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 Ægean, 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 ad

1 Ammianus Marcellinus, xxvii. 4. The similarity in the name of the island Capri, (the ancient Caprea) which lies off Sorrento, is curious, and seems to favour the account of Frontinus, that Surrentum was originally colonized by Greeks.

2

vantages of civilization which Grecian blood and Grecian intercourse could give, the city having been originally built by a colony of Andrians, and its popuulation 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 towns3, among which were Olynthus and Potidea, was readily accessible. With the former of these Stagirus appears to have been leagued as a humble ally in that resistance to the ambitious designs of Philip which terminated so calamitously. In the year 348 B. C. it was destroyed by him, and the inhabitants sold as slaves.

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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 sub

2

Thucyd. iv. 88. Dionys. Halic. Ep. i. ad Amm. p. 727.

* Demosthenes (Philipp. iii. p. 117.) says that Philip destroyed thirty-two there. Some of these were doubtless mere hamlets. * Dio Chrysost. Or. ii. p. 36.

5 áváσTATOV. Plutarch, Vit. Alex. sec. 7. If Aristotle's will, however, preserved by Diogenes Laertius, be genuine, this term must be considerably qualified; for in it he speaks of his Tarρwα oikia in Stagirus. One naturally expects the description of Demosthenes (loc. cit.) to be overcharged.

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• ἰατροῦ καὶ φίλου χρείᾳ, is the expression of Diogenes.

14

HIS EARLY EDUCATION.

jects', which latter head would in that age include every department of natural history and physiology, no less than those investigations of the properties of unorganic 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 maistery 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

1 Suidas, sub v. Nikóμaxos.

Cited and translated by Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences, Vol. iii. p. 385. See also Plutarch, Vit. Alex. sec. 8.

ORPHAN WHEN YOUNG-COMES TO ATHENS. 15

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 Phæstis, 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 enjoy

3 Hippias in Plato's Protagoras § 69, calls Athens Ts 'Exλádos αυτὸ τὸ πρυτανεῖον τῆς σοφίας. • Where, asks the Sicilian orator in Diodorus (xiii. 27) shall foreigners go for instruction, if Athens be destroyed?'

16

CALUMNY OF EPICURUS.

ment 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 views3. 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

1 See Xenophon, Rep. Ath. cap. ii. sec. 7, 8.

2 Pseudo-Ammonius, Vit. Arist.

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* Athenæus, viii. p. 354. Ælian, Var. Hist. v. 9. That these two accounts are derived from the same source appears no less from their similarity of phrase than from the remark of Athenæus, "that Epicurus was the only authority for this story against Aristotle."