Aristotle Founds the Lyceum
In 335 BCE Aristotle returned to Athens from Macedonia, where he had spent seven years as tutor to the young Alexander (the future Alexander the Great). He established a school of his own — the Lyceum, named after a gymnasium near a sanctuary of Apollo Lykeios east of the city walls — in deliberate counterpart to Plato's Academy, where he had studied for twenty years. Aristotle had left the Academy after Plato's death in 347 BCE, partly because he disagreed with Plato's increasing emphasis on pure mathematical Forms and partly because, as a Macedonian, he faced political hostility in a city nervous about Macedonian power. After time in Assos and Lesbos — where he conducted extensive marine biology fieldwork — he was invited to Pella by Philip II to educate the thirteen-year-old Alexander, a commission he held until 340 BCE. At the Lyceum, Aristotle taught in the peripatoi — the covered walkways — giving the school its alternate name, the Peripatetics. He organised systematic research across an extraordinary range of disciplines. In logic he created the syllogistic system that would remain the standard framework of formal reasoning for two thousand years. In biology he classified and described over 500 animal species with an accuracy not matched until the seventeenth century. In physics he formulated the theory of the four elements and natural motion. In ethics he produced the Nicomachean Ethics, developing the concept of eudaimonia (flourishing) and virtue as the mean between extremes. In political science he analysed 158 city-state constitutions before writing the Politics. Aristotle also collected the first systematic library in antiquity — acquiring manuscripts on an unprecedented scale, an accumulation that influenced the later collections at Alexandria. His student Theophrastus succeeded him as head of the Lyceum and continued his botanical work. When Alexander the Great died in Babylon in 323 BCE, anti-Macedonian sentiment surged in Athens. Aristotle, closely associated with Macedon, was charged with impiety — the same charge used against Socrates. He left Athens, saying he would not allow the city to sin twice against philosophy, and died in Chalcis on Euboea in 322 BCE.
- Year: 335 BCE
- Category: Cultural
