Aristotle through history. Part 3. Plato was not there

 

Athens. 367 BC. There is little information about Aristotle's upbringing, but apparently the guardian Proxenus is so impressed by Aristotle's talent that he sends him to Greece's most prestigious school, the Academy of Athens.                                        

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Sources Aristotle story in Swedish

The situation in Athens is quite calm at the moment. The disastrous defeat against Sparta is still etched in the memory of the elders. However, when the 17-year-old Aristotle arrives in the ship from Pella the city is run by a new generation. Democracy is restored for the free men, born in Athens. 

The city-state will never regain its military power but still there is no city in the known world that can match Athens in the fields of philosophy and science. It attracts philosophers, artists, and businessmen from the coasts of the Mediterranean and Black Sea, where Greek colonies are spreading. Twenty thousand foreigners, Metics, live in the city. Aristotle is just one of many who come to Athens with dreams.

As a Metic, Aristoteles is not allowed to own real estate. We have to assume that he rents a residence with decent space for him and probably an accompanying slave that takes care of the household. 

It's an amazing city. With the surrounding countryside and the slaves included, it resides two hundred thousand people. Thirty thousand are men with the right to vote. 

The central area of the city's public life, the Agora, is located in the district of Keramaikos northwest of the Acropolis. It is a large area where, as the name suggests, ceramics are fabricated, shipped from Piraeus to trade in the Mediterranean.

The square has two covered colonnades, decorated with mythological images. Next to it is the city hall, the Prytaneion: an open and round building with an altar to the goddess of the household hearth, Hestia, whose fire must never go out.

Outside the city wall there are sport grounds and military training camps, and there, in a beautiful tree-fenced place, is the goal of his journey: the Academia that Plato founded twenty years earlier. Plato named it after the demigod Akademos and it's not just any school. It educates would-be philosophers, which in those days equates to scientists, and according to Plato, those best suited to rule and control a state. 

It takes some time before Aristotle gets to meet the teacher since Plato is in Syracuse in Sicily to teach the tyrant Dionysios and his court about his radical political ideas. But when Plato finally returns, according to rumours sold as a slave by the furious tyrant, a twenty-year association begins between Plato and Aristotle, who will increasingly challenge the master's ideas with unyielding reason.

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