A LIFE OF ARISTOTLE
INCLUDING A CRITICAL DISCUSSION OF SOME QUESTIONS OF
LITERARY HISTORY
BY
JOSEPH WILLIAMS BLAKESLEY
ADVERTISEMENT.
The following Essay is intended by the author to be
preliminary to a few others in which he hopes to give an account of the several
systems of Ancient Philosophy which converged in those of Plato and Aristotle, to pursue some of the more important branches of
speculation in the course which they took after leaving the hands of the
latter, and to examine the success which has attended their
cultivation up to the present time. Before this task could be attempted with
any advantage, it was necessary to enter upon some points relative to the
history of philosophical literature, and, from the nature of these, no mode of
discussing them appeared preferable to interweaving them in a critical
biography of the founder of the Peripatetic School. The present treatise,
however, although the first of a series, is complete in
itself, and it is the intention of the writer to preserve a similar
independence to each of the others.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION.
It is not, however, to the indifference of his contemporaries,
or to that of their immediate successors, that the paucity of details relating
to Aristotle's life is due. If we may trust the account of a
commentator, Ptolemy Philadelphus, the second of the
Macedonian dynasty in Egypt, not only bestowed a great deal of study upon the
writings of the illustrious philosopher, but also wrote a biography of him. At
any rate, about the same time, Hermippus
of Smyrna, one of the Alexandrine school of learned
men, whose research and accuracy is highly praised by Josephus, composed a
work extending to some length, On the
Lives of Distinguished Philosophers and Orators, in which Aristotle appears
to have occupied a considerable space. Another author, whose date there is no
direct means of ascertaining, but who probably is to be placed somewhere about
the end of the third century before the Christian era, Timotheus of
Athens, is also to be added to the number of his early biographers. But
independently of such works as these, antiquity abounded in others which
contained information on this subject in a less direct form. Aristoxenus
of Tarentum, who during a part of his life was himself a pupil of Aristotle, in
his biographies of Socrates and Plato had frequent occasion to speak of the
great Stagirite.
Epicurus, in a treatise which is cited under the title of A Letter on the Pursuits and Habits of former Philosophers, related
several stories to his disparagement. The same, perhaps, was the case with Aristippus
(apparently the grandson of the founder of the Cyrenean
school) in his work On the Luxury of
Antiquity. And yet more valuable materials than were furnished by the two
last-mentioned works, of which at least the former appears to have been
composed in that vulgar spirit which delights in finding something to degrade
to its own level all that is above it, seem to have been contained in the treatises
of Demetrius the Magnesian
and Apollodorus the Athenian. The first of these was
a contemporary of Cicero and his celebrated friend Atticus, and appears to have
exercised his acumen in detecting such erroneous stories prevalent in his time
as arose from the confusion of different poets and philosophers who had borne
the same name; a cause which formerly in the absence of hereditary surnames,
and under the operation of many motives for falsification, was much more
fertile in its results than can now be easily imagined. The second is an
authority which for the purposes of the modern biographer of Aristotle is the
most important of all. He, like Hermippus,
was an Alexandrine scholar, and pupil of the celebrated commentator and editor
of the Homeric poems, Aristarchus. Among his voluminous works was one On the Sects of Philosophers, which no
doubt contained much that was interesting on our subject; but what renders him
valuable above any other of these lost writers, and makes us treasure up with
avidity the slightest notices by him which have come down to us, is his
celebrated Chronology, a composition
in iambic verse, often cited under the title of ....,
by that compiler whose treatise is unfortunately the most ancient systematic account
of Aristotle's life which has escaped the ravages of time. These
citations are invaluable, not merely for the positive information which we gain
from them, but because they serve also, as we shall have occasion to observe in
the sequel, for a touchstone of anecdotes whose authority is otherwise
uncertain.
ALEXANDRINE WRITERS.
The foregoing list of authors, which might be yet
further enlarged, abundantly shows that in the beginning of the first century
before Christ there were materials for compiling a biography of Aristotle as
detailed as one of Newton or Young could be in the present day. This, however,
soon afterwards ceased to be the case. When the only means of obtaining the
copy of a book was by the laborious process of transcription, the expense
necessarily confined its acquisition to comparatively few persons, and when to
this drawback we add those arising from voluminous size and but partially
interesting subject, the circulation would be very limited indeed. It may be
questioned, perhaps, whether some of the works we have noticed ever found their
way beyond the walls of the royal library at Alexandria, except in the shape of
extracts. If this were the case, the destruction of the whole or a great part
of that library in the siege of the city by Julius Caesar (b.c 48) would very probably cause
their annihilation. At all events, in subsequent times, when Rome was the centre of civilization as well as of empire, works of such
a description became totally unfit to satisfy the wants of the age. A certain
acquaintance with Greek literature, Greek philosophy, and Greek history, became
an essential accomplishment for the fashionable Roman, but this acquaintance
was nothing like the one which Cato and Scipio, which Atticus and Cicero
possessed. It was expected to be extremely comprehensive, and, as all
comprehensive knowledge must be when popularized, it was proportionally
superficial. To feed this appetite for general information was the work of the
needy men of letters under the Empire. In the time of the early Ptolemies and
of the Kings of Pergamus their energies had
been directed by the munificence of those monarchs to the accumulation of vast
stores of erudition on particular subjects. The number
of monographies,
and the minute subdivision of intellectual labour
which prevailed under their patronage, is scarcely paralleled by the somewhat
similar case of Germany at the present day. Homer, a sacred book for the
Greeks, was the principal subject of their labours;
but indeed there was no classical author and no
literary or scientific question which did not employ the abilities of a crowd
of antiquarians or commentators. The prodigious stores thus accumulated formed
the stock from which the litterateurs of Rome derived materials for the new
species of intellectual repast demanded by the taste of their times. In the
first generation of compilations which were composed for this purpose, the
writers of course made use of the existing sources of information,
and fortified their statements by citations of their authority in each
particular instance. But as the real love for literature declined before the
debilitating influence of luxury, while at the same time the fashion of
literary, accomplishments remained, it became necessary that information should
be furnished in a more generally palatable form. Hence out of the first crop of
compilations, a new generation of writers composed a sort of Omniana, a species of composition which became exceedingly popular, as it
combined a loose kind of information on those points of which everybody was
expected to possess some knowledge, with the piquancy of memoirs, and the
variety of subject which is so pleasant to a frivolous and indolent reader. It
very soon overlaid and destroyed the learned labours
of the preceding ages, and from the time at which it began to prevail, it
becomes very questionable whether a writer, when he quotes an authority of a
date earlier than the Empire, ever has cast eyes upon him, or even wishes his
readers to believe that he has done so. One of the earliest as well as most
original works of this description was the production of a female hand. Pamphila,
a lady of Egyptian extraction in the time of Nero, had married at a very early
age a person of considerable literary tastes and attainments, whose house was
the resort of many persons distinguished for the same, either for the purposes
of education or of social intercourse. During thirteen
years she states that she was never separated from her husband's side for an hour, and
that it was her habit to take notes of any thing
which she might learn either from him or from any of his literary circle, which
appeared worth recording. Out of these materials, together with extracts made
by herself from authors which she had read, she composed eight books of
miscellaneous historical memoirs, purposely abstaining from any thing
like an arrangement according to subjects, that her
readers might enjoy the pleasure arising from the variety. This work Photius, from whom we have taken our notice of it,
describes as being a most useful one for the acquirement of general
information.
Phavorinus, a native of Arles, who flourished in the reign of
the Emperor Hadrian, was the compiler of another work of the same description,
but not composed under such interesting circumstances. His Miscellaneous Historical Questions were, as well as the works of Pamphila, a
mine much worked by subsequent writers. But the degenerate taste which had
caused the production of such works as these, or at any rate as the latter, did
not stop here. Still declining, it called for yet more meager and worthless
compilations, which were furnished by drawing from the confused and turbid
Miscellanies such parts as referred to any particular subject
on which the writer thought proper to make collections. To this stage belongs
the work of Diogenes Laertius, a part of which forms the nucleus of all modern
biographies of Aristotle, as well as of Plato and most of the early Greek
philosophers; and to a yet later period, after the processes which we have been
describing had been again and again repeated, the Lives by the Pseudo-Ammonius
and his anonymous Latin translator and interpolater.
If we were to estimate the relative importance of
these later authorities by the quantity of critical discernment or sound
erudition which they display, there would be little to choose between the
contemporary of Severus, and his followers of some centuries later. But Diogenes,
although devoid of all historical or philosophical discrimination, although sometimes contradicting himself within the
limits of a single biography, and confusing
the tenets of Peripatetics
and Epicureans without the least consciousness of his own indistinct views, is
yet distinguished by the circumstance that in his narrative the names of the
earliest authorities still appear, while from the rest they have in most cases
dropped out. With the use, therefore, of due caution and diligence, we are frequently
enabled to arrive at the views entertained on a given point by individuals of
four centuries earlier date, who possessed both the wish and the means to
ascertain truth where the later writers were deficient in both. This is
particularly the case with certain classes of facts. Anecdotes illustrative of
individual character or habits of life readily spring up and have a rapid
growth, if the smallest nucleus of truth exist as a foundation for them. But
dry and uninteresting statements, such as the date of an insulated event, will
very rarely be falsified except by accidents attending transcription, unless
their determination is distinctly felt to affect the decision of some more
obviously important question. When, therefore, such statements coupled with the
name of an early authority have been preserved, there is a fair presumption
that we have firm standing ground, and other notices of uncertain origin will
possess a greater or less claim to our consideration, as they appear more or
less adapted to make parts of that body of which, as it were, a few fossil
bones have been preserved. These we shall first present collectively to the
view of our readers, and then proceed step by step in the process of redintegration.
On the authority then of Apollodorus we may fix the
birth of Aristotle in the first year of the ninety-ninth Olympiad, (BC 384-3,) and his arrival at Athens as a scholar of Plato
when seventeen years old. After remaining there twenty years, he visited the
court of Hermias
(a prince of Asia Minor of whom we shall say more in the sequel,) in the year
after his master's death,
Theophilus being then archon, (i.e. BC
348-7,) and stayed there for three years. In the
archonship of Eubulus, the fourth year of
the hundred and eighth Olympiad, (BC 345-4,) he passed over to Mytilene.
In that of Pythodotus,
the second year of the hundred and ninth, (BC 343-2,) he commenced the education of Alexander the Great at his father's court; and in the second year of the hundred and
eleventh, returned to Athens and taught philosophy in the school of the Lyceum
for the space of thirteen years; at the expiration of which time he crossed
over to Chalcis in Euboea, and there died from a disease in the archonship of Philocles,
the third year of the hundred and fourteenth Olympiad, (BC 322-1,) at the age of about sixty-three, and at the same
time that Demosthenes ended his life in Calauria.
CHAPTER II.
BIRTHPLACE OF ARISTOTLE.
Stagirus, (or, as it was later called, Stagira,) the
birthplace of one of the most extraordinary men, if not the very most, that the
world has ever produced, was a petty town in the north of Greece, situated on
the western side of the Strymonic
gulf, just where the general line of coast takes a southerly direction. It lay in the midst of a picturesque country, both in soil and
appearance resembling the southern part of the bay of Naples. Immediately south
a promontory, like the Punta della Campanella
and nearly in the same latitude, ran out in an easterly direction, effectually
screening the town and its little harbour Capros,
formed by the island of the same name, from the violence of the squalls coming
up the Aegean, a similar service to that rendered by the Italian headland to
the town of Sorrento. In the terraced windings, too, by which the visitor
climbs through the orange groves of the latter place, he may without any great
violence imagine the narrow and steep paths by which an ancient historian and
chorographer describes those who crossed the mountains out of Macedonia as
descending into the valley of Arethusa, where was seen the tomb of Euripides,
and the town of Stagirus. The inhabitants
possessed all the advantages of civilization which Grecian blood and Grecian
intercourse could give, the city having been originally built by a colony of Andrians,
and its population subsequently replenished by one from Chalcis in Euboea. The
mouth of the Strymon and the important city of
Amphipolis was within three hours' sail to the
north; and every part of the Chalcidic peninsula, a
district full of Greek towns, among which were Olynthus and Potidaea, was
readily accessible. With the former of these Stagirus
appears to have been leagued as a humble ally ill that resistance to the
ambitious designs of Philip which terminated so calamitously. In the year 348
BC it was destroyed by him, and the inhabitants sold as slaves.
Aristotle, however, did not share the misfortunes of
his native town, to which it is probable he had been for many years a stranger.
His father, Nicomachus, one of the family or guild of
the Asclepiads, in which the practice of medicine was hereditary, had taken up
his residence at the court of Philip's father Amyntas, to whom he was body surgeon, and whose confidence
he appears to have possessed in a high degree. He did not confine himself to
the empirical practice of his art, for he is related to have written six books
on medical and one on physical subjects, which latter head would in that age
include every department of natural history and physiology, no less than those
investigations of the properties of inorganic matter to which the term is
appropriated in the present day. Now this circumstance is much more important
in its bearing upon the intellectual character of Aristotle than may at first
appear. In his writings appears such a fondness for these pursuits as it seems
impossible not to believe must have been imbibed in his very earliest years,
and most probably under the immediate superintendence of this parent. For
although he was an orphan at the age of seventeen, (and how much earlier we
cannot say,) yet it is well known that instruction in the art and mastery of
healing, and such subjects as were connected therewith, was commenced by the
Asclepiads at a very early age. I do not blame the ancients, says Galen, for
not writing books on anatomical manipulation; though I commend Marinus, who
did. For it was superfluous for them to
compose such records for themselves or others, while they were from their
childhood exercised by their parents in dissecting just as familiarly as in
writing and reading; so that there was no more fear of their forgetting their
anatomy than of their forgetting their alphabet. But when grown men as well
as children were taught, this thorough discipline fell off; and the art being carried out of the family of the Asclepiads,
and declining by repeated transmission, books became necessary for the student.
And we have another, although slighter, presumptive evidence that the childhood
of the great philosopher was spent with his father at the Macedonian court, in
the circumstance of his being selected by Philip, at a period long subsequent,
to conduct the education of Alexander. This we shall find an opportunity of
reverting to in the sequel.
Whatever influence, however, was exercised by
Nicomachus over the future fortunes of his son, he had not the happiness of
living to be a witness of its effects. He, as well as his wife Phaestis,
a descendant of one of the Chalcidian colonists of Stagirus,
died while Aristotle was yet a minor, leaving him under the guardianship of Proxenus, a citizen of Atarneus
in Asia, who appears to have been settled in the native town of his ward. How
long this person continued in the discharge of his trust, we have no means of
determining more than that it was sufficiently long to imbue the object of it
with a respect and gratitude which endured through life. At the age of
seventeen, however, it terminated, and Aristotle, master of himself and
probably of a considerable fortune, came to Athens, the centre
of the civilization of the world, and the focus of every
thing that was brilliant in action or in thought.
It is not probable that any thing
but the thirst for knowledge which distinguished his residence there, was the
cause of its commencement. Plato was at that time in the height of his
reputation, and the desire to see and enjoy the intercourse of such a man would
have been an adequate motive to minds of much less capacity and taste for
philosophy than Aristotle's to resort to
a spot, where, besides, every enjoyment which even an Epicurean could desire
was to be found. It was reserved for the foolish ingenuity of later times, when
all real knowledge of this period had faded away, to invent the absurd motive of
a Delphic oracle, which commanded him to devote himself to philosophy. For
another account, scarcely less absurd, the excuse of ignorance cannot be so
easily made. Epicurus, in the work we have before spoken of, related that
Aristotle, after squandering his paternal property, adopted the profession of a
mercenary soldier, and failing in this, afterwards that of a vender of
medicines; that he then took advantage of the free manner in which Plato's instructions were given to pick up a knowledge of philosophy,
for which he was not without talent, and thus gradually arrived at his views.
It is at once manifest that this story is incompatible with the account of Apollodorus, according to which Aristotle attached himself
to the study of philosophy under Plato, before he had completed his eighteenth
year. Independently of the difficulty of conceiving that a mere boy should have
already passed through so many vicissitudes of fortune, it is obvious that he
could not before that time have squandered his property, except through the
culpable negligence of his guardian, Proxenus; and
any supposition of this sort is precluded by the singular respect testified for
that individual in his ward's will, the
substance of which or rather
perhaps a codicil to it has been preserved
to us by Diogenes Laertius. In it he directs the erection of a statue of Proxenus and of his wife, he appoints their son Nicanor
(whom he had previously adopted) to be joint guardian with Antipater of his
own son Nichomachus,
and also bestows his daughter upon him in marriage. It
is impossible to conceive that such feelings could have been aroused in the
ward by a negligent or indiscreetly indulgent guardian; and we should hardly
have reverted to the story in question, except to remark how the very form of
the calumny seems to indicate that the favourite studies
of Aristotle, in the early part of his life, were such as his father's profession would naturally have led him to,
Physiology and Natural History. Indeed, nothing is more probable than that he
might have given advice to the sick; theoretical knowledge and practical skill
being in those times so inseparably connected, that the Greek language
possesses no terms which formally distinguish them, and from this cir�cumstance the report may have arisen, that he
attempted medicine as a profession.
There are some other accounts equally discrepant with
the chronology of Apollodorus, which we have taken as
our standard. One of these is, that Aristotle did not attach himself to Plato
until he was thirty years of age: another that on his first arrival at Atheris
he was for three years the pupil of Socrates. The first of these, which rests
on the sole authority of one Eumelus, a
writer of whom nothing more whatever is known, may perhaps be a feature of the
story of Epicurus which we have just discussed: it has been conjectured,
however, with great appearance of probability, that its sole foundation is the
well-known maxim of Plato, that the study of the higher philosophy should not
be commenced before the thirtieth year. The second, as it stands, is absolutely unintelligible, Socrates having been put to death
in the archonship of Laches, (BC 400-399,) that is,
fifteen years before the birth of Aristotle. But it has been ingeniously
remarked, that at the time when Aristotle first came to Athens, Plato was
absent in Sicily, from whence he did not return till Olymp.
103. 4, the third year afterwards; so that if Aristotle was then introduced to
the philosophy of the Academy, it must have been under the auspices of some
other of the Socratic school, whom the foolish compilers of later times mistook
for its founder. Under this natural explanation, the absurd story becomes a
confirmation of the account of Apollodorus, which we
have followed a coincidence the more satisfactory as it is quite
undersigned.
We shall now proceed, as well as the scanty
information which has come down to us will allow, to sketch the course of
Aristotle's life during the ensuing period of nearly twenty
years which he spent at Athens. It appears to have been mainly, although not
entirely, occupied in the acquisition of his almost encyclopedic knowledge, in
collecting, criticising, and digesting. Of
his extraordinary diligence in mastering the doctrines of the earlier schools
of philosophy we may form some estimate from the notices of them which are
preserved in his works, which indeed constitute the principal source of our
whole knowledge upon this subject. That this information should have been
acquired by him during this part of his life is rendered likely both by the
nature of the case and by the scattered anecdotes which relate that his
industry no less than his intelligence elicited the strongest expressions of
admiration from Plato, who is said by Pseudo-Ammonius
to have called Aristotle's house -the house of the
reader-. The Latin translator adds, that in his absence his
master would exclaim, that the intelligence of the school was away, and his
audience but a deaf one! A treatise on Rhetoric, not that which has come down
to us, but one which, as we shall have occasion to show in the sequel, was
probably written during this period of his life, is described by Cicero as
containing an account of the theories of all his predecessors upon this
subject, from the time of Tisias, the
first who wrote upon it, so admirably
and perspicuously set forth, that all persons in his time who wished to gain a
knowledge of them, preferred Aristotle's description
to their own. We may take occasion to remark by the way that this taste for
reading could not have been gratified without very ample means. A collection of
books was a luxury which lay within the reach of as small a portion of the
readers of that day, as a gallery of pictures would of the amateurs of this.
This circumstance, then, is calculated to throw additional discredit on the
story told by Epicurus of Aristotle's youth. A
bankrupt apothecary could never have been a book collector. Another work of
Aristotle's, which is unfortunately lost, was compiled dining
this same time. It was a collection of Proverbs a species of literature to
which he, like most other men of reflection, attached great value. Two other
most important works, both of which are likewise lost, we may, from what we
know of their nature, probably refer to the same period, at least as far as
their plan and commencement are concerned. The first of these was a work on the
fundamental principles on which the codes of law in the States of his time were
severally based. The second was an account of no less than one hundred and fifty-eight (according to others one hundred and seventy-one or two hundred
and fifty-five) States, which, judging from some fragments which have been
preserved, involved their history from the earliest known times to his own. Of
this invaluable collection a great many scraps remain. Those which relate to
Athens, Sigonius is said to have made the basis of
his account of that commonwealth. And another work for which these apparently
formed the foundation, the Politics, has come down to us in all probability in
the unfinished draught in which it was left at the moment
of the author's death. We may conclude the evidence which these
productions afford of their writer's activity and
industry with an anecdote preserved by Diogenes. Apparently to prevent the
remission of attention which results from nature insensibly giving way under
the pressure of extremely laborious study, he was accustomed to read holding a
ball in one hand, under which was placed a brazen basin. On the slightest
involuntary relaxation of the muscles, the ball would fall, and by the sudden
noise which it made, at once dissipate the incipient drowsiness of the student.
But this intense love of knowledge had not the common
effect of converting him into a mere bookworm. In his works we see nothing like
an undue depreciation of the active forms of life, or even of its pleasures.
And this is the more remarkable, as we know that his frame was delicate, and
his constitution weakly, and that in the latter part of his life he suffered
much from bad health, circumstances
which in general lead to an under estimate of those pursuits for which a
certain robustness of body is a necessary condition. His attention to neatness
of person and dress was remarkable; indeed it is said
that he carried it to an extent which Plato considered unworthy of a
philosopher. Whether this account be true or not, it is certain that his habits
and principles were the reverse of cynical, that he enjoyed life, and was above
any unnecessary affectation of severity. Not apathy, but moderation, is a maxim
ascribed to him by Diogenes.
We have seen that Plato
felt and testified the highest admiration for the talents of his pupil. But it appears that in spite of
this there was by no means a perfect congeniality in their feelings. Aristotle
is said to have offended his master not only by the carefulness respecting his
personal appearance which we have just spoken of, but by a certain sarcastic
habit which showed itself in the expression of his countenance. It is difficult
to imagine that he should have indulged this humour
in a greater degree than Socrates is represented to have done by Plato himself.
However, a vein of irony which would appear very graceful in the master whom he
reverenced, and whose views he enthusiastically embraced, might seem quite the
reverse in a youthful pupil who promised speedily to become a rival. An
anecdote is related by Aelian,
from which we should infer that overt hostility broke out between them.
Aristotle, it is said, taking advantage of the absence of Xenocrates
from Athens, and of the temporary confinement of Speusippus
by illness, attacked Plato in the presence of his disciples with a series of
subtle sophisms, which, his powers being impaired by extreme old age, had the
effect of perplexing him and obliging him to retire in confusion and shame from
the walks of the Academy. Xenocrates, however,
returning three months after, drove Aristotle away, and restored his master to
his old haunts. On this or some other occasion it is said that Plato compared
his pupil's conduct to that of the young foals who kick at their
dam as soon as dropped. And the opinion that Aristotle had in some way or other
behaved with ingratitude to his master, certainly had obtained considerable
currency in antiquity; but it is probable that this in a great measure arose
from the false interpretation of a passage in the biography of Plato by Aristoxenus
the musician, whom we have noticed in the last chapter. This writer had related
that while Plato was absent from Athens on his travels, certain individuals, who
were foreigners, established a school in opposition to him. Some, adds Aristoteles,
the Peripatetic philosopher, after quoting this passage, have imagined that
Aristotle was the person here alluded to, but they forget that Aristoxenus,
throughout the whole of his work, speaks of Aristotle in terms of praise. Every
one who is conversant with the productive power of Greek
imagination, and the rapidity with which in that fertile soil anecdotes sprang
up and assumed a more and more circumstantial character on repetition, will not
wonder that in the course of five centuries which intervened between Aristoxenus
and Aelian,
the vague statement of the first should have bourgeoned into the circumstantial
narrative of the second.
Independently of the vulgar insolence with which this
story invests the character of Aristotle, a quality of which there is not a trace in his writings, there is much which may render us extremely suspicious
of receiving it. In the first place, other stories of equal authority represent
his feelings towards his master as those of ardent admiration and deep respect.
His biographer informs us that he dedicated an altar (by which he probably
means a cenotaph) to Plato, and put an inscription on
it to the purport that Plato was a man whom
it was sacrilege for the bad even to praise. There is certainly not much credit
to be attached to the literal truth of this story; but its character may be
considered to indicate the view which the authority followed by the biographer
took of Aristotle's sentiments
towards his master. Still better evidence exists in the way in which Plato is
spoken of in the works of his pupil that have come down to us. His opinions are
often controverted, but always with fairness, and never with discourtesy. If he
is sometimes misapprehended, the misapprehension never appears to be wilful.
In one rather remarkable instance there is exhibited a singular tenderness and
delicacy towards him. The passage in question is near the commencement of the Nicomachean
Ethics. To the doctrine of Ideas or Archetypal Forms, as maintained by Plato,
Aristotle was opposed. It became necessary for him, in the treatment of his
subject, to discuss the bearing of this doctrine upon it, and he complains that
his task is an unwelcome one, from the circumstance of persons to whom he is
attached having originated the theory. Still, he adds, it seems our duty even to slay our own flesh and blood an allusion to such cases as those of Iphigenia,
Polyxena, and Macaria, where the cause of truth is at stake, especially as we
are philosophers: loving both parties, it is a sacred duty to prefer the truth.
The delicacy which prompted such a preface as this would surely have restrained
its author from such coarseness as is attributed to him in Aelian's story.
The way in which Xenocrates
is mixed up with this affair is not to be overlooked. He is represented as the
vindicator of his master's honour,
and the punisher of the insolence and vanity of his rival. But we shall see presently
this same Xenocrates in the character of Aristotle's travelling companion during the three eventful years
of his life which immediately followed the death of Plato, consequently at no
long period after the alleged insult took place and was revenged; a
circumstance which certainly is very far from harmonizing with that conduct of
the two philosophers towards each other which Aelian's narrative
describes.
We must not forget either that Aristotle, although
probably possessed of considerable wealth, and perhaps also of some influence
from his Macedonian connections, was still only a metic, or resident alien. How sensitive the
pride of the Athenian citizen was to any appearance of pretension on the part
of these, is notorious. In certain public festivals duties of an inferior, not
to say menial, character were assigned to them. They
could hold no land; they could not intermarry with citizens, nor even maintain
a civil action in their own persons, but were obliged
for this purpose to employ a citizen as their patron or sponsor. Plato, on the contrary, was of one of
the most illustrious families in Athens, and, if we may judge by the anecdotes
of his connection with Chabrias
and Timotheus,
possessed friends among the most influential public characters of the day.
It is scarcely credible therefore, even had all better motives been wanting,
that fear of making a powerful enemy should not have restrained Aristotle from
behaving to his master in the way which has been described.
It is not difficult to imagine how such stories grew
up. There is a most marked contrast observable in the modes of thought of the
two philosophers, such a difference indeed as seems incompatible with
congeniality, although quite consistent with the highest mutual admiration and
respect. It manifests itself in their very style; Aristotle's being the driest and most jejune prose, while that
of Plato teems with the imagery of poetry. The one delights to dress his
thoughts in all the pomp of as high a degree of fancy as one can conceive
united to a sound judgment; the other seems to consider that the slightest
garment would cramp their vigour and
hide their symmetry. In Aristotle we find a searching and comprehensive view of
things as they present themselves to the understanding, but no attempt to pass
the limits of that faculty, no suspicion
indeed that such exist. Plato, on the contrary, never omits an opportunity of
passing from the finite to the infinite, from the sensuous to the spiritual,
from the domain of the intellect to that of the feelings: he is ever striving
to body forth an ideal, and he only
regards the actual as it furnishes materials
for it. Hence he frequently forgets that he violates
the conditions to which the actual world is subjected; or, perhaps we should
rather say, he disregards the importance of this. A striking exemplification of
the essential difference between the two great philosophers is afforded by the Republic of Plato compared with the
criticism of it by Aristotle. The former seems to have grown up out of a wish
to embody an ideal of justice, and is the genuine offspring of a vigorous and
luxuriant imagination reviewing the forms of social life and seeing in all
analogies to the original conception which it was the aim of the artist to set
forth. But from this point of view it is never once contemplated by its critic.
Essentially a picture, it is
discussed by him as if it were a map.
The natural consequence of these different bents is that Aristotle's views always form parts of a system intellectually
complete, while Plato's harmonize
with each other morally; we rise from the study of the latter with our feelings
purified, from that of the former with our perceptions cleared; the one
strengthens the intellect, the other elevates the spirit. Consistently with
this opposition it happened that in the earlier centuries Christianity was
often grafted on Platonism, and even where this was not the case, many persons
were prepared for its reception by the study of Plato; while in the age of the
Schoolmen, an age when religion had become theology, Aristotle's works were the only food which the philosophy of the
time could assimilate.
The difference which is so strikingly marked between
the matured philosophical characters of these two giant intellects is of a kind
which must have shown itself early. Neither could have entirely sympathized
with the other, however much he might admire his genius; and this circumstance
may very well have produced a certain estrangement, which by such of their
followers as were of too vulgar minds to understand the respect which all really great men must entertain for each other, would
readily be misinterpreted. Difference of opinion would, if proceeding from an
equal, be represented in the light of hostility, if from a former pupil, in that of ingratitude. The miserable spirit of partizanship
prevailing among the Greeks, which is so strongly reprobated by Cicero, rapidly
gave birth to tales which at first probably were meant only to illustrate the
preconceived notions which they were in course of time employed to confirm. And
so, if Plato had ever made a remark in the same sense and spirit as Waller's Epigram to a lady singing one of his own songs, this
might very easily in its passage through inferior and ungenial minds
have been distorted into the bitter reflection we have noticed above.
Respecting the relation between Aristotle and another
celebrated contemporary of his, there can be no manner of doubt. All accounts
agree with the inference we should draw from what we find on the subject in his
works, that between him and Isocrates the rhetorician there subsisted a most
cordial dislike, accompanied, on the part of the former at least, with as
cordial a contempt. Isocrates was in fact a sophist of by no means a high
order. He did not possess the cleverness which enabled many of that class to
put forth a claim to universal knowledge, and under many circumstances to
maintain it successfully. He professed to teach nothing but the art of oratory,
and the subject-matter of this he derived exclusively from the field of
politics. But his want of comprehensiveness was not compensated by any
superior degree of accuracy or depth, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus is right
in considering this limitation as the characteristic which distinguishes him
from the more ambitious pretenders Gorgias and Protagoras. Oratory, according
to his view, was the art of making what was important appear trivial, and what was
trivial appear important, in other words,
of proving black white and white black. He taught this accomplishment not on
any principles even pretending to be scientific, but by mere practice in the
school like fencing or boxing. Indignation at this miserable substitute for
philosophical institution, and at the undeserved reputation which its author
had acquired, found vent with Aristotle in the application of a sentiment which
Euripides in his Philoctetes,
a play now lost, put into the mouth of Ulysses. He resolved himself to take up
the subject, and his success was so great that Cicero appears to regard the
reputation arising from it as one of the principal motives which induced Philip
to intrust
him with the education of Alexander. The expressions too, which he uses in
describing Aristotle's treatment of
his subject apply rather to lectures combined with rhetorical practice and
historical illustration than a formal treatise. And this is an important point,
inasmuch as it proves that he assumed the functions of an instructor during
this his first residence at Athens. However, such part of his subject as
embraced the early history of the art, and might be
regarded in the light of an introduction to the rest, would very likely appear
by itself; and this is exactly the character of the work so highly praised by
Cicero in another place, but unfortunately lost, to which we have before
alluded. It was purely historical and critical, and contained none of his own
views. These were systematically developed in another work, perhaps the one
which we possess, which was certainly not written at this early period.
Apparently, in the lost work the system of Isocrates was attacked and severely
handled. The assailed party does not seem to have come forward to defend
himself; but a scholar of his, Cephisodorus,
in a polemical treatise of considerable length, did not confine himself to the defence of his master's doctrines, but indulged in the most virulent attacks upon the moral as
well as intellectual character of his rival. Upon this work Dionysius of
Halicarnassus, perhaps sympathizing with a brother rhetorician, passes a high
encomium. But from the little which we know of it, there is but scanty room for
believing that its author carried conviction to the minds of many readers not
predisposed to agree with him. One of the grounds on which he holds his
adversary up to contempt is the having made a Collection of Proverbs, an
employment, in the opinion of Cephisodorus,
utterly unworthy of one professing to be a philosopher. Such as have not, like Cephisodorus,
an enemy to overthrow by fair means or foul, will be inclined to smile at such
a charge, even if indeed they do not view it in something like the contrary
light. Apophthegms,
says Bacon, are not only for delight and ornament, but for real businesses and
civil usages; for they are, as he said, secures
aut
mucrones
verborum,
which by their sharp edge cut and penetrate the knots of Matters and Business;
and occasions run round in a ring, and what was once profitable may again be practised,
and again be effectual, whether a man speak them as ancient or make them his
own. Proverbs are the apophthegms
of a people, and from this point of view Aristotle appears to have formed his
estimate of their importance. He is said to have regarded them as exhibiting in
a compressed form the wisdom of the ages in which they severally sprang up; and
in many instances to have been preserved by their compactness and pregnancy
through vicissitudes that had swept away all other traces of the people which
originated them.
CHAPTER III.
ARISTOTLE IN ASIA,
We now pass to another stage in the life of Aristotle.
After a twenty years' stay at
Athens, he, accompanied by the Platonic philosopher Xenocrates,
passed over into Asia Minor, and took up his residence at Atarneus
or Assos
(for the accounts vary), in Mysia, at
the court of Hermias. Of the motives which
impelled him to this step we have, as is natural, very conflicting accounts.
His enemies imputed it to a feeling of jealousy, arising from Speusippus having been appointed by Plato, who had died
just before, as his successor iu the school of the
Academy. Others attributed it to a yet more vulgar motive, a taste for the
coarse sensualities and ostentatious luxury of an oriental court. But the first
of these reasons will seem to deserve but little credit, when we consider that
the position which Plato had held was not recognised
in any public manner; that there was neither endowment nor dignity attached to
it; that all honour or profit that could
possibly arise from it was due solely to the personal merits of the
philosopher; that in all probability Aristotle himself had occupied a similar
position before the death of Plato; and, that if he felt himself injured by the
selection of Speusippus (Plato's nephew), he had every opportunity of showing, by the
best of all tests, competition, how erroneous a judgment had been formed of
their respective merits. And with regard to the second
view, it will be sufficient to remark, that for the twenty years preceding this
epoch, as well as afterwards, he possessed the option of living at the court of
Macedonia, where he probably had connections, and where there was equal scope
for indulging the tastes in question. We shall, therefore, feel no scruple in
referring this journey to other and more adequate causes. The reader of Grecian
history will not fail to recollect that the suspicions which the Athenians had
for some time entertained of the ambitious designs of Philip received a sudden
confirmation just at this moment by the successes of that monarch in the
Chalcidian peninsula. The fall of Olynthus and the destruction of the Greek
confederacy, of which that town was at the head, produced at Athens a feeling
of indignation mixed with fear, of which Demosthenes did not fail to take
advantage to kindle a strong hatred of any thing belonging
to Macedon. The modern example of France will enable us readily to understand
how dangerous must have been the position of a foreigner, by birth,
connections, or feelings in the slightest degree mixed up with the unpopular
party, especially when resident in a democratic State, in which the statute
laws were every day subject to be violated by the extemporaneous resolutions of
a popular assembly. Philip indeed was accustomed or at any rate by his enemies believed to make use of such aliens, as from any cause were allowed free ingress
to the States with which he was not on good terms, as his emissaries. It is
scarcely possible under these circumstances to conceive that the jealousy of
party hatred should fail to view the distinguished philosopher, the friend of
Antipater, and the son of a Macedonian court-physician, with dislike and
distrust, especially if, as from Cicero's description appears highly probable, political affairs entered
considerably into the course of his public instructions.
Here, then, we have a reason, quite independent of any
peculiar motive, for Aristotle's quitting
Athens at this especial time. And others, scarcely less weighty, existed to
take him to the court of Hermias.
Some little time before, the gigantic body of the Persian empire had exhibited
symptoms of breaking up. Egypt had for a considerable period maintained itself
in a state of independence, and the success of the experiment had produced the
revolt of Phoenicia. The cities of Asia Minor, whose intercourse with Greece
Proper was constant, naturally felt an even greater desire to throw off the
yoke, and about the year 349 before the Christian era, most of them were in a
state of open rebellion. Confederacies of greater or less extent were formed
among them for the purpose of maintaining the common independence; and over one
of these, which included Atarneus and Assos,
one Eubulus,
a native of Bithynia, exercised a sway which Suidas
represents as that of an absolute prince. This remarkable man, of whom it is
much to be regretted that we know so little, is described as having carried on
the trade of a banker in one of these towns. If this be true, the train of
circumstances which led him to the pitch of power which he seems to have
reached was probably such a one as, in more modern times made the son of a
brewer of Ghent Regent of Flanders, or the Medici Dukes of Tuscany. A struggle
for national existence calls forth the confidence of the governed in those who
possess the genius which alone can preserve them, as unboundedly as it
stimulates that genius itself; and there appears no reason why the name of
tyrant or dynast should have been bestowed upon Eubulus
more than upon Philip van Artevelde or William of Orange. He was assisted in
the duties of his government, and afterwards succeeded by Hermias,
who is termed by Strabo his slave, an expression
which a Greek would apply no less to the Vizier than to the lowest menial
servant of an Asiatic potentate. He is also described as an
eunuch, but, whether this was the case or not, he was a man of education and
philosophy, and had during a residence at Athens attended the instructions of
both Plato and Aristotle. By the invitation of this individual, the latter,
accompanied by Xenocrates, passed over at this
particular juncture into Mysia; and
it will surely not seem an improbable conjecture that the especial object for
which their presence was desired was to frame a political constitution, in
order that the little confederacy, of which Hermias
may perhaps be regarded as the general and stadtholder, might
be kept together and enabled to maintain its independence in spite of the
formidable power of the Persian empire. Ably as such a task would doubtless
have been executed by so wise a statesman, as even the fragmentary political
work that has come down to us proves Aristotle to have been, it was not blessed
with success. Fortune for a time favoured
the cause of freedom, but the barbarian's hour was not yet come. The treachery of a Rhodian leader of
condottieri in the service of the revolted Egyptians enabled the Persian king,
Artaxerxes Ochus, rapidly to overrun
Phoenicia and Egypt, and to devote the whole force of his empire to the
reduction of Asia Minor. Yet Hermias
made his ground good, until at last he suffered himself to be
entrapped into a personal conference with the Greek general Mentor, the traitor
whose perfidy had ruined the Egyptian cause, and who now commanded the Persian
army that was sent against Atarneus. In spite of the assurance of a solemn oath, his person was
seized and sent to the court of the Persian king, who ordered him to be
strangled; the fortresses which commanded the country surrendered
at the sight of his signet; and Atarneus and Assos were
occupied by Persian troops.
The two philosophers, surprised by these sudden
misfortunes, were however fortunate enough to succeed in escaping to Mytilene,
whither they carried with them a female named Pythias, who
according to the most probable accounts was the sister and adopted daughter of Hermias.
It is singular that Aristotle's intercourse
with the Prince of Atarneus, and more especially that
part which related to his connection with this woman, whom he married, should
have brought more calumny upon him than any other event of his life; and the
strangest thing of all, according to our modern habits of thinking, is that he
himself should have thought it necessary, for the satisfaction of his own
friends, to give a particular explanation of his motives to the marriage. In a
letter to Antipater, which is cited by Aristocles,
he relates the circumstances which induced him to take this step; and they are
calculated to give us as high an opinion of the goodness of his heart as his
works do of the power of his intellect. The calamity which had befallen Hermias
would necessarily have entailed utter misery, and in all probability death,
upon his adopted daughter, had she been left behind. In this conjuncture,
respect for the memory of his murdered friend, and compassion for the
defenseless situation of the girl, induced him, knowing her besides, as he
says, to be modest and amiable, to take her as his wife. It is a striking proof
of the utter want of sentiment in the intercourse between the sexes in Greece,
that this noble and generous conduct, as every European will at once confess it
to have been, should have drawn down obloquy upon the head of its actor; while,
if he had left the helpless creature to be carried off to a Persian harem, or
sacrificed to the lust of a brutal soldiery, not a human being would have
breathed the slightest word of censure upon the atrocity. Even his apologists
appear to have considered this as one of the most vulnerable points of his
character. When Aristocles discusses the
charges which had been made against him, he dismisses most of them with
contempt as carrying the marks of falsehood in their very front. Two, however,
he adds, do appear to have obtained credit, the one that he treated Plato with
ingratitude, the other that he married the daughter of Hermias.
And indeed the relation of Aristotle to the father furnished a subject for many
publications in the second and third centuries before Christ, and appears to
have excited as much interest among literary antiquarians of that day, as the
question of the Iron Mask or of who wrote the Letters of Junius, might do
in modern times. The treatise of Apellicon
of Teos,
a wealthy antiquary and bibliomaniac contemporary with Sylla,
was regarded as the classical work among them. We shall have occasion, in the
sequel, to say something more about this personage. Aristocles
speaks of his book as sufficient to set the whole
question at rest, and silence all the calumniators of the philosopher for
ever. Indeed, if we may judge of the whole of their
charges from the few specimens that have come down to us, a further refutation
than their own extravagance was hardly needful. The hand of Pythias
is there represented as purchased by a fulsome adulation of her adopted father
and a subserviency
to the most loathsome vices which human nature in its lowest state of depravity
can engender; and the husband is said, in exultation at his good fortune, to
have paid to his father-in-law a service appropriated to the gods alone,
singing his praises, like those of Apollo, in a sacred paean. Fortunately this composition has come down to us, and turns
out to be a common scolium,
or drinking song, similar in its nature to the celebrated one, so popular at
Athenian banquets, which records the achievement of Harmodius
and Aristogiton.
It possesses no very high degree of poetical merit, but as an expression of
good feeling, and as a literary curiosity, being the only remaining specimen of
its author's powers in this branch, it perhaps deserves a place
in the note. The perfection of the manly character is personified as a virgin, for whose charms it is an enviable
lot even to die, or to endure the severest hardships. The enthusiasm with
which she inspires the hearts of her lovers is more precious than gold, than
parents, than the luxury of soft-eyed sleep! For her it was that Hercules and
the sons of Leda toiled, and Achilles and Ajax died! her fair form, too, made Hermias,
the nursling of Atarneus, renounce the cheerful light
of the sun. Hence his deeds shall become the subjects of song, and the Muses,
daughters of memory, shall wed him to immortality when they magnify the name of
Jupiter Xenius
(i.e. Jupiter as the protector of the laws of hospitality), and bestow its meed
on firm and faithful friendship! By comparing this relic with the scolium
to Harmodius
and Aristogiton,
which Athenaeus has preserved on the page preceding
the one from which this is taken, the reader will at once see that Hermias
is mentioned together with Achilles and Ajax, and the other heroes of
mythology, only in the same manner as Harmodius
is; yet not only did this performance bring down on its author's head the calumnies we have mentioned, but many years
after it was even made the basis of a prosecution of him for blasphemy : such
straws will envy and malice grasp at!
The respect of the philosopher for his departed friend
was yet further attested by the erection of a statue, or, as some say, a
cenotaph, to him at Delphi, with an inscription, in which his death was
recorded as wrought in outrage of the
sacred laws of the gods, by the monarch of the bow-bearing Persians, not
fairly by the spear in the bloody battlefield, but through the false pledge of
a crafty villain! And the nearer view of wedded life does not seem
in any respect to have diminished the good opinion he had originally formed of
his friend's daughter. She died, how soon after their marriage we cannot say, leaving one orphan daughter; and not only was her memory honoured
by the widower with a respect which exposed him, as in the former instance of
her father, to the charge of idolatry, but, in his will, made some time
afterwards, he provides that her bones should be taken up and laid by the side
of his, wherever he might be buried, as, says he, she herself enjoined.
At this epoch of Aristotle's life, when the clouds of adversity appeared to be at the thickest, his
brightest fortunes were about to appear. He had fled to Mytilene an exile,
deprived of his powerful friend, and apparently cut off from all present
opportunity of bringing his gigantic powers of mind into play. But in Mytilene
he received an invitation from Philip to undertake the training of one who, in
the World of Action, was destined to achieve an empire, which only that of his
master in the World of Thought has ever surpassed. A conjunction of two such
spirits has not been yet twice recorded in the annals of mankind; and it is
impossible to conceive any thing
more interesting and fruitful than a good contemporary account of the intercourse
between them would have been. But, although such a one did exist, as we shall
see below, we are not fortunate enough to possess it. The destroying hand of
time has been most active exactly where we should most desire information as to
details, and almost all the description we can give of this period is founded
upon the scanty notices on the subject furnished by Plutarch in his biography
of the Great Conqueror.
How much the mere personal character of Aristotle contributed
to procuring him the invitation from Philip, it is difficult to say. Cicero
represents the King as mainly determined to the step by the reputation of the
philosopher's rhetorical lectures. But a letter preserved by Aulus
Gellius,
which is well known, but can scarcely be genuine, would induce us to believe
that, from the very birth of Alexander, he was destined by his father to grow
up under the superintendence of his latest instructor. It is, indeed, not
unlikely that, at this early period, Aristotle was well known to Philip. We
have seen that, not improbably, his earliest years were passed at the court,
where his father possessed, the highest confidence of the father of Philip.
Moreover, he is said, although neither the time nor the occasion is specified,
to have rendered services to the Athenians as ambassador to the court of
Macedon. But if Gellius's
letter be genuine, how are we able to account for the absence of the
philosopher from his charge during the thirteen years which elapsed between its
professed date and the second year of the 109th Olympiad, in which we know for
certain that he first entered upon his important task? For that it was not
because he considered the influences exerted upon this tender age unimportant,
is clear from the great stress he lays upon their effect in the eighth book of
his Politics, which is entirely
devoted to the details of this subject. And although Alexander was only
thirteen years old when his connection with Aristotle commenced, yet the seeds
of many vices had even at that early period been sown by the unskillful hands
of former instructors; and perhaps the best means of estimating the value of
Aristotle's services, is to compare what his pupil really became
with what he would naturally have been had he been left under the care of
these. Two are particularly noticed by Plutarch, of totally opposite dispositions,
and singularly calculated to produce, by their combined action, that
oscillation between asceticism and luxury which, in the latter part of his life
especially, was so striking a feature in Alexander's character. The first was Leonidas, a relation of his mother Olympias,
a rough and austere soldier, who appears to have directed all his efforts to
the production of a Spartan endurance of hardship and contempt of danger. He
was accustomed to ransack his pupil's trunks for
the purpose of discovering any luxurious dress or other means of indulgence
which might have been sent to him by his mother: and, at the outset of
Alexander's Asiatic expedition, on the occasion of an
entertainment by his adopted mother, a Carian princess, he told her that
Leonidas's early discipline had made all culinary refinements a
matter of indifference to him; that the only cook he had ever been allowed to
season his breakfast was a good night's journey; and
the only one to improve his supper, a scanty breakfast. An education of which
these traits are characteristic might very well produce the personal hardiness
and animal courage for which Alexander was distinguished; it might enable him to tame a Bucephalus, to
surpass all his contemporaries in swiftness of foot, to leap down alone amidst
a crowd of enemies from the ramparts of a besieged town, to kill a lion in
single combat; it might even inspire the passion for military glory
which vented itself in tears when there was nothing left to conquer; but it would be almost as favourable
to the growth of the coarser vices as to the developement
of these ruder virtues, and we learn that, to the day of his death, the ruffianly
and intemperate dispositions which belong to barbarian blood, and which the
influences of Leonidas had tended rather to increase than diminish, were never
entirely subdued by Alexander.
The character of Lysimachus, the other instructor
especially noticed by Plutarch, was very different, but hardly likely to have
produced a much more beneficial effect. He was by birth an Acarnanian, and an
expert flatterer, by which means he is said to have gained great favour.
His favourite
thought appears to have been to compare Alexander to Achilles, Philip to
Peleus, and himself to Phoenix, as the characters were described in the epic
poetry of Greece, and this insipid stuff it was his delight to act out in the
ordinary business of life. At a later period, this passion for scene-making
nearly cost poor Phoenix and his master their lives; and to it is probably due,
in a great measure, the cormorant appetite for adulation which is the most
disgusting feature in the history of the latter.
To neither then of these two individuals, and if not to these, of course much less to the crowd
of masters in reading, writing, horsemanship, harp-playing, and the other
accomplishments included by ancient education in its two branches of Music and Gymnastic, can we ascribe a share in the production of that character
which distinguishes Alexander from any successful military leader. But to
Aristotle some of the ancients attribute a degree and kind of merit in this
respect which is perfectly absurd. Plutarch says that his pupil received from
him more towards the accomplishment of his schemes than from Philip. Alexander
himself was accustomed to say, that he honoured
Aristotle no less than his own father, that to the one he owed life, but to the
other all that made life valuable; and it is very
likely that the misinterpretation of such phrases as these led to the belief
that the Conqueror had received from his instructor direct advice for the
accomplishment of the great exploit which has made him known to posterity. But
the obligations to which he really alluded were probably of a totally different
kind. Philip is said to have perceived at a very early age that his son's disposition was a most peculiar one, sensible in the
highest degree of kindness, and tractable by gentle measures, but absolutely
ungovernable by force, and consequently requiring, instead of the austerity of
a Leonidas, or the flattery of a Lysimachus, the influence of one who could by
his cha�racter and abilities command respect, and by his tact and judgment
preserve it. Such qualifications he found in Aristotle, and the good effects
seem to have speedily shown themselves. From a rude and intemperate barbarian's his nature expanded and exhibited itself in an
attachment to philosophy, a desire of mental cultivation, and a fondness for
study. So completely did he acquire higher and more civilized tastes, that
while at the extremity of Asia, in a letter to Harpalus
he desires that the works of Philistus
the historian, the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and the
dithyrambs of Telestes and Philoxenus,
should be sent to him. Homer was his constant travelling companion. A copy,
corrected by Aristotle, was deposited by the side of his dagger, under the
pillow of the couch on which he slept; and on the occasion of a magnificent casket
being found among the spoils of Darius's camp, when a
discussion arose as to how it should be employed, the King declared that it
Should be appropriated to the use of containing this copy. But his education
had not been confined to the lighter species of literature; on the contrary, he
appears to have been introduced to the gravest and most abstruse parts of
philosophy, to which the term of acroamatic
was specifically applied. We shall in the sequel examine more fully what exact
notion is to be attached to this term: in the meantime, it will be sufficient to observe that it included the highest branches
of the science of that day. In a letter, then, preserved by Plutarch and Aulus
Gellius,
Alexander complains that his preceptor had published those of his works to
which this phrase was applied. How, he asks, now that this is the case, will he
be able to maintain his superiority to others in mental accomplishments, a
superiority which he valued more than the distinction he had won by his
conquests? Gellius likewise gives us
Aristotle's answer, in which he excuses himself by saying, that
although the works in question were published, they would be useless to all who
had not previously enjoyed the benefit of his oral instructions. Whatever may
be our opinion as to the genuineness of these letters, which Gellius
says he took from the book of the philosopher Andronicus, (a contemporary of Cicero's, to whom we shall in the sequel again revert,) it is
quite clear that if they are forgeries, they were forged in accordance with a
general belief of the time, that there was no department of knowledge however
recondite to which Aristotle had not taken pains to introduce his pupil.
But the most extraordinary feature in the education of
Alexander is the short space of time which it occupied. From the time of
Aristotle's arrival in Macedonia to the expedition of his pupil
into Asia there elapsed eight years, of this only a part, less than the half,
can have been devoted to the purpose of systematic instruction. For in the
fourth year of this period, we find Philip during an expedition to Byzantium
leaving his son sole and absolute regent of the kingdom. Some barbarian
subjects having revolted, Alexander undertook an expedition in person against
them, and took their city, which he called after his own name, Alexandropolis.
From this time he was continually engaged in business,
now leading the decisive charge at Chaeronea, and now involved in court
intrigues against a party who endeavoured
to gain Philip's confidence and induce him to alter the succession.
It is clear therefore that all instruction, in the stricter sense of the word,
must have terminated. Yet that a very considerable influence may have been
still exerted by Aristotle upon the mind of Alexander, is not only in itself
probable, but is confirmed by the titles of some of his writings which are now
lost. Ammonius,
in his division of the works of the philosopher, mentions a certain class as
consisting of treatises written for the behoof of particular individuals, and specifies among them those books
which he composed at the request of Alexander of
Macedon, that On Monarchy, and Instructions on the Mode of establishing
Colonies. The titles of these works may lead us to conjecture that the
distinguishing characteristics of Alexander's subsequent policy, the attempt to
fuse into one mass his old subjects and the people he had conquered, the assimilation of their manners, especially by
education and intermarriages, the connection
of remote regions by building cities, making roads, and establishing commercial
enterprises, may be in no small measure due to the counsels of his
preceptor. A modern writer indeed has imagined an analogy between this
assimilative policy of the conqueror, and the generalizing genius of the
philosopher. And there really does seem some ground for this belief, in spite of an observation of Plutarch's, which is at first sight diametrically opposed to
it. After speaking of the Stoical notions of an universal republic, he says,
that magnificent as the scheme was, it was never realized, but remained a mere
speculation of that school of philosophy; and he adds that Alexander, who
nearly realized it, did so in opposition to the advice of Aristotle, who had
recommended him to treat the Greeks as a general, but the barbarians as a
master, the one as friends, the other as instruments. But
there is no other authority than Plutarch for this story; and it seems far from
improbable that it is entirely built upon certain expressions used by Aristotle
in the first book of his Politics. In
that place he recognizes the relation between master and slave as a natural
one; and he also maintains the superiority of Greeks over barbarians to be so
decided and permanent as to justify the supremacy of the one over the other. Of
the latter he argues that they have not the faculty of governing in them, and
that therefore the state of slavery is for them the natural and proper form of
the social relation. But it should not be overlooked, as by some modern writers
it has been, that Aristotle explicitly distinguishes between a slave de facto and a slave de jure, and that he grounds his
vindication of slavery entirely on the principle that such a relation shall be
the most beneficial one possible to both the parties concerned in it. Where
this condition is wanting, wherever the party governed is susceptible of a
higher order of government, he distinctly maintains that the relation is a
false and unnatural one. If therefore his experience had made him acquainted
with the highly cultivated and generous races of upper Asia to which Alexander penetrated,
he must in consistency with his own principle, that every man's nature is to be developed to the highest point of
which it is capable, have advised that these should be treated on the same
footing as the Greeks, and Alexander�s conduct would
only appear a natural deduction from the general principles inculcated by his
master. As far as concerned the barbarians with whom alone the Greeks
previously to Alexander's expedition
had been brought into contact, the neighbours
of the Greek cities in Asia Minor and the Propontis,
the savage hordes of Thrace, or the Nomad tribes inhabiting the African Syrtis,
Aristotle's position was a most reasonable one. Christianity
seems the only possible means for the mutual pacification of races so different
from one another in every thought, feeling, and habit, as these and the
polished Greeks were: and Christianity itself solves the problem not by those
modifications of social life through which alone the statesman acts, or can
act; but by awakening all to the consciousness that there exists a common bond
higher than all social relations;it does not aim
at obliterating national distinctions, but it dwarfs their importance in
comparison with the universal religious faith. If we would really understand
the opinions of a writer of antiquity, we ought to understand the ground on
which he rests, and must rest. We have no right to
require of a pagan philosopher three centuries before Christ, that in his
system he should take account of the influences of Christianity; and they who
scoff at the importance which he attaches to the differences of race, would do
well to point out any instance in the history of the world where a barbarous
people has become amalgamated with a highly civilized one by any other agency.
If Aristotle might reasonably feel proud of the
talents and acquirements of his pupil, his gratification would be yet more
enhanced by the nature of the reward which his services received. We have mentioned
above the unhappy fate of Stagirus, Aristotle's birthplace. Although his own fortunes were little
affected by this calamity, his patriotism, if we may believe the account in
Plutarch, induced him to demand as the price of his instructions, the restoration
of his native town. It was accordingly rebuilt, such of the inhabitants as were
living in exile were restored to the home of their infancy, such as had been
sold for slaves were redeemed, and in the days of Plutarch strangers were shown
the shady groves in which the philosopher had walked, and the stone benches
whereon he used to repose. The constitution under which the new citizens lived
was said to be drawn up by him, and long afterwards his memory was celebrated
by the Stagirites
in a solemn festival, and, it is said, one month of the year (perhaps the one
in which he was born) called by his name. There is every reason to believe that
during the latter part of his connection with Alexander, when the more direct
instruction had ceased, the newly built town furnished him with a quiet
retreat, and that he then and there composed the treatises we have mentioned
above, for the use of his absent pupil. While their personal communication
lasted, Pella, the capital of Macedonia, was perhaps his residence, as it is
scarcely probable that Philip would have liked to trust the person of the heir,
apparent out of his dominions.
We shall conclude the account of this portion of
Aristotle's life by the mention of three other remarkable
persons who probably all shared with Alexander in the benefit of his
instructions, although this is only positively stated of the last of them. The
first of these was Callisthenes, a son of Aristotle's cousin, who afterwards attended Alexander in his Asiatic expedition,
and to whom we shall have occasion to revert in the sequel. The second was
Theophrastus, Aristotle's successor in
the school of the Lyceum some years afterwards, and the third was one Marsyas,
a native of Pella, brother to the Antigonus who, after the death of Alexander,
when the generals of the monarch divided their masters
conquests among them, became King of Lycia and Pamphylia. He was a soldier and
a man of letters; and one work of his On
the Education of Alexander is perhaps as great a loss to us as any
composition of antiquity which could be named.
CHAPTER
IV.
ARISTOTLE RETURNS TO ATHENS.
On Alexander commencing his eastern expedition,
Aristotle, leaving his relation and pupil Callisthenes to supply his own place
as a friendly adviser to the youthful monarch, whom he accompanied in the
ostensible character of historiographer, returned to Athens. Whether this step
was the consequence of any specific invitation or not, it is difficult to say.
Some accounts state that he received a public request from the Athenians to
come, and conjointly with Xenocrates to succeed Speusippus. But these views appear to proceed upon the
essentially false opinion that the position of teacher was already a publicly
recognized one, and besides to imply the belief that Xenocrates
and Aristotle were at the time on their travels together; whereas we know that
the latter was in Macedonia till B.C. 335, and that the former had four years
before this time succeeded Speusippus, not by virtue
of any public appointment, but in consequence of his private wish. If any more
precise reason be required for the philosopher's change of residence than the one which probably determined him at
first to visit Athens, namely the superior attractions which that city
possessed for cultivated and refined minds, we should incline to believe that
the greater mildness of climate was the influencing cause. His health was
unquestionably delicate; and perhaps it was a regard for this, combined with
the wish to economize time, that induced him to deliver his instructions (or at
least a part of them) not sitting or standing, but walking backwards and
forwards in the open air. The extent to which he carried this practice, although
the example of Protagoras in Plato's Dialogue is enough to show that he did
not originate it, procured for his scholars, who of course were obliged to can
form to this habit, the soubriquet of Peripatetics,
or Walkers backwards and forwards.
From the neighbouring temple and grove of Apollo Lyceus,
his school was commonly known by the name of the Lyceum; and here every morning
and evening he delivered lectures to a numerous body of scholars. Among these
he appears to have made a division. The morning course, or, as he called it
from the place where it was delivered, the morning walk, was attended only by
the more highly disciplined part of his auditory, the subjects of it belonging
to the higher branches of philosophy, and requiring a
systematic attention as well as a previously cultivated understanding on the
part of the scholar. In the evening course the subjects as well as the manner
of treating them were of a more popular cast, and more appreciable by a mixed
assembly. Aulus
Gellius
who is our sole authority on this matter, affirms that the expressions acroatic
discourses and exoteric discourses
were the appropriate technical terms for these instructions; and he further
says that the former comprised Theological, Physical, and Dialectical
investigations, the latter Rhetoric, Sophistic, (or the art of disputing,) and
Politics. We shall in another place examine thoroughly into the precise meaning
of these celebrated phrases, a task which would here too much break the thread
of the narrative. We may, however, remark that the morning discourses were
called acroatic
or subjects of lectures, not because they belonged to this or that branch, but
because they were treated in a technical and systematic manner; and so the evening discourses obtained the name of exoteric or
separate, because each of them was insulated, and not forming an integral part
of a system. It is obvious that some subjects are more suitable to the one of
these methods, and others to the other; and the division which Gellius
makes is, generally speaking, a good one. But that it
does not hold universally is plain, not to mention other arguments, from the
fact that the work on Rhetoric which has come down to us is an acroatic
work, and that on Politics apparently the unfinished draught of one; while on
the contrary, a fragment of an exoteric work preserved by Cicero in a Latin
dress is upon a theological subject.
The more select circle of his scholars Aristotle used
to assemble at stated times on a footing, which without any straining of
analogy we may compare to the periodical dinners held by some of the literary
clubs of modern times. The object of this obviously was to combine the
advantages of high intellectual cultivation with the charms of social
intercourse; to make men feel that philosophy was not a thing
separate from the daily uses of life, but one which entered
into all its charities and was mixed up with its real pleasures. These
reunions were regulated by a code of rules, of which we know enough to see that
the cynicism or pedantry, which frequently induces such as would be accounted
deep thinkers to despise the elegancies or even the decencies of life, was strongly
discountenanced. In these days, especially in England, where so many different
elements combine to produce social intercourse in its highest perfection, it is
difficult to estimate the important effect which must have been brought about
by a custom such as that just mentioned. To enjoy
leisure gracefully and creditably is not easy for any one at any time, but for
the Athenian in the days of Aristotle was a task of the greatest difficulty.
Deprived of that kind of female intercourse which in modern social life is the
great instrument for humanizing the other sex, softening, as it does, through
the affections, the disposition to ferocity and rudeness, and checking the
licentious passions by the dignity of matronly or maidenly purity, the youth of
ancient Greece almost universally fell either into a ruffianly
asceticism, or a low and vulgar profligacy. Some affected the austere manner
and sordid garb of the Lacedaemonians, regarding as effeminate all geniality of
disposition, all taste for the refinements of life, everything in short which
did not directly tend to the production of mere energy: while others entirely
quenched the moral will and the higher mental faculties in a debauchery of the
coarsest kind. To open a new region of enjoyment to the choicer spirits of the
time and thus save them from the distortion or corruption to which they
otherwise seemed doomed, was a highly important service to the cause of
civilization. The pleasure and utility resulting from the institution was very
generally recognized. Xenocrates, the friend of
Aristotle, adopted it. Theophrastus, his successor, left a sum of money in his
will to be applied to defraying the expenses of these meetings; and there were
in after times similar periodical gatherings of the followers of the Stoic
philosophers, Diogenes, Antipater, and Panastius.
If some of these, or others of similar nature, in the course of time
degenerated into mere excuses for sensual indulgence, as Athenaeus
seems to hint, no argument can be thence derived against their great utility
while the spirit of the institution was preserved.
Another arrangement made by Aristotle in the
management of his instructions appears particularly worthy of notice. In
imitation, as some say, of a practice of Xenocrates,
he appointed one of his scholars to play the part of a sort of president in his
school, holding the office for the space of ten days, after which another took
his place. This peculiarity seems to derive illustration from the practice of
the universities of Europe in the middle ages, in which, as is well known, it
was the custom for individuals on various occasions to maintain certain theses
against all who chose to controvert them. A remnant of this practice remains to
this day in the Acts (as they are termed) which are kept in the University of
Cambridge by candidates for a degree in either of the Faculties. It is an
arrangement which results necessarily from the scarcity of books of instruction, and is dropped or degenerates into a mere form
when this deficiency is removed. While information on any given subject must be
derived entirely or mainly from the mouth of the teacher, as was the case in the time of Aristotle no less than that
of Scotus and Aquinas, the most
satisfactory test of the learner's proficiency
is his ability to maintain the theory which he has received against all
arguments which may be brought against it. We shall probably be right in
supposing that this was the duty of the president spoken of by Diogenes. He
was, in the language of the sixteenth century, keeping an act. He had for the
space of ten days to defend his own theory and to refute the objections, which
his brother disciples might either entertain or invent, the master in the
meantime taking the place of a moderator, occasionally interposing to show
where issue must be joined, to prevent either party from drawing illogical
conclusions from acknowledged premises, and, probably, after the discussion had
been continued for a sufficient time, to point out the ground of the fallacy.
This explanation will also serve to account for a phenomenon, which cannot fail
to strike a reader on the perusal of any one of Aristotle's writings that have come down to us. The systematic
treatment of a subject is continually broken by an apparently needless
discussion of objections which may be brought against some particular
part. These are stated more or less fully, and
are likewise taken off; or it sometimes happens that merely the principle on
which the solution must proceed is indicated, and it is left to the ingenuity
of the reader to fill up the details. To return to our subject, it is quite
obvious that such a discipline as we have described must have had a wonderful
effect in sharpening the dialectical talent of the student, and in producing perhaps at the expense of the more valuable faculty of
deep and systematic thought extraordinary
astuteness and agility in argumentation. Indeed, if we make abstraction of the
subject-matter of the discussions, we may very well regard the exercise as
simply a practical instruction in the art of disputation, that which formed the staple of the education of the
Sophists: And now we may understand how Gellius,
writing in the second century after Christ, should place this art among the
branches which Aristotle's evening
course embraced, although in the sense in which the Sophists taught it, he
would have scorned to make any such profession. In what other light could this
compiler have viewed the fact, that insulated topics arising out of a subject
which they had heard systematically treated by their master in his lectures of
the morning, were debated by Aristotle's more advanced
scholars, in the presence of the entire body, in the evening, the master being
himself present and regulating the whole discussion.
It is evident that in this species of exercise it is
not the faculty of comprehending philosophic truth that plays the most
prominent part. As regards the subject-matter of such debates, nothing which is
at all incomplete, nothing unsusceptible of rigid definition is available.
Consequently the whole of that extensive region, where knowledge exists in a
state of growth and gradual consolidation, the domain of half-evolved truths, of observations and theories blended
together in varying proportions, of approximately ascertained laws, in the main
true, but still apparently irreconcilable with some phenomena, all this fertile soil, out of which every particle of
real knowledge has sprung and must spring, will be neglected as barren and
unprofitable. Where public discussion is the only test to be applied, an
impregnable paradox will be more valued than an imperfectly established truth.
And it is not only by diverting the attention of the student away from the pro�fitable
fields of knowledge that a pernicious effect will be produced. He will further
be tempted to give, perhaps unconsciously, an artificial roundness to
established facts by means of arbitrary definitions. In Nature everything is
shaded off by imperceptible gradations into something entirely different. Who
can define the exact line which separates the animal from the vegetable
kingdom, or the family of birds from that of animals? Who can say exactly where
disinterestedness in the individual character joins on to a well-regulated
self-love? or where fanaticism ends and
hypocrisy begins? But on the other hand the intellect
refuses to apprehend what is not clear and distinct. Hence a continual tendency
to stretch Nature on the Procrustes-bed
of Logical Definition, where, with more or less gentle
truncation or extension, a plausible theory will be formed. Should one weak
point after another be discovered in this, a new bulwark of hypothesis will be
thrown up to protect it, and at last the fort be made impregnable, but alas! in the meantime it has become a castle in
the air. Should however the genius of the disputant lie less in the power of
distinguishing and refining, than in that of presenting his views in a broad and
striking manner, should his fancy be rich and his feelings strong, above all, should he be one of a nation where
eloquence is at once the most common gift and the most envied attainment, he will call in rhetoric to the aid of his cause; and,
in this event, as the accessory gradually encroaches and elbows out that
interest to aid which it was originally introduced, as the handling of the question becomes more important, and the question
itself less so, there will
result, not, as in the former case, a Scholastic Philosophy, but an arena for
closet orators, who will abandon the systematic study of philosophy, and varnish
up declamations on net subjects. Such results doubtless did not follow in the
time of Aristotle and Xenocrates. Under them,
unquestionably, the original purpose of this discipline was kept steadily in
sight; and it was not suffered to pass from being the test of clear and
systematic thought to a mere substitute for it. But the transition must have
been to a considerable extent effected when an Arcesilaus
or a Carneades
could deliver formal dissertations in opposition to any question indifferently,
and when Cicero could regard the rhetorical practice as coordinate in
importance with the other advantages resulting to the student. In the very
excellence and reputation then of this peculiar discipline of the founder of
the Peripatetic school, we have a germ adequate to produce a rapid decay of his
philosophy, and we have no occasion to look either to external accidents or to
the internal nature of his doctrines for a reason of the degeneracy of the Peripatetics
after Theophrastus. The importance of this remark will be seen in the sequel.
It was probably in the course of this sojourn at
Athens, which lasted for the space of thirteen years, that, the greater number
of Aristotle's works were produced. His external circumstances were
at this time most favourable.
The Macedonian party was the prevalent one at Athens, so that he needed be
under no fears for his personal quiet; and the countenance and assistance he
received from Alexander enabled him to prosecute his investigations without any
interruption from the scantiness of pecuniary means. The Conqueror is said in Athenaeus to have presented his master with the sum of
eight hundred talents (about two hundred thousand pounds sterling), to meet the
expenses of his History of Animals,
and enormous as this sum is, it is only in proportion to the accounts, we have
of the vast wealth acquired by the plunder, of the Persian treasures. Pliny
also relates that some thousands of men were placed at his disposal for the
purpose of procuring zoological specimens which served as materials for this celebrated treatise. The undertaking,
he says, originated in the express desire of Alexander, who took a singular
interest in the study of Natural History. For this particular object indeed, he
is said to have received a considerable sum from Philip, so that we must
probably regard the assistance afforded him by Alexander, (no doubt after
conquest had enlarged his means), as having effected
the extension and completion of a work begun at an earlier period, previous to
his second visit to Athens. Independently too of this princely liberality, the
profits of his occupation may have been very great, and we have before seen
reason to suppose that his private fortune was not inconsiderable. It is likely
therefore that not only all the means and appliances of knowledge, but the
luxuries and refinements of private life were within his reach,
and having as little of the cynic as of the sensualist in his character,
there is every probability that he availed himself of them. Indeed
the charges of luxury which his enemies brought against him after his death,
absurd as they are in the form in which they were put, appear to indicate a man
that could enjoy riches when possessing them as well as in case of necessity he
could endure poverty.
CHAPTER V.
TURBULENT POLITICS AT
ATHENS.
Fortune, proverbially inconstant, was even more fickle
in the days of Aristotle than our own. At an earlier period of his life, we
have seen the virulence of political partizanship
rendering it desirable for him to quit Athens. The same spirit it was which
again, in his old age, forced him to seek refuge in a less agreeable but safer
spot. The death of Alexander had infused new courage into the anti-Macedonian
party at Athens, and a persecution of such as entertained contrary views
naturally followed. Against Aristotle, the intimate friend and correspondent of
Antipater, (whom Alexander on leaving Greece had left regent,) a prosecution
was either instituted or threatened for an alleged offence against religion.
The flimsiness of this pretext for crushing a political opponent, or rather a wise and inoffensive man, whose very
impartiality was a tacit censure of the violent party-spirit of his time, will appear at first sight of the particulars of the
charge. Eurymedon the Hierophant, assisted by Demophilus,
accused him of the blasphemy of paying divine honours
to mortals. He had composed, it was said, a paean
and offered sacrifices to his father in law Hermias,
and also honoured the
memory of his deceased wife Pythias
with libations such as were used in the worship of Ceres. This paean is the scolium
which we
have described above and although we cannot tell what the circumstance was
which gave rise to the latter half of the charge, we may reasonably presume
that it as
little justified the interpretation given to it as the ode does. That ignorance
and bigotry stimulated by party hatred should find matter in his writings to
confirm a charge of impiety founded on such a basis, was to be expected; and he
is related to have said to his friends, in allusion to the fate of Socrates, "Let
us leave Athens, and not give the Athenians a second opportunity of committing
sacrilege against Philosophy". He was too well acquainted with the character of the many-headed monster
to consider the absurdity of a charge as a sufficient
guarantee for security under such circumstances, and he retired with his
property to Chalcis in Euboea, where at that
time Macedonian influence prevailed. In a letter to Antipater he expresses his
regret at leaving his old haunts, but applies a verse
from Homer in a way to intimate that the disposition that prevailed there to
vexatious and malignant calumnies was incorrigible. It is not impossible that
his new asylum had before this time afforded him an occasional retreat from the
noise and bustle of Athens. Now however he owed to it a greater obligation. He
was out of the reach of his enemies, and enabled to
justify himself in the opinion of all whose judgment was valuable by a written defence of his conduct, and an exposure of the absurdities
which the accusation involved. Was it likely, he asks, that if he had
contemplated Hermias in the light of a
deity, he should have set up a cenotaph to his memory as to that of a dead man?
Were funeral rites a natural step to apotheosis? Arguments like these,
reasonable as they are, were not likely to produce much effect upon the minds
of his enemies. The person of their victim was beyond their reach; but such
means of annoyance as still remained were not neglected. Some mark of honour
at Delphi, probably a statue, had been on a former occasion (perhaps the
embassy alluded to above) decreed him by a vote of the people. This vote seems
to have been at this time rescinded, an insult the more mortifying, if, as
appears likely, it was inflicted on the pretext that he had acted the part of a
spy in the Macedonian interest. In a letter to Antipater he speaks of this
proceeding in a tone of real greatness, perfectly free from the least affectation
of indifference. He alleges that it does not occasion him great uneasiness, but
that he still feels hurt by it. It is impossible to find expressions more
characteristic of an unaffectedly magnanimous nature, or which better
illustrate the description of that disposition given by himself in one of his
works.
A subject which it is likely
occasioned him during the latter years of his life far greater pain than
anything which the fickle public of Athens could think or do, was the coolness
which had arisen between himself and his illustrious pupil. It seems to have
been closely connected with the conduct of Callisthenes, whom we have mentioned
above who had accompanied Alexander into Asia by his particular
recommendation. This individual possessed a cultivated mind, a vigorous
understanding, and a bold and fearless integrity, combined with a strong
attachment to the homely virtues and energetic character of the Macedonians,
and a corresponding hatred and contempt for the Persian manners which had been
adopted by Alexander after his successes. Unfortunately
no less for those whom it was his desire to reform than for himself, the
sterling qualities of his mind were obscured by a singular want of tact and
discretion.
He had no talent for seizing the proper moment to tell an unwelcome truth, and
so far from being able to sweeten a reproof by an appearance of interest and
affection for the party reproved, he often contrived to give his real zeal the colouring
of offended vanity or personal malice. Aristotle is said to have dreaded from
the very first that evil would follow from these defects in his
character, and to have advised him to abstain from frequent interviews with the
king, and when he did converse with him, to be careful that his conversation
was agreeable and good-humored. He probably judged that the character and
conduct of Callisthenes would of itself work an effect with a generous
disposition like Alexander's, and that its
influence could not be increased, and would in all probability be much diminished,
by the irritation of personal discussion, producing, almost of necessity,
altercation and invective. Callisthenes however did not abide by the
instructions of his master; and perhaps the ambition of martyrdom contributed
almost as much as the love of truth to his neglect of them. The description of
Kent, which Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Cornwall would certainly not do
him justice; but it is impossible to shut our eyes to the fact that he made it his occupation to be plain. Disgusted at the ceremony of the salaam, and the other oriental
customs, which in the eyes of many were a degradation to the dignity of
freeborn Greeks, he did not take the proper course, namely, to withdraw himself
from the royal banquets, and thus by his absence enter a practical protest
against their adoption; but, while he still did not cease to attend these, he
took every opportunity of testifying his disapprobation of what he saw, and his
contempt of the favours which were bestowed on
such as were less scrupulous than himself. One of them who appears to have
particularly excited his dislike was the sophist Anaxarchus,
an unprincipled flatterer, who vindicated the worst actions and encouraged the
most evil tendencies of his master; and perhaps the jealousy of this miscreant and
an unwillingness to leave him the undivided empire over Alexander's mind, was one reason which prevented him from
adopting what would have been probably the most effectual as well as the most
dignified line of conduct. Some anecdotes are related by Plutarch, which
exhibit in a very striking manner both the mutual hatred of the philosophers
breaking out in defiance of all the decencies of a court, and the rude
bluntness of Callisthenes's manners. On
one occasion, a discussion arose at supper time, as to the comparative severity
of the winters in Macedonia and in the part of the country where they then
were. Anaxarchus,
is opposition to his rival, strongly maintained the former to be the colder. Callisthenes
could not resist the temptation of a sneer at his enemy. You at least, said he,
should hardly be of that opinion. In Greece you used to get through the cold
weather in a scrubby jacket; here, I observe that you cannot sit down to table
with less than three thick mantels on your back. Anaxarchus,
whose vulgar ostentation of the wealth which his low servilities had procured
him was observed and ridiculed by all, could not turn off this sarcasm; but the
meanest animal has its sting, and he took care not to miss any opportunity for
lowering the credit of Callisthenes with Alexander, a task which the unfortunate wrong-headedness of the other rendered only
too easy. On the occasion of another royal banquet,
each of the guests as the cup passed round, drank to the monarch from it, and
then after performing the salaam, received a salute from him, a ceremony which was considered as an especial mark of
royal favour.
Callisthenes, when his turn arrived, omitted the salaam, but advanced towards
Alexander; who being busy in conversation with Hephaestion, did not
observe that the expected act of homage had been omitted. A courtier of Anaxarchus's party,
however, Demetrius, the son of Pythonax,
determined that their enemy should not benefit by this casualty, and accordingly
called out, Do not salute that fellow, sire; for he
alone has refused to salaam you. The king on hearing this refused Callisthenes
the customary compliment; but the latter far from being mortified, exclaimed
contemptuously as he returned to his seat,"Very well, then I am a kiss the
poorer!". Such gratuitous discourtesy as this could hardly fail to alienate the
kindness of a young prince, whose mere taste for refinement, leaving entirely out of consideration the intoxication
produced by unparalleled success and the flatteries which follow it, must have been revolted by it. It however gained him
great credit with the Macedonian party, who were no less jealous of the favour
which the Persian nobles found with the Conqueror than disgusted with the
adoption of the Persian customs. He was considered as the mouthpiece of the
body, and as the representative and vindicator of that, manly and
plain-speaking spirit of liberty which they regarded as their birthright, and
the satisfaction which his vanity received from this importance, combined with
a despair of reconquering the first place in Alexander0s favour
from the hated and despised Anaxarchus,
probably determined him to relinquish all attempts at pleasing the monarch, and
to adopt a line which might annoy and injure himself but could hardly benefit
any one. When an account was brought to Aristotle in Greece of the course
pursued by his relation, his sharp-sightedness led him at once to divine the
result. In a line from the Iliad,
Ah me! such words, my son, bode speedy death!
he prophetically hinted the fate which awaited him. Indeed the latter himself appears not to have been blind to
the ruin preparing for him; but this conviction did not produce any alteration
in his conduct, or, if anything, it perhaps induced him to give way to his
temper even more than before. At another banquet, the not unusual request was
made to him, that he would exhibit his talents by delivering an extemporaneous
oration, and the subject chosen was a Panegyric upon the Macedonians. He complied, and performed his task so well as to excite
universal admiration and enthusiastic applause on the part of the guests. This
circumstance appears to have nettled Alexander, whose affection for his old
fellow-pupil had probably quite vanished, and he remarked in disparagement of
the feat, in a quotation from Euripides, that on such a subject it was no great
matter to be eloquent. If Callisthenes wished really to give a proof of his
abilities, said he, let him take up the other side of the question, and try
what he can do in an invective against the Macedonians, that they may learn
their faults and reform them. The orator did not decline the challenge: his
mettle was roused, and he surpassed his former performance. The Macedonian
nation was held up to utter scorn, and especial contempt heaped upon the
warlike exploits and consummate diplomacy of Alexander's father Philip. His successes were attributed to accident or low
intrigue availing itself of the dissensions which existed at that time in
Greece; and the whole was wound up by the Homeric line
When civil broils prevail, the vilest soar to fame!
The effect of this course was such as might have been
expected. Alexander fell into a furious passion, telling the performer what was
not far from the truth, that his speech was an evidence not of skill, but of
malevolence, and the latter, perhaps conscious that he had now struck a blow
which would never be forgiven, left the room repeating as he went out a verse
from the Iliad, which seems to be an allusion to the death of Clitus,
and an intimation that he expected to be made the second victim to his
sovereign's temper.
A victim he was destined to be, although not in the
way in which he appears to have expected. A practice had been introduced by
Philip, similar to that which prevailed in the courts
of the feudal sovereigns in the Middle Ages, that the sons of the principal nobles
should be brought up at court in attendance on the person of the king. Of these
pages, esquires, or grooms of the bed-chamber, (for their office appears to
have included all these duties), who attended on Alexander, there was one named
Hermolaus,
a youth of high spirit and generous disposition, who was much attached to
Callisthenes and took great pleasure in his society and conversation. The
philosopher appears to have considered his mind as a fit depository for the
manly principles of Grecian liberty, which the tenets of Anaxarchus
and the corrupt example of the monarch threatened utterly to extinguish, and,
in the inculcation of these, to have made use of language and of illustrations,
which considering the circumstances of the case were certainly dangerous,
although in reference to the then prevailing tone of morality we shall scarcely
be justified in censuring them. Harmodius
and Aristogiton
having with the sacrifice of their own lives been fortunate enough to bring
about the freedom of their country, had been canonized as political saints, and
were held up to all the youth of the free states of Greece for admiration and
imitation; and Callisthenes can hardly deserve especial blame for participating
in this general idolatry, or for representing the glory of a tyrannicide as surpassing that of a tyrant, however
brilliant the fortunes of the latter might be. Neither can we at all wonder
that he should delight in depreciating the pride, pomp and circumstance of
greatness in comparison with dignity of character and manly energy, and in
exposing the impotence of externals to avert any of the ills to which flesh is
heir. Such considerations have been in all ages and ever will be the staple
both of Philosophy and of the sciolism
which is its counterfeit, and the necessity for dwelling upon them might to
Callisthenes appear the greater in order to counterbalance the habits of
feeling which Persian manners and sophistry like that of Anaxarchus
were calculated to spread among the Macedonian youth. He is said indeed to have
continually professed that the only motive which induced him to accompany
Alexander into Asia was that he might be the means of restoring his countrymen
to their fatherland, as true Greeks as they went out, uncorrupted by the
manners or the luxury of the Barbarians, and he seems unquestionably to have succeeded in putting a stop, at
least for a time, to the ceremony of the salaam, of all Eastern customs the one
most galling to Macedonian pride. In an evil day however to Callisthenes, it
happened, that Hermolaus was out boar-hunting
with Alexander, when the animal charged directly towards the king. The page, influenced probably more by the ardour
of the chase, and his own youthful spirits, than by any just apprehension for
his sovereign's safety, struck the creature a mortal wound before
it came up to him. Alexander, the keenest of huntsmen, baulked of his expected
sport, in the passion of the moment, ordered Hermolaus
to be flogged in the presence of his brother-pages, and deprived him of his
horse, (apparently the sign of summarily degrading him from his employment).
Such an insult to a Greek could only be washed out in the blood of the
aggressor, and Hermolaus found ready sympathy
among his compeers. It was agreed by them that Alexander should be assassinated
while asleep, and the execution of the design was fixed for a night on which
Antipater, the son of Asclepiodorus, (whom Alexander
had made lord-lieutenant of Syria,) was to be the groom in waiting. It so
happened, that on that night Alexander did not retire to bed at all, but sat at
table carousing until the very morning, whether by acci�dent, or in consequence of the advice of a Syrian
female, to whom in the character of a soothsayer he paid great respect, is not
agreed by the contemporary historians. But this circumstance, whatever was the
cause of it, saved the king and led to the detection of the plot. The next day,
Epimenes,
one of the conspirators, mentioned the matter to an individual who was strongly
attached to him. This person communicated it to Eurylochus, the
brother of Epimenes, perhaps considering
that his relationship was a sufficient guarantee for
secrecy. Eurylochus,
however, at once laid an information before Ptolemy the son of Lagus,
subsequently the first of the Greek dynasty in Egypt, and then one of the guard of honour in
attendance on Alexander. He reported to the king the names of those who he had
been told were concerned in the affair: they were arrested, and on being put to
the torture confessed their crime and gave up the names of others who were
participators. So far all accounts agree as to the
substantial facts of this story, but here a
great discrepancy commences. Ptolemy and Aristobulus
both asserted that the pages named Callisthenes as the instigator of their
design. This however was denied by the majority of
contemporary writers on the subject, who related that the ill will towards
Callisthenes previously existing in the mind of Alexander, combined with the
intimacy that subsisted between Hermolaus
and the former, furnished ample means to his enemies to raise a strong
suspicion against him. They alleged, that to a question from Hermolaus,
how a man might make himself the most illustrious of his species? he replied, By
slaying him that is most illustrious, and that to
incite the youth to the rash act, he bade him not be in awe of the couch of
gold, but remember that such a one often holds a sick or a wounded man; also,
that when Philotas
had asked him whom the Athenians honoured
most of all men, he replied, Harmodius
and Aristogiton,
the tyrannicides,
and when the querist
expressed a doubt whether such a person would at the existing time find
countenance and protection anywhere in Greece, he replied, that if every other
city shut its gates against him, he would certainly find a refuge in Athens,
and in support of this opinion quoted the instance of the Heraclidae
who there
found protection against the tyrant Eurystheus. It requires but little
penetration to see how, under circumstances of such peculiar irritation, the
words of Callisthenes might with very little violence and with the greatest
plausibility, be interpreted in a treasonable sense, although they were nothing
more than Macedonian principles expressed in a strong and antithetical manner.
Indeed, the very admixture of legendary history in the instance of the sons of
Hercules seems to betray the common places of the rhetorician. And that this
account of the matter, to which Arrhian,
following the majority of contemporary accounts,
inclines, is the true one, seems proved beyond all doubt by two letters of
Alexander himself, which are cited by Plutarch. In the former of these, written
immediately after the event to his general, Craterus, he
states, that the pages on being put to the torture confessed
their own treason, but denied that any one else was privy to the attempt. He
wrote to Attalus and Alcetas to
the same effect. But afterwards in a letter to Antipater, he says, the pages
have been stoned to death by the Macedonians; but as for the sophist I intend
to punish him, and those too who sent him out, and also
the cities which harbour conspirators against
me. In the latter part of this phrase, according to
Plutarch, he alludes to Aristotle, as being the great-uncle of Callisthenes,
and the person by whose advice he had joined the court. It seems plain that in
the interval between the writing of these letters, Alexander's mind had been worked upon by those whose interest it
was to identify the cause of manliness and virtue with that of disloyalty and
treason, by Anaxarchus and the crew of
court sycophants whose practice he sanctioned by his example,
and attempted to justify by his philosophy. The tide of hatred however
was setting too strong against Callisthenes for him to stem it. He was placed under
confinement, and according to accounts which there is too much reason to fear
are true, cruelly mutilated. It is said to have been Alexander's intention to bring him to a trial in the presence of
Aristotle on his return to Greece; but the
unfortunate man after remaining in his deplorable situation for a considerable
time, died from the effects of ill treatment.
Whatever prejudices against his old master may have been raised in the mind of Alexander on the score of Callisthenes, and whatever ill consequences might perhaps have followed if the conqueror had lived to revisit Europe, intoxicated with his military successes, and hardened by the influence of those flatterers who after Callisthenes's death reigned supreme at court, it is explicitly stated by Plutarch, that while he lived his estrangement never led him to injure Aristotle in the slightest degree. Mortification therefore at the degeneracy of his pupil, and sorrow at the loss of an affection in which he doubtless took both pride and pleasure, were the only evils which the latter during his remaining days had to endure. But a few years after the death of both, a story began to be circulated which at last grew into a form in the highest degree detrimental to his character. It is impossible to doubt that Alexander died from the fever of the country, caught immediately after indulgence in the most extravagant excesses. At the moment no suspicion to the contrary was entertained. But some time afterwards, the ambitious and intriguing Olympias, who had long indulged a bitter hostility towards Antipater, (a hostility which the successful establishment of the latter in the government of Macedonia after her son's death had inflamed into a fiendish hatred,) seized the opportunity which Alexander's rapid illness afforded to throw the suspicion of poisoning him upon her enemy, whose younger son Iolaus had been his cupbearer. It was not till the sixth year after the fatal event that this story was set on foot; and it seems to have originated in nothing!, but Olympias's desire of vengeance, which then first found a favourable vent. The bones of Iolaus, who had died in the interim, were torn from their grave, and a hundred Macedonians, selected from among the most distinguished of Antipater�s friends barbarously butchered. The accusation of poisoning the king seems at first to have been vaguely set on foot, the only circumstantial part of the story being the point necessary to justify Olympias�s malignity, namely, that Iolaus was the agent in administering the poison. But in process of time the minutest details of the transaction were supplied. We give them in the last form which they assumed. The fears of Antipater, it was said, arising from the growing irritation of Alexander incessantly stimulated against him by Olympias, induced him, on hearing that he was superseded by Craterus and ordered into Asia with new levies, to plot against his master's life. A fit means for this purpose was pointed out to him by his friend Aristotle, who dreaded the personal consequences to himself which seemed likely to follow from Alexander's anger against Callisthenes. The nature of this is quite in keeping with the other features of the narrative. It was no other than the water of the river Styx, which fell from a rock near the town of Nonacris in Arcadia, and which, according to a local superstition which is not extinct to this day, possessed not only the property of destroying animal life by its cold and petrifying qualities but also that of dissolving the hardest metals, and even precious stones. One substance alone was proof against its destructive influences, the hoof of a Scythian ass! In a vessel made out of this, a small portion of the fluid was conveyed by Cassander, Iolaus's elder brother, into Asia, and, on the occasion of the debauch at which Alexander was taken ill, administered to him by the latter. Iolaus was stimulated to the act by the desire of revenging an outrage upon himself by the king, and attachment to him induced Medius, a Thessalian, at whose palace the debauch took place, to be an accomplice in the treason. The assassin, according to the author of the Lives of the Ten Orators falsely attributed to Plutarch, was rewarded by a proposition of the demagogue Hyperides at Athens, to confer public honours upon him as a tyrannicide, and the horn cup in which the fatal draught had been conveyed from Greece deposited in the temple of Delphi.
The absurdity of this account is glaringly manifest to
readers of the present day, of whom nine out of every ten are probably better
acquainted with the nature and operation of petrifying springs than the best informed
of the Greek naturalists were. The ancients were not in possession of the
touchstone for the discovery of falsehood which modern science affords; but
even they were long before they attached any credence to the calumny. The
greater part of the writers on the subject, says Plutarch, consider the whole
matter of the reputed poisoning a mere fiction, and in confirmation of this view
they quote the fact, that although the royal remains lay for several days unembalmed,
in consequence of the disputes of the generals, and that too in a hot and close place, they exhibited no marks of corruption, but remained fresh and unchanged.
Arrhian
too, who as well as Plutarch derives his account of the king's illness and death from the court gazettes, and
confirms the statements of these by the narratives of Ptolemy and Aristobulus, says of the charge of poisoning, which he
afterwards mentions, that he has alluded to it merely to show that he has heard
of it, not that he considers it to deserve any credence. In fact, the sole
source of the story in its details appears to have been one Hagnothemis
(an individual of whom nothing else is known), who is reported to have said
that he had heard it told by King Antigonus. But its piquancy was a strong
recommendation to later writers, and it is instructive and amusing to observe
how their statements of it increase in positiveness about
in proportion as they recede from the time in which the facts of the case could
be known. Diodorus Siculus
and Vitruvius, living in the time of the two first Caesars, merely mention the rumour
that Alexander's death was occasioned by poison, through the agency
of Antipater, but do not pretend to assert its credibility. Quintus Curtius,
writing under Vespasian, considers the authorities on that side to
preponderate. The epitomizer of a degenerate age, Justin, flourishing in the
reign of Antoninus Pius, slightly alludes to the
intemperance which he allows had been assigned as the cause of Alexander�s death, but adds that in fact he died from treason,
and the disgraceful truth was suppressed by the influence of his successors.
And finally Orosius, in
the fifth century, states broadly and briefly that he died from poison
administered by an attendant, without so much as hinting that any different
belief had ever even partially obtained. But it is remarkable that of all these
writers, not one mixes up Aristotle's name with the
story; and it is probable that the foolish charge against him mentioned (and
discountenanced) by Plutarch and Arrhian,
fell into discredit very soon after it arose, and perhaps was only remembered
as a curious piece of scandalous history, until the half-lunatic Caracalla
thought proper to revive it, in order to gratify at once the tyrant's natural hatred for wisdom and virtue, and his own
morbid passion for idolizing the memory of Alexander. It is recorded of him
that he persecuted the Aristotelean
sect of philosophers with singular hatred, abolishing the social meetings of
their body which appear to have taken place in Alexandria, confiscating certain
funds which they possessed, and even entertaining the design of destroying
their master's works, on no other ground than that Aristotle was
thought to have aided Antipater in destroying Alexander.
To attempt to account for the origin of so absurd a
charge as that we have been discussing may perhaps appear rash. We cannot
however resist the temptation of hazarding a conjecture, that while the
intimacy of Aristotle with Antipater undoubtedly furnished a favourable
soil for the growth of the story, the actual germ of it is to be looked for at
Delphi. The cup in the treasure house there, which the epigram we have quoted
above represents as presented by Alexander, was probably of onyx, a stone of
which the coloured
layers resembling as they do the outer coats of a hoof, procured it the name by
which it goes. Now it is obvious that in the time of which we are speaking, when
the merchant who sold the wares was for the most part himself a traveller in distant countries, marvellous
tales would be related respecting the strange commodities which he imported.
The onyx might to the admiring Greek be represented as the solid hoof of some
strange animal, with no less plausibility than in the fourteenth cen�tury a
cocoa nut could be sold as a griffin�s egg, a long univalve shell represented as the horn of a
land animal, or the ammonites of Malta regarded as serpents changed
into stone by St Paul. And although the more extensive communication with the
East, which commenced after Alexander's expedition,
would in process of time spread more correct views on the subject of natural
productions, the old legends would linger in the temples, handed down
traditionally by the attendants, who showed the curiosities to strangers, and
were expected to be provided with a story for every relic. If any one of these
ciceroni, aware of the intimate friendship which subsisted between Aristotle
and Antipater, and also of the rumour that
Alexander had been poisoned through the agency of the latter, had either
chanced to stumble himself or to be directed by a more learned visitor to a passage
in a work of Theophrastus, (Aristotle's favourite
scholar and successor,) at that time extant, which stated that in Arcadia there
was a streamlet of water dropping from a rock, called the water of Styx, which
those who wished for, collected by means of sponges fastened to the end of
poles; and that not only was it a mortal poison to whoever drank it, but it
possessed the property of dissolving all vessels into which it was put, except they were of horn, he must have
possessed much less fancy, and a much greater regard for historical accuracy
than the rest of his countrymen, if he did not upon the visit of the next
pilgrim to the temple, add at least a conjecture or two as to the connection
which the relic in question had with a story possessing so much interest to
all. It should not be forgotten, in reference to that part of the account which
represents Aristotle as the discoverer of this peculiar property of the Stygian
water that Theophrastus is the
earliest authority for its possessing it, and that if Aristotle had been aware
that such a belief existed, we should hardly fail to find it in the book On
Wonders, in the 121st Chapter of which there is an account of a
pestilential fountain in Thrace, the water of which was said to be clear and
sparkling, and to the eye like any other, but fatal to all who drank of it.
CHAPTER VI.
DEATH OF ARISTOTLE.
We must now return from the discussion of the imputed
share of Aristotle in the death of his illustrious pupil, to the narrative of
his own. He did not long survive his departure from the city in which he had
spent so large a portion of his life. He retired to Chalcis in the year of Cephisodorus's
archonship (b. c. 323-322), and early in that of his successor Philocles,
died (as we are justified by Apollodorus's authority
in stating positively), from disease. At nearly the same time the greatest
orator that the world ever saw, the leader of that party whose influence had
expelled Aristotle from Athens, was driven to have recourse to poison, to
escape a worse fate. There are not wanting accounts that the philosopher also
met a violent death. That he poisoned himself to avoid falling into the hands
of his accusers is the view of Suidas and
of the anonymous author of his Life. But independently of the superior
authority of Apollodorus, and the evidence which
Aristotle's own opinions, expressed in more than one place, on
the subject of suicide, afford in contradiction of this story, the fact of
Chalcis being then under Macedonian influence, and consequently a perfectly
secure refuge for any one persecuted for real or supposed participation in
Macedonian politics, is quite enough to induce us to reject this story. A yet
more absurd one is repeated by some of the early Christian writers.
Mortification, according to them, at being unable to discover the cause of the
Euripus ebbing and flowing seven times every day, induced him to throw himself
headlong into the current. Of this story it is scarcely necessary to say more
than that the phenomenon which produced such fatal consequences to the
philosopher does not really exist. The stream constantly sets through the
narrow channel between Euboea and the mainland from north to south, except when
winds blowing very strongly in an opposite direction, produce for a time the
appearance of a current from south to north. But instead of wasting time upon
the refutation of these foolish accounts, we shall perhaps please our readers
better by bringing together a few circumstances which appear to confirm the
statement of Apollodorus, to which independently of
these, we should not be justified in refusing belief.
Aulus Gellius
relates that Aristotle's scholars,
when their master had past his sixty-second year, and being in a state of
extremely bad health gave them but little hopes that he would survive for any
length of time, entreated him to appoint someone of their body as his
successor, to keep their party together and preserve the philosophical views
which he had promulgated. There were at that time, says Gellius,
many distinguished men among his disciples, but two preeminently superior to
the rest, Menedemus
(or, as some suppose it should be written, Eudemus),
a Rhodian, and Theophrastus, a native of Eresus, a
town in the island of Lesbos. Aristotle, perhaps unwilling that his last
moments should be disturbed by the heart burnings
which a selection, however judicious, might produce, contrived to avoid the
invidious task, and at the same time to convey his own sentiments on the
subject. He replied, that at the proper time he would satisfy their wishes, and
shortly afterwards when the same persons who had made the request happened to
be present, he took occasion to complain that the wine which he usually drank
did not agree with him, and to beg that they would look out for some sort which
might suit him better, for instance,
said he, some Lesbian or Rhodian; two wines
which, as is notorious, were beyond almost any others celebrated in antiquity.
When a sample of each had been brought to him, he first tasted the latter and
praised it for its soundness and agreeable flavour.
Then trying the Lesbian, he seemed for a time to doubt which he should choose, but
at last said, Both are admirable wines, but the
Lesbian is the pleasanter of the two. He never made any further allusion to the
matter of a successor, and the disciples universally concluded that this,
observation relative to the Rhodian and Lesbian vintages was meant as an answer
to their question, Theophrastus the Lesbian being a man singularly
distinguished for suavity both of language and manners; and accordingly on the
death of Aristotle they unanimously acknowledged him as the chosen successor.
That this anecdote implies the belief that a disease of some duration was the
cause of the philosopher's death is quite obvious; and there is some ground for supposing that
this disease was an affection of the intestines, from which he had long
suffered. This affection, says another ancient author, which he bore with the
greatest fortitude, was of such a nature that the wonder is that he contrived
to prolong his life to the extent of sixty-three years, not that he died when
he did. For complaints of this kind warm fomentations of oil applied to the
stomach were recommended in the medical practice of antiquity. Now Lycon
the Pythagorean, a bitter calumniator of Aristotle, grounded a charge of
inordinate luxury against him, upon the assertion that he indulged himself in
the habit of taking baths of warm oil; an assertion
which, if we should fail at once to recognize it as. a misrepresentation of the
medical treatment alluded to, will be unquestionably explained by the more
accurate description of another writer, who obviously alludes to the same
circumstance.
Diogenes Laertius, as we have mentioned in an earlier
part of this essay, speaks of having seen Aristotle's will, and proceeds to give the substance of it. That this is not an
abstract of the authentic document is obvious, from the circumstance that no
mention whatever is made in it of his literary property, which was very
considerable, and which we know from other sources came to Theophrastus.
Neither however does there appear to us any good grounds for suspicion that the
account of Diogenes is either a forgery or the copy of a forgery. The whole
document bears the stamp, in our judgment, of a codicil to a previously
existing will, drawn up at a time when the testator was dangerously ill, and
had but little expectation of recovery. Thus, at the very commencement,
Antipater, the Regent of Macedonia, is appointed the supreme arbiter and
referee, and four other persons besides Theophrastus, if he be willing and able
are directed to administer until Nicanor the son of Proxenus, to whom he gives his orphan daughter in marriage, and
the guardianship of his orphan son Nicomachus, together with the whole
management of his property, shall take
possession. Nicanor was apparently abroad on some service of danger. If he
escapes, he is directed by the codicil to erect certain statues of four cubits
in height in Stagira, to Jupiter and Athene the Preservers, in pursuance of a
vow which the testator had made on his account. If anything should happen to
Nicanor before his marriage, or after his marriage before the birth of
children, and he should fail to leave instructions, Theophrastus is to take the
daughter, and stand for all purposes of administration in the place of
Nicanor. Should he decline to do so, the four provisional trustees are to act
at their own discretion, guided by the advice of Antipater. Besides these
arrangements, all which seem adopted to meet a sudden emergency, such as that
of a man dying, away from the person in whom he puts the most confidence, and
in doubt whether the one whom he next trusted would be able to act, we find
legacies to more than one individual which apparently imply a former bequest,
and a trifling want of arrangement in the latter part, quite characteristic of
a document drawn up under the circumstances we have supposed. Thus he orders statues to be erected to Nicanor, and Nicanor's father and
mother; also to Arimnestus (his own brother), that
there might be a memorial of him, he having died childless. A statue of Ceres,
vowed by his mother, is to be set up at Nemea or elsewhere. Then, as if the
mention of one domestic relation had suggested another, he commands that wherever
he should be buried, the bones of his deceased wife should be taken up and laid
by his side according to her desire; and after this he again reverts to the
subject of statues to be set up, and gives directions for the fulfillment of
the vow which he had made for the safety of Nicanor.
Aristotle left behind him a daughter named after her
mother, Pythias.
She is said to have been three times married, first to Nicanor the son of Aristotle's guardian Proxenus and his
own adopted child; secondly to Procles, a
descendant apparently son or grandson of Demaratus
King of Lacedaemon, by whom she had two sons named Procles
and Demaratus,
scholars of Theophrastus; and thirdly to Metrodorus,
an eminent physician, to whom she bore a son named after his maternal grandfather.
He also left behind him an infant son, named after his paternal grandfather,
Nicomachus, by a female of the name of Herpyllis,
of whom it is very difficult exactly to say in what relation she stood to him.
To call her his mistress would imply a licentious description of intercourse
which the name by which she is described by no means warrants us in supposing,
and which the character of Aristotle, the absence of any allusion to such a
circumstance in the numerous calumnies which were heaped upon him, and the
terms of respect in which she is spoken of in his will, would equally incline
us to discredit. It seems most probable that he was married to her by that kind
of left-handed marriage which alone the laws of Greece and Rome permitted
between persons who were not both citizens of the same state. The Latin
technical term for the female in this relation was concubina. She was
recognized by the law, and her children could inherit the sixth part of their father's property. Mark Antony lived in this kind of
concubinage with Cleopatra, and Titus with Berenice. The two Antonines, men of characters the most opposite to
licentiousness, were also instances of this practice, which indeed remained
for some time after Christianity became the religion of the state, and was
regulated by two Christian Emperors, Constantine and Justinian. The Greek term
is not used so strictly in a technical sense, and may
be said to answer with equal propriety to either of the Latin words pellex
and concubina.
Where however the legal relation was denoted, there was no other word selected
in preference; and we may safely say that this, in the case before us, is the
probable interpretation, although there is no positive authority that it is the
true one. The son of Nicomachus was brought up by Theophrastus, and if we are
to credit Cicero's assertion
that the Nicomachean
Ethics which are found among Aristotle's works, were
by some attributed to him, must have profited much by his master's instructions. It seems however more likely that Aristocles's account
of him is the correct one, who relates that he was killed in battle at a very
early age.
CHAPTER VII.
REPUTED BURIAL OF ARISTOTLES WRITINGS.
The works of Aristotle are said to have met with a
most singular mischance. They are related to have been buried sometime after
his death, and not to have been recovered till two hundred years afterwards.
This story is so curious in itself, and of such vital
importance in the History of Philosophy, that we shall make no apology for
investigating it thoroughly, in spite of the tediousness which a minute
examination of details necessarily brings with it.
The main authority for the opinion is Strabo in a
passage of his Geographical Work, where having occasion to speak of Scepsis,
a town in the Troad, he mentions two or three persons
of eminence who were born there. One of these is Neleus,
the son of Coriscus, a person who was a
scholar both of Aristotle and Theophrastus, and who succeeded to the library of
the latter in which was contained that of the former also. For Aristotle,
Strabo goes on to say, made over his own library to Theophrastus, (to whom he
also left his school), and was the first that I know of, who collected books
and taught the kings in Egypt to form a library. Theophrastus made them over to
Neleus;
he took them over to Scepsis and
made them over to his heirs, uneducated men
who let the books remain locked up without any care. When however
they observed the pains which the kings of the Attalic
dynasty, (in whose dominions the town was) were at in getting books to furnish
the library at Pergamus, they buried them
under ground in a sort of cellar. A long time after, when they had received
much injury from damp and worms, the representatives of the family sold them to
Apellicon
of Teos, the books both of Aristotle and of Theophrastus, for a very large sum. Apellicon
was more of a book-collector than a philosopher; and the result was that in an attempt to supply the gaps when he transcribed the
text into new copies, he filled them up the reverse of well, and sent the books
a broad full of mistakes. And of the Peripatetic philosophers, the more
ancient who immediately succeeded Theophrastus, as in fact they had no books at
all, except a very few, and those chiefly of the exoteric class, were unable to
philosophize systematically, but were obliged to elaborate rhetorical
disquisitions while their successors after the time when these books came out,
speculated better and more in Aristotle's spirit than they, although they too were forced to explain most of his
views by guess work from the multitude of errors. And to this inconvenience
Rome contributed a large share. For immediately after the death of Apellicon,
Sylla
having taken Athens, seized upon the library of Apellicon:
and after it had been brought here, Tyrannio
the grammarian, who was an admirer of Aristotle, had the handling of it by the favour
of the superintendant
of the library; and [so had] some booksellers, who employed wretched
transcribers, and neglected to verify the correctness of the copies, an evil
which occurs in the case of all other authors too when copied for sale, both
here and in Alexandria.
Plutarch in his Biography of Sylla,
confirms a part of this account, and adds a feature or two which is wanting
here. His authority is obviously Strabo himself in another work now lost, and
he is therefore not to be reckoned as an additional witness, but as the
representative of the one last summoned, again recalled to
explain some parts of his own testimony. From him we learn that Sylla
carried the library of Apellicon
containing the greater part of the books of Aristotle and Theophrastus, with which
up to that time most people had no accurate acquaintance, to Rome. There, he
continues, it is said, Tyrannio
the grammarian arranged the principal part of them, and Andronicus the Rhodian,
obtaining copies from him, published them and drew up the syllabuses which are
now current. He confirms the account of Strabo that the early Peripatetics
had neither a wide nor an accurate acquaintance with the works of Aristotle and
Theophrastus, from the circumstance of the property of Neleus,
to whom Theophrastus bequeathed his books, falling into the hands of illiterate
and indifferent persons; but of the story of burying the books he says nothing,
nor yet of the endeavours of Apellicon
to repair the damaged manuscripts.
Our readers have here the whole authority which is to
be found in the writers of antiquity for this celebrated story, which has been
transmitted from one mouth to another in modern times without the least
question of its truth until very lately. And not only has it been accepted as a
satisfactory reason for an extraordinary and most important fact, the decay of
philosophy for the two centuries preceding the time of Cicero, but editors and
commentators of the works of Aristotle have resorted to it without scruple for
a solution of all the difficulties which they might encounter. They have
allowed themselves the most arbitrary transpositions of the several parts of
the same work, and acknowledged no limit to the number
or magnitude of gaps which might be assumed as due to the damp and worms of the
cellar at Scepsis.
Of late years however, as the critical study of the Greek language has
increased, and the attention of scholars been more drawn towards the
philosophical department of antiquity, the inadequacy of this story to account
for the state in which Aristotle's writings have
come down to us has become more and more apparent; notices have been found
which were quite incompatible with it; and at the present time it may safely be
said that the falsity of the account in the main is completely proved. We will endeavour
to give our readers some idea of the laborious researches which have led to
this result. They have been carried on chiefly, if not entirely, by German
philologers, the pioneers in this as in almost every other uncleared region
of antiquity. But we must first call their attention to other circumstances
which would, antecedently to the investigations of which we speak, dispose us
to look with some suspicion on the tale unless very considerably qualified.
The work of Athenaeus to
which we are indebted for so much fragmentary information on matters of
antiquity, is cast in a form which had particular attractions
for the readers of the time in which the author lived, the reigns of Marcus
Aurelius and Commodus. A wealthy Roman is represented as hospitably
entertaining several persons eminent for their acquaintance with literature and
philosophy, and the most curious notices imaginable from a multitude of
writers, and upon all subjects, are woven ingeniously into the conversation of
the guests. Nearly in the beginning of the work, the author, who himself is one
of them, enlarges on the splendid munificence, the literary taste, and the
accomplishments of the host. Among other things he praises the extent and value
of his library. It was of such a size, he says, as to exceed those of all who
had gained a reputation as book collectors, Polycrates the Samian, Pisistratus
the tyrant of Athens, Euclid, (also an Athenian,) Nicocrates
of Cyprus, aye, the kings of Pergamus
too, and Euripides the poet, and Aristotle the philosopher, [and Theophrastus,]
and Neleus
who had the books of these, from whom king Ptolemy my countryman, surnamed Philadelphus, bought the whole, and carried them away
together with those he got from Athens and those from Rhodes, to the fair city
of Alexandria. It is obvious that the author here follows an account very
different from Strabo's, one which
represented Neleus's
library including the costly collections of Aristotle and Theophrastus as
forming, together with some others, the basis of the famous collection at
Alexandria. Now it is utterly inconceivable that if Ptolemy bought the whole
library of Neleus, he should have been
satisfied to leave the works of Aristotle and Theophrastus only behind in the
hands of men so ignorant of their value and careless of what became of them, as
Neleus's heirs are
represented to have been, if no other copies of these works existed; and even
supposing it possible that he should have done so, would not so singular an
incident of literary history have been mentioned by some author of antiquity?
Should we not find some record of it in Cicero, from whom we learn so much of
the history of Greek philosophy? He even mentions the degeneracy of the
Peripatetic school after Theophrastus in strong terms :
is it conceivable that if it had been really attributable to the want of their
founders' works, he should either not have heard of this, or
should not think it worth mentioning? Could such a story have escaped the
anecdote-collectors under the Empire, Aelian, Phavorinus,
and a host of others? Would Diogenes Laertius, who relates how many cooking
utensils Aristotle passed at the Euboean custom-house, have neglected so
interesting an anecdote as this? Such considerations combined with the notice
in Athenaeus must prevent an impartial judge from
attaching more than a very small degree of credit to that part of Strabo's narrative which denies the publication of the works
of Aristotle to any considerable extent before the time of Sylla.
And this scepticism
will not be diminished when we consider, that the greater part of Aristotle's works are so closely
connected with each other that if any were published, all or nearly all must
have been so. He continually refers from the one to the other for
investigations which are necessary to the argument which he has in hand. And
although these references may be and probably often are, due to a later hand,
still this objection cannot be made in all cases; in those for instance where
the special work referred to is not named, but
described in such a way that it is impossible not to identify it.
But after all, these arguments are little else than
negative, and although they lead to a probability of a very high order against
the truth of Strabo's narrative,
they are not absolutely conclusive. In fact the work of disproof is a most difficult one, from the circumstance
of the whole of the literature of the two centuries after Theophrastus, enormous
as its extent was, having been swept away, except such scanty fragments as are
found here and there imbedded in the work of some grammarian or compiler. This
will be strikingly evident from the consideration, that if the works of
Aristotle which have come down to us had been lost and a similar story had been
related of Plato's works to that
which we read in Strabo respecting those of Aristotle and Theophrastus, its
refutation would be quite as difficult as that of the one about which we are at
present concerned. But the difficulty of the problem did not damp the ardour
of the German scholars we have spoken of above. They have rummaged the
voluminous works of. the commentators upon Aristotle which the learned
eclecticism of the third, fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian era
produced, some of them still only existing in manuscript, with indefatigable
diligence, and have detected in the works of much more modern scholiasts
extracts from their predecessors, which prove to demonstration that the notice
in Athenaeus in all probability true, and that
certainly so much of Strabo�s account as is
incompatible with it, is false.
We have seen that, according to the authorities on
which the story rests, a very considerable impulse was given in the first
century before the Christian era to the study of the Peripatetic philosophy.
Andronicus the Rhodian is mentioned as the principal promoter of this revival,
having rearranged the Works of Aristotle in a way which was generally received
in the time of Strabo, and which formed the basis of the present division.
Contemporary with Andronicus, although younger than him, was Athenodorus
of Tarsus; and in the next generation to Athenodorus,
Boethus
of Sidon, both celebrated for their acquaintance with the doctrines of
Aristotle, and for their investigations of the literary questions connected
with them. Now, although the works of all these writers have perished, they
were not lost until they had furnished materials to Adrastus
and Alexander of Aphrodisias in the second
century, and to the eclectic philosophers Ammonius
Saccas,
Porphyry, Ammonius
the son of Hermias, Simplicius,
and David the Armenian in the third, fourth, and fifth; and of most of these
considerable remains have come down to the present time, so that we are
enabled, with very great precision, to ascertain the views of the ancient commentators
as Andronicus and his contemporaries are called by their more modem followers,
on several particulars, and among others, on some having a direct bearing upon
the story of Strabo.
We find, for instance, that a point which occupied
much of the attention of the ancients, was to determine between the claims of
rival works, bearing the same name and upon the same subject, to be reputed the
genuine productions of Aristotle. Andronicus questioned the pretensions of those of
the latter part of the Categories. Adrastus
found two editions (if we may use the expression) of the latter work, differing
very considerably from each other. The same is stated by him of the seventh
Book of the Physical Lectures. Cicero mentions it as a question which could not
be decided, as to whether a work on Ethics was written by Aristotle or by his
son Nicomachus. And that the only evidence on the one side or the other was
merely internal, is obvious from the remark in which he expresses his
inclination towards the latter opinion, that he does not see, why the style of
the son should not bear a close resemblance to that of the father. Another
question which occasioned considerable perplexity was the arrangement of the
several works which were held to be genuine. The present distribution is
entirely based upon an arrangement which goes no further back than the time of Andronicus, and is entirely different from the one or more
which appear to have prevailed before him. There are at this day three known
catalogues of the writings, the first is the one given by Diogenes Laertius in
his Life, the second, that of the anonymous Greek Biographer, published by Menage.
These resemble one another very much, and bear every appearance of having been
derived, probably however through secondary channels, from the same source,
which has been conjectured with great plausibility to be Hermippus
of Smyrna's work of which we have spoken in the early part of
this essay. But it is impossible to imagine a greater difference than is found
between these lists and the works which have come down to us. The names are so
completely unlike, and there are so many reciprocal omissions, that a scholar
of the sixteenth century was able, with the aid of a mortal antipathy to the
Aristotelian philosophy, to succeed in persuading himself that everything which
has come down to us under the name of the great Stagirite, was,
with very slight exceptions, spurious. The third catalogue is found only in Arabic, and is said to correspond much more nearly with our
own. And indeed a great part of the difference between
this and the two former is explicable from the fact that the same work is often
referred to under more names than one, not merely by subsequent commentators on
Aristotle, but also by the philosopher himself. But such differences,
independently of positive testimony, abundantly show that many pieces which now
form the component parts of a larger treatise were not left by the author in
such an order, or at least, that no authentic documents from which any given
arrangement could be decisively inferred, came to the knowledge of Andronicus
and his brethren. If they had, if, that is, the manuscripts of Apellicon
had been, as they are represented, a genuine copy of all or most of Aristotle's works, never till then known, the task of these
critics would have been a most easy one. There would have been no occasion for
discussions of the internal evidence to determine between various readings of
the text, different systems of arrangement, or contending claims as to
authorship. A simple reference to a primitive copy would at once have settled all.
And what shall we say to the letter of Alexander to Aristotle, complaining that
he had published his acroamatic
works and thus put the world on a footing with his most highly instructed
pupils? It is of no avail to say that the letter is not genuine: it very likely
may not be so, but it was extracted by Gellius
from the book of the very Andronicus whom this tale represents as the first
publisher of these writings, and therefore proves his belief at any rate that
some of them had been published long before.
This evidence seems to prove incontrovertibly that the
part of Strabo's and Plutarch's narrative which relates to the extraordinary treasure first made
available by Andronicus, cannot be true. By another chain of testimony equally
elaborate, Brandis
has shown that many of the works of Aristotle of the highest and most recondite
character that we now possess, were actually in the
hands of the Peripatetic school, whose degeneracy has been attributed to the
loss of them. It is well known that the successors of the great philosopher in
several instances composed works on the same subject (and sometimes identical
in title also), with existing treatises of their founder. For indeed the spirit
of dogmatism, which is often imputed to the Aristotelian philosophy by persons who
are only acquainted with the schoolmen's modifications
of it in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, is really so alien to it, that
it would be difficult to find in the history of civilization an example of a
more vigorous and healthy independence of thought, and a greater ardour
for investigation than is afforded by the earlier disciples of the Lyceum.
Although the works in question have long since been lost, Brandis has
succeeded in eliciting from the notices which remain of them in the Commentators
we have referred to, very many particulars, which show
in some instances that the author actually followed the course of the
Aristotelian parallel work, and in more that he made use of it. Under the first
of these two classes are brought, by decisive arguments, the Physical Lectures
and the first book of the Former Analytics; and there is a considerable
probability that the second book of the Former Analytics and the fifth of the
Metaphysics may be added to these. Under the second we may number the Latter
Analytics, the Categories, perhaps the treatise the Topica, the treatises on the Heavens, on Generation
and Decay, on the Soul, and the Meteorologica.
Further researches on the principle here indicated may very probably add to the
lists, but a very small part of either would be sufficient to demonstrate, when
we consider that almost every one of these treatises would involve the
possession of some others in order to be itself intelligible, that it was not
the want of acroamatic
works that produced the decay of the Peripatetic school.
To make an objection to the inference which these
facts allow us to draw against the correctness of Strabo's story on the ground that Theophrastus may possibly
have chosen to keep the works of Aristotle as well as his own, in his private
possession, and communicate the use of them only to the more favoured
of his scholars, would be a most arbitrary proceeding; as there is not the
slightest historical ground for such an hypothesis. But Brandis has
precluded even this step. He has shown that Chrysippus
the Stoic (who in his dialectical work quoted by Plutarch, speaks in the
highest terms of the cultivation of that branch of science by the Academics
down to Polemo,
and by the Peripatetics
down to Strato
inclusive), in several of his particular doctrines had
an especial reference to the former treatment of the same by Aristotle, Eudemus,
and Theophrastus. His discussion of the Idea
of Time is entirely based upon that of Aristotle, and
exhibits an unworthy endeavour
to conceal the similarity. Nay, the ancient commentators of highest reputation maintained
that the whole of the Stoics' Logical Science, on which they prided themselves much,
was nothing more than a following out of Aristotle's principles, and, in particular that their
doctrine of Contraries was entirely derived from Aristotle's book on Opposites.
But it was not only to philosophers either of his own
or of rival sects that the works of Aristotle were known at the time when they
are reported to have been lying in the cellar at Scepsis.
Aristophanes of Byzantium, the celebrated grammarian of Alexandria in the early
part of the second century before Christ, made an abridgement of his Zoological
works, and also wrote commentaries apparently on
these, or some other of his works relating to Natural History. But before his
time, Antigonus of Carystus under
Ptolemy Euergetes (B. C. 247-222), in his Collection of
Wonderful Stories, quoted largely both from these and from the works of
Theophrastus on similar subjects. Kopp says, that he used not only these, but
also the work on Foreign Customs, and
that the same is probable both of Callimachus and Nicander,
and he acutely remarks, that the reason that the works on the Parts of Animals
and the Generation of Animals are not so often cited as the Natural History, is
that the latter furnished far more material for works that would possess a
general interest, whereas the former necessarily implied a certain knowledge of
physiology in the reader. But that they could not have remained unknown while
the last was published, is evident from the circumstance that in it the author
frequently refers to them. Nor were the writings which related to physical
phenomena the only ones which we are sure reached Alexandria. Andronicus
related that in the great library there were found forty books of Analytics and
two of Categories, professedly the work of Aristotle. Of the former of these
four only, of the latter one, in both instances those which we have, were
decided upon by the ancient critics to be genuine. Besides which the
Alexandrine writers who formed Canons of Classical Poets, Historians, and
Philosophers, included Aristotle among, the last, surely not on the strength
either of his mere reputation, or only of his exoteric works.
But what, after all, was the nature of these exoteric
writings; for we are now obviously come to a point at which the accurate
determination of this question, which the continuity of the narrative has
hitherto prevented, becomes necessary. We shall endeavour
to be as brief as possible in our answer.
If we apply to Aristotle himself for information, we
shall find nothing at all in his writings to confirm the popular opinion of a
division of his doctrines into two classes, of which the one was communicated
freely, while the other was carefully reserved for those disciples whose
previously ascertained character and talents were a security for their right
appreciation of them. Wherever the term exoteric occurs, it is with reference
to a distinction not of readers or hearers, but of questions treated on. It
signifies little or nothing more than extrinsic, separate, or insulated. That
facility of comprehension as regards the main subject-matter was not
necessarily a characteristic of such works, appears from a passage in the
Metaphysics, in which the writer excuses himself from touching upon the
doctrine of Ideas (or Constituent Forms,) any more than the order of his work
demanded, assigning as a reason, that his views on this particular were already
matters of familiarity from the exoteric discourses. It is notorious that this
was one of the deepest and most difficult questions of the ancient philosophy,
being in fact the point where the schools of the Academy and Lyceum diverged,
and, consequently, if any part of Aristotle's views had been confined to a chosen few, if there had been such a
thing as an interior coterie, here would have been proper matter to be reserved
for them. Similarly, in the Nicomachean
Ethics, he refers his readers to the the exoteric
discourses for an analysis of the human mind. The law of subordination among
the parts of a composite whole, as, for instance, the law of harmony in music,
is another subject which he considers asrather proper for an exoteric investigation. In the exoteric discourses,
he discussed the Philosophy of Life, the relative importance of the several
elements which go to make up happiness, and the conditions which the social
relation imposes on a man. And in the same he proposes that an examination of
the Idea of Time should be gone into. Here then we have ample evidence that the
most abstruse subjects, physical, metaphysical, and moral, were treated of
somehow or other in discourses bearing the name of exoteric, a name to which
modern usage has almost indissolubly attached the notion of shallowness if not
of something like fraud also. Of any thing
like Freemasonry, any thing
amounting to a severance of knowledge into two distinct spheres, the one to be
inhabited by the vulgar, the other by choicer spirits, there is not a vestige.
If any acroamatic
work by Aristotle has come down to us, the Nicomachean Ethics
is one. Yet in it is nothing requiring such profundity of reflection or
sobriety of mind as would be demanded by the psychological discussion in the
exoteric work to which the author refers. And as for the terms by which
Plutarch and Clement of Alexandria denote that class of works which they place
in contradistinction to the exoteric, they are in part not used by Aristotle at
all, and in part used in a totally different sense. The phrases by which he
designates such works as appear to stand in opposition to the exoteric are
always directed to scientific treatises containing a system of several parts
methodically arranged and organically cohering, such in short would be formed
by the outline of a continuous course of lectures on some main branch of
philosophy. And that the works included under the name acroamatic or acroatic
by the philosophers since the time of Andronicus Rhodius,
were of this description seems most probable, not only from the appearance
presented by those which have come down to us, but from the fact that at the
time when Greek philosophy was first imported into Rome, the word acroatic
had become the technical term for such productions. Crates Mallotes,
who came to Rome on an embassy between the second and third Punic war, is
spoken of by Suetonius in terms which seem to show that a similar distinction
to that which obtained in Aristotle's works,
prevailed also in his.
If now we keep-steadily in view this distinction which
it is plain that Aristotle himself made in his discourses, the distinction
between cyclical, methodical, scientific productions, and insulated,
independent essays, we shall perceive at once from the nature of the case, that
without any premeditated design on the part of the author, the former would
only be appreciable by genuine disciples, those who were able and willing to
afford a steady and continuous application to the developement
of the whole, while the latter might be understood by those who brought no
previous knowledge with them, but merely attended to the matter in hand; that
the one required a severe and rigid logic to preserve all parts of the system
in due coherence, the other readily admitted of the aid which the imagination
affords to the elucidation of single points, but which often becomes
mischievous when they are to be combined; that to the first the demonstrative
form of exposition would alone be appropriate, to the second any one, narrative
or dialogic or any other, which might be most fit for placing the one matter to
be illustrated in a striking light. But we must be very careful not to confuse
these resulting distinctions with the primitive one from which they flowed, and
still more not to suppose that they were the cause of it; for we shall see
presently that want of attention to this caused in later writers first of all
inaccurate expressions as to the nature of this celebrated division and finally
an utterly erroneous view of it, and of the spirit in which it originated.
Cicero in two of his letters to Atticus speaks of
having composed two works in the manner of Aristotle's exoteric ones. The points of comparison which these two treatises (the
De Finibus,
and the De Republica)
offer, consist in the dialogic form in which they are written and the prefaces
which serve to introduce to the reader the dramatis
personae who carry on the
discussion. The objections which some of these propound to the view which it is
the design of the author to elucidate are turned into a means of bringing it
out in stronger and bolder relief. This mode of treatment in the hands of a
master obviously offers many advantages. The dramatic interest keeps the
attention of the reader from flagging, and the peculiar obstacles which the
differences of individual temperament not infrequently interpose to the
reception of any doctrine may be in this way most clearly set forth and
most easily removed. The dialogues of Plato are an obvious example of this. But
if we consider the De Oratore,
De Finibus,
and De Republica
of Cicero
to represent with tolerable accuracy the character of the Aristotelian
dialogues, we see at once a very considerable change. The genial productive
power of the artist has given way to the systematic reflection of the
philosopher. The personages introduced are not living and breathing men with
all their feelings, prejudices, and individual peculiarities, they are mere
puppets which speak the opinions entertained by those whose name they bear.
These opinions may be fairly and lucidly stated, they may be backed, by all the
pomp and power of rhetoric, as they are in Cicero and as they probably were in
Aristotle, but the speakers have no life, the scene no reality, and in spite of
the pains taken by the author to prevent it by allusions to particular times,
places; and circumstances, we rise from the perusal with our opinions more or
less modified, but with no more distinct recollection of the parties by whom
the discussion has been carried on than if they had been distinguished by the
letters of the alphabet instead of the names of known characters. But what
these productions have lost as works of art, they have gained as works of
science. The distinct and explicit exposition of a principle which prevents
them from being the former, is a merit in them as the latter. And as the
dialogic form, even where it fails in producing the dramatic impression that we
receive from Plato, admits to the fullest extent of all the assistance which
rhetoric can afford, it is not wonderful that it should have been selected by
Aristotle as an appropriate one for many or even most of his exoteric
treatises.
Neither in those cases where he adopted this form can
we be surprised that Aristotle should have made use of a style, which however
unfit for the purposes of a rigidly scientific investigation, is not at all
inappropriate to compositions such as we have described. A few relics (and
unfortunately a very few,) have come down to us of them; about thirty lines in
the original Greek are quoted by Plutarch from one of the most celebrated, and
Cicero has in a Latin dress preserved two other small fragments. The first of
these is part of a treatise which was either addressed to Eudemus,
Aristotle's disciple, or written on the occasion of his death,
and from the nature of the extract, no less than from the name it bore, seems
to have treated upon the immortality of the soul, and the miserable condition
of man while imprisoned in the body, as compared with that which preceded and
will follow the present life. Our existence on earth is regarded as a
punishment inflicted upon us by the Gods, and in support of this opinion an
appeal is made to the experience of the human race
manifesting itself in proverbs and mythological tales to that effect. The dead
are represented as dwelling in a higher sphere of Being than the living, and as
dishonoured
by any expressions or feelings on the part of the latter which involve an
opposite opinion. The language in which these sentiments are embodied is of
proportionate dignity to the theme; it is totally unlike the dry and jejune
style in which the works which have come down to us are written; on the
contrary it is rather diffuse and ornamented, and fully enables us to
understand the expression of Cicero "Aristotle, with
his golden
flood of language, which judging from his rigidly demonstrative
works alone, we should deem singularly inappropriate". One of the passages
preserved in Cicero is even more gorgeous and eloquent than the one in
Plutarch, and for the sake of the subject we will endeavour
to give some notion of its rhythm and structure, although of course a
translation twice removed from the original, can do this but very inadequately.
The argument is the common one of Natural Theology, the evidence which the
wonders of the Universe afford of the existence of an intelligent Creator.
Aristotle's reasoning appears to be directed against those who asserted
that such an inference was the result of a traditional belief handed down from
generation to generation, and interpreting all
phenomena into an accordance with itself. He attempts by an illustration to
show that this is not the case, but that it proceeds from the natural
conviction of the human mind, unswayed by
any particular bias, as soon as its attention is
roused to these objects. Suppose there to exist, says he, a race of beings, who
had always inhabited a region in the heart of the earth, dwelling in fair and
lordly mansions adorned by statues and pictures, and provided with all the
appliances of luxury in which those whom the world envies, abound, but who
never had visited the surface. Now, if these had heard by rumours
and hearsay that there was a certain Divine Power, living and acting, and then
at some time the jaws of the Earth were to open and allow them to quit their
obscure dwelling-place and come forth into the region which we inhabit, then,
when all at once they beheld Earth, Sea, and Sky, the enormous clouds, the mighty
winds, when they gazed on the Sun, and perceived how vast, how beautiful it
was, how potent in its operation, how by diffusing
its light through the whole of the Heaven it was the cause of the day: and again, when
night had veiled the earth in darkness, and they observed the whole firmament
studded and lit up with stars, the moon with her varying phases, now
increasing, now waning, and all rising and setting and running on their courses
steadily and unvaryingly for an eternity of ages; surely, when they beheld all
this, they would believe both that there were Gods, and that these mighty works
were from their hand! The passage in the De
Officiis
appears rather to be a summary of Aristotle's expressions in his own words than a translation like the above, but
even there the reader will easily recognize an oratorical structure quite unlike
what is to be found in any of the philosopher's works which have come down to us.
From these few and meagre specimens
of the exoteric works of Aristotle, we may observe without any difficulty that
in every respect they were calculated in a rhetorical and superficial age, such
as that of the successors of Theophrastus was, to supersede the others.
Literature became fashionable in high places. Philosophers thronged to the
courts of an Antigonus, a Ptolemy, or an Attalus, and exerted themselves in
making royal roads to knowledge for the sake of their patrons. A general
acquaintance with the doctrines of the school to which they attached themselves
was all that these latter could pretend to, and the instructor soon found out
that very little more would be sufficient for himself.
Why should he bestow time and labour on
what would not be available to his purposes? Why should he trouble himself with
thinking out the results which he could find ready provided to his hand? Above
all, why should he neglect works which supplied food to his fancy and grace to
his style, agreeably and lucidly written, and generally acceptable in literary
society, for the dry and laborious systematic treatise whose only merit was its
rigidly logical connection. The very discipline of the Lyceum, as we have shown
in an earlier part of this essay, contributed its share to the work of
deterioration, by producing an unconscious indifference to the truth of
opinions provided only they were plausible and coherent; and the vanity of
possessing, a multifarious knowledge lost the only check which could have
restrained it. The age of thought gave way to an age of mere accumulation of learning,
and in such a one what could take any man to works like Aristotle's scientific ones? In the time of Cicero
a considerable impulse had certainly been given to philosophy. Yet how
instructive is the story which he relates in the introduction to his Topica.
His friend Trebatius had stumbled while
looking over his library upon the Topica of
Aristotle, of which he had never heard, and on learning from Cicero the nature
of the work was seized with a strong desire to read it. The obscurity of the
book repelled him, and an eminent rhetorician to whom he applied for assistance
told him that of those works of Aristotle he knew nothing. This I was by no
means surprized
at, says Cicero, that a rhetorician should know nothing of a philosopher, of
whom, philosophers themselves, with the exception of a very few, knew nothing. And although Cicero deservedly prides himself
upon being the introducer of Greek philosophy among his countrymen, it is
extremely questionable whether, with the exception of
those works which have a direct application to oratory, his knowledge of
Aristotle was not confined to the exoteric writings. It is certainly these
which he takes as his model and his basis in his own philosophical treatises.
Where a writer's opinions are studied rather than his principles and method, where
readers do not take the trouble to put themselves upon his standing ground, to
enter into his thoughts, and follow them out through the ramifications of his
system, there will often appear a want of harmony between the results at which
he arrives. There is indeed a point from which all these will appear in their
true perspective, but this point is on an eminence which demands both time and labour
to ascend. This want of agreement in his results was imputed to Aristotle at an
early period, certainly before the time of Cicero, who notes it and gives a
partial explanation of it. On the subject of the Chief
Good says he, there are two kinds of works, the one written in a popular
manner, and termed by them exoteric, the other elaborated with greater care,
which they left in the form of notes. This makes them thought not always to say
the same thing; although in the upshot there is no discrepancy at all, in those
at least whom I mentioned, [Aristotle and Theophrastus] neither do the two
differ the one from the other. Here Cicero only speaks of those works which the
author kept by him and continually made additions to, a class of Writings which
did not form an important part of the scientific ones. But it is quite plain
that the remark might be extended to the whole of these latter; in every one of
them might be found instances where Aristotle might appear not to say the same
thing as in his more popular publications, but where at the same time in the upshot there would be no discrepancy at all. Now
here we have the fact which formed the basis of the subsequent opinion that
Aristotle had an inner and an outer doctrine, an opinion which gathered
strength and distinctness as it passed from one hand to another, and is in
modern times repeated with a confidence that would lead one to imagine it
rested on the explicit assertion of the author himself. But neither in Strabo,
Plutarch, nor Gellius is there any hint of
such a willful suppression of sentiments on the part of Aristotle, although all
three of these authors allude to a division of his works into two classes
adapted to different mental qualifications in the readers. In Clement of
Alexandria appears the first trace of any such notion, and the expressions
which he makes use of are hardly sufficient to justify
us in concluding that he had at all a decided opinion on this score. But it was
a suggestion which would not fail to be caught hold of in an age singularly
attached, as the declining Roman empire was, to mystical orgies and secret
associations. Before Clement indeed, Lucian had taken advantage of it for the
purpose of a jest, where in his Sale of Philosophers, he puts Aristotle up to
auction as a double man. But obviously this is only a ludicrous version of the
fact that his works were of very different kinds, stated, as it is not unlikely
that even the Aristotelians of that age would be fond of doing, in a
paradoxical form. Nay, even when we get down to the close of the fourth
century, to the rhetorician Themistius, a very great allowance must be made for
the conceits of his affected style, before we can safely form our estimate of
his real sentiments. No one can dream of taking in their literal sense such
phrases as those of Aristotle
shutting up and fortifying his meaning in a rampart of obscure phraseology, to
secure it from the ravages of uninitiated marauders, or considering that knowledge was like food and drugs, one sort proper for
the healthy, another for the sick, and therefore involving his meaning in a
wall of cloud, the doors of which two guardians, Perspicuity and Obscurity,
like the Homeric Hours, stood ready to open to the initiated and close upon the
profane. But after making all proper allowance, there is no question
that in the time of Themistius the opinion of the double meaning of Aristotle
was widely received. Ammonius,
in the fifth century, thinks it necessary to state, apparently in opposition to
the popular belief, that the dialogues of Aristotle differ very much from the
direct treatises; that in the latter, as addressing his discourse to genuine
students, he not only delivers his real opinions, but employs the severest
methods, such as people in general cannot follow; while in the latter, as they
are written for general use, he delivers his real opinions too, but still
employs methods not rigidly demonstrative but of such a kind that the ordinary run of people are able to follow them. But
his scholar Simplicius no longer swims against the
tide: he asserts that in the acroamatic works
Aristotle aimed at obscurity, in order through it to repel the more indolent from
him. The wit of the satirist and the flourishes of the
rhetorician were thus translated into plain prose; and from this time forward
the duplicity of Aristotle's doctrines may
be considered as reckoned among the most indisputable facts.
Having now thoroughly satisfied ourselves that the
narrative of Strabo requires much qualification, we may enquire whether there
is any part of it which is consistent with what from other sources we know
really was the case. And there seems nothing to prevent us from believing that Neleus's heirs really
possessed some books which had belonged to Aristotle and Theophrastus, that Apellicon
purchased these, and that they were brought by Sylla
to Rome and there first made known to people in general. But that these were
works of any great importance we have seen could not be the case; nor that the
decay of the Peripatetic school was owing to the want of them. A part of the
story relates to matters of fact, for which Strabo is a most respectable
witness; a part to a matter of opinion, on which he is no authority whatever
beyond any competent person of the present day. The one half is reconcilable
with the fact that the principal acroamatic works of Aristotle were in
the hands of his successors, and in the Library at Alexandria, during the interval
between Neleus
and Apellicon.
It is in accordance also with the notice of Athenaeus
that Ptolemy carried the libraries of Aristotle and Theophrastus to Alexandria,
and likewise with various other stories which having a less obvious bearing
upon the question, we have for the sake of perspicuity omitted noticing before,
but now present to the reader in a note. The other is inconsistent with these
and many other facts and may be rejected without invalidating the reputation of
Strabo either for veracity or accuracy as regards matters which came within his
scope, a reputation which we should be the last persons to desire to destroy.
What then was the nature of these documents the
preservation of which was the foundation for so remarkable a story? We can only
guess an answer, but we will nevertheless make the attempt.
Athenagus, quoting from the work of Posidonius
the historian, a contemporary of Pompey the Great, gives a sketch of the
character of Apellicon, which seems to
throw some light upon this question. A man of vast wealth and of a restless
disposition, and an adopted citizen of Athens, he appears to have alternately
plunged himself into the turbulent politics of his time, and cultivated
literature in a spurious kind of way. His taste for letters was a mere bibliomania, and brought him into trouble. He purchased,
while the fit for philosophy was upon him, the Peripatetic books and the
library of Aristotle and a great many others, being a man of great property. Moreover he surreptitiously obtained possession of the
ancient original decrees of the Assembly, which were preserved at Athens in the
temple of the Mother of the Gods, and from the other cities too he got hold of
whatever was ancient and curious. This theft obliged him to save his life by
flying the country; in the troublous times however, which soon after succeeded,
he contrived to procure his recall by joining the party of the demagogue Athenion.
This individual had induced his countrymen to take a part in the confederacy
which Mithridates had organized against the power of Rome. In an evil hour Apellicon
quitted book-collecting for military service. He took the command of an
expedition against Delos, which was occupied by Orbius
the Roman praetor; but displayed such utter ignorance of the commonest duties
of a commander that his enemy soon found an opportunity of attacking him
unawares, destroyed or captured the whole of his troops, and burnt all the
machines which he had constructed for storming the city. The unfortunate
dilettante escaped with his life, but died, in what way is not known, before Sylla
stormed Athens and seized on the library which had cost him so dear. It seems
almost certain from this account of Apellicon,
that it was the possession not of the works but of the autographs of them which
was the attraction to him. Can we then conceive that it was the original
autographs of Aristotle and Theophrastus which he purchased from the
representatives of Neleus's family? Autographs of what works? Not of the exoteric: for these
were so generally known that he would have had no difficulty in filling up the
gaps which the damp and worms had produced in his copy. Nor of the systematic
treatises; for if the original manuscript of these had existed, Andronicus
would have had no difficulty in determining what was the
production of Aristotle, and what not, in the various cases where that
question arose. Of neither of these classes of writing then can we imagine that
the story of Strabo is to be understood But if we suppose Aristotle to have left
behind him, as every literary man whose energies last to the end of his life
will do, collections on various subjects, rough draughts of future works,
commonplace books some of a miscellaneous nature, some devoted to particular
matters, containing, it may be, extracts from other writers, references to
their opinions, germs of thoughts hereafter to be worked out, lines of argument
merely indicated; it is very
conceivable that these documents, so long as a healthy and lively philosophical
spirit existed in the Peripatetic school, would receive very little attention.
If they were too fragmentary and unsystematic for publication they would remain
in the possession of Theophrastus and Neleus, too
curious to destroy, too unfinished to make any use of; and if the heirs of Neleus
were illiterate men, they would see nothing in them but so many slovenly and
disjointed scrawls, and not dream of putting them among the sumptuous
collection of books which they sold to King Ptolemy. But in the time of Apellicon,
the state of things was changed. The relics of the founder of the school would
have acquired a sacred character, and unsaleable as they
might have been to Ptolemy, who appears to have been a real lover of literature
and not a mere book-fancier, would fetch a good price with the purchaser of
stolen records. And it is not at all inconsistent with this view, that a person
whose acquaintance with philosophy was of such a kind, should mistake the
nature of the documents he had got hold of, attempt to supply the gaps when he
transcribed the text into new copies, fill these up the reverse of well, and send
the books out into the world full of mistakes.
Such is the theory which, it appears to us, will
reconcile the varying accounts respecting Aristotle's writings, and while it sweeps away all that is adventitious in the
statement of the Greek geographer, will leave his testimony substantially
unimpaired. And this theory is in fact confirmed by the state in which some of
the works of Aristotle have come down to us. For some of these are not merely
books kept by the author and continually worked at, like the Rhetoric, and
Theophrastus's History of Plants, nor are they mere notes for
lectures, a dry skeleton of the subject, complete in themselves and only
requiring the illustration and development which would be supplied by the
extemporaneous efforts of the instructor. Neither of these two descriptions
will explain all the phenomena which strike the reader in the Poetics and the
Politics, as these two treatises are found in our manuscripts. Neither of them complete the discussion of the range of topics which they
promise, and it is impossible to receive as a satisfactory explication of this
fact that they are only fragments of complete works of which the remainder has
been lost. This is quite incompatible with what we find in them, namely
redundancies, whole paragraphs recast, and standing together with those for
which they seem meant as a substitute. Such appearances are only to be
understood on the supposition that the work in which they occur was an
interleaved draught of a future treatise, itself never published (nor yet intended
for publication) by the author. In such a case we should expect to find what we
do find here, and certainly not, to the same extent, in any other work, scholia
containing archaeological or historical notes inserted in the midst of
metaphysical divisions, imperfect analyses, defective enumerations, tacit
references to writings of others or to opinions current at the time, allusions
to questions treated on by the author in the work, which are nowhere to be
found, gaps where obviously something was to be inserted, and expressions so
slovenly as to be almost or wholly ungrammatical. And on the supposition that
these works were note-books devoted to the particular subjects on which they
treat, kept by the author until the materials they contained had been worked up
and published in a complete form, and then discarded by him, we shall see in
what relation they probably stood to the works read by Cicero, and named in the
catalogues of Diogenes Laertius and the anonymous Biographer, and understand
what kind of writings those in all probability were, which descended with the
rest of Aristotle's library to
Theophrastus, and from Theophrastus to Neleus, which were neglected by the librarians of Ptolemy Philadelphus, and emerged from their obscurity in the vault
of Scepsis
to be purchased by the antiquarian Apellicon.
Only in making this estimate we must not forget the different importance which
such writings possess for us, deprived for ever of
those which were formed out of them, from that which they may have had for
their author and his immediate successors, to whom they would appear in no
other light than the scaffold, by the aid of which the cathedral has been
erected, does to the architect. And perhaps we may properly imagine that the
greater fullness of these procured their preservation after they were
recovered, while many others of the same kind, but yet
further removed from completeness, were suffered to perish.
CHAPTER VIII.
REMAINING WORKS OF ARISTOTLE.
We shall conclude
this memoir by a list and a brief literary notice of the Works which have come
down to us under the name of Aristotle, in the order in which they are given in
the edition of the Berlin Academy.
I. Categories.
The
genuineness of this work was much disputed in the time of the ancient
commentators. Adrastus
found a work on the same subject bearing the name of Aristotle, and, singularly
enough, consisting of exactly the same number of
lines. It was however by them determined to be genuine, with
the exception of the last part, which treats on what the Latin Logicians
term the Post-praedicamenta.
II.On interpretation.
A
philosophical treatise on grammar as far as relates to the nature of nouns and verbs.
Some of the old commentators from its obscurity imagined it to be a mere collection
of notes, and Andronicus considered it not to be Aristotle's. Alexander of
Aphrodisias, however,
and Ammonius proved it to
be his, and to have been used by Theophrastus in a treatise of the same name
which he wrote. Still the latter of these, as well as Porphyry, suspected that
the last part of the work was the addition of some more modern hand.
III.Former Analytics. Latter Analytics.
Theophrastus,
Eudemus and Phanias, scholars of Aristotle, wrote treatises on the same
subjects as these three of their master, and called them by the same name, a
circumstance which probably had some connection with the number of Analytics
ascribed to him.
IV.Topics.
An
analysis of the different heads from which demonstrative arguments may be
brought. It was considered by the ancient commentators as the easiest of all
Aristotle's systematic
writings. The Romans however, as Cicero tells us in the preface to his work of
the same name, found it so difficult as to be repelled by it, although he
himself praises it no less for its language than for its scientific merits. His
own work is an epitome of it made by himself from memory during a sea Voyage
from Velia to Rhegium.
V.On sophistical proofs.
An
analysis of the possible forms of fallacy in demonstration. This work has a
natural connection with the Topics, as Aristotle himself remarks in the
beginning of the last chapter of the second book.
The
preceding works taken together complete Aristotle's Logical writings, and with the introduction of
Porphyry to the Categories have gone generally in modern times by the name of
the Organum.
The philosopher gave this name to the art because of all others it is the most
purely instrumental, that is, the most entirely a means to something else, and
the least an end to be desired for its own sake. The term
however, was in subsequent ages misapplied to mean that it was the best of all
instruments for the discovery of truth, as opposed to the observation of facts,
and the art was correspondently abused.
VI.Physical Lectures.
It
is a very questionable matter whether this treatise was published by the author
as one organic whole. The last three books probably formed a treatise by, and the five
first another. Again, of these the first one is quite independent of the rest,
and is devoted to the discussion of primal principles, to which every thing
in nature may be resolved. This book is extremely valuable for the history of
philosophy before the time of Aristotle. He discusses in it the theories of Melissus, Parmenides,
Anaxagoras, Empedocles, and others. The second is taken up with an examination
of the ideas of Nature, Necessity, and Chance; and the next three with the
properties of Body, or rather with the analysis of those notions of the
understanding which are involved in the idea of Body. Of this work abstracts
and syllabuses were very early made by the Peripatetic school, and these by
keeping their attention fixed upon the connection of a system of dogmas,
perhaps contributed much to divert them from the observation of nature, and to
keep up that perpetually-recurring confusion between laws of the Understanding
and laws of the external World which characterizes the whole of the ancient
physical speculations.
VII.On the Heavens
Alexander
of Aphrodisias considered
that the proper name for this work was On
the Cosmos, as only the first two books are really on the
subject of the heavenly bodies and their circular motion. The two last treat on the four elements and the properties of
gravity and lightness, and afford much information relative to the systems of
Empedocles and Democritus.
VIII.
On Generation and Decay.
This
work treats on those properties of bodies which in our times would be considered to be the proper subjects of physiological and
of chemical science. Many other notions, however, of a metaphysical nature, are
mixed up with these, and it is only for its illustration of the history of
philosophy that this work, like the rest of the physical treatises, is of any
value to the modern student.
IX.Meteorology.
The
first of these books was by some in the time of the old commentators held not
to be genuine; and Ammonius
and others considered that the fourth should immediately follow the second of
the last treatise, with which the subjects on which it treats, the changes
effected in bodies by heat and cold, moisture and dryness, &c., are
certainly more nearly connected.
X.To Alexander, on the World.
XI.On the Soul.
In
the first of these books are discussed the opinions of preceding philosophers
upon this subject; in the second, the Soul in its sensible relations; in the third,
in its rational ones. A celebrated dialogue of Aristotle's, to which we
have before referred, bore this same title; and such as consider that the
exoteric works were all in the form of dialogues, imagine that in the Nicomachean Ethics he alludes to it. There are
parts, however, of the third book of this treatise which seem apt for his
purpose in that place, and although the work serves to make up that system of
Aristotle's to which the
preceding physical treatises as well as the following belong, it is
sufficiently independent of them to allow of its being perfectly understood
without their perusal; a character which in our opinion is the only essential
one of an exoteric writing.
XII.Eight tracts on physical subjects, namely,
(a.) On Perception and Objects of Perception,
(b.) On
Memory and Recollection,
(c.) On
Sleep and Waking.
(d.) On
Dreams,
(e.) On
the Prophetic Vision in Sleep,
(f) On
Length and Shortness of Life.
(g.) On Youth and Age, Life and Death,
(h.) On Respiration
XIII. On Breath.
This
treatise, of which the subject is the same as that of the last mentioned,
except that there is more reference in it to the lower animals, has been
considered by many not to be by Aristotle. Sylbourg considers the style to point to
Alexander of Aphrodisias
as its author. Meursius
thought it probably to be by Theophrastus, and Patritius by Strato, principally because such a book is
mentioned by Diogenes among the writings of these. Fabricius considers it to be Aristotle's, because
Aristotle himself, in his treatise On the
Movement of Animals, appears to allude to it, and Galen quotes it as his.
But neither of these two passages are quite conclusive.
XIV. Accounts
of Animals,
This
work is variously entitled in the manuscripts. Pliny, where he speaks of Aristotle's magnificent work On Animals
in fifty books, appears to include together with this all the treatises, on
natural history which follow it, (and indeed are naturally connected with it,) as
well as some on comparative anatomy, now lost. The same may be said of Cicero's notice of
them. This work was illustrated by diagrams of the several parts of animals,
which together with the necessary explanations perhaps formed a treatise by
themselves. But, in fact, the whole of the works on natural history are as
closely connected with one another as the several parts of the Organum, and it would be difficult to assign any
reason why the one class should be regarded as exoteric and the other not so.
Of the probable gradual growth of these works we have spoken above.
XV.On the Parts of Animals
XVI.
On the Movement of Animals
A
curious tract investigating the influences which operate ab extra upon animals. This treatise, together with the one
following, and that On Breath, are often put
together with the eight tracts before mentioned, and
make up in the aggregate what are called the Parva Naturalia.
XVII.
On the Locomotion of Animals
XVIII.On the Engendering of Animals
XIX.
On Colours.
This
has been considered by some critics to be the work of Theophrastus. Plutarch
speaks of a treatise by Aristotle of the same name in two books.
XX.From the Book on Sounds
Apparently this tract is only a fragment; although
Porphyry, who has preserved it in his commentary on the Harmonicon of Ptolemy,
says that he has given the whole work.
XXI. Physiognomica
Of
this tract the last chapter of the Former Analytics is a sort of
compendium
XXII. On Plants.
Aristotle
wrote two books on plants, but not these which we have. They are a translation
into Greek from the Latin; and even this version was considerably removed from
a Greek original, having been made by some Gaul from an Arabian version, which
again was only derived from a more ancient Latin translation. The original of all
these, according to Scaliger's view, was only a cento of scraps taken partly from
Aristotle, and partly from the first book of Theophrastus's History of Plants.
Aristotle�s work was
already lost in the time of Alexander of Aphrodisias.
XIII. On Wonderful Stories.
This
book, in spite of its title, is nothing more than a
collection of strange accounts, nor does it appear to have formed a part of a
larger work of at all a different description. The latter part is obviously
spurious, and with respect to the remainder various opinions have been held.
XXIV. Mechanics.
The
first part of this work touches upon the principles of mechanics,
and is followed by a number of questions which are resolved by a
reference to them.
XXV. Problems.
This
is a collection of questions on various subjects in thirty-eight divisions, of
which the first relates to medical, the fifteenth to mathematical, the
eighteenth to philological, the nineteenth to musical, the twenty-seventh and
three following to ethical, and the rest mainly to physical and physiological
matters. Theophrastus is also said to have compiled a collection of problems,
and Pliny quotes him as the authority for a circumstance which we find
mentioned in this work.
XXVI. On Indivisible Lines.
This
tract is said by Simplicius to have been by some of
the ancient commentators ascribed to Theophrastus.
XXVII. The Quarters and Names of the Winds.
XXVIII. On Xenophanes, on Zeno, on Gorgias.
XXIX. The Metaphysics
This
collection of treatises is said to have been called by Andronicus by this name,
because when he endeavoured
to group the works of Aristotle together systematically, these remained after
he had completed his physical cycle, and he had no better resource than to put
them together after it.
XXX. Nicomachean Ethics.
This is one of the most perspicuous, as well as most
valuable of the works of Aristotle which has come down to us. Although in a
scientific form, there is a reference throughout to practical utility, and
Aristotle himself seems to avow that he has sacrificed some of the rigidness of
his method to this consideration. It is, however, unequalled to this day as a
treatise on Morals. On the subject of the name
different accounts are given. Most of the ancient commentators assert that it
was so called by Aristotle because inscribed to his son Nicomachus. Cicero
appears, as we have seen, to consider the son the author. Petiti
endeavours
to show that the treatise was written at a time when Nicomachus was not born.
It was probably, like the Rhetoric, worked at by the author after having been
published, and this will account for some of those passages which he considers
to be interpolations by the son.
XXXI. The Great Ethics.
XXXII. The Eudemian Ethics.
This work was in ancient times attributed to
Theophrastus or Eudemus. The third and three
following books agree considerably both in subject and style with the fifth,
sixth, and seventh of the Nicomachean Ethics.
XXXIII.On Virtues and Vices.
XXXIV. Politics
Of this work we have given our opinion in an earlier
part of this Essay.
XXXV. Economics.
Of Aristotle's work bearing
this name Diogenes Laertius only mentions one book; and of these it seems quite
evident that both are not by the same author, Erasmus held the first to be
Aristotle's but to be only a fragment, but Niebuhr considers
that lately discovered authorities incontestably prove it to be by
Theophrastus.
If the second book is Aristotle's, it is probably a collection made by him when
collecting materials for his historical and philosophical writings on
government. It is chiefly a string of instances of oppression exercised by one
people upon another, or by tyrants upon their subjects.
XXXVI. The Art of Rhetoric
Besides these books which contain his exposition of
the art, Aristotle wrote one other which contained a history of it and of its
professors from the earliest times to his own. Of this Cicero speaks in the
highest terms, but it is unfortunately lost.
XXXVII.The Rhetoric to Alexander
This treatise is not mentioned by Diogenes Laertius in his catalogue of Aristotle's works; and the dedicatory preface at the beginning is a solitary instance, if it be a writing of Aristotle's, of such a style. Quintilian appears to quote it as the production of Anaximenes of Lampsacus, a contemporary of the Stagirite.
XXXVIII. On
the Poetic Art.
On the subject
of this work we have spoken. It has been considered by others
a fragment of the two books On Poets, which Macrobius
quotes, but it hardly seems possible to consider it in this light. If it is
derived in any way from a published work, it must have been by a process of
epitomizing and selecting, and that not very skillfully.
APPENDIX.
The Political Treatise of
Aristotle is so important for the elucidation of Greek history and Greek
philosophy, that it seems desirable to give some of the reasons which have led
us to form the opinion we have expressed in the text, at greater length than would
be allowed by the limits of an ordinary note; and the principal of them are
accordingly here subjoined. At the same time, however satisfactory we may deem
them, we cannot expect that they will appear at once equally conclusive to
those who have been accustomed always to regard the work in a different light,
and we would request such persons, after perusing the following note, to study
the treatise itself, and then decide whether the form of its composition is, or
is not, incompatible with any other view than the one we have taken of it.
I. In the third Book, the author, on
the occasion of mentioning certain states where an executive power,
almost supreme, was entrusted to one individual, although the rest of the
institutions partook more or less of a democratic character, gives Epidamnus
as an existing instance. In the fifth Book, he has occasion again to refer to
this functionary, but he speaks of his office as one which, no longer existed.
A revolution, gradual but complete, had in the interval been effected
at Epidamnus.
The constitution had acquired a completely popular character, and the office of
Supreme Administrator had together with the other oligarch al features of the
government, been swept away. That such blemishes as this would not have been
left standing in a work published by the author himself, few persons will be
inclined to question. Still it may be argued that although not published by
him, it may yet have been in course of preparation for publication in its
present form, and that its last finish, in which such incongruities would have
been removed, may have been prevented by his death. But this argument may be
shown to be inadmissible. In this same fifth Book there is a passage obviously
written while the expedition and death of Dion the Syracusan, (which latter
happened soon after the dethronement of Dionysius the tyrant by his agency,) was
a subject of common talk and considered as an event of the day. One cause of despotical
governments being overthrown is, says Aristotle, dissension among those parties
in whose hands they are, as in the instance of Gelon's relations,
and at the present time in that of Dionysius's. Dion's death, which he mentions presently afterwards; took
place in the first half of the year 353, B. C. Now Aristotle was at this time
little more than thirty years of age, and was at
Athens pursuing his studies under Plato. (We cannot therefore suppose that the
Politics is a work, the elaboration of which was cut short by the author's death, without at the same time supposing that this
expression was by him suffered to stand for a period of more than thirty years,
of which every succeeding one would render its impropriety more glaring.
II. In a passage of the first Book, in the course of
an analysis of the different elements which enter into
the Social Relation, the question is started whether the acquisition of
external objects of desire, necessarily and in the nature of things is a part
of the office of the master of a household. For the purpose of elucidating his
views on this subject, the Author digresses into a general discussion of the
question of Production. Some kinds of this he considers as pointed out by
Nature herself to Man; the exercise of them is necessary to the supply of his
natural wants in the Social State, and consequently, (this Social State itself
being grounded in Nature,) the industrial tendency which prompts him to such
exercise is to be regarded as analogous to those ordinary instincts which
direct the animal creation to the particular regions that furnish the food
required by their peculiar organization. But Production has a natural limit,
and this limit is short of the extent to which the powers of Man are capable of carrying it. Its natural limit is the
satisfaction of the natural wants of the Community, under the highest possible
form of civilization. So soon as this limit is passed, Production changes its
character. Its employment then becomes the accumulation of means without
reference to an end; and it assumes the character, according to the views of
the ancients, of a spurious, unnatural, and sordid pursuit. To this species of
Production, Aristotle proposes to appropriate the name of Acquisition. The same
arguments which prove that the former kind was, in the nature
of things, part of the duty of the head of the Family, would show that
this latter is not; and such is the conclusion to which Aristotle comes, and
which he formally states.
III.In the
third Book is proposed for discussion the question whether government by a
Monarch on whom there is no constitutional check, or by a Code of Laws absolutely rigid and unchangeable, is the alternative to be
preferred, on the hypothesis that in the one case the laws, and in the other
the autocrat, shall be the best conceivable. The heads of the arguments on both
sides are given. But strangely enough, we find in this place, that immediately
after the subject has been to all appearance concluded, it recommences afresh.
Here in fact are two long paragraphs, of which the one is obviously intended to
be a recasting of the other, standing side by side, the original one closely
following its more digested and orderly arranged substitute. Their identity is
quite manifest on the most cursory perusal, after the attention of the reader
has once been directed to the circumstance. It is worth remarking that the
passage where the magistracy at Epidamnus,
to which we before adverted, is spoken of as existing, occurs in what we
consider the prior in time of these two rival paragraphs.
IV.Towards the
end of the third book (Aristotle mentions having discussed another subject
which may be regarded as the connecting link between his Moral and his
Political philosophy, namely, whether the qualities which go to make up the
perfection of a man, as a man, are the same in kind and degree as those which
constitute his perfection as a citizen; or, in the phraseology of the Greek
philosophy, whether the virtue of a man is identical with the virtue of a
citizen. This, he says, he has settled in his first Book. But the subject is
really handled not in the first, but the third Book. Now we can scarcely
conceive that Aristotle himself could cite his own work so inaccurately, and
we might be inclined perhaps to consider that the expression referred to a former
treatise and not a former part of this one. But we are prevented from doing
this by the recurrence of the same phrase in another passage where it is
impossible to avoid referring it to the first book of the Polities. We are
therefore inclined to conjecture that at the time this reference was made, the
first Book did not terminate where it now does, but was continued on into what
is now the third, that the present second Book, (which is perfectly insulated
from all the refit of the treatise and consists entirely of a review of certain
constitutions existing in the time of Aristotle, together with a discussion of
the political writings of Plato, Phaleas of Chaleddon,
Hippodamus
of Miletus, and others) was wanting.
V.Other
passages might be produced which appear to indicate the accumulation of
materials, or the growth of thoughts, in a manner which we could not expect to
find either in a published work, or one in course of preparation for
publication.
Thus the examination of what rights constitute
citizenship, a question entered upon by him in the beginning of the third Book,
has every appearance of being a collection of notes put down by him while he
was in the course of coming to his opinions. His first definition of
citizenship is participation in judicial and official functions. Then he goes
on to say that this definition is more applicable to democracies than to any
other form of government, and after exemplifying the truth of this observation
by the cases of Lacedaemon and Carthage, proposes to alter it and substitute
for it the position that a citizen is one who has a right to a share in
functions either deliberative or judicial. Then follow two notes of which the
second grows as it were out of the first, and continues
to the end of the chapter. In the former he distinguishes between the legal and
the natural definition of citizenship, and in the second remarks upon certain
political writers of the time, who had raised a question connected with the
definition of citizenship, namely, what constituted the identity of a state.
After this he again resumes the thread of the discussion. But these notes are
not like the one we mentioned above: they are very short, but they refer to a
great many points, and even the opinions which are remarked on are rather
implied as known than distinctly stated.
In the fourth Book he attempts an analysis of States
considered as masses of individuals. But the passage is in disorder and the
enumeration incomplete. The fifth class he speaks of is the military one. The
mention of this class suggests a critique upon the Republic of Plato, in
reference to a similar analysis which is introduced there. On reverting to his
own division, he proceeds not with a sixth, but a seventh class.
Some way further on he begins the subject again, as it
were from a new point of view. He proceeds to attempt a classification of
states, by analyzing government into its component functions, and exhausting
the number of ways in which the various judicial, executive, and deliberative
duties of the state may be performed. But the division is incomplete, and to
all appearance designedly so. See for instance p. 1300. col. a. lin. 23. seqq.,
where it appears plain that the author did not wish to enumerate all the different
modes by which the functionaries might be appointed, but only the more
important ones, those perhaps
on which he had certain remarks to make. Still a complete enumeration is so
apparently necessary, that the passage seems to have been tampered with by some
person who desiderated it.
The confusion in one or two of these passages some may
be inclined to attribute merely to ordinary causes, such as the ignorance or
carelessness of transcribers, or the damaged condition of the manuscripts which
they copied. We are not disposed to accept this solution of the difficulties
which meet us so constantly in the work; although it is extremely difficult to
say what degree of disarrangement may not be due to this cause. Such an hypothesis however can hardly be entertained in such
cases as the following.
VI.In a
passage in the third Book the question on which Aristotle is engaged is the one
we alluded to before whether the perfection of civism is identical with the
perfection of humanity. This question may, he says, after resolving it in one
way, be settled with the same result by another course of investigation, viz.,
by determining what is the idea of the perfection of a state.
Now a perfect state requires that the employment of the members of it should be
different, but that each one should perform his duty in the best imaginable
manner. That mental and bodily state of the individual which is the best
adapted to produce this result in the highest conceivable degree, is in the
language of Greek metaphysics called his virtue or perfection (apery). If now
the duty to be performed be different the virtue (or talent) which is requisite
to produce the performance will be different. But such is the case in the
perfection of a state: there must be a division of labour,
handicrafts'men as well as philosophers, tillers of the soil as well as
politicians. It is therefore inconsistent that all the citizens should be of
the highest order of mind, or indeed of the same order whatever it may be.
VII. The
instance of an obvious deficiency which we have just given, although perhaps
one of the most striking cases of this kind, is not the only one. In the
enumeration of the different archetypal forms of Government, he expresses his
intention to treat of Despotic Monarchy (or Tyranny,) the last in order; for of all, says he, it has the least claim to be
considered a Polity, and polities are the subject with which our investigation
is concerned.
Now certainly we might refer this observation to the
reason which has just been assigned, but if this be its right application, how
very superfluous and unnecessarily formal it is. A couple of pages further on,
the number of different modifications which the despotic form of government
assumes are enumerated, and the author winds up the paragraph by saying These
are the different species of Despotic Monarchy, so many and no more from the
causes which have been mentioned. But the reader will look in vain for this
professed mention of the causes; and, putting this circumstance together with
the formal statement before mentioned, we have little scruple in conjecturing
that the latter really followed a separate discussion of the nature of Despotic
Government, which also contained reasons why the forms it assumed should be so
many and no more.
VIII. There is
another class of cases, in which the author obviously alludes to the writings
of contemporaries, but the allusions are so little explicit and at the same time it is so obvious that they are
allusions that it seems impossible to avoid one of two
inferences, either that the passages in which they occur are little else than
memoranda for the writer himself, or that the
work is a collection of notes for lectures, and that a formal oral statement of
the opinions referred to had antecedently been given. The latter view has been
entertained with respect to most of Aristotle's writings, but in our opinion it is inconsistent with the comparatively
full development of some parts of this work, with the incompleteness of the whole as a system, and above all, with
the contemporaneous existence of such phenomena as those of which we have above
given an example (where
an original paragraph stood side by side with its intended successor. The
following may serve as instances of the allusions we speak of, although an
inspection of the whole course of the argument in the context is necessary to
appreciate their force.
In the fourth Book he speaks of certain political writers, and says that their usual mode of considering the
various modifications of Government, was to suppose two types, pure Oligarchy
and pure Democracy, and to regard the other forms as compounds, in various
proportions, of these. Similarly they held that there
were two archetypal species in musical composition, the Dorian and the
Phrygian, of which the rest were but compounds. But says he, the better and the
truer mode of division is that which we adopted, to lay down the properly
constituted forms of Government as being two or one in number,
and regard the rest as lapses from this type. Now, if we recur to
Aristotle's own division, we find that he really lays down
neither one nor two properly constituted archetypal forms of Government, but
three; namely, Monarchy, Aristocracy and Polity. These three differ from one
another in the circumstance that the supreme authority in them is respectively
in the hands of one individual, a minority and a majority, while they agree
with one another, and are regarded as uncorrupted and legitimate forms in that
the recognized end of government is, equally in all of them, the advantage not
of the governors but of the whole. Tyranny, Oligarchy, and Democracy, in which
the interest not of the whole, but severally of the One, the Few, and the
Majority, is the recognized end, are considered by him as lapses or deviations
respectively from the three types. Now there is nothing in the interval between
this formal division and the passage with which we are at present concerned to
prepare us for a resolution of the tripartite distribution into the alleged
bipartite one; although certainly it may be argued that Monarchy is only a particular case of Aristocracy and may be here so considered.
This view of the subject however does not accord with Aristotle's manner of treating the question of Monarchy in the
latter part of the third Book. Should we not rather be justified in supposing
that as the writers of whom he is speaking neglected the consideration of the
Monarchical form, so Aristotle in comparing his own division with theirs, threw
out of consideration that part of it to which theirs furnished no parallel, and
thus that the two properly constituted types to which he alludes are the
Aristocracy and Polity of his former division. If this opinion be a sound one;
if the author really did thus tacitly modify his statements with a reference to
the treatment of the same subject by others, we cannot but regard the work as
neither published nor intended for publication.
The same political writers are perhaps those alluded
to in the early part of the sixth Book; but the expression is general in its
form. Aristotle proposes to discuss the modifications of government which arise
in cases where a combination is formed of heterogeneous elements, such as
courts of law regulated on the principles of aristocracy with election to
offices on those of oligarchy, or an oligarchal
executive council and oligarchal
courts of law with an aristocratical
mode of selecting magistrates. These are cases, he says, which ought to be
considered, and in the current theories were not so.
We will terminate this long and somewhat wearisome
discussion by directing the attention of the reader to one other passage, which
although certainly corrupt, and, besides, very slovenly expressed, may perhaps
be tolerably explained on the principle which has been stated. Violent
revolutions, by which the whole constitution of the