ARISTOTÈLE (ἈΡΙΣΤΟΤΈΛΗΣ)

ARISTOTLE (Ἀριστοτέλης). — The greatest Greek philosopher and one of the greatest of all time.

SUMMARY:

I. Life

2. Works

3. Historical development of thought

4. Division of philosophy

5. Logic

6. Metaphysics

7. Physics

8. Ethics

9. Politics

10. Rhetoric

11. Poetics

12. Overall assessment

13. The pedagogy of A.

I. —

13. LIFE

A. was born at Stagira (now Stavro) in Chalcidice, Thrace, in 384–383 B.C. His father Nicomachus, of a family of physicians possibly originating from Messenia, was physician to Amyntas II of Macedon. His mother was descended from colonists from Euboean Chalcidice, where A. owned land and a house. Having lost his parents while still a boy, he was brought up by Proxenus of Atarneus, perhaps a relative, to whose son Nicanor he later repaid the kindness he had received from his father by adopting him and giving him his daughter Pithias in marriage (Test. 12). In 367–366 he came to Athens and entered the Academy, where he remained until Plato’s death, a period of twenty years. The reports of serious disagreements between him and his master are due to a misinterpretation of a passage by Plato’s pupil Aristoxenus of Tarentum and to the general tendency of later biography toward novelistic invention. These reports were already refuted in the 2nd century A.D. by Aristocles of Messene (Euseb., Praep. ev., XV, 2, 3). Proof of the veneration A. had for Plato is the so-called elegy on the altar, which he composed for Eudemus (whether the Cyprian or the Rhodian is uncertain) and which concerns an altar dedicated, as he writes, “to the venerable Friendship of man (Plato), whom the wicked are not even entitled to praise.” Relations with Speusippus, who succeeded Plato as head of the Academy, must have been different, for in the same year (348–7) A. and Xenocrates left Athens and retired to Assos in the Troad. The city was then under the rule of Hermias, an eunuch who had risen from being a money-changer to become prince of Atarneus, though he had entrusted its administration to the Academicians Erastus and Coriscus of Scepsis, whose advice and teaching he had followed even during Plato’s lifetime. A. quickly won Hermias’s friendship and married his niece and adopted daughter Pithias, by whom he had a daughter Pithias, whom he later destined for Nicanor. He remained at Assos for three years and among his pupils there were Theophrastus of Eresus, in nearby Lesbos, and his nephew Callisthenes. In 345–344 he moved to Mytilene, and from there, accepting an invitation from Philip of Macedon, who chose him as tutor to his thirteen-year-old son Alexander, he set out two years later for Pella in the company of his nephew and perhaps also Theophrastus. It is not unlikely that the choice was suggested by Hermias, who maintained secret and dangerous political relations with Philip, which led to his downfall. Suspected by the Persian court, in 341 he was treacherously seized and taken to Susa, where he was tortured and crucified. On the scaffold he asked that his friends be told that he had done nothing unworthy of philosophy. A. honored his memory with a cenotaph at Delphi, for which he wrote an epigram, and with the famous hymn to Virtue.

Alexander remained under A.’s tutelage until 340, when Philip, setting out against Byzantium, entrusted him with the regency of the kingdom. During this three-year period A. had been with the master and his most faithful companions in the peaceful retreat at Mieza. What A. taught him we do not know, but in addition to philosophy he must have given considerable attention to poetry and politics. It seems that he prepared an edition of the Iliad for him, and to this period may be assigned the dialogue On Kingship and the three-book work On Poets. In the years that followed, until 335, A. divided his residence between the court and Stagira. At the court he formed a friendship with Antipater, who was to become regent, and enjoyed his protection even after his death. The letters he wrote to him fill nine books, and it was to Antipater that A. entrusted the execution of his last wishes.

In 335–334 A. returned to Athens. Pithias had died, and he had taken with him a woman from Stagira, Herpyllis, by whom he had a son Nicomachus. But he retained a fond memory of the first, and in his will he arranged for her bones to be transferred to the place where he would be buried, as she herself had wished. The Academy had been under the direction of Xenocrates, who had succeeded Speusippus after the latter’s death in 339, for four years. For A. to re-enter it was impossible: he had already come too far and could only teach in his own school. He opened it in the precinct of the Lyceum, giving it the form, like the Academy, of a religious association celebrating the cult of the Muses. Later it acquired a fund and more suitable premises outside the Diomean Gate. From the use of the covered walkways (περὶ παντοῦ), where the students gathered, the school of Plato had already received the name of Peripatos (Epicurus, Fr. 171; Philodemus, Ind. Acad. 6, 5; 7, 9). A.’s school retained this name par excellence, and its members were designated as Peripatetics because of their habit of discoursing while walking (cf. Epicurus, Fr. 423). Continuing the Academic custom, the students were called “friends” among themselves and gathered for common meals and symposia, for which A. himself laid down the rules. The morning hours were devoted to the more difficult disciplines; in the afternoon A. addressed a wider audience on rhetoric and dialectic. Besides A., Theophrastus and Eudemus of Rhodes also taught. Although modeled on the Academy, A.’s school was something entirely new and different. Primarily oriented toward research, it greatly expanded the field of its activity, replacing the place held in the Academy by mathematics with the biological and historical sciences.

The work that A., in collaboration with his pupils, produced in the thirteen years he still lived is prodigious and in many respects has defied the centuries. The protection of Antipater and Alexander provided him with the means, and it was only through Alexander’s great Asian campaign that he was able to obtain specimens of the fauna and flora of those distant regions. Almost nothing is known of his relations with the king during this period, to which belongs the Alexander or On Colonization, but he could hardly have approved Alexander’s policy of gradually equating barbarians with Greeks, which became ever more pronounced in Asia, and the news of the execution of Callisthenes, who had followed the expedition as official historian, must have been extremely bitter to him in 327.

A.’s position in Athens, however, depended on the fortunes of his pupil. When the latter died in 323, the anti-Macedonian party brought a charge of impiety against him. The principal accuser, Demophilus—perhaps the son of the historian Ephorus—based the charge on the hymn to Hermias. A. avoided trial by fleeing, so as not to give the Athenians, as he said, another opportunity to sin against philosophy. He retired to Chalcis, to his mother’s house, where he died the following year at the age of sixty-three. He left Theophrastus in charge of the school.

WORKS

In the 1st century B.C., Andronicus of Rhodes catalogued 1000 books belonging to the works of ARISTOTLE. Remains of his esoteric works are found in two Arabic sources (v. ARISTOTLE, Op., vol. V and A. Baumstark, op. cit. in bibliography, p. 61), from which about 100 titles can be derived. The total reaches 200 when adding a list that has come down in the double recension of Diogenes Laertius and the Menagiana Vita, which very probably goes back to Hermippus (c. 200 B.C.) and through him to the Alexandrian Library. With the Constitution of Athens, which has been restored to us by 2 papyri, and including the apocryphal works, we possess 47 works in 162 books. The fragments and testimonies amount to a little over 60. Of these, some were in dialogue form and formed part of the works published by ARISTOTLE himself, which he cites under the name of ἐξωτὸς πλοῖος ἐκδεδόμενου λόγου (H. Bonitz, Index, p. 104 b, 44 ff.), and which the ancients called esoteric. These were contrasted with those intended solely for use in the School, which the commentators called acroamatic, and into which, apart from the Constitution of Athens, all the works that have come down to us fall. This explains, in contrast to the «flumen aureum orationis» of which Cicero speaks (Acad., II, 119: other texts in Zeller, p. 111, 1), their often neglected style, almost always dry, sometimes extremely concise, and the network of internal cross-references, not all of the first hand (Bonitz, Index, p. 95 b ff.). The continuous work of revision to which, following the progress of reflection and teaching, they were subjected, is evidenced by the additions, multiple recensions, interruptions, and the fluid state of certain parts. Every pupil had at least, as far as he was concerned, his own copies, which in this way also circulated outside the School, and