Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/570

510 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 imagination. 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 spiritualising, 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."

Best recent editions, &c. (1.) Text. Bergk, 2 vols., Teubner, 1867; Holden (expurgated edition), Bell, 1868. (2.) Commentaries. Acharnenses, Equites, Nubes, Vespse, W. C. Green, in the Catena Classicorum, Riyingtons, 1870; Nubes and Ranse, A. Sidgwick (for beginners), Rivingtons, 1872. (3.) Translations. Mitchell (Acharn., Knights, Clouds, Wasps), 2 vols., 1822; J. H. Frere (Acharn., Knights, Birds, Frogs, Peace) being 2d vol. of his works, Pickering, 1871; B. H. Kennedy, The Birds (with an excellent introduction), Macmillan, 1874. (R. C. J.)

 ARISTOPHANES of BYZANTIUM, one of the most famous of the Alexandrian critics, flourished about the middle of the 3d century B.C. He studied under Eratosthenes and Zenodotus, and himself founded a school for grammar and criticism, of which the most distinguished pupil was the great Aristarchus of Samothraco. He was afterwards appointed to the superintendence of the Alexandrian library. Aristophanes, like his great pupil, was celebrated as an Homeric critic, but little is known of the results of his labours on that poet. He seems, however, to have been particularly occupied with the consideration of questions of authenticity. He arranged and commented on the works of Hesiod, AlcaBus, Pindar, Anacreon, Callimachus, Plato, and Aristotle; he also explained and wrote arguments to the plays of Aristophanes and the tragic poets. He is justly celebrated as the inventor of the Greek sys tem, of punctuation, accent, and breathing. To him, also, is due in great measure the foundation of the well-known Alexandrian Canon.

The fragments of his works have been collected and published by A. Nauck, Aristophanis Byzantii Fragmenta, 1848. See also, Kreuser, Griech. Accentlehre; Yilloisson, Proleg. ad. Horn. H.; F. A. Wolf, Proleg. in Horn.

 

N the history of European thought and knowledge, down to the period of the revival of letters, the name of Aristotle was, without a rival, supreme; and this supremacy arose from no false estimate or unwarranted preference. Aristotle, speaking generally, treated of every subject which came within the range of ancient thought, and if we regard matter, and not form or literary style, he treated of each of these subjects better than any one else. He also initiated many new branches of inquiry, dependent on observation and induction, and thus not only represented in himself the culmination of Greek speculative philosophy, but was also, as far as possible, the forerunner of modern science. Therefore, the sense of mankind recognised him gradually (after many vicissitudes of appreciation) as the strongest of the ancients. It even came to pass that, for a long period, all secular writings but those of Aristotle had dropped out of notice in Europe. His works may almost have the credit of having saved men from relapsing into barbarism. All sought in Aristotle the basis of knowledge. Universities and grammar schools were founded in Aristotle. Dante only justly expresses this predominance, when he speaks of Aristotle 1 as "the master of those that know," and depicts him as centre and head of the philosophic family. Of the influence which he has exercised over the minds of men we have evidence, not only in the vast literatures connected with his system, which exist in all great libraries, but also in the traces which that system has left in all the modern languages of Europe. The number of Aristotelian "fossils" 2 existing in our everyday language is quite remarkable. If it had not been for the system of Aristotle, we should have had to express many of our ordinary thoughts differently.

The thought of Aristotle takes its start out of two separate sets of elements previously existing in Greece: the one purely philosophical, the other scientific. In Plato were summed up and remoulded all the former results of logical, metaphysical, psychological, ethical, and political speculation in Greece. And Aristotle was, in the first place, thoroughly imbued with Plato, and all the purely philosophical side of his writings was conceived in close relation to Plato's works, the results of which he may be said to have codified, reducing into expository form what Plato had left scattered up and down, rather as hints and suggestions, in his brilliant dramatic dialogues. Partly, then, Aristotle adopted the results of Plato, and made them available for the world in general; partly he dissented from some of the Platonic doctrines, and carried on a polemic against them. To compare the Platonic dialogues with the works of Aristotle, and to trace the agreements and disagreements between them, forms an interesting study in the history of philosophy. But on the whole, the difference between Aristotle and Plato is one of aims rather than of doctrines. Aristotle's aim, almost from first to last, is to be scientific, and to reduce even philosophy to science. He wishes to deal with what can be known for certain, and to express this in exact language. Plato's aim was, in one sense, greater than this; in another sense it was inferior to it. Plato stood apart from dogmatic systematising; he seems to have regarded truth as too great and many-sided to be capable of being submitted to such a process; he was content to develop various aspects of the truth, on all the highest questions, as they appeared to different minds, or to the same mind at different periods. To do this he chose the vehicle of the dramatic dialogue, in which nothing was positively announced beyond the views arrived at for the moment by the particular speakers. He was a poet at the same time

