In the fourth century BC, the lands and the sea to the east of Athens were a battleground between empires. To the east of the Aegean there were Persia and Anatolia, modern-day Turkey. Macedonia lay to the north and the powerful Greek city-states to the west. Armies fought for fertile land or to control the ports that were the gateways into new trade routes; the Macedonians, the Persians, the Spartans were all at various times in the ascendant in the Aegean.
In 348 BC, when Aristotle was about thirty years old, Philip of Macedonia laid siege to the important coastal city of Olynthus. Built on the flat-topped hills overlooking the Gulf of Torone and under the protection of Athens, the town was of strategic importance to Philip, but he also wanted to capture two of his troublesome relatives who had taken refuge in the town and were making claims to his throne. Although the Athenians sent troops and ships to protect the Olynthian citizens, they failed to reach the city in time. Philip’s troops looted the city before razing all its buildings and selling its entire population—including the Athenian garrison—into slavery.
In the wake of the attack, anti-Macedonian feeling erupted in Athens. Anti-Macedonian slogans were daubed on house walls; Athenians threw rotting food at Macedonians and attacked their property. It was probably not safe for Aristotle to walk alone at night. He put up with the persecution at first, keeping to himself. But he knew he was vulnerable; his status as a respected philosopher would not be enough to protect him. Only fifty years earlier, in 399 BC, the great Socrates had been charged with heresy by a jury of five hundred Athenian citizens, accused, Plato tells us in his Apologia, of being “an evil-doer and curious person, searching into things under the earth and above the heavens … and teaching all this to others.” Socrates had been sentenced to death by a margin of six votes. Refusing the opportunity to escape the city and thus break the Athenian law that had condemned him, he was executed by poison.
As the xenophobia in the streets of Athens thickened in 348 BC, Aristotle finally gave the order to his slaves to begin packing up his belongings. He left the city quickly, boarding a merchant ship down in the port of Piraeus, taking with him his beautiful clothes, his extensive library,* and some of his slaves. He almost certainly did not expect to return. Few places of refuge were open to him: he could not head north to his hometown, Stageira, because Philip had destroyed it on his march into Olynthus; nor could he return to his mother’s homeland in Chalcis, on the island of Euboea, because Philip had stirred up the islanders against Athenians and to them Aristotle was an Athenian. The political landscape of the Aegean had turned against him.
This is where the picture of Aristotle’s early life disappears from view for a while. We know that he left Athens in 348 BC and that he arrived in the port of Atarneus, on the coast of the Troad, two hundred miles east, a few weeks or months later. We lose him in between, somewhere in the Aegean Sea. It is probable that he first headed directly north, hugging the coast of Euboea and then Thessaly, making his way to the Macedonian court in Pella, the capital city of Macedonia, the city where he had spent at least some of his childhood and which might have seemed a natural refuge. If he did find a way of getting to the Macedonian court, he would have found Philip, now in his midthirties, seriously disfigured since he had last seen him; he had lost an eye in battle, and the scar stretched across half of his face. Philip was also now a father of two boys—the seven-year-old Alexander, who would become Alexander the Great, and his elder brother, the ten-year-old Arrhidaeus—and he was married to his fourth wife, Olympias, a member of the snake-worshipping cult of Dionysus. The courtiers gossiped that she slept with snakes and that Alexander, already wild and uncontrollable, was the offspring of an alliance between his mother and Zeus, not the natural son of Philip.*
The seascape of Aristotle’s journey.
© John Gilkes
Aristotle’s feelings toward Philip must have been complex at this point. Even if he had fond memories of the prince whom he had known as a boy in the Macedonian court, it would have been difficult for him to forgive the king for the destruction of Stageira. Under Philip’s orders, the Macedonian soldiers had massacred or enslaved all the occupants of his hometown, and these may have included members of Aristotle’s family, his late father’s slaves, and his tutors and friends. They had set fire to and razed all the buildings he remembered with affection—the marketplace, the temples, the gymnasia. But he was now a political refugee and he would have to bite his tongue.
Whichever route he took on his great sea journey across the Aegean from Athens to Atarneus, Aristotle would have stopped at ports on many different Greek islands so that the captains could restock supplies, repair their sails, and rest their sailors. He spent a good deal of time in harbors, getting in and out of boats. Day by day, week by week, island by island, he would have noticed the bird and plant life changing around him. Watching the sailors fishing with nets and lines from the side of the boat, Aristotle would have noticed the differences between the fish that came up in the nets, the birds that followed the boats, and the leaves from the different plants that flourished in each new port. He no doubt besieged the sailors and the fishermen with questions. Each set of answers gave him a new set of questions to ask about the natural world: about adaptation, reproduction, species, varieties, diversity. For Aristotle, now at sea, like Ishmael in Melville’s Moby-Dick, “the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open.”
Aristotle’s boat docked at the port of Atarneus a few weeks later. At some point since he had fled Athens, either one or both of his protectors, Philip of Macedonia or Proxenus, his uncle, had secured him a new position as a political adviser in this foreign court. Aristotle’s new patron and protector, Hermias, was one of the most interesting figures in this fourth-century-BC Aegean theater of power. Hermias had been born a slave and had worked as a private secretary for a successful banker who had spent his money on extending his territories along the coast of Asia Minor opposite Lesbos; he had even been sent to study at Plato’s Academy in Athens. When his master died, Hermias inherited a wealthy coastal princedom, protected by a small army of mercenaries; now he wanted to establish a court that would replicate something of the life he had experienced in Athens. Plato, assuring him that all just and successful rulers needed philosophers in their courts to advise and temper the power of the king, had already sent him two philosopher brothers from the academy, Erastos and Koriskos, to give him advice on governance and ethics.
Aristotle flourished in Hermias’ court. He married Hermias’ young niece Pythias* soon after he arrived, a marriage that indicates the high esteem in which his patron held him. Now Aristotle was more than a court philosopher to Hermias; he was kin. Soon he was also father to a daughter, named after her young mother. He had a new kind of power here, an opportunity to apply his emerging ideas about politics and governance to the concrete day-to-day problems that pressed upon his patron and to help shape the ruler’s relationships with his subjects.
In return for effective political counsel, Hermias gave Aristotle and his companions a school in Assos, some one hundred miles away, a small coastal town built on raised ground that looked across the sea to Lesbos. As news of the school spread, young men from settlements inland came to Assos to attend classes. Aristotle was still a Platonist, but in his new Academy he was striking out for himself, shaping and defining new questions about the natural world.
It was in Assos that Aristotle began the project that would become his great book The History of the Animals, an attempt to describe the habits of as many different species as possible and to use those descriptions to try to discover key patterns and designs amid all the apparent diversity he had seen on his great sea journey and continued to see on the coast of the Troad. He took his students out of the lecture theater and down the road to the rocky seashore. He showed them how to collect detailed facts about plants, lizards, and birds, how to find birds’ nests, how to observe animals in their natural habitats, how to dissect a snake or a seabird to observe its internal as wel
l as external structures.
Nobody had asked questions and gathered information quite like this before; certainly no one in Athens had been interested in studying the shapes and functions of birds’ beaks or the stamens of plants or the life cycles of cicadas. As Aristotle and his students collected along the rocky shoreline of Assos, wading in and out of rock pools, watching seabirds nesting, mating, and feeding, they talked incessantly, sketching out arguments and counterarguments about nature’s patterns and rhythms. Start with the facts, Aristotle would insist, then work up and out to general principles. Accept nothing as truth unless you see it with your own eyes. The younger men, such as Theophrastus or Coriscus’ son Neleus, accepted these new principles and methods easily, enthusiastically collecting beetles, describing plumage patterns, and learning to dissect. It was always more difficult for Aristotle to persuade his older Athenian companions, still preoccupied with Plato’s abstractions, of the worth of this fact-collecting work.
There had been a revolution in Aristotle’s way of seeing and thinking in the months since he left the Academy. Plato’s world had been one of abstracts and ideal forms, concentrated not on the here-and-now, the materiality of nature, but on another world entirely, up there. Aristotle’s new world, in contrast, consisted of observable facts, a world of down here.
Nature had usurped his childhood gods; it astounded him. Philosophy starts in wonder and wonderment, he would tell his students as he gathered them to watch a chick hatch from its egg or a spider weave its web. Astonished by the immense variety of species and body parts he had seen on his sea journey, Aristotle was searching for evidence of the unity and regularity of design and structure at the heart of all this apparent diversity. There were continuities as well as discontinuities with Plato’s philosophy in this zoological work—Aristotle was, like Plato, searching for the irreducible form in things. But Aristotle had become what we would now call an empiricist. And this empiricism began in exile from the Academy, on the seashores and lagoons of Asia Minor.
After two years teaching in the school in Assos, Aristotle, his wife, and his companions sailed across the nine-mile-wide channel to the island of Lesbos, where they stayed for a further two years. Theophrastus brought him to the island as Aristotle’s zoological project gathered pace, describing the fish in the lagoons, the petrified forest up in the hills, the natural springs that gushed up in cracks in the rocks or in lush moss-lined caves. The Greek poets Alcaeus and Sappho, who had once lived there, described the island as wet and heavy with fruit, flowers, grapes, and olives. Alcaeus wrote of the “bloom of soft autumn,” and claimed to have “heard the flowery spring coming,” the “chirring of summer cicadas, the long-winged widgeon flying overhead, harlequin necks outstretched.” Sappho described an orchard where “cool water babbles through apple-branches, and the whole place is shadowed by roses, and from the shimmering leaves the sleep of enchantment comes down; therein too a meadow, where horses graze, blossoms with spring flowers and the winds blow gently.”
During the two years in which Aristotle lived on Lesbos, he favored the largest of the two lagoons for fish observation, perhaps because it bordered Pyrra, one of the five main cities of Lesbos, built high up on a hill, a citadel above a tiny natural harbor. Pyrra was destroyed by an earthquake only a hundred years after Aristotle walked its streets and marketplaces; the whole town disappeared into the lagoon. Today you can still see stumps of columns sticking out of the lagoon, half a mile from the salt flats where fresh sea salt is harvested and where Aristotle watched fish spawn and cuttlefish change color.
For two years the beautiful sea lagoon at Pyrra became Aristotle’s natural laboratory. He would have come to know the time of day by the coming and going of the fishermen’s boats, by the length of the shadows, by the sounds of the men at work on the salt flats, by the calls of the birds, or by the depth of blue in the water. His zoological questions multiplied here, they became more focused and precise; he had begun to question the relationship between stasis, change, and diversity, between form and function. He assigned specific natural philosophical questions to particular students. Why had the starfish in the lagoon multiplied to such an extent that they had become a pest to the fishermen and yet the scallops had all but disappeared? Why did sea urchins spawn in midwinter here but almost nowhere else in the Aegean? Why were there so many varieties of cuttlefish in the lagoon and yet no octopuses at all? Why were there no parrot wrasses, or any kind of spiny fish, or sea crawfish, or the spotted or the spiny dogfish; and, why did all the lagoon’s fishes, except only a little gudgeon, migrate seaward to breed? Why was the chameleon common to the Asiatic coast and found all around the lagoon and yet never to be found on the Greek islands farther west or on the Greek mainland?
The philosophers set to work to investigate nature’s ways. All around the bay below the citadel of Pyrra, the fishermen had built walkways and piers where they fished with rod and line and tended simple fish farms. On land, on the harbors and near the markets, they built holding bays or cisterns to keep their finest and most valuable fish alive and protected from the scorching sun. Lying on the platforms built out over the lagoon, Aristotle could observe the fish breeding and feeding in their natural environment. Here, either in the cool of the covered cisterns or out on the wooden walkways in the cool of the early mornings or as the sun began to dip, he watched them for hours at a time, making careful notes or dictating to a slave and formulating questions to discuss with Theophrastus and the other students.
In the introduction to Parts of Animals, Aristotle passionately defends this orderly observation of particulars; one senses that it was difficult to convince students who had been trained on abstract verbal dueling that investigating earthworms or insects was worth doing. “If any person thinks the examination of the rest of the animal kingdom an unworthy task,” he wrote in that introduction,
he must hold in like disesteem the study of man. For no one can look at the primordia of the human frame—blood, flesh, bones, vessels, and the like—without much repugnance. Moreover, when any one of the parts or structures, be it which it may, is under discussion, it must not be supposed that it is its material composition to which attention is being directed or which is the object of the discussion, but the relation of such part to the total form. Similarly, the true object of architecture is not bricks, mortar, or timber, but the house; and so the principal object of natural philosophy is not the material elements, but their composition, and the totality of the form, independently of which they have no existence.
In defending his methods, Aristotle reminded his students of what Heraclitus had said to the strangers who hesitated to enter when they found him warming himself by the kitchen fire. He told them not to be afraid, for gods were present even in the kitchen. Nothing was too low for the philosopher. Every aspect of nature’s realm was worthy of study. Every animal opened up to investigation revealed something natural and beautiful. Nothing was without design, nothing without purpose. Instead of speculating on the things in the heavens you cannot know, he told his students, use your eyes and hands and senses to investigate what is, not what might be.
The more Aristotle and his students collected facts, the more those facts challenged the worth of the old classification methods. He came to understand that you could not describe one group of animals as feathered and another as unfeathered, one group as wild and another tame, or call some animals walkers and others fliers. Take an ant, for instance, he would explain, or a glowworm. If you stick to the old categories, you will have to put them in both the winged and unwinged groups. Now Aristotle was preoccupied not with dichotomies but with gradations, species that looked almost identical and yet had one or more quite different body parts.
From his descriptions we know that Aristotle would lie for several hours on a small platform at the lagoon watching the giant goby (kobios) and the intertidal blenny (phucis) as they swam about together in the shallows. The two fish are almost impossible to tell apart; they have the same salt-a
nd-pepper markings, body shapes, and upturned eyes. Lifting them out of the water, Aristotle examined their fins, noting that the goby’s fins are like suckers and the blenny’s fins are like rays. But though the design of each is different, they work in exactly the same way, he argued. Both are perfect designs to enable the fish to hold their positions on the muddy floor of the lagoon when high winds whip the waves into peaks. And by dropping scraps of meat into the water he would show his students how the two fish eat different things, too. So why are two fish so similar and yet so different? one of his students might have asked. Aristotle’s answer was that these two fish had been given limbs and parts that were the most useful designs for their own particular environments. Nature had provided those already perfected forms. Nature itself was perfect.
Once the pile of collated facts about animals had grown substantial, Aristotle became more confident. He was certain the cosmos had not been created by a god or gods; it had not come into being nor would it pass away; it was eternal. And if there was no beginning to the world, it could not have been designed; there had been no maker. It was ruled and driven from inside itself, not from the outside. Some aspects of the body parts of animals served a purpose; others were just the outcomes of a process. All around him he saw the evidence of modes of adaptation that ensured the preservation of species: the different shapes of the beaks of the Lesbos birds he studied; the varying shapes and lengths of birds’ legs. But he had also become certain that species, though subject to minor changes and adaptations, were as eternal as time itself. Certain small animals might be spontaneously generated in mud or decaying matter, but this was no proof of species change. While he knew of the existence of hybrids, some fertile, others not, this, too, did not challenge his conviction that species were eternal and that they had not come into being through the chance collisions of atoms, as the Greek philosopher Democritus had once argued.
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