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is levelled against Cleon, and presents us with a striking picture both of a vulgar and insolent charlatan, and of the fickle, cunning, credulous, and rather stupid mob over whom he precariously despotises. It is related of this piece that, when no actor would undertake to play the part of the influential Cleon, A. himself impersonated the demagogue. Unfortunately for the character of Cleon, as well as that of the Athenian democracy, these caricatures and misrepresentations of A. have been received as historical pictures. How far they are from the truth, has been clearly shewn by Grote in his History of Greece. See CLEON. 423, A. produced the Clouds, which, along with the Knights, are the two most famous of his comedies. They exhibit in overflowing richness that fancy, wit, humour, satire, and shrewd insight which characterise this greatest of all Greek comic writers. The Clouds, however, displays at the same time the weaknesses and limitations of A.'s mind. Its aim was to deride the pretensions of the new sophistical school, and to point out its pernicious tendencies. So far well. But A., who was no philosopher, demonstrates his own incapacity to appreciate the highest range of thought and character, by selecting no less a person than Socrates as the most perfect representative of a sophist. A., who was both religiously and politically conservative, had apparently no clearer conception of abstract truth than is involved in reverence for the sanctities of the past, the old gods, old traditions, old manners, and

which reason the shrub is sometimes called Pipe-shrub, Pipe-vine, or Dutchman's Pipe.-The tropical species are distinguished for their beauty and the peculiar forms of their flowers. Some of them are much prized ornaments of our hot-houses.

To the natural order Aristolochiaceae belongs also the genus ASARUM.

ARISTOPHANES, the only writer of the old Greek comedy of whom we possess any entire works, was the son of one Philippus, and was born at Athens about the year 444 B. C. We know very little of his history. Plato, in his Symposium, relates that he was fond of pleasure-a statement which it is easy to credit when we consider the tendencies of his profession in all ages. It seems equally clear, however, from the vigorous and consistent expression of his convictions in his various works, and from the fearless manner in which he assails the political vices of his day, that he was possessed of an honest and independent spirit. He appeared as a comic writer in the fourth year of the Peloponnesian war (427 B. C.). The piece which he produced was entitled Daitaleis (the Banqueters), and received the second prize. It ridiculed the follies of extravagance, and, like all his subsequent works, was pervaded by a contempt of modern life, and an admiration of the sentiments and manners of the earlier generations. Next year, he wrote the Babylonians, in which he satirised Cleon, the so-called demagogue, so sharply, that the latter endeavoured to deprive him of the rights of citizenship, by insinuating that he was not a real Athenian. This, in all probability, gave rise to the various traditions of A. having been born in Rhodes, Egypt, &c. Fragments of these plays remain. In 425, his Acharnians obtained the first prize. It was written to expose the madness of the war then waging between Athens and Sparta, and exhibits the feelings of the peace-party' in the former city. It is still extant. In 424 appeared Hippeis, the Knights or Horsemen. It was the first which the poet produced in his own name, and evinces the singular boldness of the author. It

innovations, and considered all equally pernicious. As he had represented Cleon the reformer as a vulgar innovator and demagogue, ruled by the lowest considerations, he makes the innovating views of Socrates also proceed from corrupt motives, veiled perhaps with more craft. Alcibiades is caricatured in this brilliant comedy as a wildly extravagant youth, whose career of ruin is accelerated by the insidious instructions of Socrates; and a hint is thrown out towards the end of the piece, which unfortunately proved to be the shadow of a coming event.' A. represents the father of Alcibiades as about to burn the philosopher and his whole phrontisterion (subtlety-shop); and there can be little doubt that this dramatic vilification of the purest of heathen moralists led to that persecution which, twenty years later, culminated in his condemnation and death. In 422 appeared the Wasps, still extant, in which the popular courts of justice are attacked; and three years later, in his Peace, he returns to the subject of the Peloponnesian war, which is ridiculed with great cleverness. 414 he produced two comedies, Amphiaraus and the Birds, both of which caricature, in the liveliest manner, the Sicilian expedition, then being meditated, but which proved so utter a failure. The Lysistrata belongs to the year 411, and exhibits a civil war of the sexes, as the monstrous issue of that in the Peloponnesus. In his Plutus and Ecclesiazusa, which respectively appeared in 408 and 392, true to his mission as the enemy of innovation, he assailed the new passion for Doric manners and institutions, and ventured to ridicule Plato, in that, however, in which the philosopher is weakest-namely, his political theory. Euripides, also, as the sophist among poets, is severely handled in the Frogs, which belongs to the year 405.

In

A. wrote fifty-four comedies, of which only eleven are extant. He is acknowledged to stand far above all his contemporaries or successors of the middle and new comedy in wealth of fancy and beauty of language. His choruses sometimes exhibit the purest spirit of poetry; and Plato himself says that the soul of A. was a temple for the Graces. The

common rhetorical teaching, of which, doubtless, the prevailing excellence would lie in the form of the address, being artistic rather than profound or erudite. One of the disciples of Isocrates, defending his master against A., wrote a treatise wherein allusion is made to a work (now lost) on proverbs, the first recorded publication of the philosopher.

The comedies of A. have been edited by Brunck (1781-1783), Dindorf (1794-1826), Bekker (1829). They have all been translated into German by Voss (Brunswick, 1821), and there are several translations of single plays into English.

ARISTOTELIA. See MAQUI.

A'RISTOTLE was born at the Grecian colonial town of Stageira, on the west side of the Strymonic Gulf (now the Gulf of Contessa, in Turkey in Europe), in the year 384 B. C. He belonged to a family in which the practice of physic was hereditary. His father, Nikomachus, was the friend and physician of Amyntas II., king of Macedonia, father of Philip, and grandfather of Alexander the Great. A. lost both parents while he was quite young, and was brought up under the care of Proxenus, a citizen of Atarneus, in Asia Minor, who was then settled at Stageira. It is to be conjectured that his education, such as it was, would take the direction of preparing him for the family profession, and that whatever knowledge and power of manipulation attached to the practice of physic at that time, would rank among his early acquisitions. In after-life, he occupied himself largely in the dissecting of animals, and was acquainted with all the facts that had been derived from this source by others before him. It seems probable, however, that he early abandoned the intention of following physic as a profession, and aspired to that cultivation of universal knowledge for its own sake, in which he attained a distinction without parallel in the history of the human race.

In his 18th year (367 B. C.) he left Stageira for Athens, then the intellectual centre of Greece and of the civilised world. Plato, on whom he doubtless had his eye as his chief instructor, was then absent at Syracuse in that extraordinary episode of his life, connecting him as political adviser with the two successive Syracusan despots-Dionysius the Elder, and Dionysius the Younger-and with Dion. A., therefore, pursued his studies by books, and by the help of any other masters he could find, during the first three years of his stay. On the return of Plato, he became his pupil, and soon made his master aware of the remarkable penetration and reach of his intellect. The expressions said to have been used by Plato imply as much; for we are told that he spoke of A. as the 'Intellect of the School.' Unfortunately, there is a total absence of particulars or precise information as to the early studies of the rising philosopher. He remained at Athens twenty years, during which the only facts recorded, in addition to his studying with Plato, are, that he set up a class of rhetoric, and that in so doing, he became the rival of the celebrated orator and rhetorical teacher, Isocrates, whom he appears to have attacked with great severity. It was in the schools of rhetoric that the young men of Athens got the principal part of their education for public life. They learned the art of speaking before the Dikasteries, or courts of law, and the public assembly, with efficiency and elegance; and incidentally acquired the notions of law and public policy that regulated the management of affairs at the time. We can easily suppose that A. would look with contempt upon the shallowness-in

The death of Plato (347 B. C.) was the occasion of A.'s departure from Athens. It was not extraordinary or unreasonable that A. should hope to succeed his master as the chief of his school, named the Academy. We now know that no other man then existing had an equal title to that pre-eminence. Plato, however, left his nephew Spensippus as his successor. We may suppose the disappointment thus arising to have been the principal circumstance that determined A. to stay no longer in Athens; but there are also other reasons that may be assigned, arising out of his relations with the Macedonian royal family at a time when the Athenians and Philip had come into open enmity.

Whatever may be the explanation, he went in his thirty-seventh year, after a stay of nearly twenty years in Athens, to the Mysian town of Atarneus, in Asia Minor, opposite to the island of Lesbos. Here he lived with Hermeias, the chief of the town, a man of singular energy and ability, who had conquered his dominion for himself from the Persians, at that time masters of nearly all Asia Minor. A. had taught him rhetoric at Athens, and he became in return the attached friend and admirer of his teacher. For three years the two lived together in the stronghold of Atarneus; but by treachery and false promises, the Rhodian Mentor, an officer in the Persian service, got possession of the person of Hermeias, put him to death, and became master of all the places held by him. A. accordingly fled, and took refuge in Mitylene, the chief city of the neighbouring island of Lesbos. He also took with him Pythias, the sister of Hermeias, and made her his wife. In a noble ode, he has commemorated the merits of his friend thus lost to him through the treachery of a Greek renegade. His wife, Pythias, died a few years afterwards in Macedonia, leaving him a daughter of the same name. His son, Nikomachus, to whom he dedicated his chief work on ethics-called, in consequence, the Nikomachean Ethics-was born to him at a later period of his life by a concubine.

After two years' stay at Mitylene, he was invited (in the year 342 B. C., age 42) by Philip to Macedonia, to educate his son Alexander, then in his fourteenth year. What course of study Alexander was made to go through, we cannot state. He enjoyed the teaching of A. for at least three years, and contracted a strong attachment to his preceptor, which events afterwards converted into bitter enmity. The two parted finally when Alexander commenced his expedition into Asia (334 B. c.), and A. came from Macedonia to Athens, having recommended to the future conqueror, as a companion in his campaigns, the philosopher Callisthenes, whom he educated along with Alexander. Now at the age of fifty, he entered on the final epoch of his life; he opened a school called the Lyceum,' from its proximity to the temple of Apollo Lyceius. From his practice of walking up and down in the garden during his lectures, arose the other name of his school and sect, the Peripatetic. It would appear to have been his habit to give a morning lecture to select pupils on the more abstruse subjects, and one in the evening of a more popular kind to a general audience. He may now be supposed to have composed his principal writings; but, unfortunately, there is nothing known of the dates of any of them. This crowning period

of his life lasted twelve years. After the death of Alexander, the anti-Macedonian party at Athens obtained an ascendency, and among other consequences, an accusation was prepared against A., the pretext being impiety. With the fate of Socrates before his eyes, he chose a timely escape, and in the beginning of 322 B. C., took refuge at Chalcis in Euboea, where, in the autumn of the same year, he died, aged 62. He had long been afflicted with indigestion, and ultimately sank under this malady.

The philosophy of A. differed from that of Plato on many points, especially in the fundamental doctrine termed the Theory of Ideas. The Platonic ideas' or 'forms' were conceived as real existences, imparting all that is common to the particular facts or realities, instead of being derived from them by an operation of the mind. Thus, the actual circles of nature derive their mathematical properties from the pre-existing ‘idea,' or circle in the abstract; the actual men owe their sameness to the ideal man. A. was opposed to this doctrine throughout, although he always speaks of its author with respect, and sometimes with affection. The whole method of A. was in marked contrast to the Platonic handling of philosophical subjects: he was a most assiduous observer and collector of facts, from which he drew inductions with more or less accuracy. Plato, on the other hand, valued facts merely in criticising the views that he was bent upon demolishing, and not as a means of establishing sound theories.

The writings of A. may be said to have embraced the whole circle of the knowledge of his time. Many of them are lost; those that remain refer principally to the following departments.

Astronomy, Mechanics, Physics, were treated of by him at some length; but here his failure was complete, if we look at his writings from the point of view now acquired. He was the victim of capricious fancies, based upon doctrines common among his contemporaries, accepted by him as principles of reasoning, and conducting him to the most unsound conclusions. His theory of the rotation of the sphere, the necessary perfection of circular motion, of the impossibility of a vacuum, and the like, did more to confuse than to explain the phenomena of nature. Nor can it be said that the time was not ripe for putting these subjects on a rational basis; for he was very shortly followed by a series of men, who both observed and reasoned soundly respecting them, and laid the foundation of their great subsequent progress—namely, Euclid, Apollonius, Archimedes, Eratosthenes, and Hipparchus.

The thirteen books called Metaphysics contain much profound thought, but are obscure and defectively arranged; indeed, neither the actual arrangement of the books, nor the title which they bear, can be ascribed to A. himself. The subject to which they are devoted is Ontology-the science of Ens, quatenus Ens-which he terms Philosophia Prima, and sometimes Theology. He distinguishes three branches of theoretical philosophy. 1. Physics -the study of sensible material particular things, each of which differs from every other, and all of which have in themselves the principle of change or motion. 2. Mathematics-that of geometrical and numerical entities, known by general definitions, susceptible neither of change nor of movement, capable of being considered and reasoned upon apart from matter, but not capable of existing apart from matter. 3. The First or Highest Philosophywhich studies the essences of things eternal, unchangeable, and apart from all that change, movement, and differentiation which material embodi

ment involves.

deal with the extreme abstractions or generalities of all sciences. It is a collection, partly of doubts and difficulties, partly of attempted solutions, upon these last refinements of the human mind. It includes many valuable comments on the philosophy of Plato and others anterior to or contemporary with A. The general terms and subtle distinctions which this treatise first brought to view, were highly prized throughout all the philosophy of the middle ages. He appears in a very different light in his great work on Animals. He has here amassed a stock of genuine observations, and also introduced a method of classification which continues to this day as the most approved groundwork of zoological classification. In this work we see perhaps, in the most advantageous light, the two great qualities of his mind, rarely coupled in the same individual-the aptitude for observation, and logical method. The excellence shewn in his various writings generally depends upon one or other of these qualities.

His Organon or Logic is his complete development of formal reasoning, and is the basis and nearly the whole substance of syllogistic or scholastic logic. This science he almost entirely created. Mr Grote observes (History of Greece, part ii. chap. lxviii.) that 'what was begun by Socrates, and improved by Plato, was embodied as a part of a comprehensive system of formal logic by the genius of A.; a system which was not only of extraordinary value in reference to the processes and controversies of its time, but which also, having become insensibly worked into the minds of instructed men, has contributed much to form what is correct in the habits of modern thinking. Though it has now been enlarged and recast by some modern authors (espe cially by Mr John Stuart Mill in his admirable System of Logic) into a structure commensurate with the vast increase of knowledge and extension of positive method belonging to the present daywe must recollect that the distance between the best modern logic and that of A. is hardly so great as that between A. and those who preceded him by a century-Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the Pythagoreans; and that the movement in advance of these latter commences with Socrates.'

A considerable portion of his writings relate to the Human Mind and Body. In one of these, a short treatise on Memory and Recollection, he gave the first statement of the laws of Association of Ideas.

His treatises on Rhetoric and Poetics were the earliest development of a Philosophy of Criticism, and still continue to be studied. The same remark is applicable to his elaborate disquisitions on Ethics.

Perhaps one of his greatest works is his Politics, based upon a collection made by himself of 158 different Constitutions of States; the collection itself being unhappily lost. Here we see the spirit of the inductive observer, which indeed is no less apparent in the works mentioned in the last paragraph. It is, however, a singular fact, that he gives no evidence of having read the historian Thucydides; and his only reference to Herodotus is on a point of natural history. Yet the narratives and descriptions contained in the works of both these writers are probably of as much value, and as much in point, in a Political Philosophy, as the very best observations made by himself.

The great current distinctions of Matter and Form, Substance and Quality, Actuality and Potentiality, are due to A. See Grote's Aristotle, 1872.

ARISTO'XENUS, of Tarentum, a pupil of Aristotle's, and one of the oldest writers upon music, flourished about 330 years B. C. He was extraordinarily active and versatile in his literary studies, and is said to have composed upwards of 450 treatises

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