Aristotle by Natali Carlo Hutchinson D. S

Author:Natali, Carlo, Hutchinson, D. S.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

4. TEACHING WHILE STROLLING

The school of Aristotle was called in ancient sources “Lyceum” or else “Peripatos.” The first name suggests meetings held in the palaestra that the orator Lycurgus had caused to be built in the grove dedicated to the hero Lycos, the son of Pandion (Pausanias, Description of Greece, 1.19.3). Lycurgus “created the gymnasium in the Lyceum, and planted trees and built the palaestra … he created a list with all the acts of his administration and had it inscribed, for viewing by anyone who wished, on a pillar facing the gymnasium that had been established by him” ([Plutarch], The Ten Orators VII, 841c–d and 843f). In the Lyceum there was a dressing room and a covered gallery, according to Plato (Euthydemus 272e and 273a). Socrates often spent the entire day there (Symposium 223d). We have seen in the previous section (p. 110) that intellectuals liked to gather in the Lyceum. In fragment 1 (Müller) of the Description of Greece by Heraclides “Criticus” (third century BCE), mention is made of three gymnasia: the Academy, the Lyceum, and the Kunosarges, “all of them thickly planted with trees and grassy lawns. Festivals of every kind; recreation and pastimes for the soul from every kind of philosopher; many schools, frequent spectacles.”

Aristotle’s teaching, from what we have seen, was not such as to be capable of being conducted totally in an outdoor location, in an extemporaneous way. The site in which the teaching was carried out was very likely not the public gymnasium situated in the Lyceum; there are some (such as Gigon 1962, p. 64) who hypothesize that Aristotle and his students would meet in rooms located near the Lyceum, and that this was the origin of the name of the school.

The name peripatos means “promenade” or “place where one can stroll,” after dinner for example (Eudemian Ethics I.2, 1214b23–24; see Bonitz 1870, s.v. peripatos). We have already seen that in the will of Theophrastus, the bequest that established the school included a garden, a peripatos, and several houses. It is not clear exactly what this peripatos was; it might have been a colonnade, or else a leafy walkway. The term later came to indicate the lessons of the “philosophical school,” and it is used in this sense in the passage by Dicaearchus just quoted, in which the philosopher plays on the ambiguity of the term peripatos and contrasts the more usual meaning with the more technical one. Again, in the passage from Aristocles concerning the period that Aristotle spent in the Academy, cited above (pp. 20–21), the school of Plato was indicated with the term peripatos. Philodemus used the same term to describe the school run by Erastus, Coriscus, and Aristotle at Assos (see above, p. 41). In his will, Lyco uses peripatos to describe the buildings of the school, or the school itself (Diogenes Laertius 5.70).

It is unclear whether the students of Aristotle were called “Peripatetics” because the school had a peripatos, as stated in Plutarch’s Against Colotes (14, 1115a) and Cicero’s De Oratore (3.

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