Aristotle's travel through history. Part 4. Plato on the death of Socrates

 

Athens 367 BC: Writing about Aristotle without mentioning Plato is difficult. Maybe impossible. And with Plato comes Socrates into the picture.

Chapters & Sources

Aristotle story in Swedish

Plato is not only well-educated and rich. He is also a powerful and experienced soldier with awards for bravery. A man of the world with connections among kings and businessmen. It is an impressive person that the 17-year-old Aristotle meets.

He is certainly not satisfied, however. The 40 year older man is rather disillusioned after many setbacks. After the defeat in the war against the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War, he ventured into politics, at the age of 23. He joined the 30 tyrants, those who threw out democracy and took over the state. The maternal uncle and Socrates' good friend Charmides was one of the leaders. But it did not turn out as Plato had expected. He quickly had enough of the tyrants' brutal methods and retreated.

New hope was lit when the tyrants' rule was overthrown a few years later and democracy was reintroduced. But although commerce and trade were running well again, it became clear that Athens' heyday was over. Democracy was probably not the best solution, which he had certainly heard before. Plato's aristocratic family had never had much faith in democracy.

The signs were obvious. In the south, the Spartans, black soup slurping with militarised brains, had proved stronger in battle. In the north, war drums were heard from the increasingly strong kingdom of Macedonia. No, Athens' political life of lies and excesses did not impress. The only wise man was probably the man who claimed to know nothing, Socrates.

He could never get over Socrates' fate, which Aristotle eventually wrote about. Plato was less than 28 when the death sentence was handed down. The city council claimed that Socrates had corrupted the youth and was therefore to blame for the loss of Athen's greatness. 

According to Plato, the truth had indeed come from Socrates himself during the defence speech. Certainly it was so, that Socrates with sharp questions and biting irony had provoked the council members, exposed their ignorance. He made them unresponsive and stupid.

When the sentence came, he refused to plead for his life. He also declined a friend's offer to help him escape from custody. Instead, he asked them to send his wife and children home. They wouldn't have to witness the end.

He had emptied the goblet of hemlock with his own hands. He had laid down on his back, waiting for the paralysis that had already started in his feet and was now spreading upwards. The friends burst into tears and Plato comforted them. He was old, seventy one. He said that death was nothing dangerous but more to be considered a dreamless sleep. Wasn't it good to sleep without being bothered by dreams?

Plato could not let it go. Miserable, he set off. First to Egypt and then to Italy where he made the acquaintance of disciples of Pythagoras. A Greek mathematician who had lived in Croton in Southern Italy in the 5th century BC.

The Pythagoreans fascinated him. Their religious faith, rationality - numerological mysticism and mathematical precision made an impression. They carried the idea that reality could be described with numbers, which suddenly seemed self-evident for Plato. The goal of scientific thinking – reality, must be expressible in mathematical terms—the most precise and definite kind of thinking of which we are capable. 

Plato was also convinced by the Pythagoreans' belief that the earth was spherical - that the entire cosmos was spherical with celestial bodies and stars in Pythagorean orbits. Exact, infallible. Mathematical.

Astronomy was certainly nothing new to the well-educated Plato. As a young man, he had studied under Cratylos, who in turn had been a student of Heracleitus, known for a cosmology based on fire being the basic material of the universe. Now he had new ideas to deal with.

After the trip, at the age of 32, he once again went to war, the Corinthian. It was there that he received awards for bravery. It was also during the war that he began writing down his ideas in dialogues, starring Socrates; the ever-questioning and the revealer of ignorance.

He probably also worked with the idea of starting the Academy in order to produce a more capable generation of political leaders, a philosophical elite with the knowledge that contemporary leaders obviously lacked.

But more important to this story is that, inspired by the Pythagoreans, he began to form his image of the cosmos, which he would eventually pass on to the knowledge-hungry Aristotle.

To be continued

*

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.                                        

                                                                                                                                       Chapters &

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.

Next chapter

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.

Chapters & Sources

Aristotle stories in Swedish

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.  

Chapters & Sources

Aristotle story in Swedish

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

*