Among the lost plays, the following are the chief of which anything is known:—1.The BanquetersΔαιταλεῖς, 427B.C.—A satire on young Athens. A father has two sons; one is brought up in the good old school, another in the tricky subtleties of the new; and the contrast of results is the chief theme.2.The Babylonians, 426B.C.—Under this name the subject-allies of Athens are represented as “Babylonians”-barbarian slaves, employed to grind in the mill. The oppression of the allies by the demagogues—a topic often touched elsewhere—was, then, the main subject of the piece, in which Aristophanes is said to have attacked especially the system of appointing to offices by lot. The comedy is memorable as opening that Aristophanic war upon Cleon which was continued in theKnightsand theWasps.The Merchantmen, The Farmers, The Preliminary Contest(Proagon), and possibly theOld Age(Geras), belonged to the First Period. TheGerasis assigned by Süvern to 422B.C., and is supposed to have been a picture of dotage similar to that in theKnights. A comedy calledThe Islandsis conjectured to have dealt with the sufferings imposed by the war on the insular tributaries. TheTriphaleswas probably a satire on Alcibiades; theStorks, on the tragic poet Patrocles.In theAeolosicon—produced by his son Araros in 387B.C.—Aristophanes probably parodied theAeolusof Euripides. TheCocalusis thought to have been a parody of the legend, according to which a Sicilian king of that name slew Minos.
Among the lost plays, the following are the chief of which anything is known:—
1.The BanquetersΔαιταλεῖς, 427B.C.—A satire on young Athens. A father has two sons; one is brought up in the good old school, another in the tricky subtleties of the new; and the contrast of results is the chief theme.
2.The Babylonians, 426B.C.—Under this name the subject-allies of Athens are represented as “Babylonians”-barbarian slaves, employed to grind in the mill. The oppression of the allies by the demagogues—a topic often touched elsewhere—was, then, the main subject of the piece, in which Aristophanes is said to have attacked especially the system of appointing to offices by lot. The comedy is memorable as opening that Aristophanic war upon Cleon which was continued in theKnightsand theWasps.
The Merchantmen, The Farmers, The Preliminary Contest(Proagon), and possibly theOld Age(Geras), belonged to the First Period. TheGerasis assigned by Süvern to 422B.C., and is supposed to have been a picture of dotage similar to that in theKnights. A comedy calledThe Islandsis conjectured to have dealt with the sufferings imposed by the war on the insular tributaries. TheTriphaleswas probably a satire on Alcibiades; theStorks, on the tragic poet Patrocles.
In theAeolosicon—produced by his son Araros in 387B.C.—Aristophanes probably parodied theAeolusof Euripides. TheCocalusis thought to have been a parody of the legend, according to which a Sicilian king of that name slew Minos.
A sympathetic reader of Aristophanes can hardly fail to perceive that, while his political and intellectual tendencies are well marked, his opinions, in so far as they colour his comedies, are too indefinite to reward, or indeed to tolerate, analysis. Aristophanes was a natural conservative. His ideal was the Athens of the Persian wars. He disapproved the policy which had made Athenian empire irksome to the allies and formidable to Greece; he detested the vulgarity and the violence of mob-rule; he clave to the old worship of the gods; he regarded the new ideas of education as a tissue of imposture and impiety. How far he was from clearness or precision of view in regard to the intellectual revolution which was going forward, appears from theClouds, in which thinkers and literary workers who had absolutely nothing in common are treated with sweeping ridicule as prophets of a common heresy. Aristophanes is one of the men for whom opinion is mainly a matter of feeling, not of reason. His imaginative susceptibility gave him a warm and loyal love for the traditional glories of Athens, however dim the past to which they belonged; a horror of what was ugly or ignoble in the present; a keen perception of what was offensive or absurd in pretension. The broad preferences and dislikes thus generated were enough not only to point the moral of comedy, but to make him, in many cases, a really useful censor for the city. The service which he could render in this way was, however, only negative. He could hardly be, in any positive sense, a political or a moral teacher for Athens. His rooted antipathy to intellectual progress, while it affords easy and wide scope for his wit, must after all, lower his intellectual rank. The great minds are not the enemies of ideas. But as a mocker—to use the word which seems most closely to describe him on this side—he is incomparable for the union of subtlety with riot of the comicimagination. As a poet, he is immortal. And, among Athenian poets, he has it for his distinctive characteristic that he is inspired less by that Greek genius which never allows fancy to escape from the control of defining, though spiritualizing, reason, than by such ethereal rapture of the unfettered fancy as lifts Shakespeare or Shelley above it,—
“Pouring his full heartIn profuse strains of unpremeditated art.”
“Pouring his full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.”
Bibliography.—Editio princeps (Aldine, Venice, 1498), by Marcus Musurus (not including theLysistrataandThesmophoriazusae); S. Bergler (ed. P. Burmann, 1760); Invernizi-Beck-Dindorf (1794-1834); I. Bekker (1829); H.A. Holden (expurgated text, 1868), withOnomasticon(new ed., 1902); F.H.M. Blaydes (1880-1893), and critical edition (1886); J. van Leeuwen (1893 foll.); F.W. Hall and E.M. Geldart (text, 1900-1901), with the fragment (from the Oxyrhynchus papyri) of a dialogue between two women concerning a leathern phallus, perhaps from Aristophanes. There is a complete edition of the valuable scholia by F. Dübner (1842, Didot series),—with the anonymous biographies of the poet; of the Ravenna MS. by A. Martin (1883), and W.G. Rutherford (1896-1905). Among English translations mention may be made of those of V.J. Hickie (prose, in Bohn’sClassical Library); (verse) J. Hookham Frere, five plays; T. Mitchell, four plays; and, above all, B.B. Rogers, a brilliant work of exceptional merit. There is a concordance to the plays and fragments by H. Dunbar (1883). On Aristophanes generally see H. Müller-Strübing,Aristophanes und die historische Kritik(1873); the article by G. Kaibel in Pauly-Wissowa’sRealencyclopadie, ii. 1 (1896); A. Couat,Aristophane et l’ancienne comédie attique(1889); E. Deschanel,Études sur Aristophane(3rd ed., 1892); G. Dantu,Opinions et critiques d’Aristophane sur le mouvement politique et intellectuel à Athènes(Paris, 1907). For the numerous editions and translations of separate plays in English and other languages see the introductions to Blaydes’s edition, and, for the literature, the introduction to W.J.M. Starkie’s edition of theWasps(1897); W. Engelmann,Scriptores Graeci(1880); and “Bericht über die Literatur der griechischen Komödie aus den Jahren 1892-1901” in C. Bursian’sJahresbericht über die Fortschritte der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, cxvi. (1904).
Bibliography.—Editio princeps (Aldine, Venice, 1498), by Marcus Musurus (not including theLysistrataandThesmophoriazusae); S. Bergler (ed. P. Burmann, 1760); Invernizi-Beck-Dindorf (1794-1834); I. Bekker (1829); H.A. Holden (expurgated text, 1868), withOnomasticon(new ed., 1902); F.H.M. Blaydes (1880-1893), and critical edition (1886); J. van Leeuwen (1893 foll.); F.W. Hall and E.M. Geldart (text, 1900-1901), with the fragment (from the Oxyrhynchus papyri) of a dialogue between two women concerning a leathern phallus, perhaps from Aristophanes. There is a complete edition of the valuable scholia by F. Dübner (1842, Didot series),—with the anonymous biographies of the poet; of the Ravenna MS. by A. Martin (1883), and W.G. Rutherford (1896-1905). Among English translations mention may be made of those of V.J. Hickie (prose, in Bohn’sClassical Library); (verse) J. Hookham Frere, five plays; T. Mitchell, four plays; and, above all, B.B. Rogers, a brilliant work of exceptional merit. There is a concordance to the plays and fragments by H. Dunbar (1883). On Aristophanes generally see H. Müller-Strübing,Aristophanes und die historische Kritik(1873); the article by G. Kaibel in Pauly-Wissowa’sRealencyclopadie, ii. 1 (1896); A. Couat,Aristophane et l’ancienne comédie attique(1889); E. Deschanel,Études sur Aristophane(3rd ed., 1892); G. Dantu,Opinions et critiques d’Aristophane sur le mouvement politique et intellectuel à Athènes(Paris, 1907). For the numerous editions and translations of separate plays in English and other languages see the introductions to Blaydes’s edition, and, for the literature, the introduction to W.J.M. Starkie’s edition of theWasps(1897); W. Engelmann,Scriptores Graeci(1880); and “Bericht über die Literatur der griechischen Komödie aus den Jahren 1892-1901” in C. Bursian’sJahresbericht über die Fortschritte der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, cxvi. (1904).
(R. C. J.)
1The dates in the text, as given by Jebb, are retained. According to R.G. Kent,Classical Review(April 1905, April 1906), Aristophanes was born in 465, and died in 375B.C.2Or “fourty-four” (readingμδ´forνδ´in Suidas).3See E. Curtius,Hist. of Greece, iii (Eng. trans. p. 275).4The date is uncertain; others give 392 and 389.
1The dates in the text, as given by Jebb, are retained. According to R.G. Kent,Classical Review(April 1905, April 1906), Aristophanes was born in 465, and died in 375B.C.
2Or “fourty-four” (readingμδ´forνδ´in Suidas).
3See E. Curtius,Hist. of Greece, iii (Eng. trans. p. 275).
4The date is uncertain; others give 392 and 389.
ARISTOPHANES,of Byzantium, Greek critic and grammarian, was born about 257B.C.He removed early to Alexandria, where he studied under Zenodotus and Callimachus. At the age of sixty he was appointed chief librarian of the museum. He died about 185-180B.C.Aristophanes chiefly devoted himself to the poets, especially Homer, who had already been edited by his master Zenodotus. He also edited Hesiod, the chief lyric, tragic and comic poets, arranged Plato’s dialogues in trilogies, and abridged Aristotle’sNature of Animals. His arguments to the plays of Aristophanes and the tragedians are in great part preserved. His works on Athenian courtesans, masks and proverbs were the results of his study of Attic comedy. He further commented on theΠίνακεςof Callimachus, a sort of history of Greek literature. As a lexicographer, Aristophanes compiled collections of foreign and unusual words and expressions, and special lists (words denoting relationship, modes of address). As a grammarian, he founded a scientific school, and in hisAnalogysystematically explained the various forms. He introduced critical signs—except the obelus; punctuation prosodiacal, and accentual marks were probably already in use. The foundation of the so-called Alexandrian “canon” was also due to his impulse (Sandys, Hist. Class. Schol., ed. 1906, i. 129 f.).
Nauck,Aristophanis Byzantii Grammatici Fragmenta(1848).
Nauck,Aristophanis Byzantii Grammatici Fragmenta(1848).
ARISTOTLE(384-322B.C.), the great Greek philosopher, was born at Stagira, on the Strymonic Gulf, and hence called “the Stagirite.” Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in hisEpistle on Demosthenes and Aristotle(chap. 5), gives the following sketch of his life:—Aristotle (Άριστοτέλης) was the son of Nicomachus, who traced back his descent and his art to Machaon, son of Aesculapius; his mother being Phaestis, a descendant of one of those who carried the colony from Chalcis to Stagira. He was born in the 99th Olympiad in the archonship at Athens of Diotrephes (384-383), three years before Demosthenes. In the archonship of Polyzelus (367-366), after the death of his father, in his eighteenth year, he came to Athens, and having joined Plato spent twenty years with him. On the death of Plato (May 347) in the archonship of Theophilus (348-347) he departed to Hermias, tyrant of Atarneus, and, after three years’ stay, during the archonship of Eubulus (345-344) he moved to Mitylene, whence he went to Philip of Macedon in the archonship of Pythodotus (343-342), and spent eight years with him as tutor of Alexander. After the death of Philip (336), in the archonship of Euaenetus (335-334), he returned to Athens and kept a school in the Lyceum for twelve years. In the thirteenth, after the death of Alexander (June 323) in the archonship of Cephisodorus (323-322), having departed to Chalcis, he died of disease (322), after a life of three-and-sixty years.
I. Aristotle’s Life
This account is practically repeated by Diogenes Laertius in hisLife of Aristotle, on the authority of theChroniclesof Apollodorus, who lived in the 2nd centuryB.C.Starting then from this tradition, near enough to the time, we can confidently divide Aristotle’s career into four periods: his youth under his parents till his eighteenth year; his philosophical education under Plato at Athens till his thirty-eighth year; his travels in the Greek world till his fiftieth year; and his philosophical teaching in the Lyceum till his departure to Chalcis and his death in his sixty-third year. But when we descend from generals to particulars, we become less certain, and must here content ourselves with few details.
Aristotle from the first profited by having a father who, being physician to Amyntas II., king of Macedon, and one of the Asclepiads who, according to Galen, practised their sons in dissection, both prepared the way for his son’s influence at the Macedonian court, and gave him a bias to medicine and biology, which certainly led to his belief in nature and natural science, and perhaps induced him to practise medicine, as he did, according to his enemies, Timaeus and Epicurus, when he first went to Athens. At Athens in his second period for some twenty years he acquired the further advantage of balancing natural science by metaphysics and morals in the course of reading Plato’s writings and of hearing Plato’s unwritten dogmas (cf.ἐν τοῖς λεγομένοις ἀγράφοις δόγμασιν, Ar.Physics, iv. 2, 209 b 15, Berlin ed.). He was an earnest, appreciative, independent student. The master is said to have called his pupil the intellect of the school and his house a reader’s. He is also said to have complained that his pupil spurned him as colts do their mothers. Aristotle, however, always revered Plato’s memory (Nic. Ethics, i. 6), and even in criticizing his master counted himself enough of a Platonist to cite Plato’s doctrines as what “we say” (cf.φαμέν,Metaphysics, i. 9, 990 b 16). At the same time, he must have learnt much from other contemporaries at Athens, especially from astronomers such as Eudoxus and Callippus, and from orators such as Isocrates and Demosthenes. He also attacked Isocrates, according to Cicero, and perhaps even set up a rival school of rhetoric. At any rate he had pupils of his own, such as Eudemus of Cyprus, Theodectes and Hermias, books of his own, especially dialogues, and even to some extent his own philosophy, while he was still a pupil of Plato.
Well grounded in his boyhood, and thoroughly educated in his manhood, Aristotle, after Plato’s death, had the further advantage of travel in his third period, when he was in his prime. The appointment of Plato’s nephew, Speusippus, to succeed his uncle in the Academy induced Aristotle and Xenocrates to leave Athens together and repair to the court of Hermias. Aristotle admired Hermias, and married his friend’s sister or niece, Pythias, by whom he had his daughter Pythias. After the tragic death of Hermias, he retired for a time to Mitylene, and in 343-342 was summoned to Macedon by Philip to teach Alexander, who was then a boy of thirteen. According to Cicero (De Oratore, iii. 41), Philip wished his son, then a boy of thirteen, to receive from Aristotle “agendi praecepta et eloquendi.” Aristotle is said to have written on monarchy and on colonies for Alexander; and the pupil is said to have slept with his master’s edition of Homer under his pillow, and to have respected him, until from hatred of Aristotle’s tactless relative, Callisthenes, who was done to death in 328, he turned at last against Aristotle himself. Aristotle had power to teach, and Alexander to learn. Still we must not exaggerate the result. Dionysius must have spoken too stronglywhen he says that Aristotle was tutor of Alexander for eight years; for in 340, when Philip went to war with Byzantium, Alexander became regent at home, at the age of sixteen. From this date Aristotle probably spent much time at his paternal house in his native city at Stagira as a patriotic citizen. Philip had sacked it in 348: Aristotle induced him or his son to restore it, made for it a new constitution, and in return was celebrated in a festival after his death. All these vicissitudes made him a man of the world, drew him out of the philosophical circle at Athens, and gave him leisure to develop his philosophy. Besides Alexander he had other pupils: Callisthenes, Cassander, Marsyas, Phanias, and Theophrastus of Eresus, who is said to have had land at Stagira. He also continued the writings begun in his second period; and the Macedonian kings have the glory of having assisted the Stagirite philosopher with the means of conducting his researches in theHistory of Animals.
At last, in his fourth period, after the accession of Alexander, Aristotle at fifty returned to Athens and became the head of his own school in the Lyceum, a gymnasium near the temple of Apollo Lyceius in the suburbs. The master and his scholars were called Peripatetics (οἱ ἐκ τοῦ περιπάτου), certainly from meeting, like other philosophical schools, in a walk (περίπατος), and perhaps also, on the authority of Hermippus of Smyrna, from walking and talking there, like Protagoras and his followers as described in Plato’sProtagoras(314E, 315C). Indeed, according to Ammonius, Plato too had talked as he walked in the Academy; and all his followers were called Peripatetics, until, while the pupils of Xenocrates took the name “Academics,” those of Aristotle retained the general name. Aristotle also formed his Peripatetic school into a kind of college with common meals under a president (ἄρχων) changing every ten days; while the philosopher himself delivered lectures, in which his practice, as his pupil Aristoxenus tells us (Harmonicsii,init.), was, avoiding the generalities of Plato, to prepare his audience by explaining the subject of investigation and its nature. But Aristotle was an author as well as a lecturer; for the hypothesis that the Aristotelian writings are notes of his lectures taken down by his pupils is contradicted by the tradition of their learning while walking, and disproved by the impossibility of taking down such complicated discourses from dictation. Moreover, it is clear that Aristotle addressed himself to readers as well as hearers, as in concluding his whole theory of syllogisms he says, “There would remain for all of you or for our hearers (πάντων ὑμῶν ἢ τῶν) a duty of according to the defects of the investigation consideration, to its discoveries much gratitude” (Sophisticai Elenchi, 34,184 b 6). In short, Aristotle was at once a student, a reader, a lecturer, a writer and a book collector. He was, says Strabo (608), the first we knew who collected books and taught the kings in Egypt the arrangement of a library. In his library no doubt were books of others, but also his own. There we must figure to ourselves the philosopher, constantly referring to his autograph rolls; entering references and cross-references; correcting, rewriting, collecting and arranging them according to their subjects; showing as well as reading them to his pupils; with little thought of publication, but with his whole soul concentrated on being and truth.
On his first visit to Athens, during which occurred the fatal battle of Mantineia (362B.C.), Aristotle had seen the confusion of Greece becoming the opportunity of Macedon under Philip; and on his second visit he was supported at Athens by the complete domination of Macedon under Alexander. Having witnessed the unjust exactions of a democracy at Athens, the dwindling population of an oligarchy at Sparta, and the oppressive selfishness of new tyrannies throughout the Greek world, he condemned the actual constitutions of the Greek states as deviations (παρεκβάσεις) directed merely to the good of the government; and he contemplated a right constitution (ὀρθὴ πολιτεία), which might be either a commonwealth, an aristocracy or a monarchy, directed to the general good; but he preferred the monarchy of one man, pre-eminent in virtue above the rest, as the best of all governments (Nicomachean Ethics, viii. 10;Politics, Γ 14-18). Moreover, by adding (Politics, Η 7, 1327 b 29-33) that the Greek race could govern the world by obtaining one constitution (μιᾶς τυγχάνον πολιτείας), he indicated some leaning to a universal monarchy under such a king as Alexander. On the whole, however, he adhered to the Greek city-state (πόλις), partly perhaps out of patriotism to his own Stagira. Averse at all events to the Athenian democracy, leaning towards Macedonian monarchy, and resting on Macedonian power, he maintained himself in his school at Athens, so long as he was supported by the friendship of Antipater, the Macedonian regent in Alexander’s absence. But on Alexander’s sudden death in 323, when Athens in the Lamian war tried to reassert her freedom against Antipater, Aristotle found himself in danger. He was accused of impiety on the absurd charge of deifying the tyrant Hermias; and, remembering the fate of Socrates, he retired to Chalcis in Euboea. There, away from his school, in 322 he died. (A tomb has been found in our time inscribed with the name of Biote, daughter of Aristotle. But is thisourAristotle?)
Such is our scanty knowledge of Aristotle’s life, which seems to have been prosperous by inheritance and position, and happy by work and philosophy. His will, which was quoted by Hermippus, and, as afterwards quoted by Diogenes Laertius, has come down to us, though perhaps not complete, supplies some further details, as follows:—Antipater is to be executor with others. Nicanor is to marry Pythias, Aristotle’s daughter, and to take charge of Nicomachus his son. Theophrastus is to be one of the executors if he will and can, and if Nicanor should die to act instead, if he will, in reference to Pythias. The executors and Nicanor are to take charge of Herpyllis, “because,” in the words of the testator, “she has been good to me,” and to allow her to reside either in the lodging by the garden at Chalcis or in the paternal house at Stagira. They are to provide for the slaves, who in some cases are to be freed. They are to see after the dedication of four images by Gryllion of Nicanor, Proxenus, Nicanor’s mother and Arimnestus. They are to dedicate an image of Aristotle’s mother, and to see that the bones of his wife Pythias are, as she ordered, taken up and buried with him. On this will we may remark that Proxenus is said to have been Aristotle’s guardian after the death of his father, and to have been the father of Nicanor; that Herpyllis of Stagira was the mother of Nicomachus by Aristotle; and that Arimnestus was the brother of Aristotle, who also had a sister, Arimneste. Every clause breathes the philosopher’s humanity.
II. Development from Platonism
Turning now from the man to the philosopher as we know him best in his extant writings (seeAristoteles, ed. Bekker, Berlin, 1831, the pages of which we use for our quotations), we find, instead of the general dialogues of Plato, special didactic treatises, and a fundamental difference of philosophy, so great as to have divided philosophers into opposite camps, and made Coleridge say that everybody is born either a Platonist or an Aristotelian. Platonism is the doctrine that the individuals we call things only become, but a thing is always one universal form beyond many individuals,e.g.one good beyond seeming goods; and that without supernatural forms, which are models of individuals, there is nothing, no being, no knowing, no good. Aristotelianism is the contrary doctrine: a thing is always a separate individual, asubstance(οὐσία), natural such as earth or supernatural such as God; and without these individual substances, which have attributes and universals belonging to them, there is nothing, to be, to know, to be good. Philosophic differences are best felt by their practical effects: philosophically, Platonism is a philosophy of universal forms, Aristotelianism a philosophy of individual substances: practically, Plato makes us think first of the supernatural and the kingdom of heaven, Aristotle of the natural and the whole world.
So diametrical a difference could not have arisen at once. For, though Aristotle was different from Plato, and brought with him from Stagira a Greek and Ionic but colonial origin, a medical descent and tendency, and a matter-of-fact worldly kind of character, nevertheless on coming to Athens as pupil of Plato he must have begun with his master’s philosophy. What then inmore detail was the philosophy which the pupil learnt from the master? When Aristotle at the age of eighteen came to Athens, Plato, at the age of sixty-two, had probably written all his dialogues except theLaws; and in the course of the remaining twenty years of his life and teaching, he expounded “the so-called unwritten dogmas” in his lectures on the Good. There was therefore a written Platonism for Aristotle to read, and an unwritten Platonism which he actually heard.
To begin with the written philosophy of the Dialogues. Individual so-called things neither are nor are not, but become: the real thing is always one universal form beyond the many individuals,e.g.the one beautiful beyond all beautiful individuals; and each form (ἰδέα) is a model which causes individuals by participation to become like, but not the same as, itself. Above all forms stands the form of the good, which is the cause of all other forms being, and through them of all individuals becoming. The creator, or the divine intellect, with a view to the form of the good, and taking all forms as models, creates in a receptacle (ὑποδοχή, Plato,Timaeus, 49A) individual impressions which are called things but really change and become without attaining the permanence of being. Knowledge resides not in sense but in reason, which, on the suggestion of sensations of changing individuals, apprehends, or (to be precise) is reminded of, real universal forms, and, by first ascending from less to more general until it arrives at the form of good and then descending from this unconditional principle to the less general, becomes science and philosophy, using as its method the dialectic which gives and receives questions and answers between man and man. Happiness in this world consists proximately in virtue as a harmony between the three parts, rational, spirited and appetitive, of our souls, and ultimately in living according to the form of the good; but there is a far higher happiness, when the immortal soul, divesting itself of body and passions and senses, rises from earth to heaven and contemplates pure forms by pure reason. Such in brief is the Platonism of the written dialogues; where the main doctrine of forms is confessedly advanced never as a dogma but always as a hypothesis, in which there are difficulties, but without which Plato can explain neither being, nor truth nor goodness, because throughout he denies the being of individual things. In the unwritten lectures of his old age, he developed this formal into a mathematical metaphysics. In order to explain the unity and variety of the world, the one universal form and the many individuals, and how the one good is the main cause of everything, he placed as it were at the back of his own doctrine of forms a Pythagorean mathematical philosophy. He supposed that the one and the two, which is indeterminate, and is the great and little, are opposite principles or causes. Identifying the form of the good with the one, he supposed that the one, by combining with the indeterminate two, causes a plurality of forms, which like every combination of one and two are numbers but peculiar in being incommensurate with one another, so that each form is not a mathematical number (μαθηματικὸς ἀριθμός), but a formal number (εἰδητικὸς ἀριθμός). Further he supposed that in its turn each form, or formal number, is a limited one which, by combining again with the indeterminate two, causes a plurality of individuals. Hence finally he concluded that the good as the one combining with the indeterminate two is directly the cause of all forms as formal numbers, and indirectly through them all of the multitude of individuals in the world.
Aristotle knew Plato, was present at his lectures on the Good, wrote a report of them (περὶ τἀγαθοῦ), and described this latter philosophy of Plato in hisMetaphysics. Modern critics, who were not present and knew neither, often accuse Aristotle of misrepresenting Plato. But Heracleides and Hestiacus, Speusippus and Xenocrates were also present and wrote similar reports. What is more, both Speusippus and Xenocrates founded their own philosophies on this very Pythagoreanism of Plato. Speusippus as president of the Academy from 347 to 339 taught that the one and the many are principles, while abolishing forms and reducing the good from cause to effect. Xenocrates as president from 339 onwards taught that the one and many are principles, only without distinguishing mathematical from formal numbers. Aristotle’s critics hardly realize that for the rest of his life he had to live and to struggle with a formal and a mathematical Platonism, which exaggerated first universals and attributes and afterwards the quantitative attributes, one and many, into substantial things and real causes.
Aristotle had no sympathy with the unwritten dogmas of Plato. But with the written dialogues of Plato he always continued to agree almost as much as he disagreed. Like Plato, he believed in real universals, real essences, real causes; he believed in the unity of the universal, and in the immateriality of essences; he believed in the good, and that there is a good of the universe; he believed that God is a living being, eternal and best, who is a supernatural cause of the motions and changes of the natural world, and that essences and matter are also necessary causes; he believed in the divine intelligence and in the immortality of our intelligent souls; he believed in knowledge going from sense to reason, that science requires ascent to principles and is descent from principles, and that dialectic is useful to science; he believed in happiness involving virtue, and in moral virtue being a control of passions by reason, while the highest happiness is speculative wisdom. All these inspiring metaphysical and moral doctrines the pupil accepted from his master’s dialogues, and throughout his life adhered to the general spirit of realism without materialism pervading the Platonic philosophy. But what he refused to believe with Plato was that reality is not here, but only above; and what he maintained against Plato was that it is both, and that universals and forms, one and many, the good, are real but not separate realities. This deep metaphysical divergence was the prime cause of the transition from Platonism to Aristotelianism.
Fragmenta Aristotelis.—Aristotle’s originality soon asserted itself in early writings, of which fragments have come down to us, and have been collected by Rose (see the Berlin edition of Aristotle’s works, or more readily in the Teubner series, which we shall use for our quotations). Many, no doubt, are spurious; but some are genuine, and a few perhaps cited in Aristotle’s extant works. Some are dialogues, others didactic works. A special interest attaches to the dialogues written after the manner of Plato but with Aristotle as principal interlocutor; and some of these,e.g.theπερὶ ποιητῶνand theEudemus, seem to have been published. It is not always certain which were dialogues, which didactic like Aristotle’s later works; but by comparing those which were certainly dialogues with their companions in the list of Aristotle’s books as given by Diogenes Laertius, we may conclude with Bernays that the books occurring first in that list were dialogues. Hence we may perhaps accept as genuine the following:—
1. Dialogues:—
περὶ δικαιοσύνης: On justice.περὶ ποιητῶν: On poets (perhaps cited inPoetics, 15, 1454 b 18,ἐν τοῖς ἐκδεδομένοις λόγοις).περὶ φιλοσοφίας: On philosophy (perhaps cited inPhysics, ii. 2, 194 a 35-36).περὶ πολιτικοῦ: A politician.περὶ ῥητορικῆς ἢ Γρύλλος: On rhetoric.προτρεπτικός: An exhortation to philosophy (probably in dialogue, because it is the model of Cicero’s dialogueHortensius).Εὔδημος ἢ περὶ Ψυχῆς: On soul (perhaps cited inDe Anima, i. 4, 407 b 29,καὶ τοῖς ἐν κοινῷ γενομένοις λόγοις).
περὶ δικαιοσύνης: On justice.
περὶ ποιητῶν: On poets (perhaps cited inPoetics, 15, 1454 b 18,ἐν τοῖς ἐκδεδομένοις λόγοις).
περὶ φιλοσοφίας: On philosophy (perhaps cited inPhysics, ii. 2, 194 a 35-36).
περὶ πολιτικοῦ: A politician.
περὶ ῥητορικῆς ἢ Γρύλλος: On rhetoric.
προτρεπτικός: An exhortation to philosophy (probably in dialogue, because it is the model of Cicero’s dialogueHortensius).
Εὔδημος ἢ περὶ Ψυχῆς: On soul (perhaps cited inDe Anima, i. 4, 407 b 29,καὶ τοῖς ἐν κοινῷ γενομένοις λόγοις).
2. Didactic writings:—
(1) Metaphysical:—
περὶ τἀγαθοῦ: On the good (probably not a dialogue but a report of Plato’s lectures).περὶ ἰδεῶν: On forms.
περὶ τἀγαθοῦ: On the good (probably not a dialogue but a report of Plato’s lectures).
περὶ ἰδεῶν: On forms.
(2) Political:—
περὶ βασιλείας: On monarchy.Άλέξανδρος ἤ ὑπὲρ ἀποίκων: On colonies.
περὶ βασιλείας: On monarchy.
Άλέξανδρος ἤ ὑπὲρ ἀποίκων: On colonies.
(3) Rhetorical:—
τέχνης τῆς Θεοδέκτου συναγωγή: TheTheodectea(cited in the Preface to theRhetoric to Alexander(chap. i.)), and asτὰ Θεοδέκτειαin theRhetoric(iii. 9, 1410 b 2).τεχνῶν συναγωγή: A historical collection of arts of rhetoric.
τέχνης τῆς Θεοδέκτου συναγωγή: TheTheodectea(cited in the Preface to theRhetoric to Alexander(chap. i.)), and asτὰ Θεοδέκτειαin theRhetoric(iii. 9, 1410 b 2).
τεχνῶν συναγωγή: A historical collection of arts of rhetoric.
Difficult as it is to determine when Aristotle wrote all these various works, some of them indicate their dates. Gryllus, celebrated in the dialogue on rhetoric, was Xenophon’s son who fell at Mantineia in 362; and Eudemus of Cyprus, lamented in the dialogue on soul, died in Sicily in 352. These then were probably written before Plato died in 347; and so probably were most of the dialogues, precisely because they were imitations of the dialogues of Plato. Among the didactic writings, theπερὶ τὰγαθοῦwould probably belong to the same time, because it was Aristotle’s report of Plato’s lectures. On the other hand, the two political works, if written for Alexander, would be after 343-342 when Philip made Aristotle his tutor. So probably were the rhetorical works, especially theTheodectea; since both politics and oratory were the subjects which the father wanted the tutor to teach his son, and, when Alexander came to Phaselis, he is said by Plutarch (Alexander, 17) to have decorated the statue of Theodectes in honour of his association with the man through Aristotle and philosophy. On the whole, then, it seems as if Aristotle began with dialogues during his second period under Plato, but gradually came to prefer writing didactic works, especially in the third period after Plato’s death, and in connexion with Alexander.
These early writings show clearly how Aristotle came to depart from Plato. In the first place as regards style, though the Stagirite pupil Aristotle could never rival his Attic master in literary form, yet he did a signal service to philosophy in gradually passing from the vague generalities of the dialogue to the scientific precision of the didactic treatise. The philosophy of Plato is dialogue trying to become science; that of Aristotle science retaining traces of dialectic. Secondly as regards subject-matter, even in his early writings Aristotle tends to widen the scope of philosophic inquiry, so as not only to embrace metaphysics and politics, but also to encourage rhetoric and poetics, which Plato tended to discourage or limit. Thirdly as regards doctrines, the surpassing interest of these early writings is that they show the pupil partly agreeing, partly disagreeing, with his master. TheEudemusandProtrepticusare with Plato; the dialogueson Philosophyand the treatiseon Formsare against Plato.
TheEudemus, on the soul (Fragmenta, 37 seq.), must have been in style and thought the most Platonic of all the Aristotelian writings. Plato’s theory of the soul and its immortality was not the ordinary Greek view derived from Homer, who regarded the body as the self, the soul as a shade having a future state but an obscure existence, and stamped that view on the hearts of his countrymen, and affected Aristotle himself. After Homer there had come to Greece the new view that the soul is more real than the body, that it is imprisoned in the carcase as a prison-house, that it is capable of enjoying a happier life freed from the body, and that it can transmigrate from body to body. This strange, exotic, ascetic view was adopted by some philosophers, and especially by the Pythagoreans, and so transmitted to Plato. Aristotle in theEudemus, written about 352, when he was thirty-two, also believed in it. Accordingly, the soul of Eudemus, when it left his body, is said to be returning home: the soul is made subject to the casting of lots, and in coming from the other world to this it is supposed to forget its former visions: but its disembodied life is regarded as its natural life in a better world. TheEudemusalso contained a celebrated passage, preserved by Plutarch (Consolat. ad Apoll..27;Fragm.44). Here we can read the young Aristotle, writing in the form of the dialogue like Plato, avoiding hiatus like Isocrates, and justifying the praises accorded to his style by Cicero, Quintilian and Dionysius. It shows how nearly the pupil could imitate his master’s dialogues, and still more how exactly he at first embraced his master’s doctrines. It makes Silenus, captured by Midas, say that the best of all things is not to have been born, and the next best, having been born, to die as soon as possible. Nothing could be more like Plato’sPhaedo, or more unlike Aristotle’s later workon the Soul, which entirely rejects transmigration and allows the next life to sink into the background.Hardly less Platonic is theProtrepticus(Fragm.50 seq.), an exhortation to philosophy which, according to Zeno the Stoic, was studied by his master Crates. It is an exhortation, whose point is that the chief good is philosophy, the contemplation of the universe by divine and immortal intellect. This is indeed a doctrine of Platonic ethics from which Aristotle in his later days never swerved. But in theProtrepticushe goes on to say that seeming goods, such as strength, size, beauty, honours, opinions, are mere illusion (σκιαγραφία), worthless and ridiculous, as we should know if we had Lyncean eyes to compare them with the vision of the eternal. This indifference to goods of body and estate is quite Platonic, but is very different from Aristotle’s later ethical doctrine that such goods, though not the essence, are nevertheless necessary conditions of happiness. Finally, in the spirit of Plato’sPhaedoand the dialogueEudemus, theProtrepticusholds that the soul is bound to the sentient members of the body as prisoners in Etruria are bound face to face with corpses; whereas the later view of theDe Animais that the soul is the vital principle of the body and the body the necessary organ of the soul.Thus we find that at first, under the influence of his master, Aristotle held somewhat ascetic views on soul and body and on goods of body and estate, entirely opposed both in psychology and in ethics to the moderate doctrines of his later writings. This perhaps is one reason why Cicero, who had Aristotle’s early writings, saw no difference between the Academy and the Peripatetics (Acad. Post, i. 4, 17-18).On the other hand, the dialogueon Philosophy(περὶ φιλοσοφίας,Fragm.1 seq.) strikingly exhibits the origin of Aristotle’s divergence from Platonism, and that too in Plato’s lifetime. The young son of a doctor from the colonies proved too fond of this world to stomach his Athenian master’s philosophy of the supernatural. Accordingly in this dialogue he attacked Plato’s fundamental position, both in its written and in its unwritten presentment, as a hypothesis both of forms and of formal numbers. First, he attacked the hypothesis of forms (τὴν τῶν ἰδεῶν ὑπόθεσιν,Fragm.8), exclaiming in his dialogues, according to Proclus, that he could not sympathize with the dogma even if it should be thought that he was opposing it out of contentiousness; while Plutarch says that his attacks on the forms by means of his exoteric dialogues were thought by some persons more contentious than philosophical, as presuming to disdain Plato’s philosophy: so far was he, says Plutarch, from following it. Secondly, in the same dialogue (Fragm.9), according to Syrianus, he disagreed with the hypothesis of formal numbers (τοῖς εἰδητικοῖς ἀριθμοῖς). If, wrote Aristotle, the forms are another sort of number, not mathematical, there would be no understanding of it. Lastly, in the same dialogue (Fragm.18 seq.) he revealed his emphasis on nature by contending that the universe is uncreate and indestructible. According to Plato, God caused the natural world to become: according to Aristotle it is eternal. This eternity of the world became one of his characteristic doctrines, and subsequently enabled him to explain how essences can be eternal without being separate from this world which is also eternal (cf.Metaph.Ζ 8). Thus early did Aristotle begin, even in Plato’s lifetime, to oppose Plato’s hypothesis of supernatural forms, and advance his own hypothesis of the eternity of the world.He made another attack on Platonism in the didactic workπερὶ ἰδεῶν, (Fragm.185 seq.), contending that the Platonic arguments prove not forms (ἰδέαι) but only things common (τὰ κσινά). Here, according to Alexander the commentator, he first brought against Plato the argument of “the third man” (ὸ τρίτος ἄνθρωπος); that, if there is the form, one man beyond many men, there will be a third man predicated of both man and men, and a fourth predicated of all three, and so on to infinity (Fragm.188). Here, too, he examined the hypothesis of Eudoxus that things are caused by mixture of forms, a hypothesis which formed a kind of transition to his own later views, but failed to satisfy him on account of its difficulties. Lastly, in the didactic workπερὶ τἀγαθοῦ(Fragm.27 seq.), containing his report of Plato’s lectures on the Good, he was dealing with the same mathematical metaphysics which in his dialogueon Philosophyhe criticized for converting forms into formal numbers. Aristoxenus, at the beginning of the second book of theHarmonics, gives a graphic account of the astonishment caused by these lectures of Plato, and of their effect on the lectures of Aristotle. In contending, as Aristotle’s pupil, that a teacher should begin by proposing his subject, he tells us how Aristotle used to relate that most of Plato’s hearers came expecting to get something about human goods and happiness, but that when the discourses turned out to be all about mathematics, with the conclusion that good is one, it appeared to them a paradox, which some despised and others condemned. The reason, he adds, was that they were not informed by Plato beforehand; and for this very reason, Aristotle, as he told Aristoxenus himself, used to prepare his hearers by informing them of the nature of the subject. From this rare personal reminiscence we see at a glance that the mind of Plato and the mind of Aristotle were so different, that their philosophies must diverge; the one towards the supernatural, the abstract, the discursive, and the other towards the natural, the substantial, the scientific.Aristotle then even in the second period of his life, while Plato was still alive, began to differ from him in metaphysics. He rejected the Platonic hypothesis of forms, and affirmed that they are not separate but common, without however as yet having advanced to a constructive metaphysics of his own; while at the same time, after having at first adopted his master’s dialectical treatment of metaphysical problems, he soon passed from dialogues to didactic works, which had the result of separating metaphysics from dialectic. Theall-important consequence of this first departure from Platonism was that Aristotle became and remained primarily a metaphysician. After Plato’s death, coming to his third period he made a further departure from Platonism in his didactic works on politics and rhetoric, written in connexion with Alexander and Theodectes. Those on politics (Fragm.646-648) were designed to instruct Alexander on monarchy and on colonization; and in them Aristotle agreed with Plato in assigning a moral object to the state, but departed from him by saying that a king need not be a philosopher, as Plato had said in theRepublic, but does need to listen to philosophers. Still more marked was his departure from Plato as regards rhetoric. Plato in theGorgias, (501A) had contended that rhetoric is not an art but an empirical practice (τριβὴ καὶ ἐμπειρία); Aristotle in theGryllus(Fragm.68-69), written in his second period, took according to Quintilian a similar view. But in his third period, in theTheodectea(Fragm.125 seq.), rhetoric is treated as an art, and is laid out somewhat in the manner of his laterArt of Rhetoric; while he also showed his interest in the subject by writing a history of other arts of rhetoric calledτεχνῶν συναγωγή(Fragm.136 seq.). Further, in treating rhetoric as an art in theTheodecteahe was forced into a conclusion, which carried him far beyond Plato’s rigid notions of proof and of passion: he concluded that it is the work of an orator to use persuasion, and to arouse the passions (τὸ τὰ πάθη διαγεῖραι),e.g.anger and pity (ib.133-134). Nor could he treat poetry as he is said to have done without the same result.
TheEudemus, on the soul (Fragmenta, 37 seq.), must have been in style and thought the most Platonic of all the Aristotelian writings. Plato’s theory of the soul and its immortality was not the ordinary Greek view derived from Homer, who regarded the body as the self, the soul as a shade having a future state but an obscure existence, and stamped that view on the hearts of his countrymen, and affected Aristotle himself. After Homer there had come to Greece the new view that the soul is more real than the body, that it is imprisoned in the carcase as a prison-house, that it is capable of enjoying a happier life freed from the body, and that it can transmigrate from body to body. This strange, exotic, ascetic view was adopted by some philosophers, and especially by the Pythagoreans, and so transmitted to Plato. Aristotle in theEudemus, written about 352, when he was thirty-two, also believed in it. Accordingly, the soul of Eudemus, when it left his body, is said to be returning home: the soul is made subject to the casting of lots, and in coming from the other world to this it is supposed to forget its former visions: but its disembodied life is regarded as its natural life in a better world. TheEudemusalso contained a celebrated passage, preserved by Plutarch (Consolat. ad Apoll..27;Fragm.44). Here we can read the young Aristotle, writing in the form of the dialogue like Plato, avoiding hiatus like Isocrates, and justifying the praises accorded to his style by Cicero, Quintilian and Dionysius. It shows how nearly the pupil could imitate his master’s dialogues, and still more how exactly he at first embraced his master’s doctrines. It makes Silenus, captured by Midas, say that the best of all things is not to have been born, and the next best, having been born, to die as soon as possible. Nothing could be more like Plato’sPhaedo, or more unlike Aristotle’s later workon the Soul, which entirely rejects transmigration and allows the next life to sink into the background.
Hardly less Platonic is theProtrepticus(Fragm.50 seq.), an exhortation to philosophy which, according to Zeno the Stoic, was studied by his master Crates. It is an exhortation, whose point is that the chief good is philosophy, the contemplation of the universe by divine and immortal intellect. This is indeed a doctrine of Platonic ethics from which Aristotle in his later days never swerved. But in theProtrepticushe goes on to say that seeming goods, such as strength, size, beauty, honours, opinions, are mere illusion (σκιαγραφία), worthless and ridiculous, as we should know if we had Lyncean eyes to compare them with the vision of the eternal. This indifference to goods of body and estate is quite Platonic, but is very different from Aristotle’s later ethical doctrine that such goods, though not the essence, are nevertheless necessary conditions of happiness. Finally, in the spirit of Plato’sPhaedoand the dialogueEudemus, theProtrepticusholds that the soul is bound to the sentient members of the body as prisoners in Etruria are bound face to face with corpses; whereas the later view of theDe Animais that the soul is the vital principle of the body and the body the necessary organ of the soul.
Thus we find that at first, under the influence of his master, Aristotle held somewhat ascetic views on soul and body and on goods of body and estate, entirely opposed both in psychology and in ethics to the moderate doctrines of his later writings. This perhaps is one reason why Cicero, who had Aristotle’s early writings, saw no difference between the Academy and the Peripatetics (Acad. Post, i. 4, 17-18).
On the other hand, the dialogueon Philosophy(περὶ φιλοσοφίας,Fragm.1 seq.) strikingly exhibits the origin of Aristotle’s divergence from Platonism, and that too in Plato’s lifetime. The young son of a doctor from the colonies proved too fond of this world to stomach his Athenian master’s philosophy of the supernatural. Accordingly in this dialogue he attacked Plato’s fundamental position, both in its written and in its unwritten presentment, as a hypothesis both of forms and of formal numbers. First, he attacked the hypothesis of forms (τὴν τῶν ἰδεῶν ὑπόθεσιν,Fragm.8), exclaiming in his dialogues, according to Proclus, that he could not sympathize with the dogma even if it should be thought that he was opposing it out of contentiousness; while Plutarch says that his attacks on the forms by means of his exoteric dialogues were thought by some persons more contentious than philosophical, as presuming to disdain Plato’s philosophy: so far was he, says Plutarch, from following it. Secondly, in the same dialogue (Fragm.9), according to Syrianus, he disagreed with the hypothesis of formal numbers (τοῖς εἰδητικοῖς ἀριθμοῖς). If, wrote Aristotle, the forms are another sort of number, not mathematical, there would be no understanding of it. Lastly, in the same dialogue (Fragm.18 seq.) he revealed his emphasis on nature by contending that the universe is uncreate and indestructible. According to Plato, God caused the natural world to become: according to Aristotle it is eternal. This eternity of the world became one of his characteristic doctrines, and subsequently enabled him to explain how essences can be eternal without being separate from this world which is also eternal (cf.Metaph.Ζ 8). Thus early did Aristotle begin, even in Plato’s lifetime, to oppose Plato’s hypothesis of supernatural forms, and advance his own hypothesis of the eternity of the world.
He made another attack on Platonism in the didactic workπερὶ ἰδεῶν, (Fragm.185 seq.), contending that the Platonic arguments prove not forms (ἰδέαι) but only things common (τὰ κσινά). Here, according to Alexander the commentator, he first brought against Plato the argument of “the third man” (ὸ τρίτος ἄνθρωπος); that, if there is the form, one man beyond many men, there will be a third man predicated of both man and men, and a fourth predicated of all three, and so on to infinity (Fragm.188). Here, too, he examined the hypothesis of Eudoxus that things are caused by mixture of forms, a hypothesis which formed a kind of transition to his own later views, but failed to satisfy him on account of its difficulties. Lastly, in the didactic workπερὶ τἀγαθοῦ(Fragm.27 seq.), containing his report of Plato’s lectures on the Good, he was dealing with the same mathematical metaphysics which in his dialogueon Philosophyhe criticized for converting forms into formal numbers. Aristoxenus, at the beginning of the second book of theHarmonics, gives a graphic account of the astonishment caused by these lectures of Plato, and of their effect on the lectures of Aristotle. In contending, as Aristotle’s pupil, that a teacher should begin by proposing his subject, he tells us how Aristotle used to relate that most of Plato’s hearers came expecting to get something about human goods and happiness, but that when the discourses turned out to be all about mathematics, with the conclusion that good is one, it appeared to them a paradox, which some despised and others condemned. The reason, he adds, was that they were not informed by Plato beforehand; and for this very reason, Aristotle, as he told Aristoxenus himself, used to prepare his hearers by informing them of the nature of the subject. From this rare personal reminiscence we see at a glance that the mind of Plato and the mind of Aristotle were so different, that their philosophies must diverge; the one towards the supernatural, the abstract, the discursive, and the other towards the natural, the substantial, the scientific.
Aristotle then even in the second period of his life, while Plato was still alive, began to differ from him in metaphysics. He rejected the Platonic hypothesis of forms, and affirmed that they are not separate but common, without however as yet having advanced to a constructive metaphysics of his own; while at the same time, after having at first adopted his master’s dialectical treatment of metaphysical problems, he soon passed from dialogues to didactic works, which had the result of separating metaphysics from dialectic. Theall-important consequence of this first departure from Platonism was that Aristotle became and remained primarily a metaphysician. After Plato’s death, coming to his third period he made a further departure from Platonism in his didactic works on politics and rhetoric, written in connexion with Alexander and Theodectes. Those on politics (Fragm.646-648) were designed to instruct Alexander on monarchy and on colonization; and in them Aristotle agreed with Plato in assigning a moral object to the state, but departed from him by saying that a king need not be a philosopher, as Plato had said in theRepublic, but does need to listen to philosophers. Still more marked was his departure from Plato as regards rhetoric. Plato in theGorgias, (501A) had contended that rhetoric is not an art but an empirical practice (τριβὴ καὶ ἐμπειρία); Aristotle in theGryllus(Fragm.68-69), written in his second period, took according to Quintilian a similar view. But in his third period, in theTheodectea(Fragm.125 seq.), rhetoric is treated as an art, and is laid out somewhat in the manner of his laterArt of Rhetoric; while he also showed his interest in the subject by writing a history of other arts of rhetoric calledτεχνῶν συναγωγή(Fragm.136 seq.). Further, in treating rhetoric as an art in theTheodecteahe was forced into a conclusion, which carried him far beyond Plato’s rigid notions of proof and of passion: he concluded that it is the work of an orator to use persuasion, and to arouse the passions (τὸ τὰ πάθη διαγεῖραι),e.g.anger and pity (ib.133-134). Nor could he treat poetry as he is said to have done without the same result.
On the whole then, in his early dialectical and didactic writings, of which mere fragments remain, Aristotle had already diverged from Plato, and first of all in metaphysics. During his master’s life, in the second period of his own life, he protested against the Platonic hypothesis of forms, formal numbers and the one as the good, and tended to separate metaphysics from dialectic by beginning to pass from dialogues to didactic works. After his master’s death, in the third period of his own life, and during his connexion with Alexander, but before the final construction of his philosophy into a system, he was tending to write more and more in the didactic style; to separate from dialectic, not only metaphysics, but also politics, rhetoric and poetry; to admit by the side of philosophy the arts of persuasive language; to think it part of their legitimate work to rouse the passions; and in all these ways to depart from the ascetic rigidity of the philosophy of Plato, so as to prepare for the tolerant spirit of his own, and especially for his ethical doctrine that virtue consists not in suppressing but in moderating almost all human passions. In both periods, too, as we shall find in the sequel, he was already occupied in composing some of the extant writings which were afterwards to form parts of his final philosophical system. But as yet he had given no sign of system, and—what is surprising—no trace of logic. Aristotle was primarily a metaphysician against Plato; a metaphysician before he was a logician; a metaphysician who made what he called primary philosophy (πρώτη φιλοσοφία) the starting-point of his philosophical development, and ultimately of his philosophical system.
III. Composition of his Extant Works
The system which was taught by Aristotle at Athens in the fourth period of his life, and which is now known as the Aristotelian philosophy, is contained not in fragments but in extant books. It will be best then to give at once a list of these extant works, following the traditional order in which they have long been arranged, and marking with a dagger (†) those which are now usually considered not to be genuine, though not always with sufficient reason.