are based on adding to what has been transmitted (ex paradoseōs ēuxēmenas), then what remains, for all of you who have listened to our work, is to be forgiving of what has been omitted, and to be very grateful for what has been discovered” (184a8–b8).

In contrast with rhetoric, a subject upon which numerous textbooks already existed for a long time, dialectic found a systematic form for the first time in the work of Aristotle. He stated that he had labored for a long time over these subjects (tribēi zētountes polun chronon eponoumen) and that he hoped for the indulgence and gratitude of his audience. What can we draw from this passage? First of all, that Aristotle in the Academy offered lectures, dedicated to the illustration of the various dialectical forms, by way of reading such logoi as the Topics and Sophistical Refutations; moreover, that he spent a great deal of time on the study of dialectic during this period; in the third place, that he apparently always paid special attention to the comparison between rhetoric and dialectic, a comparison that is present in this text, as well as in the beginning of the Rhetoric and in the lone fragment of the lost dialogue Sophist.⁵⁴ All the same, here too there is no mention of a “course on rhetoric,” and it would seem that the central focus of Aristotle’s attention during these years had been dialectic, whereas rhetoric was pressed into service primarily as a point of comparison; on this, see Berti 1977, pp. 175+.

5. A SUDDEN INTERRUPTION

In the year 348 BCE, Philip of Macedon conquered Olynthus, and in 347 the anti-Macedonian party of Demosthenes took power in Athens. In that same year, Plato died, and Speusippus became the head of the Academy after him.⁵⁵ “Now then, Spe[usippus]succeeded him as head of the school. Philochorus [says that when Speu]sippus [dedicated] the Graces in the mousei[on] he was then [in] con[trol] of it, and on them is i[nsc]ribed: Speusipp[us] dedicated these Goddesses of Grace to the s[acred] Muses, offering gifts for the sake of lea[rn]ing.”⁵⁶ And in this same year Aristotle left Athens, perhaps together with Xenocrates. “When Plato died in the first year [of the 108th Olympiad], at the time of Theophilus [348/347 BCE], he [Aristotle] set out to stay with Hermias and remained three years [347–345] (Diogenes Laertius 5.9). “When Plato died in the archonship of Theophilus [348/347], he [Aristotle] set out to stay with Hermias, the tyrant of Atarneus, and spent a period of three years with him” (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, First Letter to Ammaeus 5.2).

In the most recent studies, there has been much discussion whether Aristotle’s departure from Athens was caused by events within the school or by external political events. Those who believe that the death of Plato was the decisive cause of his departure, as does Jaeger (1923, pp. 135–144),⁵⁷think that Aristotle was driven away by doctrinal disagreements with Speusippus, and was signaling in this way his distance from Platonism. Others who think, along with Zeller (1897, 1:19), that the reasons were not reasons of “theoretical” rivalry, but what we would define today as “academic politics,” tend to suppose that neither Aristotle nor Xenocrates would have accepted the naming of Speusippus as the head of the school. A judgment of this sort presupposes in the Academy a job of “scholarch,” with specific administrative functions and a special moral authority over the other constituents of the community. That is acceptable for dogmatic schools, such as the Epicureans (see below, section 3 of chapter 2), in which it was important that the scholarch be a faithful follower of the master’s thought, but such an idea seems far less appropriate for the more liberal schools of Plato and Aristotle.

Those who, on the other hand, believe that Aristotle had already, at the time of Plato’s death, taken an independent philosophical position think that there is no reason to accept that Plato’s death would have triggered a philosophical crisis in Aristotle, and they therefore judge it possible that the departure of Aristotle from Athens is due to external reasons, to a worsening of the political climate.⁵⁸ This entails accepting that Aristotle already in this period represented an openly pro-Macedonian position, such as would make him invidious to the Athenians in a moment of crisis such as that which followed the conquest of Olynthus. The words of Demochares quoted above (section 2 of chapter 1) would support this hypothesis, but it would seem that these words were spoken forty years after the event and in a different historical moment. It is not possible to establish anything certain on this point, because neither of these two hypotheses has yet found any unimpeachable arguments in the texts.

6. AT THE COURTS OF PRINCES AND KINGS

6.1. ATARNEUS

The period from 347 to 335 BCE is the most obscure time in Aristotle’s life. After he went away from Athens, his tracks appear more uncertain, and the reports on his movements appear more doubtful than before. It is reasonably certain, all the same, that he spent three years at the court of Hermias, the tyrant of Atarneus. “When Plato died in the first year [of the 108th Olympiad], at the time of Theophilus [348/347 BCE], he set out to stay with Hermias and remained three years [347–345]; and he went to Mytilene at the time when Euboulus was archon, in the fourth year of the 108th Olympiad [345]. And at the time of Pythodotus he went to stay with Philip, in the second year of the 109th Olympiad [343], Alexander being already fifteen years old[thirteen, according to Düring 1957, pp. 34 and 254]” (Diogenes Laertius 5.9–10). “When Plato died in the archonship of Theophilus [348/347], he set out to stay with Hermias, the tyrant of Atarneus, and spent a period of three years with him before departing for Mytilene in the archonship of Euboulus [345/344]. He left there to stay with Philip in the archonship of Pythodotus [343/342], and spent a period of eight years with him as tutor to Alexander” (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, First Letter to Ammaeus 5.2–3).

Perhaps the acquaintance between Aristotle and Hermias, discussed by Didymus Chalcenterus in the passage quoted below, was due to the fact that Proxenus was from Atarneus; some scholars have hypothesized that in 347, after Aristotle left Athens, he simply decided to go back to one of the cities where he had personal ties.⁵⁹ If the statement of Strabo quoted in note 61 is to be taken seriously, Aristotle was accompanied by his fellow Academic philosopher Xenocrates, a native of Chalcedon on the Bosphorus, a city not far from Assos; but Strabo is the only source of this report.⁶⁰Afterward, Aristotle spent two years in Mytilene, and then for another three years served as the tutor of Alexander the Great. We do not really know what he was doing during the other four years.

Hermias of Atarneus is nowadays known primarily because he was a friend of Aristotle, but he was a very well-known and much-discussed character in antiquity.⁶¹ Without mentioning his name, Demosthenes reports (Fourth Philippic 32) that “the man who is the agent and accomplice of all of Philip’s machinations against the King [of Persia] has been seized, and the King will hear of all these deeds, not from our accusations [ … ] but from the man himself who organized them and carried them out.” Nineteenth-century philologists speculated that the person linked to Philip of Macedon, to whom Demosthenes refers anonymously, was in fact Hermias of Atarneus. This hypothesis has been confirmed by the discovery of a somewhat damaged papyrus fragment from a work commenting on the Philippics of Demosthenes by Didymus Chalcenterus (an Alexandrian scholar of the first century BCE), who, in connection with that passage, explains the reference in Demosthenes at some considerable length.⁶²

The purpose of the scholar’s comments is to provide a sketch of the controversies concerning the figure of Hermias. “Since [a great dif ]-ference is to be heard among those who trans[mit stories about Hermias for the sake of ] the receptive ears [of those who nowadays] busy themselves with such things, I think I should speak about this [at greater length]. For some recol[lect the man] as the best, others, by contrast, as the worst” (col. 4, lines 59–65, as edited and supplemented by P. Harding 2006). Didymus then quotes Theopompus, who, in the forty-sixth book of hisPhilippics, reports Hermias as being a eunuch and a Bithynian, who seized Assos and later conquered Atarneus and the surrounding territory. According to Theopompus, he was the cruelest and wickedest tyrant of all, he used drugs against his enemies, and he treated many of the Ionians abusively. In the end, Theopompus concludes, he was punished for his misdeeds, by being seized and dragged before the king of Persia, at whose hands he endured considerable physical abuse before being crucified (4.66–5.21).

This same Theopompus, however, in a Letter to Philip (a passage also cited by Didymus, at 5.24–28 and 5.52–63, rather damaged lines), says that Hermias had acquired a certain fame among the Greeks. In this Letter, apparently written during the lifetime of Hermias, he is described as being “refined, and a lov[er of beauty] (philokalos). And, despite being [a barba]rian, he does philosophy with the P[lato]nists, and, although he was born a slave, he competes in international festivals with expensive teams. And despite possessing rocky crags and tin[y land] he got … [twenty-three lines are too damaged to be intelligible] … Plato [ … ] and into the surrounding country he led his army [ … ] and Erastus and Aristotle [ … ] for which reason indeed they all [ … ]afterwards, [when others] had [come] he gave them so[me land] as a gift. [ … ] And he changed the tyranny … to a milder system of rule. For this reason he also ruled over a[ll the neigh]bo[ri]ng country as far as Assos, when [ … ] to the above-mentioned philosophers [ … ] the city of Assos. Of th[em] he was most [recep]tive to Aristotle, and [his disposition to]-wards him was very familiar.”⁶³

Among Hermias’s supporters there was also Callisthenes, who recalls his death in heroic tones. In the account of Didymus (5.66–6.18), according to Callisthenes, “not only was he this so[rt of man when he was far from] dangers, but even [when he found himself ] close to them he continued to remain the same, and he gave the great[est proof of his virtue then,] in the man[ner of his death.] For the barbarians observed [his] courage [with astonishment.] Indeed the King, when [question]ing him and hearing[nothing] different from the same stories, was impressed by his courage and the steadiness of his demeanour, and it occurred to him to let him off completely, thinking that if they became friends, he would be one of the most useful. But when Bagoas and Mentor objected, out of resentment and the fear that if released he might be foremost instead of them, he changed his mind again; but when [he] passed sentence, he granted him an exemption from the mutilations that take place there, [on account of ] his virtue. Now the existence of such moderation [on the part of ] enemies is totally incredible and [greatly contrary to] the cus[tom] of the barbarians. [ … ] Phil[ip … ] about to [ … ] for him to [send a mes]sage to his [friends and his com]panions that he had done nothing un[worth]y of philosophy [or dis]honorable.’ ”

This mention of Hermias’s death leads us directly to recall the poem written by Aristotle, described by Didymus as a hymn (paean), cited next in his text (6.22–36).⁶⁴

O Virtue, won by much toil of the mortal race,
You are the prettiest prey in the hunt of life;
For your beautiful form, O Virgin,
To die, is in Greece a fine fate to strive for,
As well as enduring fierce trials unending.
Such fruits as this you cast into hearts,
As good as immortal, and better than gold,
Better than parents, and languid-eyed sleep.
For your sake, even the godlike
Hercules and the sons of Leda
Held up under many labours
When [hunting for] your power;
Longing for you, Achilles and
Ajax went to the house of Hades;
For the sake of your lovely form, the scion
of Atarneus forsook the rays of the sun.
Wherefore the glory of his deeds,
And he, shall be exalted by the Muses,
The daughters of Memory, they who
Exalt the majesty of godlike Hospitality,
And the privilege of lasting Friendship.

Didymus then recalls (6.39–43) that Aristotle erected a monument to Hermias at Delphi; the monument still existed in Didymus’s time, and on it was the following inscription:

Here lies, breaching the law sacred to Blessed Ones,
A man killed by the king of bow-bearing Persians,
Not besting him plainly in dread combat with spears,
But using the trust of a most treacherous man.

But it doesn’t end there; there were further polemics to reckon with. Didymus then cites (6.46–49) from a book about Theocritus of Chios written by a certain Bryon, who states that Theocritus composed the following hostile epigram, apparently in response to the above epigram by Aristotle:⁶⁵

To Hermias the eunuch, and slave of Eubulus as well,
This empty tomb was raised by Aristotle’s empty mind.
Impressed by the belly’s lawless nature, he chose to dwell
In the outlet of Borboros’ stream, not in the Academe.

Lastly, Didymus concludes (6.50–59), there are even differing accounts of where Hermias was captured and how he died. Hermippus, in the second book of his Aristotle, says that Hermias died in prison, but others say that he was tortured and crucified, as Didymus had mentioned earlier (5.19–21), relying on Theopompus. A third version was supplied by Callisthenes, who states, as we saw above, that Hermias suffered appalling treatment with conspicuous bravery, without admitting anything to the king about his plots with Philip, which earned him an exemption from mutilation.

The result of these conflicting reports and opinions, in which some glorify Hermias and others consider him a villain, is that the reports about him are completely confused and contradictory. What is certain is that Hermias was the tyrant or dictator, after Eubulus, of Atarneus, the birthplace of Proxenus, who was Aristotle’s adoptive father or guardian. Besides Theopompus and Strabo (13.1.57), Diogenes Laertius and others say that Hermias was a eunuch, a former slave of Eubulus, the former tyrant of Assos (who had been a banker), and then was himself tyrant (see testimonia 21–24).⁶⁶ In 345/344, in 343, or in 341/340, according to the various reconstructions,⁶⁷ as Didymus and Strabo tell us, Hermias was captured and killed by Mentor, a mercenary in the service of the Persian king. His reign therefore did not last a long time, five or ten years at the most. It seems clear from Aristotle’s Hymn to Hermias that Hermias was a Greek and not a barbarian, as Theopompus claimed in the passage quoted above; but it was customary among Greek authors, when engaged in a polemic, to call everyone barbarians (see Mulvany 1926).

Some sources that tend to praise Aristotle, such as the Neoplatonic biographies, prefer to pass over in virtual silence this relationship with so questionable a figure; among the biographers of this tradition, his stay at the court of Hermias is mentioned only in Usaibia, and the mention is brief (Life of Aristotle 5, tr. Düring 1957). The school of Aristotle by contrast, beginning with the master himself, always defended the memory of Hermias;⁶⁸ Aristotle celebrated his virtues in the Hymn and with the epigram, both cited above. The metric form of the poem was first studied by Festa (1923) and later Bowra (1938), who argued that the very form of the poem indicates that it was composed to be sung in chorus, and thinks that it was sung every day at Aristotle’s table. This story, as Athenaeus clearly tells us (15, 696a), is tied to the question of the trial for impiety brought by the Athenians against Aristotle; see below, section 9 of chapter 1, pp. 61–62. Didymus Chalcenterus, as we have seen above, cites the treatise that Aristotle’s nephew Callisthenes wrote about Hermias, in which a favorable approach is evident, making Hermias out to be virtually a martyr to philosophy. Later, in the first century BCE, the Peripatetic Apellicon wrote another treatise, defending the friendship between Aristotle and Hermias from defamation (see section 1 of chapter 4). And so the tradition favorable to Hermias continued throughout the history of the Peripatetic school, both to celebrate the tyrant and to defend Aristotle from the accusation of having ties to a man considered by many to be despicable.

In general, there are no significant traces of the events of Aristotle’s private life in his works. Aristotle mentions Eubulus in Politics (II.7, 1267a31–37), without naming Hermias;⁶⁹ and in the Economics, a later work written by a member of the Aristotelian school, Hermias is cited (II.2, 1351a35), but there is no talk of his friendship with Aristotle. The friendship between Aristotle and Hermias, all the same, is proved with certainty by Aristotle’s so-called Hymn to Hermias, mentioned above (and on this see section 1.1C of chapter 4). In this text, the references to the “majesty of godlike Hospitality” and to the “privilege of lasting Friendship” testify to the nature of the friendship between the philosopher and the tyrant. Some believe that Aristotle had a role as political adviser to Hermias, in accordance with the Platonic tradition; see Mulvany 1926, p. 164, and Weil 1960, p. 15).

We know that Aristotle married Pythia, a person who was certainly very close to Hermias, and who is mentioned in Aristotle’s will (see above, section 3 of chapter 1, pp. 14–15). Gigon calculated that there are no fewer than six different versions of the relationship between Pythia and Hermias: daughter, granddaughter, concubine, niece, sister, and sister adopted as daughter.⁷⁰ In his On Philosophy, Aristocles preserves part of a letter said to be from Aristotle to Antipater, which seems to express a need on Aristotle’s part to defend his marriage; he tells Antipater, “I married her after the death of Hermias,⁷¹ out of good will toward him, and in any case she was sensible and good” (excerpted in Eusebius 15.2.14 = testimonium 581).

Hermias had relationships not only with Aristotle but also with the Academy at large. As we can conclude from the passage quoted above, and from numerous other sources, several students of Plato had already got there before Aristotle, notably Erastus and Coriscus of Scepsis (testimonia10T5–7 Lasserre 1987). Coriscus of Scepsis was the father of the same Neleus of Scepsis who became a student of Aristotle in the Peripatos and inherited the library of Theophrastus, according to Strabo 13.1.54 (testimonium 10T3 Lasserre 1987) and Diogenes Laertius 5.52 (we shall discuss the fate of these libraries below, in section 3 of chapter 2). Therefore, there existed a definite relationship between the Platonic school and Hermias, but it is not easy to establish either its origin or its nature. Some ancient sources speak of a sojourn spent by Hermias in the Platonic Academy (Theopompus and Hermippus, cited above, and Strabo 13.1.57, cited in note 61), but the name Hermias appears in none of the lists of the students of Plato (for these lists, see Lasserre 1987, testimonia 1T1–9).

Moreover, from the Platonic Sixth Letter, purportedly sent by Plato⁷² to Hermias, Erastus, and Coriscus, in order to exhort them to get along together, it appears that Plato had not yet met Hermias. “It seems to me, without yet having met him, that Hermias has a natural ability of this sort[sc. practical political ability], and has acquired skill through experience” (322e6–7). And the letter makes it out that the connection between the Academy and the tyrant depended on the fact that Erastus and Coriscus, students of Plato, had become friends of Hermias, in a relationship that was useful for both. “You are living as neighbours one to another, and you have an obligation to help each other as much as possible. For Hermias, neither the great number of horses he has, or of other military armaments, nor even his gold, add overall to his power as much as his having lasting friends of sound character” (322c–d). Erastus and Coriscus, on the other hand, need a statesman who can protect them, so that their studies would not get neglected (322e–323a). In the passage cited above,⁷³ Hermippus describes the relationships that Hermias maintained with Plato’s students and, on the basis of this fragmentary information, some have supposed that Hermias actually entrusted the Platonists with a city they could rule, Assos. But from the text of the Sixth Letter, nothing would seem further from the interests of Erastus and Coriscus than to receive the gift of a city, even a small one like Assos, to rule over; in fact, they “lack the wisdom to defend themselves against the wicked and the unjust, as well as a certain ability for aggression,” and they are “inexperienced (apeiroi)” (322d–e). Nor is there any mention of any role as political advisers that the two of them supposedly played under Hermias, as certain modern critics believe (e.g., Gaiser 1985, p. 17).

It is true that in a treaty between Hermias and the city of Eretria, carved on a stone inscription that is still preserved (Dittenberger 1915, no. 229), there are several mentions of Hermias “and his associates” (kai hoi hetairoi). Jaeger (1923, pp. 112+) and others such as Gaiser (1985, p. 20) have thought that they could identify these hetairoi as Erastus and Coriscus; and Pavese (1961) actually thought that they were Aristotle and Xenocrates, and he believed that Aristotle had been part of the government. This is pure speculation,⁷⁴ and it is in no way likely that the hetairoi were the philosophers. The story is told, in the ps.-Aristotelian Economics (2.2, 1351a33–37), that Mentor of Rhodes, after taking Hermias prisoner and seizing his fortresses, left in place the “overseers” (epimelētai) that Hermias had posted there. When these overseers felt more secure and brought back into light the riches that they had concealed, Mentor arrested them and stripped them of everything. It is clear from this passage that those who were in charge of governing the fortresses, such as Assos, on behalf of Hermias, were no philosophers, who fled when the tyrant died, but simple soldiers, as is shown by their conduct. It is also noteworthy, in this text, that there is no moral judgment whatever and no expression of support for Hermias; that characteristic differentiates this text from all the other passages of Peripatetic origin about Hermias (see van Groningen 1933, p. 172). The judgment offered of Mentor in Magna Moralia (1.34, 1197b21–22), by contrast, is much harsher; Mentor is said to be clever (deinos) even though he is wicked (phaulos). According to the Suda (s.v. “Hermias” = testimonium 24), Hermias is said to have written a treatise on the immortality of the soul in one book, following Aristotle’s doctrines, but no one believes this.

Aside from these reports, there is not much information about what Aristotle was doing in Assos. From Wilamowitz (1893, 1:334) and onward, it was thought that Aristotle had participated in the discussions of a school of philosophers (this is also stated by Jaeger, Bidez, Bignone, Gauthier, and various others).⁷⁵ According to Jaeger (1923, p. 149), this school was an offshoot of the Platonic Academy, set up to realize on a smaller scale the political attempt that failed at Syracuse. And, in fact, the sources that are hostile to Plato give a long list of students who tried to apply in their own cities the political doctrines of their master;⁷⁶ but that there was in Assos a relationship between philosophers and a tyrant, like the one theorized by Aristotle in which the government follows the advice of the philosophers, is not at all certain. If this modern hypothesis were to be confirmed, the short duration and tragic end of the tyranny of Hermias would certainly not provide much supporting evidence for the practicality of the Aristotelian formula, nor for the quality of the advice given by the philosophers to the tyrant.

While we cannot say anything precise about the political role of Aristotle and his colleagues, there is however fairly certain evidence of the existence of a community of philosophers at Assos;⁷⁷ Theopompus, in the passage quoted above, states that Hermias engaged in philosophy together with the Platonists, even though he was a barbarian and a slave; and Philodemus of Gadara, in his Index of Academic Philosophers, speaks of a peripatos where philosophers gathered.⁷⁸ “They had been invited by Her[mias] in a very kindly way earlier, too, but then, because of the death of Plato, he urged them even a b[it mo]re. On their arrival, he [gave] them everything in common and allowed them to li[ve in] a city, the city of Assos,⁷⁹ where they re[sid]ed and did philosophy, meeting together in a single [Peri]patos, and Hermias provided them, it [seems,] with every[thing nec]essary.”⁸⁰ Moreover, Aristotle often cites Coriscus, especially in Metaphysics and in Eudemian Ethics, as an example of an “individual substance,” and this has led some to think that the passages in which his name appears were written when Aristotle, Erastus, and Coriscus were discussing topics of first philosophy together.

According to what little we can gather from these sparse reports, the community of Plato’s students in Assos was not divided by any substantial disagreements, and Philodemus emphasizes that they all belonged to a single Peripatos (concerning the meaning of this term, see section 4 of chapter 3). This does not necessarily mean that in this period Aristotle had no distinct philosophical positions of his own. It indicates rather that the habit of study and discussion acquired in the Academy was carried on in Asia Minor as well, presumably on the basis of comparing different opinions on similar problems, problems that all Academics concurred in considering important and worthy of attention. We shall return to this point later.

Many have remarked that the data on the life of the animals collected in Research on Animals show that Aristotle conducted a large part of his biological studies over the course of the years from 347 to 335 in the Troad, at Assos and Atarneus, and then on Lesbos, and then in Macedonia, because many of the observations pertain to species common and in some cases indigenous to those regions (Thompson 1910 and Lee 1948). But this reasoning, which at first seemed unquestionable, has been opened up again for discussion more recently, and with good reason; in his Research on Animals, Aristotle worked primarily from written sources, including Homer, the poets, and Xenophon, and not from personal observation (Solmsen 1978; but see Byl 1980, pp. xxxviii–xl and 1–135). All the same, we cannot rule out that Aristotle dedicated part of his time in Assos and Mytilene to biological research. A theory that Theophrastus met Aristotle before the latter’s stay on Mytilene, that he took part in the Peripatos at Assos, and that he wrote his work On Fire at Assos, has been hypothesized by Gaiser (1985, esp. pp. 28–36), but without any secure textual basis.⁸¹

Around 345/344 BCE, Aristotle left Hermias and moved over to Lesbos, perhaps to conduct research, in the view of Lee (1948, p. 64), or perhaps because of his newly born friendship with Theophrastus, in the view of Regenbogen (1940, col. 1357) and Berti (1977, p. 29). There he made the acquaintance of other people, and other students of Aristotle came from Lesbos, such as Phanias and Praxiphanes, as remarked by Bignone 1936 (2:43–44); Bignone also claims that Aristotle also founded a school in Mytilene (1936, 1:411+), but this is a doubtful business.⁸²

6.2. MACEDONIA

According to the ancient chronologies, in the years 343–335 BCE Aristotle lived in Macedonia, first as the tutor of Alexander and later, when Alexander was appointed regent by his father Philip in 340, as a private citizen. The evidence about this period in Aristotle’s life is fairly thin, as Zeller had long ago noted (1897, 1:21–22). The chief source for the event in Aristotle’s life that took him to Macedonia is Plutarch, who writes in his Life of Alexander (7.2) that, since Philip “didn’t have much faith in teachers of music or the general curriculum to provide him with attentiveness and discipline [ … ] he sent for the most well esteemed and well versed of the philosophers, Aristotle, and paid him a suitably handsome tuition” (testimonium 25a). The description of this event given by Plutarch is part of the tradition of fictionalized biographies that were extremely popular with the Hellenistic and Roman public; at that point in time, Aristotle was certainly not famous, and the further details given by Plutarch appear to be invented. He writes that Philip assigned to the teacher and pupil a temple of the Nymphs at Mieza in the district of Emazia, where in Plutarch’s time one could see the marble seats and the shady lanes frequented by Aristotle and Alexander. Even today, anyone who goes to Mieza will find archaeological excavations with the sign “School of Aristotle,” but the whole thing is not credible. According to Plutarch, Aristotle taught Alexander ethics, politics, medicine, and all his esoteric doctrines (including the treatise on first causes entitled Metaphysics); and he prepared for him a critical edition of the Iliad. Plutarch tells us that the relationship between the two cooled off little by little, even though Alexander remained passionate about philosophy; indeed he took with him into Asia Anaxarchus of Abdera, a follower of Democritus, and he gave fifty talents to Xenocrates (in order to irritate Aristotle, said many; see Diogenes Laertius 4.8).

Others who speak of the relationship between Aristotle and Alexander include Quintilian, Dio Chrysostom, Justin, and all the Neoplatonic biographies (testimonia 25a–h). The information given us by these sources is largely the product of fantasy, but the encounter between the two of them must have actually taken place,⁸³ even though several ancient sources that speak of Alexander make no mention of his relationship with Aristotle.⁸⁴ In fact, the Stoics, who consider Alexander a model of moral depravity, never mention Aristotle as having been responsible for his education (see Stroux 1933 and Chroust 1966, p. 128). All the same, there is sufficiently ancient evidence linking Aristotle and Alexander to allow us to accept the traditional report. In his Memoranda, Alexinus of Elis (a student of Eubulides and a contemporary of Zeno the Stoic) related a conversation that Alexander had with his father Philip, in which the son complained about the logoi of Aristotle. In his On Philosophy (fr. 2 Chiesara), Aristocles held that “even the stories of the sophist Alexinus can be reasonably judged ridiculous; he depicts Alexander as a boy speaking with his father Philip and scorning the logoi of Aristotle and instead approving Nicagoras, known as Hermes” (excerpted in Eusebius 15.2.4 =testimonium 58e); but what is ridiculous is the belief in a human Hermes, not the implication that Alexander knew the logoi of Aristotle.⁸⁵

It is no easy matter to establish what these logoi were, whether lectures or treatises, or even the famous logoi exōterikoi, the popular published works of Aristotle. In fact, we know nothing certain about what Aristotle may have taught Alexander, but the question has aroused the imagination of modern historians. Their opinions more or less reduce to three: (A) Aristotle taught Alexander his entire system, including metaphysics, ethics, and politics;⁸⁶ (B) Aristotle taught Alexander traditional Greek culture, including epic poets and tragedians (despite the low esteem in which these authors were held in the Academy);⁸⁷ (C) Aristotle taught Alexander dialectic. This latter report might be confirmed by the Letter to Alexander of Isocrates, in which he states that Alexander rejects no part of philosophy, not even eristic, that is, sophistry (tōn te philosophiōn … tēn peri tas eridas), given that Isocrates generally uses this expression to refer to those who dedicate themselves to investigations of a theoretical or dialectical nature (Helen 1; see Eucken 1983, pp. 9–10), including the members of the Academy (Antidosis 258). From the point of view of Isocrates and his conception of philosophy, the differences of theoretical position between the various philosophers, such as Antisthenes, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, might well have appeared to be of very little relevance; he states in general that the ruler should not get into discussions with his subjects, or be contradicted, but he should guide them by making use of the philosophical logoi that are appropriate for making good choices, both in public affairs and in private matters, that is, the logoi of Isocrates himself (Letter to Alexander 3–4). If the letter is authentic, the report, however vague and imprecise, would be so ancient as to be incontrovertible, but there are doubts about its authenticity.⁸⁸

No hypothesis is really entirely demonstrable, and we must come to a halt in the face of conjectures. We have seen that Plutarch believed that Aristotle had taught Alexander his entire philosophy; others thought it was a good idea to invent Aristotelian texts specifically addressed to the young prince. That is why we find, both in the traditional corpus of writings by Aristotle and in other collections, works dedicated to Alexander such as the Rhetoric for Alexander, or the letter to Alexander on government, preserved in Arabic translation (see below, pp. 123–124). However, none of these writings is certainly authentic, and they testify only to the effort made by ancient intellectuals to fill this lacuna, which was in its own right a source of the greatest curiosity; what could the greatest philosopher of antiquity have taught the greatest conqueror in the universe? To put it kindly, however, their perhaps adequate theoretical abilities were of no assistance in this literary effort of theirs; nothing astonishing, nothing worthy of the occasion, and nothing appropriate to the great names of each of the personages is to be found in the pseudonymous Aristotelian writings for Alexander.

We also have a few fragments of a treatise On Royalty, in which some see traces of the instruction given by Aristotle to Alexander; and among these is the famous advice that “it is not necessary for the king himself to do philosophy; rather it will hinder him, but [ … the king] should be open to hearing and being persuaded by those genuine philosophers whom he encounters” (Themistius, Oration 8, 107c–d). Despite the lack of information that faces us, many link this episode instead with the Academic doctrine on the necessity of giving a philosophical education to a king, rather than with any events in Aristotle’s biography (Rose, Robin, Jaeger, Prächter, Bidez, and Randall; for a good overview of the question, see Berti 1977, pp. 29–30, and Laurenti 1987, pp. 867–909).

Another famous piece of advice that Aristotle is said to have offered to Alexander is to “behave towards Greeks as their leader (hēgemonikōs) and towards foreigners as their master (despotikōs), taking care of the former as friends and kinsmen and dealing with the latter as animals or plants” (Plutarch, Alexander: Fortune or Virtue? I.6, 329b; see also Strabo 1.4.9). This advice, however, tends in the opposite direction from the policy of racial assimilation encouraged by Alexander. Its attitude is certainly in keeping with the opinions concerning barbarians that we find in Aristotle’s writings, but it might well be thought that it would have been difficult for Alexander to have felt the need to ask Aristotle for advice on how to govern; the relationship of the king with the philosophers would appear to have been set up rather differently, and the Callisthenes affair suggests that Alexander was not very docile, nor was he receptive to the advice of philosophers. But, on the other hand, Aristotle wrote a book called Alexander, subtitledConcerning the Colonies or Concerning the Colonists (Alexandros ē hyper apoikōn or apoikiōn); these titles are listed both in Diogenes Laertius (5.22) and in the list of Aristotle’s writings found in the anonymous ancient Life of Aristotle (sc. the Vita Menagiana; see below, section 1.3 of chapter 4), so it is fairly certain that an Aristotelian text with such a title existed.⁸⁹ (However, it is not certain that the advice that Plutarch preserves is derived from this work, where it is placed in the editions of Ross 1955 and Laurenti 1987; other scholars have seen it as a fragment from a Letter to Alexander, on which see below, p. 122). We have no certain information on the circumstances in which Aristotle wrote this work on colonies, and we have only a vague report about its contents and no certain fragments (see Laurenti 1987, pp. 911–959). The same is true for the Arabic text published by Bielawski and Plezia under the title Lettre d’Aristote à Alexandre sur la politique envers les cités: this work is generally considered to be pure compilation, done by someone who was very familiar with Aristotle’s treatises; for the discussion on this point, see below, pp. 123–124.

Some have tried to guess what Aristotle might have taught Alexander by examining Alexander’s political decisions, at least his most respectable ones. Jaeger claims that Aristotle suggested to Alexander the idea of unifying Greece under Macedonian leadership (1923, pp. 156–160). But this is an uncertain matter. Wilamowitz had earlier noted that Aristotle in his Politics limits himself to the problems of the polis (1893, 1:336, 365–369), and that in this work the idea that Greece could become a politically unified entity is not there; rather, he states that the small poleis should continue to exist. It is, of course, true that in the Politics (VII.6, 1327b32–33), Aristotle mentions the unification of Greece against the barbarians, but what he was thinking about is rather a unification (perhaps federal) among the various cities (mias tugkanon politeias), and there is not a word about any role for the Macedonian kings in this context; this silence is important and makes an evident contrast with clearly pro-Macedonian positions, such as that of Isocrates. Even Isocrates openly advises the unification of Greece against the barbarians, under the leadership of Philip of Macedon; he says that only Philip can successfully unify Thebes, Argos, Sparta, and Athens, and can succeed in defeating the king of Persia (Philip 16, 41–45, 57, 68+, 80, 88, 139). It is worth the trouble to emphasize this difference of positions, because modern historians usually view the Peripatetic school as a sort of cultural “fifth column” of the Macedonian kingdom in Athens (for a recent example, see Will 1983, p. 54n39).

In the passage from Timaeus of Tauromenium quoted above (section 3 of chapter 1, p. 10), the historian, who was younger than Aristotle by a generation, at once connects and contrasts Aristotle with Alexander the Great’s expedition into Asia. But, as was the case with Hermias, there is no reference whatever in the works of Aristotle that have survived to his relationship with Philip or Alexander, nor is Macedonia the object of any particular appreciation, support, or explicit praise; rather, in Politics VII.2 (1324b9–22), the Macedonians are listed among non-Greek peoples, along with Scythians, Persians, Thracians, Celts, Iberians, and Carthaginians,⁹⁰ and, just like Plato (Gorgias 470d+), Aristotle considers the Macedonian royal family as an example of barbaric customs in hisPolitics (on this point, see Wilamowitz 1893 (1:348), Ehrenberg 1938 (pp. 62–102), and Weil 1960, pp. 184–185, 195, 198–201, and 215–217). This contrasts, once again, with what Isocrates says in Philip (105+), where he attributes to the Macedonian royal house the glories of Hercules. Aristotle never mentions any events in the life of Alexander or his wars; for instance, when he speaks of Thebes, he does not mention the fact that Alexander razed it to the ground, nor does he ever mention the expedition into Asia and the destruction of the Persian Empire. An ancient tradition holds that Alexander sent Aristotle botanical samples and exotic animals for his biological studies from Asia, but there is no trace in the writings of Aristotle of any of this; the reports that we find in hisResearch on Animals (IX.1, 610a15+) on India and its fauna, such as elephants, are entirely a matter of fables and legends.⁹¹

The main events in Alexander’s reign are instead mentioned by the subsequent Peripatetics. There may be a reference to the fall of the Persian Empire in the ps.-Aristotelian Economics (I.6, 1344b34), which speaks of Persian customs in the past tense, but it is chiefly Theophrastus who, in hisResearch on Plants, offers specific reports. He recalls the expedition of Alexander (1.4.1, 4.7.3), he mentions a specific place in the city of Babylon (2.6.7), he describes the amazement of Greek and Macedonian soldiers when they found themselves confronted with unknown plants and herbs (4.4.1–10), such that they tried to identify them by giving them the names of the plants of their own countries, and he mentions the name of the personal physician of Alexander (4.16.6).⁹² The difference between his perspective and that of his master is considerable.

Here we can only mention a fragment of the text On Fortune by Demetrius of Phalerum, reported by two historians, Polybius (29.21.3–6) and Diodorus Siculus (31.10.1–2), in which the orator and politician comments on the fall of the Persian Empire and predicts the end of the Macedonian kingdom. “If one takes into consideration not limitless time nor many generations, but merely these last fifty years up to now, you will recognize in them the toughness of Fortune. Fifty years ago, do you think either the Persians or the king of the Persians, or the Macedonians or the king of the Macedonians, if one of the gods had predicted the future to them, would ever have believed that by the present time, not even the name of the Persians would have remained at all, they who were masters of almost the whole world, and that the Macedonians would now be ruling over everything, they who formerly didn’t even have a name? No, in a way the Fortune that breaches contracts in our lives, produces new things beyond our power to think about, and displays her power in ways beyond belief, is now too, I think, showing all humans, by sending the Macedonians to dwell in the prosperity of the Persians, that she is lending them these good things until she wishes to do something else with them.” The comment is strange coming from a politician who built his career on support from Macedon and who attained supreme power in Athens only as the “administrator” (epimelētēs) of Cassander (Diodorus Siculus 18.74.2; see above, section 3, p. 13).⁹³ Polybius quotes the prediction as a comment on the Roman conquest of Macedonia (29.21.2), and he affirms that Demetrius’s intention had been “to show humans that Fortune is changeable.” Modern historians who have studied this passage generally consider it to be a sinister prophecy of the fate of the Macedonian monarchy, or as an expression of pessimism, whether personal on the part of Demetrius or general on the part of all Greeks at the end of the fourth century BCE. This passage is generally linked to the fragments of Theophrastus on the power of fate (fr. 487–501 FHSG), but Theophrastus is referring to the lives of individuals, not entire peoples; in his Consolation to Apollonius (6, 104d), Plutarch tells Apollonius that “all of us have suffered the same thing. ‘Fortune is aimless,’ says Theophrastus, ‘and is terribly good at stealing away the things we work for and overturning apparent prosperity, since it has no prescribed time.’ ”

Yet arguably the matter could be understood differently; according to my hypothesis, Demetrius does nothing more here than apply to the events of his own time certain distinctions practiced by the Peripatetic school. In Aristotle’s view, that which depends on “luck” (tychē) falls into the sphere in which human actions are undertaken (Physics II.6, 197b2–8) and corresponds to that which happens “by accident” (kata sumbebēkos) (II.5, 197a5–6; II.5, 197a32–35; II.6, 197b23–24; II.6, 198a6–7). It is not possible to have a science about things that happen by accident, according to Aristotle. Not only does this limitation apply to small-scale everyday events, but it may also be characteristic of events of large significance (Metaphysics XI (K).8, 1065b1). But what could it mean to say that events such as the collapse of world empires happen as the result of tychē? In our view, that which distinguishes, in Peripatetic philosophy, between events such as the rise and fall of great hegemonies and the political organization of the polis is that events of the first sort are in a certain sense irrational, beyond scientific and political knowledge; the cities, on the other hand, are the ultimate end, the culmination of the genetic development of the forms of human community, the highest level that man can attain, in which his social nature finds its fullest realization (Politics I.2). No major novelties or later innovations in the form of the human community are predicted after the birth of the polis (Politics II.5, 1264a1–5). Therefore it is possible to have a theoretical understanding of thepolis, an understanding expressed in Aristotle’s Politics, while this is not true of the affairs of kingdoms. For that reason, Aristotle seems more interested in questions of constitutional and social history than in the histoire événementielle of his times.

We do not really know what connections there were between Aristotle and Alexander after Alexander assumed the throne (335/334 BCE) and stopped attending the philosopher’s lectures. Plutarch tells us that relations between the two became increasingly chilly, and modern scholars think that this development is due especially to their disagreement over the way that Alexander treated the Persians after conquering their empire, as we have seen above. That there actually was a disagreement of this type between the Greeks and Alexander is the clear conclusion to be reached from the episode of Callisthenes (on this, see below, section 7 of chapter 1). But to maintain simultaneously, as has indeed happened, not only that, on the one hand, Aristotle gave advice to Alexander but also, on the other hand, that he was the head, at least spiritually, of a sort of “Greek nationalist party” among the circle of Alexander’s friends, a party that attempted to oppose the policies of the king (see Wilamowitz 1893, 1:339), and, on a still other hand, that he was the head, at least spiritually, of a sort of “pro-Macedonian party” in the polis of Athens, as various modern historians have claimed from time to time—all this is not very credible. Aristotle’s chief interests were, surely, the theoretical life, philosophical research, and philosophical reflection; and, after the Macedonian period, the affairs of the kingdom of Macedonia and the development of Aristotle’s political thinking seem to have developed along their own lines, independent of one another.

In general, the contemporaries of Aristotle seem not to have been particularly impressed by the fact that Aristotle was the teacher of Alexander; the fact did not attract universal attention, and it was only in later periods that it was considered the most exciting episode of Aristotle’s life. Chroust maintains that the shift in appreciation took place in the time of Andronicus of Rhodes, and in connection with his edition and publication of the works of Aristotle (1966, pp. 130–131); see below, section 1 of chapter 3.

Aside from the question of Alexander’s education, ancient sources attest to other relationships between Aristotle and King Philip of Macedon. We have already seen above (section 2 of chapter 1) the accusation of Demochares, according to which Aristotle was present in the Macedonian camp in 348 BCE during the siege of Olynthus, and the story about the destruction and reconstruction of Stagira. Just as questionable are the reports according to which Aristotle wrote works for Philip (Vita Marciana 4 and Vita Latina40). The work in question is listed in the catalogs under the titleDecrees of Cities or Greek Cities or On Localities (see Diogenes Laertius 5.26, and frs. 612–614 Rose 1886 = frs. 405 and 407 Gigon 1987). It is supposed to have been written in order to help Philip eliminate the disagreements and territorial disputes among the Greek cities, in order to found a Pan-Hellenic league (Bergk 1887, p. 483; Nissen 1892; Wilamowitz 1893, 1:305; Pohlenz 1929; Tovar 1943), but others reject the entire story, or are rather skeptical (Heitz 1865, pp. 263–264 and Moraux 1951, pp. 122–123). Philodemus of Gadara was thought to have claimed that Aristotle dissuaded Philip from attacking Persia (testimonium 31); but this is not a trustworthy report, especially if we compare it with others, according to which Aristotle had an unwavering anti-Persian attitude and had urged Alexander to attack Persia, and in any case the textual basis of the report is not sound.⁹⁴

Perhaps Aristotle remained in Macedonia for a few years after 334/335 BCE. This is affirmed by Hermippus in Diogenes Laertius 5.2 (in 5.4 the version is different), according to whom Aristotle had been an ambassador of Athens to Philip (see also Philodemus of Gadara in the Index of Academic Philosophers).⁹⁵ If we trust the discoveries of Lee (1948, p. 63), Aristotle undertook various biological research projects in Macedonia as well, and therefore spent a certain amount of time there. But, as we have seen above (p. 41), these claims are now questionable again. A fragment of a letter attributed to Aristotle in ps.-Demetrius, Elocution (29 and 154) contains this curious statement: “I went from Athens to Stagira because of the Great King, and from Stagira to Athens because of the great winter.” It is not clear what this means (see Prächter 1926, pp. 350+, Düring 1957, p. 400, and Plezia 1961, p. 121), but to the Greeks the Great King was the king of Persia, not the one in Macedonia. We cannot therefore interpret this as a reference to a political mission undertaken by Aristotle on behalf of Philip of Macedon.⁹⁶ The passage was held to be an invention by Zeller (1897, 1:21n6).

At this point I should perhaps draw some conclusions from this discussion of relations between Aristotle and Macedonia. It seems that we are faced with two sets of discordant facts, which lead to differing conclusions. On the one hand, there is a whole series of historical data suggesting fairly close relationships on the part of Aristotle and his family with Macedonian notables; to begin with, the presence of Aristotle in Macedonia as Alexander’s tutor is reliably documented, and Aristotle probably had a relationship with Philip, and it seems that Aristotle was, for a time, one of those numerous well-known and intelligent Greeks who, according to Isocrates (Philip 19), lived in Macedonia and had relationships with the king; again, Aristotle’s nephew Callisthenes accompanied Alexander to Asia, though with unfortunate results; Aristotle was later accused by the Athenian democrats, as we have seen, of being a friend to Macedonia; finally, certain pupils of the school, such as Demetrius of Phalerum, were dependent on the power of the Macedonians. Even Hermias, who had a close relationship with Aristotle, is described by Demosthenes as an “agent and accomplice of Philip.” Even though it is possible to argue over each individual fact, the accumulation of elements is fairly impressive.⁹⁷

On the other hand, there is the undeniable fact that, in Aristotle’s treatises, even in Politics, the political power of Macedonia in Aristotle’s time remains completely invisible, and the few references to Macedonia found in the work are either cold or almost hostile. Aristotle, in contrast with Theophrastus, refrains from even mentioning any specific events from Alexander’s expeditions. This total silence is broken, of course, by the indirect reports on the works that Aristotle is said to have dedicated to the Macedonian monarchs, which we have discussed above; but this does not take away from the fact that in the treatises that survive, that is, in the most well-researched theoretical works, Aristotle maintains an attitude of complete detachment. It would be difficult to characterize the Politics or the Constitution of Athens as texts compiled in order to defend and sustain the political influence of Macedonia in Athens, like the Philip of Isocrates, for these were works connected with teaching in Aristotle’s school, directed to pupils among whom must have been many Athenian citizens. This is a case, therefore, in which biographical information can have a negative influence on the study of a work; to interpret the Politics as Kelsen does (1937–1938), as an explicit defense of hereditary monarchy in general and an implicit defense of the Macedonian monarchy in particular, and to see the ethical ideal of the theoretical life as nothing more than a prop for monarchic government, is to close off the path to a correct interpretation of both the value and the meaning of these fundamental works in the history of thought.

7. THE ADVENTURE OF CALLISTHENES

Callisthenes of Olynthus,⁹⁸ Aristotle’s nephew or cousin,⁹⁹ was famous throughout history for the episode in which he took part in Alexander’s campaign against Persia, as well as for being put to death by Alexander himself, on the accusation of having conspired against the king. Because he died before Aristotle, he is not mentioned in his will; therefore, we do not exactly know the degree of family relation between the two, nor do we know anything about Damotimus, the father of Callisthenes. The figure of Callisthenes, however, confirms what was said before; among many of these philosophers and men of culture, there existed close ties of family and of friendship, to the point of making philosophy appear on some occasions as the specific pursuit of a certain family or clan (genos) and its closest friends.

According to the account in Plutarch’s Life of Alexander (55.7–8), Callisthenes was raised by Aristotle, probably after Philip had destroyed the city of Olynthus (testimonium 28c), and may have lived with Aristotle at Assos or Mytilene.¹⁰⁰ Indeed, we have already seen that Callisthenes wrote a treatise on Hermias, in which he showed that he had some familiarity with the personality of the tyrant (see section 6.1 of chapter 1), and this familiarity places him in close contact with the affairs of Aristotle (Jacoby 1901, Jaeger 1923 (pp. 115–116), Wormell 1953, Chroust). Later, Callisthenes collaborated with Aristotle in editing a catalog of winners of the Pythian games (see section 8 of chapter 1).¹⁰¹ It would seem that the pair collaborated fairly continually, at least until 334 or 331 BCE, when Callisthenes left with Alexander on the campaign against Persia. Callisthenes wrote a History of Greece in which he recounted the history of Greece from 386 to 356 BCE, a book about the Sacred War, and a work on the Deeds of Alexander.¹⁰² It is not at all certain, however, that Aristotle entrusted his young relative with responsibilities for research projects in biology and geography, as some historians have supposed. It is not known to what degree the philosophy of Aristotle influenced the historiographical work of Callisthenes; some say greatly (Jacoby 1923, ad loc. and Jaeger 1923, pp. 318+), others say not much (Bosworth 1970). If we possessed entire works by Callisthenes, we would certainly know more. He supported Macedonian policy in his works and, according to ancient sources (Diogenes Laertius 5.4 and 10; Suda, s.v. “Callisthenes”), Aristotle gave him a recommendation as the historian of the expedition of Alexander.¹⁰³

With the disgrace, imprisonment, and execution of Callisthenes, Aristotle’s group of friends suddenly found itself in the floodlights of high-level politics of the time, as Gigon remarked (1958, p. 188). The facts are recounted in Plutarch (Life of Alexander, chs. 52–55) and Arrian (4.10–14), in substantially the same way; Callisthenes is presented by these authors as a figure with the character of a Cato and an enemy of flattery, with a somewhat arrogant personality and very conscious of his dignified position. Completely opposite to him was the Democritean philosopher Anaxarchus of Abdera,¹⁰⁴ also a member of Alexander’s expedition, who was described as a man willing to engage in any form of flattery. Apart from a few secondary episodes, the major clash between Callisthenes and Alexander took place because of the king’s demand that he be saluted with genuflection by the Greeks and the Macedonians, as his new Persian subjects did. Callisthenes refused, with a certain haughtiness, and both Plutarch and Arrian say that he had been right in substance but excessive in the manner of his refusal.¹⁰⁵ Rumors also circulated that he gave general support to the traditionalist tendency, namely to those groups of Greeks and Macedonians who opposed the evolution of the royal dominion of Alexander into a sort of oriental monarchy. Many modern historians have accepted this version (e.g., Schwartz 1901, col. 1889); others instead (e.g., Jacoby 1923, ad loc.), relying on certain statements of Plutarch and Arrian, believe that Callisthenes did not really oppose the Persian policy of Alexander, but that the difference between the two of them arose mainly because the king and the historian both had ugly personalities that were destined to clash with each other. However this may be, Callisthenes was involved in a conspiracy to assassinate Alexander, organized by the king’s pages who were young aristocrats of Macedonian origin, was imprisoned, and died. There are various versions of his death: that he was hanged, that he was devoured by a lion (Diogenes Laertius 5.5), or that he died of disease and harsh treatment in prison (see Prandi 1985 for an examination of the various versions offered by ancient historians).

Aristotle mourned the loss of his relative and colleague (Diogenes Laertius 5.5 and 39), and Theophrastus commemorated him in a book entitled Callisthenes or On Bereavement, very little of which survives beyond the title (Diogenes Laertius 5.44), but in which Theophrastus spoke about the importance of fate in human affairs and its connection to the character of the individual (Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 3.21 and 5.25; ps.-Alexander of Aphrodisias, De anima mantissa 186.28–31). This reference to the problems that stem from the individual’s character accords with the reports of historians on the harshness of Callisthenes’s character that are found in Plutarch, Diogenes Laertius, and Arrian, in whose opinion the fate of Callisthenes was determined above all by his lack ofsavoir faire.

Some say that after this episode the Peripatetic school became fiercely hostile to Alexander.¹⁰⁶ The rumor is ancient, and in the tradition there remain traces of conflict and serious clashes between Aristotle and Alexander.¹⁰⁷ There are certain ancient writers (such as Plutarch, Arrian, Dio Cassius, and Pliny) who believed the story that Alexander had been poisoned by Antipater, acting in concert with Aristotle (testimonia 29a–d); but other historians who report the poisoning of Alexander (such as Curtius Rufus, Diodorus Siculus, ps.-Callisthenes, and Julius Valerius) do not report any participation on the part of Aristotle (see Plezia 1948). Dio Cassius tells the story (77.7) that the emperor Caracalla, for whom Alexander was the greatest hero in human history, believed so completely in the reports that Alexander had been assassinated with Aristotle’s help that he expelled the philosophers “called Aristotelians” from Alexandria, had their books burned, and destroyed their sussitia, namely the rooms dedicated to their common meals and their meetings (testimonium 29d). It is unlikely that the story about the participation of Aristotle in the murder of Alexander is true.

The idea that there was hostility between the Peripatetic school and Alexander is also widespread in modern scholarship. It is difficult to see how this hypothesis could fit in with the idea, also generally accepted by historians, that the Peripatetics were the cultural “fifth column” of Macedonian politics in Athens; I have already expressed my reservations on this point.

8. ATHENS REVISITED

“His arrival at Athens was in the second year of the 111th Olympiad [335 BCE], and he lectured in the Lyceum for thirteen years [335–323]” (Diogenes Laertius 5.10). “After the death of Philip in the archonship of Evaenetus [335/334], he returned to Athens, and taught in the Lyceum for a period of twelve years” (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, First Letter to Ammaeus 5.3). The most important event of the second part of Aristotle’s life was undoubtedly his decision to return to Athens and open an independent school there, separate from Plato’s. This was probably a decisive factor in the preservation of his work. In fact, we do not have the complete works of any philosopher of the time who worked outside of Athens, and, among those who worked in Athens, not one of the writings of the students of Plato has been preserved.

The fact should be emphasized that Aristotle decided to open a school of his own in Plato’s own city, Athens (see Berti 1977, p. 31). This indicates a will to be independent, if not to be in opposition; evidently he did not wish to return to the group of Academics. The institution of an independent community, dedicated to the discussion of problems similar to those dealt with in the Academy, but distinct from those examined, for instance, in the school of Isocrates, can only indicate a will to establish his own independence of thought, though remaining within a partly shared tradition, and a desire to give birth to an autonomous community of discussion, in which the usual philosophical terms—“theory,” “philosophy,” “dialectic,” “wisdom,” and “conduct” (praxis)—would take on a new and original meaning, different from the use made by the master Plato and his older fellow students. For this reason, it seems to me that the claims of the Neoplatonic biographers cannot be accepted when they maintain that Xenocrates and Aristotle were the joint heirs to Speusippus and that, by common consent, they carried on the work of the school in two locations that differed only spatially, the Academy and the Lyceum (see Jaeger 1923, pp. 428–430, with Gigon 1962, p. 46).¹⁰⁸

Wilamowitz (1893) has appositely noted that the period in which Aristotle returned to Athens was a period of restoration; cults were being reopened and ceremonies that had been abandoned got back their honored status, the fleet and the arsenal underwent restoration, and the city was generally trying to return to normal. On a strictly political level, however, after the fall of Thebes, Alexander’s position as the head of the League of Corinth and the virtual leader of Greece was by then firmly established, and Athens had been obliged to accept the situation. The hypothesis that Aristotle had come to Athens with the express intention of getting involved in politics in support of Alexander, and as a spokesman for the Macedonian court, is a product of modern authors and is not attested by any ancient source.

Düring went further and stated that Aristotle’s arrival in Athens went wholly unnoticed (Düring 1957, p. 460 and Düring 1966, p. 20), and that Aristotle remained a fairly obscure philosopher, unknown for the duration of his stay in Athens. The first part of this judgment seems to me reliable, as far as one can tell from the weakness of the indications and the lack of certain information, but about the second part there can be legitimate doubts. The very quantity of attacks and polemics on the part of his contemporaries, well documented by Düring (1966, p. 26), suggests that Aristotle and his followers were not in fact obscure characters but were fairly well known, at least in the circle of “philosophers” and educated people, even if the comic playwrights failed to make Aristotle the butt of their jokes, as they had done to Socrates, Plato, and other well-known philosophers. Aristotle therefore does not seem to have enjoyed the vast public notoriety that Socrates and Plato had among their more humble fellow citizens, but rather to have been a philosopher who was well known primarily among educated people.

For that matter, when compared with what can be read in the works of Isocrates and Plato, the works of Aristotle show a more relaxed attitude, less preoccupied with how philosophical studies were judged by the ordinary citizen (see Natali 1987). And popular attitudes were also changing; compared with the reactions at the time of the first efforts of the Sophists and of Socrates, it seems that, over time, the existence of independent philosophical schools had become an accepted fact of life for the ordinary Athenian, and the fact that some young people got educated in philosophy prompted less and less scandal. On the other hand, the school of Aristotle, in its founder’s time, could not have been very involved in the city’s political life, despite the arguments of Wilamowitz (1881, pp. 181–186). For what happened after the death of Aristotle, see below (chapter 3).

In the last wills and testaments of the Peripatetic scholarchs (Diogenes Laertius 5.51–57, 5.61–64, 5.69–74), and from Hellenistic authors such as Antigonus of Carystus (cited in Athenaeus 12, 547d–e, a passage discussed below at pp. 93–95), we find a description of a Peripatetic school with a rather complex organization; it seems to be endowed with a garden, some houses, lecture halls, spaces for group banquets, and so on. Was the school like this during Aristotle’s time as well? Bernays claimed that Aristotle, as a metic, could not own real estate in Athens, and for that reason, he asserts (1881, p. 108), it would not be surprising¹⁰⁹ if Aristotle had not left his students an autonomously organized school endowed with its own buildings, because the buildings where his lessons took place were not his property. Bernays observed as well that Theophrastus was the first Peripatetic to receive the grant of a right to own real estate (egktēsis) in Athens, through the efforts of the Peripatetic Demetrius of Phalerum, who in those years (316–306 BCE) governed the city (Diogenes Laertius 5.39). Düring and Brink believe that this evidence suffices to rule out the existence of an institutionally organized Peripatetic school as early as Aristotle’s time, and they think that the school of Aristotle consisted only of a group of friends, with a very free and informal structure, dedicated to the study of philosophy (see Düring 1957, pp. 260 and 460, with Brink 1940, cols. 905–907).

All the same, a great many others, including Ross, Kafka, Prächter, Gauthier, Jaeger, and Chroust (1972a), have stated that the fact that Aristotle did not own real estate in Athens does not by any means exclude the presence of an organized school, which the philosopher could have directed in rented premises (as Lyco would later do; see Athenaeus 12, 547 d–e, cited below at pp. 93–94). In the texts of Aristotle, there are sufficient indications to document the existence of a rather complex teaching activity, very different from the free discussion while strolling that is typical of the time of Protagoras and Socrates. Concerning the organization of the school, see below, chapter 3.

Was Aristotle busy with political business during his second stay in Athens? We shall explore in detail below (section 2 of chapter 4) the entirely political interpretation given by Chroust of this period of Aristotle’s life, but for now the following should be kept in mind: some ancient sources speak generically, without giving us too many clarifications, of a benefaction (euergetein) on the part of the philosopher toward the city (Vita Marciana 15–22); and Diogenes Laertius claims that Aristotle served as an ambassador for Athens (5.2), as did Xenocrates (4.8–9), Menedemus (2.140), and Arcesilaus (4.39). It is not clear how we should evaluate these reports, but some among the most important scholars, such as Mulvany (1926) and Düring (1957, pp. 58, 110, 232–234), hold them to be entirely unreliable.

Linked to this problem is the problem of how to interpret the information in Ptolemy’s Life of Aristotle, in the version of Usaibia (Life of Aristotle 18, tr. Düring 1957), according to which the Athenians awarded proxenia to Aristotle, by decree of the assembly, for the benefits that he had brought to the city, and had commissioned an inscription to this effect on a column. “In the inscription on this column, they mentioned that Aristotle of Stagira, son of Nicomachus, had served the city well by doing good and by the great number of his own acts of assistance and beneficence, and by all his services to the people of Athens, especially by intervening with King Philip for the purpose of promoting their interests and securing that they were well treated; that the people of Athens therefore wanted it to be quite clear that they appreciated the good that had come out of this; that they bestowed distinction and praise upon him, and would keep him in faithful and honored remembrance.” Usaibia then relates that a certain “Himeraios” was opposed to these tokens of respect, and that he demolished the column where the inscription appeared (see section 1.2 of chapter 4).¹¹⁰ Antipater had Himeraios killed for this,¹¹¹ and later on the inscription was restored by a certain “Stephanos,” who added to the inscription the story of the misdeeds of Himeraios. It would have been difficult for Usaibia to invent all this, including the Greek names. There is a real historical person named Himeraius,¹¹² though it is not known who this “Stephanos” might have been. In the nineteenth century, Baumstark, Steinschneider, and Drerup defended the authenticity of the decree, while today opinions diverge; fairly favorable to the authenticity of the decree are Gigon 1958 (pp. 138–141 and 164), Gigon 1962 (commentary to section 59), Chroust 1967a, Chroust 1973 (pp. 139–141), and Chroust 1973a. The latter hypothesizes, not very reliably, that Aristotle defended the interests of Athens to Philip after the defeat of Chaeronea in 338 BCE; opposed to this is Düring 1957, pp. 239–241.

There is no detailed information about the activities undertaken by Aristotle at Athens, apart from teaching and discussing philosophical problems. What we have instead is information about a research project in history, a “commission” so to speak, given to Aristotle and his associates by theAmphictyons, the magistrates governing the games in honor of Apollo at Delphi. Despite the damage to the document, an inscription at Delphi demonstrates the reliability of the information, recording this work in the following terms. “The temple keepers have decreed: since Aristotle of Stagira son of Nicomachus and Callisthenes of Olynthus son of Damotimus [drafted] at the request of the Amphictions catalogues of those who ha[ve wo]n the [Pythian games] fro[m the time of … ]¹¹³ and also those who had organized the games since the begi[nning,] Aristotle an[d C]al[li]sthenes are to be prais[ed] and [cr]owned; and t[he tre]asurers are to [bui]ld the cat[alogue into the tem]ple by tr[anscribin]g …” (Dittenberger 1915, no. 275 =testimonium 43). A few fragments of this catalog survive (frs. 615–617 Rose 1886 = frs. 410–414 Gigon 1987). It must have been carved on stone and placed in the temple, because in the accounts of the treasurers of Delphi there remains the notation of a payment to the stone carver Dinomachus for this work. On the basis of the sum that was paid, some reckon that the inscription comprised twenty-one thousand letters.¹¹⁴ This demonstrates that, during his stay in Athens, Aristotle had relationships with people and institutions outside the city as well. This research was performed in collaboration with Callisthenes and must therefore have been done before the latter left with Alexander (334 or 331 BCE), but, according to the most recent research (Lewis 1958), the stele was not actually erected until 327, the year in which the payment of the costs of inscription was recorded in the Delphic account books.

Many say that during Aristotle’s stay in Athens he made friends with the Macedonian regent, Antipater. This seems confirmed by the fact that twice in his last will and testament Aristotle mentions Antipater as his principal executor (Diogenes Laertius 5.11 and 5.13), unless this means only that Aristotle wished, through this legal pretense, to place his last wishes under the protection of the Macedonian power.¹¹⁵

9. TRIAL AND FLIGHT

In 323 BCE Alexander died, and in Athens the anti-Macedonian party became stronger again. In the same year Aristotle moved to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died the following year (October 322, according to Düring 1966).¹¹⁶ Modern historians suppose that there is a certain connection between the two events. “Then he set off for Chalcis in the third year of the 114th Olympiad [322 BCE] and died of an illness, at the age of about sixty-three, in the archonship of Philocles, the same year that Demosthenes passed away in Calauria” (Diogenes Laertius 5.10). “In the thirteenth year, after the death of Alexander in the archon-year of Cephisodorus [323/322], he set off for Chalcis, where he died of an illness at the age of sixty-three. Now then, these are the facts transmitted to us by those who wrote about the life of the man” (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, First Letter to Ammaeus 5.3–6.1).

Almost all ancient authors report that Aristotle left Athens to avoid being condemned to death for impiety.¹¹⁷ Indeed, a trial was commenced against him on those charges, more than seventy-five years after the death of Socrates—in other words, following a long period of relative tranquillity in which it seemed that the ancient distrust of philosophers had somewhat diminished, and that the practice of accusing philosophers of impiety had fallen out of fashion (see Derenne 1930, Marasco 1976, Dover 1976, and Humphreys 1978, p. 213). In contrast with the cases of Protagoras, Socrates, Theodorus the Atheist,¹¹⁸ and similar cases, however, it would appear that the trial was not prompted by, or at least did not take as its pretext, the ideas professed by the philosopher, but rather by his public behavior, not directly linked to his ideas.¹¹⁹ This must have depended on the changing times and also on the nature of Aristotle’s philosophical research, which, on the one hand, was conducted on a level that was too abstract and complex to unsettle an ordinary citizen and, on the other hand, for theoretical and systematic reasons, was very careful to avoid excessively paradoxical and absurd positions like those of the Sophists.

Both ancients and moderns have thought that the accusation of impiety was an excuse to strike out at Aristotle for political motives, but they have identified these motives differently (see Gigon 1958, p. 178). The ancients thought it was the relationship between Aristotle and Hermias, whereas the moderns think it was the relationship between Aristotle and Alexander. The ancients, including Hermippus (cited below),¹²⁰ Diogenes Laertius (5.5), Mubashir (20, tr. Düring), and Usaibia (7, tr. Düring), basically think that the accusation against Aristotle was for his having treated Hermias as a deity, by praising him with the epigram and the Hymn to Hermias that was sung in his honor, as to a god.

Relying on Hermippus, a character in The Learned Banqueters of Athenaeus denies that this poem was a hymn (paian). “But surely the song written by the extremely learned Aristotle for Hermias of Atarneus is not a hymn, as Demophilus who filed the indictment against the philosopher for impiety [the text is corrupt at this point] provided by Eurymedon, on the grounds that he impiously and shamefully sang a hymn, every day in the dining-rooms [sussitia], to Hermias. That there are no features at all of a hymn in the song, but that it a particular type of skolion in its very form, I will make clear to you from the text itself” (15, 696a–b). The words of the song follow (696b–d), and then the character draws his conclusion (696e): “now then, I don’t see how anyone could discern anything in these [verses] that is specific to a hymn, since the writer clearly admits that Hermias is dead when he says, ‘For the sake of your lovely form, the scion | of Atarneus forsook the rays of the sun;’ and it does not even have a hymnal chorus.” Various examples of hymns follow, each with its own refrain, followed by a quote from the Defense against the Charge of Impiety, an apocryphal work attributed to Aristotle (696e–697b). Boyancé believes in the truth of the accusations mentioned in this account (1937, pp. 299–310), that Aristotle ordered the singing every day, at mealtimes in his school, of a hymn in which Hermias was deified. However, this seems unlikely according to Gigon 1958 (p. 178) and Gigon 1962 (p. 75), since, if it had been true, Aristotle would have continued to celebrate the memory of Hermias every day for a full fifteen years, many of which were passed in Athens, before the Athenians found anything ridiculous in this practice.

The moderns, instead, hypothesize that the hostility against Aristotle erupted because the philosopher was considered a proponent of the Macedonian power. Diogenes Laertius claims (5.5) that the accusers of Aristotle were Demophilus and the hierophantEurymedon,¹²¹ as was also reported in the biography of Aristotle by Hermippus (cited above). Some have ventured that, because a hierophant is the highest priest of the Eleusinian mysteries, Aristotle must have attacked these mysteries.¹²²

We do not necessarily need to think of a nocturnal flight; it seems that Aristotle left Athens with all his slaves and household possessions, but naturally this does not exclude the possibility that he was threatened with a trial. He headed to Chalcis, where he lived for a year and perhaps opened a school. Diogenes Laertius cites (10.1) a late Peripatetic scholar named Heraclides Lembus who tells us that Epicurus “came to Athens at the age of eighteen at the time when Xenocrates was teaching in the Academy and Aristotle was teaching (diatribousi) in Chalcis” (fr. 9 FHG; the passage does not appear among the testimonia in Düring 1957). Strabo also mentions the residence or school (diatribē) of Aristotle in Chalcis (10.1.11). According to Aulus Gellius (Attic Nights,13.5), when Aristotle was dying, he named Theophrastus as his successor as head of the school, choosing him over Eudemus of Rhodes. Not all scholars accept these reports.¹²³

Some traces of these events remain in the collection of letters attributed to Aristotle. In his Miscellaneous Research (14.1), Aelian notes that Aristotle is said to have been deprived of the honors decreed for him by the Amphictyons of Delphi (mentioned just above),¹²⁴ and that Aristotle himself supposedly wrote to Antipater as follows. “About those things which were decreed for me at Delphi and of which I am now deprived, my present attitude is that neither am I greatly concerned about them nor are they of no concern to me at all” (testimonium 67c). Some link this report to the accusations of impiety (Düring 1957, p. 401; Plezia 1961, p. 112; Dittenberger 1915, commentary to no. 275, citing similar cases), and there are traces of a violent anti-Macedonian reaction in Delphi in the years 324/323 BCE (Goulet 1989–2012, 1:423). In the Neoplatonic Lives, in Diogenes Laertius, and in various ancient authors,¹²⁵ there is mention of a complaint allegedly expressed to Antipater on Aristotle’s part about his treatment at Athens, saying that “it is hard to live in Athens; pear ripens upon pear, and fig upon fig.” The comment is obscure, but seems to be a protest against the Athenian denouncers or voluntary public informers known as “sycophants,” a word evidently but obscurely derived from sukon, meaning “fig.” A jest that Aristotle supposedly wrote to Antipater as he was about to leave Athens, as reported by various sources (the Neoplatonic Lives and other ancient authors),¹²⁶ is very interesting. He supposedly wrote, “I will not let the Athenians sin a second time against philosophy,” linking his case to that of Socrates and, at the same time, clearly taking the opposite decision from the one made by Socrates. The episode is a good reflection of the difference between the intellectual personalities of Socrates and Aristotle; this is a perfect case of the Italian proverb se non è vero, è ben trovato (if it isn’t true, it’s well made up).

Aristotle died in Chalcis in 322 BCE. Generally the ancients relate that he died of a stomach ailment, but there is no lack of more fictionalized versions.¹²⁷

10. FROM TRADITIONAL CUSTOMS, A NEW MODEL

Ultimately, we know relatively little about the life of Aristotle, at least in comparison with the information we have about many philosophers closer to us in time; but when compared with the reports we have about other ancient philosophers and poets, such as Homer, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Theophrastus, and Strato, we have a reasonable amount of information, and these facts allow us to attempt an overall reconstruction, in broad outlines, of the figure he represents. In my view, with Aristotle a new kind of intellectual reaches its perfect development, different from the intellectuals of the preceding ages, and particularly important as a model for many centuries to come. In this intellectual figure, remarkably innovative aspects are mixed together with aspects that are entirely traditional. In this section I would like to try to describe these novel elements, and so let me begin by outlining what Aristotle was not.

Aristotle was not a charismatic personality like Empedocles, who dressed in purple and wore a golden crown (Diogenes Laertius 8.73), or like the Cynics Menedemus and Menippus, who went around dressed as sorcerers, with black capes, hats with the signs of the zodiac, and magic wands in hand, characters midway between priest, prophet, and sideshow charlatan.¹²⁸ Nor was he a paid teacher, like the Sophists or the masters of rhetoric such as Isocrates,¹²⁹ and for that reason he lacked certain characteristics of the Sophists, such as the need to advertise himself and a certain tendency to salesmanship, typical of all those who, in order to earn a living, need to seek students by showing off their own fame and talent.¹³⁰ As I shall explain in greater detail below, in Aristotle’s case, his interests seemed to center around research rather than the teaching and the political training of his students.

The problem of whether or not he received fees for the lessons given to others is a very important issue in the definition of what kind of intellectual Aristotle was. All ancient sources insist on this point, even though not all the modern critics have devoted sufficient thought to the matter. It is well known that the impropriety of accepting payment for lessons constituted one of the cardinal points in the polemics of Socrates and some Socratics against professional Sophists, and that Socrates did not get paid for his teaching, though he did not reject occasional offers of help from his wealthier friends. The students of Socrates also respected, some more, some less, their master’s position; a partial exception was Aeschines of Sphettus, who earned a living by composing speeches for the law courts after returning to Athens from Syracuse, though he did not dare to become a Sophist (Diogenes Laertius 2.62). Aristippus of Cyrene was the exception; he did get paid for his lectures and lived the life of an itinerant teacher typical of the Sophists, making long journeys in both Greece and Sicily. Perhaps it was to him that Xenophon was alluding when he said (Memoirs of Socrates 1.2.60), “Some of them [the companions of Socrates], after getting from him a few bits for nothing, sold them to others for a lot.”¹³¹

Like Socrates, Plato and his students, including Aristotle, refused to be paid for their lectures, or rather for the philosophical teaching imparted to their audience; but this decision did not have the same significance in the case of Socrates as in the cases of Plato and Aristotle. When Socrates decided not to accept the role of a salaried teacher, he did so at the price of a life spent in miserable conditions, and the same also happened to the Cynics; see von Arnim (1898, pp. 37+), who claims that Diogenes, Menedemus, Crates, and Metrocles became adepts of a gospel of poverty, that they taught philosophy not as a profession but to comply with “God’s will,” and that with this choice and by acting in certain manners, they embodied the purest type of Socratic personality. The decision of Socrates and the Cynics was a paradoxical decision, by the ethical standards common in the fourth century BCE, a decision that defied all the value criteria of ordinary Athenians; they always held it to be certainly true that a poor man, a bad administrator of his own family fortune, who was not concerned with maintaining or increasing his own wealth, would be considered to be a complete nobody.¹³²

The attitude of Socrates and many of those who closely followed his example, in the face of such widespread opinion, was at the same time didactic and polemical. They based their activity as thinkers and teachers primarily if not exclusively on direct discussion, on personal contact with their students, on persuasion, and on empathy, trying to produce in their own students a conversion of sorts and an alienation from the lifestyle of ordinary citizens. The philosophical activity of Socrates gave rise to a particular type of human relationship. In Aristotle’s view of the intellectual life, by contrast, there was no tendency at all to missionary proselytizing, to conceiving one’s life choice as a “witnessing” involving not only narrowly intellectual work but also the entire personality of the subject.¹³³

The fact is, for people such as Plato and Aristotle, the refusal to be paid for philosophical teaching, and hence to draw from philosophy the means of earning a living, assumed a very particular significance, contrasting with that of Socrates; and though in some respects Aristotle was living a life similar to the life lived by Socrates, he distanced himself decisively from the Socratic model of a “life dedicated to philosophy.” Plato and Aristotle were rich men, in fact, from good families, who lived from their own resources.¹³⁴They did not look to “philosophy” as a way of earning a living, nor did they choose to live in poverty in order to dedicate themselves to converting their neighbor; rather they chose the life of philosophy because they saw it as one of the possible responses, indeed, the best possible response, to the problem that faced all free adult Greek males who were sufficiently rich that they were not constrained to work, of how to occupy their scholē.

The scholē of the Greeks was not “free time” in the modern sense, in which one rests after the effort of working, by bowling or strolling or being with friends, so that one can then return to one’s own job in society. It refers to that part of the day that is free from necessary commitments, the part in which we express our own individual character and articulate the meaning we wish to give to our own lives; it is not the time left over from the really important things but the most important part of our lives, the part in which we pose the question of what sort of person we are. For Plato and Aristotle, dedicating themselves to philosophy was also a choice of bios, of a way of spending one’s life, and of best actualizing one’s human capacities; it was, in a word, the choice of a way of being happy. For this reason, one could say that with Plato and Aristotle there was a progressive distancing from the original Socratic model. Of course, in many respects the influence of Socrates remained strong in both of them, especially where the role of dialogue and dialectic was concerned, because the Platonic dialogue somehow institutionalized Socratic discussion, and the Aristotelian treatises maintain a dialectical structure and were based on examining the opinions of experts. But it is precisely in this process of the “institutionalization” of dialectic that we see signs of development in the intellectual figure of the philosopher.

On the basis of these new premises, even the way of conducting a dialogue with one’s interlocutors has changed. Aristotle’s position is much “colder” and more rational than that of Socrates, and it is generally disliked by those who look to philosophical reflection to satisfy their emotional needs. The Aristotelian model of life and reflection gives the first place to the intellect, to investigation, and to intellectual discussion in which to develop convictions derived from the comparison of theses and theoretical positions. It gives the first place to purely rational argumentation, not emotional appeals or moral imperatives;¹³⁵ a secondary role is decisively assigned to personal interaction. Philosophical investigation is conducted, generally speaking, among a restricted group of colleagues, and the theoretical debate can even be set up with a thesis written in a book, without being face to face with the living person (see below, section 1 of chapter 3).

Plato’s position strikes us as fairly close to that of Aristotle, apart from Plato’s evaluation of the written word, because in both of them dialectic and discussion are more prevalent than giving witness to ethical values; but the student Aristotle lacked many of the main aspects of the cultural personality of his teacher Plato. Aristotle was a citizen of a tiny polis, he lived as an outsider all his life in a wide array of very different places, and this did not permit him to cultivate a true interest in the political life of a specific polis or to plan a direct political intervention, as did happen to a certain degree in the Academy (see most recently the overview by Isnardi Parente 1988, and below, section 2 of chapter 2). Any interest in politics appears to be present in Aristotle only in an indirect form, as a scientific reflection on the polis. This situation, however, also rendered him immune to that vein of bitter polemic against Athenian political life that continually flows through the works of Plato. And yet it is true that, in the dialogue On Justice (fr. 1 Ross), mention is made of an interlocutor who “mourns the city of the Athenians” (ps.-Demetrius, Elocution 28), but the topic of that discussion, to judge from the few surviving fragments, appears to be the search for what rhetorical form is best suited to express commiseration, and not what judgment to offer concerning the political life of the city of Athens, according to Laurenti (1987, pp. 182–186).¹³⁶

Returning to the life choices made by philosophers, the decision to devote one’s own life to philosophy was often presented in ancient texts as the fruit of personal deliberation, sometimes almost as a conversion (see Nock 1933, pp. 129+, and Gigon 1946), and certainly in many cases that is what took place. But the biographical facts add certain rather complex and archaic nuances that allow us to understand the situation better. In some cases, the decision to devote one’s own life to philosophy appears to have been a question of genos, a family affair, in an environment where such decisions constitute distinctive features of an aristocratic family or group of families.¹³⁷ We must remind ourselves on this point of certain characteristics of an aristocratic frame of mind that are quite different from our modern ones; hobbies and ways of spending their scholē are in ancient culture definitely to some extent matters of individual choice, but of individuals immersed in a very strong and clearly constraining family context, in which the influence of custom and family traditions is extremely lively. At times one has the impression that in the ancient aristocratic families all the men, the sons following the fathers, devoted themselves to the same diversions and the same activities. Thus in Pindar we see that the family of Alcimedon of Aegina devoted itself to wrestling, the sons following the fathers (Olympian VIII), and the family of Xenophon of Corinth had a tradition across the whole clan (genos) of victories in the various athletic games (Olympian XIII). In Athens, the wife of Strepsiades, in the Clouds of Aristophanes (60–77), comes from a noble family that is traditionally passionate about horses.

Even the dedication of oneself to literary and philosophical culture, to the tutelage of the “sophists” and to one’s own theoretical reflection, can become, in this aristocratic context, the distinguishing characteristic of a noble house. The dialogues of Plato show fairly clearly by their choice of characters that Plato also meant to celebrate his own family as one of the most learned, and one of the closest to Socrates,¹³⁸ and one of those readiest to absorb his teaching, as he himself says in his Charmides (154d–155a). Socrates is narrating the account of his discussion with Critias, who was Plato’s uncle and older cousin to Charmides, another uncle of Plato. “By Heracles!” I said, “how irresistible you say the man [Charmides] is, if he has only one more thing little something in addition.”—“What?” said Critias.—“If his soul,” I replied, “has a good nature (eu pephykos). And it rather stands to reason, Critias, that he ought to be such a man, since he belongs to your household (oikias).” “Well yes,” he said, “he is very much a gentleman (kalos kai agathos) in those ways too.”—“In that case,” I said, “why don’t we undress that part of him and inspect it before the visible part? He is fully of an age now, I think, to be willing to have a conversation.”—“Yes indeed, very much so,” said Critias, “since he is actually a philosopher (philosophos), and also, as it seems to others as well as himself, very much a poet.”—“And that fine quality, my dear Critias,” I said, “goes back a long way in your family, from your kinship(syngeneias) with Solon.”

Of course, these ties were not binding, but we have seen that perhaps Aristotle attended the Academy because of the friendship that bound Proxenus to Plato; and then again, where Aristotle’s descendants are concerned, philosophy became something of a family business, and between the master and his closest students bonds of affection and kinship were established. We can guess at similar relationships in other contexts as well; Diogenes Laertius tells of an entire family, a father and two sons, who were influenced by Diogenes the Cynic to give themselves to philosophy (6.75–76), and another family of Cynics was that of Crates, his wife Hipparchia, and her brother Metrocles (6.96–98 and 5.94; see also frs. 5.H.19–26 [Crates], 5.I [Hipparchia], and 5.L [Metrocles] in Giannantoni 1990). On the other hand, as we shall see in greater detail below when we examine the last will and testament of Theophrastus, among the most natural candidates for membership in the philosophical community established by the Aristotelians were family members and relatives of the master.¹³⁹ The same is true of Plato’s school where Speusippus is concerned. Obviously, this is just a general trend; not all the relatives of the philosopher do philosophy with him, nor are the relatives and intimate friends of the philosopher the only ones to do philosophy with him, but for some members of the philosopher’s circle this choice of way of life came about more easily and more naturally than for others—for instance, for a member of a family in which the traditional hobby is raising hunting dogs.

Plato and Aristotle did philosophy for their own pleasure, therefore, following their own particular traditions, and not in a professional or competitive context; their standards of success were therefore much different from our own. Aristotle declares this many times in his two treatises on Ethics, when he emphasizes the link between a life of theory and happiness, and when he praises the way of life chosen by Anaxagoras. The founding of a school, the gathering around oneself of a group of students and collaborators, and the dedicating of one’s own life and all one’s intellectual energy to making theoretical progress—all this should be seen, in the case of Plato and Aristotle, as a way of giving meaning to their own aristocratically affluent lives, and not as the choice of a social role, as a professional vocation, a Beruf in the Weberian sense.

It is often said, however, that Aristotle’s life resembles that of a university lecturer, and occasionally we get to see the personal story of the greatest philosopher of antiquity expounded as if it had been the career of an older colleague of ours; we read that in the Academy Aristotle gave a “course” in rhetoric (presumably as a stipendiary assistant and not as a “full professor”), and that the Gryllus had been his doctoral thesis. We run a risk in making this comparison; even though it is not entirely mistaken, there are important differences that should not be overlooked. Certain distinctive characteristics of a professor or university lecturer would have been missing from the curriculum vitae of Aristotle: he did not work in an institutional context; he was not an employee of the state or even of a public or private research institute; and his activity was not marked by any need to advance himself or have a “career,” as is so often implied in certain reconstructions of philologists and modern critics, who unwittingly project their own experiences and conceptual schemes onto the figure of the ancient scholar, as apparently similar to us as he is profoundly different.¹⁴⁰ Even the decision that Aristotle made, at a certain point, to return to Athens and open a school of his own was certainly not meant as a way to attain any “career advancement” that would be comparable to what an academic of the present day might aspire to after managing, with great effort, to move to a famous academic center.

This new cultural model was unquestionably prepared by the evolution of the Platonic Academy; but Aristotle is its most perfect and important product, on account of the great depth of his theoretical development, and on account of his awareness of developing the theory and putting into practice the model of a life in which happiness coincides with giving primacy to intellectual activity over all others, because only intellectual activity is perfectly human. In this sense, it seems to me that at times the importance of the Aristotelian lesson is nowadays rather underestimated, or that some of its most extreme and paradoxical aspects are excessively emphasized, to the detriment of the truly important ones.¹⁴¹ The truly essential elements, it seems, were his development of this model and the fact that Aristotle opened up the road to a special way of understanding the idea of “doing philosophy” that was different from his predecessors. At the same time, he founded this model of intellectual life on a series of ethical and anthropological arguments and on a global conception of human nature, a conception that constitutes a coherent and complex theoretical system, which remained for a long time at the foundation of European intellectual consciousness.