ABSTRACT
One of the great books embodying the Greek spirit was written by a man who was an outlander among the Greeks. Born in 384 B.C. in Stagira, Aristotle came from one of the frontier outposts of Greek settlement which faced the rising political sun of Macedon and its new "barbarian" energies. Stagira was a small city in a peninsula that had been settled by people from Chalcis. As a colony on the rim of Greek life it was for that reason all the more intensely Greek in feeling, on the same principle that makes the foreign-born in America more slavish in following the stereotypes of our culture than those whose sense of security makes them freer. Unlike Plato, who wore his aristocracy with a sure and quiet grace, Aristotle came of the upper middle class, which may serve partly to account—as it did in Machiavelli's case— for the dryness and realism of his intelligence and its lack of the more inflated and poetic values, but which sheds light also on his persistent emphasis upon the role of the middle class in a healthy equilibrium state. His father was a physician, and from him he may have derived a technical and scientific tradition which made it possible for Aristotle to deal with experience in a more matter-of-fact way than was habitual with the Greek ruling classes. We know very little of his boyhood, except that for a few years before he had reached his teens he lived in Pella, the Macedonian capital, where his father had become court physician to the king. But his parents died while he was still a boy, 2and he grew up with a guardian—in easy circumstances, possessed of some property.
