Aristotle: a biography without a life

Aristotle: The First Teacher, Philip Freeman, Yale University Press, £18.99

Aristotle was born in Stagira, a small town in northern Greece, in 384 BC. His father Nicomachus served as physician to King Amyntas III in nearby Macedon, and both his parents died while he was a child. He was raised by a guardian, Proxenus of Atarneus (a city on the coast of Asia Minor), who sent him aged 17 to Plato’s Academy where he remained for 20 years. These are the bare bones of a biography, and they are almost all that we know for certain about Aristotle’s life. In his short and well-paced book, Philip Freeman occasionally supplements these details with a degree of cautious imagination. The waterfalls near Stagira ‘must have offered a favourite outing’ for the youngster; the Macedonian court ‘must have been a shock’ after his quiet childhood; he ‘must have felt as if his world were falling apart’ after both his parents died.

The philosopher who arrived at Philip’s court allegedly had thin legs, small eyes, a lisp, fashionable hair, and a fondness for rings and fine clothes. He married well and died wealthy, leaving a will in which he freed his household slaves by name, with money and property attached. He also provided generously for his companion Herpyllis and their son Nicomachus, after whom one of his two weighty works on ethics was named (it is distinguished as ‘the Nicomachean Ethics’). When Freeman notes, however, that by contrast to Aristotle, Socrates had been ‘a humble stonemason’ who barely travelled out of Athens, it is a shame this standard but erroneous view of that philosopher is blandly trotted out. Plato’s dialogues place Socrates’ father in the milieu of Pericles’ circle, and a household able to equip a son as a hoplite was well off. Unlike Aristotle, Socrates chose to espouse poverty and self-abnegation as part of his philosophical mission. Nothing about Aristotle’s life story points similarly to any relationship of his everyday experience to the colossal output of his mind.

Freeman notes that Werner Jaeger’s 1923 attempt to find in Aristotle’s life the key to the development of his philosophy remains ‘a tricky business not supported by most scholars.’ If we want to understand how Aristotle’s life might explain his thought, we are destined for disappointment. While the basic facts rest on reasonably solid testimony, many of the more colourful details – his appearance, his lisp, his bon mots, his deathbed – do not. These come down from sources compiled centuries after Aristotle’s death, some coloured by the rivalry between the Academy and the Lyceum. We cannot even be sure whether Plato’s cleverest student took it as a bitter slight when, after Plato’s death in 347 BC, leadership of the Academy passed to Plato’s nephew Speusippus rather than to him. We simply learn that he returned to Atarneus and joined the court of the tyrant Hermias, a former slave and a close friend of his.

Hermias was to suffer a horrible death on the orders of the Great King, Artaxerxes III, who may have suspected his friendly dealings with Macedon as showing hostile intentions to Persia. Having been lured into a trap, he was tortured and finally crucified. To honour his friend, Aristotle composed a Hymn to Virtue, which was still sung by his students years later, as well as an indignant epigram on a monument set up at Delphi, which runs (in my translation):

This man was slain in breach of sacred law,

by Persia’s archer-king, who scorned to draw

him into open combat, spear to spear,

but used deceit to draw his victim near.

The sentiment is conventionally pious and martial, not what one might expect from such an unconventional and wide-ranging mind as Aristotle’s, had the authorship not been secure.

Aristotle went on to marry Pythias, Hermias’ niece and adopted daughter. While he was based at Atarneus he sailed to nearby Lesbos, around 345 BC, with his pupil and friend Theophrastus for a project of marine research involving first-hand observation, dissection, and analysis of the testimony of local fishermen. It became the subject of a groundbreaking work of biological science, History of Animals. The title of Freeman’s short chapter on the book, ‘The Invention of Science’, echoes Armand Marie Leroi’s 2015 masterly book The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science. After returning to Athens from Macedon, Aristotle founded his own school, the Lyceum, and directed it for around 12 years.

Tradition holds that Aristotle lectured his students while strolling round the colonnades, which gave rise to the name given to his followers – Peripatetics, the ‘walkers around’ (some scholars prefer to trace the name to the peripatos, the covered walkway at the Lyceum). He was not, of course, the first man to conduct such philosophical teaching, so while Freeman’s subtitle, ‘The First Teacher’, translates the Arabic al-mu’allim al-awwal, the honorific title given to Aristotle by medieval Muslim scholars, the phrase might be better rendered the ‘foremost teacher’. The title given to the 9th-century al-Farabi, al-mu’allim al-thani, ‘the Second Teacher’, confirms that these were assessments of the thinkers’ ranking as sources of knowledge. Aristotle’s primacy in this regard is echoed in Dante’s lines that honour him as ‘Il maestro di color che sanno’ – ‘the master of those who know’ – cited as this book’s epigraph.

After Alexander the Great’s death in 323 BC, anti-Macedonian feeling in Athens produced a charge of impiety against Aristotle, ostensibly over the old hymn in praise of Hermias. Aristotle left for Chalcis, reportedly remarking that he would not let the Athenians ‘sin against philosophy a second time.’ The Chalcidian customs officials are said to have found 75 saucepans among his baggage, though it’s suggested that these were precious inscribed bronze plaques from Aristotle’s vast library. He died within the year of a chronic stomach complaint, lying in bed holding a skinful of warm oil to his stomach with one hand and a bronze ball in the other, so that when he drifted off the ball would drop and he would be reminded to reheat the oil. It’s ironically apt that a man of such unprecedented observational skill should die only when he dropped the ball for the last time.