book iv

. chap, viii.; A. Holm, _History of Greece_, Eng. trans., vol. i. chap. xvi. (M. N. T.)

ARISTONICUS, of Alexandria, Greek grammarian, lived during the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius. He taught at Rome and wrote commentaries and grammatical treatises. His chief work was [Greek: Peri Saemeion Homaerou], in which he gave an account of the "critical marks" inserted by Aristarchus in the margin of his recension of the text of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. Important fragments are preserved in the scholia of the Venetian Codex A of the _Iliad_.

Friedlander, _Aristonici_ [Greek: Peri Saemeion Iliados] _reliquiae_ (1853); Carnuth, _Aristonici_ [Greek: Peri Saemeion Odusseias] _reliquiae_ (1869).

ARISTOPHANES (c. 448-385 B.C.[1]), the great comic dramatist and poet of Athens. His birth-year is uncertain. He is known to have been about the same age as Eupolis, and is said to have been "almost a boy" when his first comedy (_The Banqueters_) was brought out in 427 B.C. His father Philippus was a landowner in Aegina. Aristophanes was an Athenian citizen of the tribe Pandionis, and the deme Cydathene. The stories which made him a native of Camirus in Rhodes, or of the Egyptian Naucratis, had probably no other foundation than an indictment for usurpation of civic rights ([Greek: xenias graphae]) which appears to have been more than once laid against him by Cleon. His three sons--Philippus, Araros and Nicostratus--were all comic poets. Philippus, the eldest, was a rival of Eubulus, who began to exhibit in 376 B.C. Araros brought out two of his father's latest comedies--the _Cocalus_ and the _Aeolosicon_, and in 375 began to exhibit works of his own. Nicostratus, the youngest, is assigned by Athenaeus to the Middle Comedy, but belongs, as is shown by some of the names and characters of his pieces, to the New Comedy also.

Although tragedy and comedy had their common origin in the festivals of Dionysus, the regular establishment of tragedy at Athens preceded by half a century that of comedy. The Old Comedy may be said to have lasted about eighty years (470-390 B.C.), and to have flourished about fifty-six (460-404 B.C.). Of the forty poets who are named as having illustrated it the chief were Cratinus, Eupolis and Aristophanes. The Middle Comedy covers a period of about seventy years (390-320 B.C.), its chief poets being Antiphanes, Alexis, Theopompus and Strattis. The New Comedy was in vigour for about seventy years (320-250 B.C.), having for its foremost representatives Menander, Philemon and Diphilus. The Old Comedy was possible only for a thorough democracy. Its essence was a satirical censorship, unsparing in personalities, of public and of private life--of morality, of statesmanship, of education, of literature, of social usage--in a word, of everything which had an interest for the city or which could amuse the citizens. Preserving all the freedom of banter and of riotous fun to which its origin gave it an historical right, it aimed at associating with this a strong practical purpose--the expression of a democratic public opinion in such a form that no misconduct or folly could altogether disregard it. That licentiousness, that grossness of allusion which too often disfigures it, was, it should be remembered, exacted by the sentiment of the Dionysiac festivals, as much as a decorous cheerfulness is expected at the holiday times of other worships. This was the popular element. Without this the entertainment would have been found flat and unseasonable. But for a comic poet of the higher calibre the consciousness of a recognized power which he could exert, and the desire to use this power for the good of the city, must always have been the uppermost feelings. At Athens the poet of the Old Comedy had an influence analogous, perhaps, rather to that of the journalist than to that of the modern dramatist. But the established type of Dionysiac comedy gave him an instrument such as no public satirist has ever wielded. When Moliere wished to brand hypocrisy he could only make his Tartuffe the central figure of a regular drama, developed by a regular process to a just catastrophe. He had no choice between touching too lightly and using sustained force to make a profound impression. The Athenian dramatist of the Old Comedy worked under no such limitations of form. The wildest flights of extravagance were permitted to him. Nothing bound him to a dangerous emphasis or a wearisome insistence. He could deal the keenest thrust, or make the most earnest appeal, and at the next moment--if his instinct told him that it was time to change the subject--vary the serious strain by burlesque. He had, in short, an incomparable scope for trenchant satire directed by sure tact.

Aristophanes is for us the representative of the Old Comedy. But his genius, while it includes, also transcends the genius of the Old Comedy. He can denounce the frauds of a Cleon, he can vindicate the duty of Athens to herself and to her allies, with a stinging scorn and a force of patriotic indignation which makes the poet almost forgotten in the citizen. He can banter Euripides with an ingenuity of light mockery which makes it seem for the time as if the leading Aristophanic trait was the art of seeing all things from their prosaic side. Yet it is neither in the denunciation nor in the mockery that he is most individual. His truest and highest faculty is revealed by those wonderful bits of lyric writing in which he soars above everything that can move laughter or tears, and makes the clear air thrill with the notes of a song as free, as musical and as wild as that of the nightingale invoked by his own chorus in the _Birds_. The speech of Dikaios Logos in the _Clouds_, the praises of country life in the _Peace_, the serenade in the _Ecclesiazusae_, the songs of the Spartan and Athenian maidens in the _Lysistrata_, above all, perhaps, the chorus in the _Frogs_, the beautiful chant of the Initiated,--these passages, and such as these, are the true glories of Aristophanes. They are the strains, not of an artist, but of one who warbles for pure gladness of heart in some place made bright by the presence of a god. Nothing else in Greek poetry has quite this wild sweetness of the woods. Of modern poets Shakespeare alone, perhaps, has it in combination with a like richness and fertility of fancy.

Fifty-four[2] comedies were ascribed to Aristophanes. Forty-three of these are allowed as genuine by Bergk. Eleven only are extant. These eleven form a running commentary on the outer and the inner life of Athens during thirty-six years. They may be ranged under three periods. The first, extending to 420 B.C., includes those plays in which Aristophanes uses an absolutely unrestrained freedom of political satire. The second ends with the year 405. Its productions are distinguished from those of the earlier time by a certain degree of reticence and caution. The third period, down to 388 B.C., comprises two plays in which the transition to the character of the Middle Comedy is well marked, not merely by disuse of the parabasis, but by general self-restraint.

I. _First Period_, (1) 425 B.C. _The Acharnians._--Since the defeat in Boeotia the peace party at Athens had gained ground, and in this play Aristophanes seeks to strengthen their hands. Dicaeopolis, an honest countryman, is determined to make peace with Sparta on his own account, not deterred by the angry men of Acharnae, who crave vengeance for the devastation of their vineyards. He sends to Sparta for samples of peace; and he is so much pleased with the flavour of the Thirty Years' sample that he at once concludes a treaty for himself and his family. All the blessings of life descend on him; while Lamachus, the leader of the war party, is smarting from cold, snow and wounds.

(2) 424 B.C. _The Knights._--Three years before, in his _Babylonians_, Aristophanes had assailed Cleon as the typical demagogue. In this play he continues the attack. The Demos, or State, is represented by an old man who has put himself and his household into the hands of a rascally Paphlagonian steward. Nicias and Demosthenes, slaves of Demos, contrive that the Paphlagonian shall be supplanted in their master's favour by a sausage-seller. No sooner has Demos been thus rescued than his youthfulness and his good sense return together.

(3) 423 B.C. _The Clouds_ (the first edition; a second edition was brought out in 422 B.C.).--This play would be correctly described as an attack on the new spirit of intellectual inquiry and culture rather than on a school or class. Two classes of thinkers or teachers are, however, specially satirized under the general name of "Sophist" (v. 331)--1. The Physical Philosophers--indicated by allusions to the doctrines of Anaxagoras, Heraclitus and Diogenes of Apollonia. 2. The professed teachers of rhetoric, belles lettres, &c., such as Protagoras and Prodicus. Socrates is taken as the type of the entire tendency. A youth named Pheidippides--obviously meant for Alcibiades--is sent by his father to Socrates to be cured of his dissolute propensities. Under the discipline of Socrates the youth becomes accomplished in dishonesty and impiety. The conclusion of the play shows the indignant father preparing to burn up the philosopher and his hall of contemplation.

(4) 422 B.C. _The Wasps._--This comedy, which suggested _Les Plaideurs_ to Racine, is a satire on the Athenian love of litigation. The strength of demagogy, while it lay chiefly in the ecclesia, lay partly also in the paid dicasteries. From this point of view the _Wasps_ may be regarded as supplementing the _Knights_. Philocleon (admirer of Cleon), an old man, has a passion for lawsuits--a passion which his son, Bdelycleon (detester of Cleon) fails to check, until he hits upon the device of turning the house into a law-court, and paying his father for absence from the public suits. The house-dog steals a Sicilian cheese; the old man is enabled to gratify his taste by trying the case, and, by an oversight, acquits the defendant. In the second half of the play a change comes over the dream of Philocleon; from litigation he turns to literature and music, and is congratulated by the chorus on his happy conversion.

(5) 421 B.C.[3] _The Peace._--In its advocacy of peace with Sparta, this play, acted at the Great Dionysia shortly before the conclusion of the treaty, continues the purpose of the _Acharnians_. Trygaeus, a distressed Athenian, soars to the sky on a beetle's back. There he finds the gods engaged in pounding the Greek states in a mortar. In order to stop this, he frees the goddess Peace from a well in which she is imprisoned. The pestle and mortar are laid aside by the gods, and Trygaeus marries one of the handmaids of Peace.

II. _Second Period_. (6) 414 B.C. _The Birds._--Peisthetaerus, an enterprising Athenian, and his friend Euelpides persuade the birds to build a city--"Cloud-Cuckoo-borough"--in mid-air, so as to cut off the gods from men. The plan succeeds; the gods send envoys to treat with the birds; and Peisthetaerus marries Basileia, daughter of Zeus. Some have found in the _Birds_ a complete historical allegory of the Sicilian expedition; others, a general satire on the prevalence at Athens of headstrong caprice over law and order; others, merely an aspiration towards a new and purified Athens--a dream to which the poet had turned from his hope for a revival of the Athens of the past. In another view, the piece is mainly a protest against the religious fanaticism which the incident of the Hermae had called forth.

(7) 411 B.C. _The Lysistrata._--This play was brought out during the earlier stages of those intrigues which led to the revolution of the Four Hundred. It appeared shortly before Peisander had arrived in Athens from the camp at Samos for the purpose of organizing the oligarchic policy. The _Lysistrata_ expresses the popular desire for peace at any cost. As the men can do nothing, the women take the question into their own hands, occupy the citadel, and bring the citizens to surrender.

(8) 411 B.C. _The Thesmophoriazusae_ (Priestesses of Demeter).--This came out three months later than the _Lysistrata_, during the reign of terror established by the oligarchic conspirators, but before their blow had been struck. The political meaning of the play lies in the absence of political allusion. Fear silences even comedy. Only women and Euripides are satirized. Euripides is accused and condemned at the female festival of the Thesmophoria.

(9) 405 B.C. _The Frogs._--This piece was brought out just when Athens had made her last effort in the Peloponnesian War, eight months before the battle of Aegospotami, and about fifteen months before the taking of Athens by Lysander. It may be considered as an attempt to distract men's minds from public affairs. It is a literary criticism. Aeschylus and Euripides were both lately dead. Athens is beggared of poets; and Dionysus goes down to Hades to bring back a poet. Aeschylus and Euripides contend in the under-world for the throne of tragedy; and the victory is at last awarded to Aeschylus.

III. _Third Period_.[4] (10) 393 B.C.[4] _The Ecclesiazusae_ (women in parliament).--The women, disguised as men, steal into the ecclesia, and succeed in decreeing a new constitution. At this time the demagogue Agyrrhius led the assembly; and the play is, in fact, a satire on the general demoralization of public life.

(11) 388 B.C. _The Plutus_ (Wealth).--The first edition of the play had appeared in 408 B.C., being a symbolical representation of the fact that the victories won by Alcibiades in the Hellespont had brought back the god of wealth to the treasure-chamber of the Parthenon. In its extant form the _Plutus_ is simply a moral allegory. Chremylus, a worthy but poor man, falls in with a blind and aged wanderer, who proves to be the god of wealth. Asclepius restores eyesight to Plutus; whereupon all the just are made rich and all the unjust are reduced to poverty.

Among the lost plays, the following are the chief of which anything is known:--

1. _The Banqueters_ [Greek: Daitaleis], 427 B.C.--A satire on young Athens. A father has two sons; one is brought up in the good old school, another in the tricky subtleties of the new; and the contrast of results is the chief theme.

2. _The Babylonians_, 426 B.C.--Under this name the subject-allies of Athens are represented as "Babylonians"-barbarian slaves, employed to grind in the mill. The oppression of the allies by the demagogues--a topic often touched elsewhere--was, then, the main subject of the piece, in which Aristophanes is said to have attacked especially the system of appointing to offices by lot. The comedy is memorable as opening that Aristophanic war upon Cleon which was continued in the _Knights_ and the _Wasps_.

_The Merchantmen, The Farmers, The Preliminary Contest_ (_Proagon_), and possibly the _Old Age_ (_Geras_), belonged to the First Period. The _Geras_ is assigned by Suvern to 422 B.C., and is supposed to have been a picture of dotage similar to that in the _Knights_. A comedy called _The Islands_ is conjectured to have dealt with the sufferings imposed by the war on the insular tributaries. The _Triphales_ was probably a satire on Alcibiades; the _Storks_, on the tragic poet Patrocles.

In the _Aeolosicon_--produced by his son Araros in 387 B.C.--Aristophanes probably parodied the _Aeolus_ of Euripides. The _Cocalus_ is thought to have been a parody of the legend, according to which a Sicilian king of that name slew Minos.

A sympathetic reader of Aristophanes can hardly fail to perceive that, while his political and intellectual tendencies are well marked, his opinions, in so far as they colour his comedies, are too indefinite to reward, or indeed to tolerate, analysis. Aristophanes was a natural conservative. His ideal was the Athens of the Persian wars. He disapproved the policy which had made Athenian empire irksome to the allies and formidable to Greece; he detested the vulgarity and the violence of mob-rule; he clave to the old worship of the gods; he regarded the new ideas of education as a tissue of imposture and impiety. How far he was from clearness or precision of view in regard to the intellectual revolution which was going forward, appears from the _Clouds_, in which thinkers and literary workers who had absolutely nothing in common are treated with sweeping ridicule as prophets of a common heresy. Aristophanes is one of the men for whom opinion is mainly a matter of feeling, not of reason. His imaginative susceptibility gave him a warm and loyal love for the traditional glories of Athens, however dim the past to which they belonged; a horror of what was ugly or ignoble in the present; a keen perception of what was offensive or absurd in pretension. The broad preferences and dislikes thus generated were enough not only to point the moral of comedy, but to make him, in many cases, a really useful censor for the city. The service which he could render in this way was, however, only negative. He could hardly be, in any positive sense, a political or a moral teacher for Athens. His rooted antipathy to intellectual progress, while it affords easy and wide scope for his wit, must after all, lower his intellectual rank. The great minds are not the enemies of ideas. But as a mocker--to use the word which seems most closely to describe him on this side--he is incomparable for the union of subtlety with riot of the comic imagination. As a poet, he is immortal. And, among Athenian poets, he has it for his distinctive characteristic that he is inspired less by that Greek genius which never allows fancy to escape from the control of defining, though spiritualizing, reason, than by such ethereal rapture of the unfettered fancy as lifts Shakespeare or Shelley above it,--

"Pouring his full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art."

BIBLIOGRAPHY.--Editio princeps (Aldine, Venice, 1498), by Marcus Musurus (not including the _Lysistrata_ and _Thesmophoriazusae_); S. Bergler (ed. P. Burmann, 1760); Invernizi-Beck-Dindorf (1794-1834); I. Bekker (1829); H.A. Holden (expurgated text, 1868), with _Onomasticon_ (new ed., 1902); F.H.M. Blaydes (1880-1893), and critical edition (1886); J. van Leeuwen (1893 foll.); F.W. Hall and E.M. Geldart (text, 1900-1901), with the fragment (from the Oxyrhynchus papyri) of a dialogue between two women concerning a leathern phallus, perhaps from Aristophanes. There is a complete edition of the valuable scholia by F. Dubner (1842, Didot series),--with the anonymous biographies of the poet; of the Ravenna MS. by A. Martin (1883), and W.G. Rutherford (1896-1905). Among English translations mention may be made of those of V.J. Hickie (prose, in Bohn's _Classical Library_); (verse) J. Hookham Frere, five plays; T. Mitchell, four plays; and, above all, B.B. Rogers, a brilliant work of exceptional merit. There is a concordance to the plays and fragments by H. Dunbar (1883). On Aristophanes generally see H. Muller-Strubing, _Aristophanes und die historische Kritik_ (1873); the article by G. Kaibel in Pauly-Wissowa's _Realencyclopadie_, ii. 1 (1896); A. Couat, _Aristophane et l'ancienne comedie attique_ (1889); E. Deschanel, _Etudes sur Aristophane_ (3rd ed., 1892); G. Dantu, _Opinions et critiques d'Aristophane sur le mouvement politique et intellectuel a Athenes_ (Paris, 1907). For the numerous editions and translations of separate plays in English and other languages see the introductions to Blaydes's edition, and, for the literature, the introduction to W.J.M. Starkie's edition of the _Wasps_ (1897); W. Engelmann, _Scriptores Graeci_ (1880); and "Bericht uber die Literatur der griechischen Komodie aus den Jahren 1892-1901" in C. Bursian's _Jahresbericht uber die Fortschritte der classischen Altertumswissenschaft_, cxvi. (1904). (R. C. J.)

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The dates in the text, as given by Jebb, are retained. According to R.G. Kent, _Classical Review_ (April 1905, April 1906), Aristophanes was born in 465, and died in 375 B.C.

[2] Or "fourty-four" (reading [Greek: mt'] for [Greek: nd'] in Suidas).

[3] See E. Curtius, _Hist. of Greece_, iii (Eng. trans. p. 275).

[4] The date is uncertain; others give 392 and 389.

ARISTOPHANES, of Byzantium, Greek critic and grammarian, was born about 257 B.C. He removed early to Alexandria, where he studied under Zenodotus and Callimachus. At the age of sixty he was appointed chief librarian of the museum. He died about 185-180 B.C. Aristophanes chiefly devoted himself to the poets, especially Homer, who had already been edited by his master Zenodotus. He also edited Hesiod, the chief lyric, tragic and comic poets, arranged Plato's dialogues in trilogies, and abridged Aristotle's _Nature of Animals_. His arguments to the plays of Aristophanes and the tragedians are in great part preserved. His works on Athenian courtesans, masks and proverbs were the results of his study of Attic comedy. He further commented on the [Greek: Pinakes] of Callimachus, a sort of history of Greek literature. As a lexicographer, Aristophanes compiled collections of foreign and unusual words and expressions, and special lists (words denoting relationship, modes of address). As a grammarian, he founded a scientific school, and in his _Analogy_ systematically explained the various forms. He introduced critical signs--except the obelus; punctuation prosodiacal, and accentual marks were probably already in use. The foundation of the so-called Alexandrian "canon" was also due to his impulse (_Sandys, Hist. Class. Schol_., ed. 1906, i. 129 f.).

Nauck, _Aristophanis Byzantii Grammatici Fragmenta_ (1848).

ARISTOTLE (384-322 B.C.), the great Greek philosopher, was born at Stagira, on the Strymonic Gulf, and hence called "the Stagirite." Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in his _Epistle on Demosthenes and Aristotle_ (chap. 5), gives the following sketch of his life:--Aristotle ([Greek: Aristotelaes]) was the son of Nicomachus, who traced back his descent and his art to Machaon, son of Aesculapius; his mother being Phaestis, a descendant of one of those who carried the colony from Chalcis to Stagira. He was born in the 99th Olympiad in the archonship at Athens of Diotrephes (384-383), three years before Demosthenes. In the archonship of Polyzelus (367-366), after the death of his father, in his eighteenth year, he came to Athens, and having joined Plato spent twenty years with him. On the death of Plato (May 347) in the archonship of Theophilus (348-347) he departed to Hermias, tyrant of Atarneus, and, after three years' stay, during the archonship of Eubulus (345-344) he moved to Mitylene, whence he went to Philip of Macedon in the archonship of Pythodotus (343-342), and spent eight years with him as tutor of Alexander. After the death of Philip (336), in the archonship of Euaenetus (335-334), he returned to Athens and kept a school in the Lyceum for twelve years. In the thirteenth, after the death of Alexander (June 323) in the archonship of Cephisodorus (323-322), having departed to Chalcis, he died of disease (322), after a life of three-and-sixty years.

I. ARISTOTLE'S LIFE

This account is practically repeated by Diogenes Laertius in his _Life of Aristotle_, on the authority of the _Chronicles_ of Apollodorus, who lived in the 2nd century B.C. Starting then from this tradition, near enough to the time, we can confidently divide Aristotle's career into four periods: his youth under his parents till his eighteenth year; his philosophical education under Plato at Athens till his thirty-eighth year; his travels in the Greek world till his fiftieth year; and his philosophical teaching in the Lyceum till his departure to Chalcis and his death in his sixty-third year. But when we descend from generals to

## particulars, we become less certain, and must here content ourselves

with few details.

Aristotle from the first profited by having a father who, being physician to Amyntas II., king of Macedon, and one of the Asclepiads who, according to Galen, practised their sons in dissection, both prepared the way for his son's influence at the Macedonian court, and gave him a bias to medicine and biology, which certainly led to his belief in nature and natural science, and perhaps induced him to practise medicine, as he did, according to his enemies, Timaeus and Epicurus, when he first went to Athens. At Athens in his second period for some twenty years he acquired the further advantage of balancing natural science by metaphysics and morals in the course of reading Plato's writings and of hearing Plato's unwritten dogmas (cf. [Greek: en tois legomenois agraphois dogmasin], Ar. _Physics_, iv. 2, 209 b 15, Berlin ed.). He was an earnest, appreciative, independent student. The master is said to have called his pupil the intellect of the school and his house a reader's. He is also said to have complained that his pupil spurned him as colts do their mothers. Aristotle, however, always revered Plato's memory (_Nic. Ethics_, i. 6), and even in criticizing his master counted himself enough of a Platonist to cite Plato's doctrines as what "we say" (cf. [Greek: phamen], _Metaphysics_, i. 9, 990 b 16). At the same time, he must have learnt much from other contemporaries at Athens, especially from astronomers such as Eudoxus and Callippus, and from orators such as Isocrates and Demosthenes. He also attacked Isocrates, according to Cicero, and perhaps even set up a rival school of rhetoric. At any rate he had pupils of his own, such as Eudemus of Cyprus, Theodectes and Hermias, books of his own, especially dialogues, and even to some extent his own philosophy, while he was still a pupil of Plato.

Well grounded in his boyhood, and thoroughly educated in his manhood, Aristotle, after Plato's death, had the further advantage of travel in his third period, when he was in his prime. The appointment of Plato's nephew, Speusippus, to succeed his uncle in the Academy induced Aristotle and Xenocrates to leave Athens together and repair to the court of Hermias. Aristotle admired Hermias, and married his friend's sister or niece, Pythias, by whom he had his daughter Pythias. After the tragic death of Hermias, he retired for a time to Mitylene, and in 343-342 was summoned to Macedon by Philip to teach Alexander, who was then a boy of thirteen. According to Cicero (_De Oratore_, iii. 41), Philip wished his son, then a boy of thirteen, to receive from Aristotle "agendi praecepta et eloquendi." Aristotle is said to have written on monarchy and on colonies for Alexander; and the pupil is said to have slept with his master's edition of Homer under his pillow, and to have respected him, until from hatred of Aristotle's tactless relative, Callisthenes, who was done to death in 328, he turned at last against Aristotle himself. Aristotle had power to teach, and Alexander to learn. Still we must not exaggerate the result. Dionysius must have spoken too strongly when he says that Aristotle was tutor of Alexander for eight years; for in 340, when Philip went to war with Byzantium, Alexander became regent at home, at the age of sixteen. From this date Aristotle probably spent much time at his paternal house in his native city at Stagira as a patriotic citizen. Philip had sacked it in 348: Aristotle induced him or his son to restore it, made for it a new constitution, and in return was celebrated in a festival after his death. All these vicissitudes made him a man of the world, drew him out of the philosophical circle at Athens, and gave him leisure to develop his philosophy. Besides Alexander he had other pupils: Callisthenes, Cassander, Marsyas, Phanias, and Theophrastus of Eresus, who is said to have had land at Stagira. He also continued the writings begun in his second period; and the Macedonian kings have the glory of having assisted the Stagirite philosopher with the means of conducting his researches in the _History of Animals_.

At last, in his fourth period, after the accession of Alexander, Aristotle at fifty returned to Athens and became the head of his own school in the Lyceum, a gymnasium near the temple of Apollo Lyceius in the suburbs. The master and his scholars were called Peripatetics ([Greek: oi ek ton peripaton]), certainly from meeting, like other philosophical schools, in a walk ([Greek: peripatos]), and perhaps also, on the authority of Hermippus of Smyrna, from walking and talking there, like Protagoras and his followers as described in Plato's _Protagoras_ (314 E, 315 C). Indeed, according to Ammonius, Plato too had talked as he walked in the Academy; and all his followers were called Peripatetics, until, while the pupils of Xenocrates took the name "Academics," those of Aristotle retained the general name. Aristotle also formed his Peripatetic school into a kind of college with common meals under a president ([Greek: archon]) changing every ten days; while the philosopher himself delivered lectures, in which his practice, as his pupil Aristoxenus tells us (_Harmonics_ ii, _init_.), was, avoiding the generalities of Plato, to prepare his audience by explaining the subject of investigation and its nature. But Aristotle was an author as well as a lecturer; for the hypothesis that the Aristotelian writings are notes of his lectures taken down by his pupils is contradicted by the tradition of their learning while walking, and disproved by the impossibility of taking down such complicated discourses from dictation. Moreover, it is clear that Aristotle addressed himself to readers as well as hearers, as in concluding his whole theory of syllogisms he says, "There would remain for all of you or for our hearers ([Greek: panton umon ae ton aekroamenon]) a duty of according to the defects of the investigation consideration, to its discoveries much gratitude" (_Sophisticai Elenchi_, 34,184 b 6). In short, Aristotle was at once a student, a reader, a lecturer, a writer and a book collector. He was, says Strabo (608), the first we knew who collected books and taught the kings in Egypt the arrangement of a library. In his library no doubt were books of others, but also his own. There we must figure to ourselves the philosopher, constantly referring to his autograph rolls; entering references and cross-references; correcting, rewriting, collecting and arranging them according to their subjects; showing as well as reading them to his pupils; with little thought of publication, but with his whole soul concentrated on being and truth.

On his first visit to Athens, during which occurred the fatal battle of Mantineia (362 B.C.), Aristotle had seen the confusion of Greece becoming the opportunity of Macedon under Philip; and on his second visit he was supported at Athens by the complete domination of Macedon under Alexander. Having witnessed the unjust exactions of a democracy at Athens, the dwindling population of an oligarchy at Sparta, and the oppressive selfishness of new tyrannies throughout the Greek world, he condemned the actual constitutions of the Greek states as deviations ([Greek: parekbaseis]) directed merely to the good of the government; and he contemplated a right constitution ([Greek: orthae politeia]), which might be either a commonwealth, an aristocracy or a monarchy, directed to the general good; but he preferred the monarchy of one man, pre-eminent in virtue above the rest, as the best of all governments (_Nicomachean Ethics_, viii. 10; _Politics_, [Gamma] 14-18). Moreover, by adding (_Politics_, [Eta] 7, 1327 b 29-33) that the Greek race could govern the world by obtaining one constitution ([Greek: mias tonchanon politeias]), he indicated some leaning to a universal monarchy under such a king as Alexander. On the whole, however, he adhered to the Greek city-state ([Greek: polis]), partly perhaps out of patriotism to his own Stagira. Averse at all events to the Athenian democracy, leaning towards Macedonian monarchy, and resting on Macedonian power, he maintained himself in his school at Athens, so long as he was supported by the friendship of Antipater, the Macedonian regent in Alexander's absence. But on Alexander's sudden death in 323, when Athens in the Lamian war tried to reassert her freedom against Antipater, Aristotle found himself in danger. He was accused of impiety on the absurd charge of deifying the tyrant Hermias; and, remembering the fate of Socrates, he retired to Chalcis in Euboea. There, away from his school, in 322 he died. (A tomb has been found in our time inscribed with the name of Biote, daughter of Aristotle. But is this _our_ Aristotle?)

Such is our scanty knowledge of Aristotle's life, which seems to have been prosperous by inheritance and position, and happy by work and philosophy. His will, which was quoted by Hermippus, and, as afterwards quoted by Diogenes Laertius, has come down to us, though perhaps not complete, supplies some further details, as follows:--Antipater is to be executor with others. Nicanor is to marry Pythias, Aristotle's daughter, and to take charge of Nicomachus his son. Theophrastus is to be one of the executors if he will and can, and if Nicanor should die to act instead, if he will, in reference to Pythias. The executors and Nicanor are to take charge of Herpyllis, "because," in the words of the testator, "she has been good to me," and to allow her to reside either in the lodging by the garden at Chalcis or in the paternal house at Stagira. They are to provide for the slaves, who in some cases are to be freed. They are to see after the dedication of four images by Gryllion of Nicanor, Proxenus, Nicanor's mother and Arimnestus. They are to dedicate an image of Aristotle's mother, and to see that the bones of his wife Pythias are, as she ordered, taken up and buried with him. On this will we may remark that Proxenus is said to have been Aristotle's guardian after the death of his father, and to have been the father of Nicanor; that Herpyllis of Stagira was the mother of Nicomachus by Aristotle; and that Arimnestus was the brother of Aristotle, who also had a sister, Arimneste. Every clause breathes the philosopher's humanity.

II. DEVELOPMENT FROM PLATONISM

Turning now from the man to the philosopher as we know him best in his extant writings (see _Aristoteles_, ed. Bekker, Berlin, 1831, the pages of which we use for our quotations), we find, instead of the general dialogues of Plato, special didactic treatises, and a fundamental difference of philosophy, so great as to have divided philosophers into opposite camps, and made Coleridge say that everybody is born either a Platonist or an Aristotelian. Platonism is the doctrine that the individuals we call things only become, but a thing is always one universal form beyond many individuals, e.g. one good beyond seeming goods; and that without supernatural forms, which are models of individuals, there is nothing, no being, no knowing, no good. Aristotelianism is the contrary doctrine: a thing is always a separate individual, a _substance_ ([Greek: ousia]), natural such as earth or supernatural such as God; and without these individual substances, which have attributes and universals belonging to them, there is nothing, to be, to know, to be good. Philosophic differences are best felt by their practical effects: philosophically, Platonism is a philosophy of universal forms, Aristotelianism a philosophy of individual substances: practically, Plato makes us think first of the supernatural and the kingdom of heaven, Aristotle of the natural and the whole world.

So diametrical a difference could not have arisen at once. For, though Aristotle was different from Plato, and brought with him from Stagira a Greek and Ionic but colonial origin, a medical descent and tendency, and a matter-of-fact worldly kind of character, nevertheless on coming to Athens as pupil of Plato he must have begun with his master's philosophy. What then in more detail was the philosophy which the pupil learnt from the master? When Aristotle at the age of eighteen came to Athens, Plato, at the age of sixty-two, had probably written all his dialogues except the _Laws_; and in the course of the remaining twenty years of his life and teaching, he expounded "the so-called unwritten dogmas" in his lectures on the Good. There was therefore a written Platonism for Aristotle to read, and an unwritten Platonism which he actually heard.

To begin with the written philosophy of the Dialogues. Individual so-called things neither are nor are not, but become: the real thing is always one universal form beyond the many individuals, e.g. the one beautiful beyond all beautiful individuals; and each form ([Greek: idea]) is a model which causes individuals by participation to become like, but not the same as, itself. Above all forms stands the form of the good, which is the cause of all other forms being, and through them of all individuals becoming. The creator, or the divine intellect, with a view to the form of the good, and taking all forms as models, creates in a receptacle ([Greek: hypodochae], Plato, _Timaeus_, 49 A) individual impressions which are called things but really change and become without attaining the permanence of being. Knowledge resides not in sense but in reason, which, on the suggestion of sensations of changing individuals, apprehends, or (to be precise) is reminded of, real universal forms, and, by first ascending from less to more general until it arrives at the form of good and then descending from this unconditional principle to the less general, becomes science and philosophy, using as its method the dialectic which gives and receives questions and answers between man and man. Happiness in this world consists proximately in virtue as a harmony between the three parts, rational, spirited and appetitive, of our souls, and ultimately in living according to the form of the good; but there is a far higher happiness, when the immortal soul, divesting itself of body and passions and senses, rises from earth to heaven and contemplates pure forms by pure reason. Such in brief is the Platonism of the written dialogues; where the main doctrine of forms is confessedly advanced never as a dogma but always as a hypothesis, in which there are difficulties, but without which Plato can explain neither being, nor truth nor goodness, because throughout he denies the being of individual things. In the unwritten lectures of his old age, he developed this formal into a mathematical metaphysics. In order to explain the unity and variety of the world, the one universal form and the many individuals, and how the one good is the main cause of everything, he placed as it were at the back of his own doctrine of forms a Pythagorean mathematical philosophy. He supposed that the one and the two, which is indeterminate, and is the great and little, are opposite principles or causes. Identifying the form of the good with the one, he supposed that the one, by combining with the indeterminate two, causes a plurality of forms, which like every combination of one and two are numbers but peculiar in being incommensurate with one another, so that each form is not a mathematical number ([Greek: mathaematikos arithmos]), but a formal number ([Greek: eidaetikos arithmos]). Further he supposed that in its turn each form, or formal number, is a limited one which, by combining again with the indeterminate two, causes a plurality of individuals. Hence finally he concluded that the good as the one combining with the indeterminate two is directly the cause of all forms as formal numbers, and indirectly through them all of the multitude of individuals in the world.

Aristotle knew Plato, was present at his lectures on the Good, wrote a report of them ([Greek: peri tagathou]), and described this latter philosophy of Plato in his _Metaphysics_. Modern critics, who were not present and knew neither, often accuse Aristotle of misrepresenting Plato. But Heracleides and Hestiacus, Speusippus and Xenocrates were also present and wrote similar reports. What is more, both Speusippus and Xenocrates founded their own philosophies on this very Pythagoreanism of Plato. Speusippus as president of the Academy from 347 to 339 taught that the one and the many are principles, while abolishing forms and reducing the good from cause to effect. Xenocrates as president from 339 onwards taught that the one and many are principles, only without distinguishing mathematical from formal numbers. Aristotle's critics hardly realize that for the rest of his life he had to live and to struggle with a formal and a mathematical Platonism, which exaggerated first universals and attributes and afterwards the quantitative attributes, one and many, into substantial things and real causes.

Aristotle had no sympathy with the unwritten dogmas of Plato. But with the written dialogues of Plato he always continued to agree almost as much as he disagreed. Like Plato, he believed in real universals, real essences, real causes; he believed in the unity of the universal, and in the immateriality of essences; he believed in the good, and that there is a good of the universe; he believed that God is a living being, eternal and best, who is a supernatural cause of the motions and changes of the natural world, and that essences and matter are also necessary causes; he believed in the divine intelligence and in the immortality of our intelligent souls; he believed in knowledge going from sense to reason, that science requires ascent to principles and is descent from principles, and that dialectic is useful to science; he believed in happiness involving virtue, and in moral virtue being a control of passions by reason, while the highest happiness is speculative wisdom. All these inspiring metaphysical and moral doctrines the pupil accepted from his master's dialogues, and throughout his life adhered to the general spirit of realism without materialism pervading the Platonic philosophy. But what he refused to believe with Plato was that reality is not here, but only above; and what he maintained against Plato was that it is both, and that universals and forms, one and many, the good, are real but not separate realities. This deep metaphysical divergence was the prime cause of the transition from Platonism to Aristotelianism.

_Fragmenta Aristotelis._--Aristotle's originality soon asserted itself in early writings, of which fragments have come down to us, and have been collected by Rose (see the Berlin edition of Aristotle's works, or more readily in the Teubner series, which we shall use for our quotations). Many, no doubt, are spurious; but some are genuine, and a few perhaps cited in Aristotle's extant works. Some are dialogues, others didactic works. A special interest attaches to the dialogues written after the manner of Plato but with Aristotle as principal interlocutor; and some of these, e.g. the [Greek: peri poiaeton] and the _Eudemus_, seem to have been published. It is not always certain which were dialogues, which didactic like Aristotle's later works; but by comparing those which were certainly dialogues with their companions in the list of Aristotle's books as given by Diogenes Laertius, we may conclude with Bernays that the books occurring first in that list were dialogues. Hence we may perhaps accept as genuine the following:--

1. Dialogues:-- [Greek: peri dikaiosunaes]: On justice. [Greek: peri poiaeton]: On poets (perhaps cited in _Poetics_, 15, 1454 b 18, [Greek: en tois ekdekomenois logois]). [Greek: peri philosophias]: On philosophy (perhaps cited in _Physics_, ii. 2, 194 a 35-36). [Greek: peri politikou]: A politician. [Greek: peri rhaetorikaes hae Grullos]: On rhetoric. [Greek: protreptikos]: An exhortation to philosophy (probably in dialogue, because it is the model of Cicero's dialogue _Hortensius_). [Greek: Eudaemos hae peri Psuchaes]: On soul (perhaps cited in _De Anima_, i. 4, 407 b 29, [Greek: kai tois en koino levomenois logois]).

2. Didactic writings:-- (1) Metaphysical:-- [Greek: peri tagathou]: On the good (probably not a dialogue but a report of Plato's lectures). [Greek: peri ideon]: On forms. (2) Political:-- [Greek: peri basileias]: On monarchy. [Greek: Alexandros hae hyper apoikon]: On colonies. (3) Rhetorical:-- [Greek: technaes taes theodektou sunagogae]: The _Theodectea_ (cited in the Preface to the _Rhetoric to Alexander_ (chap. i.)), and as [Greek: ta theodekteia] in the _Rhetoric_ (iii. 9, 1410 b 2), [Greek: technon sunagogae]: A historical collection of arts of rhetoric.

Difficult as it is to determine when Aristotle wrote all these various works, some of them indicate their dates. Gryllus, celebrated in the dialogue on rhetoric, was Xenophon's son who fell at Mantineia in 362; and Eudemus of Cyprus, lamented in the dialogue on soul, died in Sicily in 352. These then were probably written before Plato died in 347; and so probably were most of the dialogues, precisely because they were imitations of the dialogues of Plato. Among the didactic writings, the [Greek: peri tagathou] would probably belong to the same time, because it was Aristotle's report of Plato's lectures. On the other hand, the two political works, if written for Alexander, would be after 343-342 when Philip made Aristotle his tutor. So probably were the rhetorical works, especially the _Theodectea_; since both politics and oratory were the subjects which the father wanted the tutor to teach his son, and, when Alexander came to Phaselis, he is said by Plutarch (_Alexander_, 17) to have decorated the statue of Theodectes in honour of his association with the man through Aristotle and philosophy. On the whole, then, it seems as if Aristotle began with dialogues during his second period under Plato, but gradually came to prefer writing didactic works, especially in the third period after Plato's death, and in connexion with Alexander.

These early writings show clearly how Aristotle came to depart from Plato. In the first place as regards style, though the Stagirite pupil Aristotle could never rival his Attic master in literary form, yet he did a signal service to philosophy in gradually passing from the vague generalities of the dialogue to the scientific precision of the didactic treatise. The philosophy of Plato is dialogue trying to become science; that of Aristotle science retaining traces of dialectic. Secondly as regards subject-matter, even in his early writings Aristotle tends to widen the scope of philosophic inquiry, so as not only to embrace metaphysics and politics, but also to encourage rhetoric and poetics, which Plato tended to discourage or limit. Thirdly as regards doctrines, the surpassing interest of these early writings is that they show the pupil partly agreeing, partly disagreeing, with his master. The _Eudemus_ and _Protrepticus_ are with Plato; the dialogues _on Philosophy_ and the treatise _on Forms_ are against Plato.

The _Eudemus_, on the soul (_Fragmenta_, 37 seq.), must have been in style and thought the most Platonic of all the Aristotelian writings. Plato's theory of the soul and its immortality was not the ordinary Greek view derived from Homer, who regarded the body as the self, the soul as a shade having a future state but an obscure existence, and stamped that view on the hearts of his countrymen, and affected Aristotle himself. After Homer there had come to Greece the new view that the soul is more real than the body, that it is imprisoned in the carcase as a prison-house, that it is capable of enjoying a happier life freed from the body, and that it can transmigrate from body to body. This strange, exotic, ascetic view was adopted by some philosophers, and especially by the Pythagoreans, and so transmitted to Plato. Aristotle in the _Eudemus_, written about 352, when he was thirty-two, also believed in it. Accordingly, the soul of Eudemus, when it left his body, is said to be returning home: the soul is made subject to the casting of lots, and in coming from the other world to this it is supposed to forget its former visions: but its disembodied life is regarded as its natural life in a better world. The _Eudemus_ also contained a celebrated passage, preserved by Plutarch (_Consolat. ad Apoll._.27; _Fragm._ 44). Here we can read the young Aristotle, writing in the form of the dialogue like Plato, avoiding hiatus like Isocrates, and justifying the praises accorded to his style by Cicero, Quintilian and Dionysius. It shows how nearly the pupil could imitate his master's dialogues, and still more how exactly he at first embraced his master's doctrines. It makes Silenus, captured by Midas, say that the best of all things is not to have been born, and the next best, having been born, to die as soon as possible. Nothing could be more like Plato's _Phaedo_, or more unlike Aristotle's later work _on the Soul_, which entirely rejects transmigration and allows the next life to sink into the background.

Hardly less Platonic is the _Protrepticus_ (_Fragm._ 50 seq.), an exhortation to philosophy which, according to Zeno the Stoic, was studied by his master Crates. It is an exhortation, whose point is that the chief good is philosophy, the contemplation of the universe by divine and immortal intellect. This is indeed a doctrine of Platonic ethics from which Aristotle in his later days never swerved. But in the _Protrepticus_ he goes on to say that seeming goods, such as strength, size, beauty, honours, opinions, are mere illusion ([Greek: okiagraphia]), worthless and ridiculous, as we should know if we had Lyncean eyes to compare them with the vision of the eternal. This indifference to goods of body and estate is quite Platonic, but is very different from Aristotle's later ethical doctrine that such goods, though not the essence, are nevertheless necessary conditions of happiness. Finally, in the spirit of Plato's _Phaedo_ and the dialogue _Eudemus_, the _Protrepticus_ holds that the soul is bound to the sentient members of the body as prisoners in Etruria are bound face to face with corpses; whereas the later view of the _De Anima_ is that the soul is the vital principle of the body and the body the necessary organ of the soul.

Thus we find that at first, under the influence of his master, Aristotle held somewhat ascetic views on soul and body and on goods of body and estate, entirely opposed both in psychology and in ethics to the moderate doctrines of his later writings. This perhaps is one reason why Cicero, who had Aristotle's early writings, saw no difference between the Academy and the Peripatetics (_Acad. Post_, i. 4, 17-18).

On the other hand, the dialogue _on Philosophy_ ([Greek: peri philosophias], _Fragm._ 1 seq.) strikingly exhibits the origin of Aristotle's divergence from Platonism, and that too in Plato's lifetime. The young son of a doctor from the colonies proved too fond of this world to stomach his Athenian master's philosophy of the supernatural. Accordingly in this dialogue he attacked Plato's fundamental position, both in its written and in its unwritten presentment, as a hypothesis both of forms and of formal numbers. First, he attacked the hypothesis of forms ([Greek: taen ton ideon hypothesin], _Fragm._ 8), exclaiming in his dialogues, according to Proclus, that he could not sympathize with the dogma even if it should be thought that he was opposing it out of contentiousness; while Plutarch says that his attacks on the forms by means of his exoteric dialogues were thought by some persons more contentious than philosophical, as presuming to disdain Plato's philosophy: so far was he, says Plutarch, from following it. Secondly, in the same dialogue (_Fragm._ 9), according to Syrianus, he disagreed with the hypothesis of formal numbers ([Greek: tois eidaetikois arithmois]). If, wrote Aristotle, the forms are another sort of number, not mathematical, there would be no understanding of it. Lastly, in the same dialogue (_Fragm._ 18 seq.) he revealed his emphasis on nature by contending that the universe is uncreate and indestructible. According to Plato, God caused the natural world to become: according to Aristotle it is eternal. This eternity of the world became one of his characteristic doctrines, and subsequently enabled him to explain how essences can be eternal without being separate from this world which is also eternal (cf. _Metaph._ [Zeta] 8). Thus early did Aristotle begin, even in Plato's lifetime, to oppose Plato's hypothesis of supernatural forms, and advance his own hypothesis of the eternity of the world.

He made another attack on Platonism in the didactic work [Greek: peri ideon], (_Fragm._ 185 seq.), contending that the Platonic arguments prove not forms ([Greek: ideai]) but only things common ([Greek: ta koina]). Here, according to Alexander the commentator, he first brought against Plato the argument of "the third man" ([Greek: ho tritos anthropos]); that, if there is the form, one man beyond many men, there will be a third man predicated of both man and men, and a fourth predicated of all three, and so on to infinity (_Fragm._ 188). Here, too, he examined the hypothesis of Eudoxus that things are caused by mixture of forms, a hypothesis which formed a kind of transition to his own later views, but failed to satisfy him on account of its difficulties. Lastly, in the didactic work [Greek: peri tagathou] (_Fragm._ 27 seq.), containing his report of Plato's lectures on the Good, he was dealing with the same mathematical metaphysics which in his dialogue _on Philosophy_ he criticized for converting forms into formal numbers. Aristoxenus, at the beginning of the second book of the _Harmonics_, gives a graphic account of the astonishment caused by these lectures of Plato, and of their effect on the lectures of Aristotle. In contending, as Aristotle's pupil, that a teacher should begin by proposing his subject, he tells us how Aristotle used to relate that most of Plato's hearers came expecting to get something about human goods and happiness, but that when the discourses turned out to be all about mathematics, with the conclusion that good is one, it appeared to them a paradox, which some despised and others condemned. The reason, he adds, was that they were not informed by Plato beforehand; and for this very reason, Aristotle, as he told Aristoxenus himself, used to prepare his hearers by informing them of the nature of the subject. From this rare personal reminiscence we see at a glance that the mind of Plato and the mind of Aristotle were so different, that their philosophies must diverge; the one towards the supernatural, the abstract, the discursive, and the other towards the natural, the substantial, the scientific.

Aristotle then even in the second period of his life, while Plato was still alive, began to differ from him in metaphysics. He rejected the Platonic hypothesis of forms, and affirmed that they are not separate but common, without however as yet having advanced to a constructive metaphysics of his own; while at the same time, after having at first adopted his master's dialectical treatment of metaphysical problems, he soon passed from dialogues to didactic works, which had the result of separating metaphysics from dialectic. The all-important consequence of this first departure from Platonism was that Aristotle became and remained primarily a metaphysician. After Plato's death, coming to his third period he made a further departure from Platonism in his didactic works on politics and rhetoric, written in connexion with Alexander and Theodectes. Those on politics (_Fragm._ 646-648) were designed to instruct Alexander on monarchy and on colonization; and in them Aristotle agreed with Plato in assigning a moral object to the state, but departed from him by saying that a king need not be a philosopher, as Plato had said in the _Republic_, but does need to listen to philosophers. Still more marked was his departure from Plato as regards rhetoric. Plato in the _Gorgias_, (501 [Alpha]) had contended that rhetoric is not an art but an empirical practice ([Greek: tribae kai empeiria]); Aristotle in the _Gryllus_ (_Fragm._ 68-69), written in his second period, took according to Quintilian a similar view. But in his third period, in the _Theodectea_ (_Fragm._ 125 seq.), rhetoric is treated as an art, and is laid out somewhat in the manner of his later _Art of Rhetoric_; while he also showed his interest in the subject by writing a history of other arts of rhetoric called [Greek: technon ounagogae] (_Fragm._ 136 seq.). Further, in treating rhetoric as an art in the _Theodectea_ he was forced into a conclusion, which carried him far beyond Plato's rigid notions of proof and of passion: he concluded that it is the work of an orator to use persuasion, and to arouse the passions ([Greek: to ta pathae diageirai]), e.g. anger and pity (_ib._ 133-134). Nor could he treat poetry as he is said to have done without the same result.

On the whole then, in his early dialectical and didactic writings, of which mere fragments remain, Aristotle had already diverged from Plato, and first of all in metaphysics. During his master's life, in the second period of his own life, he protested against the Platonic hypothesis of forms, formal numbers and the one as the good, and tended to separate metaphysics from dialectic by beginning to pass from dialogues to didactic works. After his master's death, in the third period of his own life, and during his connexion with Alexander, but before the final construction of his philosophy into a system, he was tending to write more and more in the didactic style; to separate from dialectic, not only metaphysics, but also politics, rhetoric and poetry; to admit by the side of philosophy the arts of persuasive language; to think it part of their legitimate work to rouse the passions; and in all these ways to depart from the ascetic rigidity of the philosophy of Plato, so as to prepare for the tolerant spirit of his own, and especially for his ethical doctrine that virtue consists not in suppressing but in moderating almost all human passions. In both periods, too, as we shall find in the sequel, he was already occupied in composing some of the extant writings which were afterwards to form parts of his final philosophical system. But as yet he had given no sign of system, and--what is surprising--no trace of logic. Aristotle was primarily a metaphysician against Plato; a metaphysician before he was a logician; a metaphysician who made what he called primary philosophy ([Greek: protae philosophia]) the starting-point of his philosophical development, and ultimately of his philosophical system.

III. COMPOSITION OF HIS EXTANT WORKS

The system which was taught by Aristotle at Athens in the fourth period of his life, and which is now known as the Aristotelian philosophy, is contained not in fragments but in extant books. It will be best then to give at once a list of these extant works, following the traditional order in which they have long been arranged, and marking with a dagger ([+]) those which are now usually considered not to be genuine, though not always with sufficient reason.

A. LOGICAL

1. [Greek: Kataegoriai]: _Categoriae_: On simple expressions signifying different kinds of things and capable of predication [probably an early work of Aristotle, accepting species and genera as "secondary substances" in deference to Plato's teaching].

2. [Greek: peri Hermaeneias]: _De interpretatione_: On language as expression of mind, and especially on the enunciation or assertion ([Greek: apophansis, apophantikos logos]) [rejected by Andronicus according to Alexander; but probably an early work of Aristotle, based on Plato's analysis of the sentence into noun and verb].

3. [Greek: Analytika protera]: _Analytica Priora_, On syllogism, with a view to demonstration.

4. [Greek: Analytika ustera]: _Analytica Posteriora_: On demonstration, or demonstrative or scientific syllogism ([Greek: apodeixis, apodeiktikos ae epistaemonilos syllogismos]).

5. [Greek: Topika]: _Topica_: On dialectical syllogism ([Greek: Dialektikos syllogismos]), so called from consisting mainly of commonplaces ([Greek: topoi]. _loci_), or general sources of argument.

6. [Greek: Sophistikoi elenchoi]: _Sophistici Elenchi_: On sophistic ([Greek: sophistikos]) or eristic syllogism ([Greek: eristikos syllogismos]), so called from the fallacies used by sophists in refutation ([Greek: elenchos]) of their opponents.

[Numbers 1-6 were afterwards grouped together as the _Organon_.]

B. PHYSICAL

1. [Greek: Physikae akroasis]: _Physica Auscultatio_: On Nature as cause of change, and the general principles of natural science.

2. [Greek: peri ouranou]: _De coelo_: On astronomy, &c.

3. [Greek: peri geneseos kai phthoras]: _De generatione et corruptione_: On generation and destruction in general.

4. [Greek: Meteorologika]: _Meteorologica_: On sublunary changes.

5.[+] [Greek: peri kosmou]: _De mundo_: On the universe. [Supposed by Zeller to belong to the latter half of the 1st century B.C.]

6. [Greek: peri psyches]: _De anima_: On soul, conjoined with organic body.

7. [Greek: peri aistheseos kai aistheton]: _De sensu et sensili_: On sense and objects of sense.

8. [Greek: peri mnaemaes kai anamneseos]: _De memoria et reminiscentia_: On memory and recollection.

9. [Greek: peri hypnou kai egregorseos]: _De somno et vigilia_: On sleep and waking.

10. [Greek: peri enypnion]: _De insomniis_: On dreams.

11. [Greek: peri taes kath hypnon mantikes] or [Greek: peri mantikes pes hen tois hypnois]: _De divinatione per somnum_: On prophecy in sleep.

12. [Greek: peri makrobiotetos kai brachybiotetos]: _De longitudine et brevitate vitae_: On length and shortness of life.

13. [Greek: peri neotetos kai geros kai peri zoaes kai thanatou]: _De juventute et senectute et de vita et morte_: On youth and age, and on life and death.

14. [Greek: peri anapnoes]: _De respiratione_: On respiration. [Numbers 7-14 are grouped together as Parva naturalia.]

15.[+] [Greek: peri pneumatos]: _De spiritu_: On innate spirit (_spiritus vitalis_).

16. [Greek: peri ta zoa istoriai]: _Historia animalium_: Description of facts about animals, i.e. their organs. &c.

17. [Greek: peri zoon morion]. _De partibus animalium_: Philosophy of the causes of the facts about animals, i.e. their functions.

18.[+] [Greek: peri zoon kineseos]: _De animalium motione_: On the motion of animals. [Ascribed to the school of Theophrastus and Strato by Zeller.]

19. [Greek: peri zoon poreias]: _De animalium incessu_: On the going of animals.

20. [Greek: peri zoon geneseos]: _De animalium generatione_: On the generation of animals.

21.[+] [Greek: peri chromaton]: _De coloribus_: On colours. [Ascribed to the school of Theophrastus and Strato by Zeller.]

22.[+] [Greek: peri akouston]: _De audibilibus_. [Ascribed to the school of Theophrastus and Strato by Zeller.]

23.[+] [Greek: Physiognomonika]: _Physiognomonica_: On physiognomy, and the sympathy of body and soul.

24.[+] [Greek: peri phytos]: _De plantis_: On plants. [Not Aristotle's work on this subject.]

25.[+] [Greek: peri thaumasion akousmatos]: _De mirabilibus ausculationibus_: On phenomena chiefly connected with natural history.

26.[+] [Greek: Maechanica]: _Quaestiones mechanicae_: Mechanical questions.

C. MISCELLANEOUS

1.[+] [Greek: Problaemata]: _Problemata_: Problems on various subjects [gradually collected by the Peripatetics from partly Aristotelian materials, according to Zeller].

2.[+] [Greek: peri atomon grammon]: _De insecabilibus lineis_: On indivisible lines. [Ascribed to Theophrastus, or his time, by Zeller.]

3.[+] [Greek: anemos theseis kai prosaegoriai]: _Ventorum situs et appellationes_: A fragment on the winds.

4.[+] [Greek: peri Xenophanous, peri Zaenonos, peri Gorgiou]: _De Xenophane, Zenone et Gorgia_: On Xenophanes, Zeno and Gorgias.

D. PRIMARY PHILOSOPHY OR THEOLOGY OR WISDOM

[Greek: ta meta ta physika]: _Metaphysica_: On being as being and its properties, its causes and principles, and on God as the motive motor of the world.

E. PRACTICAL

1. [Greek: Aethika Nikomacheia]: _Ethica Nicomachea_: On the good of the individual.

2.[+] [Greek: Aethika megala]: _Magna Moralia_: On the same subject. [According to Zeller, an abstract of the _Nicomachean_ and the _Eudemian Ethics_, tending to follow the latter, but possibly an early draft of the _Nicomachean Ethics_.]

3.[+] [Greek: Aethika Eudaemia] or [Greek: pros Eudaemos]: _Ethica ad Eudemum_: On the same subject. [Usually supposed to be written by Eudemus, but possibly an early draft of the _Nicomachean Ethics_.]

4.[+] [Greek: peri aretos kai kakios]: _De virtutibus et vitiis_: On virtues and vices. [An eclectic work of the 1st century B.C., half Academic and half Peripatetic, according to Zeller.]

5. [Greek: Politika]: _De re publica_: Politics, on the good of the state.

6.[+] [Greek: Oikonomika]: _De cura rei familiaris_: Economics, on the good of the family. [The first book a work of the school of Theophrastus or Eudemus, the second later Peripatetic, according to Zeller.]

F. ART

1. [Greek: technae Rhaetorikae]: _Ars rhetorica_: On the art of oratory.

2.[+] [Greek: Rhaetorikae pros: Alexandron:] _Rhetorica ad Alexandrum_: On the same subject. [Ascribed to Anaximenes of Lampsacus (fl. 365, Diodorus xv. 76) by Petrus Victorius, and Spengel, but possibly an earlier rhetoric by Aristotle.]

3. [Greek: peri Poiaetikaes]: _De poetica_: On the art of poetry [fragmentary].

G. HISTORICAL

[Greek: Athaenaion politeia:] _De republica Atheniensium_: On the Constitution of Athens. [One of the [Greek: Politeiai], said to have been 158 at least, the genuineness of which is attested by the defence which Polybius (xii.) makes of Aristotle's history of the Epizephyrian Locrians against Timaeus, Aristotle's contemporary and critic. Hitherto, only fragments have come down to us (cf. _Fragm_. 381-603). The present treatise, without however its beginning and end, written on a papyrus discovered in Egypt and now in the British Museum, was first edited by F.G. Kenyon 1890-1891.] (See the article CONSTITUTION OF ATHENS.)

_The Difficulty._--The genuineness of the Aristotelian works, as Leibnitz truly said (_De Stilo Phil. Nizolii_, xxx.), is ascertained by the conspicuous harmony of their theories, and by their uniform method of swift subtlety. Nevertheless difficulties lurk beneath their general unity of thought and style. In style they are not quite the same: now they are brief and now diffuse: sometimes they are carelessly written, sometimes so carefully as to avoid hiatus, e.g. the _Metaphysics_ A, and parts of the _De Coelo_ and _Parva Naturalia_, which in this respect resemble the fragment quoted by Plutarch from the early dialogue _Eudemus_ (_Fragm_. 44). They also appear to contain displacements, interpolations, prefaces such as that to the _Meteorologica_, and appendices such as that to the _Sophistical Elenchi_, which may have been added. An Aristotelian work often goes on continuously at first, and then becomes disappointing by suddenly introducing discussions which break the connexion or are even inconsistent with the beginning; as in the _Posterior Analytics_, which, after developing a theory of demonstration from necessary principles, suddenly makes the admission, which is also the main theory of science in the _Metaphysics_, that demonstration is about either the necessary or the contingent, from principles either necessary or contingent, only not accidental. At times order is followed by disorder, as in the _Politics_. Again, there are repetitions and double versions, e.g. those of the _Physics_, vii., and those of the _De Anima_, ii., discovered by Torstrik; or two discussions of the same subject, e.g. of pleasure in the _Nicomachean Ethics_, vii. and x.; or several treatises on the same subject very like one another, viz. the _Nicomachean Ethics_, the _Eudemian Ethics_ and the _Magna Moralia_; or, strangest of all, a consecutive treatise and other discourses amalgamated, e.g. in the _Metaphysics_, where a systematic theory of being running through several books ( [Beta, Gamma, Epsilon, Zeta, Eta, Theta]) is preceded, interrupted and followed by other discussions of the subject. Further, there are frequently several titles of the same work or of different parts of it. Sometimes diagrams ([Greek: diagraphai] or [Greek: hypographai]) are mentioned, and sometimes given (e.g. in _De Interp_. 13, 22 a 22; _Nicomachean Ethics_, ii. 7; _Eudemian Ethics_, ii. 3), but sometimes only implied (e.g. in _Hist. An._ i. 17, 497 a 32; iii. 1, 510 a 30; iv. 1, 525 a 9). The different works are more or less connected by a system of references, which give rise to difficulties, especially when they are cross-references: for example, the _Analytics_ and _Topics_ quote one another: so do the _Physics_ and the _Metaphysics_; the _De Vita_ and _De Respiratione_ and the _De Partibus Animalium_; this latter treatise and the _De Animalium Incessu_; the _De Interpretatione_ and the _De Anima_. A late work may quote an earlier; but how, it may be asked, can the earlier reciprocally quote the later?

Besides these difficulties in and between the works there are others beyond them. On the one hand, there is the curious story given partly by Strabo (608-609) and partly in Plutarch's _Sulla_ (c. 26), that Aristotle's successor Theophrastus left the books of both to their joint pupil, Neleus of Scepsis, where they were hidden in a cellar, till in Sulla's time they were sold to Apellicon, who made new copies, transferred after Apellicon's death by Sulla to Rome, and there edited and published by Tyrannio and Andronicus. On the other hand, there are the curious and puzzling catalogues of Aristotelian books, one given by Diogenes Laertius, another by an anonymous commentator (perhaps Hesychius of Miletus) quoted in the notes of Gilles Menage on Diogenes Laertius, and known as "Anonymus Menagii," and a third copied by two Arabian writers from Ptolemy, perhaps King Ptolemy Philadelphus, son of the founder of the library at Alexandria. (See Rose, _Fragm_. pp. 1-22.) But the extraordinary thing is that, without exactly agreeing among themselves, the catalogues give titles which do not agree well with the Aristotelian works as we have them. A title in some cases suits a given work or a part of it; but in other cases there are no titles for works which exist, or titles for works which do not exist.

These difficulties are complicated by various hypotheses concerning the composition of the Aristotelian works. Zeller supposes that, though Aristotle may have made preparations for his philosophical system beforehand, still the properly didactic treatises composing it almost all belong to the last period of his life, i.e. from 335-334 to 322; and from the references of one work to another Zeller has further suggested a chronological order of composition during this period of twelve years, beginning with the treatises on Logic and Physics, and ending with that on Metaphysics. There is a further hypothesis that the Aristotelian works were not originally treatises, but notes of lectures either for or by his pupils. This easily passes into the further and still more sceptical hypothesis that the works, as we have them, under Aristotle's name, are rather the works of the Peripatetic school, from Aristotle, Theophrastus and Eudemus downwards. "We cannot assert with certainty," says R. Shute in his _History of the Aristotelian Writings_ (p. 176), "that we have even got throughout a treatise in the exact words of Aristotle, though we may be pretty clear that we have a fair representation of his thought. The unity of style observable may belong quite as much to the school and the method as to the individual." This sceptical conclusion, the contrary of that drawn by Leibnitz from the harmony of thought and style pervading the works, shows us that the Homeric question has been followed by the Aristotelian question.

_The Solution._--Such hypotheses attend to Aristotle's philosophy to the neglect of his life. He was really, as we have seen, a prolific writer from the time when he was a young man under Plato's guidance at Athens; beginning with dialogues in the manner of his master, but afterwards preferring to write didactic works during the prime of his own life between thirty-eight and fifty (347-335-334), and with the further advantage of leisure at Atarneus and Mitylene, in Macedonia and at home in Stagira. When at fifty he returned to Athens, as head of the Peripatetic school, he no doubt wrote much of his extant philosophy during the twelve remaining years of his life (335-322). But he was then a busy teacher, was growing old, and suffered from a disease in the stomach for a considerable time before it proved fatal at the age of sixty-three. It is therefore improbable that he could between fifty and sixty-three have written almost the whole of the many books on many subjects constituting that grand philosophical system which is one of the most wonderful works of man. It is far more probable that he was previously composing them at his leisure and in the vigour of manhood, precisely as his contemporary Demosthenes composed all his great speeches except the _De Corona_ before he was fifty.

Turning to Aristotle's own works, we immediately light upon a surprise: Aristotle began his extant scientific works during Plato's lifetime. By a curious coincidence, in two different works he mentions two different events as contemporary with the time of writing, one in 357 and the other in 356. In the _Politics_ ([Epsilon] 10, 1312 b 10), he mentions as now ([Greek: nun]) Dion's expedition to Sicily which occurred in 357. In the _Meteorologica_ (iii. 1, 371 a 30), he mentions as now ([Greek: nun]) the burning of the temple at Ephesus, which occurred in 356. To save his hypothesis of late composition, Zeller resorts to the vagueness of the word "now" ([Greek: nun]). But Aristotle is graphically describing isolated events, and could hardly speak of events of 357 and 356 as happening "now" in or near 335. Moreover, these two works contain further proofs that they were both begun earlier than this date. The _Politics_ ([Beta] 10) mentions as having happened lately ([Greek: neosti]) the expedition of Phalaecus to Crete, which occurred towards the end of the Sacred War in 346. The _Meteorologica_ ([Gamma] 7) mentions the comet of 341. It is true that the _Politics_ also mentions much later events, e.g. the assassination of Philip which took place in 336 ([Epsilon] 10, 1311 b 1-3). Indeed, the whole truth about this great work is that it remained unfinished at Aristotle's death. But what of that? The logical conclusion is that Aristotle began writing it as early as 357, and continued writing it in 346, in 336, and so on till he died. Similarly, he began the _Meteorologica_ as early as 356 and was still writing it in 341. Both books were commenced some years before Plato's death: both were works of many years: both were destined to form parts of the Aristotelian system of philosophy. It follows that Aristotle, from early manhood, not only wrote dialogues and didactic works, surviving only in fragments, but also began some of the philosophical works which are still parts of his extant writings. He continued these and no doubt began others during the prime of his life. Having thus slowly matured his separate writings, he was the better able to combine them more and more into a system, in his last years. No doubt, however, he went on writing and rewriting well into the last period of his life; for example, the recently discovered [Greek: Athaenaion politeia] mentions on the one hand (c. 54) the archonship of Cephisophon (329-328), on the other hand (c. 46) triremes and quadriremes but without quinqueremes, which first appeared at Athens in 325-324; and as it mentions nothing later it probably received its final touches between 320 and 324. But it may have been begun long before, and received additions and changes. However early Aristotle began a book, so long as he kept the manuscript, he could always change it. Finally he died without completing some of his works, such as the _Politics_, and notably that work of his whole philosophic career and foundation of his whole philosophy--the _Metaphysics_--which, projected in his early criticism of Plato's philosophy of universal forms, gradually developed into his positive philosophy of individual substances, but remained unfinished after all.

On the whole, then, Aristotle was writing his extant works very gradually for some thirty-five years (357-322), like Herodotus (iv. 30) contemplated additions, continued writing them more or less together, not so much successively as simultaneously, and had not finished writing at his death.

There is a curious characteristic connected with this gradual composition. An Aristotelian treatise frequently has the appearance of being a collection of smaller discourses ([Greek: logoi]), as, e.g., K.L. Michelet has remarked.

This is obvious enough in the _Metaphysics_: it has two openings (Books [Alpha] and [alpha]); then comes a nearly consecutive theory of being ([Beta], [Gamma], [Epsilon], [Zeta], [Eta], [Theta]), but interrupted by a philosophical lexicon [Delta]; afterwards follows a theory of unity ([Iota]); then a summary of previous books and of doctrines from the _Physics_ ([Kappa]); next a new beginning about being, and, what is wanted to complete the system, a theory of God in relation to the world ([Lambda]); finally a criticism of mathematical metaphysics ([Mu], [Nu]), in which the argument against Plato ([Alpha] 9) is repeated almost word for word ([Mu] 4-5). The _Metaphysics_ is clearly a compilation formed from essays or discourses; and it illustrates another characteristic of Aristotle's gradual method of composition. It refers back to passages "in the first discourses" ([Greek: en tois protois logois]) --an expression not uncommon in Aristotelian writings. Sometimes the reference is to the beginning of the whole treatise; e.g. _Met_. [Beta] 2, 997 b 3-5, referring back to [Alpha] 6 and 9 about Platonic forms. Sometimes, on the other hand, the reference only goes back to a previous part of a given topic, e.g. _Met_. [Theta] 1, 1045 b 27-32, referring back to [Zeta] 1, or at the earliest to [Gamma] 2. On either alternative, however, "the first discourses" mentioned may have originally been a separate discourse; for Book [Gamma] begins quite fresh with the definition of the science of being, long afterwards called "Metaphysics," and Book [Zeta] begins Aristotle's fundamental doctrine of substance.

Another indication of a treatise having arisen out of separate discourses is its consisting of different parts imperfectly connected. Thus the _Nicomachean Ethics_ begins by identifying the good with happiness ([Greek: eudaimonia]), and happiness with virtuous action. But when it comes to the moral virtues (