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peoples who were inferior by nature and adapted to submission (ovo dovλo); such people had no "virtue" in the technical civic sense, and were properly occupied in performing the menial functions of society, under the control of the apoToL. Thus, combined with the criteria of descent, civic status and the ownership of the land, there was the further idea of intellectual and social superiority. These qualifications were naturally, in course of time, shared by an increasingly large number of the lower class who broke down the barriers of wealth and education. From this stage the transition is easy to the aristocracy of wealth, such as we find at Carthage and later at Venice, in periods when the importance of commerce was paramount and mercantile pursuits had cast off the stigma of inferiority (in Gr. Bavavoia). It is important at this stage to distinguish between aristocracy and the feudal governments of medieval Europe. In these it is true that certain power was exercised by a small number of families, at the expense of the majority. But under this system each noble governed in a particular area and within strict limitations imposed by his sovereign; no sovereign authority was vested in the nobles collectively.

Under the conditions of the present day the distinction of aristocracy, democracy and monarchy cannot be rigidly maintained from a purely governmental point of view. In no case does the sovereign power in a state reside any longer in an aristocracy, and the word has acquired a social rather than a political sense as practically equivalent to "nobility," though the distinction is sometimes drawn between the "aristocracy of birth" and the " aristocracy of wealth." Modern history, however, furnishes many examples of government in the hands of an aristocracy. Such were the aristocratic republics of Venice, Genoa and the Dutch Netherlands, and those of the free imperial cities in Germany, Such, too, in practice though not in theory, was the government of Great Britain from the Revolution of 1689 to the Reform Bill of 1832. The French nobles of the Ancien Régime, denounced as "aristocrats " by the Revolutionists, had no share as such in government, but enjoyed exceptional privileges (e.g. exemption from taxation). This privileged position is still enjoyed by the heads of the German mediatized families of the " High Nobility." In Great Britain, on the other hand, though the aristocratic principle is still represented in the constitution by the House of Lords, the "aristocracy" generally, apart from the peers, has no special privileges.

ARISTODEMUS (8th century B.C.), semi-legendary ruler of Messenia in the time of the first Messenian War. Tradition relates that, after some six years' fighting, the Messenians were forced to retire to the fortified summit of Ithome. The Delphic oracle bade them sacrifice a virgin of the house of Acpytus. Aristodemus offered his own daughter, and when her lover, hoping to save her life, declared that she was no longer a maiden, he slew her with his own hand to prove the assertion false. In the thirteenth year of the war, Euphacs, the Messenian king, died. As he left no children, popular election was resorted to, and Aristodemus was chosen as his successor, though the national soothsayers objected to him as the murderer of his daughter. As a ruler he was mild and conciliatory. He was victorious in the pitched battle fought at the foot of Ithome in the fifth year of his reign, a battle in which the Messenians, reinforced by the entire Arcadian levy and picked contingents from Argos and Sicyon, defeated the combined Spartan and Corinthian forces. Shortly afterwards, however, led by unfavourable omens to despair of final success, he killed himself on his daughter's tomb. Though little is known of his life and the chronology is uncertain, yet Aristodemus may fairly be regarded as a historical character. His reign is dated 731-724 B.C. by Pausanias, and this may be taken as approximately correct, though Duncker (History of Greece, Eng. trans., ii. p. 69) inclines to place it eight years later.

Pausanias iv. 9-13 is practically our only authority. He followed as his chief source the prose history of Myron of Priene, an untrustworthy writer, probably of the 2nd century B.C.; hence a good deal of his story must be regarded as fanciful, though we cannot distinguish accurately between the true and the fictitious. (M. N. T.)

ARISTOLOCHIA (Gr. ǎporos, best, Xoxeía, child-birth, in allusion to its repute in promoting child-birth), a genus of shrubs or herbs of the natural order Aristolochiaceae, often with climbing stems, found chiefly in the tropics. The flower forms a tube inflated at the base. A. Clematitis, birthwort, is a central and southern European species, found sometimes in England apparently wild on ruins and similar places, but not a native. A. Sipho, Dutchman's pipe, or pipe vine, is a climber, native in the woods of the Atlantic United States, and grown in Europe as a garden plant. The flower is bent like a pipe.

A member of the same order is the asarabacca (Asarum europacum), a small creeping herb with kidney-shaped leaves and small purplish bell-shaped flowers. It is a native of the woods of Europe and north temperate Asia, and occurs wild in some English counties. It was formerly grown for medicinal purposes, the underground stem having cathartic and emetic properties. An allied species, A. canadense, is the Canadian snake-root, a native of Canada and the Atlantic United States. ARISTOMENES, of Andania, the semi-legendary hero of the second Messenian war. He was a member of the Aepytid family, the son of Nicomedes (or, according to another version, of Pyrrhus) and Nicoteleia, and took a prominent part in stirring up the revolt against Sparta and securing the co-operation of Argos and Arcadia. He showed such heroism in the first encounter, at Derae, that the crown was offered him, but he would accept only the title of commander-in-chief. His daring is illustrated by the story that he came by night to the temple of Athene " of the Brazen House" at Sparta, and there set up his shield with the inscription, "Dedicated to the goddess by Aristomenes from the Spartans" His prowess contributed largely to the Messenian victory over the Spartan and Corinthian forces at "The Boar's Barrow" in the plain of Stenyclarus, but in the following year the treachery of the Arcadian king Aristocrates caused the Messenians to suffer a crushing defeat at " The Great Trench." Aristomenes and the survivors retired to the mountain stronghold of Eira, where they defied the Spartans for eleven years. On one of his raids he and fifty of his companions were captured and thrown into the Cacadas, the chasm on Mt. Taygetus into which criminals were cast. Aristomenes alone was saved, and soon reappeared at Eira: legend told how he was upheld in his fall by an cagle and escaped by grasping the tail of a fox, which led him to the hole by which it had entered. On another occasion he was captured during a truce by some Cretan auxiliaries of the Spartans, and was released only by the devotion of a Messenian girl who afterwards became his daughter-in-law. At length Eira was betrayed to the Spartans (668 B.C. according to Pausanias), and after a heroic resistance Aristomenes and his followers had to evacuate Messenia and seek a temporary refuge with their Arcadian allies. A desperate plan to seize Sparta itself was foiled by Aristocrates, who paid with his life for his treachery. Aristomenes retired to Ialysus in Rhodes, where Damagetus, his son-in-law, was king, and died there while planning a journey to Sardis and Ecbatana to seck aid from the Lydian and Median sovereigns (Pausanias iv. 14-24). Another tradition represents him as captured and slain by the Spartans during the war (Pliny, Nat. Hist. xi. 187; Val. Maximus i. 8, 15; Steph. Byzant. s.v. 'Avdavia). Though there seems to be no conclusive reason for doubting the existence of Aristomenes, his history, as related by Pausanias, following mainly the Messeniaca of the Cretan epic poet Rhianus (about 230 B.C.), is evidently largely interwoven with fictions. These probably arose after the foundation of Messene in 369 B.C. Aristomenes' statue was set up in the stadium there: his bones were fetched from Rhodes and placed in a tomb surmounted by a column (Paus, iv. 32. 3, 6); and more than five centuries later we still find heroic honours paid to him, and his exploits a popular subject of song (ib. iv. 14. 7; 16. 6).

For further details see Pausanias iv.; Polyaenus ii. 31; G. Grote, History of Greece, pt. ii. chap. vii.; M. Duncker, History of Greece, Eng. trans., book iv. chap. viii.; A. Holm, History of Greece, Eng. trans., vol. i. chap. xvi. (M. N. T.)

ARISTONICUS, of Alexandria, Greek grammarian, lived during | of form. The wildest flights of extravagance were permitted

the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius. He taught at Rome and wrote commentaries and grammatical treatises. His chief work was Περὶ Σημείων Ομήρου, in which he gave an account of the "critical marks" inserted by Aristarchus in the margin of his recension of the text of the Iliad and Odyssey. Important fragments are preserved in the scholia of the Venetian Codex A of the Iliad.

Friedländer, Aristonici Пept Enuelwv Dádos reliquiae (1853); Carnuth, Aristonici Пlepi Enpelwr 'Odvooeias reliquiae (1869).

ARISTOPHANES (c. 448-385 B.C.'), the great comic dramatist and poet of Athens. His birth-year is uncertain. He is known to have been about the same age as Eupolis, and is said to have been "almost a boy" when his first comedy (The Banqueters) was brought out in 427 B.C. His father Philippus was a landowner in Aegina. Aristophanes was an Athenian citizen of the tribe Pandionis, and the deme Cydathene. The stories which made him a native of Camirus in Rhodes, or of the Egyptian Naucratis, had probably no other foundation than an indictment for usurpation of civic rights (evías ypaon) which appears to have been more than once laid against him by Cleon. His three sonsPhilippus, Araros and Nicostratus-were all comic poets. Philippus, the eldest, was a rival of Eubulus, who began to exhibit in 376 B.C. Araros brought out two of his father's latest comedies-the Cocalus and the Acolosicon, and in 375 began to exhibit works of his own. Nicostratus, the youngest, is assigned by Athenaeus to the Middle Comedy, but belongs, as is shown by some of the names and characters of his pieces, to the New Comedy also.

Although tragedy and comedy had their common origin in the festivals of Dionysus, the regular establishment of tragedy at Athens preceded by half a century that of comedy. The Old Comedy may be said to have lasted about eighty years (470390 B.C.), and to have flourished about fifty-six (460-404 B.C.). Of the forty poets who are named as having illustrated it the chief were Cratinus, Eupolis and Aristophanes. The Middle Comedy covers a period of about seventy years (390-320 B.C.), its chief poets being Antiphanes, Alexis, Theopompus and Strattis. The New Comedy was in vigour for about seventy years (320-250 B.C.), having for its foremost representatives Menander, Philemon and Diphilus. The Old Comedy was possible only for a thorough democracy. Its essence was a satirical censorship, unsparing in personalities, of public and of private life of morality, of statesmanship, of education, of literature, of social usage in a word, of everything which had an interest for the city or which could amuse the citizens. Preserving all the freedom of banter and of riotous fun to which its origin gave it an historical right, it aimed at associating with this a strong practical purpose the expression of a democratic public opinion in such a form that no misconduct or folly could altogether disregard it. That licentiousness, that grossness of allusion which too often disfigures it, was, it should be remembered, exacted by the sentiment of the Dionysiac festivals, as much as a decorous cheerfulness is expected at the holiday times of other worships. This was the popular element. Without this the entertainment would have been found flat and unseasonable. But for a comic poct of the higher calibre the consciousness of a recognized power which he could exert, and the desire to use this power for the good of the city, must always have been the uppermost feelings. At Athens the poet of the Old Comedy had an influence analogous, perhaps, rather to that of the journalist than to that of the modern dramatist. But the established type of Dionysiac comedy gave him an instrument such as no public satirist has ever wielded. When Molière wished to brand hypocrisy he could only make his Tartuffe the central figure of a regular drama, developed by a regular process to a just catastrophe. He had no choice between touching too lightly and using sustained force to make a profound impression. The Athenian dramatist of the Old Comedy worked under no such limitations [The 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 455, and died in 375 B.C.)

to him. Nothing bound him to a dangerous emphasis or a wearisome insistence. He could deal the keenest thrust, or make the most earnest appeal, and at the next moment-if his instinct told him that it was time to change the subject-vary the serious strain by burlesque. He had, in short, an incomparable scope for trenchant satire directed by sure tact.

Aristophanes is for us the representative of the Old Comedy. But his genius, while it includes, also transcends the genius of the Old Comedy. He can denounce the frauds of a Cleon, he can vindicate the duty of Athens to herself and to her allies, with a stinging scorn and a force of patriotic indignation which makes the poet almost forgotten in the citizen. He can banter Euripides with an ingenuity of light mockery which makes it seem for the time as if the leading Aristophanic trait was the art of seeing all things from their prosaic side. Yet it is neither in the denunciation nor in the mockery that he is most individual. His truest and highest faculty is revealed by those wonderful bits of lyric writing in which he soars above everything that can move laughter or tears, and makes the clear air thrill with the notes of a song as free, as musical and as wild as that of the nightingale invoked by his own chorus in the Birds. The speech of Dikaios Logos in the Clouds, the praises of country life in the Peace, the serenade in the Ecclesiazusae, the songs of the Spartan and Athenian maidens in the Lysistrata, above all, perhaps, the chorus in the Frogs, the beautiful chant of the Initiated, these passages, and such as these, are the true glories of Aristophanes. They are the strains, not of an artist, but of one who warbles for pure gladness of heart in some place made bright by the presence of a god. Nothing else in Greek poetry has quite this wild sweetness of the woods. Of modern poets Shakespeare alone, perhaps, has it in combination with a like richness and fertility of fancy.

Fifty-four? comedies were ascribed to Aristophanes. Fortythree of these are allowed as genuine by Bergk. Eleven only are extant. These eleven form a running commentary on the outer and the inner life of Athens during thirty-six years. They may be ranged under three periods. The first, extending to 420 B.C., includes those plays in which Aristophanes uses an absolutely unrestrained freedom of political satire. The second ends with the year 405. Its productions are distinguished from those of the earlier time by a certain degree of reticence and caution. The third period, down to 388 B.C., comprises two plays in which the transition to the character of the Middle Comedy is well marked, not merely by disuse of the parabasis, but by general self-restraint.

I. First Period. (1) 425 B.C. The Acharnians.-Since the defeat in Boeotia the peace party at Athens had gained ground, and in this play Aristophanes seeks to strengthen their hands. Dicaeopolis, an honest countryman, is determined to make peace with Sparta on his own account, not deterred by the angry men of Acharnae, who crave vengeance for the devastation of their vineyards. He sends to Sparta for samples of peace; and he is so much pleased with the flavour of the Thirty Years' sample that he at once concludes a treaty for himself and his family. All the blessings of life descend on him; while Lamachus, the leader of the war party, is smarting from cold, snow and wounds.

(2) 424 B.C. The Knights.-Three years before, in his Babylonians, Aristophanes had assailed Cleon as the typical demagogue. In this play he continues the attack. The Demos, or State, is represented by an old man who has put himself and his household into the hands of a rascally Paphlagonian steward. Nicias and Demosthenes, slaves of Demos, contrive that the Paphlagonian shall be supplanted in their master's favour by a sausage-seller. No sooner has Demos been thus rescued than his youthfulness and his good sense return together.

(3) 423 B.C. The Clouds (the first edition; a second edition was brought out in 422 B.C.).-This play would be correctly described as an attack on the new spirit of intellectual inquiry and culture rather than on a school or class. Two classes of [Or "forty-four" (reading ud' for vo' in Suidas).]

thinkers or teachers are, however, specially satirized under the general name of "Sophist " (v. 331)-1. The Physical Philosophers-indicated by allusions to the doctrines of Anaxagoras, Heraclitus and Diogenes of Apollonia. 2. The professed teachers of rhetoric, belles lettres, &c., such as Protagoras and Prodicus. Socrates is taken as the type of the entire tendency. A youth named Pheidippides-obviously meant for Alcibiades -is sent by his father to Socrates to be cured of his dissolute propensities. Under the discipline of Socrates the youth becomes accomplished in dishonesty and impiety. The conclusion of the play shows the indignant father preparing to burn up the philosopher and his hall of contemplation.

(4) 422 B.C. The Wasps.-This comedy, which suggested Les Plaideurs to Racine, is a satire on the Athenian love of litigation. The strength of demagogy, while it lay chiefly in the ecclesia, lay partly also in the paid dicasteries. From this point of view the Wasps may be regarded as supplementing the Knights. Philocleon (admirer of Cleon), an old man, has a passion for lawsuits-a passion which his son, Bdelycleon (detester of Cleon) fails to check, until he hits upon the device of turning the house into a law-court, and paying his father for absence from the public suits. The house-dog steals a Sicilian cheese; the old man is enabled to gratify his taste by trying the case, and, by an oversight, acquits the defendant. In the second half of the play a change comes over the dream of Philocleon; from liti

gation he turns to literature and music, and is congratulated

by the chorus on his happy conversion.

(5) 421 B.C.' The Peace.-In its advocacy of peace with Sparta, this play, acted at the Great Dionysia shortly before the conclusion of the treaty, continues the purpose of the Acharnians. Trygaeus, a distressed Athenian, soars to the sky on a beetle's back. There he finds the gods engaged in pounding the Greek states in a mortar. In order to stop this, he frees the goddess Peace from a well in which she is imprisoned. The pestle and mortar are laid aside by the gods, and Trygacus marries one of

the handmaids of Peace.

II. Second Period. (6) 414 B.C. The Birds.-Peisthetaerus, an enterprising Athenian, and his friend Euelpides persuade the birds to build a city-" Cloud-Cuckoo-borough "in mid-air, so as to cut off the gods from men. The plan succeeds; the gods send envoys to treat with the birds; and Peisthetaerus marries Basileia, daughter of Zeus. Some have found in the Birds a complete historical allegory of the Sicilian expedition; others, a general satire on the prevalence at Athens of headstrong caprice over law and order; others, merely an aspiration towards a new and purified Athens-a dream to which the poet had turned from his hope for a revival of the Athens of the past. In another view, the piece is mainly a protest against the religious fanaticism which the incident of the Hermae had called forth.

(7) 411 B.C. The Lysistrata.-This play was brought out during the earlier stages of those intrigues which led to the revolution of the Four Hundred. It appeared shortly before Peisander had arrived in Athens from the camp at Samos for the purpose of organizing the oligarchic policy. The Lysistrata expresses the popular desire for peace at any cost. As the men can do nothing, the women take the question into their own hands, occupy the citadel, and bring the citizens to surrender.

(8) 411 B.C. The Thesmophoriazusae (Priestesses of Demeter).This came out three months later than the Lysistrata, during the reign of terror established by the oligarchic conspirators, but before their blow had been struck. The political meaning of the play lies in the absence of political allusion. Fear silences even comedy. Only women and Euripides are satirized. Euripides is accused and condemned at the female festival of the Thesmophoria.

(9) 405 B.C. The Frogs.-This piece was brought out just when Athens had made her last effort in the Peloponnesian War, eight months before the battle of Aegospotami, and about fifteen months before the taking of Athens by Lysander. It may be considered as an attempt to distract men's minds from public affairs. It is a literary criticism. Aeschylus and Euripides 1 See E. Curtius, Hist. of Greece, iii. (Eng. trans. p. 275).

were both lately dead. Athens is beggared of poets; and Diony sus goes down to Hades to bring back a poet. Aeschylus and Euripides contend in the under-world for the throne of tragedy; and the victory is at last awarded to Aeschylus.

III. Third Period. (10) 393 B.C. The Ecclesiazusae (women in parliament).-The women, disguised as men, steal into the ecclesia, and succeed in decreeing a new constitution. At this time the demagogue Agyrrhius led the assembly; and the play is, in fact, a satire on the general demoralization of public life. (11) 388 B.C. The Plutus (Wealth).-The first edition of the play had appeared in 408 B.C., being a symbolical representation of the fact that the victories won by Alcibiades in the Hellespont had brought back the god of wealth to the treasurechamber of the Parthenon. In its extant form the Plutus is simply a moral allegory. Chremylus, a worthy but poor man, falls in with a blind and aged wanderer, who proves to be the god of wealth. Asclepius restores eyesight to Plutus; whereupon all the just are made rich and all the unjust are reduced to poverty.

Among the lost plays, the following are the chief of which anything is known:

1. The Banqueters (Dairadeîs), 427 B.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, 426 B.C.—Under this name the subject-allies of Athens are represented as "Babylonians"-barbarian slaves, 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 the Knights and the Wasps.

employed to grind in the mill. The oppression of the allies by the

and possibly the Old Age (Geras), belonged to the First Period. The Merchantmen, The Farmers, The Preliminary Contest (Proagon), The Geras is assigned by Suvern to 422 B.C., and is supposed to have been a picture of dotage similar to that in the Knights. A comedy called The Islands is conjectured to have dealt with the sufferings imposed by the war on the insular tributaries. The Triphales was probably a satire on Alcibiades; the Storks, on the tragic poet Patrocles.

In the Aeolosicon-produced by his son Araros in 387 B.C.Aristophanes probably parodied the Acolus of Euripides. The Cocalus is 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 the Clouds, 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 comic [The date is uncertain; others give 392 and 389.]

imagination. As a poet, he is immortal. And, among Athenian | (345-344) he moved to Mitylene, whence he went to Philip of 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 heart

In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. BIBLIOGRAPHY.-Editio princeps (Aldine, Venice, 1498), by Marcus Musurus (not including the Lysistrata and Thesmophoriazusae); S. Bergler (ed. P. Burmann, 1760); Invernizi-BeckDindorf (1794-1834); I. Bekker (1829); H. A. Holden (expurgated text, 1868), with Onomasticon (new ed., 1902); F. H. M. Blaydes (1860-1893), 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 W. J. Hickie (prose, in Bohn's Classical 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 PaulyWissowa's Realencyclopädie, ii. 1 (1896); A. Couat. Aristophane et l'ancienne comédie attique (1889); E. Deschanel, Etudes 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 the Wasps (1897); W. Engelmann, Scriptores Graeci (1880); and "Bericht über die Literatur der griechischen Komödie aus den Jahren 1892-1901 in C. Bursian's Jahresbericht über die Fortschritte der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, cxvi. (1904). (R. C. J.)

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ARISTOPHANES, of Byzantium, Greek critic and grammarian, was born about 257 B.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 185-180 B.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's Nature 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 the Illvaxes of 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 his Analogy systematically 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 " was also due to his impulse (Sandys, Hist. Class. Schol., ed. 1906, i. 129 f.).

canon

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Nauck, Aristophanis Byzantii Grammatici Fragmenta (1848). ARISTOTLE (384-322 B.C.), the great Greek philosopher, was born at Stagira, on the Strymonic Gulf, and hence called "the Stagirite." Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in his Epistle on Demosthenes and Aristotle (chap. 5), gives the following sketch of his life: Aristotle ('ApiσToréλns) 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 (367-365), 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

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

Life of Aristotle, on the authority of the Chronicles of Apollodorus, This account is practically repeated by Diogenes Laertius in his who lived in the 2nd century B.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 sixtythird 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. év Toîs λeyouivos aypapois doyμao, 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 strongly

when he says that Aristotle was tutor of Alexander for eight | race could govern the world by obtaining one constitution (mas 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 the History 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 (ol ÈK TOû #Epiñárov), certainly from meeting, like other philosophical schools, in a walk (weрiπаTоs), and perhaps also, on the authority of Hermippus of Smyrna, from walking and talking there, like Protagoras and his followers as described in Plato's Protagoras (314 E, 315 C). 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 (äpxwv) changing every ten days; while the philosopher himself delivered lectures, in which his practice, as his pupil Aristoxenus tells us (Harmonics, ii. 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 hκроaμévwv) a duty of according to the defects of the investigation consideration, to its discoveries much gratitude" (Sophistical Elenchi, 34, 184 b6). 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 (362 B.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 tyrannics throughout the Greek world, he condemned the actual constitutions of the Greek states as deviations (TapeкBáoas) directed merely to the good of the government; and he contemplated a right constitution (open woλTeia), 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, T 14-18). Moreover, by adding (Politics, H 7, 1327 b 29-33) that the Greek

TUYxávov Toλreías), 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 (róλes), 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 this our Aristotle?)

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 (see Aristoteles, 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, a substance (ovoia), 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 in

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