102 GREEK PHILOSOPHY. 



important city of Amphipolis was within three hours' sail to the 

 north ; and every part of the Chalcidic peninsula, a district full of 

 Greek towns, 1 among which were Olynthus and Potidaea, was readily 

 accessible. With the former of these Stagirus appears to have been 

 leagued as a humble ally 2 in that resistance to the ambitious designs 

 of Philip which terminated so calamitously. In the year 348 B. c. it 

 was destroyed by him, 3 and the inhabitants sold as slaves. 



Aristotle's Aristotle, however, did not share the misfortunes of his native 

 :hiidhood. town? to wn i cn it [ s probable he had been for many years a stranger. 

 His father, Nicomachus, one of the family or guild of the Asclepiads, 

 in which the practice of medicine was hereditary, had taken up his 

 residence at the court of Philip's father, Amyntas, to whom he was 

 body surgeon, and whose confidence he appears to have possessed in a 

 high degree. 4 He did not confine himself to the empirical practice of 

 his art, for he is related to have written six books on medical and one 

 on physical 'subjects, 5 which latter head would in that age include 

 every department of natural history and physiology, no less than those 

 investigations of the properties of inorganic matter to which the term 

 is appropriated in the present day. Now this circumstance is much 

 more important in its bearing upon the intellectual character of 

 Early "educa- Aristotle than may at first appear. In his writings appears such a 

 fondness for these pursuits as it seems impossible not to believe must 

 have been imbibed in his very earliest years, and most probably under 

 the immediate superintendence of this parent. For although he was 

 an orphan at the age of seventeen (and how much earlier we cannot 

 say), yet it is well knqwn that education in the " art and maistery of 

 healing," and such subjects as were connected therewith, was com- 

 menced by the Asclepiads at a very early age. " I do not blame the 

 ancients," says Galen, 6 " for not writing books on anatomical manipu- 

 lation ; though I commend Marinus, who did : for it was superfluous 

 for them to compose such records for themselves or others, while they 

 were from their childhood exercised by their parents in dissecting just 

 as familiarly as in writing and reading ; so that there was no more 

 fear of their forgetting their anatomy than of their forgetting their 

 alphabet. But when grown men as well as children were taught, this 

 thorough discipline fell off; and the art being carried out of the family 

 of the Asclepiads, and declining by repeated transmission, books be- 



1 Demosthenes (Philipp. iii. p. 117) says that Philip destroyed thirty-two there. 

 Some of these were doubtless mere hamlets. 



2 Dio Chrysost. Or. ii. p. 38. 



3 a.vdffrurov. Plutarch, Vit. Alex. sec. 7. If Aristotle's will, however, pre- 

 served by Diogenes Laertius, be genuine, this term must be considerably qualified; 

 for in it he speaks of his -ra-r^a eixia in Stagirus. One naturally expects the 

 description of Demosthenes (loc. cit.) to be overcharged. 



4 icvrgou x.ou <f>ikou %*'&, is the expression of Diogenes. 



5 Suidas, sub v. Ntxo^a^aj. 



6 Cited and translated by Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences, vol. iii. 

 p. 385. See also Plutarch, Vit. Alex. sec. 8. 



