106 GREEK PHILOSOPHY. 



to remark by the way that this taste for reading could not have been 

 gratified without very ample means. A collection of books was a 

 luxury which lay within the reach of as small a portion of the readers 

 of that day, as a gallery of pictures would of the amateurs of this. 1 

 This circumstance, then, is calculated to throw additional discredit on 

 the story told by Epicurus of Aristotle's youth. A bankrupt apo- 

 thecary could never have been a book collector. Another work of 

 Aristotle's, which is unfortunately lost, was compiled during this same 

 time. It was a collection of Proverbs (Trapo/'pcu), a species of 

 literature to which he, like most other men of reflection, attached 

 great value. Two other most important works, both of which are 

 likewise lost, we may, from what we know of their nature, probably 

 refer to the same period, at least as far as their plan and commence- 

 ment are concerned. The first of these was a work on the funda- 

 mental principles on which the codes of law in the States of his time 

 were severally based. 2 The second was an account of no less than one 



1 The facilities for obtaining the copy of a book were very much increased after 

 the extensive manufacture of papyrus at Alexandria under the Ptolemies, and when 

 transcription had become a profitable and widely-practised profession. Yet we find 

 Polybius (iii. 32) at some pains to take off the objection to his work arising from 

 its costliness. But in the time of Aristotle's youth, the expense must have been 

 far greater. He, probably in the latter part of his life, possessed a very large 

 library (Athensei. Epitom. p. iii.), which he left to his successor, Theophrastus. 

 (Strabo, xiii. p. 608.) The philosophers after him appear likewise to have made 

 collections. We know this for certain of Theophrastus, Strato, and Lycon (Diog. 

 Laert. v. sec. 52, 62, 73); and such were probably used under greater or less re- 

 strictions by their respective scholars. But nothing of this sort is related of the 

 earlier philosophers, whose systems indeed did not require (at least to anything 

 like the extent of Aristotle's) any previous historical investigation. And Plato, if 

 he really did purchase the work of Philolaus, as he was said by Satyrus, and Timon 

 the Sillographer (Aulus Gellius, iii. 17.; Diog. Laert. iii. 9, viii. 15, 85), to 

 have done, and to have reproduced the philosophy of it in his Timseus, certainly 

 had no intention of communicating it to his scholars. Hence, it appears unlikely 

 that Aristotle could have obtained the use of the greater part of the works which 

 the plan of his studies required by other means than purchase. 



2 The title of the treatise was uxa.wp.<ra. voXtav. (See Casaubon and Menage 

 on Diog. Laert. v. 26.) Grotius, deceived by the corrupt reading, woXt/xuv for 

 rt'oXiuv, in Ammonius (sub v. ws), and Sir James Mackintosh (Discourse on the 

 Law of Nature and Nations, p. 16), implicitly following him, conceived that the 

 work was " a treatise on the laws of war." But any one who will peruse atten- 

 tively the third book of the Politics, will see that it would be much more accu- 

 rately described by calling it " a treatise on the spirit of laws." In the small 

 states of Greece it was not difficult to reduce all the existing laws, or at any rate 

 those which related to the political constitution, to some one axiom, which was 

 regai-ded as the generative principle, the idee-mere of the whole code. For this 

 axiom, whether explicitly stated, or only to be gathered from the common and sta- 

 tute law, the technical term in Aristotle's time was TO S/W/av, "the rule of right." 

 This was different in different states : he speaks of TO VIXKUV oXtya^ixov, TO 2/*u* 

 agiffToxgaTtxov, and TO ^txai&v %w/u.ox(ia,Tixov, " the oligarchical, aristocratic, and 

 democratic rules of right." Such assertions of political claims as might be con- 

 sidered obvious applications of these fundamental axioms were called by the name 

 ^ixaiuftaTu, " prerogatives," or " pleas of right," being, in fact, embodiments of 

 some principle of equity in a maxim. Thus, in our own country, the right of the 

 crown to dissolve parliament; that of the subject to be tried by jury, and to be 



