Aristotle through history. Part 1: Babylon. Good but not enough

It’s late afternoon and I’m skiing through the Southforest in the direction of the Midforest mountain, when the darkness suddenly falls down from the sky. Fear creeps in and I stop in a forest glade. It is not becoming completely dark. Up there the stars sparkle and the moon is full and her pale glow is filtered between the trees, glimmering in the snow.

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The place is magical and I’m a statue with thick wooled socks sticking up from clumsy boots, wide wooden skis, bamboo poles with leather rod straps, looking at the uncountable stars. I stand perfectly still until the sweat on my back goes cold, as does my wrist in the gap between the knitted woolen gloves and the jacket sleeve. I haven't the faintest idea how it all goes together, those sparkling fireworks in the sky. I probably believe in God.

So, of course humans and animals have stared for millions of years without even trying to understand what is going on up there. A crackling mystery. The sun rises every morning, the moon goes through its phases. The sun goes down, the stars come out. They blink and that's natural. Are they telling us something? People believe in gods.

There is not much time to investigate the natural phenomena when everyone is busy hunting and looking for food, but civilisations begin to take hold, in North Africa and the Middle East, mainly on the banks of the Nile, Euphrates and Tigris. The Fertile Crescent. 

The farmers follow the changes of the seasons and improve the methods. A lot goes by itself. Sheep tell when they need food. Cows when to be milked. Hens lay eggs, regardless of the positions of the stars. The wheat shows when to harvest, and the surpluses make the lords of the farmers richer and ideas grow. Large projects, dam construction, canals. The greater ideas, the more need of planning.

No, it is not enough. Following the seasons like the farmers is not enough. Rituals begin to form in the worship of the gods and eventually their representatives on the earth, with symbols, great temples in dreams longing to be materialised. Thousands of people must be coordinated. All this requires planning, advanced leadership and coordinating meetings. The days and the hours must be counted more precisely and the eyes go up to the gods in the sky. Can they arrange it?

Appointed observers start to record the regularity of the sky on papyrus and clay tablets. It’s good but still not enough. The rulers also want to know what the gods have to say. With the naked eye, the rulers can see that stars sometimes come very close to each other. They stand in conjunction. What are they talking about? What are their plans? Sometimes they stand opposite each other, in opposition. Maybe in an argument.

A new kind of professionals enters, freed from labor on the river beds: the astrologers. For hundreds of years, they will carefully record the positions of the sun, moon, planets and stars. Day after day.

Most concerned are the Babylonians. They develop algorithms that make it possible to predict recurring phenomena, such as solar eclipses. The predictions are used in planning, to await star constellations that are particularly favourable for war. Unlike the Egypts they don’t have a single ruler, but many that are ready to fight to get larger shares of the affluence along the river beds and canals.

The measurements are made with the eye and simple wooden tools that make it possible to read angles between celestial bodies, and with the horizon as a reference point. It will take thousands of years until the first telescopes appear, but the measurements stand up well over time.

So, when the Greeks appear in our history books in 650 BC, they have a lot of material to work with. Egyptians and Babylonians provide them with mathematics, geometry and algorithms, which make it possible to predict the timing of celestial events. It’s an invaluable treasure: hundreds of years of observations and a reliable storage media in the form of the clay tablets.

It is not enough, however. The Greek natural philosophers bring in a new and crucial element: curiosity. It is not enough to passively regard celestial phenomena as the work of the gods. They want to understand how everything is connected, how nature works, and will ponder this for hundreds of years.

Several hundreds years later, Aristotle sends a thank you to both the Egyptian and Babylonian astronomers in his essay "On the Heavens”, which he writes in 350 BC. They have given him the data he needs to make a theoretical model of the cosmos, how it works. It is fundamentally flawed but will stand for more than 2,500 years.

Next: Orphaned in Royal Company

Aristotle through history. Part 2. Orphaned in Royal Company

Stagira. Around 380 BC. It is dawn and a man and a little boy are about to leave town. They are in the northern Greek city of Stagira on the east side of Chalkidiki peninsula. The man's name is Nicomachus, he is a doctor. The boy is Aristotle. They are in mourning, the wife and mother, Phaestis, has died. Nicomachus sees no point in staying in the little town. He is an ambitious doctor of rich birth who expects more from life.  

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A ship is waiting. They sail south and then west, around the peninsulas of Kassandra, Sithonia and Athos which stick out like three fingers from Chalkidiki, and further on into the shallow gulf where Thessaloniki will later be founded and on to the new city of Pella. The ship docks at a new stone-paved harbor and the slaves unload the goods. They take the last bite on a four-wheeled cart, pulled by two horses and with their slaves walking close behind the load. 

Aristotle’s father is rich, owns properties and has financial options, but these are dangerous times with looming violence and war. The Corinthian War ended just a few years before Aristotle was born. Pella, which the Macedon king Amyntas III made the capital of the kingdom, has military protection and the plain south of the city is rich and fertile. It’s a city of the future.

The father buys a new house on the flatlands south of the Paiko mountain range, where the young capital is spreading out. It is not a society where people visit a doctor but rather the doctors who travelling around to their patients. Aristotle follows his father closely and learns medicine and healing arts. It happens in secrecy, as it should in Macedon, from father to son. 

Good doctors are probably not easy to find and Nicomachus quickly gains a reputation, since the royal court catches the eye of him. Maybe there were already contacts. Some kind of kinship between rich people. After a rather short time, he finds himself employed as the court doctor with direct access to the royal family. This is of importance to Aristotle, since he will meet the king’s son Philip who's in the same age.

Things look good for the boy but after only a few years Nicomachus dies. It's unclear how. Aristotle’s brother in law, Proxenus of Atarneus takes in the now orphaned boy and ensures that he is educated as befits an aristocrat. That is, in the greek language, rhetoric and poetry. Aristotle probably wades through the works of Hesiod and Homer. Maybe the great female poet Sappho. It takes place at the Macedonian court on the Acropolis hill or nearby in the extensive urban settlement on the plain south, where a regular street network spreads out.

And there, on the market square, maybe at the agora, around sanctuaries and elegant residential buildings with peristyle courtyards and rooms with floor mosaics, he gets to know Philip. The talented boys will both become famous and powerful – in completely different ways.

Next: Plato was not there

*

Walking Manhattan

New York. July, 2009. We stayed in an apartment at Upper East, just a few blocks from Central Park. My first visit without work and meetings. Soon I realised that my son knew more about the city than I. He told me about Lower East around Chinatown, and Ludlow Street where the artists and musicians hanged around. He had a friend there and our paths diverged. I was looking for a book. 

It rained that day but I didn't care and walked down to Battersea and back, looking for famous bookshops and antiquaries and learned that most of them don’t exist anymore. I was too late but found one at Upper East, on the third floor. The door was locked but the owner came walking up the stairs. He, a tall and broad middle-aged man in a suit, asked where I came from and what I was doing in town. I told him I was there with my 20-year-old son.

“You must be a good man”, he said. “I wouldn’t go anywhere with my son.”
“Why?”
“He smokes pot all nights and sleeps all days. He’s in the lost generation! I can’t stand him. Where are your son?”
"At Ludlow Street, I'd guess."
"You could tell him to stay there."
I told the man I was looking for an early print of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five.
“What? Are you insane? Still in the medieval time? You don’t walk around to find old books anymore!” He thought a while and said: “I will help you. Come on in.”

He locked up the door and invited me into the office. There were a lot of computers inside and two people working in front of computer screens. Old analog maps were hanging on the walls that were dark.
The man presented me loudly: “This good man comes from Sweden to look for books here. He is in deep trouble since he’s traveling with his 20-year-old son. Give him all help he needs!”

His employees, a young man and woman, started to search for the book. They scanned the whole world and printed out a list of all available early prints of Slaughterhouse-Five.

“This is the way to do it”, the man said. “The International League of Antiquarian Booksellers - ILAB is the place. Absolutely reliable, best prices and accurate quality information on each copy - and usually quick deliveries! Stop do this walking!”
He turned to the woman. “Help this good man out so he can take care of his son.”  
I walked on south, in the direction of Ludlow Street.