ABSTRACT
One of the striking features in the history of the Peripatetic school is the decline in interest in natural philosophy after Theophrastus and Strato. That decline may not in itself be as puzzling as it seems at first sight; as John Glucker has argued, Aristotle's school was the odd one out among Athenian philosophical schools in the early Hellenistic period, in concerning itself with natural philosophy as a subject of interest in its own right. The evidence for any concern with nature is most tenuous in the case of Lyco. Hieronymus explained long-sightedness in the elderly by recourse to an effluence theory of sight; the denser particles travel less far than the finer ones, and vision in the elderly is more susceptible to disturbance by the denser particles. Aristo is cited by the Florentine paradoxographer, once conjecturally identified with Sotion, for the effects on the mind of water from a fountain in his home island of Ceos.
