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November 29 - December 28, 2021
Aristotle’s assertion that “a difference of capacities among its members enables them to attain a higher and better life by the mutual exchange of their different services.” From that point of view alone, Alexandria was already Aristotle’s city.
the Museum was dedicated not just to science but to all the Muses, its Peripatetic staff also launched the first systematic study of Greek literature and language (following in the footsteps of Aristotle’s own work in his Rhetoric and Poetics).*
Egypt’s two-millennia-old tradition of study of mathematics and geometry, as well as astronomy and medicine.
Aristotelian principle: that the starting point of all true knowledge is not (contrary to Plato) abstract reasoning, but the collection and comparison of individual specimens, whether they be plants and shellfish or books and manuscripts.
no fewer than 120,000 separate titles, arranged
Herophilus pioneered the study of the neurovascular system.
It was a first hint of the battles to come between religion and science over what we call medical ethics.8
great fire that devastated
large portions of the Great Library in 48 BCE.†
astronomy.
mathematics Bertrand Russell
Paradise Lost:
Euclid.
Euclid’s Elements is peerless in its clarity
The subtext of the Elements is also the principle Euclid may have absorbed from his teachers at the Academy: that mathematics and geometry are reason’s direct insight into the mind of the “supreme geometer,” God Himself. Indeed, Euclid’s principal works could almost have served as textbooks for Plato’s Rulers in the Republic. They were the Elements for arithmetic and geometry; the Conic Sections for the study of proportion and harmony; and his Phaenomena as a guide to astronomy, since it focuses on the theory of uniformly rotating spheres.13 Still, as a work the Elements is pure Aristotle: one
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Plato's god
“Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I shall move the earth.”
Although they professed to despise the Greeks as a people, the Romans developed a strange dependence on Greek culture and on its two greatest thinkers.
Greek science and technology helped their armies and navies move and fight, just as Greek art filled their homes and villas and Greek literature their libraries.
And the manuals the Romans increasingly relied on for understanding the glitches in Greek culture, as well as their own, were Plato and Aristotle.
Roman readers found them reassuring. You couldn’t go wrong, it seemed, if you relied on one or the other to understand some issue, whether it was astronomy† and physics or politics and poetry.
Jonathan Barnes and Miriam Griffin write, Plato and Aristotle “formed an integral part” of an educated Roman’s mental equipment; they were “tools for thinking analytically and making rational decisions.”4 It is not too far-fetched to say that it is the Romans who permanently etched Plato and Aristotle into the grain of Western civilization, just as they made them the governing intellects of their empire.
how the Romans succeeded in just fifty-six years§ in making themselves virtual masters of the civilized world, “an achievement,” as Polybius wrote, “without parallel in human history.”
Polybius
Polybius wanted to write an entirely new kind of history, one with a universal theme—the role of the unexpected or Fortune in the making of human events.
turn history into a science based on clear rational principles backed up by observation.
to both Aristotle and Plat...
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Aristotle
Aristotle’s Politics classified all governments as rule by either the One (monarchy), the Few (aristocracy), or the Many (democracy).
“The result is a union which is strong enough to withstand all emergencies,” Polybius wrote; “this peculiar form of constitution possesses an irresistible power to achieve any goal it has set itself.” Following this analysis, Polybius had to conclude, “It is impossible to find a better form of constitution than this.”
Here Polybius turned to the second of his authorities, Plato.
Books VIII and IX Plato
Socrates warns his listeners that every political system that fails to live up to those ideal principles must eventually be overtaken by an inevitable cycle of decay and collapse.
“which treats all men as equals whether they are equal or not,” must lead inevitably to moral corruption, civic disorder, and mob rule.
The chaos that results will lead inevitably to one-man rule, he says, in order to restore calm.
kingship.
wolf.”
tyranny”
“democracy is born” again.
“For this state, [which] takes its foundation and growth from natural causes, will pass through a natural evolution to its decay.” Sooner or later, doom would come to the greatest empire in the world. This is “a proposition which scarcely requires proof,” Polybius grimly wrote, “since the inexorable course of nature is sufficient to impose it on us.”
The Godfather.
“Now we are suffering the evils of too long a peace. Luxury, deadlier than any armed invader, lies like an incubus upon us still, avenging the world we brought to heel,” Juvenal wrote in Satire VI.
Cicero learned to rely on his gifts as an orator and a lawyer to get ahead.
Cicero’s De Re Publica is closely modeled on the Republic,
Cicero rejected Polybius’s prediction of Rome’s doom and Plato’s inevitable cycle of political degeneration. Instead, he had Aristotle come to Rome’s rescue not in just one but two powerful ways.
the republic is the place where citizens learn and practice the virtues they need in order to be happy, as a matter of civic habit.
One could easily spot the oratorical superstars by the size of their corona, literally “crown,” or circle of admiring listeners.
Oratory, Plato says, has the same relation to justice as cosmetology does to bodybuilding: “a mischievous, swindling, base, servile trade which creates an illusion by the use of … makeup and depilation and costume, and makes people assume a borrowed beauty to the neglect of the beauty that is the result of training and discipline.”27 And for the same reason: both politics and makeup appeal to the emotions instead of reason.
Each simply assumed he could ride out the coming chaos and emerge on top. Instead, all four would die violent deaths—while the republic itself, much as Polybius had predicted, passed into history.
During his dictatorship, Caesar sometimes spoke about carrying out important social reforms, especially relieving the crushing debt on Rome’s working families. In the end, he did little or nothing.
Caesar’s murder has been immortalized by Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar. This is appropriate, since the assassination
