AR'ISTIP'PUS, a disciple of Socrates, and founder of a philosophical school among the Greeks, which was called the Cyrenaic, from his native city Cyrene, in Africa; flourished 380 B.c. His moral philosophy differed widely from that of Socrates, and was a science of re fined voluptuousness. His fundamental prin ciples were that all human sensations may be reduced to two, pleasure and plain. Pleasure is a gentle, and pain a violent, emotion. All liv ing beings seek the former and avoid the lat ter. Happiness ' is nothing but a continued pleasure, composed of separate gratifications.
AkISTOBULUS, Jew of Alexandria, who lived about 180 ac., in the time of Ptolemy VII, whose teacher he was supposed to have claimed to have been. The work which brings his name down to modern times and of which only parts are still in existence was a com mentary on the Pentateuch, in which he at tempted to prove his theory that much of the literature of ancient Greece had been borrowed from that book. To uphold his view he quoted
copiously from works supposed to have been written by Homer, Orpheus, Linus and Hesiod. He has been the subject of much controversy, many scholars, including Renan, Eichhorn, Wendland and others, contending that his work was not genuine. Their arguments are mainly based on the peculiar forms of the quotations and the supposed claim of Aristobulus to be the teacher of Ptolemy. On the other hand such authorities as Vlackenaer, Freudenthal, Clemen, Schlatter and Schiirer maintain that Aristobulus may have taken his Greek quota tions from some older Jewish writer, which would account for the similarity of their style to the Old Testament. A full discussion of the subject, together with a bibliography, is given in Schurer's 'Geschichte des jiidischen Volkes' (Vol. III, p. 512, 4th ed., 1909).