the tacit protection of Alexander and Antipater, Aristotle returned in triumph to Athens, which was still the cultural capital of the Greek-speaking world. He promptly organized a new school of his own. Since the time of Pericles, the city had been host to a variety of schools run by Sophists and philosophically minded orators like Isocrates. But Aristotle chose to create a new community of philosophical friends, not unlike Plato’s Academy, and to compete directly with his former friend Xenocrates, who had become scholarch of the Academy after the death of Speusippus. Perhaps as a result, rumors began to spread about Aristotle’s “vanity and prodigious ingratitude” toward Plato, and toward the school that had nurtured his philosophical interests for two decades.
Because Aristotle’s new school was located in a gymnasium attached to the temple of Lycian Apollo, it became known as the Lyceum. And because the site included a peripatos, a colonnaded garden “where he would walk up and down philosophizing with students until it was time for a rub-down,” his followers were called Peripatetics.
Aristotle became the school’s formal scholarch, “first among equals.” But as had been true at the Academy, there was no requirement that members of Aristotle’s community slavishly parrot his own theoretical views. Some associates like Theophrastus were old friends and senior scholars who taught and conducted independent research; others were younger men who came to study at their side. It was an institution open to the public, though of course most auditors were gentlemen of means, who didn’t need to work for a living. Aristotle began to number important men among his pupils, though the great majority of the school’s known members were, like Aristotle himself, resident aliens, not Athenians.
Just how the school paid for its ambitious program of instruction and research is unclear. The Lyceum, like the Academy under Plato, did not take tuition from students. As a foreigner, Aristotle could not legally own property in Athens, so his school had only a tenuous title to its grounds. But since Aristotle himself was wealthier than ever, he may have been able to defray personally some of the expenses. Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23–79) claimed that Alexander gave Aristotle a large cash gift to build his library and also put “thousands of men” at his disposal to gather information about flora and fauna. This may be a wild exaggeration. But under the circumstances, there can be little doubt that the Lyceum depended on Macedonian support, both financial and political. (In pointed contrast, Xenocrates refused gifts to the Academy from the Macedonians, in protest of what he, like many Athenians, regarded as an illegitimate occupation.)
Aristotle had amassed a vast personal library of books, maps, and scholarly documents, and he put this archive at the disposal of his colleagues and students. This archive became a model for the famous ancient library at Alexandria (supposedly first organized a few decades later by one of Aristotle’s students, Demetrius of Phaleron). Scholars at the Lyceum began to collate and catalog material from the archive in order to publish sets of related documents (for example, a collection of the constitutions of different Greek city-states)—the first time information like this had been systematically compiled and organized.
Aristotle’s scholarly manuscripts and lecture notes were also archived, and those that survived form the basis of the Aristotelian corpus as we know it today. The sheer range of the topics discussed in this corpus suggests that Aristotle was a paragon of disciplined inquiry, with an apparently insatiable appetite for information about the phenomenal world, in addition to his ongoing curiosity about rhetoric and the proper criteria for evaluating competing arguments. By now, he had evolved an independent approach to many of the questions that had puzzled Plato and Socrates. Aristotle was the first to establish logic as a field of inquiry in its own right. He was the first to classify and categorize flora and fauna in an organized way, and one of the first to produce causal explanations for a variety of physical phenomena. Unlike Plato, he refused to entertain the theory that reality ultimately consisted of immaterial Forms. Instead, he chose to examine perceptible things and natural bodies—plants, animals, human beings, cities, the sun, the stars—in an effort to acquire concrete knowledge about the particulars of what really exists. This reality he believed to be blessed by the gods: “All things have by nature something divine in them,” he said; and also, “God and nature create nothing that does not fulfill a purpose.”
Instruction in empirical research