ABSTRACT
Attempts have sometimes been made to explain the positive, technical bent of Aristotle’s mind and the heaviness, which is so unlike the freedom and grace of Plato, by his race and education. But Aristotle was not a Macedonian. Stageira, his native town, was a very ancient Ionian colony in Thracian Chalcidice, and his mother came from Chalcis in Euboea. It is true that his father Nieomachos was a physician in the service of Amyntas II, King of Macedon, the father of Philip, and came of a family of physicians. But, since Nicomachos died while his son was quite young, it is very unlikely that he influenced him directly. At the age of eighteen (366-305) Aristotle entered the Academy. He stayed there twenty years, and taught in the school, perhaps in rhetoric. He was very much attached to the Master (notwithstanding tales which are suspect) and wrote a beautiful eulogy of him in his poem to the memory of his fellow-disciple Eudemos of Cyprus (Frag. 623), and Plato is said to have esteemed him for his penetrating mind and vast erudition. When Speusippos became head of the school, Aristotle left, with Xenocrates, for Lydia, and stayed at the court of Hermeias, the tyrant of Atarneus, an old fellow-pupil. Near-by, in the Troad, there were Platonic circles at Scepsis and at Assos, where, no doubt, Aristotle began to display an independent philosophic activity. Three years later, Hermeias having been surrendered to the Persians and killed, Aristotle took refuge in Mitylene, where he married his first wife, a kinswoman of the tyrant, named Pythias, of whom he seems to have been very fond. Shortly afterwards, he returned to Macedon at the request of King Philip, who entrusted him with the education of his son Alexander, then aged thirteen (343-342). There he remained until 335-334.
