On a promontory above the village of Stagira, in northern Greece, stands a rather uninspired modern statue of Aristotle. Its expressionless face gazes out over the lumpy wooded hills toward the distant blue Aegean. Aristotle’s pristine white marble form, almost luminescent in the brilliant sunlight, wears a décolleté toga and sandals, bearing a slightly chipped scroll in its left hand. (This damage is said to be the work of a souvenir-hunting Argentinean philosophy professor.) Carved into the plinth in Greek are the words “Aristotle the Stagirite.”
Aristotle was born at Stagira, but despite the statue he wasn’t born in the modern village of Stagira. According to the guide book he was born in nearby ancient Stagira, whose ruins are still visible. After my disappointing encounter with the statue, I set off to find the ruins. These were somewhere just down the road, I was told by a young Batman returning home from school. With a flourish of his black plastic cloak, he indicated the road to the coast.
After an hour’s sweltering walk down the long winding road, with the thunder rumbling ominously around the rocky hills above me, I was eventually given a lift to Stratoni, an eerie combination of deserted seaside resort and mining village. Ancient Stagira lay somewhere off the old road a bit farther to the north, I was told by a carpenter who was repairing the closed café on the empty waterfront.
Few cars travel on this road in October, as I was soon to discover. And the autumn storms in this region, when they eventually break, can be severe. For an hour I sheltered beneath a narrow ledge of rock as the torrential downpour cascaded over the bare hillside with no sign of ruins or vehicles visible in the flickering, crashing gloom around me. Soaked to the skin, I raged to myself about the statue of Aristotle which had led me to Stagira, the wrong Stagira. It was nothing more than a fraud. The modern village of Stagira had no claim whatsoever to be known as Aristotle’s birthplace, apart from fortuitously sharing the same name. Why, by the same token they might just as well erect a statue of Joan of Arc in New Orleans. . . .
Aristotle was born in 384 B.C. at ancient Stagira in Greek Macedonia. In the fourth century B.C. Macedonia was regarded by the ancient Greeks in much the same way as the modern French regard Britain and America. But Stagira was not beyond the pale of civilization. This was a small Greek colony founded by the Aegean island of Andros.
Aristotle’s father Nicomachus had been personal physician to Amyntas, the king of Macedon and grandfather of Alexander the Great. As a result of this connection, which had ripened into friendship, Aristotle’s father seems to have become a rich man, acquiring estates around Stagira and elsewhere in Greece. The young Aristotle was brought up in an atmosphere of medical learning, but his father died when he was still young. Aristotle was then taken to Atarneus, a Greek city on the coast of Asia Minor, where he was brought up by his cousin Proxenus.
Like many an heir to a fortune, Aristotle soon began spending his inherited cash in determined fashion. According to one story, he blew the lot on wine, women, and song and ended up so broke that he was forced to join the army for a spell. After this he returned to Stagira where he took up medicine. Then, at the age of thirty, he gave it all up and set off for Athens to study at the Academy under Plato, where he remained for eight years. Later medieval hagiographers, determined to turn Aristotle into a saintly character, tended to ignore or discount these unthinkable calumnies. And sure enough, there is another version of Aristotle’s early manhood. According to this rather more boring (but admittedly rather more credible) story, Aristotle went straight to the Academy at the age of seventeen. Yet even some of the sources for this story allude to a brief playboy interlude.
Either way, Aristotle soon settled down to a period of intense study at the Academy, quickly establishing himself as the finest mind of his generation. Initially he was a student, but he was soon invited to become one of Plato’s colleagues. It seems that to begin with, Aristotle worshiped Plato. He certainly absorbed all the Platonic doctrine that was taught at the Academy, and his own philosophy was to be firmly grounded in its principles.
But Aristotle was far too bright to be a mere follower of anyone, even Plato. When Aristotle discerned what appeared to be a contradiction (or, heaven forbid, a flaw) in the works of his master, he felt it his intellectual duty to point this out. This habit soon began to irritate Plato, and though they appear not to have quarreled, the evidence suggests that the two greatest minds of their age soon found it politic to maintain a certain distance. Plato is known to have referred to Aristotle as “the mind on legs” and to have called his house “the reading shop.” This latter remark referred to Aristotle’s famous collection of ancient scrolls. Aristotle was in the habit of buying up as many rare scrolls of ancient works as he could lay his hands on, and was one of the first private citizens to own a library.
The young academic evidently received a considerable income from his inherited estates and soon became known in Athens for his cultured manners and gracious (if rather scholarly) lifestyle. Tradition has it that he was a weedy fellow, with spindly legs, who spoke with a lisp. Perhaps to compensate for this he became a natty dresser, donning the latest fashion in sandals and togas, and adorning his fingers with tastefully jeweled rings. Even Plato, who was no pauper, envied Aristotle his library. Yet despite Aristotle’s comfortable and refined way of life, his early works (now lost) were mainly dialogues discussing the base futility of existence and the joys of the hereafter.
Aristotle had a natural inclination toward the practical and the scientific. This led him to view Plato’s ideas from an increasingly realistic standpoint. Plato believed that the particular world we perceive around us consists of mere appearances. The ultimate reality lies in a further world of ideas, which resemble forms or ideals. The particular objects of the world we perceive derive their reality only by partaking in this ultimate world of ideas. Thus a particular cat, such as the black one I can see lying on the chair, is only a cat because it partakes in the ultimate idea (or form) of cattiness; and it is only black insofar as it partakes in the idea (or ideal) of black. The only true reality lies beyond the world we perceive—in this ultimate realm of ideas.
Where Plato’s approach to the world was essentially religious, Aristotle’s tended toward the scientific. This made him disinclined to dismiss the world around us as unreal. But he did continue to divide things into primary and secondary substances. Except that for Aristotle the primary substances were the particular objects of the world, and the secondary substances were the ideas or forms. Initially he dithered about which of these substances was in fact the ultimate reality, partly out of respect for Plato. (His old teacher had, after all, suggested this conception in the first place.) But gradually Aristotle became more and more convinced that he was living in the real world, and he shifted away from Plato’s view.
Over the years Aristotle virtually turned Plato’s philosophy on its head. Despite this, his metaphysical theories remain recognizably an adaptation of Plato’s. Where Plato viewed forms as ideas that had a separate existence, Aristotle saw forms (or universals, as he called them) more as essences embodied in the substance of the world, with no separate existence of their own. Aristotle was to offer a number of devastating arguments against Plato’s Theory of Ideas but appears not to have appreciated that these criticisms were equally devastating to his own Theory of Universals. Yet no one else seemed to notice this either. As a result, it was largely in the form of Aristotle’s modified doctrine that Plato’s theories were to become the dominant philosophy of the medieval world.
Fortunately there were many obscure points and apparent contradictions in Aristotle’s works, which gave medieval scholars food for endless controversy arising from different interpretations. These arguments over errors, heresies, schismatic misbeliefs, and devil-inspired misinterpretations kept alive the notion of philosophy, when to all intents and purposes the entire enterprise had died (or, perhaps more accurately, had entered a long Rip van Winkle period). It has been suggested that a number of these controversies arose from simple clerical errors, the result of medieval copyists inserting their own guesses in place of words that were no longer legible in the original worm-eaten texts.
In 347 B.C. Plato died, and the position of head of the Academy fell vacant. Half a dozen of Plato’s most able colleagues judged there was only one man fit to take over this prestigious post. Unfortunately, each of them had a different man in mind (usually himself). Here Aristotle was no exception. To his disgust Speusippus, Plato’s cousin, was eventually given the job. Speusippus is known to have been so bad-tempered that on one occasion he tossed his dog into a well for barking during his lectures. Eventually he administered euthanasia to himself after becoming an object of public ridicule during an exchange with Diogenes the Cynic in the Agora. Speusippus was scarcely the intellectual equal of the man whose doctrines were to lay the foundations for all serious intellectual thought for the next two millennia, and on his appointment Aristotle left Athens in high dudgeon, accompanied by his friend Xenocrates (another disappointed candidate).
Aristotle sailed across the Aegean to Atarneus, where he had spent his youth. This was now ruled by the eunuch Hermias, a Greek mercenary who had managed to take over this corner of Asia Minor. On a visit to Athens, Hermias had been highly impressed by what he had seen of the Academy, and he now welcomed Aristotle with open arms. Hermias was determined to make Atarneus a center of Greek culture, and Aristotle began advising him on the best way to go about this.
Aristotle’s political philosophy consists largely of an examination of the different types of state, and how best they can be run. His understanding of politics is profound. This led him to adopt a pragmatic attitude, in direct contrast to Plato’s idealistic approach. In The Republic Plato had described how a philosopher-king should rule his utopia (which, like any utopia, was in fact little more than a tyranny). Aristotle, on the other hand, described how to run an actual state, outlining effective courses of action that often almost anticipate Machiavelli.
Aristotle knew how politics worked and knew that it had to be effective to be of any use at all. This is not to say he was devoid of ideals. On the whole, Aristotle believed that the purpose of the state was to produce and support a class of cultured gentlemen such as himself—though he understands that this is not always possible. For instance, in order to run a tyranny successfully its ruler must behave like a tyrant. In such a police state there would be no room for Aristotle’s cultured elite. Although at one point he does suggest that there is another way to run a tyranny: the tyrant can assume a religious pose and adopt a policy of moderation.
Some say this moderate approach is the one Aristotle probably adopted while tutoring the tyrant Hermias. In my view this is unlikely. Yet I am not suggesting that Aristotle would have advocated his own recommended means for maintaining a full-blown tyranny—which he described in chilling detail. In Aristotle’s view, if you wished to run a tyranny properly it was necessary to run a tight ship. Liberal cultural activity must be banned and the population kept in fear and poverty and set to work building great public monuments, with occasional interludes of war to keep them alert and demonstrate their need to maintain a great leader. (Aristotle’s analysis remains relevant, from Plato’s philosopher-king to Saddam Hussein.)
Aristotle evolved his political philosophy during his later years. At the time he was tutoring Hermias he probably adhered to the ideas expressed in Plato’s Republic. If so, he may well have tactfully modified Plato’s doctrine of the philosopher-king. It was not necessary for a eunuch-tyrant to become a philosopher; instead he should just be sure to follow the advice of one.
Aristotle was now approaching middle age. Despite his dandyism, he was considered very much the dry-as-dust professorial type. Then, to the surprise of all who knew him, Aristotle fell in love. The object of his affections was a young girl called Pythias, who is known to have been part of Hermias’s household. Some say she was Hermias’s sister, others that she was his adopted daughter. Other usually reliable sources claim that she was originally Hermias’s concubine (which must have been something of a sinecure considering his sexual status). These contradictions suggest that she may well have been a palace courtesan. Was this an early case of the besotted professor falling for his Blue Angel?
Pythias wasn’t a virgin when Aristotle married her, judging from his pronouncement: “once they have actually become married and call each other man and wife, it is quite wrong for a man or a woman to be unfaithful”—implying that before this it’s okay. This pronouncement is found in Aristotle’s remarks about adultery, and it appears that on such personal matters he was in the habit of generalizing from his own rather limited experience. In his remarks on marriage he asserts that the best age to marry is thirty-seven for a man and eighteen for a woman, precisely the ages at which he and Pythias were married. Brilliant though Aristotle may have been, imagination was not always his strong point.
This makes it all the more ironic that in his Poetics the prosaic Aristotle sets out the most influential elucidation of literature ever written while Plato, by far the most poetically gifted of all the philosophers, decreed that poets should be banned. (What was Plato trying to hide, one wonders.) Aristotle had a high regard for poetry, claiming that it was of more value than history because it was more philosophical. History deals only with particular events, whereas poetry is closer to the universal. Here he appears to be contradicting himself and echoing Plato’s worldview. But Aristotle’s celebrated assertion that tragedy “arouses pity and fear so that such emotions are purged by the performance” remains a cardinal insight into the moving but problematic experience of tragic drama.
Being a profound and essentially serious character, Aristotle found himself out of his depth when it came to comedy. In his opinion, comedy is the imitation of inferior people, and ludicrousness is merely a painless form of ugliness. Aesthetics can only attempt to clear up the mess created by art, and theoreticians of comedy usually end up on a banana peel. Aristotle is no exception, observing that “To begin with, comedy was not taken seriously.”
Not long after his marriage Aristotle founded a school at Assos. Three years later he moved on to Mytilene, on the island of Lesbos, where he founded another school. By this time Aristotle is known to have been deeply interested in the classification of plants and animals. One of his favorite haunts for specimen hunting was the shores of the all but landlocked Yera Gulf, whose still blue waters beneath Mount Olympus are as idyllic today as they must have been then. In spring the slopes are covered by a multicolored carpet of flowers, and in Aristotle’s day there would have been wolves, wild boar, lynx, and even bear in the mountains: the first naturalist’s paradise for the first naturalist. In his works on nature Aristotle attempted to discover a hierarchy of classes and species but was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of his research. He was convinced that nature had a purpose and that each feature of an animal was there for a function. “Nature does nothing in vain,” he claimed. It was to be well over two millennia before biology made any effective advance on this notion, with Darwin’s theory of evolution.
By now Aristotle had acquired a reputation as the leading intellectual throughout Greece. Philip of Macedon had recently overrun Greece, for the first time uniting its bickering city-states into one sovereign country, and he invited Aristotle to become tutor to his unruly young son Alexander. As Aristotle’s father had been personal physician and friend to Philip’s father, Aristotle was considered one of the family, and he felt obliged to accept this regal offer. Reluctantly he set out for the Macedonian capital of Pella.
Nowadays Pella is little more than a field of stones, with some pebble mosaics and half a dozen columns, beside the busy main road from Thessaloniki to the western Greek border. It is a surprisingly unimpressive spot, considering that this was the first capital of ancient Greece; and later, after Alexander the Great launched his campaign to conquer the world, it could even have claimed to be the first (and last) capital of the known world.
Here in 343 B.C. one of the finest minds the world has ever known set about trying to educate one of the greatest megalomaniacs the world has ever known. Aristotle was forty-two years old, Alexander was thirteen, but not surprisingly it was Alexander who won hands down. The headstrong young pupil learned absolutely nothing from his tutor during the three years of their association. Or so the story goes. Aristotle was convinced of the superiority of the Greeks to all other races. In his eyes the finest leader would be a Homeric hero, such as Achilles, whose mind had been exposed to the latest advances in Greek civilization; and he believed that in man’s mind lay an ability to subdue the entire world. There’s no denying that Alexander bore an uncanny resemblance to this blueprint, even if he did not turn out quite as Aristotle might have wished. But we can only speculate on this meeting of minds, about which curiously little is known.
What is known is that in payment for his services Aristotle asked Philip to rebuild his birthplace, Stagira, which had inadvertently been reduced to rubble during one of Philip’s recent campaigns in the Halkidiki peninsula. And there is evidence that while Alexander was on his great expedition of conquest, he sent back assorted unknown plants and a zoo of exotic animals for his old tutor to classify. Horticultural lore has it that this was how the first rhododendrons reached Europe from central Asia. If so, Aristotle must have misclassified this species: rhododendron means rose tree in ancient Greek.
In 336 B.C. Philip of Macedon was assassinated, and the sixteen-year-old Alexander assumed the throne. After speedily executing all other possible claimants, and embarking on a few preliminary blitzkrieg campaigns through Macedonia, Albania, up through Bulgaria and across the Danube, and down through Greece (reducing Thebes to a smoking ruin en route), Alexander set off on his campaign to conquer the known world. In practice this included North Africa, and Asia as far as Tashkent and northern India. Fortunately Aristotle’s geography lessons hadn’t mentioned China, whose existence was unknown to the West at this time.
Meanwhile Aristotle had returned to Stagira. But before he had left Pella, Aristotle had recommended his cousin Calisthenes to Alexander for the position of court intellectual. This act of generosity was to prove all but fatal for Aristotle. Calisthenes was a bit of a blabbermouth, and Aristotle warned him about talking too much at court before he left. When Alexander set out on his world-beating campaign, he took along Calisthenes as his official historian. But while they were fighting their way through Persia, Calisthenes appears to have talked himself into a charge of treason. Whereupon Alexander had him locked up in a portable cage. As Calisthenes trailed alongside the army in his cage, languishing in the desert heat, his body became covered with sores and crawling insects, until in the end Alexander became so sick of the sight of him that he threw him to a lion. But like all successful megalomaniacs Alexander had his paranoid streak: he blamed Aristotle for Calisthenes’ treachery. Alexander is said to have been on the point of signing orders for Aristotle’s death, but in the end he set off to conquer India instead.
After spending five years in Stagira, Aristotle returned to Athens. Then in 335 B.C. Speusippus died, and the position of head of the Academy once again fell vacant. This time it was given to Aristotle’s old friend Xenocrates, who was considered a suitably austere and dignified character despite having once been awarded a gold crown “for his prowess in drinking at the Feast of Pitchers.” (Xenocrates was to die in office twenty years later by tripping in the night and falling into a cistern.)
Aristotle was so miffed at being passed over once again that he decided to found a rival school of his own. This he established in a large gymnasium beyond the city walls beneath Mount Lycabettos. The gymnasium was attached to the nearby Temple of Apollo Lyceus (Apollo in the form of a wolf). Thus Aristotle’s school became known as the Lyceum. The name lives on to this day, most appropriately in the French word lycée, though precisely why Aristotle’s great school should also be commemorated in the names of ballrooms and theaters is not so clear. Aristotle’s original Lyceum certainly taught a wide range of subjects, but ballroom dancing and acting were not to achieve full-fledged academic status until the twentieth century in the American Midwest.
The Lyceum was much more like a modern university than the Academy. A new leader was elected to the student council every ten days, separate faculties competed for students, and occasional attempts were even made to institute a schedule of classes. The Lyceum undertook research in the different sciences, passing on its findings to the students; the Academy was more interested in giving its students sufficient grounding in politics and law, so that they could become future rulers of the city. The Lyceum was the MIT (or even the Institute of Advanced Studies) of its day, whereas the Academy more resembled nineteenth-century Oxford or the Sorbonne.
The differences between the Lyceum and the Academy aptly illustrate the differences between the philosophies of Aristotle and Plato. Where Plato wrote The Republic, Aristotle preferred to collect copies of the constitutions of all the Greek city-states and select the best points from each. The Lyceum was the school that city-states turned to when they wished to have a new constitution written. No one tried to set up the Republic. Unfortunately Aristotle’s exhaustive study of politics had already been rendered practically redundant—by none other than his worst pupil, Alexander. The face of the world was changing forever: Alexander’s new empire was bringing about the end of the city-state, much as today continental confederations may well bring about the effective end of the independent nation-state. Neither Aristotle nor any of the galaxy of intellectuals gathered in the schools of Athens appear to have noticed this great historical change, an omission on a par with nineteenth-century intellectuals from Marx to Nietzsche failing to foresee the supremacy of the United States.
Aristotle gave his lectures at the Lyceum while walking with his pupils, and hence his school of followers became known as the Peripatetics (those who walk up and down). Some, however, claim they received this name because their master gave his lectures in the sheltered arcade of the gymnasium (known as the Peripatos).
Aristotle is credited with the founding of logic (it was over two thousand years before a logician of similar caliber was to appear); he was a metaphysician almost on a par with Plato; and he surpassed his master in both ethics and epistemology. (Despite this, Plato has the edge on him as an originator. Aristotle may have come up with the answers, but Plato was the one to see the basic questions which we should be asking in the first place.)
Aristotle’s most significant achievement was in the field of logic. To all intents he invented this subject. Aristotle came to see logic as the foundation on which all learning is based. Plato had understood that knowledge could be discovered by dialectic (conversational argument by means of question and answer), but it was Aristotle who formalized and advanced this method with his discovery of the syllogism. According to Aristotle, the syllogism showed that “when certain things are stated, it can be shown that something other than what is stated necessarily follows.” For example, if we make the following two statements:
All humans are mortal.
All Greeks are human.
It can be inferred that:
All Greeks are mortal.
This is logically necessary and undeniable. Aristotle distinguished between different types of syllogism, involving negatives or limited cases, but they all had the same basic structure. The major premise is followed by a minor premise, which leads to a conclusion. Thus:
No philosophers are dunces.
Some humans are philosophers.
Therefore some humans are not dunces.
To our present way of thinking, this type of argument appears hopelessly cumbersome and liable to lead to all kinds of woolly thought. But in its day it represented a categorical advance in human thinking—of a magnitude that has remained unsurpassed before or since. That is not to say it doesn’t have certain definite flaws. For instance, the syllogism:
All horses are animals.
All horses have hooves.
Therefore some animals have hooves.
This argument is valid only if there are such things as horses. As is shown by the following syllogism of the same structure:
All unicorns are horses.
All unicorns have horns.
Therefore some horses have horns.
Aristotle called his logic “analytika,” which means unraveling. Every science or field of knowledge had to start from a set of first principles, or axioms. From these its truths could be deduced by logic (or unraveled). These axioms defined the subject’s field of activity, separating it from irrelevant or incompatible elements. Biology and poetry, for instance, started from mutually exclusive premises. Thus mythical beasts were not a part of biology, and biology had no need to be written in the form of poetry. This logical approach released entire fields of knowledge, giving them the potential to discover whole new sets of truths. It was to be two millennia before these definitions became a stranglehold, restricting the development of human knowledge.
Aristotle’s thinking was philosophy through many centuries to come, and in the Middle Ages it came to be regarded as gospel, preventing further development. Aristotle’s thinking may have built the intellectual edifice of the medieval world, but it was hardly his fault that this eventually became a prison.
Aristotle himself would never have allowed this. His works are littered with the kinds of inconsistencies that show a continually questioning and developing mind. He preferred research into the actual workings of the world to mere speculation about its nature. Even his mistakes often appear to have a poetic insight—“anger is the boiling of blood around the heart,” “the eye is made blue by the sky.” In true Greek fashion he saw education as the way forward for humanity, believing that an educated man differed from an uneducated one “as much as the living from the dead.” Yet his understanding of the place of education was not that of a shallow optimist: “it is an ornament in prosperity, and a refuge in adversity.” He may have ended a bit of a pedant, but he gives indication of having known his share of suffering. He remained a teacher throughout his life and never sought to hold public office, yet no man throughout human history has ever had such a lasting effect on the world.
In this we are fortunate, for Aristotle seems to have been a good man. He saw the goal of humanity as the pursuit of happiness, which he defined as the actualization of the best we are capable of. But what is the best we are capable of? In Aristotle’s view, reason is man’s highest faculty. Therefore “the best (and happiest) man spends as much of his time as possible in the purest activity of reason, which is theorizing.” This is very much an innocent professorial view of happiness: hedonism as a purely theoretical pursuit. Few in the real world would subscribe to such a view (and those who do don’t seem to be any happier than the thoughtless philistine enjoying his lottery winnings).
Similar objections apply to Aristotle’s view that we should try to actualize what we do best. It is arguable that his famous pupil Alexander sought the actualization of the best he was capable of—inflicting suffering and death on countless thousands in the process. Yet it can also be argued that Aristotle sought to check such moral excesses with his famous doctrine of the Golden Mean.
According to this idea, every virtue is the mean between two extremes. This recalls the traditional Greek concept of moderation, mentioned even in the works of Homer, who predated Aristotle by some five hundred years and described events that had taken place a millennium before the philosopher’s birth. The early Greeks (and indeed the later ancient Greeks) were in great need of a concept of moderation. “Nothing too much” was soon adopted as one of their chief maxims of moral guidance. Such was their abundant energy that when it was not channeled into creative endeavors it frequently found outlet in excess. The frenzied and orgiastic behavior associated with the worshipers of Dionysius; the dark aspects of character and ritual that persisted into Greek tragedy; the terrors and superstitions of everyday life—these are the shadow side of the early classical era. For philosophy, mathematics, and artistic excellence to emerge from such chaos, supreme moderation was required.
Characteristically Pythagoras even tried to ally this moderation to mathematics, so that the virtue between two extremes could be calculated. Everything without measure, or unmeasurable (such as infinity), was evil. Exactitude became a virtue. (Strong elements of this remain recognizable in Western morality to this day.)
Plato, with his love of the mathematical and the abstract, appears to go along with much of this. Aristotle, on the other hand, was against the mathematical approach to morals. It was not possible to calculate what is good. The good was not to be determined by purely abstract considerations; it was more akin to the harmony found in a work of art. Moral virtue was a mean between two extremes, but this depended more upon a person’s nature and the situation in which he found himself. To kill a man on the battlefield was different from killing one on the street; and even here, if you killed him in the furtherance of a robbery it was different from doing so if he had grievously wronged you. Along with Aristotle’s view of harmony came a necessary element of relativism. And this too exhibited moderation.
The difficulty arises when you attempt to formulate this morality in any detail. If, according to the Golden Mean, every virtue lies between two extremes, what precisely are these extremes? Without ancient Greek fervor, and intimacy with dangerous extremes, such a doctrine leads only to mediocrity or verbal juggling. To call telling the truth halfway between telling a lie and correcting a falsehood is ingenious but ethically vacuous. (Aristotle didn’t maintain this but would have needed to come up with something like it to fill the gap in his argument.)
During Aristotle’s later years his wife Pythias died. Marriage obviously suited him, for he now married his maidservant Herpyllis, who was to be the mother of his first son Nicomachus. In 323 B.C. news reached Athens that Alexander had died in Babylon, at the end of a prolonged drinking bout with his generals. The Athenians had long resented being under the domination of the uncultured Macedonians, and at Alexander’s death they gave vent to their feelings. Aristotle, who had been born in Macedonia and was renowned for having tutored its ablest son, became a victim of this wave of anti-Macedonian feeling. He was arraigned on a trumped-up charge of impiety, his accuser Eurymedon the hierophant citing the eulogy he had written twenty years earlier on the death of his benefactor, the eunuch Hermias of Atarneus. This had contained the lines:
“Sons of the gods strove for thee
And the Heroes returned to the earth
All for thy love and thee to see.”
This was hardly impiety, but the mob required victims. If Aristotle had stood trial he would certainly have been sentenced to death. But Aristotle was not made of the same stuff as Socrates; he had no inclination toward martyrdom. Wisely he fled the city to prevent Athens from “sinning twice against philosophy.”
This was no easy decision. It involved Aristotle abandoning his beloved Lyceum forever. Deprived of his library and access to his research archives, the aging philosopher now retired to property in Chalkis which he had inherited from his father. This city lies thirty miles north of Athens on the long island of Euboea, at the point where it is separated from the mainland by a narrow channel. The waters of this channel are subject to an unexplained phenomenon. Despite the Aegean being virtually tideless, a rapid current runs through the channel, changing directions for no accountable reason as many as a dozen times a day. A persistent local myth has it that Aristotle spent many days racking his brains for an explanation of this phenomenon and when, for the first time in his life he found himself defeated, he jumped into the water and drowned.
More reliable historical sources record that Aristotle died in 322 B.C. at the age of sixty-three, a year after arriving in Chalkis. He is said to have died of a stomach illness, though one source claims he committed suicide by drinking aconite, a poisonous extract made from wolfsbane. In those days this was sometimes used as a medicament, which suggests to me an accidental overdose or self-administered euthanasia rather than straight suicide. But it’s possible that his bitter disappointment at losing the Lyceum brought him to the point where he no longer considered life worth living.
Aristotle’s will begins with the immortal words: “All will be well, but in case anything should happen ...” It goes on to outline instructions for the care of his children and the granting of freedom to his slaves. He then informs his executor that if Herpyllis wishes to marry again, “she should be given to someone not unworthy.” The author of this document comes through as an essentially prosaic, decent man, his character utterly unwarped by being the vehicle of supreme genius. He ends his will by requesting that part of the money he leaves be used to erect life-sized statues of Zeus and Athena in Stagira.
I detected no sign of these statues when I finally arrived at the scattered, rain-swept stones of ancient Stagira during the tail end of a thunderstorm on that unfortunate afternoon several years ago in Greece. As I blundered about over the godforsaken hillside, I found myself reminded of Aristotle’s insight into the nature of comedy. According to him, the ludicrous was merely a form of painless ugliness. Numb with cold, and not a pretty sight, I realized there was still some mileage left in Aristotle’s thought, at least where the ludicrous was concerned.
Aristotle’s originality remains unparalleled in the history of philosophy. Despite this, he suffered from the oldest philosophical delusion of them all, one that remains with us to this day. According to Cicero: “Aristotle criticized the philosophers who preceded him for thinking that their intellectual effort had been sufficient to complete philosophy once and for all. He was convinced they must have been either very stupid or very conceited to think such a thing. However, as philosophy had made such great strides in just a few years, he was confident that it would soon be brought to a successful conclusion.”