Page:Aristotle (Grant).djvu/14

 the year 367, when he was seventeen years old, his father having recently died, he was sent by his guardian, Proxenus of Atarneus, to complete his studies at Athens, “the metropolis of wisdom.” There he continued to reside for twenty years, during the greater part of which time he attended the school of philosophy which Plato had founded in the olive-groves of Academus, on the banks of the Cephisus. He had probably inherited from his father means sufficient for his support, so that he could live without care for the acquirement of anything save knowledge. But in the acquisition of this he manifested a zeal unsurpassed in the annals of study. Among his fellow-pupils in the Academe, he is said to have got the sobriquet of “the Reader;” while Plato himself called him “the Mind of the School,” in recognition of his quick and powerful intelligence. In order to win time, even from sleep, Aristotle is said to have invented the plan of sleeping with a ball in his hand, so held over a brazen dish, that whenever his grasp relaxed the ball would descend with a clang, and arouse him to the resumption of his labours.

Plato’s philosophy was absolutely pre-eminent in Greece at this time. It embodied within itself all that was best in the doctrine and the spirit of Socrates, and beyond it there was nothing, except the mystical theories of the Pythagoreans (the best elements in which Plato had assimilated), and the materialistic theories of the Atomists, which Plato, and afterwards Aristotle, controverted. The writings of Aristotle are quite consistent with the tradition that he was for twenty years