ABSTRACT
Aristotle (384-322) was born at Stageira, an Ionian colony on the Chaldike peninsula near the kingdom of Macedonia. His father was personal physician to Amyntas III, king of the Macedonians and the grandfather of Alexander the Great. Aristotle’s destiny, like that of his father, was closely tied to the Macedonian royal family. As the son of a physician, Aristotle may have been predisposed to empiricism. In any case he was by birth fairly highly placed on the social scale and seems to have been well off. Nevertheless, he had two handicaps in Athens: he was an immigrant without rights of citizenship, and he wasno doubt with good reason-considered ‘a friend of the Macedonians’.
