Aristotle: His Life and School

"Well, it’s more than just a biography . Not that a biography of Aristotle wouldn’t be a good thing, but it’s so much more than that. Carlo Natali is an eminent classicist as well as ancient philosopher. He really knows his Greek and Latin, and this is crucial when you’re dealing with the peculiar ancient biographical sources on Aristotle. Many of these sources are hostile. Aristotle had enemies, both in his own time and in later antiquity, as well as amongst early Christians and in the early Middle Ages. There’s a great deal of derogatory material in their writings which needs to be sifted carefully. The main source is a man called Diogenes Laertius, who wrote biographies of the ancient philosophers, but they are often more like comic caricatures. He has Aristotle engaging in daft sexual shenanigans and being vain. But this is obviously part of the propaganda and counter-propaganda going on between different philosophical schools. Piecing together Aristotle’s life also involves archaeological sites at Mieza in Macedonia and in Athens as well as inscriptions—epigraphic evidence—from near Assos, the city in Asia Minor where he lived for a while. And we have evidence contained in Aristotle’s own works: for example, when he writes about creatures he’s seen in Lesbos, we get a strong sense of his time on that island. “The original book was ground-breaking because, before it, studies of Aristotle’s life had been highly speculative” But this Aristotle book is far more than a biography. Natali is at Venice University, and it was published in 1991 in Italian. D S Hutchinson—who is a superb Aristotelian at Toronto—has not only translated it but has made new English translations. He has gone back to all those ancient sources so that things don’t get lost in his interpretation of the Italian translation. Also some new sources have turned up since 1991. The current version is from 2013, so it’s quite up to date. The original book was ground-breaking because, before it, studies of Aristotle’s life had been highly speculative. The Germans, including Werner Jaeger constructed enormous hypothetical timelines, trying to put all the treatises (which I consider to be fundamentally undatable) in chronological order. They would say, look there’s an arc where we can see Aristotle’s disagreements with Plato becoming more and more marked, or his views on the possibility or impossibility of an afterlife changing, and other such alleged developments. It’s all speculative. Natali stripped all that back to empirically provable facts; Aristotle would have approved of that. It was a revolutionary book from that point of view. The first chapter is about Aristotle’s life and the second chapter is about the Lyceum. We know quite a lot about the Lyceum, the university he set up in Athens, and its legal status. The third chapter is about the radically new forms of activity that had not happened at the Academy, which included book-collecting. Aristotle’s library at the Lyceum was legendary and its organisation later became the model of the Library of Alexandria. There were also new pedagogical methods, including those public lectures. So, it’s much more than a biography. It’s about the whole foundation of peripatetic philosophy. And it’s so readable."