Page:Ferrier Works vol 2 1888 LECTURES IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY.pdf/418

Rh uncle. He was a native of Athens. He accompanied Plato on his third journey to Syracuse, and is said to have shown much prudence and address amid the troubled atmosphere of the court of Dionysius. His active and moral powers were by all accounts greater than his intellectual acuteness. On the death of Plato in 347, he became his successor in the Academy, having been so nominated by Plato himself. Aristotle may have looked forward to that elevation as a position to which he was well entitled to aspire. But Aristotle was destined for higher things than to be the follower even of so great a philosopher as Plato. Although he has much in common with his master, he was rather fitted to found a new dynasty in philosophy than to be the continuator of an old one. Aristotle, not long afterwards, became the founder of the peripatetic school of philosophy, which held its meetings in the Lyceum. Speusippus continued president of the Academy for about eight years. He was compelled by a lingering illness to relinquish the office some time before his death, which probably took place about 330 B.C., or it may be somewhat earlier. He is said, in particular, to have lectured against the hedonism of Aristippus.

51. Xenocrates, who succeeded Speusippus as president of the Academy about 340 B.C., was a native of Chalcedon, a city on the shores of the Bosporus. He was born in 396. In early life he came to Athens, and attached himself to Plato. Like