Page:The academic questions, treatise de finibus, and Tusculan disputations.djvu/27

xx reconcile freedom with unity and reason, and to mingle monarchy with democracy.

With respect to his theology, he appears to have agreed entirely with Socrates.

Aristotle was born at Stageira, 384. His father, Nicomachus, was physician to Amyntas II., king of Macedon. At the age of seventeen he went to Athens, in hopes to become a pupil of Plato; but Plato was in Sicily, and did not return for three years, which time Aristotle applied to severe study, and to cultivating the friendship of Heraclides Ponticus. When Plato returned, he soon distinguished him above all his other pupils. He remained at Athens twenty years, maintaining, however, his connexion with Macedonia; but on the death of Plato, 347, which happened while Aristotle was absent in Macedonia on an embassy, he quitted Athens, thinking, perhaps, that travelling was necessary to complete his education. After a short period, he accepted an invitation from Philip to superintend the education of Alexander. He remained in Macedonia till 335, when he returned to Athens, where he found Xenocrates had succeeded Speusippus as the head of the Academy. Here the Lyceum was appropriated to him, in the shady walks (περίπατοι) of which he delivered his lectures to a number of eminent scholars who flocked around him. From these walks the name of Peripatetic was given to the School which he subsequently established. Like several others of the Greek philosophers, he had a select body of pupils, to whom he delivered his esoteric doctrines; and a larger, more promiscuous, and less accomplished company, to whom he delivered his exoteric lectures on less abstruse subjects. When he had resided thirteen years at Athens, he found himself threatened with a prosecution for impiety, and fled to Chalcis, in Eubœa, and died soon after, 322.

His learning was immense, and his most voluminous writings embraced almost every subject conceivable; but only a very small portion of them has come down to us. Cicero, however, alludes to him only as a moral philosopher, and occasionally as a natural historian; so that it may be