Note 34 — Chapter II · ARISTOTELIAN CANON.

What Strabo asserts about the Peripatetic Scholarchs succeeding Theophrastus (viz., μηδὲν ἔχειν φιλοσοφεῖν πραγματικῶς, ἀλλὰ θέσεις ληκυθίζειν: that they could not handle philosophy in a businesslike way — with those high generalities and that subtle analysis which was supposed to belong to philosophy — but gave smooth and ornate discourses on set problems or theses) is fully borne out by what we read in Cicero about these same Peripatetics. The Stoics (immediate successors and rivals) accused their Peripatetic contemporaries even of being ignorant of Dialectic: which their founder, Aristotle, in his works that we now possess, had been the first to raise into something like a science. Cicero says (De Finibus, iii. 12, 41): “His igitur ita positis (inquit Cato) sequitur magna contentio: quam tractatam à Peripateticis mollius (est enim eorum consuetudo dicendi non satis acuta, propter ignorationem Dialecticæ), Carneades tuus, egregiâ quâdam exercitatione in dialecticis summâque eloquentiâ, rem in summum discrimen adduxit.” Also Cicero, in Tuscul. Disput. iv. 5. 9: “Quia Chrysippus et Stoici, quum de animi perturbationibus disputant, magnam partem in iis partiendis et definiendis occupati sunt, illa eorum perexigua oratio est, quâ medeantur animis nec eos turbulentos esse patiantur. Peripatetici autem ad placandos animos multa afferunt, spinas partiendi et definiendi prætermittunt.” This last sentence is almost an exact equivalent of the words of Strabo: μηδὲν ἔχειν φιλοσοφεῖν πραγματικῶς, ἀλλὰ θέσεις ληκυθίζειν. Aristotle himself, in the works which we possess, might pass as father of the Stoics rather than of the Peripatetics; for he abounds in classification and subdivision (spinas partiendi et dividendi), and is even derided on this very ground by opponents (see Atticus ap. Euseb. Præp. Ev. xv. 4); but he has nothing of the polished amplification ascribed to the later Peripatetics by Strabo and Cicero. Compare, about the Peripatetics from Lykon to Kritolaus, Cicero, De Finibus, v. 5: “Lyco, oratione locuples, rebus ipsis jejunior.” Plutarch (Sylla, c. xxvi.) calls these later Peripatetics χαριέντες καὶ φιλόλογοι, &c.