ABSTRACT
The writings of Theophrastus, his immediate successor, include Metaphysics and an Inquiry into Plants, which are not scholastic annotations but renewals and extensions of enquiries to which he himself had been a party during Aristotle’s life. Aristotle had argued that there are two forms of continuous motion, the linear and the cyclic; when Xenarchus added a third, the spiral motion, he was evidently conscious that he was contradicting the man whom he acknowledged as his master in philosophy. Plutarch believes that Aristotle’s philosophy coincides at many points with that of Plato. After Plutarch, Platonism began to eclipse the other schools and gradually assumed a scholastic character as it strove to wrest from the Dialogues a coherent and normative system which would be immune to Aristotle’s strictures. Atticus forgets that it was Aristotle who gives the name of matter to the ‘receptacle’, which has no name of its own in Plato’s myth.
