The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science

by Armand Marie Leroi

Aristotle was summoned to the Macedonian court. He had reason enough to go. Macedon was, after all, home, and it was no longer the backwater that he had left behind nearly a quarter of a century previously. Amyntas was long dead; Philip II had succeeded to the Macedonian throne, had raised an army and was flexing his military muscles. In Athens, Demosthenes warned the citizenry, in ever more apocalyptic tones, of the danger brewing on their doorstep. They ignored him – to their cost. Philip wanted a tutor for his son: someone to rub the rough edges off the boy and give him the philosophical education befitting a prince. Did Aristotle make the boy into the man he would become? Or did he try to temper his natural powers? We long to know, but do not. For Aristotle’s teenage pupil was not just any spoilt princeling, but Alexander himself, future King of the oikoumenē, the Known World. It is one of the most remarkable conjunctions in history: one of history’s greatest thinkers has, for a few years, the whip hand over one of her greatest military leaders – and then unleashes him on the world. (Pierre-Simon Laplace merely examined Napoleon for admission to the École Militaire.) Writing four centuries later, Plutarch sets the scene: For their study and leisure Philip gave them the Nymphaion at Mieza: even today people point out to you the stone seats and shaded walks of Aristotle. It is likely that Alexander did not study just ethics and politics here but also those secret and mor...