AR'ISTOTLE was b. at the Grecian colonial town of Stageira, on the w. side of the Strymonic gulf (now the gulf of Contessa, in Turkey in Europe). in the year 384 B.C. He belonged to a family in which the practice of physic was hereditary. His father, Nikomachus, was the friend and physician of Amyntas II., king of Macedonia, father of Philip, and grandfather of Alexander the great. A. lost both parents while he was quite young, and was brought up under the care of Proxenus, a citizen of Atartreus, in Asia Minor, who was then settled at Stageira. It is to be conjectured that his educa tion, such as it was, would take the direction of preparing him for the family profes sion, and that whatever knowledge and power of manipulation attached to the practice of physic at that time would rank among his early acquisitions. In after-life, he occu pied himself largely in the dissecting of animals, and was acquainted with all the facts that had been derived from this source by others before him. It seems probable, how ever, that he early abandoned the intention of following physic as a profession, and aspired to that cultivation of universal knowledge for own sake, in which he attained a distinction without parallel in the history of the human race.
In his 18th year (367 B.C.) he left Stageira for Athens, then the intellectual center of Greece and of the civilized world. Plato, on whom he doubtless had his eye as his chief instructor, was then absent at Syracuse in that extraordinary episode of his life, connecting him as political adviser with the two successive Syracusan despots—Diony sius the elder, and Dionysius the younger—and with Dion. A., therefore, pursued his studies by books, and by the help of any other masters he could find, during the first three years of his stay. On the return of Plato, he became his pupil, and soon made his master aware of the remarkable penetration and reach of his intellect. The expres sions said to have been used by Plato imply as much; for we are told that he spoke of A. as the "intellect of the school." Unfortunately, there is a total absence of particu
lars or precise information as to the early studies of the rising philosopher. He remained at Athens twenty years, during which the only recorded, in addition to his study ing with Plato, are, that he set up a class of rhetoric, and that in so doing he became the rival of the celebrated orator and rhetorical teacher, Isotrates, whom he appears to have attacked with great severity. It was in the schools of rhetoric that the young men of Athens got the principal part of their education for public life. They learned the art of speaking before the dikasteries, or courts of law, and the public assembly, with efficiency and elegance; and incidentally acquired the notions of law and public policy that regulated the management of affairs at the time. We can easily suppose that A. would look with contempt upon the shallowness—in all that regarded thought or subject matter —of the common rhetorical teaching, of which, doubtless, the prevailing excel lence would lie in the form of the address, being artistic rather than profound or erudite. One of the disciples of Isocrates, defending his master A., wrote a treatise wherein allusion is made to a work (now lost) on proverbs, the first recorded publication of the philosopher.
The death of Plato (347 n.c.) was the occasion of A.'s departure from Athens. It was not extraordinary or unreasonable that A. should hope to succeed his master as the chief of his school, named the academy. We now know that no other man then exist ing had an equal title to that pre-eminence. Plato, however, left his nephew Spensippus as his successor. We may suppose the disappointment thus arising to have been the principal circumstance that determined A. to stay no longer in Athens; but there are also other reasons that may be assigned, arising out of his relations with the Macedo nian royal family at a time when the Athenians and Philip had come into open enmity.