The district known as the Lyceum lay just beyond Athens’ stone walls. A sanctuary dedicated to Apollo Lykeios – Apollo of the Wolves – it contained, among other things, a military training ground, a racetrack, a collection of shrines and a park. The topography is uncertain. Strabo is vague, Pausanias is worse, and, besides, one wrote twenty years, the other two centuries after Sulla, a Roman general, had razed the place to the ground. Sulla also chopped down the ancient plane trees that lined its winding paths and built siege engines from their wood. Cicero, visiting in 97 BC, found only a waste. His visit was an homage to Aristotle who, more than two hundred years before, had rented a few buildings and set up his school there. It was said that Aristotle used to walk the Lyceum’s shady paths and that, as he did so, he talked.
He talked about the proper constitution of the city: the dangers of tyranny – and of democracy too. And of how Tragedy purifies through pity and fear. He analysed the meaning of the Good, to agathon, and spoke of how humans should spend their lives. He set his students logical puzzles and then demanded that they reconsider the nature of fundamental reality. He spoke in terse syllogisms and then illustrated his meaning with endless lists of things. He began his lectures with the most abstract principles and followed their consequences for hours till yet another part of the world lay before them dissected and explained. He examined his predecessors’ thought – the names of Empedocles, Democritus, Socrates and Plato were forever on his lips – sometimes with grudging recognition, often with scorn. He reduced the chaos of the world to order, for Aristotle was, if nothing else, a systems man.
His students would have regarded him with awe and, perhaps, a little fear. Some of his sayings suggest an acid tongue: ‘The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.’ ‘Educated men are as superior to uneducated as the living are to the dead.’ Of a rival philosopher he said: ‘It would be a shame for me to keep quiet if Xenocrates is still talking.’ There is a description too, and it isn’t an attractive one. It’s of a dandy who wore lots of rings, dressed rather too well and fussed about with his hair. Asked why people seek beauty in others he replied: ‘That’s a question only a blind man would ask.’ It is said that he had thin legs and small eyes.
This may be mere gossip: the Athenian schools were forever feuding and the biographers are unreliable. But we know what Aristotle talked about, for we have his lecture notes. Among them are the works – Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics, Sophistical Refutations, the Metaphysics, the Eudemian and Nicomachean Ethics, Poetics, Politics – that loom over the history of Western thought like a mountain range. Sometimes clear and didactic, often opaque and enigmatic, riddled with gaps and rife with redundancies, they are the books that have made Aristotle’s name immortal. That we have them at all is mostly due to Sulla, who looted the library of a Piraeus bibliophile and took them back to Rome. But these philosophical texts are only a part – and not even the most important part – of what Aristotle wrote. Among the books that Sulla stole were at least nine that were all about animals.
Aristotle was an intellectual omnivore, a glutton for information and ideas. But the subject he loved most was biology. In his works the ‘study of nature’ springs to life for he turns to describing and explaining the plants and animals that, in all their variety, fill our world. To be sure, some philosophers and physicians had dabbled in biology before him, but Aristotle gave much of his life to it. He was the first to do so. He mapped the territory. He invented the science. You could argue that invented science itself.
At the Lyceum he taught a great course in natural science. In the introduction to one of his books there is a sketch of the curriculum: first, an abstract account of nature, then the motion of the stars, then chemistry, meteorology and geology in quick order, and then, the bulk of it, an account of living things – the creatures that he knew, among them, us. His zoological works are the notes for this part of the course. There was one book on what we call comparative zoology, another on functional anatomy, two on how animals move, one on how they breathe, two on why they die, one on the systems that keep them alive. There was a series of lectures on how creatures develop in the womb and grow into adults, reproduce and begin the process again – for there’s a book on that too. There were also some books about plants, but we don’t know what they contained. They are lost along with about two-thirds of his works.
The books that we have are a naturalist’s joy. Many of the creatures that he writes about live in or near the sea. He describes the anatomies of sea urchins, ascidians and snails. He looks at marsh birds and considers their bills, legs and feet. Dolphins fascinate him for they breathe air and suckle their young yet look like fish. He mentions more than a hundred different kinds of fishes – and tells of what they look like, what they eat, how they breed, the sounds they make and the patterns of their migrations. His favourite animal was that weirdly intelligent invertebrate, the cuttlefish. The dandy must have plundered fish markets and hung around wharves talking to fishermen.
But most of Aristotle’s science isn’t descriptive at all: it’s answers to questions, hundreds of them. Why do fishes have gills and not lungs? Fins but not legs? Why do pigeons have a crop and elephants a trunk? Why do eagles lay so few eggs, fish so many, why are sparrows so salacious? What is it with bees, anyway? And the camel? Why do humans, uniquely, walk upright? How do we see – smell – hear – touch? What is the influence of the environment on growth? Why do children sometimes look like their parents, and sometimes not? What is the purpose of testicles, menstruation, vaginal fluids, orgasms? What is the cause of monstrous births? What is the real difference between male and female? How do living things stay alive? Why do they reproduce? Why do they die? This is not a tentative foray into a new field: it’s a complete science.
~~The Lagoon- How Aristotle Invented Science -by- Armand Marie Leroi
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