Last Updated: 2022-11-28
Who was Aristotle?
Although Plato's nickname for him was simply "Mind", he was, of course, no more a disembodied mind than any other human being. He had parents (who died when he was a child or early adolescent), an older sister and a younger brother, a wife (who also died young) by whom he had a daughter, another partner after his wife died by whom he had a son, friends, enemies, teachers, schoolmates, colleagues, students, servants, and some very powerful people whom he served and befriended as well. Although the facts of his life are hazy indeed 2400 years after the fact, if reconstructions by modern scholars are close to the mark then he lived quite an eventful life, not just of scholarship but of political influence and something approaching intrigue.
Aristotle was born in 384 BCE at a small town in northern Greece (almost in Macedonia) called Stagira, a colony founded almost 300 years earlier by the cities of Andros and Chalkis. On both his father's side and his mother's side he came from a long line of doctors who were said to be descended from Asclepius, a physician mentioned in The Iliad of Homer. His father Nicomachus, whose family came from Andros, was the court physician to and perhaps a friend and confidant of Amyntas III, the king of Macedonia; his mother Phaestis was from a well-to-do family of Chalkis, where they owned an estate.
Amyntas died in 370 BCE when Aristotle was thirteen and Aristotle's parents died before Aristotle went to Athens in 367 BCE, so it's possible that Nicomachus and Phaestis were killed during the royal intrigues that followed the death of Amyntas and before the accession of King Philip II in 359 BCE. Aristotle's older sister Arimneste married a man (seemingly a distant relative) named Proxenus, who hailed from Atarneus on the western coast of Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey). After the death of his parents, Aristotle was put under the care and guidance of his sister and her husband. At age 16 or 17 Aristotle was sent to Athens for further education, perhaps initially under the rhetorician and philosopher Isocrates and then under Plato once the latter returned from an ill-fated political venture at the Greek city of Syracuse in Sicily. Aristotle spent the next 20 years as an active member of the Academy, Plato's school and research community, where he studied and eventually taught.
In 348 or 347 BCE, Aristotle left Athens and the Academy under circumstances that are unclear. Some accounts say that he left after the death of Plato in 347 BCE, but others say that he left in 348 BCE before Plato died. Why would he have left sooner? Some scholars speculate that Aristotle, with his connections to the Macedonian court, was forced to leave because of anti-Macedonian sentiment in Athens stirred up after the destruction of the city of Olynthus by the forces of King Philip in the summer of 348 BCE. In any case, Aristotle went not to his mother's estate at Chalkis on the island of Euboea (which was in a state of chaos at the time) but back to Atarneus. Here he became a friend and adviser to Hermias, the ruler of Atarneus. Soon thereafter, Aristotle met and married a woman named Pythia, the adopted daughter or niece of Hermias, with whom Aristotle had a daughter also named Pythia.
Scholars of a philosophical bent like to imagine that Aristotle went to Atarneus (and subsequently to nearby Assos and Mytilene) solely to perform biological research with two of his colleagues from the Academy, Theophrastus and Xenocrates. Although Aristotle certainly did extensive research in the area (as summarized in The Lagoon by Armand Marie Leroi), it's also possible that Aristotle was engaged in diplomatic missions from King Philip to Hermias, since Atarneus would have provided a convenient beachhead for Philip's planned invasion of Persia. Perhaps the Persian king Artaxerxes got wind of such machinations, because he had Hermias captured, tortured, and killed in 342 BCE.
It seems that Aristotle then relocated to Macedonia (Herpyllis, his common-law wife after the death of Pythia and the mother of his son Nicomachus, was also from Stagira). Modern legend has it that Philip called upon Aristotle to tutor his son Alexander (the future Alexander the Great), but there is no early evidence for this relationship; indeed, the Epicureans and Stoics would have loved to pin Alexander's epic character failings on his teacher Aristotle, but they never mentioned it among their many calumnies. Philip himself was assassinated in 336 BCE, whereupon the young Alexander ascended to the throne and proceeded to conquer all of Greece. In the midst of the ensuing squabbles, it's possible that Aristotle convinced Alexander to spare the city of Athens, which had revolted along with Thebes (which Alexander destroyed) when rumors spread that Alexander had been killed in fighting the Illyrians north of Macedonia. Perhaps not coincidentally, Aristotle returned to Athens in 335 BCE, where he founded his own school, called the Lyceum, and spent the next thirteen years while Alexander took his army east to conquer Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Babylonia, Persia, Bactria, and even northwestern portions of India.
During Alexander's prolonged absence, he put one of Philip's old generals, Antipater, in charge of keeping the peace back in Greece. It seems that Aristotle and Antipater had a close relationship from the time when Philip was king of Macedonia (indeed, Antipater was the executor for Aristotle's last will and testament) and they exchanged many letters (which might have included reports from Aristotle on the political situation in Athens). When Alexander died at Babylon in 323 BCE, Aristotle once again left Athens because of anti-Macedonian agitation, which this time might have included a charge of impiety against Aristotle (the same charge which had led to the execution of Plato's teacher Socrates in 399 BCE). To prevent the Athenians from "sinning twice against philosophy", Aristotle fled to the estate of his mother's family in Chalkis, where he died soon after in 322 BCE at the age of 62, perhaps of stomach cancer.
Thus we can see that Aristotle led a full and eventful life. In the midst of all this activity, Aristotle founded the sciences of logic and biology, wrote hundreds of popular dialogues and scholarly works on an enormous range of subjects, taught numerous students, gave public lectures, and contributed fundamentally to epistemology, metaphysics, psychology, rhetoric, literary analysis, political theory, and ethics. Although he was not without his faults, his intellectual legacy is immense and will never be equalled.
What was Aristotle like as a person? That's hard to say. Unlike Socrates, he never served in the military and never had to work for a living (Socrates was a stonemason), although the ancient sources indicate that he was quite active in diplomatic affairs. Unlike Plato, Epicurus, and many other ancient (and modern) philosophers, Aristotle married and had children, to whom he was very devoted; indeed, he expended great care in his will to ensure that his deceased relations would be remembered and that his living relations would be cared for. He also made provisions to free the slaves he had inherited with generous stipends so that they could support themselves. He seems to have been a steadfast friend to powerful men like Philip, Hermias, and Antipater as well as to colleagues in learning like Plato, Theophrastus, and Xenocrates. Clearly he worked extremely hard to understand the world around him; but he also, through his popular writings and his teaching activities, put a great deal of thought and effort into convincing other people to take life seriously through philosophical exploration instead of (or at least in addition to) money-making, military expeditions, political leadership, and other practical pursuits.