Examined Lives_ From Socrates to Nietzsc - By James S. Miller Page 0,36

perished through an act of pure will.

In Sinope and Corinth and Athens, the citizens raised statues to his memory. “Even bronze grows old with time,” read the epitaph inscribed at Sinope, “but your fame, Diogenes, not all Eternity shall take away. For you alone did point out to mortals the lessons of self-sufficiency, and the path for the best and easiest life.”

Long after his death, the stories told about Diogenes exercised an influence in their own right, as an episode from the life of Dio Chrysostom demonstrates. Having acquired a reputation as a good man and an orator of an ascetic cynical bent, Dio was invited to deliver a series of four speeches before the Roman emperor Trajan. In the fourth of his speeches, Dio represented Diogenes at some length discoursing with Alexander the Great, in order to show Trajan that a life of perfect self-control alone equips a man to rule rightly over others. It is an edifying instance of life imitating art. Diogenes may never have actually met Alexander the Great—but Dio Chrysostom was in fact a friend and confidant of Trajan, a ruler widely hailed for his wisdom, restraint, and regard for justice.

And so the legend of Diogenes lived on. Despite, or because of, its comic flavor, improbable details, and frisson of scandal, the myth has never lost its potential to provoke and even to transform the conduct of anyone willing to take it seriously—from Dio Chrysostom to Michel Foucault, nearly two thousand years later.

ARISTOTLE

Aristotle instructing Alexander the Great, artist unknown, illumination on vellum, in Ibn Bakhtishu, Manafi al-Hayawan (Uses of Animals), Persia, thirteenth century. A famous physician and one of the leading Islamic zoologists of the eighth century, Ibn Bakhtishu was also an authority on the works of Aristotle. (British Library, London, UK/British Library Board. All rights reserved/The Bridgeman Art Library International)

It is a curious fact about the reputation of Aristotle—who from late antiquity to the early Renaissance was widely revered as “the Master of those who know,” “the limit and paragon of human intelligence,” or, simply, “the philosopher” (Ille Philosophus)—that, in the first two centuries after his death, surprisingly few philosophers treated him as a worthwhile interlocutor.

The problem seems to have been his alleged character and conduct. To a near contemporary like the philosopher Epicurus, Aristotle was neither “an ideal of human excellence” nor an exemplary researcher “untroubled by passion, and undimmed by any great moral defects”—to quote two modern authorities—but rather a wily political operator and pedant who was unworthy of being associated with philosophy as a way of life. In Athens and elsewhere throughout the Greek-speaking world, in the first centuries after Aristotle’s death in 322 B.C., doubts about his character and conduct ran deep. They were persistent, and they were widespread. Indeed, such doubts help to explain the virtually complete neglect, otherwise puzzling, of his written work until the first century B.C., when scholars belatedly established the corpus of texts upon which Aristotle’s posthumous fame came to rest.

Apart from an apparently genuine will and a few fragments from purported letters, Aristotle’s extant texts shed little light on his life. All of his originally published works, including a number of early dialogues, have disappeared, aside from a few excerpts quoted by later writers. The reliable biographical evidence is so sparse that one is almost tempted to leave the topic where the German philosopher Martin Heidegger did in a famous 1924 lecture course on Aristotle: “The man was born, he worked, and then died.”

The classical Aristotelian corpus has traditionally been regarded as a creation of Andronicus of Rhodes, a scholar who organized what survived of Aristotle’s writings into more or less coherent accounts of topics by excerpting passages from a large number of manuscripts and rough drafts, probably including lecture notes. The resulting text fills two thousand modern printed pages, roughly twice the size of the surviving Platonic corpus. The range of this material is encyclopedic, with more than forty independently organized texts on (among other topics) metaphysics, theology, physics, astronomy, meteorology, zoology, botany, psychology, ethics, politics, rhetoric, and poetics.

A flesh-and-blood personality cannot be discerned in these treatises, which are artless in style, often opaque, and relentlessly impersonal. As the eighteenth-century English poet Thomas Gray quipped, reading Aristotle “is like eating dried hay.”

This did not stop Andronicus himself from doing for Aristotle what any proper ancient editor would for do anyone who claimed to be a true philosopher: he evidently prefaced his edition with an edifying biography, taking care to reprint the text of