Aristotle
...Amyntas III of Macedon, father of Philip II of Macedon and grandfather of Alexander the Great. In 367, Aristotle moved to Athens to study at Plato’s Academy, where he stayed for twenty years. Aristotle left the Academy in 347, the year Plato died, and some have speculated that he felt snubbed that Plato did not choose him as his successor. The more likely explanation, however, is that anti-Macedonian sentiment was on the rise in Athens, causing Aristotle to fear being persecuted for his associations with King Philip’s court.
Over the next four years, Aristotle traveled about the eastern Aegean, studying and teaching. During this time, he conducted a remarkable array of experiments and observations in the biological sciences. In 343, he was summoned back north to Macedonia to be the personal tutor to King Philip’s son, the young Alexander the Great. We do not know the precise relationship between Aristotle and Alexander, though their relationship has been the subject of much speculation and mythmaking over the centuries.
As the Macedonians came to dominate Greece, Aristotle returned to Athens and set up his own philosophical school at the Lyceum, where he taught from 335 until 323. What we have of Aristotle’s writings are mostly lectures he gave at the Lyceum in these years. Their dry style and uneven structure is due partly to the fact that they were lecture notes never intended for publication and partly to the fact that they were patched together into their present form by editors many centuries after Aristotle’s death. Aristotle published many popular works admired for their lively style, but none of these have survived.
Historically, Aristotle lived in the twilight years of the Greek city-state. Ancient Greece consisted of a number of independent city-states, of which Athens was the most significant. Though the city-states relied on slave labor and...
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