The High Life of Aristotle: A Philosopher’s Brush With Pharmaceuticals

‘Aristotle: The First Teacher’By Philip FreemanYale University Press, 306 pagesAristotle was a drug dealer? No less than three sources say so, adding that he had already squandered his inheritance money, and had also tried soldiering. “What are we to make of this?” asks Philip Freeman.Like many biographers of ancient lives, Philip Freeman interrogates his sources, pointing out that none of them were his subject’s contemporaries, and that the origin story of the drug dealing is traceable to a rival philosopher who had it in for Aristotle.Yet Mr. Freeman will not let the drug money trail alone, suggesting: “That the young man squandered at least some of it when he came of age is not out of question: young people of every century have done the same.” But that still won’t do, so the biographer offers, “throughout his life Aristotle was never short of financial resources, so it seems unlikely that he continued long in such prodigal ways.”So that’s an end of it, right? Not exactly. Soldiering was a possibility in an era of many wars, and: “The claim that Aristotle sold drugs is less nefarious than it seems. All the sources use the same Greek verb, pharmakopoleo, or the related noun pharmakoples. These mean, respectively, “selling drugs” and “drug merchant” in the modern sense of an apothecary or pharmacist — though they could also refer to someone who mixed poisons. Assuming that Aristotle was not so financially strapped that he aided in murder plots to earn a living, the word could simply “indicate that he was using the medical skills he had learned from his physician father to make some ready cash.”What matters here is procedure. The canvassing of all the possibilities, the careful examination of language, and an openness to figuring out why certain stories get told. Aristotle had enemies, sometimes as a result of his proximity to Macedonia and Macedonians — no favorites of the Greeks, Mr. Freeman explains.For the reader mainly interested in what Aristotle wrote, the biographical details may seem nugatory, but for those who want to know what sort of man Aristotle was, which after all is the purpose of biography, Mr. Freeman’s effort to account for every pertinent detail in the philosopher’s life is admirable, even if at times he lamentably capitulates to the nagging need of so many biographers to assert what his subject “must have” thought.Mr. Freeman’s evocation of the context in which Aristotle wrote and taught is especially valuable. The biographer finds no evidence that intellectual disagreements — such as Aristotle’s rejection of Plato’s “theory of Forms, in which Plato claimed that a higher, invisible reality underlay our world,” led to any bad feeling between them. As a student in Plato’s academy, Aristotle was expected to engage in vigorous argument.Much of Aristotle’s writing has perished, and many periods of his life remain irretrievable, yet his will survived, and that tells Mr. Freeman a lot, including that the philosopher had a wife and concubine and was kind to his slaves, even though he considered them inferior beings, as did most contemporary masters.Aristotle is “the first teacher.” He initiated the study of literature, pursued a diligent regimen of observation that marks the beginnings of the scientific method, and inquired into what constituted an ethical life. As the teacher of Alexander the Great, we can only wonder how much Aristotle contributed to the conqueror’s ability to understand the people he dominated and sometimes even to adapt to their ways.Mr. Freeman does not indulge such speculation, even though his rendering of the Aristotle/Alexander nexus has stimulated me to think of philosophy as so much more than thinking about the nature of reality, especially for a young military man schooled by a teacher who dissected sea creatures, mapped the stars, and invented the discipline of logic.Did Aristotle get some things wrong? Of course, particularly his belief, Mr. Freeman notes, that “flies, were not born from parents but rather arose spontaneously from decaying matter. It does seem hard to excuse Aristotle for such a mistake — in the case of flies, their maggots hatched from eggs are clearly visible to the naked eye.” In other words, we have a criticism of the philosopher by a biographer who is thinking, dare I say it, like an Aristotelian.Mr. Rollyson is author of the forthcoming ‘Sappho’s Fire: Kindling the Modern World.‘

The High Life of Aristotle: A Philosopher’s Brush With Pharmaceuticals

The High Life of Aristotle: A Philosopher’s Brush With Pharmaceuticals

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