The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, Diogenes Laërtius [the gingerbread man read aloud TXT] 📗

Prose-Writers of the same name. And the same authority says that Hermias had been the slave of Eubulus, and a Bithynian by descent, and that he slew his master. But Aristippus, in the first book of his treatise on Ancient Luxury, says that Aristotle was enamoured of the concubine of Hermias, and that, as Hermias gave his consent, he married her; and was so overjoyed that he sacrificed to her, as the Athenians do to the Eleusinian Ceres. And he wrote a hymn to Hermias, which is given at length below.

After that he lived in Macedonia at the court of Philip, and was entrusted by him with his son Alexander as a pupil; and he entreated him to restore his native city which had been destroyed by Philip, and had his request granted; and he also made laws for the citizens. And also he used to make laws in his schools, doing this in imitation of Xenocrates, so that he appointed a president every ten days. And when he thought that he had spent time enough with Alexander, he departed for Athens, having recommended to him his relation Callisthenes, a native of Olynthus; but as he spoke too freely to the king, and would not take Aristotle’s advice, he reproached him and said:

Alas! my child, in life’s primeval bloom,
Such hasty words will bring thee to thy doom.45

And his prophecy was fulfilled, for as he was believed by Hermolaus to have been privy to the plot against Alexander, he was shut up in an iron cage, covered with lice, and untended; and at last he was given to a lion, and so died.

Aristotle then having come to Athens, and having presided over his school there for thirteen years, retired secretly to Chalcis, as Eurymedon the hierophant had impeached him on an indictment for impiety, though Phavorinus, in his Universal History, says that his prosecutor was Demophilus, on the ground of having written the hymn to the beforementioned Hermias, and also the following epigram which was engraven on his statue at Delphi:

The tyrant of the Persian archer race,
Broke through the laws of God to slay this man
Not by the manly spear in open fight,
But by the treachery of a faithless friend.

And after that he died of taking a draught of aconite, as Eumelus says in the fifth book of his Histories, at the age of seventy years. And the same author says that he was thirty years old when he first became acquainted with Plato. But this is a mistake of his, for he did only live in reality sixty-three years, and he was seventeen years old when he first attached himself to Plato. And the hymn in honor of Hermias is as follows:

O Virtue, won by earnest strife,
And holding out the noblest prize
That ever gilded earthly life,
Or drew it on to seek the skies;
For thee what son of Greece would
Deem it an enviable lot,
To live the life, to die the death,
That fears no weary hour, shrinks from no fiery breath?

Such fruit hast thou of heavenly bloom,
A lure more rich than golden heap,
More tempting than the joys of home,
More bland than spell of soft-eyed sleep.
For thee Alcides, son of Jove,
And the twin boys of Leda strove,
With patient toil and sinewy might,
Thy glorious prize to grasp, to reach thy lofty height.

Achilles, Ajax, for thy love
Descended to the realms of night;
Atarneus’ King thy vision drove,
To quit for aye the glad sunlight,
Therefore, to memory’s daughters dear,
His deathless name, his pure career,
Live shrined in song, and link’d with awe,
The awe of Xenian Jove, and faithful friendship’s law.46

There is also an epigram of ours upon him, which runs thus:

Eurymedon, the faithful minister
Of the mysterious Eleusinian Queen,
Was once about t’ impeach the Stagirite
Of impious guilt. But he escaped his hands
By mighty draught of friendly aconite,
And thus defeated all his wicked arts.

Phavorinus, in his Universal History, says that Aristotle was the first person who ever composed a speech to be delivered in his own defense in a court of justice, and that he did so on the occasion of this prosecution, and said that at Athens:

Pears upon pear-trees grow; on fig-trees, figs.

Apollodorus, in his Chronicles, says that he was born in the first year of the ninety-ninth olympiad, and that he attached himself to Plato, and remained with him for twenty years, having been seventeen years of age when he originally joined him. And he went to Mitylene in the archonship of Eubulus, in the fourth year of the hundred and eighth olympiad. But as Plato had died in the first year of this same olympiad, in the archonship of Theophilus, he departed for the court of Hermias, and remained there three years. And in the archonship of Pythodotus he went to the court of Philip, in the second year of the hundred and ninth olympiad, when Alexander was fifteen years old; and he came to Athens in the second year of the hundred and eleventh olympiad, and presided over his school in the Lyceum for thirteen years; after that he departed to Chalcis, in the third year of the hundred and fourteenth olympiad, and died at about the age of sixty-three years of disease, the same year that Demosthenes died in Calauria, in the archonship of Philocles.

It is said also that he was offended with the king, because of the result of the conspiracy of Callisthenes against Alexander; and that the king, for the sake of annoying him, promoted Anaximenes to honor, and sent presents to Xenocrates. And Theocritus of Chios wrote an epigram upon him to ridicule him, in the following terms, as it is quoted by Ambryon in his account of Theocritus:

The empty-headed Aristotle rais’d
This empty tomb to Hermias the Eunuch,
The ancient slave of the ill-us’d Eubulus.
[Who, for his monstrous appetite, preferred
The Bosphorus to Academia’s groves.]

And Timon attacked him too, saying of him:

Nor the sad chattering of the empty Aristotle.

Such was