VOLUME II SLICE V Arculf to Armour, Philip (continued 5)

ARIKARA, or Aricara (from ariki, horn), a tribe of North American Indians of Caddoan stock. They are now settled with the Hidatsas and the Mandans on the Fort Berthold Reservation, North Dakota. They originally lived in the Platte Valley, Nebraska, with the Pawnees, to whom they are related. They number about 400.

See Handbook of American Indians, ed. F.W. Hodge (Washington 1907)

ARIMASPI, an ancient people in the extreme N.E. of Scythia (q.v.), probably the eastern Altai. All accounts of them go back to a poem by Aristeas of Proconnesus, from whom Herodotus (iii. 116, iv. 27) drew his information. They were supposed to be one-eyed (hence their Scythian name), and to steal gold from the griffins that guarded it. In art they are usually represented as richly dressed Asiatics, picturesquely grouped with their griffin foes; the subject is often described by poets from Aeschylus to Milton. They are so nearly mythical that it is impossible to insist on the usual identification with the ancestors of the Huns. Their gold was probably real, as gold still comes from the Altai.

ARIMINUM (mod. Rimini), a city of Aemilia, on the N.E. coast of Italy, 69 m. S.E. of Bononia. It was founded by the Umbrians, but in 268 B.C. became a Roman colony with Latin rights. It was reached from Rome by the Via Flaminia, constructed in 220 B.C., and from that time onwards was the bulwark of the Roman power in Cisalpine Gaul, to which province it even gave its name. Its harbour was of some importance, but is now silted up, the sea having receded. The remains of its moles were destroyed in 1807-1809. Ariminum became a place of considerable traffic owing to the construction of the Via Aemilia (187 B.C.) and the Via Popilia (132 B.C.), and is frequently mentioned by ancient authors. In 90 B.C. it acquired Roman citizenship, but in 82 B.C. having been held by the partisans of Marius, it was plundered by those of Sulla (who probably made the Rubicon the frontier of Italy instead of the Aesis), and a military colony settled there. Caesar occupied it in 49 B.C. after his crossing of the Rubicon. It was one of the eighteen richest cities of Italy which the triumviri selected as a reward for their troops. In 27 B.C. Augustus planted new colonists there, and divided the city into seven vici after the model of Rome, from which the names of the vici were borrowed. He also restored the Via Flaminia (Mon. Ancyr. c. 20) from Rome to Ariminum. At the entrance to the latter the senate erected, in his honour, a triumphal arch which is still extant—a fine simple monument with a single opening. At the other end of the decumanus maximus or main street (3000 Roman ft. in length) is a fine bridge over the Ariminus (mod. Marecchia) begun by Augustus and completed by Tiberius in A.D. 20. It has five wide arches, the central one having a span of 35 ft., and is well preserved. Both it and the arch are built of Istrian stone. The present Piazza Giulio Cesare marks the site of the ancient forum. The remains of the amphitheatre are scanty; many of its stones have gone to build the city wall, which must, therefore, at the earliest belong to the end of the classical period. In A.D. 1 Augustus’s grandson Gaius Caesar had all the streets of Ariminum paved. In A.D. 69 the town was attacked by the partisans of Vespasian, and was frequently besieged in the Gothic wars. It was one of the five seaports which remained Byzantine until the time of Pippin. (See Rimini.)

See A. Tonini, Storia della Città di Rimini (Rimini, 1848-1862).

(T. As.)

ARIOBARZANES, the name of three ancient kings or satraps of Pontus, and of three kings of Cappadocia and a Persian satrap.

Of the Pontic rulers two are most famous, (1) The son of Mithradates I., who revolted against Artaxerxes in 362 B.C. and may be regarded as the founder of the kingdom of Pontus (q.v.). According to Demosthenes he and his three sons received from the Athenians the honour of citizenship. (2) The son of Mithradates III., who reigned c. 266-240 B.C., and was one of those who enlisted the help of the invading Gauls (see Galatia).

Of the Cappadocian rulers the best-known one (“Philo-Romaeus” on the coins) reigned nominally from 93 to 63 B.C., but was three times expelled by Mithradates the Great and as often reinstated by Roman generals. Soon after the third occasion he formally abdicated in favour of his son Ariobarzanes “Philopator,” of whom we gather only that he was murdered some time before 51. His son Ariobarzanes, called “Eusebes” and “Philo-Romaeus,” earned the gratitude of Cicero during his proconsulate in Cilicia, and fought for Pompey in the civil wars, but was afterwards received with honour by Julius Caesar, who subsequently reinstated him when expelled by Pharnaces of Pontus. In 42 B.C. Brutus and Cassius declared him a traitor, invaded his territory and put him to death.

The Persian satrap of this name unsuccessfully opposed Alexander the Great on his way to Persepolis (331 B.C.).

ARION, of Methymna, in Lesbos, a semi-legendary poet and musician, friend of Periander, tyrant of Corinth. He flourished about 625 B.C. Several of the ancients ascribe to him the invention of the dithyramb and of dithyrambic poetry; it is probable, however, that his real service was confined to the organization of that verse, and the conversion of it from a mere drunken song, used in the Dionysiac revels, to a measured antistrophic hymn, sung by a trained body of performers. The name Cycleus given to his father indicates the connexion of the son with the “cyclic” or circular chorus which was the origin of tragedy. According to Suidas he composed a number of songs and proems; none of these is extant; the fragment of a hymn to Poseidon attributed to him (Aelian, Hist. An. xii. 45) is spurious and was probably written in Attica in the time of Euripides. Nothing is known of the life of Arion, with the exception of the beautiful story first told by Herodotus (i. 23) and elaborated and embellished by subsequent writers. According to Herodotus, Arion being desirous of exhibiting his skill in foreign countries left Corinth, and travelled through Sicily and parts of Italy, where he gained great fame and amassed a large sum of money. At Taras (Tarentum) he embarked for his homeward voyage in a Corinthian vessel. The sight of his treasure roused the cupidity of the sailors, who resolved to possess themselves of it by putting him to death. In answer to his entreaties that they would spare his life, they insisted that he should either die by his own hand on shipboard or cast himself into the sea. Arion chose the latter, and as a last favour begged permission to sing a parting song. The sailors, desirous of hearing so famous a musician, consented, and the poet, standing on the deck of the ship, in full minstrel’s attire, sang a dirge accompanied by his lyre. He then threw himself overboard; but instead of perishing, he was miraculously borne up in safety by a dolphin, supposed to have been charmed by the music. Thus he was conveyed to Taenarum, whence he proceeded to Corinth, arriving before the ship from Tarentum. Immediately on his arrival Arion related his story to Periander, who was at first incredulous, but eventually learned the truth by a stratagem. Summoning the sailors, he demanded what had become of the poet. They affirmed that he had remained behind at Tarentum; upon which they were suddenly confronted by Arion himself, arrayed in the same garments in which he had leapt overboard. The sailors confessed their guilt and were punished. Arion’s lyre and the dolphin were translated to the stars. Herodotus and Pausanias (iii. 25. 7) both refer to a brass figure at Taenarum which was supposed to represent Arion seated on the dolphin’s back. But this story is only one of several in which the dolphin appears as saving the lives of favoured heroes. For instance, it is curious that Taras, the mythical founder of Tarentum, is said to have been conveyed in this manner from Taenarum to Tarentum. On Tarentine coins a man and dolphin appear, and hence it may be thought that the monument at Taenarum represented Taras and not Arion. At the same time the connexion of Apollo with the dolphin must not be forgotten. Under this form the god appeared when he founded the celebrated oracle at Delphi, the name of which commemorates the circumstance. He was also the god of music, the special preserver of poets, and to him the lyre was sacred.

Among the numerous modern versions of the story, particular mention may be made of the pretty ballad by A.W. Schlegel; see also Lehrs, Populare Aufsatze aus dem Alterthum (1844-1846); Clement, Arion (1898).

ARIOSTO, LODOVICO (1474-1533) Italian poet, was born at Reggio, in Lombardy, on the 8th of September 1474. His father was Niccolo Ariosto, commander of the citadel of Reggio. He showed a strong inclination to poetry from his earliest years, but was obliged by his father to study the law—a pursuit in which he lost five of the best years of his life. Allowed at last to follow his inclination, he applied himself to the study of the classics under Gregorio da Spoleto. But after a short time, during which he read the best Latin authors, he was deprived of his teacher by Gregorio’s removal to France as tutor of Francesco Sforza. Ariosto thus lost the opportunity of learning Greek, as he intended. His father dying soon after, he was compelled to forego his literary occupations to undertake the management of the family, whose affairs were embarrassed, and to provide for his nine brothers and sisters, one of whom was a cripple. He wrote, however, about this time some comedies in prose and a few lyrical pieces. Some of these attracted the notice of the cardinal Ippolito d’Este, who took the young poet under his patronage and appointed him one of the gentlemen of his household. This prince usurped the character of a patron of literature, whilst the only reward which the poet received for having dedicated to him the Orlando Furioso, was the question, “Where did you find so many stories, Master Ludovic?” The poet himself tells us that the cardinal was ungrateful; deplores the time which he spent under his yoke; and adds, that if he received some niggardly pension, it was not to reward him for his poetry, which the prelate despised, but to make some just compensation for the poet’s running like a messenger, with the risk of his life, at his eminence’s pleasure. Nor was even this miserable pittance regularly paid during the period that the poet enjoyed it. The cardinal went to Hungary in 1518, and wished Ariosto to accompany him. The poet excused himself, pleading ill health, his love of study, the care of his private affairs and the age of his mother, whom it would have been disgraceful to leave. His excuses were not received, and even an interview was denied him. Ariosto then boldly said, that if his eminence thought to have bought a slave by assigning him the scanty pension of 75 crowns a year, he was mistaken and might withdraw his boon—which it seems the cardinal did.

The cardinal’s brother, Alphonso, duke of Ferrara, now took the poet under his patronage. This was but an act of simple justice, Ariosto having already distinguished himself as a diplomatist, chiefly on the occasion of two visits to Rome as ambassador to Pope Julius II. The fatigue of one of these hurried journeys brought on a complaint from which he never recovered; and on his second mission he was nearly killed by order of the violent pope, who happened at the time to be much incensed against the duke of Ferrara. On account of the war, his salary of only 84 crowns a year was suspended, and it was withdrawn altogether after the peace; in consequence of which Ariosto asked the duke either to provide for him, or to allow him to seek employment elsewhere. A province, situated on the wildest heights of the Apennines, being then without a governor, Ariosto received the appointment, which he held for three years. The office was no sinecure. The province was distracted by factions and banditti, the governor had not the requisite means to enforce his authority and the duke did little to support his minister. Yet it is said that Ariosto’s government satisfied both the sovereign and the people confided to his care; and a story is added of his having, when walking out alone, fallen in with a party of banditti, whose chief, on discovering that his captive was the author of Orlando Furioso, humbly apologized for not having immediately shown him the respect which was due to his rank. Although he had little reason to be satisfied with his office, he refused an embassy to Pope Clement VII. offered to him by the secretary of the duke, and spent the remainder of his life at Ferrara, writing comedies, superintending their performance as well as the construction of a theatre, and correcting his Orlando Furioso, of which the complete edition was published only a year before his death. He died of consumption on the 6th of June 1533.

That Ariosto was honoured and respected by the first men of his age is a fact; that most of the princes of Italy showed him great partiality is equally true; but it is not less so that their patronage was limited to kind words. It is not known that he ever received any substantial mark of their love for literature; he lived and died poor. He proudly wrote on the entrance of a house built by himself,

“Parva, sed apta mihi, sed nulli obnoxia, sed non Sordida, parta meo sed tamen aere domus;”

which serves to show the incorrectness of the assertion of flatterers, followed by Tiraboschi, that the duke of Ferrara built that house for him. The only one who seems to have given anything to Ariosto as a reward for his poetical talent was the marquess del Vasto, who assigned him an annuity of 100 crowns on the revenues of Casteleone in Lombardy; but it was only paid, if ever, from the end of 1531. That he was crowned as poet by Charles V. seems untrue, although a diploma may have been issued to that effect by the emperor.

The character of Ariosto seems to have been fully and justly delineated by Gabriele, his brother:—

“Ornabat pietas et grata modestia Vatem, Sancta fides, dictique memor, munitaque recto Justitia, et nullo patientia victa labore, Et constans virtus animi, et clementia mitis, Ambitione procul pulsa, fastusque tumore.”

His satires, in which we see him before us such as he was, show that there was no flattery in this portrait. In these compositions we are struck with the noble independence of the poet. He loved liberty with a most jealous fondness. His disposition was changeable withal, as he himself very frankly confesses in his Latin verses, as well as in the satires.

“Hoc olim ingenio vitales hausimus auras, Multa cito ut placeant, displicitura brevi. Non in amore modo mens haec, sed in omnibus impar Ipsa sibi longa non retinenda mora.”

Hence he never would bind himself, either by going into orders, or by marrying, till towards the end of his life, when he espoused Alessandra, widow of Tito Strozzi. He had no issue by his wife, but he left two natural sons by different mothers.

His Latin poems do not perhaps deserve to be noticed: in the age of Flaminio, Vida, Fracastoro and Sannazaro, better things were due from a poet like Ariosto. His lyrical compositions show the poet, although they do not seem worthy of his powers. His comedies, of which he wrote four, besides one which he left unfinished, are avowedly imitated from Plautus and Terence; and although native critics may admire in them the elegance of the diction, the liveliness of the dialogue and the novelty of some scenes, few will feel interest either in the subject or in the characters, and it is hard to approve the immoral passages by which they are disfigured, however grateful these might be to the audiences and patrons of theatrical representations in Ariosto’s own day.

Of all the works of Ariosto, the most solid monument of his fame is the Orlando Furioso, the extraordinary merits of which have cast into oblivion the numberless romance poems which inundated Italy during the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries.

The popularity which an earlier poem on the same theme, Orlando Innamorato, by Boiardo, enjoyed in Ariosto’s time, cannot be well conceived, now that the enthusiasm of the crusades, and the interest which was attached to a war against the Moslems, have passed away. Boiardo wrote and read his poem at the court of Ferrara, but died before he was able to finish it. Many poets undertook the difficult task of its completion; but it was reserved for Ariosto both to finish and to surpass, his original. Boiardo did not, perhaps, yield to Ariosto either in vigour or in richness of imagination, but he lived in a less refined age, and died before he was able to recast or even finish the poetical romance which he had written under the impulse of his exuberant fancy. Ariosto, on the other hand, united to a powerful imagination an elegant and cultivated taste. He began to write his great poem about 1503, and after having consulted the first men of the age of Leo X., he published it in 1516, in only 40 cantos (extended afterwards to 46); and up to the moment of his death never ceased to correct and improve both the subject and the style. It is in this latter quality that he excels, and for which he had assigned him the name of Divino Lodovico. Even when he jests, he never compromises his dignity; and in pathetic description or narrative he excites the reader’s deepest feelings. In his machinery he displays a vivacity of fancy with which no other poet can vie; but he never lets his fancy carry him so far as to omit to employ, with an art peculiar to himself, those simple and natural pencil-strokes which, by imparting to the most extraordinary feats a colour of reality, satisfy the reason without disenchanting the imagination. The death of Zerbino, the complaints of Isabella, the effects of discord among the Saracens, the flight of Astolfo to the moon, the passion which causes Orlando’s madness, teem with beauties of every variety. The supposition that the poem is not connected throughout is wholly unfounded; there is a connexion which, with a little attention, will become evident. The love of Ruggero and Bradamante forms the main subject of the Furioso; every part of it, except some episodes, depend upon this subject; and the poem ends with their marriage.

The first complete edition of the Orlando Furioso was published at Ferrara in 1532, as noted above. The edition of Morali (Milan, 1818) follows the text of the 1532 edition with great correctness. Of editions published in England, those of Baskerville (Birmingham, 1773) and Panizzi (London, 1834) are the most important. The indifferent translations into English of Sir John Harrington (1591) and John Hoole (1783) have been superseded by the spirited rendering of W. Stewart Rose (1823). See also E. Gardner, Ariosto: the Prince of Court Poets (1906).

ARISTAENETUS, Greek epistolographer, flourished in the 5th or 6th century A.D. He was formerly identified with Aristaenetus of Nicaea (the friend of Symmachus), who perished in an earthquake at Nicomedia, A.D. 358, but internal evidence points to a much later date. Under his name two books of love stories, in the form of letters, are extant; the subjects are borrowed from the erotic elegies of such Alexandrian writers as Callimachus, and the language is a patchwork of phrases from Plato, Lucian, Alciphron and others. The stories are feeble and insipid, and full of strange and improbable incidents.

Text: Boissonade (1822); Hercher, Epistolographi Graeci (1873). English translations: Boyer (1701); Thomas Brown (1715); R.B. Sheridan and Halked (1771 and later).

ARISTAEUS, a divinity whose worship was widely spread throughout ancient Greece, but concerning whom the myths are somewhat obscure. The account most generally received connects him specially with Thessaly. Apollo carried off from Mount Pelion the nymph Cyrene, daughter or granddaughter of the river-god Peneus, and conveyed her to Libya, where she gave birth to Aristaeus. From this circumstance the town of Cyrene took its name. The child was at first handed over to the care of the Hours, or the nymph Melissa and the centaur Cheiron. He afterwards left Libya and went to Thebes, where he received instruction from the Muses in the arts of healing and prophecy, and married Autonoe, daughter of Cadmus, by whom he had several children, among others, the unfortunate Actaeon. He is said to have visited Ceos, where, by erecting a temple to Zeus Icmaeus (the giver of moisture), he freed the inhabitants from a terrible drought. The islanders worshipped him, and occasionally identified him with Zeus, calling him Zeus Aristaeus. After travelling through many of the Aegean islands, through Sicily, Sardinia and Magna Graecia, everywhere conferring benefits and receiving divine honours, Aristaeus reached Thrace, where he was initiated into the mysteries of Dionysus, and finally disappeared near Mount Haemus. While in Thrace he is said to have caused the death of Eurydice, who was bitten by a snake while fleeing from him. Aristaeus was essentially a benevolent deity; he was worshipped as the first who introduced the cultivation of bees (Virgil, Georg. iv. 315-558), and of the vine and olive; he was the protector of herdsmen and hunters; he warded off the evil effects of the dog-star; he possessed the arts of healing and prophecy. He was often identified with Zeus, Apollo and Dionysus. In ancient sculptures and coins he is represented as a young man, habited like a shepherd, and sometimes carrying a sheep on his shoulders. Coins of Ceos exhibit the head of Aristaeus and Sirius in the form of a dog crowned with rays.

Pindar, Pythia, ix. 5-65; Apollonius Rhodius, schol. on ii. 498, 500; Diodorus, iv. 81.

ARISTAGORAS (d. 497 B.C.), brother-in-law and cousin of Histiaeus, tyrant of Miletus. While Histiaeus was practically a prisoner at the court of Darius, he acted as regent in Miletus. In 500 B.C. he persuaded the Persians to join him in an attack upon Naxos, but he quarrelled with Megabates, the Persian commander, who warned the inhabitants of the island, and the expedition failed. Finding himself the object of Persian suspicion, Aristagoras, instigated by a message from Histiaeus, raised the standard of revolt in Miletus, though it seems likely that this step had been under consideration for some time (see Ionia). After the complete failure of the Ionian revolt he emigrated to Myrcinus in Thrace. Here he fell in battle (497), while attacking Ennea Hodoi (afterwards Amphipolis) on the Strymon, which belonged to the Edonians, a Thracian tribe. The aid given to him by Athens and Eretria, and the burning of Sardis, were the immediate cause of the invasion of Greece by Darius.

See Herodotus v. 30-51, 97-126; Thucydides iv. 102; Diodorus xii. 68; for a more favourable view see G.B. Grundy, Great Persian War (London, 1901).

ARISTANDER, of Telmessus in Lycia, was the favourite soothsayer of Alexander the Great, who consulted him on all occasions. After the death of the monarch, when his body had lain unburied for thirty days, Aristander procured its burial by foretelling that the country in which it was interred would be the most prosperous in the world. He is frequently mentioned by the historians who wrote about Alexander, and was probably the author of a work on prodigies, which is referred to by Pliny (Nat. Hist. xvii. 38) and Lucian.

Philopatris, 21; Arrian, Anabasis, ii. 26, iii. 2, iv. 4; Plutarch, Alexander; Curtius iv. 2, 6, 15, vii. 7.

ARISTARCHUS, of Samos, Greek astronomer, flourished about 250 B.C. He is famous as having been the first to maintain that the earth moves round the sun. On this account he was accused of impiety by the Stoic Cleanthes, just as Galileo, in later years, was attacked by the theologians. His only extant work is a short treatise (with a commentary by Pappus) On the Magnitudes and Distances of the Sun and Moon. His method of estimating the relative lunar and solar distances is geometrically correct, though the instrumental means at his command rendered his data erroneous. Although the heliocentric system is not mentioned in the treatise, a quotation in the Arenarius of Archimedes from a work of Aristarchus proves that he anticipated the great discovery of Copernicus. Further, Copernicus could not have known of Aristarchus’s doctrine, since Archimedes’s work was not published till after Copernicus’s death. Aristarchus is also said to have invented two sun-dials, one hemispherical, the so-called scaphion, the other plane.

Editio princeps by Wallis (1688); Fortia d’Urban (1810); Nizze (1856). See Bergk-Hinrichs, Aristarchus van Samos (1883); Tannery, Aristarque de Samos; also Astronomy.

ARISTARCHUS, of Samothrace (c. 220-143 B.C.), Greek grammarian and critic, flourished about 155. He settled early in Alexandria, where he studied under Aristophanes of Byzantium, whom he succeeded as librarian of the museum. On the accession of the tyrant Ptolemy Physcon (his former pupil), he found his life in danger and withdrew to Cyprus, where he died from dropsy, hastened, it is said, by voluntary starvation, at the age of 72. Aristarchus founded a school of philologists, called after him “Aristarcheans,” which long flourished in Alexandria and afterwards at Rome. He is said to have written 800 commentaries alone, without reckoning special treatises. He edited Hesiod, Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles and other authors; but his chief fame rests on his critical and exegetical edition of Homer, practically the foundation of our present recension. In the time of Augustus, two Aristarcheans, Didymus and Aristonicus, undertook the revision of his work, and the extracts from these two writers in the Venetian scholia to the Iliad give an idea of Aristarchus’s Homeric labours. To obtain a thoroughly correct text, he marked with an obelus the lines he considered spurious; other signs were used by him to indicate notes, varieties of reading, repetitions and interpolations. He arranged the Iliad and the Odyssey in twenty-four books as we now have them. As a commentator his principle was that the author should explain himself, without recourse to allegorical interpretation; in grammar, he laid chief stress on analogy and uniformity of usage and construction. His views were opposed by Crates of Mallus, who wrote a treatise Άνωμαλίας, especially directed against them.

See Lehrs, De Aristarchi Stud. Homericis (3rd ed., 1882); Ludwich, Aristarchs homerische Textcritik (1884); especially Sandys, Hist. of Class. Schol. (ed. 1906), vol. i. with authorities; also Homer.

ARISTEAS, a somewhat mythical personage in ancient Greece, said to have lived in the time of Cyrus and Croesus, or, according to some, ca. 690 B.C. We are chiefly indebted to Herodotus (iv. 13-15) for our knowledge of him and his poem Arimaspeia. He belonged to a noble family of Proconnesus, an island colony from Miletus in the Propontis, and was supposed to be inspired by Apollo. He travelled through the countries north and east of the Euxine, and visited the Hyperboreans, Issedonians and Arimaspians, who fought against the gold-guarding griffins. An important historical fact which seems to be indicated in his poem is the rush of barbarian hordes towards Europe under pressure from their neighbours. Twelve lines of the poem are preserved in Tzetzes and Longinus. Wonderful stories are told of Aristeas. At Proconnesus, he fell dead in a shop; simultaneously a traveller declared he had spoken with him near Cyzicus; his body vanished; six years afterwards, he returned. Again disappearing, 240 years later he was at Metapontum, and commanded the inhabitants to raise a statue to himself and an altar to Apollo, whom he had accompanied in the form of a raven, at the founding of the city. According to Suidas, Aristeas also wrote a prose theogony. The genuineness of his works is disputed by Dionysius of Halicarnassus.

See Tournier, De Aristea Proconneso (1863); Macan, Hdt. iv. 14 note.

ARISTEAS, the pseudonymous author of a famous Letter in which is described, in legendary form, the origin of the Greek translation of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint (q.v.). Aristeas represents himself as a Gentile Greek, but was really an Alexandrian Jew who lived under one of the later Ptolemies. Though the Letter is unauthentic, it is now recognized as a useful source of information concerning both Egyptian and Palestinian affairs in the 2nd and possibly in the 3rd century B.C.

An English translation, based on a critical Greek text, was published by H. St J. Thackeray in the Jewish Quarterly Review, vol. xv. There are two modern editions of the Greek, one by the last named (in Swete’s Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek, Cambridge, 1900), the other by P. Wendland (Leipzig, 1900).

ARISTIDES [Άριστείδης] (c. 530-468 B.C.), Athenian statesman, called “the Just,” was the son of Lysimachus, and a member of a family of moderate fortune. Of his early life we are told merely that he became a follower of the statesman Cleisthenes and sided with the aristocratic party in Athenian politics. He first comes into notice as strategus in command of his native tribe Antiochis at Marathon, and it was no doubt in consequence of the distinction which he then achieved that he was elected chief archon for the ensuing year (489-488). In pursuance of his conservative policy which aimed at maintaining Athens as a land power, he was one of the chief opponents of the naval policy of Themistocles (q.v.). The conflict between the two leaders ended in the ostracism of Aristides, at a date variously given between 485 and 482. It is said that, on this occasion, a voter, who did not know him, came up to him, and giving him his sherd, desired him to write upon it the name of Aristides. The latter asked if Aristides had wronged him. “No,” was the reply, “and I do not even know him, but it irritates me to hear him everywhere called the just.”

Early in 480 Aristides profited by the decree recalling the post-Marathonian exiles to help in the defence of Athens against the Persian invaders, and was elected strategus for the year 480-479. In the campaign of Salamis he rendered loyal support to Themistocles, and crowned the victory by landing Athenian infantry on the island of Psyttaleia and annihilating the Persian garrison stationed there (see Salamis). In 479 he was re-elected strategus, and invested with special powers as commander of the Athenian contingent at Plataea; he is also said to have judiciously suppressed a conspiracy among some oligarchic malcontents in the army, and to have played a prominent part in arranging for the celebration of the victory. In 478 or 477 Aristides was in command of the Athenian squadron off Byzantium, and so far won the confidence of the Ionian allies that, after revolting from the Spartan admiral Pausanias, they offered him the chief command and left him with absolute discretion in fixing the contributions of the newly formed confederacy (see Delian League). His assessment was universally accepted as equitable, and continued as the basis of taxation for the greater part of the league’s duration; it was probably from this that he won the title of “the Just.” Aristides soon left the command of the fleet to his friend Cimon (q.v.), but continued to hold a predominant position in Athens. At first he seems to have remained on good terms with Themistocles, whom he is said to have helped in outwitting the Spartans over the rebuilding of the walls of Athens. But in spite of statements in which ancient authors have represented Aristides as a democratic reformer, it is certain that the period following the Persian wars during which he shaped Athenian policy was one of conservative reaction. (For the theory based on Plutarch, Aristid. 22, that Aristides after Plataea threw open the archonship to all the citizens, see Archon.)

He is said by some authorities to have died at Athens, by others on a journey to the Euxine sea. The date of his death is given by Nepos as 468; at any rate he lived to witness the ostracism of Themistocles, towards whom he always displayed a generous conduct, but had died before the rise of Pericles. His estate seems to have suffered severely from the Persian invasions, for apparently he did not leave enough money to defray the expenses of his burial, and it is known that his descendants even in the 4th century received state pensions. (See Athens; Themistocles.)

Authorities.—Herodotus viii. 79-81, 95; ix. 28; “Constitution of Athens” (Ath. Pol.), 22-24, 41; Plutarch, Aristides; Cornelius Nepos, Vita Aristidis. See also E. Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums (Stuttgart, 1901), iii. pp. 481, 492. In the absence of positive information the 4th-century writers (on whom Plutarch and Nepos mainly rely) seized upon his surname of “Just,” and wove round it a number of anecdotes more picturesque than historical. Herodotus is practically our only trustworthy authority.

(M. O. B. C.)

ARISTIDES, of Miletus, generally regarded as the father of Greek prose romance, flourished 150-100 B.C. He wrote six books of erotic Milesian Tales (Μιλησιακὰ), which enjoyed great popularity, and were subsequently translated into Latin by Cornelius Sisenna (119-67 B.C.). They are lost, with the exception of a few fragments, but the story of the Ephesian matron in Petronius gives an idea of their nature. They have been compared with the old French fabliaux and the tales of Boccaccio.

Plutarch, Crassus, 32; Ovid, Tristia, ii. 413, 443; Müller, Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum, iv.

ARISTIDES, of Thebes, a Greek painter of the 4th century B.C. He is said to have excelled in expression. For example, a picture of his representing a dying mother’s fear lest her infant should suck death from her breast was much celebrated. He also painted one of Alexander’s battles. One of his pictures is said to have been bought by King Attalus for 100 talents (more than £20,000).

ARISTIDES, AELIUS, surnamed Theodorus, Greek rhetorician and sophist, son of Eudaemon, a priest of Zeus, was born at Hadriani in Mysia, A.D. 117 (or 129). He studied under Herodes Atticus of Athens, Polemon of Smyrna, and Alexander of Cotyaeum, in whose honour he composed a funeral oration still extant. In the practice of his calling he travelled through Greece, Italy, Egypt and Asia, and in many places the inhabitants erected statues to him in recognition of his talents. In 156 he was attacked by an illness which lasted thirteen years, the nature of which has caused considerable speculation. However, it in no way interfered with his studies; in fact, they were prescribed as part of his cure. Aristides’ favourite place of residence was Smyrna. In 178, when it was destroyed by an earthquake, he wrote an account of the disaster to Aurelius, which deeply affected the emperor and induced him to rebuild the city. The grateful inhabitants set up a statue in honour of Aristides, and styled him the “builder” of Smyrna. He refused all honours from them except that of priest of Asclepius, which office he held till his death, about 189. The extant works of Aristides consist of two small rhetorical treatises and fifty-five declamations, some not really speeches at all. The treatises are on political and simple speech, in which he takes Demosthenes and Xenophon as models for illustration; some critics attribute these to a later compiler (Spengel, Rhetores Graeci). The six Sacred Discourses have attracted some attention. They give a full account of his protracted illness, including a mass of superstitious details of visions, dreams and wonderful cures, which the god Asclepius ordered him to record. These cures, from his account, offer similarities to the effects produced by hypnotism. The speeches proper are epideictic or show speeches—on certain gods, panegyrics of the emperor and individual cities (Smyrna, Rome); justificatory—the attack on Plato’s Gorgias in defence of rhetoric and the four statesmen, Thucydides, Miltiades, Pericles, Cimon; symbouleutic or political, the subjects being taken from the past history of free Greece—the Sicilian expedition, peace negotiations with Sparta, the political situation after the battle of Leuctra. The Panathenaicus and Encomium of Rome were actually delivered, the former imitated from Isocrates. The Leptinea—the genuineness of which is disputed—contrast unfavourably with the speech of Demosthenes. Aristides’ works were highly esteemed by his contemporaries; they were much used for school instruction, and distinguished rhetoricians wrote commentaries upon them. His style, formed on the best models, is generally clear and correct, though sometimes obscured by rhetorical ornamentation; his subjects being mainly fictitious, the cause possessed no living interest, and his attention was concentrated on form and diction.

Editio princeps (52 declamations only) (1517); Dindorf (1829); Keil (1899); Sandys, Hist. of Class. Schol. i. 312 (ed. 1906).

ARISTIDES, QUINTILIANUS, the author of an ancient treatise on music, who lived probably in the third century A.D. According to Meibomius, in whose collection (Antiq. Musicae Auc. Septem, 1652) this work is printed, it contains everything on music that is to be found in antiquity. (See Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyc. ii. 894.)

ARISTIDES, APOLOGY OF. Until 1878 our knowledge of the early Christian writer Aristides was confined to the statement of Eusebius that he was an Athenian philosopher, who presented an apology “concerning the faith” to the emperor Hadrian. In that year, however, the Mechitharists of S. Lazzaro at Venice published a fragment in Armenian1 from the beginning of the apology; and in 1889 Dr Rendel Harris found the whole of it in a Syriac version on Mount Sinai. While his edition was passing through the press, it was observed by the present writer that all the while the work had been in our hands in Greek, though in a slightly abbreviated form, as it had been imbedded as a speech in a religious novel written about the 6th century, and entitled “The Life of Barlaam and Josaphat.” The discovery of the Syriac version reopened the question of the date of the work. For although its title there corresponds to that given by the Armenian fragment and by Eusebius, it begins with a formal inscription to “the emperor Titus Hadrianus Antoninus Augustus Pius”; and Dr R. Harris is followed by Harnack and others in supposing that it was only through a careless reading of this inscription that the work was supposed to have been addressed to Hadrian. If this be the case, it must be placed somewhere in the long reign of Antoninus Pius (138-161). There are, however, no internal grounds for rejecting the thrice-attested dedication to Hadrian his predecessor, and the picture of primitive Christian life which is here found points to the earlier rather than to the later date. It is possible that the Apology was read to Hadrian in person when he visited Athens, and that the Syriac inscription was prefixed by a scribe on the analogy of Justin’s Apology, a mistake being made in the amplification of Hadrian’s name.

The Apology opens thus: “I, O king, by the providence of God came into the world; and having beheld the heaven, and the earth, and the sea, the sun and moon, and all besides, I marvelled at their orderly disposition; and seeing the world and all things in it, that it is moved by compulsion, I understood that He that moveth and governeth it is God. For whatsoever moveth is stronger than that which is moved, and whatsoever governeth is stronger than that which is governed.” Having briefly spoken of the divine nature in the terms of Greek philosophy, Aristides proceeds to ask which of all the races of men have at all partaken of the truth about God. Here we have the first attempt at a systematic comparison of ancient religions. For the purpose of his inquiry he adopts an obvious threefold division into idolaters, Jews and Christians. Idolaters, or, as he more gently terms them in addressing the emperor, “those who worship what among you are said to be gods,” he subdivides into the three great world-civilizations—Chaldeans, Greeks and Egyptians. He chooses this order so as to work up to a climax of error and absurdity in heathen worship. The direct nature-worship of the Chaldeans is shown to be false because its objects are works of the Creator, fashioned for the use of men. They obey fixed laws and have no power over themselves. “The Greeks have erred worse than the Chaldeans ... calling those gods who are no gods, according to their evil lusts, in order that having these as advocates of their wickedness they may commit adultery, and plunder and kill, and do the worst of deeds.” The gods of Olympus are challenged one by one, and shown to be either vile or helpless, or both at once. A heaven of quarrelling divinities cannot inspire a reasonable worship. These gods are not even respectable; how can they be adorable? “The Egyptians have erred worse than all the nations; for they were not content with the worships of the Chaldeans and Greeks, but introduced, moreover, as gods even brute beasts of the dry land and of the waters, and plants and herbs.... Though they see their gods eaten by others and by men, and burned, and slain, and rotting, they do not understand concerning them that they are no gods.”

Throughout the whole of the argument there is strong common-sense and a stern severity unrelieved by conscious humour. Aristides is engaged in a real contest; he strikes hard blows, and gives no quarter. He cannot see, as Justin and Clement see, a striving after truth, a feeling after God, in the older religions, or even in the philosophies of Greece. He has no patience with attempts to find a deeper meaning in the stories of the gods. “Do they say that one nature underlies these diverse forms? Then why does god hate god, or god kill god? Do they say that the histories are mythical? Then the gods themselves are myths, and nothing more.”

The Jews are briefly treated. After a reference to their descent from Abraham and their sojourn in Egypt, Aristides praises them for their worship of the one God, the Almighty Creator; but blames them as worshipping angels, and observing “sabbaths and new moons, and the unleavened bread, and the great fast, and circumcision, and cleanness of meats.” He then proceeds to the description of the Christians. He begins with a statement which, when purged of glosses by a comparison of the three forms in which it survives, reads thus: “Now the Christians reckon their race from the Lord Jesus Christ; and He is confessed to be the Son of God Most High. Having by the Holy Spirit come down from heaven, and having been born of a Hebrew virgin, He took flesh and appeared unto men, to call them back from their error of many gods; and having completed His wonderful dispensation, He was pierced by the Jews, and after three days He revived and went up to heaven. And the glory of His coming thou canst learn, O king, from that which is called among them the evangelic scripture, if thou wilt read it. He bad twelve disciples, who after His ascent into heaven went forth into the provinces of the world and taught His greatness; whence they who at this day believe their preaching are called Christians.” This passage contains striking correspondences with the second section of the Apostles’ Creed. The attribution of the Crucifixion to the Jews appears in several 2nd-century documents; Justin actually uses the words “He was pierced by you” in his dialogue with Trypho the Jew.

“These are they,” he proceeds, “who beyond all the nations of the earth have found the truth: for they know God as Creator and Maker of all things, and they worship no other god beside Him; for they have His commandments graven on their hearts, and these they keep in expectation of the world to come.... Whatsoever they would not should be done unto them, they do not to another.... He that hath supplieth him that hath not without grudging: if they see a stranger they bring him under their roof, and rejoice over him, as over a brother indeed, for they call not one another brethren after the flesh, but after the spirit. They are ready for Christ’s sake to give up their own lives; for His commandments they securely keep, living holily and righteously, according as the Lord their God hath commanded them, giving thanks to Him at all hours, over all their food and drink, and the rest of their good things.” This simple description is fuller in the Syriac, but the additional details must be accepted with caution: for while it is likely that the monk who appropriated the Greek may have cut it down to meet the exigencies of his romance, it is the habit of certain Syriac translators to elaborate their originals. After asserting that “this is the way of truth,” and again referring for further information to “the writings of the Christians,” he says: “And truly this is a new race, and there is something divine mingled with it.” At the close we have a passage which is found only in the Syriac, but which is shown by internal evidence to contain original elements: “The Greeks, because they practise foul things ... turn the ridicule of their foulness upon the Christians.” This is an allusion to the charges of Thyestean banquets and other immoralities, which the early apologists constantly rebut. “But the Christians offer up prayers for them, that they may turn from their error; and when one of them turns, he is ashamed before the Christians of the deeds that were done by him, and he confesses to God saying: ‘In ignorance I did these things’; and he cleanses his heart, and his sins are forgiven him, because he did them in ignorance in former time, when he was blaspheming the true knowledge of the Christians.”

These last words point to the use in the composition of this Apology of a lost apocryphal work of very early date, The Preaching of Peter. This book is known to us chiefly by quotations in Clement of Alexandria: it was widely circulated, and at one time claimed a place within the Canon. It was used by the Gnostic Heracleon and probably by the unknown writer of the epistle to Diognetus. From the fragments which survive we see that it contained: (1) a description of the nature of God, which closely corresponds with Arist. i., followed by (2) a warning not to worship according to the Greeks, with an exposure of various forms of idolatry; (3) a warning not to worship according to the Jews—although they alone think they know the true God—for they worship angels and are superstitious about moons and sabbaths, and feasts, comp. Arist. xiv.; (4) a description of the Christians as being “a third race,” and worshipping God in “a new way” through Christ; (5) a proof of Christianity from Jewish prophecy; (6) a promise of forgiveness to Jews and Gentiles who should turn to Christ, because they had sinned “in ignorance” in the former time. Now all these points, except the proof from Jewish prophecy, are taken up and worked out by Aristides with a frequent use of the actual language of The Preaching of Peter. A criterion is thus given us for the reconstruction of the Apology, where the Greek which we have has been abbreviated, and we are enabled to claim with certainty some passages of the Syriac which might otherwise be suspected as interpolations.

The style of the Apology is exceedingly simple. It is curiously misdescribed by Jerome, who never can have seen it, as “Apologeticum pro Christianis contextum philosophorum sententiis.” Its merits are its recognition of the helplessness of the old heathenism to satisfy human aspiration after the divine, and the impressive simplicity with which it presents the unfailing argument of the lives of Christians.

The student may consult The Apology of Aristides, Syriac text and translation (J.R. Harris), with an appendix containing the Greek text, Texts and Studies, i. 1 (1891), and a critical discussion by R. Seeberg in Zahn’s Forschungen, v. 2 (1893); also, brief discussions by A. Harnack, Altchristl. Litteratur, i. 96 ff., Chronologie, i. 271 ff., where references to other writers may be found. The Epistola ad omnes philosophos and the Homily on the Penitent Thief, ascribed by Armenian tradition to Aristides, are really of 5th-century origin. Trans. of Apology by W.S. Walford (1909).

(J. A. R.)

1 Codex Venet. ann., 981, and Codex Etchmiaz. of the 11th century.

ARISTIPPUS (c. 435-356 B.C.), Greek philosopher, the founder of the Cyrenaic school, was the son of Aritadas, a merchant of Cyrene. At an early age he came to Athens, and was induced to remain by the fame of Socrates, whose pupil he became. Subsequently he travelled through a number of Grecian cities, and finally settled in Cyrene, where he founded his school. His philosophy was eminently practical (see Cyrenaics). Starting from the two Socratic principles of virtue and happiness, he emphasized the second, and made pleasure the criterion of life. That he held to be good which gives the maximum of pleasure. In pursuance of this he indulged in all forms of external luxury. At the same time he remained thoroughly master of himself and had the self-control to refrain or to enjoy. Diogenes Laertius (ii. 65), quoting Phanias the peripatetic, says that he received money for his teaching, and Aristotle (Met. ii. 2) expressly calls him a sophist. Diogenes further states that he wrote several treatises, but none have survived. The five letters attributed to him are undoubtedly spurious. His daughter Arete, and her son Aristippus (μητροδίδακτος, “pupil of his mother”), carried on the school after his death. A cosmopolitan on principle, and a convinced disbeliever in the ethics of his day, he comes very near to modern empiricism and especially to the modern Hedonist school.

ARISTO or Ariston, of Chios (c. 250 B.C.), a Stoic philosopher and pupil of Zeno. He differed from Zeno on many points, and approximated more closely to the Cynic school. He was eloquent (hence his nickname “the Siren”) but controversial in tone. He despised logic, and rejected the philosophy of nature as beyond the powers of man. Ethics alone he considered worthy of study, and in that only general and theoretical questions. He rejected Zeno’s doctrine of desirable things, intermediate between virtue and vice. There is only one virtue—a clear, intelligent, healthy state of mind (hygeia). Aristo is frequently confounded with another philosopher of the same name, Ariston of Iulis, in Ceos, who, about 230 B.C., succeeded Lyco as scholarch of the Peripatetics. (See Stoics.)

ARISTO, of Pella, a Jewish Christian writer of the middle of the 2nd century, who like Hegesippus (q.v.) represents a school of thought more liberal than that of the Pharisaic and Essene Ebionites to which the decline of Jewish Christianity mainly led. Aristo is cited by Eusebius (Hist. Eccl. iv. 6. 3) for a decree of Hadrian respecting the Jews, but he is best known as the writer of a Dialogue (between Papiscus, an Alexandrian Jew, and Jason, who represents the author) on the witness of prophecy to Jesus Christ, which was approvingly defended by Origen against the reproaches of Celsus. The little book was perhaps used by Justin Martyr in his own Dialogue with Trypho, and probably also by Tertullian and Cyprian, but it has not been preserved.

The literature is cited in G. Krüger’s Early Christian Literature, pp. 104 f.

ARISTOBULUS, of Cassandreia, Greek historian, accompanied Alexander the Great on his campaigns, of which he wrote an account, mainly geographical and ethnological. His work was largely used by Arrian.

Müller, Historicorum Graecorum Fragmenta; Schöne, De Rerum Alexandri Magni Scriptoribus (1870).

ARISTOBULUS, of Paneas (c. 160 B.C.), a Jewish philosopher of the Peripatetic school. Gercke places him in the time of Ptolemy X. Philometor (end of 2nd century), Anatolius in that of Ptolemy II. Philadelphus, but the middle of the 2nd century is more probable. He was among the earliest of the Jewish-Alexandrian philosophers whose aim was to reconcile and identify Greek philosophical conceptions with the Jewish religion. Only a few fragments of his work, apparently entitled Commentaries on the Writings of Moses, are quoted by Clement, Eusebius and other theological writers, but they suffice to show its object. He endeavoured to prove that early Greek philosophers had borrowed largely from certain parts of Scripture, and quoted from Linus, Orpheus, Musaeus and others, passages which strongly resemble the Mosaic writings. These passages, however, were obvious forgeries. It is suggested that the name Aristobulus was taken from 2 Macc. i. 10. The hypothesis (Schlatter, Das neugefundene hebräische Stück des Sirach) that it was from Aristobulus that the philosophy of Ecclesiasticus was derived is not generally accepted.

See E. Schürer, History of the Jewish People (Eng. trans., 1890-1891), ii. 237 seq.; article Alexandrian School: Philosophy; and s.v. “Aristobulus” in Jewish Encyclopedia (Paul Wendland).

ARISTOCRACY (Gr. ἄριστος, best; κρατία, government), etymologically, the “rule of the best,” a form of government variously defined and appreciated at different times and by different authorities. In Greek political philosophy, aristocracy is the government of those who most nearly attain to the ideal of human perfection. Thus Plato in the Republic advocates the rule of the “philosopher-king” who, in the social scheme, is analogous to Reason in the intellectual, and alone is qualified to control the active principles, i.e. the fighting population and the artisans or workers. Aristocracy is thus the government by those who are superior both morally and intellectually, and, therefore, govern directly in the interests of the governed, as a good doctor works for the good of his patient. Aristotle classified good governments under three heads—monarchy, aristocracy and commonwealth πολιτεία, to which he opposed the three perverted forms—tyranny or absolutism, oligarchy and democracy or mob-rule. The distinction between aristocracy and oligarchy, which are both necessarily the rule of the few, is that whereas the few ἄριστοι will govern unselfishly, the oligarchs, being the few wealthy (“plutocracy” in modern terminology), will allow their personal interests to predominate. While Plato’s aristocracy might be the rule of the wise and benevolent despot, Aristotle’s is necessarily the rule of the few.

Historically aristocracy develops from primitive monarchy by the gradual progressive limitation of the regal authority. This process is effected primarily by the nobles who have hitherto formed the council of the king (an excellent example will be found in Athenian politics, see Archon), whose triple prerogative— religious, military and judicial—is vested, e.g., in a magistracy of three. These are either members of the royal house or the heads of noble families, and are elected for life or periodically by their peers, i.e. by the old royal council (cf. the Areopagus at Athens, the Senate at Rome), now the sovereign power. In practice this council depends primarily on a birth qualification, and thus has always been more or less inferior to the Aristotelian ideal; it is, by definition, an “oligarchy” of birth, and is recruited from the noble families, generally by the addition of emeritus magistrates. From the earliest times, therefore, the word “aristocracy” became practically synonymous with “oligarchy,” and as such it is now generally used in opposition to democracy (which similarly took the place of Aristotle’s πολιτεία), in which the ultimate sovereignty resides in the whole citizen body.

The aristocracy of which we know most in ancient Greece was that of Athens prior to the reforms of Cleisthenes, but all the Greek city-states passed through a period of aristocratic or oligarchic government. Rome, between the regal and the imperial periods, was always more or less under the aristocratic government of the senate, in spite of the gradual growth of democratic institutions (the Lat. optimates is the equivalent of ἄριστοι). There is, however, one feature which distinguishes these aristocracies from those of modern states, namely, that they were all slave-owning. The original relation of the slave-population, which in many cases outnumbered the free citizens, cannot always be discovered. But in some cases we know that the slaves were the original inhabitants who had been overcome by an influx of racially different invaders (cf. Sparta with its Helots); in others they were captives taken in war. Hence even the most democratic states of antiquity were so far aristocratic that the larger proportion of the inhabitants had no voice in the government. In the second place this relation gave rise to a philosophic doctrine, held even by Aristotle, that there were peoples who were inferior by nature and adapted to submission (Φύσει δοῦλοι); such people had no “virtue” in the technical civic sense, and were properly occupied in performing the menial functions of society, under the control of the ἄριστοι. Thus, combined with the criteria of descent, civic status and the ownership of the land, there was the further idea of intellectual and social superiority. These qualifications were naturally, in course of time, shared by an increasingly large number of the lower class who broke down the barriers of wealth and education. From this stage the transition is easy to the aristocracy of wealth, such as we find at Carthage and later at Venice, in periods when the importance of commerce was paramount and mercantile pursuits had cast off the stigma of inferiority (in Gr. βαναυσία).

It is important at this stage to distinguish between aristocracy and the feudal governments of medieval Europe. In these it is true that certain power was exercised by a small number of families, at the expense of the majority. But under this system each noble governed in a particular area and within strict limitations imposed by his sovereign; no sovereign authority was vested in the nobles collectively.

Under the conditions of the present day the distinction of aristocracy, democracy and monarchy cannot be rigidly maintained from a purely governmental point of view. In no case does the sovereign power in a state reside any longer in an aristocracy, and the word has acquired a social rather than a political sense as practically equivalent to “nobility,” though the distinction is sometimes drawn between the “aristocracy of birth” and the “aristocracy of wealth.” Modern history, however, furnishes many examples of government in the hands of an aristocracy. Such were the aristocratic republics of Venice, Genoa and the Dutch Netherlands, and those of the free imperial cities in Germany. Such, too, in practice though not in theory, was the government of Great Britain from the Revolution of 1689 to the Reform Bill of 1832. The French nobles of the Ancien Régime, denounced as “aristocrats” by the Revolutionists, had no share as such in government, but enjoyed exceptional privileges (e.g. exemption from taxation). This privileged position is still enjoyed by the heads of the German mediatized families of the “High Nobility.” In Great Britain, on the other hand, though the aristocratic principle is still represented in the constitution by the House of Lords, the “aristocracy” generally, apart from the peers, has no special privileges.

ARISTODEMUS (8th century B.C.), semi-legendary ruler of Messenia in the time of the first Messenian War. Tradition relates that, after some six years’ fighting, the Messenians were forced to retire to the fortified summit of Ithome. The Delphic oracle bade them sacrifice a virgin of the house of Aepytus. Aristodemus offered his own daughter, and when her lover, hoping to save her life, declared that she was no longer a maiden, he slew her with his own hand to prove the assertion false. In the thirteenth year of the war, Euphaes, the Messenian king, died. As he left no children, popular election was resorted to, and Aristodemus was chosen as his successor, though the national soothsayers objected to him as the murderer of his daughter. As a ruler he was mild and conciliatory. He was victorious in the pitched battle fought at the foot of Ithome in the fifth year of his reign, a battle in which the Messenians, reinforced by the entire Arcadian levy and picked contingents from Argos and Sicyon, defeated the combined Spartan and Corinthian forces. Shortly afterwards, however, led by unfavourable omens to despair of final success, he killed himself on his daughter’s tomb. Though little is known of his life and the chronology is uncertain, yet Aristodemus may fairly be regarded as a historical character. His reign is dated 731-724 B.C. by Pausanias, and this may be taken as approximately correct, though Duncker (History of Greece, Eng. trans., ii. p. 69) inclines to place it eight years later.

Pausanias iv. 9-13 is practically our only authority. He followed as his chief source the prose history of Myron of Priene, an untrustworthy writer, probably of the 2nd century B.C.; hence a good deal of his story must be regarded as fanciful, though we cannot distinguish accurately between the true and the fictitious.

(M. N. T.)

ARISTOLOCHIA (Gr. ἄριστος, best, λοχεία, child-birth, in allusion to its repute in promoting child-birth), a genus of shrubs or herbs of the natural order Aristolochiaceae, often with climbing stems, found chiefly in the tropics. The flower forms a tube inflated at the base. A. Clematitis, birthwort, is a central and southern European species, found sometimes in England apparently wild on ruins and similar places, but not a native. A. Sipho, Dutchman’s pipe, or pipe vine, is a climber, native in the woods of the Atlantic United States, and grown in Europe as a garden plant. The flower is bent like a pipe.

A member of the same order is the asarabacca (Asarum europaeum), a small creeping herb with kidney-shaped leaves and small purplish bell-shaped flowers. It is a native of the woods of Europe and north temperate Asia, and occurs wild in some English counties. It was formerly grown for medicinal purposes, the underground stem having cathartic and emetic properties. An allied species, A. canadense, is the Canadian snake-root, a native of Canada and the Atlantic United States.

ARISTOMENES, of Andania, the semi-legendary hero of the second Messenian war. He was a member of the Aepytid family, the son of Nicomedes (or, according to another version, of Pyrrhus) and Nicoteleia, and took a prominent part in stirring up the revolt against Sparta and securing the co-operation of Argos and Arcadia. He showed such heroism in the first encounter, at Derae, that the crown was offered him, but he would accept only the title of commander-in-chief. His daring is illustrated by the story that he came by night to the temple of Athene “of the Brazen House” at Sparta, and there set up his shield with the inscription, “Dedicated to the goddess by Aristomenes from the Spartans.” His prowess contributed largely to the Messenian victory over the Spartan and Corinthian forces at “The Boar’s Barrow” in the plain of Stenyclarus, but in the following year the treachery of the Arcadian king Aristocrates caused the Messenians to suffer a crushing defeat at “The Great Trench.” Aristomenes and the survivors retired to the mountain stronghold of Eira, where they defied the Spartans for eleven years. On one of his raids he and fifty of his companions were captured and thrown into the Caeadas, the chasm on Mt. Taygetus into which criminals were cast. Aristomenes alone was saved, and soon reappeared at Eira: legend told how he was upheld in his fall by an eagle and escaped by grasping the tail of a fox, which led him to the hole by which it had entered. On another occasion he was captured during a truce by some Cretan auxiliaries of the Spartans, and was released only by the devotion of a Messenian girl who afterwards became his daughter-in-law. At length Eira was betrayed to the Spartans (668 B.C. according to Pausanias), and after a heroic resistance Aristomenes and his followers had to evacuate Messenia and seek a temporary refuge with their Arcadian allies. A desperate plan to seize Sparta itself was foiled by Aristocrates, who paid with his life for his treachery. Aristomenes retired to Ialysus in Rhodes, where Damagetus, his son-in-law, was king, and died there while planning a journey to Sardis and Ecbatana to seek aid from the Lydian and Median sovereigns (Pausanias iv. 14-24). Another tradition represents him as captured and slain by the Spartans during the war (Pliny, Nat. Hist. xi. 187; Val. Maximus i. 8, 15; Steph. Byzant. s.v. Άνδανία). Though there seems to be no conclusive reason for doubting the existence of Aristomenes, his history, as related by Pausanias, following mainly the Messeniaca of the Cretan epic poet Rhianus (about 230 B.C.), is evidently largely interwoven with fictions. These probably arose after the foundation of Messene in 369 B.C. Aristomenes’ statue was set up in the stadium there: his bones were fetched from Rhodes and placed in a tomb surmounted by a column (Paus. iv. 32. 3, 6); and more than five centuries later we still find heroic honours paid to him, and his exploits a popular subject of song (ib. iv. 14. 7; 16. 6).

For further details see Pausanias iv.; Polyaenus ii. 31; G. Grote, History of Greece, pt. ii. chap. vii.; M. Duncker, History of Greece, Eng. trans., book iv. chap, viii.; A. Holm, History of Greece, Eng. trans., vol. i. chap. xvi.

(M. N. T.)

ARISTONICUS, of Alexandria, Greek grammarian, lived during the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius. He taught at Rome and wrote commentaries and grammatical treatises. His chief work was Περὶ Σημείων Όμήρου, in which he gave an account of the “critical marks” inserted by Aristarchus in the margin of his recension of the text of the Iliad and Odyssey. Important fragments are preserved in the scholia of the Venetian Codex A of the Iliad.

Friedländer, Aristonici Περὶ Σημείων Ίλιάδος reliquiae (1853); Carnuth, Aristonici Περὶ Σημείων Όδυσσεἰας reliquiae (1869).

ARISTOPHANES (c. 448-385 B.C.1), the great comic dramatist and poet of Athens. His birth-year is uncertain. He is known to have been about the same age as Eupolis, and is said to have been “almost a boy” when his first comedy (The Banqueters) was brought out in 427 B.C. His father Philippus was a landowner in Aegina. Aristophanes was an Athenian citizen of the tribe Pandionis, and the deme Cydathene. The stories which made him a native of Camirus in Rhodes, or of the Egyptian Naucratis, had probably no other foundation than an indictment for usurpation of civic rights (ξενίας γραφή) which appears to have been more than once laid against him by Cleon. His three sons— Philippus, Araros and Nicostratus—were all comic poets. Philippus, the eldest, was a rival of Eubulus, who began to exhibit in 376 B.C. Araros brought out two of his father’s latest comedies—the Cocalus and the Aeolosicon, and in 375 began to exhibit works of his own. Nicostratus, the youngest, is assigned by Athenaeus to the Middle Comedy, but belongs, as is shown by some of the names and characters of his pieces, to the New Comedy also.

Although tragedy and comedy had their common origin in the festivals of Dionysus, the regular establishment of tragedy at Athens preceded by half a century that of comedy. The Old Comedy may be said to have lasted about eighty years (470-390 B.C.), and to have flourished about fifty-six (460-404 B.C.). Of the forty poets who are named as having illustrated it the chief were Cratinus, Eupolis and Aristophanes. The Middle Comedy covers a period of about seventy years (390-320 B.C.), its chief poets being Antiphanes, Alexis, Theopompus and Strattis. The New Comedy was in vigour for about seventy years (320-250 B.C.), having for its foremost representatives Menander, Philemon and Diphilus. The Old Comedy was possible only for a thorough democracy. Its essence was a satirical censorship, unsparing in personalities, of public and of private life—of morality, of statesmanship, of education, of literature, of social usage—in a word, of everything which had an interest for the city or which could amuse the citizens. Preserving all the freedom of banter and of riotous fun to which its origin gave it an historical right, it aimed at associating with this a strong practical purpose—the expression of a democratic public opinion in such a form that no misconduct or folly could altogether disregard it. That licentiousness, that grossness of allusion which too often disfigures it, was, it should be remembered, exacted by the sentiment of the Dionysiac festivals, as much as a decorous cheerfulness is expected at the holiday times of other worships. This was the popular element. Without this the entertainment would have been found flat and unseasonable. But for a comic poet of the higher calibre the consciousness of a recognized power which he could exert, and the desire to use this power for the good of the city, must always have been the uppermost feelings. At Athens the poet of the Old Comedy had an influence analogous, perhaps, rather to that of the journalist than to that of the modern dramatist. But the established type of Dionysiac comedy gave him an instrument such as no public satirist has ever wielded. When Molière wished to brand hypocrisy he could only make his Tartuffe the central figure of a regular drama, developed by a regular process to a just catastrophe. He had no choice between touching too lightly and using sustained force to make a profound impression. The Athenian dramatist of the Old Comedy worked under no such limitations of form. The wildest flights of extravagance were permitted to him. Nothing bound him to a dangerous emphasis or a wearisome insistence. He could deal the keenest thrust, or make the most earnest appeal, and at the next moment—if his instinct told him that it was time to change the subject—vary the serious strain by burlesque. He had, in short, an incomparable scope for trenchant satire directed by sure tact.

Aristophanes is for us the representative of the Old Comedy. But his genius, while it includes, also transcends the genius of the Old Comedy. He can denounce the frauds of a Cleon, he can vindicate the duty of Athens to herself and to her allies, with a stinging scorn and a force of patriotic indignation which makes the poet almost forgotten in the citizen. He can banter Euripides with an ingenuity of light mockery which makes it seem for the time as if the leading Aristophanic trait was the art of seeing all things from their prosaic side. Yet it is neither in the denunciation nor in the mockery that he is most individual. His truest and highest faculty is revealed by those wonderful bits of lyric writing in which he soars above everything that can move laughter or tears, and makes the clear air thrill with the notes of a song as free, as musical and as wild as that of the nightingale invoked by his own chorus in the Birds. The speech of Dikaios Logos in the Clouds, the praises of country life in the Peace, the serenade in the Ecclesiazusae, the songs of the Spartan and Athenian maidens in the Lysistrata, above all, perhaps, the chorus in the Frogs, the beautiful chant of the Initiated,—these passages, and such as these, are the true glories of Aristophanes. They are the strains, not of an artist, but of one who warbles for pure gladness of heart in some place made bright by the presence of a god. Nothing else in Greek poetry has quite this wild sweetness of the woods. Of modern poets Shakespeare alone, perhaps, has it in combination with a like richness and fertility of fancy.

Fifty-four2 comedies were ascribed to Aristophanes. Forty-three of these are allowed as genuine by Bergk. Eleven only are extant. These eleven form a running commentary on the outer and the inner life of Athens during thirty-six years. They may be ranged under three periods. The first, extending to 420 B.C., includes those plays in which Aristophanes uses an absolutely unrestrained freedom of political satire. The second ends with the year 405. Its productions are distinguished from those of the earlier time by a certain degree of reticence and caution. The third period, down to 388 B.C., comprises two plays in which the transition to the character of the Middle Comedy is well marked, not merely by disuse of the parabasis, but by general self-restraint.

I. First Period, (1) 425 B.C. The Acharnians.—Since the defeat in Boeotia the peace party at Athens had gained ground, and in this play Aristophanes seeks to strengthen their hands. Dicaeopolis, an honest countryman, is determined to make peace with Sparta on his own account, not deterred by the angry men of Acharnae, who crave vengeance for the devastation of their vineyards. He sends to Sparta for samples of peace; and he is so much pleased with the flavour of the Thirty Years’ sample that he at once concludes a treaty for himself and his family. All the blessings of life descend on him; while Lamachus, the leader of the war party, is smarting from cold, snow and wounds.

(2) 424 B.C. The Knights.—Three years before, in his Babylonians, Aristophanes had assailed Cleon as the typical demagogue. In this play he continues the attack. The Demos, or State, is represented by an old man who has put himself and his household into the hands of a rascally Paphlagonian steward. Nicias and Demosthenes, slaves of Demos, contrive that the Paphlagonian shall be supplanted in their master’s favour by a sausage-seller. No sooner has Demos been thus rescued than his youthfulness and his good sense return together.

(3) 423 B.C. The Clouds (the first edition; a second edition was brought out in 422 B.C.).—This play would be correctly described as an attack on the new spirit of intellectual inquiry and culture rather than on a school or class. Two classes of thinkers or teachers are, however, specially satirized under the general name of “Sophist” (v. 331)—1. The Physical Philosophers—indicated by allusions to the doctrines of Anaxagoras, Heraclitus and Diogenes of Apollonia. 2. The professed teachers of rhetoric, belles lettres, &c., such as Protagoras and Prodicus. Socrates is taken as the type of the entire tendency. A youth named Pheidippides—obviously meant for Alcibiades—is sent by his father to Socrates to be cured of his dissolute propensities. Under the discipline of Socrates the youth becomes accomplished in dishonesty and impiety. The conclusion of the play shows the indignant father preparing to burn up the philosopher and his hall of contemplation.

(4) 422 B.C. The Wasps.—This comedy, which suggested Les Plaideurs to Racine, is a satire on the Athenian love of litigation. The strength of demagogy, while it lay chiefly in the ecclesia, lay partly also in the paid dicasteries. From this point of view the Wasps may be regarded as supplementing the Knights. Philocleon (admirer of Cleon), an old man, has a passion for lawsuits—a passion which his son, Bdelycleon (detester of Cleon) fails to check, until he hits upon the device of turning the house into a law-court, and paying his father for absence from the public suits. The house-dog steals a Sicilian cheese; the old man is enabled to gratify his taste by trying the case, and, by an oversight, acquits the defendant. In the second half of the play a change comes over the dream of Philocleon; from litigation he turns to literature and music, and is congratulated by the chorus on his happy conversion.

(5) 421 B.C.3 The Peace.—In its advocacy of peace with Sparta, this play, acted at the Great Dionysia shortly before the conclusion of the treaty, continues the purpose of the Acharnians. Trygaeus, a distressed Athenian, soars to the sky on a beetle’s back. There he finds the gods engaged in pounding the Greek states in a mortar. In order to stop this, he frees the goddess Peace from a well in which she is imprisoned. The pestle and mortar are laid aside by the gods, and Trygaeus marries one of the handmaids of Peace.

II. Second Period. (6) 414 B.C. The Birds.—Peisthetaerus, an enterprising Athenian, and his friend Euelpides persuade the birds to build a city—“Cloud-Cuckoo-borough”—in mid-air, so as to cut off the gods from men. The plan succeeds; the gods send envoys to treat with the birds; and Peisthetaerus marries Basileia, daughter of Zeus. Some have found in the Birds a complete historical allegory of the Sicilian expedition; others, a general satire on the prevalence at Athens of headstrong caprice over law and order; others, merely an aspiration towards a new and purified Athens—a dream to which the poet had turned from his hope for a revival of the Athens of the past. In another view, the piece is mainly a protest against the religious fanaticism which the incident of the Hermae had called forth.

(7) 411 B.C. The Lysistrata.—This play was brought out during the earlier stages of those intrigues which led to the revolution of the Four Hundred. It appeared shortly before Peisander had arrived in Athens from the camp at Samos for the purpose of organizing the oligarchic policy. The Lysistrata expresses the popular desire for peace at any cost. As the men can do nothing, the women take the question into their own hands, occupy the citadel, and bring the citizens to surrender.

(8) 411 B.C. The Thesmophoriazusae (Priestesses of Demeter).— This came out three months later than the Lysistrata, during the reign of terror established by the oligarchic conspirators, but before their blow had been struck. The political meaning of the play lies in the absence of political allusion. Fear silences even comedy. Only women and Euripides are satirized. Euripides is accused and condemned at the female festival of the Thesmophoria.

(9) 405 B.C. The Frogs.—This piece was brought out just when Athens had made her last effort in the Peloponnesian War, eight months before the battle of Aegospotami, and about fifteen months before the taking of Athens by Lysander. It may be considered as an attempt to distract men’s minds from public affairs. It is a literary criticism. Aeschylus and Euripides were both lately dead. Athens is beggared of poets; and Dionysus goes down to Hades to bring back a poet. Aeschylus and Euripides contend in the under-world for the throne of tragedy; and the victory is at last awarded to Aeschylus.

III. Third Period.4 (10) 393 B.C.4 The Ecclesiazusae (women in parliament).—The women, disguised as men, steal into the ecclesia, and succeed in decreeing a new constitution. At this time the demagogue Agyrrhius led the assembly; and the play is, in fact, a satire on the general demoralization of public life.

(11) 388 B.C. The Plutus (Wealth).—The first edition of the play had appeared in 408 B.C., being a symbolical representation of the fact that the victories won by Alcibiades in the Hellespont had brought back the god of wealth to the treasure-chamber of the Parthenon. In its extant form the Plutus is simply a moral allegory. Chremylus, a worthy but poor man, falls in with a blind and aged wanderer, who proves to be the god of wealth. Asclepius restores eyesight to Plutus; whereupon all the just are made rich and all the unjust are reduced to poverty.

Among the lost plays, the following are the chief of which anything is known:—

1. The Banqueters Δαιταλεῖς, 427 B.C.—A satire on young Athens. A father has two sons; one is brought up in the good old school, another in the tricky subtleties of the new; and the contrast of results is the chief theme.

2. The Babylonians, 426 B.C.—Under this name the subject-allies of Athens are represented as “Babylonians”-barbarian slaves, employed to grind in the mill. The oppression of the allies by the demagogues—a topic often touched elsewhere—was, then, the main subject of the piece, in which Aristophanes is said to have attacked especially the system of appointing to offices by lot. The comedy is memorable as opening that Aristophanic war upon Cleon which was continued in the Knights and the Wasps.

The Merchantmen, The Farmers, The Preliminary Contest (Proagon), and possibly the Old Age (Geras), belonged to the First Period. The Geras is assigned by Süvern to 422 B.C., and is supposed to have been a picture of dotage similar to that in the Knights. A comedy called The Islands is conjectured to have dealt with the sufferings imposed by the war on the insular tributaries. The Triphales was probably a satire on Alcibiades; the Storks, on the tragic poet Patrocles.

In the Aeolosicon—produced by his son Araros in 387 B.C.—Aristophanes probably parodied the Aeolus of Euripides. The Cocalus is thought to have been a parody of the legend, according to which a Sicilian king of that name slew Minos.

A sympathetic reader of Aristophanes can hardly fail to perceive that, while his political and intellectual tendencies are well marked, his opinions, in so far as they colour his comedies, are too indefinite to reward, or indeed to tolerate, analysis. Aristophanes was a natural conservative. His ideal was the Athens of the Persian wars. He disapproved the policy which had made Athenian empire irksome to the allies and formidable to Greece; he detested the vulgarity and the violence of mob-rule; he clave to the old worship of the gods; he regarded the new ideas of education as a tissue of imposture and impiety. How far he was from clearness or precision of view in regard to the intellectual revolution which was going forward, appears from the Clouds, in which thinkers and literary workers who had absolutely nothing in common are treated with sweeping ridicule as prophets of a common heresy. Aristophanes is one of the men for whom opinion is mainly a matter of feeling, not of reason. His imaginative susceptibility gave him a warm and loyal love for the traditional glories of Athens, however dim the past to which they belonged; a horror of what was ugly or ignoble in the present; a keen perception of what was offensive or absurd in pretension. The broad preferences and dislikes thus generated were enough not only to point the moral of comedy, but to make him, in many cases, a really useful censor for the city. The service which he could render in this way was, however, only negative. He could hardly be, in any positive sense, a political or a moral teacher for Athens. His rooted antipathy to intellectual progress, while it affords easy and wide scope for his wit, must after all, lower his intellectual rank. The great minds are not the enemies of ideas. But as a mocker—to use the word which seems most closely to describe him on this side—he is incomparable for the union of subtlety with riot of the comic imagination. As a poet, he is immortal. And, among Athenian poets, he has it for his distinctive characteristic that he is inspired less by that Greek genius which never allows fancy to escape from the control of defining, though spiritualizing, reason, than by such ethereal rapture of the unfettered fancy as lifts Shakespeare or Shelley above it,—

“Pouring his full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.”

Bibliography.—Editio princeps (Aldine, Venice, 1498), by Marcus Musurus (not including the Lysistrata and Thesmophoriazusae); S. Bergler (ed. P. Burmann, 1760); Invernizi-Beck-Dindorf (1794-1834); I. Bekker (1829); H.A. Holden (expurgated text, 1868), with Onomasticon (new ed., 1902); F.H.M. Blaydes (1880-1893), and critical edition (1886); J. van Leeuwen (1893 foll.); F.W. Hall and E.M. Geldart (text, 1900-1901), with the fragment (from the Oxyrhynchus papyri) of a dialogue between two women concerning a leathern phallus, perhaps from Aristophanes. There is a complete edition of the valuable scholia by F. Dübner (1842, Didot series),—with the anonymous biographies of the poet; of the Ravenna MS. by A. Martin (1883), and W.G. Rutherford (1896-1905). Among English translations mention may be made of those of V.J. Hickie (prose, in Bohn’s Classical Library); (verse) J. Hookham Frere, five plays; T. Mitchell, four plays; and, above all, B.B. Rogers, a brilliant work of exceptional merit. There is a concordance to the plays and fragments by H. Dunbar (1883). On Aristophanes generally see H. Müller-Strübing, Aristophanes und die historische Kritik (1873); the article by G. Kaibel in Pauly-Wissowa’s Realencyclopadie, ii. 1 (1896); A. Couat, Aristophane et l’ancienne comédie attique (1889); E. Deschanel, Études sur Aristophane (3rd ed., 1892); G. Dantu, Opinions et critiques d’Aristophane sur le mouvement politique et intellectuel à Athènes (Paris, 1907). For the numerous editions and translations of separate plays in English and other languages see the introductions to Blaydes’s edition, and, for the literature, the introduction to W.J.M. Starkie’s edition of the Wasps (1897); W. Engelmann, Scriptores Graeci (1880); and “Bericht über die Literatur der griechischen Komödie aus den Jahren 1892-1901” in C. Bursian’s Jahresbericht über die Fortschritte der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, cxvi. (1904).

(R. C. J.)

1 The dates in the text, as given by Jebb, are retained. According to R.G. Kent, Classical Review (April 1905, April 1906), Aristophanes was born in 465, and died in 375 B.C.

2 Or “fourty-four” (reading μδ´ for νδ´ in Suidas).

3 See E. Curtius, Hist. of Greece, iii (Eng. trans. p. 275).

4 The date is uncertain; others give 392 and 389.

ARISTOPHANES, of Byzantium, Greek critic and grammarian, was born about 257 B.C. He removed early to Alexandria, where he studied under Zenodotus and Callimachus. At the age of sixty he was appointed chief librarian of the museum. He died about 185-180 B.C. Aristophanes chiefly devoted himself to the poets, especially Homer, who had already been edited by his master Zenodotus. He also edited Hesiod, the chief lyric, tragic and comic poets, arranged Plato’s dialogues in trilogies, and abridged Aristotle’s Nature of Animals. His arguments to the plays of Aristophanes and the tragedians are in great part preserved. His works on Athenian courtesans, masks and proverbs were the results of his study of Attic comedy. He further commented on the Πίνακες of Callimachus, a sort of history of Greek literature. As a lexicographer, Aristophanes compiled collections of foreign and unusual words and expressions, and special lists (words denoting relationship, modes of address). As a grammarian, he founded a scientific school, and in his Analogy systematically explained the various forms. He introduced critical signs—except the obelus; punctuation prosodiacal, and accentual marks were probably already in use. The foundation of the so-called Alexandrian “canon” was also due to his impulse (Sandys, Hist. Class. Schol., ed. 1906, i. 129 f.).

Nauck, Aristophanis Byzantii Grammatici Fragmenta (1848).

ARISTOTLE (384-322 B.C.), the great Greek philosopher, was born at Stagira, on the Strymonic Gulf, and hence called “the Stagirite.” Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in his Epistle on Demosthenes and Aristotle (chap. 5), gives the following sketch of his life:—Aristotle (Άριστοτέλης) was the son of Nicomachus, who traced back his descent and his art to Machaon, son of Aesculapius; his mother being Phaestis, a descendant of one of those who carried the colony from Chalcis to Stagira. He was born in the 99th Olympiad in the archonship at Athens of Diotrephes (384-383), three years before Demosthenes. In the archonship of Polyzelus (367-366), after the death of his father, in his eighteenth year, he came to Athens, and having joined Plato spent twenty years with him. On the death of Plato (May 347) in the archonship of Theophilus (348-347) he departed to Hermias, tyrant of Atarneus, and, after three years’ stay, during the archonship of Eubulus (345-344) he moved to Mitylene, whence he went to Philip of Macedon in the archonship of Pythodotus (343-342), and spent eight years with him as tutor of Alexander. After the death of Philip (336), in the archonship of Euaenetus (335-334), he returned to Athens and kept a school in the Lyceum for twelve years. In the thirteenth, after the death of Alexander (June 323) in the archonship of Cephisodorus (323-322), having departed to Chalcis, he died of disease (322), after a life of three-and-sixty years.

I. Aristotle’s Life

This account is practically repeated by Diogenes Laertius in his Life of Aristotle, on the authority of the Chronicles of Apollodorus, who lived in the 2nd century B.C. Starting then from this tradition, near enough to the time, we can confidently divide Aristotle’s career into four periods: his youth under his parents till his eighteenth year; his philosophical education under Plato at Athens till his thirty-eighth year; his travels in the Greek world till his fiftieth year; and his philosophical teaching in the Lyceum till his departure to Chalcis and his death in his sixty-third year. But when we descend from generals to particulars, we become less certain, and must here content ourselves with few details.

Aristotle from the first profited by having a father who, being physician to Amyntas II., king of Macedon, and one of the Asclepiads who, according to Galen, practised their sons in dissection, both prepared the way for his son’s influence at the Macedonian court, and gave him a bias to medicine and biology, which certainly led to his belief in nature and natural science, and perhaps induced him to practise medicine, as he did, according to his enemies, Timaeus and Epicurus, when he first went to Athens. At Athens in his second period for some twenty years he acquired the further advantage of balancing natural science by metaphysics and morals in the course of reading Plato’s writings and of hearing Plato’s unwritten dogmas (cf. ἐν τοῖς λεγομένοις ἀγράφοις δόγμασιν, Ar. Physics, iv. 2, 209 b 15, Berlin ed.). He was an earnest, appreciative, independent student. The master is said to have called his pupil the intellect of the school and his house a reader’s. He is also said to have complained that his pupil spurned him as colts do their mothers. Aristotle, however, always revered Plato’s memory (Nic. Ethics, i. 6), and even in criticizing his master counted himself enough of a Platonist to cite Plato’s doctrines as what “we say” (cf. φαμέν, Metaphysics, i. 9, 990 b 16). At the same time, he must have learnt much from other contemporaries at Athens, especially from astronomers such as Eudoxus and Callippus, and from orators such as Isocrates and Demosthenes. He also attacked Isocrates, according to Cicero, and perhaps even set up a rival school of rhetoric. At any rate he had pupils of his own, such as Eudemus of Cyprus, Theodectes and Hermias, books of his own, especially dialogues, and even to some extent his own philosophy, while he was still a pupil of Plato.

Well grounded in his boyhood, and thoroughly educated in his manhood, Aristotle, after Plato’s death, had the further advantage of travel in his third period, when he was in his prime. The appointment of Plato’s nephew, Speusippus, to succeed his uncle in the Academy induced Aristotle and Xenocrates to leave Athens together and repair to the court of Hermias. Aristotle admired Hermias, and married his friend’s sister or niece, Pythias, by whom he had his daughter Pythias. After the tragic death of Hermias, he retired for a time to Mitylene, and in 343-342 was summoned to Macedon by Philip to teach Alexander, who was then a boy of thirteen. According to Cicero (De Oratore, iii. 41), Philip wished his son, then a boy of thirteen, to receive from Aristotle “agendi praecepta et eloquendi.” Aristotle is said to have written on monarchy and on colonies for Alexander; and the pupil is said to have slept with his master’s edition of Homer under his pillow, and to have respected him, until from hatred of Aristotle’s tactless relative, Callisthenes, who was done to death in 328, he turned at last against Aristotle himself. Aristotle had power to teach, and Alexander to learn. Still we must not exaggerate the result. Dionysius must have spoken too strongly when he says that Aristotle was tutor of Alexander for eight years; for in 340, when Philip went to war with Byzantium, Alexander became regent at home, at the age of sixteen. From this date Aristotle probably spent much time at his paternal house in his native city at Stagira as a patriotic citizen. Philip had sacked it in 348: Aristotle induced him or his son to restore it, made for it a new constitution, and in return was celebrated in a festival after his death. All these vicissitudes made him a man of the world, drew him out of the philosophical circle at Athens, and gave him leisure to develop his philosophy. Besides Alexander he had other pupils: Callisthenes, Cassander, Marsyas, Phanias, and Theophrastus of Eresus, who is said to have had land at Stagira. He also continued the writings begun in his second period; and the Macedonian kings have the glory of having assisted the Stagirite philosopher with the means of conducting his researches in the History of Animals.

At last, in his fourth period, after the accession of Alexander, Aristotle at fifty returned to Athens and became the head of his own school in the Lyceum, a gymnasium near the temple of Apollo Lyceius in the suburbs. The master and his scholars were called Peripatetics (οἱ ἐκ τοῦ περιπάτου), certainly from meeting, like other philosophical schools, in a walk (περίπατος), and perhaps also, on the authority of Hermippus of Smyrna, from walking and talking there, like Protagoras and his followers as described in Plato’s Protagoras (314 E, 315 C). Indeed, according to Ammonius, Plato too had talked as he walked in the Academy; and all his followers were called Peripatetics, until, while the pupils of Xenocrates took the name “Academics,” those of Aristotle retained the general name. Aristotle also formed his Peripatetic school into a kind of college with common meals under a president (ἄρχων) changing every ten days; while the philosopher himself delivered lectures, in which his practice, as his pupil Aristoxenus tells us (Harmonics ii, init.), was, avoiding the generalities of Plato, to prepare his audience by explaining the subject of investigation and its nature. But Aristotle was an author as well as a lecturer; for the hypothesis that the Aristotelian writings are notes of his lectures taken down by his pupils is contradicted by the tradition of their learning while walking, and disproved by the impossibility of taking down such complicated discourses from dictation. Moreover, it is clear that Aristotle addressed himself to readers as well as hearers, as in concluding his whole theory of syllogisms he says, “There would remain for all of you or for our hearers (πάντων ὑμῶν ἢ τῶν) a duty of according to the defects of the investigation consideration, to its discoveries much gratitude” (Sophisticai Elenchi, 34,184 b 6). In short, Aristotle was at once a student, a reader, a lecturer, a writer and a book collector. He was, says Strabo (608), the first we knew who collected books and taught the kings in Egypt the arrangement of a library. In his library no doubt were books of others, but also his own. There we must figure to ourselves the philosopher, constantly referring to his autograph rolls; entering references and cross-references; correcting, rewriting, collecting and arranging them according to their subjects; showing as well as reading them to his pupils; with little thought of publication, but with his whole soul concentrated on being and truth.

On his first visit to Athens, during which occurred the fatal battle of Mantineia (362 B.C.), Aristotle had seen the confusion of Greece becoming the opportunity of Macedon under Philip; and on his second visit he was supported at Athens by the complete domination of Macedon under Alexander. Having witnessed the unjust exactions of a democracy at Athens, the dwindling population of an oligarchy at Sparta, and the oppressive selfishness of new tyrannies throughout the Greek world, he condemned the actual constitutions of the Greek states as deviations (παρεκβάσεις) directed merely to the good of the government; and he contemplated a right constitution (ὀρθὴ πολιτεία), which might be either a commonwealth, an aristocracy or a monarchy, directed to the general good; but he preferred the monarchy of one man, pre-eminent in virtue above the rest, as the best of all governments (Nicomachean Ethics, viii. 10; Politics, Γ 14-18). Moreover, by adding (Politics, Η 7, 1327 b 29-33) that the Greek race could govern the world by obtaining one constitution (μιᾶς τυγχάνον πολιτείας), he indicated some leaning to a universal monarchy under such a king as Alexander. On the whole, however, he adhered to the Greek city-state (πόλις), partly perhaps out of patriotism to his own Stagira. Averse at all events to the Athenian democracy, leaning towards Macedonian monarchy, and resting on Macedonian power, he maintained himself in his school at Athens, so long as he was supported by the friendship of Antipater, the Macedonian regent in Alexander’s absence. But on Alexander’s sudden death in 323, when Athens in the Lamian war tried to reassert her freedom against Antipater, Aristotle found himself in danger. He was accused of impiety on the absurd charge of deifying the tyrant Hermias; and, remembering the fate of Socrates, he retired to Chalcis in Euboea. There, away from his school, in 322 he died. (A tomb has been found in our time inscribed with the name of Biote, daughter of Aristotle. But is this our Aristotle?)