The Politics of Aristotle

by Aristotle

  [B 90] So we assign life to the man who is awake rather than to him who is asleep, to him who understands rather than to him who is foolish, and we say the pleasure of living is the pleasure we get from the exercise of the soul—for that is true life. [B 91] If, then, there is more than one exercise of the soul, still the chief of all is that of understanding as well as possible. It is clear, then, that necessarily the pleasure arising from understanding and contemplation is, alone or most of all, the pleasure of living. Pleasant life and true enjoyment, therefore, belong only to philosophers, or to them most of all. For the activity of our truest thoughts, nourished by the most real of things and preserving steadfastly for ever the perfection it receives, is of all activities the most productive of joy.

  (Iamblichus, Protrepticus 59.19–60.10 Pistelli):

  [B 93] If we should not only infer this from the parts of happiness but also go deeper and establish it on the basis of happiness as a whole, let us state explicitly that as philosophizing is related to happiness so it is related to our character as good or bad men. For it is as leading to or following from well-being that all things are worthy of choice, and of the sources of happiness some are necessary others pleasant. [B 94] Thus we lay it down that happiness is either understanding and a form of wisdom, or excellence, or genuine pleasure, or all of these. [B 95] Now if it is understanding, clearly philosophers alone will enjoy a happy life; if it is excellence of the soul or enjoyment, then too it will belong to them alone or most of all—for excellence is that which governs our life, and understanding is, if one thing is compared with another, the most pleasant of all things. Similarly, if one says that all these things together are identical with happiness, it must be defined by understanding. [B 96] Therefore all who can should practise philosophy; for this is either the perfect life or of all single things most truly the cause of it for souls.

  F 55 R3, F 59 R3, F 60 R3, F 61 R3 (Iamblichus, Protrepticus 45.4–48.21 Pistelli):

  [B 97] It is no bad thing to throw light on the subject by adducing what appears clearly to everyone. [B 98] To everyone this much is quite plain, that no-one would choose to live in possession of the greatest1 possible wealth and power but deprived of understanding and mad, not even if he were to be pursuing with delight the most violent pleasures, as some madmen do. All men, then, it seems, shun folly above all things. Now the contrary of folly is understanding; and of two contraries one is to be avoided, the other to be chosen. [B 99] Thus as illness is to be avoided, so health is to be chosen. Hence according to this argument too, in the light of common conceptions, it seems that understanding is most desirable of all things, and not for the sake of anything that follows from it. For even if a man had everything but were destroyed and diseased in his understanding, his life would not be desirable, since even the other good things could not profit him. [B 100] Therefore all men, insofar as they can come within reach of understanding and taste its savour, reckon other things as nothing, and for this reason not one of us would endure being drunk or a child throughout his life.

  [B 101] For this reason too, though sleep is a very pleasant thing, it is not desirable, even if we suppose the sleeper to have all possible pleasures, because the images of sleep are false while those of waking men are true. For sleep and waking differ in nothing else but the fact that the soul when awake often knows the truth but in sleep is always deceived; for the whole nature of dreams is an image and a falsity. [B 102] Further, the fact that most men shrink from death shows the soul’s love of learning. For it shrinks from what it does not know, from darkness and obscurity, and naturally seeks what is manifest and knowable. This is, above all, the reason why we say we ought to honour exceedingly those who have caused us to see the sun and the light, and to revere our fathers and mothers as causes of the greatest of goods—they are, it seems, the causes of our understanding and seeing. It is for the same reason that we delight in things and men that are familiar, and call dear those whom we know. These things, then, show plainly that what is knowable and manifest and clear is a thing to be loved; and if what is knowable and clear, then also knowing and understanding.

  [B 103] Besides this, just as in the case of property it is not the same possession that conduces to life and to a happy life for men, so it is in the case of understanding too: we do not, I think, need the same understanding with a view to mere life and with a view to the good life. The majority of men may well be pardoned for doing this: they certainly pray for happiness, but they are content if they can merely live. But unless one thinks one ought to endure living on any terms whatever, it is ridiculous not to suffer every toil and bestow every care to gain that kind of understanding which will know the truth. [B 104] One might recognise this from the following facts too, if one viewed human life in a clear light. For one will find that all the things men think great are mere scene-painting; hence it is rightly said that man is nothing and that nothing human is stable. Strength, size, beauty are a laugh and of no worth;. . .2 only because we see nothing accurately. [B 105] For if one could see as clearly as they say Lynceus did, who saw through walls and trees, would one ever have thought a man endurable to look at if one saw of what poor materials he is made? Honours and reputation, things so envied, are more than other things full of indescribable folly; for to him who catches a glimpse of things eternal it seems foolish to crave for these things. What is there among human things that is long-lived or lasting? It is owing to our weakness, I think, and the shortness of our life that even this appears great. [B 106] Which of us, looking to these facts, would think himself happy and blessed? For all of us are from the very beginning (as they say in the initiation rites) shaped by nature as though for punishment. For it is an inspired saying of the ancients that the soul pays penalties and that we live for the punishment of great sins. [B 107] For indeed the conjunction of the soul with the body looks very much like this. For as the Etruscans are said often to torture captives by chaining dead bodies face to face with the living, fitting part to part, so the soul seems to be extended throughout and affixed to all the sensitive members of the body.

  [B 108] Mankind possesses nothing divine or blessed that is of any account except what there is in us of mind and understanding: this alone of our possessions seems to be immortal, this alone divine. [B 109] By virtue of being able to share in this faculty, life, however wretched and difficult by nature, is yet so cleverly arranged that man seems a god in comparison with all other creatures. [B 110] For mind is the god in us—whether it was Hermotimus or Anaxagoras who said so—and mortal life contains a portion of some god. We ought, therefore, either to philosophize or to say farewell to life and depart hence, since all other things seem to be great nonsense and folly.

  F 51 R3 (Elias, Prolegomena Philosophiae 3.17–23):

  . . . or like Aristotle in his work entitled Protrepticus; for he puts it like this: If you ought to philosophize you ought to philosophize; and if you ought not to philosophize you ought to philosophize: therefore, in any case you ought to philosophize. For if philosophy exists, we certainly ought to philosophize, since it exists; and if it does not exist, in that case too we ought to inquire why philosophy does not exist—and by inquiring we philosophize; for inquiry is the cause of philosophy.

  F 53 R3 (Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes III xxviii 69):

  Thus Aristotle, accusing the old philosophers who taught that philosophy had been perfected by their own talents, says that they were either very stupid or very conceited; but that he sees that, since in a few years a great advance has been made, philosophy will in a short time be brought to completion.

  F 54 R3 (Calcidius, Commentarius in Timaeum 225.21–226.2 Waszink):

  . . . Aristotle agrees, saying that at first children, before they are weaned, think that all men are their fathers and all women their mothers, and that as they grow older they make the distinction but they are not always successful in distinguishing and often are taken in by false images and stretch out their hands towards the image.

  F 54
R3 (Calcidius, Commentarius in Timaeum 226.8–15 Waszink):

  It is the height of madness not merely to be ignorant but not to realize that you are ignorant and therefore to assent to false images and to suppose that true images are false—as when men think that wickedness is advantageous and virtue an impediment that brings destruction; and such an opinion accompanies to their last years many men who believe that doing injury is very expedient and acting rightly disadvantageous, and who are therefore reviled. Aristotle calls such people aged children, because their minds hardly differ from those of children.

  F 56 R3 (Plutarch, Pelopidas 279B):

  For of the majority of people, as Aristotle says, some do not use it [sc. wealth] through meanness, and others misuse it through extravagance—and the latter spend their lives as slaves to every passing pleasure, the former as slaves to their business.

  F 61 R3 (Cicero, de finibus II xiii 40):

  . . . man, as Aristotle says, was born for two things, understanding and action, as though he were a mortal god.

  F 62 R3 (Plutarch, quaestiones convivales 734D):

  Coming into contact with Aristotle’s Scientific Problems, which had been brought to Thermopylae, Florus himself came to teem with many puzzles—as is normal and proper to philosophical natures—and passed them on to his companions; he thus bore witness to Aristotle’s remark that much learning is the beginning of many puzzles.1

  F 63 R3 (Diogenes Laertius, IX 53):

  He [sc. Protagoras] was the first to discover the so-called ‘knot’ on which they carry their burdens, as Aristotle says in his On Education; for he was a porter, as Epicurus too says somewhere.

  F 64 R3 (Themistius, orationes 295CD):

  This man, after some slight association with my studies or amusements, had almost the same experience as the philosopher Axiothea, Zeno of Citium, and the Corinthian farmer. . . . The Corinthian farmer, after coming into contact with Gorgias—not Gorgias himself, but the dialogue Plato wrote in criticism of the sophist—at once gave up his farm and his vines, mortgaged his soul to Plato, and sowed and planted Plato’s views there. This is the man whom Aristotle honours in his Corinthian1 dialogue.

  F 65 R3 (Diogenes Laertius, VIII 57):

  Aristotle in the Sophist says that Empedocles was the first to discover rhetoric, Zeno dialectic.

  F 66 R3 (Diogenes Laertius, VIII 63):

  Aristotle says that he [sc. Empedocles] was a free spirit and averse to all authority, if (as Xanthus says in his account of him) he refused the kingship which was offered to him, plainly setting more value on simplicity.

  F 67 R3 (Diogenes Laertius, IX 54):

  Pythodorus, son of Polyzelus, one of the Four Hundred, accused him [sc. Protagoras]; but Aristotle says that Euathlus did.

  F 68 R3 (Diogenes Laertius, II 55):

  Aristotle says that a vast number of people wrote eulogies and memorials to Grylos, partly in the wish to please his father.

  F 69 R3 (Quintilian, II xvii 14):

  Aristotle, as is his custom, has in the Grylos produced for the sake of inquiry certain arguments of his usual subtlety [to show that rhetoric is not an art] . . .

  F 70 R3 (Diogenes Laertius, VIII 57–58):

  In his On Poets he [sc. Aristotle] says that Empedocles was both Homeric and skilled in his diction, using metaphor and the other devices of poetry; and that although he wrote other poems too—the Crossing of Xerxes, and a Prelude to Apollo—a sister of his (or, as Hieronymus says, a daughter) later burned them, the Prelude by accident, the Persian verses deliberately because they were unfinished. And he says in general that he also wrote tragedies and works on politics.

  F 71 R3 (Diogenes Laertius, VIII 51–52):

  Eratosthenes, in his Olympic Victors, says that Meton’s father1 won his victory in the seventy-first Olympiad: his authority is Aristotle. . . . Aristotle, and also Heraclides, say that he [sc. Empedocles] died at the age of sixty.

  F 72 R3 (Athenaeus, 505C):

  Aristotle in his work On Poets writes thus: ‘Are we then to deny that the so-called mimes of Sophron, which are not even in verse,1 or those of Alexamenus of Teos, which were written before2 the Socratic dialogues, are dialogues3 and imitations?’ Thus Aristotle, the most learned of men, says outright that Alexamenus wrote dialogues before Plato.

  F 73 R3 (Diogenes Laertius, III 37):

  Aristotle says that the form of his [sc. Plato’s] writings was in between poetry and prose.

  F 74 R3 (Macrobius, V xviii 19–20):

  I will quote Aristotle’s own words in the second book of his On Poets, where he says this about Euripides: ‘Euripides says that the sons of Thestius went with their left foot unshod—at all events, he writes that:

  In their left step they were unshod of foot, while the other had sandals, so that they should have one knee light.

  Now the custom of the Aetolians is just the opposite: their left foot is shod, the right unshod—I suppose because the leading foot should be light, but not the one which remains fixed’.

  F 75 R3 (Diogenes Laertius, II 46):

  He [sc. Socrates] had as rivals, according to Aristotle in the third book of his On Poetry, a certain Antilochus of Lemnos and Antiphon the soothsayer—just as Pythagoras had Cylon of Croton; Homer when alive Syagrus and when dead Xenophanes of Colophon; Hesiod when alive Cercops and when dead the aforesaid Xenophanes; Pindar, Amphimenes of Cos; Thales, Pherecydes; Bias, Salaros of Priene; Pittakos, Antimenidas and Alcaeus; Anaxagoras, Sosibius; and Simonides, Timocreon.

  F 76 R3 ([Plutarch], Vita Homeri 3):

  Aristotle in the third book of his On Poetry says that in the island of Ios, at the time when Neleus the son of Codrus was leading the Ionian settlement, a certain girl who was a native of the island became pregnant by a spirit which was one of the companions of the Muses in the dance. Being ashamed of what had happened because of the size of her belly, she went to a place called Aegina. Pirates raided the place, enslaved the girl, and took her to Smyrna which was then under the Lydians; they did this as a favour to Maeon, who was the king of Lydia and their friend. He fell in love with the girl for her beauty and married her. While she was living near the Meles the birth-pangs came upon her and she gave birth to Homer on the bank of the river. Maeon adopted him and brought him up as his own child, Critheis having died immediately after her delivery. Not long after, Maeon himself died. When the Lydians were being oppressed by the Aeolians and had decided to leave Smyrna, and their leaders had called on any who wished to follow them to leave the town, Homer, who was still an infant, said he too wished to follow (όμηρεῖν); for which reason he was called Homer instead of Melesigenes.

  F 78 R3 (Cicero, ad Quintum fratrem III ν I):

  . . . Aristotle says in his own name what he has to say about the state and the outstanding man.

  F 79 R3 (Syrianus, Commentarius in Metaphysica 168.33–35):

  In the second book of the Politicus he [sc. Aristotle] says the same as his predecessors about this subject—his words are: ‘The good is the most accurate measure of all things’.

  F 80 R3 (Seneca, de ira I ix 2):

  Anger, Aristotle says, is necessary, nor can any battle be won without it—unless it fills the mind and kindles the spirit. But we must treat it not as a commander but as a soldier.

  (Philodemus, Volumina Rhetorica II. 175, frag. XV):

  A hare that makes its appearance among hounds cannot escape, Aristotle says, nor can that which is deemed despicable and shameless survive among men.

  F 82 R3 (Demetrius, de elocutione 28):

  At all events, in Aristotle’s work On Justice, if the speaker who is bewailing the fate of Athens were to say ‘The enemy city they captured, their own they forsook,’ he would have used the language of emotion and lament; but if he makes it assonant—‘The enemy city they took, their own they forsook’—by heaven he will not rouse any emotion or pity but only tears of laughter.

  F 83 R3 (Athenaeus, 6D):

  Others call Philoxenus a fish-lover, but A
ristotle calls him simply a dinner-lover. He writes, I think, as follows: ‘When they are making speeches to crowded audiences they spend the whole day in relating marvels, and that to men who have just sailed in from the Phasis or the Borysthenes, when they have read nothing themselves but the Dinner of Philoxenus—and not the whole of that.’

  F 84 R3 (Suetonius, de blasphemiis 84 Taillardat):

  Aristotle in the first book of his On Justice says that he [sc. Eurybatos] was a thief who, when he was caught and put in chains, was encouraged by the warders to show how he got over walls and into houses: on being set free, he fastened the spikes to his feet and took the sponges—then he easily climbed up, broke through the roof, and got away.

  F 86 R3 (Plutarch, de Stoicorum repugnantiis 1040E):

  . . . he [sc. Chrysippus] says in criticism of Aristotle on the subject of justice that he is not right in saying that if pleasure is the end justice is destroyed, and with justice each of the other excellences.

  F 87 R3 (Boethius, Commentarius in de Interpretatione, ed. 2,1 i 27):

  In his work On Justice he [sc. Aristotle] makes it clear that nouns and verbs are not sounds that signify objects of perception; he says: ‘the objects of thought and the objects of perception are from the start distinct in their natures’.

  F 89 R3 (Cicero, de officiis II xvi 56–57):

  How much more serious and true is Aristotle’s criticism of us for not being astonished at these vast sums of money spent on captivating the populace. For he says1 that if men besieged by an enemy should be compelled to pay a mina for a pint of water, that seems at first incredible to us and everyone is astonished; but when they think about it, they pardon it as due to necessity. Yet in the case of this enormous outlay and endless expenditure, we are not greatly astonished at all—even though necessity is not being relieved or respect increased, and the pleasure of the populace itself lasts only a very short time and moreover derives from the most trivial of objects where at the moment of gratification even the memory of the pleasure dies. He rightly infers that these things gratify children, womenfolk, slaves, and slavelike free men; but they can in no way be approved of by a serious man who weighs events with a sure judgment.