It has been suggested that Aristotle was probably the last person to know everything there was to be known in his own time. His combined works constitute a virtual encyclopedia of Greek knowledge. He also studied education, foreign customs, literature and poetry. In philosophy, he wrote on aesthetics, ethics, government, metaphysics, politics, economics, psychology, rhetoric and theology. In physical science, Aristotle studied anatomy, astronomy, embryology, geography, geology, meteorology, physics and zoology. His most important treatises include Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, De Anima (On the Soul) and Poetics.Īristotle not only studied almost every subject possible at the time, but made significant contributions to most of them. The works that have survived are in treatise form and were not, for the most part, intended for widespread publication, as they are generally thought to be lecture aids for his students.

Aristotle wrote many dialogues, only fragments of which survived. It is during this period in Athens from 335 to 323 BC when Aristotle is believed to have composed many of his works. According to the Suda, he also had an eromenos, Palaephatus of Abydus. While in Athens, his wife Pythias died and Aristotle became involved with Herpyllis of Stageira, who bore him a son whom he named after his father, Nicomachus. Aristotle conducted courses at the school for the next twelve years.

In one famous example, he counsels Alexander to be ‘a leader to the Greeks and a despot to the barbarians, to look after the former as after friends and relatives, and to deal with the latter as with beasts or plants’.īy 335 BC he had returned to Athens, establishing his own school there known as the Lyceum. Aristotle encouraged Alexander toward eastern conquest, and his attitude towards Persia was unabashedly ethnocentric. Tactfully, he included the young prince and his father in that category. In his Politics, Aristotle states that only one thing could justify monarchy, and that was if the virtue of the king and his family were greater than the virtue of the rest of the citizens put together. During that time he gave lessons not only to Alexander, but also to two other future kings: Ptolemy and Cassander. Aristotle was appointed as the head of the royal academy of Macedon.

Human actions