Aristotle: Poems

“Aristotle: —Son of Nicomachus and Phaestias … of Stageira a city of Thrace; philosopher; pupil of Plato … He was for thirteen years head of the school of philosophy which was known as the Peripatetic because he taught in the walk or garden after he withdrew from the Academy, which was the teaching-place of Plato. He was born in the 99th Olympiad （384-1 B.C.）, and died at Chalcis of a draught of aconite which he took because he was impeached for writing a Paean in honour of Hermeias the Eunuch. Some writers, however, declare that he died of disease at the age of seventy.1”

Suidas Lexicon

“[Aristotle]: He wrote a very great number of works, the names of which, in view of the man's excellence in every kind, I have thought it to the purpose to subjoin … Epic Poems 2 beginning

Holy one, Chiefest of Gods, far-darting …3

Elegiac Poems 4 beginning

Daughter of a Mother of fair offspring5

Diogenes Laertius Lives of the Philosophers

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“Not only does Aristotle praise Plato in a Eulogy , but in the Elegiacs to Eudemus he eulogises Plato in his praise of Eudemus, writing as follows:

And coming to the renowned plain of Cecropia he built6 an altar in honour of the holy Friendship of one whom it were not right for the bad even to praise, one who was the first if not the only man to show forth plainly by his own life and methods of discourse how we may become both good and happy, and without whom no man can ever receive this blessing.7

Olympiodorus on Plato “He withdrew to Chalcis because he was indicted for impiety by the hierophant Eurymedon —or according to the Miscellaneous History of Favorinus, by Demophilus, the accusation being that he had composed the Hymn 8 to the aforesaid Hermeias, and also the following inscription for his statue at Delphi:

This man in impious violation of the sacred law of the Blessed was slain by the king of the bowmen of Persia, who overcame him not in bloody spear-fight openly, but by use of his trust in a treacherous man.9

Diogenes Laertius Lives of the Philosophers [Aristotle]

1 cf. Diog. L. 5. 6, who makes him 63

2 or lines

3 Apollo

4 or lines

5 these are the last in the list of nearly 400 works

6 a slight and not improbable emendation makes this ‘thou didst build’; in either case the subjt. is presumably Eudemus （of Cyprus）

7 i.e. be both good and happy: cf. Ammon. Vit. Arist. 399 W （‘because he dedicated an altar to Plato’ on which he wrote: ‘2-3’） and Scholia to Arist.

8 see L.G. iii. 410

9 cf. Pap. Didym. in Dem. 6. 36 Berl. Klass. texte i. 27