ARISTOTLE was born in Stagira, a city in northern Greece, in 384 BC. His father was a physician to the royal court of Macedonia. He may have had some training as a physician, but his father died before Aristotle came of age. In 367, when he was 17 years of age, he came to Athens to study in Plato’s Academy. He seems to have made an immediate impression on his teachers there, and to have launched his career as a philosopher. He spent twenty years in the Academy, first as a student, then as a lecturer. When Plato died in 347, he did not stay in Athens but went to Assos, on the Aegean coast of Anatolia, where he became a member of the court of Hermias the Greek rule of the city, under the Persian authorities who occupied the area. About three years later he moved to the island of Lesbos, within sight of Assos, and worked with his colleague and student Theophrastus, studying biology among other things.
Around 342/1 BC he was invited to come to the court of Philip of Macedon and became a tutor to the crown prince, Alexander. His former patron, Hermias was arrested by the Persian authorities on a charge of treason and crucified. But Hermias left word that Aristotle should take his daughter or niece Pythias as his wife. In 340 Alexander was appointed regent and presumably Aristotle became an advisor rather than a teacher of the prince. In 338 Philip and Alexander defeated the allied Greek states in battle at Chaeronea and became the leaders of all Greece. Two years later Philip was assassinated and Alexander became king.
In 335/4 Aristotle returned to Athens, but not to the Academy. He founded his own school, the Lyceum, and attracted students and colleagues. Alexander the Great began his invasion of the Persian Empire and continued eastward to the borders of India, returning to Babylonia, where he died of disease in 323. When word of his death reached Athens, Aristotle retired to the Chalcis (mother city of Stagira), “lest Athens should sin a second time against philosophy,” that is, so they did not put Aristotle to death as they had Socrates. He died a year later from a stomach ailment.
It appears that Aristotle had maintained connections with the royal house of Macedon, which he inherited from his father, throughout his life. He may have left Athens when Plato died because of the rise of anti-Macedonian feeling stirred up by Demosthenes. He was suspected of supplying intelligence to Philip about the Persian Empire while he was in Assos. He may have left Assos because of suspicions of his connections, while in fact staying in touch with his sources in Assos. His invitation to teach in Macedonia looks like a reward for services rendered. Aristotle was influential enough to have his native city Stagira rebuilt by Philip after it was destroyed for revolting against the king earlier. When Alexander died, Aristotle left Athens for fear of a popular uprising against the Macedonians.
If Plato developed the most comprehensive philosophy to date, Aristotle developed the most systematic philosophy. Like Plato, Aristotle wrote dialogues for the public, though Aristotle’s dialogues were more didactic and less dramatic than Plato’s. But he also wrote lectures or treatises for his own students, which he did not publish. After his death, these treatises were published and because of their rigor they eventually replaced his dialogues. They became required reading in the Neoplatonic schools of the Roman Empire and were widely commented on by scholars.
Unlike the free-wheeling dialogues of Plato, the treatises of Aristotle focused on one subject-area of philosophy at a time. Aristotle invented many subjects and raised the level of discussion on nearly all he addressed. He invented formal logic, he wrote about the logic of science, he studied natural science (inventing the word ‘physics’ which we still use), cosmology, meteorology, zoology, psychology, metaphysics, ethics (as a systematic study), political science, made the study of rhetoric scientific, as also the study of literature. When his works, that were mostly lost to western Europe during the early Middle Ages, were recovered in the later Middle Ages, they fueled the rise of the universities and supplied much of the curriculum.
