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Given the Choice, Who Would You Be in Your Next Life?

The Last Judgement, by Michelangelo.
The responsibility lies with the chooser; God is not responsible. — Republic X

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Plato concludes The Republic with the myth of Er, a timeless story of death, judgment, reincarnation, and the soul’s freedom to choose its destiny. This fresh retelling and interpretation explores why it remains one of the greatest philosophical myths ever told.

The Myth of Er has had an enduring influence on the Western imagination, shaping, among other things, our inherited ideas of heaven, hell, and moral destiny. Although Plato presents the story as told by Socrates at the end of The Republic, it draws on older Greek and Near Eastern traditions of judgment after death, cosmic order, and the journey of the soul.

The Myth of Er

Er, a soldier from Pamphylia, was slain in battle. Twelve days later, as his body lay on the funeral pyre, he returned to life and told those around him what he had seen in the interval between death and rebirth.

During those twelve days, his soul had journeyed to a strange meadow marked by four openings: two leading upward into the heavens, and two descending into the earth below.

Judges sat in this meadow and assigned souls according to their conduct in life. The just were directed to the right and upward, ascending through one of the openings into the heavens; the unjust were directed to the left and downward, descending into the earth.

At the same time, other souls were returning. Bright, cheerful souls descended from above, having completed a thousand-year reward in the heavens. They spoke joyfully of what they had experienced. By contrast, other souls rose up from below, exhausted and in pain, describing a thousand-year punishment in the depths of the earth.

When Er approached the judges, he was told that he was not to be judged. Instead, he was to observe and later report what he had seen to humanity.

After seven days in the meadow, the souls set out on a further journey of five days, eventually arriving at the Spindle of Necessity.

This was a vast column of light, brighter than anything they had ever seen, extending through the cosmos and holding together the movements of the sun, moon, planets, and stars. The structure of the heavens rotated like a spindle, with concentric circles turning within one another.

At its centre stood Necessity, or Ananke, attended by her three daughters, the Fates. In each of the celestial circles sat a Siren, each producing a single note, so that together they formed a cosmic harmony.

When all the souls had gathered, a prophet announced:

“Hear the word of Lachesis, daughter of Necessity. Mortal souls, you are entering a new cycle of life and death. Your destiny will not be assigned to you, but chosen by you. The one who draws the first lot shall choose first; and the life chosen shall become his fate.”

The souls then came forward in order and selected their next lives from a vast assortment of human and animal forms.

The first to choose, having seen neither reward nor punishment in a way that had truly reshaped him, hastily selected the life of a tyrant. Only later did he discover that this life entailed horrors he had failed to foresee, including the destruction of his own family. His earlier virtue had been habitual rather than reflective; he had never truly understood what made a life good.

By contrast, many of those returning from punishment in the underworld, having suffered greatly, now chose more moderate and balanced lives. But their choices were often driven by fear and aversion rather than understanding.

Last of all came Odysseus, the man of many ways. Having experienced the extremes of fortune and glory, he searched for a long time before finding the life of an ordinary private man, overlooked by everyone else. Delighted with his discovery, he remarked that he would have made the same choice even if he had been first to choose.

Once all souls had chosen, they travelled to the plain of Forgetfulness. There they encamped by the River Lethe. Each soul was required to drink from the river, and in doing so forgot everything it had previously known. Some, still unsteady from desire or confusion, drank more than they needed.

In the night, as they slept, the souls rose upward like stars and were reborn into their chosen lives. At that moment, Er awoke to find himself once again on his funeral pyre.

Interpretation of the Myth

At the beginning of The Republic, Plato’s brother Glaucon challenges Socrates with a stark claim: most people are not just; they merely behave justly when it is advantageous to do so. If they could act unjustly without consequence, they would.

In response, Socrates constructs an elaborate account of justice—not as social convention or reputation, but as something belonging to the inner structure of the soul. Just as health is not merely the appearance of the body but its proper functioning, justice is the harmonious ordering of the self. An unjust soul, however successful it may appear externally, is internally disordered.

The myth of Er comes at the end of this argument, and one of its purposes is to show that justice does, in the end, prevail. Although the just may suffer and the unjust prosper in this life, each soul ultimately receives its due. In this sense, the myth answers Glaucon’s challenge: justice is not merely socially convenient, but intrinsically valuable, because it orders the soul. The myth suggests that such a soul is ultimately rewarded.

But the myth does something more than reassure us that justice is eventually rewarded and injustice punished. It explores something more unsettling: how easily souls can misjudge what is good for them, even after they have seen the consequences of their choices.

The problem Plato is concerned with is not only moral weakness, but moral blindness. Even a thousand years in heaven or hell does not guarantee wisdom. Some souls, having endured punishment, choose more carefully; others, despite every opportunity to learn, repeat their mistakes. Experience alone is not enough. Suffering may teach caution, but only philosophy teaches understanding.

Within this framework, justice is not simply about behaving correctly, but about forming a soul capable of recognising what is truly good. Without such understanding, even freedom of choice can become dangerous. The tyrant’s error lies not merely in his lust for power, but in his ignorance about the kind of life he is selecting. His failure is epistemic before it is moral.

Yet reward and punishment alone are not enough. The deeper concern of the myth is the formation of character. We do not choose wisely merely because we have suffered, nor because we have prospered, but because we have learnt to distinguish appearance from reality and the merely desirable from the truly good.

Odysseus, at the end of the myth, provides the final illustration. Having experienced the extremes of human life, he passes over lives of power and renown to choose that of an ordinary private man. It is one of the most quietly profound moments in Greek literature. The greatest of heroes no longer seeks greatness, but peace. His choice suggests that wisdom lies not in acquiring more, but in learning what is enough.

In the end, the myth of Er is less a literal description of the afterlife than a meditation on justice, character, and choice. Plato affirms that justice is ultimately rewarded, but he also insists that reward alone is not enough. A good life depends not merely on receiving one’s due, but on acquiring the wisdom to recognise what is truly worth choosing.

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Ever Met a Clever Fool? Why Intelligence Alone Is Not Enough

Caspar David Friedrich: Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog
Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (c. 1818). Greater perspective is the beginning of wisdom.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Every time I utter the word ‘wisdom’, someone giggles or sneers. Wisdom, more so even than expertise, does not sit comfortably in an egalitarian, anti-elitist society. In an age dominated by materialism and consumerism, science and technology, and specialisation and compartmentalisation, it is too loose, too grand, and too mysterious a concept. With our heads in our smartphones and tablets, in our bills and bank statements, we simply do not have the time or mental space for it—or even the idea of it.

But things were not always thus.

The word wisdom features 222 times in the Old Testament, which includes all of seven so-called ‘wisdom books’: Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Solomon, the Book of Wisdom, and Sirach.

Here is Ecclesiastes 7:12:

For wisdom is a defence, and money is a defence: but the excellency of knowledge is, that wisdom giveth life to them that have it.

The word philosophy literally means ‘the love of wisdom’, and wisdom is the overarching aim of philosophy—or, at least, ancient philosophy.

In Plato’s Lysis, Socrates tells the young Lysis that, without wisdom, he will be of no worth to anyone:

And therefore, my boy, if you are wise, all men will be your friends and kindred, for you will be useful and good; but if you are not wise, neither father, nor mother, nor kindred, nor anyone else, will love you.

The patron goddess of Athens, the city in which the Lysis is set, is none other than Athena, goddess of wisdom, who sprang out from the skull of Zeus. Her symbol, and the symbol of wisdom, is the owl, a bird of prey which cleaves through darkness.

Indeed, wisdom derives from the Proto-Indo-European root weid-, ‘to see’. In Norse mythology, Odin gouged out one of his eyes and offered it to Mimir in exchange for a drink from the well of knowledge and wisdom, symbolically trading one mode of perception for another, higher one.

Is Wisdom the Same as Knowledge?

People often speak of ‘knowledge and wisdom’ as though they might be closely related or even the same thing. So one hypothesis is that wisdom is knowledge, or a great deal of knowledge. But if wisdom is knowledge, then it has to be a certain kind of knowledge, or else learning the telephone directory, or the names of all the rivers in the world, might count as wisdom.

Nor can it simply be scientific or technical knowledge, or else every contemporary person would be wiser than the wisest of ancient philosophers. Any twenty-first-century school-leaver would be wiser than a Seneca or Socrates.

Remember: the Delphic oracle pronounced Socrates the wisest of all people not because he knew everything, or even very much, but because he knew the extent of what he did not know.

Still, there seems to be more to wisdom than mere ‘negative knowledge’, or else I could simply be super-sceptical about everything and count myself wise.

Or maybe wisdom consists in having high epistemic standards, that is, in having a high bar for believing something, and an even higher bar for calling that belief knowledge. But then we are back to a picture of wisdom as something like science…

So Is Wisdom Simply Correct Opinion?

In Plato’s Meno, Socrates notices that people of wisdom and virtue seem remarkably poor at imparting those qualities. Themistocles was able to teach his son Cleophantus skills such as standing upright on horseback and throwing the javelin, yet no one ever credited the poor wretch with anything like his father’s wisdom—and the same could also be said of Lysimachus and his son Aristides, Pericles and his sons Paralus and Xanthippus, and Thucydides and his sons Melesias and Stephanus.

If wisdom cannot be taught, how, asks Meno, did good people come about? Socrates replies that right action is possible under guidance other than that of knowledge. A person who has knowledge of the road to Larisa (a city-state in Thessaly) may make a good guide. But a person who has only correct opinion about the road, despite never having travelled it, might make an equally good guide.

Knowledge and correct opinion can therefore lead to the same destination.

Since wisdom cannot be taught, it cannot be knowledge; and if it cannot be knowledge, it can only be correct opinion—which explains why paragons of wisdom such as Themistocles, Lysimachus, and Pericles were unable to impart their wisdom even unto their own sons.

Wise people, says Socrates, are no different from soothsayers, prophets, and poets, who say many true things when they are divinely inspired but have no real knowledge of what they are saying.

Or Is Wisdom the Same as Understanding?

Aristotle gives us another clue in the Metaphysics, when he says that wisdom is the understanding of causes. None of the five senses are regarded as wisdom because, although they provide the most authoritative knowledge of sensible particulars, they are unable to discern the more distant causes of anything.

Similarly, we suppose artists to be wiser than artisans because artists know the ‘why’ or cause, and can therefore teach, whereas artisans do not, and cannot.

In other words, wisdom is the understanding of the right relations between things, which calls for more distant and elevated perspectives, and perhaps also the ability or willingness to shift between perspectives.

In the Tusculan Disputations, Cicero cites as a paragon of wisdom the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras, who, upon being informed of the death of his son, simply said, “I knew that I begot a mortal.”

For Cicero, true sapience consists in preparing oneself for every eventuality, so as never to be taken—or overtaken—by surprise. And it is true that wisdom, the understanding of causes and connexions, has forever been associated with both insight and foresight.

What, Then, Is Wisdom?

Wisdom is not so much a kind of knowledge as a way of seeing, or ways of seeing.

When we take a few steps back, like when we stand under the shower or go on holiday, we begin to behold the bigger picture. In common parlance, ‘wisdom’ has two opposites: ‘foolishness’ and ‘folly’, which both derive from the Latin follis (‘bellows’, ‘bag’) and involve, respectively, lack and loss of perspective.

In cultivating a broader perspective, it helps, of course, to be knowledgeable, but it also helps to be intelligent, reflective, open-minded, and disinterested—which is why we often seek out and pay for independent advice.

Above all, it helps to be courageous, because the view from on high, though it can be exhilarating, and ultimately liberating, is at first terrifying—not least because it conflicts with so much that we have been taught or enculturated to think.

Courage, said Aristotle, is the first of the human qualities, because it is the one which underwrites all the others.

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If You Love Words, Read On

The sophist Gorgias speaking before an audience and casting his spell.
Gorgias mesmerising his audience.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

The ancient Greek sophist Gorgias compared the power of words to the power of drugs. More than two thousand years later, his insight is as compelling as ever. Words can persuade and deceive, comfort and inspire, alter the course of a life—or even the march of history.

Gorgias (483—375 BCE) hailed from Leontini in Sicily. He studied the art of persuasion—or rhetoric—under Corax and Tisias in nearby Syracuse and was also acquainted with the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles. In 427, he led an embassy to Athens to forge a defensive alliance against an overbearing Syracuse.

If Athens gave birth to philosophy, Sicily gave birth to rhetoric. Gorgias inherited the techniques of Corax and Tisias, the nominal founders of rhetoric, but transformed them into something that could dazzle audiences.

Indeed, Gorgias was something of a showman. He delighted in making unconventional, counterintuitive, or absurd arguments appear the stronger, and spoke in a florid, rhyming style that hypnotised all those who heard him. When in the theatre at Athens, he would say, “Come, propose me a theme!” He took great pride in his ability to defend any position, on any subject, and founded the art of extempore (‘off the cuff’) oratory.

In the Rhetoric, Aristotle characterises Gorgias’ style of oratory as ‘ironic’—and Gorgias’ opinions, if he had any at all, are hard to decipher. Rather than any positive philosophy, he offered an agnostic art of persuasion which he held to be of the utmost value.

In Plato’s Philebus, the sophist Protarchus tells Socrates: “I have often heard Gorgias maintain, Socrates, that the art of persuasion far surpassed every other; this, as he says, is by far the best of them all, for to it all things submit, not by compulsion, but of their own free will.”

Of Gorgias’ works, two short display speeches survive, the Encomium of Helen and the Defence of Palamedes, along with a fragment of a funeral oration and two paraphrases of a lost treatise, On Non-Being.

Words as Magic

In the Encomium of Helen, Gorgias sets himself the unlikely task of praising Helen and exculpating her for leaving Sparta with Paris and sparking the Trojan War. Gorgias argues that Helen could have been persuaded to leave in one of four ways: by the gods; by physical force; by the power of love; by the power of speech. But whichever way it was, she herself would have been blameless.

In defending Helen, Gorgias compares the effect of speech on the soul to the effect of drugs on the body: ‘Just as different drugs draw forth different humours from the body—some putting a stop to disease, others to life—so too with words: some cause pain, others joy, some strike fear, some stir the audience to boldness, some benumb and bewitch the soul with evil persuasion.’

A doctor’s diagnosis, a judge’s verdict, a declaration of love, a political speech, a prayer, or a promise may consist of nothing more than words, yet each can change the course of a life—even the course of nations and the march of history.

Perhaps this is why so many ancient cultures regarded words as sacred. In the Vedas, speech is revered as a divine power, and even personified as the goddess Vac. A similar idea can be found in the Bible, at John 1:1: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ In Genesis, God does not create the world with his hands, but by speech: ‘And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.’

As a psychiatrist, I am often reminded of Gorgias’ insight. Faced with a suicidal patient, everything may depend upon finding the right words at the right moment. A single sentence, if it is the right one, can alter a person’s entire outlook. Equally, a single sentence can break—or make—a career or a relationship.

The linguist may insist that ‘casting spells’ and ‘spelling words’ have different etymologies; the psychologist suspects that they spring from the same ancient intuition. If they had told us at school that we were learning magic, we would have paid a lot more attention.

Nothing Exists

In On Non-Being, Gorgias pushes his fascination with language to its absolute limit. Responding to the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides, who held that reality is one and accessible to reason, he parodies his arguments by turning each of them on its head: (1) nothing exists; (2) even if something did exist, nothing could be known about it; (3) even if something could be known, this knowledge could not be communicated to others; and (4) even if it could be communicated, it could not be understood. But as ever with Gorgias, it is far from clear whether these stood among his genuine opinions.

Gorgias spent much of his long life in Thessaly where he enjoyed the patronage of Aristippus of Larissa and Jason of Pherae. He taught Aristippus’ one-time beloved, the Meno who lent his name to Plato’s Meno, as well as the orator Isocrates, who came to rank among the Ten Attic Orators.

In his autobiographical Antidosis, Isocrates tells us that Gorgias:

…spent his time in Thessaly when the Thessalians were the most prosperous people in Hellas; he lived a long life and devoted himself to the making of money; he had no fixed domicile in any city and therefore paid out nothing for public weal nor was he subject to any tax; moreover, he did not marry and beget children, but was free from this, the most unremitting and expensive of burdens…

Having no wife or children, Gorgias died at the grand old age of 108.

Plato’s attacks ensured that the Sophists would long be remembered as clever tricksters rather than serious thinkers. Yet Gorgias deserves a more generous hearing. More than two thousand years ago, he recognised something we are still apt to forget: words do not merely describe the world. They shape how we experience it.

Every day we persuade, comfort, deceive, negotiate, inspire, forgive, and fall in love with nothing more substantial than sounds carried through the air. That is the nearest thing to magic that human beings have ever possessed.

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Sun, Sex, and Sea: How Aristotle Invented Science on Lesbos

Aristotle and Theophrastus on Lesbos

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 9 August 2026.

Long before there were laboratories, microscopes, or indeed scientists, Aristotle spent two happy years on the Greek island of Lesbos studying animals. He dissected specimens, questioned fishermen and beekeepers, and observed everything from the mating habits of octopuses to the development of chicks. Some of his conclusions were far off the mark; others would not be confirmed for more than two thousand years. In those two years, Aristotle did not merely invent science and biology. He developed a way of looking at the natural world that would transform his philosophy—and, ultimately, ours.

Aristotle remained at Plato’s Academy for nearly twenty years, only leaving after Plato’s death in 347. The reasons for his departure are unclear: he may have felt slighted at being passed over for the scholarchship of the Academy in favour of Plato’s nephew, Speusippus; or he may have fled, possibly even before Plato’s death, for fear of the growing anti-Macedonian feeling.

In 351, the orator Demosthenes had delivered his First Philippic denouncing Philip II’s imperial ambitions, and in 348, the year before Plato’s death, Philip had razed Athenian ally Olynthus to the ground.

Then in his thirty-seventh year, Aristotle travelled with fellow Platonist Xenocrates of Chalcedon to Assos (in the Troad, Asia Minor) to join the court of Hermias of Atarneus, who had studied at the Academy. Aristotle may or may not have gone to Assos as an ambassador of Philip, who wished to have Hermias for an ally.

In either case, it seems that he exerted a moderating influence on Hermias, who softened his harsh tyrannical rule—enabling him, in short succession, to win over neighbouring peoples and expand his territory.

In 344, Hermias was captured by a mercenary in the service of Artaxerxes III of Persia and tortured for information about the invasion plans of his ally Philip. But Hermias held his silence, his dying words being that he had done nothing shameful or unworthy of philosophy. Aristotle honoured the memory of his perfect friend with a statue at Delphi and a still extant hymn to virtue.

At around this time, he married Hermias’ niece and adoptive daughter, Pythias, who helped him in his work and bore him a daughter, also Pythias.

After the death of Hermias, Aristotle and his student Tyrtamus crossed over to Lesbos to research the flora and fauna of the island and its remarkable lagoon, then known as the Pyrrha lagoon, now known as the Gulf of Kalloni. Tyrtamus went down in history as Theophrastus [‘Divinely-speaking’], the nickname given to him by Aristotle.

Supposedly, the more empirical Theophrastus concentrated on the flora while the more speculative Aristotle concentrated on the fauna, so that the one is remembered as the father of botany and the other as the father of zoology. In fact, Theophrastus also wrote on animals, and Aristotle on plants, but these works have been lost, as have almost all of Theophrastus’ wide-ranging works.

Lebos aerial view
Lesbos and the inland Gulf of Kalloni (left of the picture)

Aristotle’s Biological Works

Aristotle’s biological works constitute the first systematic study of the living world and, in many respects, the beginning of science as we know it. These works are usually ignored, though they make up a quarter of his extant corpus, and were revered by naturalists such as Georges Cuvier and Charles Darwin—who, in the year of his death, 1882, wrote to William Ogle that ‘although Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods … they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.’

Although Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods … they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle. —Charles Darwin

Aristotle accompanied his History of Animals (a somewhat misleading title, cf. ‘natural history’) with a now lost book of anatomical drawings. His other biological writings are the Parts of Animals, Movement of Animals, Progression of Animals, and Generation of Animals, as well as On the Soul and seven shorter works collectively known as the Parva Naturalia.

On the Soul may seem out of place, until one remembers that the very word ‘animal’ [anima] means ‘having breath’ or ‘having soul’. The soul, says Aristotle, is the principle of life, and the knowledge of it contributes greatly to our understanding of nature and truth in general. On the Soul includes a detailed discussion of the senses and established our notion of the ‘five senses’, with Aristotle explicitly stating that ‘there is no sixth sense in addition to the five enumerated’.

In his biological works, Aristotle outlines more than five hundred species, some in more detail than others. He describes the chambered stomachs of ruminants, the social organization of bees, and the embryological development of a chick. He notices that some sharks are viviparous, and that whales and dolphins differ from other fish in breathing air and suckling their young. He infers that brood size decreases with body mass, whereas gestation period and overall lifespan increase.

In a playful by-the-way, he remarks that ‘after drinking wine, the Indian parrot becomes more saucy than ever’.

For centuries, some of Aristotle’s accounts seemed too fanciful to be true, for instance, that the young of a dogfish grow inside their mother’s body, that the male of the river catfish guards the eggs for forty or fifty days after the female has left, or that male octopuses have a sperm-transferring tentacle that sometimes snaps off during mating. Each of these wonders of the world had to wait until the nineteenth century to be confirmed.

Unlike Plato, Aristotle privileged observation over speculation. Like our scientists, he began with a careful gathering of data, from which he attempted to infer explanations and make predictions. He carried out dissections and even rudimentary experiments such as cutting out the heart of a turtle to discover that it could still move its limbs for a surprisingly long time.

However, he did not carry out anything like modern case-control studies, and relied uncritically on the lay testimony of beekeepers, fishermen, travellers, and the like. His lack of rigour led to some embarrassing errors, such as the claim that lions copulate back-to-back, while bears adopt the missionary position and hedgehogs stand on their hind legs to face each other. Or the claim that the female of several species has fewer teeth than the male.

Among these species, he included humans, when he could simply have looked into Pythias’ mouth (wife or daughter).

Biology as Philosophy

Aristotle was not simply doing biology for the sake of biology, but for the sake of philosophy. Like Plato, he was searching for universals, but this time from the ground up. ‘We should,’ he said, ‘venture on the study of every kind of animal without distaste; for each and all will reveal to us something natural and something beautiful.’

An animal gives birth to the same animal because of its form [eidos] or ordering pattern—an idea that resonates with modern genetics. The male supplies the form, which is also the soul, in his semen, while the female provides the material in her menses. When the semen meets the menses, they congeal into an egg or embryo ‘like fig juice which curdles milk’. If the semen fails to ‘master the menses’, a female is born.

The soul is not superadded or even supervenient, but corresponds to the animal’s ordering pattern and dynamic processes. Aristotle’s interest in biology informs his theory of the form, which in turn informs his entire physics and metaphysics.

All beings, from minerals to plants and animals, have a form, the potential of which determines their position on the eleven-rung scala naturae, or great chain of being. The Church adapted the concept of a great chain of being, which later helped to justify slavery, colonization, and evangelization. Plants have a vegetative soul, capable of growth and reproduction. Animals, as well as a vegetative soul, have a sensitive soul, capable of sensation and movement, and hence of desire and imagination.

Humans, uniquely, also have a rational soul, capable of thought and reflection. Contra Plato, the soul inheres in the organism, and dies with it—except for the rational soul, which, being a part of God, is immortal. Thought cannot die, since, unlike all else, it is not the function of a particular organ—the brain and the lungs being, in Aristotle’s view, mere radiators for the heart, which is the site of the internal fire and the seat of intelligence, motion, and sensation.

The Great Chain of Being, or Scala Dei

Although he held that all beings have a form, and that the form is injected by the male (a male being defined as ‘an animal that breeds inside another’), Aristotle also believed that many lower animals spontaneously generate: that eels grow out of mud, and insect maggots from putrefying flesh, even though Homer had said otherwise—when, in Iliad XIX, Achilles fears that flies will ‘breed worms’ in the corpse of Patroclus.

To be fair to Aristotle, he had observed that eels have no gonads, and could hardly have guessed that they only develop them in the course of their epic migration to the Sargasso Sea. The earliest challenge to spontaneous generation came as late as 1668, when Francesco Redi covered jars of rotting flesh with gauze and found that only the controls, that is, the uncovered jars, grew maggots.

Aristotle was not a Darwinist nor even a creationist, but an eternalist who believed that the plants and animals before him had always existed and would always exist. One argument that he gives for eternalism is that, if motion had a beginning, this beginning must itself have resulted from a movement, which is a paradox.

Although he privileged observation over theory, his eternalism, albeit logically held, blinded him to the significance of the petrified forest of Lesbos, which would have confronted him with fossilized trees from millions of years ago.

Such are the main lines of Aristotle’s biology and associated philosophy. Many of his inferences have not stood the test of time. Salacious animals do not age more quickly than continent ones. Hair is not grown at the expense of semen, even if women and eunuchs don’t grow bald. And it is not because they lack fatness that bloodless animals are shorter lived than sanguineous ones.

But was the beginning of science not bound to look like this? And is it not remarkable that we today can still read its record?

Aristotle spent no more than two years on Lesbos. In 343, King Philip commissioned him to tutor his son Alexander, who was then around thirteen years old, promising in return to rebuild his native Stageira and repatriate its former citizens.

Aristotle would go on to teach the future conqueror of the known world, but on Lesbos he had begun conquering another world altogether: the hidden world beneath his feet.

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How the Son of a Court Physician Became the Most Influential Philosopher in History

Plato and Aristotle. Detail from the School of Athens by Raphael.
In Raphael’s School of Athens (1509–1511), Plato holds his Timaeus and points towards the heavens; Aristotle holds his Ethics and gestures towards the world before him.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Few people have shaped the world as profoundly as Aristotle. Yet, for all his influence, surprisingly little is known about the man himself. As one historian remarked, all that can be said with certainty is that ‘the man was born, worked, and then died’. Even so, the surviving fragments reveal an extraordinary life, which transformed the son of a provincial court physician into the most influential philosopher in the West.

Aristotle was born in 384 BCE in Stageira, on the Chalcidice peninsula of north-eastern Greece. In 348, Philip II of Macedon occupied and destroyed the city, but then had it rebuilt and repopulated in honour of Aristotle, who had been his childhood friend and whom he had appointed to tutor his son, Alexander, the future King of the Oikouménē, or Known World. 

The Stagirite’s father, Nicomachus, served as physician to Philip’s father, Amyntas III of Macedon, and descended, purportedly, from the god of medicine, Asclepius—as did his mother, Phæstis. With the healing arts running so thickly in his blood, Aristotle would have been expected to follow in his father’s footsteps. Certainly, his medical background, and the empiricism of physicians such as Hippocrates, informed his method and philosophy. 

Aristotle had a brother and sister, and was probably the youngest of the three siblings. At about the age of thirteen, he lost both his parents and became the ward of Proxenus of Atarneus (in Æolis, Asia Minor), who rounded whatever medical training he had received from his late father. Proxenus married Aristotle’s sister, Arimneste. Together, they had a daughter, Hero, and a son, Nicanor. Hero in turn had a son, the historian Callisthenes of Olynthus, great nephew to Aristotle.

Plato’s Most Brilliant Student

In 367, Proxenus sent the seventeen-year-old Aristotle to study at Plato’s Academy, which had by then become a pre-eminent centre of learning. If Diogenes Laertius is to be believed, the grown-up Aristotle had small eyes and slender calves, dressed fashionably, and spoke with a lisp.

Aristotle remained at the Academy for nearly twenty years, only leaving after Plato’s death in 347. The reasons for his departure are unclear: he may have felt slighted at being passed over for the scholarchship of the Academy in favour of Plato’s nephew, Speussipus; or he may have fled, possibly even before Plato’s death, for fear of the growing anti-Macedonian feeling. In 351, the orator Demosthenes had delivered his First Philippic denouncing Philip II’s imperial ambitions, and in 348, the year before Plato’s death, Philip had razed Athenian ally Olynthus to the ground.

Twenty years at the Academy convinced Aristotle not only of philosophy’s power, but also of its limits. Where Plato sought truth by looking beyond the visible world, Aristotle increasingly sought it within it.

The Philosopher and the Tyrant

Then in his thirty-seventh year, Aristotle travelled with fellow Platonist Xenocrates of Chalcedon to Assos (in the Troad, Asia Minor) to join the court of Hermias of Atarneus, who had studied at the Academy. Aristotle may or may not have gone to Assos as an ambassador of Philip, who wished to have Hermias for an ally. In either case, it seems that he exerted a moderating influence on Hermias, who softened his harsh tyrannical rule—enabling him, in short succession, to win over neighbouring peoples and expand his territory.

In 344, Hermias was captured by a mercenary in the service of Artaxerxes III of Persia and tortured for information about the invasion plans of his ally Philip. But Hermias held his silence, his dying words being that he had done nothing shameful or unworthy of philosophy. Aristotle honoured the memory of his perfect friend with a statue at Delphi and a still extant hymn to virtue.

At around this time, he married Hermias’ niece and adoptive daughter, Pythias, who helped him in his work and bore him a daughter, also Pythias.

Paradise on Lesbos

After the death of Hermias, Aristotle and his student Tyrtamus crossed over to Lesbos to research the flora and fauna of the island and its remarkable lagoon, then known as the Pyrrha lagoon, now known as the Gulf of Kalloni.

Tyrtamus went down in history as Theophrastus [‘Divinely-speaking’], the nickname given to him by Aristotle. Supposedly, the more empirical Theophrastus concentrated on the flora while the more speculative Aristotle concentrated on the fauna, so that the one is remembered as the father of botany and the other as the father of zoology. In fact, Theophrastus also wrote on animals, and Aristotle on plants, but these works have been lost, as have almost all of Theophrastus’ wide-ranging works.

Aristotle was not simply doing biology for the sake of biology, but for the sake of philosophy. Like Plato, he was searching for universals, but this time from the ground up. ‘We should’ he said, ‘venture on the study of every kind of animal without distaste; for each and all will reveal to us something natural and something beautiful.’

Teaching Alexander

Aristotle spent no more than two years on Lesbos.

In 343, King Philip commissioned him to tutor his son Alexander, who was then around thirteen years old, promising in return to rebuild his native Stageira and repatriate its former citizens. In the Temple of the Nymphs at Mieza, near the Macedonian capital of Pela, Aristotle taught not only Alexander but also his close friend or lover Hephæstion, and two other future rulers, Ptolemy and Cassander.

It is said that Aristotle prepared for Alexander an annotated copy of the Iliad, which inspired the prince to model his life on that of the demy-divine Achilles. Even if the story is invented, Aristotle’s influence over Alexander is indicated by the crowd of zoologists and botanists that accompanied him on his Eastern conquests, and by the official chronicler of these conquests, who was none other than Aristotle’s great nephew, Callisthenes of Olynthus.

According to both Plutarch and Aulus Gellius, upon hearing that Aristotle had published some of his teachings, Alexander wrote to him from Asia:

Alexander to Aristotle, greeting. You have not done well to publish your books of oral doctrine; for what is there now that we excel others in, if those things which we have been instructed in be laid open to all? For my part, I assure you, I had rather excel others in the knowledge of what is excellent, than in the extent of my power and dominion. Farewell.

Later, as pharaoh in Egypt, Ptolemy built the Great Library of Alexandria, turning the city, which had been founded by Alexander, into a major centre of learning. Alexander, and Ptolemy after him, did much to disseminate Greek culture, so that three centuries later Greek seemed like the natural choice of language for the New Testament.

Aristotle’s Great Project: Organising All Human Knowledge

In around 339, Speussipus suffered a stroke and died, and Xenocrates became the third scholarch of the Academy, with Aristotle passed over for a second time. Among those who frequented the lectures of Xenocrates at the Academy were Zeno of Citium, founder of the Stoic school, and Epicurus of Samos, founder of the Epicurean school.

In 334, Aristotle, now returned to Athens, established his own school in a public exercise and training ground dedicated to the god Apollo Lyceus [‘Apollo the Wolf-god’], whence its name, the Lyceum. A temple had once stood on the expansive site, which in Aristotle’s time had different areas dedicated to different purposes. Both Socrates and Plato had spoken or taught there, to the extent that the Lyceum is the setting of Plato’s Euthydemus, which features Socrates and Cleinias, the grandson of Alcibiades, in conversation with Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, a pair of moronic brothers and sophists.

Aristotle taught in the morning, and in the afternoon would sometimes give a public lecture. He often did his thinking and teaching while walking along the Lyceum’s shaded paths, or peripatoi, so that his students, who doubled up as his colleagues and researchers, came to be known as the peripatetics.

Over the next twelve years, Aristotle wrote many of his works and collected the West’s first great library, including copies of the constitutions of 158 cities. He also developed the world’s first botanical garden and zoological park from the plant and animal specimens that Alexander kept returning from the East.

After the death of his wife Pythias, he became involved with Herpyllis of Stageira, who bore him a son whom he named Nicomachus after his father. To this son, he dedicated his major work of ethics, the Nicomachean Ethics. According to the Suda, he also had an eromenos [younger male lover], the historian Palæphatus of Abydus.

Aristotle’s school lived or limped on until 86 BCE, when Athens was sacked by Sulla, the only man in history to have occupied both Athens and Rome. According to Plutarch, Sulla felled the ancient planes of the Academy and Lyceum to build siege engines. In antiquity, the Lyceum had stood to the east of the city wall. In 1996, its remains were uncovered in a park behind the Hellenic Parliament, while clearing space for the new Museum of Modern Art.

Exile and Death

In the East, Callisthenes had become increasingly critical of Alexander’s adoption of Persian customs, especially those, such as proskynesis (falling down before the king and kissing the ground or his feet), which fed into his mounting megalomania.

When a former pupil implicated Callisthenes in a regicidal plot, Alexander left Aristotle’s great nephew to perish in prison. According to Diogenes Laertius, Callisthenes was ‘confined in an iron cage and carried about until he became infested with vermin through lack of proper attention; and finally he was thrown to a lion and so met his end.’ The death of his great nephew soured Aristotle’s relationship with Alexander, and prompted Theophrastus to write a treatise on grief, the now lost Callisthenes.

Even so, Aristotle’s long-time association with Alexander had led the Athenians to perceive him as Macedonian. After Alexander’s death in Babylon in 323, anti-Macedonian feeling in Athens flared up, and Demophilius and Eurymedon the Hierophant charged Aristotle with impiety, possibly for praying to his late friend Hermias rather than anything in the Physics or Metaphysics. Aristotle fled to the solitude, or loneliness, of his country house at Chalcis in Eubœa, an island off the Attic coast and the homeland of his mother’s family. Referencing the trial and execution of Socrates, he explained, ‘I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy.’

In the event, Aristotle died within the year, in 322, aged sixty-two, possibly from an abdominal condition. Theophrastus, who was not Macedonian but Lesbian, had remained in Athens as scholarch of the peripatetic school. In his will, Aristotle named him as his successor and bequeathed him his works and library. On the family side, he left a furnished house, three female slaves, and a talent of silver to his wife or concubine Herpyllis, and appointed his nephew Nicanor as guardian to the still young Nicomachus. Nicomachus became a pupil of Theophrastus and, according to Aristippus, his eromenos. He died in battle while still young.

Theophrastus inherited not only Aristotle’s school but also the intellectual legacy of the man who, for centuries to come, would simply be known as ‘The Philosopher’.

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