ARISTOTLE. 101 



On the authority, then, of Apollodorus, 1 we may fix the birth of Summary of 

 Aristotle in the first year of the ninety-ninth Olympiad (B.C. 384-3), i^onthe 

 and his arrival at Athens as a scholar of Plato when seventeen years authority of 

 old. After remaining there twenty years he visited the court of A P llodorus - 

 Hermias (a prince of Asia Minor, of whom we shall say more in the 

 sequel), in the year after his master's death, Theophilus being then 

 archon (i.e., B.C. 348-7), and stayed there for three years. In the 

 archonship of Eubulus, the fourth year of the hundred and eighth 

 Olympiad (B.C. 345-4), he passed over to Mytilene. In that of 

 Pythodotus, the second year of the hundred and ninth (B.C. 343-2), 

 he commenced the education of Alexander the Great at his father's 

 court ; and in the second year of the hundred and eleventh, returned 

 to Athens and taught philosophy in the school of the Lyceum for the 

 space of thirteen years ; at the expiration of which time he crossed 

 over to Chalcis in Eubcea, and there died from a disease in the archon- 

 ship of Philocles, the third year of the hundred and fourteenth 

 Olympiad (B.C. 322-1), at the age of about sixty-three, and at the 

 same time that Demosthenes ended his life in Calauria. 



Stagirus (or, as it was later called, Stagira), the birthplace of one Birthplace of 

 of the most extraordinary men, if not the very most, that the world Anstotle - 

 has ever produced, was a petty town in the north of Greece, situated its situation. 

 on the western side of the Strymonic gulf, just where the general line 

 of coast takes a southerly direction. It lay in the midst of a pic- 

 turesque country, both in soil and appearance resembling the southern 

 part of the Bay of Naples. Immediately south a promontory, like 

 the Punta della Campanella, and nearly in the same latitude, ran out 

 in an easterly direction, effectually screening the town and its little 

 harbour Capros, formed by the island of the same name, from the 

 violence of the squalls coming up the ^Egean, a similar service to that 

 rendered by the Italian headland to the town of Sorrento. In the 

 terraced windings, too, by which the visitor climbs through the orange 

 groves of the latter place, he may, without any great violence, imagine 

 the "narrow and steep paths" by which an ancient historian and 

 chorographer describes those who crossed the mountains out of Mace- 

 donia as descending " into the valley of Arethusa, where was seen the 

 tomb of Euripides and the town of Stagira." 2 The inhabitants pos- civilization, 

 sessed all the advantages of civilization which Grecian blood and 

 Grecian intercourse could give ; the city having been originally built 

 by a colony of Andrians, and its population subsequently replenished 

 by one from Chalcis in Eubcea. 3 The mouth of the Strymon and the 



1 Ap. Diog. Laert, Vit. Arist. sec. 9. Compare Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 

 Epist. i. ad Arnmaeum, pp. 727, 728, whose account agrees with that of Diogenes, 

 and is itself probably based on the chronology of Apollodorus. See Clinton's Fasti 

 Hellenic!, 2, 320 B. c. col. 3. 



8 Ammianus Marcellinus, xxvii. 4. The similarity in the name of the island 

 Capri, which lies off Sorrento, is curious, and seems to favour the account of Frou- 

 tinus, that Surrentum was originally colonized by Greeks. 



3 Thucyd. iv. 88 ; Dionys. Halic. Ep. i. ad Anim. p. 727. 



