Aristotle founds the Lyceum

The story

From the doctor's son to the Academy

Aristotle was born in 384 or 383 BC at Stagira, a small Greek town on the Chalcidice peninsula, in northern Greece. His father, Nicomachus, was the doctor of the king of Macedon, Amyntas III. It is said that as a boy he helped his father and from him took his interest in living things and in direct observation. Orphaned, he was entrusted to a guardian, who sent him to Athens when he was about seventeen or eighteen.

In Athens he entered Plato's Academy. He stayed there about twenty years, until his teacher's death, in 347 BC. He was never an Athenian citizen but a metic, that is a resident foreigner. After Plato's death he left Athens and moved to Asia Minor, to Assos, to the ruler of the place, Hermias, and then to Mytilene, on the island of Lesbos.

Alexander's teacher

Around 343–342 BC the king of Macedon Philip II called him to his Macedonian court (at Mieza) to act as tutor to his son Alexander, who was about thirteen. The task lasted about three years. The young prince, who would become Alexander the Great, had the greatest thinker of the time as his teacher.

The Lyceum

Around 335–334 BC Aristotle returned to Athens and opened a school of his own, in a gymnasium near a precinct sacred to Apollo Lyceus (hence the name “Lyceum”). The school was also called the “Peripatos”, from the Greek “peripatos”, that is “walk”: according to tradition the teachers and pupils discussed while walking under a colonnade. His followers were called Peripatetics.

The Lyceum was different from the Academy. Aristotle gave great importance to the observation of facts. In the school they studied nature, politics and poetry, and Aristotle also gathered a library. Most of the works of Aristotle that have come down to us were intended for the school and not for the public.

An encyclopedic mind

Aristotle wrote about almost everything. The group of works devoted to logic, that is, the correct way of reasoning, is called the “Organon” (“instrument”). Then there are the “Physics”, devoted to nature and movement, the “Metaphysics”, which tries to understand what “being” means, the moral works such as the “Nicomachean Ethics”, the “Politics”, the “Rhetoric” and the “Poetics”, on the art of writing poetry and tragedies.

He was very interested in animals. His “History of Animals” is in ten books, and other works deal with their parts and how they reproduce. According to the Treccani encyclopedia entry, among his observations is that of the stomach of ruminants, and he understood that dolphins breathe and give birth like mammals, not like fish. He also tried to arrange living things on a scale, from inanimate beings up to man.

The last years and the fate of the books

In 323 BC Alexander died. Aristotle was accused of impiety, as Socrates had been. He then left the city and took refuge at Chalcis, on the island of Euboea, where he died in 322 BC.

The leadership of the Lyceum passed to his pupil Theophrastus, who also inherited the library. At Theophrastus' death the collection passed to another heir, Neleus, who took it to Scepsis, in Asia Minor. According to an ancient story, the manuscripts were hidden in a cellar, to keep them from the kings who wanted to buy them for their libraries, and were then sold to a rich collector, Apellicon of Teos, who brought them back to Athens. The Roman general Sulla took them to Rome after the capture of Athens. There the philosopher Andronicus of Rhodes put them in order and published them. The edition that resulted is still the reference one today, although scholars think Andronicus intervened in the texts, correcting them or moving things around.