AKISTOTLE. 97 



celebrated friend Atticus, 1 and appears to have exercised his acumen 

 in detecting such erroneous stories prevalent in his time as arose from 

 the confusion of different poets and philosophers who had borne the 

 same name ; 2 a cause which with us would hardly be adequate to 

 produce any great effect, but formerly, in the absence of hereditary 

 surnames, and under the operation of many motives for falsification, 

 was much more fertile in its results than can now be easily imagined. 3 

 The second is an authority, who, for the purposes of the modern 

 biographer of Aristotle, is the most important of all. He, like Her- 

 mippus, was an Alexandrine scholar, and pupil of the celebrated editor 

 and commentator of the Homeric poems, Aristarchus. 4 Among his 

 voluminous works was one ' On the Sects of Philosophers,' which no 

 doubt contained much that was interesting on our subject ; but what 

 renders him valuable above any other of these lost writers, and makes 

 us treasure up with avidity the slightest notices by him which have 

 come down to us, is his celebrated ' Chronology,' a composition in 

 iambic verse, often cited under the title of Xpovt/ca, or Xpovi<c) <7vjraie, 

 by that compiler whose treatise is unfortunately the most ancient 

 systematic account of Aristotle's life which has escaped the ravages of 

 time. These citations are invaluable, not merely for the positive 

 information which we gain from them, but because they serve also, as 

 we shall have occasion to observe in the sequel, for a touchstone of 

 anecdotes whose authority is otherwise uncertain. 5 



The foregoing list of authors, which might be yet further enlarged Gradual 

 did we not fear to exceed the due limits of this occasion, abundantly offhe 6racy 

 shows that in the beginning of the first century before Christ there literature on 

 were materials for compiling a biography of Aristotle as detailed as jecTs! SU 

 one of Newton or Young could be in the present day. This, how- 

 ever, soon afterwards ceased to be the case. When the only means 

 of obtaining the copy of a book was by the laborious process of 

 transcription, the expense necessarily confined its acquisition to com- 

 paratively few persons, and when to this drawback we 'add those 

 arising from voluminous size and but partially interesting subject, the 

 circulation would be very limited indeed. It may be questioned, 

 perhaps, whether some of the works we have noticed ever found their 

 way beyond the walls of the royal library at Alexandria, except in 

 the shape of extracts. If this were the case, the destruction of the 

 whole or a great part of that library 6 in the siege of the city by Julius 



1 Cicero, Brut. 91. He is alluded to in Epp. ad Attic, iv. 11 ; but in viii. 11, 

 ix. 9, xii. 6, it is Demetrius the Syrian, a rhetorician, who is referred to. This 

 latter is also spoken of in Brut. 91. 2 Diog. Laert. v. 3. 



3 See Galen, Comment, in Hippocr. de Nat. Horn. ii. pp. 105, 109, and in 

 Hippocr. de Humor, i. p. 5, ed. Kuehn. 4 Suidas, sub v. 'AvroXXodugos. 



5 See, with reference to Apollodorus and his works, Voss, De Historicis Graecis, 

 p. 132, et seq. ; Heyne, ad Apollodori Bibliothec. vol. i. pp. 385, 457; and Brandis 

 in the Rheinisches Museum, vol. iii. p. 110; in whose opinion the chronology of 

 Apollodorus is founded on that of Eratosthenes. 



6 Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticse, vi. 17. 



[G. K. P.] H 



