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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.
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
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