Aristotle : a chapter from the history of science, including analyses of Aristotle's scientific writings / by George Henry Lewes.

  • Lewes George Henry, 1817-1878.
Date:
1864
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Aristotle : a chapter from the history of science, including analyses of Aristotle's scientific writings / by George Henry Lewes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    thus circumstanced will be ruined, that idle gossip, which always flits about a celebrated name, invented a story of his having wasted his means, and having been reduced to sell drugs for a subsistence; a story which, however, found refutation even among the ancients, and is wholly irreconcilable with the known facts of his subsequent career. He was young, ardent, ambitious, rich. Athens, the glory of the world, though her political sun was setting, the luminous centre of Philosophy and Art, beckoned to him, as Rome and Florence beckon to the students of our day. Plato taught there, and might admit him to the groves of the Academy. To listen to this old man eloquent, was a rare attraction, and naturally it drew him to Athens. Arrived there, he found that Plato was absent. Awaiting the great teacher's return, he qualified himself for discipleship by three years of arduous study. Had he squandered his wealth in dissipa- tion, as the babblers reported, he could not have collected the treasure of books which he is Imown to have bought; for in those days it was almost as costly to create a library of books as in our own to create a gallery of pictures.^ To collect books and to read them are not always the same thing. With him they were one; and Plato, alluding to the extraordinary passion he displayed, called him the reader. His writings show how diligently he had studied all accessible literature ; and it is to his punctilious quotation ^ According to Gellius, he paid for the works of Speusippus alone three Attic talents, that is about 700/. of our money, a sum not to be spared out of the profits of drug-selling unless by a merchant prince. In our own days 1,000/. has been paid for a rare edition of an Italian poet ; but that was merely the avidity of a collector's faror backed by the wealth of an English noble- man. Curious details on the price of books in the Middle Ages may be read in MuRATOM : Dissertazione sopra Vantichita Italiane, Diss. XLIII. Com- pare also Heeren : Geschichte der Classischen Litteratur im Mittelalter, Werke, 1822, IV. In our days of cheap literature—cheap, because we have cheap paper, and that because we wear linen instead of woollen clothes —these details seem to render the darkness of the dark ages more in- telligible.