ABSTRACT
Aristotle is the man who limited providence, gainsaid the immortality of the soul, and affirmed the necessity of external goods to happiness; the last tenet was peculiarly unpalatable to the founder of encratism. The ironic description of Aristotle as a friend of Plato evokes a passage from the Nicomachean Ethics. A more knowledgeable, though less than candid, reading of Aristotle is preserved in the Refutation of all Heresies, discovered in 1851, which is commonly attributed to the turbulent cleric Hippolytus of Rome. When he purports to trace the teaching of the heresiarch Basilides to Aristotle, his errors and distortions are all the more interesting to historians if they illustrate not his own ignorance but the freedom with which Greeks of this epoch handled their intellectual patrimony. Hippolytus commences not with the summary of first principles, which would be usual in a doxography, but with a philippic against the Aristotelian notion of substance.
