Aristotle: Ancient Greece’s greatest philosopher?
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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. You're about to listen to You're Dead to Me. Episodes will be released on Fridays wherever you get your podcasts. But if you are in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes 28 days earlier than anywhere else. First on BBC Sounds.

Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are dusting off our philosophy textbooks and going back nearly 2,400 years to ancient Greece to learn all about one of history's greatest beardy chin-strokers, Aristotle.

And to help us tell our virtue ethics from our empiricism, we have one top-notch teacher and one very eager pupil. In History Corner, she's Professor of Classics at Durham University and a Fellow of the British Academy. You might have heard her on Radio 4's Nathalie Haynes Stand-Up for the Classics or Radio 4's Great Lives. Maybe you've read one of her many books, including Aristotle's Way, How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life, and her most recent book, Facing Down the Furies. And you'll know her from our episode on Mr Triangle himself, Pythagoras. It's Professor Edith Hall. Welcome back, Edith.

Hi, I'm absolutely thrilled to be here, though I would dispute that Aristotle's actually dead to me because I dream about him almost every night. OK, we'll get into that later. And in Comedy Corner, he's a writer, comedian, presenter, producer and podcaster. He's a polymath. Maybe you've listened to his incredible podcasts, No Such Thing As A Fish, and his new show, We Can Be Weirdos, or his new kids' book, Impossible Things, and you'll definitely remember him from our episode of You're Dead To Me all the way back in Series 1 on Young Napoleon...

It's Dan Schreiber. Welcome back, Dan. Hey, thanks for having me. I have to say, Aristotle, from what you were saying just before we started recording, absolutely the type of person I'd want to sit down and ask weird questions to. He sounds really interesting. So last time out, Dan, we had you back in 18th century France and Corsica, and we were following the travails of a young man called Napoleone. Yes.

How do you feel about ancient Greece? Is this a comfort area for you? No, I'm equally as ignorant in ancient Greece as I am at that time. But I'm fascinated by this period because it feels like this is the moment that science erupted. I know that Aristotle's often called the first scientist. So...

So, what do you know?

All right, that brings us to the first segment of the podcast. This is the So What Do You Know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject. And Aristotle is one of the most famous Western philosophers of all time. He's one of the most famous names in all of history. Maybe you're picturing a beardy guy in a robe. Maybe he's lecturing a bottle blonde Alexander the Great because you've seen the movie Alexander where all the Macedonians were Irish for some strange reason.

Perhaps you've encountered Aristotelian ethics through the wonderful sitcom The Good Place. You may have seen Aristotelian quotes all over Facebook and Instagram. He's very quotable. But who was this philosopher who changed intellectual life in the West forever? How did he get to be so brainy and so important? And what do you do when a king orders you to tutor his frat boy son? Let's find out. Right, Professor Edith, let's start at the beginning. Where and when was Aristotle born? What was his family situation like?

Aristotle actually had a really very boringly sort of normal personal life. So he's a GP's son. He's the son of the GP in a little town called Stagira, which means the dripping place because it's high up on a cliff where the waters drip down into the sea. I've been there.

This is not Macedonia. This was a free, independent city-state in northeastern Greece. And dad's called... Nicomachus. Nicomachus. Yeah. What does that mean? It actually means victory in battle.

Yeah, because Nike is the goddess of victory. That's the one. And Makas means war? Fight. Fight. Okay. Die. So a GP who's actually pretty hardcore. Greek names are something else. I mean, they really are. I mean, Aristotle means the best goal, which isn't a bad name for him. You know, the best goal in life, your best telos.

Best purpose. He's definitely real, right? Aristotle. Yeah. Because there's so many of these characters from this period where the stuff was written about them all these years after and you find out, oh, Pythagoras, was that a real guy? Aristotle's like, we know he's real. He is very, very real. Yeah. He's extremely real, even though just lately some of his works have been banned in China and some of the Chinese internet started saying he wasn't real. But, you know, take it from me, not the Chinese internet. Yeah.

So his mother was called Festus and he seems to have been very fond of her. So he has a comfortable, idyllic childhood in this very small, beautiful town. So he has this nice childhood, but very sadly, his parents died when he was about 13. Both of them, we don't quite know why. And then between 13 and 17, there are various different stories. But I think the true story is that his older sister died

had married a very nice and very rich guy who lived actually in what's now northwest Turkey because that was all Greek.

near Troy, you know, in the ancient world, lots of people lost their parents young, people died younger for all kinds of reasons. And he actually really landed on his feet. So at 13, his sister takes him in. He goes to sort of live with his uncle and his... Well, it's his brother-in-law. His brother-in-law, sorry. His older brother-in-law. Right. And they're in Turkey. They're in northwest Turkey. So the Greek world, as we know it, isn't just Athens and Sparta. It certainly is not. The Greek world is basically all around the Black Sea.

all down the west coast of Turkey, half of Lebanon, the Levantine coast, North Africa, Egypt, all the way over to Libya and Tunis, and then all the way around to Spain. The Greeks never liked going far inland until Alexander. They liked to live within 25 miles of the sea, wherever they were, and go everywhere by ship.

Does he cross over with any other great notable character from history, if you were looking global? Kind of like Cervantes and Shakespeare were living in the same period, right? He's on a cusp between what we call classical Athenian democratic Athens. So that's the Parthenon, it's Pericles, it's the Peloponnesian War and the Persian Wars. And then because he teaches Alexander...

what we call the Hellenistic world, which is after the Macedonian takeover of the Persian Empire. So the Greeks are then running everything all the way to the Hindu Kush. So at 13, he lives through tragedy. His parents die. He goes to live with his sister. You know, he sort of is

He's a young man. What do you think he does with his time, you know, 13, 14? Yeah, I don't fully know what a Turkish life when you're 13 is like. Okay, so what was he doing? Was there any sports at the time? Oh, yeah. I'm sort of going off Monty Python sketches here, but yeah. You went to the gymnasium.

You went to the gymnasium and you did all the things that you do in track and field at the Olympics. I was going to say, because if his name's a great goal, then... You run around, you throw spears, javelins, discuses. You also, he seems to know an awful lot about horses. I think he knew a lot about horses, so I suspect that he was quite a good chariot.

You say you knew a lot about horses. This is one few things I know about him, is that didn't he believe that certain winds, if they hit your horse, could fertilise your horse? So you sort of had to keep them out of... We'll get to that later, actually. There's some interesting stuff. We'll come to the biology. This is why I love him so much. There's usually an empirical explanation for...

for why he came up with this theory, at least. Yeah, okay, right. So put a pin in that one, come back to me. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, you've gone for sports and I think that's sort of spot on. The other thing that's interesting about him is supposedly he tries his hand at war and fails. So his dad's had the good warfare name. Yeah, that particular piece of evidence is a really, really dodgy source. As we're always having with these ancient guys, there was huge biographical tradition and people who didn't like his particular school of philosophy, so like the Stoics,

or a rival school of philosophy would create malicious rumours. There is a rumour that he tried national military service and didn't really like it. And so he decided that he was the nerdy intellectual one that had to be packed off to university to study stuff. Actually, he's got huge respect for athletics and health and training in all of his works. I suspect that it was just he was very good at athletics, but even better.

Intellectual things. Yeah. What's interesting about Aristotle, he doesn't have a kind of rebellious bad boy phase. He's not wearing a leather jacket with his tunic. Okay. It's not really a good look anyway, but you know, he's not doing that. Instead, he's absolutely excelling everywhere. And so his brother-in-law and his sister spot the talent and go, this kid needs proficiency.

proper training, right? Absolutely. Otherwise, he would undoubtedly have become the general practitioner in Stegger because these things were hereditary. And in fact, his father came from generations and generations of doctors who

to the extent that he's supposed to be descended from Macaon, who is a mythical doctor in the Iliad, who was, you know, the son of Asclepius, the actual god of medicine. Oh, really? Yes. So if you were a practising doctor, you would hang out on your window, you know, great-grandson of Asclepius. I mean...

Obviously, if you were a blacksmith, you'd put great-grandson of Hephaestus, you know, direct descent. This was part of the marketing spiel. Wow. Either his sister or his brother-in-law just got so fed up with this boy going on and on about, you know, saying, do I know I'm really here? Do we exist at supper? Yeah.

You say fed up. I think they're going, this kid, he should go places. So they say, OK, we got money. What's the best university in the world? Oh, we know it's Plato's Academy in Athens. Send him off at 17. Did he possibly invent the...

But why? That's Socrates. That's Socrates. But why is Socrates? So Aristotle rocks up to Plato's Academy in Athens. At 17. Or rather, he's a good boy, so he queues up politely and waits to be let in. But he arrives, he's there, he's going to learn from this superstar philosopher. And Plato had been taught by Socrates.

So you're learning from the guy who learned from Socrates? Yeah, that's wild. It's pretty good. Yeah. Who came after? I know we might get into it later, but was there a fourth after Aristotle? Theophrastus. Yeah. Oh, he's not impressed. Not as big a name as the other three. So Plato has a couple of nicknames for Aristotle, his new student. Do you want to guess what they are? Son of a doctor, great mythical god as a great, great, great grandparent. Yeah.

Were they buddies? Did he bring them in to make him nickname worthy? Well, they became buddies. I think Aristotle was his star pupil. There's some very interesting bits, though, in Plato's Republic. He actually throws down this challenge. He says, right, I'm going to ban all poets and artists and theatre people from my republic. But anybody out there who thinks that they ought to be in there, why don't you write a prose treatise about

And because Aristotle later wrote the Poetics, which is a prose treatise defending the art, you actually can quite often almost hear him talking to the brightest boy. You know, the little boy who's stretching his arm up really, really high. I know the answer. I know the answer. Sir, sir, sir. I know, I know. Exactly. So you do quite get

often get that sense that Plato's talking directly to him. Would he have been young? As in, would everyone else been in their 20s and 30s? Yes, he would have been young to go there at 17. Right, okay. Oh, so he's young Sheldon almost. He's like a sort of teenage sensation. So the nicknames we've got, I think, are The Walking Library.

Okay, very good. Which is quite nice. And just the brain. Just the brain. Where's the brain today? It's awfully quiet. He stayed on and became a teacher, you know, because he stayed there for 20 whole years. Yeah. I think he was perfectly happy there with, you know, the old boy. He got the old boy there, but he gradually became more and more important.

And he studies a variety of things at the academy, right? So it's not just philosophy, it's astronomy, natural science. Well, he studies lots of things that Plato really wouldn't have approved of. I mean, I think that's the really important thing. So Plato's academy did not study natural science.

Oh, really? No, no, no. I think Aristotle's out there sort of picking up mushrooms and stones and sort of measuring plants and trees and doing all kinds of things which Plato wouldn't particularly have approved of. Because Plato's just hardcore theory. Well, it's the three great branches of philosophy as they were then, which are ethics, how should I live, epistemology, how do I know things, and ontology, philosophy.

What is existence, right? So it's hardcore philosophy. He liked maths, yeah, all theoretical. But things like natural science, Socrates had played around with in his youth, but had given up. And there is no sign that Plato was interested in it at all. How interesting. Yeah. So I think Aristotle is this sort of sneaky, he's basically a country boy. You know, he's from northern Greece. He's like, I don't know, coming down from the highlands of Scotland.

to London and he really needs to go out and sniff some heather and shoot some grouse or something. Was it Aristotle who thought that maybe the plant life had souls? No, he didn't think it had souls. He didn't think it had souls. That's much more Pythagorean actually. Okay, right. But he did think it was life and actually a lot of his really, really important

thinking about what is it to be human, what is an anthropos, a human, is that I share this with plant life, but they don't share consciousness and language. Or I share this with animal life, but they don't share the ability to deliberate. So he starts from all of life, a living thing, a zoan, like our word zoo, and then he gradually refines and refines and refines what's different about the human animal.

So he's the ultimate postgrad because he comes at 17 and he is there 20 years and he's studying stuff he's meant to be studying and he's studying bonus courses. So he writes about lyric poetry. He writes about drama, which is obviously theatre with masks and tragedy, right? You know, sort of Medea and things like that. He writes about epic, which I guess is the Iliad, the Odyssey. He writes about comedy, but we don't have it.

Which is devastating to me because you and I both love comedy. We don't have his book on comedy. We've lost Book Two of the Poetics. How did we lose it? Where did it go? I just basically think we lost most of the stuff we lost because Byzantine monks didn't like it. Didn't get the job. Oh, you think trashed. We've lost almost all of Sappho because various Christian bishops said we don't want any of that lesbian pornography. Right. That kind of thing. I suspect there was an awful lot.

that wasn't really appropriate to the Greek Orthodox Church in Aristotle on comedy. Yeah. So I don't know what was in it. I have read everything that Aristotle wrote in his surviving works about humour. And so...

I'm sad to say that he says that we've all got to be humorous. We've got to be a good person is going to be humorous. But he says that there are two extremes. You can be a sullen person who never laughs at anything. Don't do that. You can be a buffoon who makes really crude jokes and is always making jokes and messing around and larking around and won't have a serious conversation. He says there is a mean, which is just to be appropriately witty. And that isn't very promising. Yeah.

Yes, Dan, appropriate wit. Appropriate wit. What did he label himself as? I think he thought he was an appropriate wit. And he does sometimes tell some slightly dry anecdotes. So the one I like best is when he's talking about weird ways of predicting the weather, weather forecasting. So he talks about a guy who lived in Byzantium who kept pet hedgehogs and used to tell in Byzantium, which is now Istanbul,

and he could tell what was going to happen to the weather depending on what direction his hedgehogs were walking in. And Aristotle does find that funny. Bring that back. Bring it back. The hedgehog clock. Perfect. In 348, a big thing happens to him. The death of Plato, 348 BCE. His tutor, his great intellectual figurehead dies.

And again, the idyllic life comes crashing down around him. And you might assume that he gets the gig teaching at the academy, takes over running the school. I wouldn't assume that. No? Okay. Well, no, because clearly he's gone into the natural sciences. Plato is going, this guy's lost the plot. He'd be the equivalent of a fringe scientist these days. You'd be like, what's happened to this guy? He was so that the brain's gone faulty. Get him out. He's in the wrong bit of the library. He'd be in your book, couldn't he? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. No, I...

I assume because of the power of Plato as well that other people around him would be going, why is he talking, why is he looking at mushrooms? What's going on? Well, you've clearly deduced what happened because he doesn't get the job that he's expecting. The rivals sort of step in and muscle him out and it's a guy called Spusippus. Yeah, which means enthusiast for horses. LAUGHTER

He was, to my mind, a rather boring mathematician. And nobody's ever heard of him. But he was also related to Plato. Oh, nepotism. Partly nepotism, but I suspect it was much more envy that all the other people at the academy just couldn't stand the fact that this guy so outclassed them that instead of saying, great, we make him in charge and we're in his slipstream and we can all benefit...

It's bye-bye Aristotle. So he doesn't get the gig and he instead, he gets an invitation to go to a new place. He does. And this place is called Assos. Yeah. Okay. And off he goes to Assos, which is where? It's absolutely stunning. It's on the western coast of Turkey, but further down. And it's all

The nearest island is Lesbos, so as you can see, it's about sort of halfway down. And he's invited by a guy called Hermias, who is a former slave who's now ended up as king. That's what they say. There's been some sort of coup. He may have committed murder. He may have murdered the tyrant. He's become...

or tyrant, which means somebody who's come into monarchical power but not through hereditary. And he invites Aristotle over, apparently, to help him write a constitution. Which sounds very progressive and modern, doesn't it? So he heads off to Assos. I spent most of my 30s on Assos too, but I was mostly trying to buy skinny jeans. LAUGHTER

That would be an Aristotle joke. That's appropriate wit, everyone. I bet there was an equivalent joke for that. So Assos, he goes there and he finds love. He does. It's either Hermiaus' daughter or his adopted daughter or possibly his niece. But anyway, it's a...

posh woman in his court called Pythias called Pythias yeah what's that mean well it means like the sort of big snake at Delphi the python yeah but that's okay sort of snaky lady which is snaky lady what should we call our daughter snake snake lady yeah

Anyway, he marries her and it seems to have been very happy. And they have a daughter together, also called Pythias, because Aristotle apparently, you know, he's run out of names. He's like, well, you know, I've met one. Well, it's possible, but it's also possible that she actually died in childbirth. Oh, really? In which case it would have been very natural to call the little girl Pythias. Oh, that's sad. Oh, right. So we don't know? We don't really know. Oh, OK. It's interesting what we know and don't know. It's only lasted a couple of years. OK, so he's raising the baby on his own.

Apparently. Ah, it's suddenly taken a turn, isn't it? He does refer, though, to people who send babies out to wet nurses quite often. Okay, so he's got some help. He's got a constitution, all right. Yes, he has. But they move to the Isle of Lesbos. They do. Which is not far from Assos. And we've got this single dad with his little girl.

What do you think they get up to on Lesbos? What do you think Aristotle's going to do? I'm not going to take the bait, buddy. Nice try. Well, I don't know. Give me a bit more about Lesbos. What is the island like? Is it populated at this point? It is. Very much so. There are three big cities. The biggest is Mytilene. And it's a place of great culture. It's deeply cultured. Right. Very ancient. It's had the poet Sappho.

It's had another very famous poet called Alsaeus. It's already in the Iliad as the land of fair women. Also got the most extraordinary natural world. I mean, it's got... Botanists today will say it's got outstanding amount of really interesting plants that don't exist anywhere else. And it's got this massive lagoon, which is a lake, which is mainly freshwater, but it actually blurs into saltwater and meets the sea. And it had...

such an amazing amount of interesting creatures living in it that Aristotle said, I know what I want to be now. I'm going to be a marine zoologist. Did he invent that? Yeah. Wow. I'm going to be a thing I've just invented. At 37, he's like, I'm just going to invent marine biology. And you know, the original Adam's Family movie, not the TV series, they have a pet octopus. Yeah. Because it's a cephalopod. Do you know what they call it?

Aristotle. Yeah. Imagine if you were able to tell him the influence he's had on the world. The octopus. Yeah. The question of what did he do with his daughter? I do. I want to know if sometimes scientists do look at their young as possibly an experiment. And that's why I was asking about the island. Was it to separate them?

the daughter from the mainland so as to just bring her up believing in weird stuff. But possibly not. I don't think so. The fact is he got a very good friend, either already had or more likely made. But there was this young guy who was 17 years younger than him, so about 20.

called Theophrastus, who means speaks like a god. And he is a lesbian. He lives on Lesbos. Stop it. I'm just mirroring what you're saying. He's obsessed with plants. And I think they quite literally decided over whatever the ancient ouzo was to invent zoology and botany together. And I think he's probably living off Theophrastus' hospitality.

But what I really admire is for all he knew, he was going to be stuck on that island as a poor relation, as it were, forever. Right. And he says, OK, if I'm going to be stuck on this island, what's this island got?

I will devote my life to inventing Zoology. Do you see what I mean? He's not desperately trying to get his job back in Africa. No, if life gives you lemon, you know. Study that lemon and write a book about it. Right, exactly. Invent lemon studies. Yeah. But it does sound like he, it doesn't matter what his life circumstance would have been, the curious mind would have just explored any surrounding. I think that's exactly.

And so when he's there, he describes 500 species of animal. He's looking at plants as well. Yeah, but it was easier back then. There was so much, nothing had been described. But he also invents environmental thinking. One of the things he sees or doesn't see in the lagoon, he says there used to be a thing called a red scallop. The fishermen have told me, he talked to all the people who really knew, the fishermen have told me, but overfishing is...

has killed it. It is extinct. Yeah, oh wow. He actually says that. That's the first reference in world literature to human industrial farming or anything actually killing off a species. And extinction is an idea that isn't really rediscovered until the 18th century. So he's now actually quite big in green circles. Guys, controversial theory.

I think he might have been a time traveler. This feels like someone who's like almost a glitch. Yeah. Like too much information just poured out of one person. You think he's got a wristwatch? You think it is? I think if we are living in a simulation, he got the extra weapons. I knew you'd make it weird. I didn't think it would be this far in. Well, I needed to hear the evidence first. And clearly... It's like Cyborg Aristotle. Something's going on. Yeah. But we're ready, you know.

this is not your average human. People listening are going to be like, yes, Dan, it's Aristotle. That's why we're talking about him. Exactly, yeah. No, but you're right. He's extraordinary in every way. And he's not flawless, and we'll talk about some of his flaws later, but I think he's one of the most interesting people in history. Mm-hmm.

So on Lesbos, he is raising his little daughter. It's almost like two men and a little baby. It's like these two brilliant scientists and a little girl. It's like a really charming rom-com. Two men, a baby and a hundred octopuses. Now it feels like a novel. Now it feels more like literary fiction. So he describes 500 species at least. He writes, I think, 10 books on animals, as well as many other things. Theophrastus is writing about plants and they're sort of chatting and comparing notes.

So Sappho had been a couple of centuries before. She'd written lyric poetry. Aristotle then invented zoology. So Lesbos, they're both writing about the birds and the bees, but in totally different ways. It's really nice, isn't it? It's an amazing sort of place. But sticking with Aristotle's scientific work, I mean, he gets things wrong. Mini quiz for you, Dan. Here are five myths that were believed in the ancient world. Aristotle believed four of them. Which of them did he disprove? Number one, women have fewer teeth than men.

Number two, eels do not reproduce. They spontaneously generate. Three, elephants cannot bend their knees. Four, the Earth is the centre of the universe. And five, a heavier object falls faster than a lighter one. Which of those did Aristotle disprove? I...

I think the teeth one is real. I think he actually pushed that, which that's one of the few things I know about Aristotle to think. But do you know what? Maybe women had fewer teeth back then. Maybe that's an evolutionary quirk that's happened since his time. Yeah.

Elephants can't bend their knees. I bet, did he ever see an elephant? That would be my first question. Elephants on Lesbos? Not sure. Another good novel, Elephants on Lesbos. Yeah, remember, he's getting information from other people as well. Later. I know, but everyone else is an idiot compared to this guy. He's just going to take that. I'm going to say the elephants one is the one that he disproved. You're right. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah, well done. I mean, process deduction, I guess because he's interested in animals. But yeah, he disproves that one. He believes the other four.

I very much doubt if Aristotle had ever seen an elephant. I suspect he got a letter from one of Alexander's lieutenants who had indeed seen elephant bendening in India. So he believes that women have fewer teeth than men. But the point about that one is that it's...

result of doing some empirical studies and drawing false inference from them. So I know because I've given birth to two children and breastfed two children and I have lost two teeth. So if you look into the mouth of a woman, you know, who had four children, which most women will have done in ancient Greece, they will have all lost one, two, three child because you do. And he'll have counted few if he did a test case of 30 women.

and they all have four fewer teeth than men, that is actually a perfectly valid inference from an empirical survey. But I imagine at the time that would have been such like a dinner party conversation. Have you heard Aristotle's latest? Women have fewer teeth. Quick, let's count. And then gradually you'd realize, oh, is he...

Well, you didn't have women at dinner parties. Yeah. The symposium is just... But he would have looked in any woman who was prepared to open her mouth and show her. You there, come here, show me your teeth. Including his daughter, presumably. Yeah, presumably, who wasn't a woman yet. And I think it may be the same with eels because I don't know an awful lot about eels and reproduction, but I

I suspect he got a tank and watched them for many hours because we know, for example, he sat looking at a chicken's egg for 20 days or something to see what happened to it. Because he did anatomy, didn't he? He did dissection. He also did dissection. He will have watched those eels and never actually seen them copulate or something and therefore inferred. So I'm not... I think...

I think laughing at him is wrong because he was drawing sometimes false inferences from studious empirical observation. Yeah, I don't think it should be laughed at anyway. I think this is a genius who is doing a lot of stuff. And yeah, you're occasionally going to have to abandon the latest thing. And not everybody's prepared to watch this.

A tank full of eels for several days. There you go. Dedication. That's the dedication. Didn't he have a thing about flies as well? Yeah, he looks at flies. He really was interested in crustaceans, wasn't he? Crabs, cuttlefish, lobsters, fish. So your podcast is called No Such Thing as a Fish. Yes. He would have had such an argument with you about that. He really would. But he would have loved to hear why you thought that because he spent ages trying to work out what is a fish, what isn't a fish. Is lobster a fish? Are they mammals? Yes, exactly. Right.

He's all confused with warm-blooded. And he argued against other philosophers using dichotomy, didn't he? He said that they're too simple in going things with wings, things without wings. He's like, no, no, no, it's way more complex. You've got to look at every small... He invented the spreadsheet, mate. Did he? Yeah, you can tell that from his work on volcanoes. He takes the test case. He builds up a relational database, which is no mean feat on ancient papyrus.

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Offer ends April 1st. Go to cheapcaribbean.com to start saving. He's on Les Boss, he's doing all this, he's having a great time, he's written stuff, and then suddenly he gets a job offer. Oh dear. From a man called Philip of Macedon, who's in the king business. And Philip says, I've got a kid over here, bit of a brat.

Could you teach him? And the kid's name is? Well, I've heard his name being mentioned a few times this episode. Alexander the Great. Not yet great. Not yet great. Alexander the... The brat. The brat. So he's the heir to the throne. He's the son of Philip's fourth wife, Olympias. Complicated court politics, murder, poison, intrigue. Absolutely. You never know you're going to survive through adulthood.

And Aristotle gets the gig and he decides to go. Why? Well, he gets the gig and decides to go. That's how it's always put in his biographies. We don't know any more about it. I would say when you get a letter from Philip, the greatest murderer the Greek world has ever known of Macedon, you don't sit around saying, I don't think I feel like that because you might be dead the next day. So you think he's a threat. Also, it did mean money, money, money, money.

money, money. And I think Aristotle already always had his eye on the long game, which was to found a university to completely outclass the academy. So, Dan, what would your curriculum be if you were going to have to educate a sort of tyrant's child? Wow. Well, if I was Aristotle... Well, you've got three sons, right? I have three sons. Yeah. I feel like it's a bit... I've got modern knowledge. I'm trying to put myself back into the fourth century. Okay. Yeah.

class on Excel spreadsheets. We've got to learn how to do that. Certainly if it's been invented just recently, that's kind of like the latest trendy thing. Joke writing classes with Aristotle. I believe that...

Do you think he has the mind of a tyrant? 13, 14. Yeah, but if you're... I always get the impression that the children of a dictator are a bit scary at that age. Yeah. Because they feel they can push everyone around. It's very Joffrey, Game of Thrones sort of risk, isn't it? It's sort of like a slightly psychopathic teenager. Yeah. So the question is, this is not normal teaching circumstances. You put your foot wrong, you might get killed, right, by the dad. So you've got to play into...

It's sort of like a lesson on my family and other villains, you know, teaching them how

But you also want to put love and interest into that. Aristotle doesn't want to raise someone dangerous. No, he wants to put, well, you've got the most curious man alive who's been tasked with a fertile brain who could change the world. I mean, that's a perfect combo, really. It must have been incredibly difficult. It must have been so hard to toe that line and maybe get in the subtle lessons of goodness while also making...

making the dad feel like he's not got a child who might not be a great warrior themselves. So, yeah, but largely Excel spreadsheets. Prepare for the workplace. Yeah. Because Alexander is told you don't have to be a philosopher, but please do listen to the philosophers.

Which feels like a compromise. Like, okay, all right, you're not going to be a philosopher, I get it, but can you at least listen to them? Well, he would have definitely taught him ethics, politics and rhetoric. This is a sort of curriculum, how to behave. So rhetoric is speech making. How to govern your country and how to speak in public. Yes, this has been the basis of it, but we simply don't know. And everything that Aristotle wrote after...

Alexander went east. Philip died and Alexander went east. And Aristotle went straight back to Athens and founded the Lyceum. Everything he wrote after, he never really talks about Massa. And he does talk about things like really evil, very rich people. LAUGHTER

Or what happens in tyrants' households. You know, that kind of thing. But he doesn't put names to it usually. Yes. We don't get a sense that he had a good time in Macedonia. No. Do we know much about what Alexander the Great mentioned about him in his...

No, because Alexander the Great we know even less about than Aristotle. All the sources are so late. And myths were being made because he died out there. He never came back. He crossed the Hellespont and never came back. He liked being on campaign with all his male mates and drinking himself stupid. I mean, he did. And I think that's one thing Oliver Stone got.

over quite well in that movie. He liked that life. He never wanted to come back and be a responsible ruler. On the curriculum question, I do feel like I would have a superpower to be a teacher back then because I do very often in the various other things that I do say something that sounds factual, sounds confident, but is absolutely not true, it turns out. And people believe me because of the rest of my... You have a natural authority. Yeah. You do. And in this day and age, unfortunately, people can Google it and tell me I'm wrong. LAUGHTER

So it's aged 48 that we get Aristotle returning to Athens, you know, and he's lived life by this point. He has written a new constitution. He's fallen in love. He's become a new dad. He's been widowed. He's invented zoology. He's invented marine biology. He's tutored a trust fund brat and survived the most dangerous blaze in the world. And he's gone back home to Athens, you'd think to take up his job at the academy, but he doesn't, right? He ends up

a rival school, which I don't know if that's petty. No, it's not petty. No? He just wanted to run his own show. I completely get it. He didn't want to go back to all those old rivalries. But that school is called the Lyceum. And because Theophrastus was natural science and he did it with Theophrastus. So he brings Theophrastus with him. Utterly loyal to Theophrastus, yes. They do it together. Is he received back into Athens as a kind of returning hero? Well, not as a returning hero, I don't think, but as a perfectly welcome resident alien. He never got citizenship.

Never, really? But I think he got loads of money. I have to say this. I think he was very sensible that he will have been paid extremely well being with Philip of Macedon's court. So he took that money and ran and stayed alive and ran. And then put some money into the school. Yes. So the Lyceum is arguably the first teaching university.

The academy is a philosophy class, but this has got a library. This feels like it's something different. It is something different. One of the things that he did was lecture to the public in the afternoons. They had public lectures. I mean, he saw it as a public-facing institution. And he wrote lots of books, which we very sadly haven't got, which put his complicated ideas in very simple form to circulate amongst the general public. He was highly committed to that. And he genuinely believed, he said, if everybody could do something

what I say about trying to be a good person and about running your cities, the world would be a better place. He'd actually believed it. But he only stayed alive for about 13 years. But in that 13 years, my goodness, what he did. Yeah. And his followers were called the peripatetics. Yes. Which means people who walk. Yes. There's two theories about that. There were two theories in antiquity. One is that there was a covered thing like a cloister at the

which is called the peripatos, so that they could walk around even in the rain, which is what monks do. It's very useful. You know, you go to Bologna every...

or it's because he liked hiking. And the Greek for walking even today is per patau. It's the same word. I go walking. But it could be both. He could like walking in his cloister and going out hiking. Right. Where's his daughter at this point? She's with him and he's got a new girlfriend who he never seems to marry.

She's called her Pyllis, and she seems to be a slave or commoner in some way that he couldn't marry. Maybe she, I don't know. You know, we don't know why he didn't marry her, but he treated her as his wife. She was from Stagra. He was very, very attached to her, and he had his son, Nicomachus, named after, in the Greek way, his father. Yes, so the father of the GP, Nicomachus. Yes, after whom the Nicomachean ethics...

His name. You're holding up a book? I'm holding up the Nike McKeon Ethics. Yeah. Which I, you know, just happen to have in my pocket. So this is one of... So he writes 160 books or treatises. Yeah. And a lot of them, I think, in that time or finished them in that time. How big are these books? Like, are we talking like word count per book? Oh, God. They vary between 5,000 to 120,000. Okay. Yeah. I mean, we've got a lot of his... We've only got 31 of his 160 books. So we don't... We only have...

A small percentage, but we know kind of what he's writing and it's extraordinary. And he's writing books on physics, on metaphysics, on Nike McKeon ethics, the politics, on the soul. He writes about the soul. He writes about animals. He writes about storytelling. He writes about jurisprudence and law and justice and equity. Like he's just every subject. Logic. He's doing everything. And the thing that I suppose he's most famous for in moral philosophy is what we call virtue ethics. Yeah.

How would you sum that up? I mean, it's a big subject. How would you sum that up quickly on a comedy podcast? Okay, you're more likely to be happy if you try to be nice, A. And B, you don't have to suppress your emotions and instincts. You've just got to get them in the right amount. That's it. Job done. Yeah, that's beautiful. So I love this because I'm a creature of huge excess. And so I was always told in my Christian household and the binary system, which is also Platonism, that, you know,

Having a sexual urge is bad. Having anger is bad. Wanting revenge is bad. You know, it's all good, bad, good, bad. What Aristotle says is, no, there's a right amount of revenge. There's a right amount of sex. There's a right amount of wine. Right. Which he calls the golden mean, right? Well, he calls it the mean. The Romans then called it the golden. Okay. Yeah. Tomesson.

Yeah, which basically... It's so sensible. It's sensible centrist politics. It's what we want. And there are words that are used in philosophy. Eudaimonia? Yeah, that means... Flourishing. Flourishing. It's more a verb than a noun. Oh, is it? It's not happiness, but living your life in a way that will conduce to happiness.

And you means good and daimonio means spirit. Yeah. I like the word felicity, which was the Romans translated it as. Felicity. And then the other one would be arete, which means moral excellence, I suppose. So those are the sort of two Greek ideas. And your telos, your goal. Yeah. Your end. Your dunamis is your potential. And he's called Aristotle. He's called the ultimate goal. He is. He's called the ultimate best goal. So be good, be happy, and you will be good. And if you be good, you'll be happy. Basically. Yeah.

It's pretty good, isn't it? It's very simple. Yeah. I think it's true as well. He doesn't need my backing. And there's no life after death. It's all about now. That's very important. So be here now. He's very zen, isn't he? It's very zen. It's now. It's now. This is it. You won't get punished afterwards. You'll just be miserable now if you're nasty. Does he believe in the gods? Sort of. But they're kind of these weird things that live far away on the planet. Yeah. No interest. The unmoved mover. Yeah. He has no interest or she.

has no interest whatsoever in human life, you are at your dashboard. You've got to sort it out. Humans have got to sort it out. You know, you can't look to the beyond for any moral answers. Was that a wild concept to not have the gods? Fairly, fairly. Right, and to say that there's no life after death. So again, a fringe sort of like idea. He's a maverick, isn't he? He really is. Yeah. But you've got to take charge. This is it. You've got potential. You've got your life. So he's all about self-knowledge. He's all about moderation. Yeah.

He's trying to create a better world by...

Creating better individuals. Starting from the individual. Exactly. Plato's starting from dictating the look of the state from top to bottom. Yes. Plato's writing about the polis, the city, the empire. And he actually, you see, he even hates adultery, which is amazing for an ancient Greek guy. And the reason is not because of, you know, whatever. It's because the ultimate building block of society, he says, is the couple. Yeah. And he is prepared to envisage gay couples, right? There is a couple. The partnership comes before even the children, right?

He says, if that is corrupted by disloyalty or lies, then you've corrupted the foundation. So you know that classic question of if you could have a dinner party with any guests from history. So Aristotle seems like he's the perfect guest to be there.

Out of curiosity, if he was at my dinner party and he saw women at the table at my other, what would he be saying there? I think he was a bit of a flirt, actually. Interesting. He constantly cites the example of what to do if you really, really fancy your neighbour's wife. Hang on a minute. You said adultery was a bad thing. No, he doesn't. He's coveting his neighbour's wife. He says what to do. And then he gives you the example of Helen of Troy. Yeah. And he says, be like the old men in the Iliad who said when they saw her, God, she's beautiful, but sent her back because she's caused the war.

Wow. Okay. He says, do with your lady you're infatuated with or man you're infatuated with. Yeah. Do the Helen. You say, yes, you're gorgeous. I'll bugger off. That's a shame because Helen's also at my dinner party. Sorry, Helen. Got to go.

I think we do. I mean, we've spent a lot of the episode saying what an extraordinary man. And I'm not going to back away from that. But he has flaws. He's not a saint. There are things that he believed that we would find repellent. Absolutely. One of them was that he did not believe women were as intellectually capable as men. Right.

So he thinks women are not as smart? We do not have a deliberative capacity. We can't think things through. We're all emotion. Therefore, we cannot have full citizenship. So it's the idea of logos, is it, or logic? Yes. We don't have, well, it's precisely deliberative that you cannot think through decisions rationally. He's also, he's ancient Greek, so he is a slave owner.

Because they all are. Well, he also came out with the big justification of slavery that I'm afraid was wheeled out ever from the 15th century to the American Civil War. He was responsible for that.

I think the slavery thing is the thing where we really struggle with that. It's a very big one, yeah. Yeah, because he's often been called a biological misogynist because of his science, but I don't think that's entirely fair. But he does think that it's a man's job to think. Yeah, but he does even, I mean, I'm not trying to defend him on this, but he does even say there is a really big problem because quite a lot of slaves do appear to be actually...

as good and big and clever as we are. His empirical good sense, he does actually admit that. And he also, in his will, had all his own slaves freed so they wouldn't be sold on. Okay. And is that... Most unusual. That's unusual. Okay. A lot of slaves were perfectly happy if they got a good master, I think. The worst thing was if you've got a good master, so you're basically okay. You're not being flogged to death every day, whatever, you know.

If you're then sold on, you have no idea who you're going to. So he made sure that didn't happen. Yeah. There still is a bit of a plot twist on Aristotle. But, you know, that is going to happen. We know what Aristotle looked like, which is quite rare. We know.

We know what he looks like. We have a copy of a sculpture done by him by someone who knew him. So the guy was called Lysippos, who did a bronze of him. We don't have the bronze. We've got a later Roman copy in marble. Do you want to describe him for us? Very lovely beard. Yes. Very curly. His hair is... Hmm.

Hmm. I don't know if anyone's seen modern day Ron Weasley at his age. It's got this floppish look about it. He's got quite a pronounced upper forehead, I would say. Big brain. For that big old brain. Yeah. Walking library. Yeah.

His nose quite dented. I'm not going to say substance abuse, but it looks like the old white powder might have gone in there. Surely that's an athletic injury from his teenage years. Yes, exactly. He was a jock, yeah. No, it's very white eyeballs, no pupils. They would have been painted in. So this would have been a painted statue. That's why I say he looks exactly like my husband.

Oh, congratulations. Wow. It took me a very long time. I was 32 until I found one who looked exactly like Aristotle. Yeah. And you locked him down. It's quite rare for us to have a portrait of a Greek philosopher. That's amazing. So this is a statue. This is a statue done by someone who knew him. Well, he must have known him because he was at the court in Macedon at the same time as he was. We do have to kill Aristotle off. He sort of dies slightly in ignominy. He's sort of chased out of Athens.

Yes. Why? Okay, so that's to do with Macedonian high politics. This is after Alexander dies and there's lots of jockeying for power and influence and the Athenians don't want to be taken over by the Macedonians because he's got Macedonian connections.

They accuse him of doing the same sort of things they did Socrates, which is subverting the youth, bringing in, you know, it's what he did to philosophers he didn't like. But instead of, he said, I'm not going to give you the satisfaction of doing a suicide thing like Socrates. I'm going to take the option of exile. And he goes off to the island of Euboea, which was not under Athenian jurisdiction, but where his mother came from and he had a house, takes his

her pillus and apparently his children. So he's got more kids at this point? Well, you know, he's got the two. Yeah. He's got Nicomicus and the older girl, Pygothias. Okay. And seems to write about his very detailed will and dies apparently of stomach cancer about a year later. And Theothrastes stays behind in that? Yes. And keeps his books? Yes.

And that's how we have them, right? Well, there's a very long story behind that. But yes, he's got Theophrastus to leave everything to. And that must have been a very great comfort. I mean, Theophrastus was, you know, Nicomachus is still very young. He's got an

very adult son who's been his best friend for a very, very long time. Wonderful relationship. So he died soon after the sort of exile from Athens. And his reputation immediately after is not that burnished with glory. It takes a little while for people to rediscover his brilliance, I think. Is that fair? Yeah, because other more new and shiny philosophical schools took over, especially Stoicism and Epicureanism, which...

The peripatos, the academics at the Lyceum carried on and became one of the most dominant schools of antiquity, but not immediately after. It took a sort of century and a half or so, didn't it? Yes. This guy was pretty brilliant, actually. And then, of course, he was a huge deal in the Middle Ages. Yes, he was a huge deal in...

Well, Aquinas and the Latin church, that's another whole story. But he's had, in the 20th century, been rediscovered by ethics people because of this secular morality system seems to be the most close to what we need now of anything from antiquity. Of how to live a good life. Yes. Yeah. So there you go, Dan. Aristotle, pretty good life.

Yeah, he's all right. Yeah, no, what an incredible life. It feels silly again saying that because obviously it must be an incredible life, but I was surprised by how few details I knew about what he had actually achieved in his time. How old was he when he died?

63. 63. But when we did the Pythagoras episode, you were able to sort of knock down quite a few myths, but there was still an awful lot of stuff that we really struggled to get to grips with. Yeah, yeah. Here, we've just got so much. Well, Pythagoras himself left so little. We have actually almost everything I've said, 80% of it is out of his own work.

Yeah. Right. So this is solid testimony. And we've only got 31 books out of 160. Maybe one day others will show up somewhere. And I've also been to all of those places where he lived. And I've been to Lesbos. I've been to Assos.

I've been to Stagra. With your husband cosplaying alongside you as you're there. Actually, no, it was my 16-year-old daughter who made the movie that you can find on YouTube. Okay, nice. I've never read any Aristotle. If I went now to a bookshop and had to get one of his writing, what is the one? I would get History of Animals.

I would too. I read it this weekend. It's brilliant. It's such a read, isn't it? Yeah. It's a very good one to start kids off on as well. Great. It's a lot of narrative and description. It's not too full of logistical syllogisms. Yeah. The Nuance Window!

All right, time now for the nuance window. This is where Dan and I peripatetically promenade around the Lyceum for two minutes while Professor Edith tells us something that we need to know about Aristotle. My stopwatch is ready. You have two minutes, Edith. Take it away. The one thing that most people have heard about Aristotle was that Monty Python wrote a philosopher's song in which they quoted him.

Plato, they say, could stick it away, half a crate of whiskey every day. Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle. Hobbes was fond of his dram. René Descartes was a drunken fart. I drink, therefore I am. That may be the only thing you know about Aristotle, that he was indeed a bugger for the bottle. What I want to tell you, though, is that Monty Python can be completely plagiaristic. The history of Aristotle bottle songs goes all the way back to 1652. I have done this research.

And there is a tavern song by one John Hilton that was sung in 1652. So actually, it's a really dodgy moment because, you know, Oliver Cromwell's running the place and spoiling fun. But he says, come away, come away to the tavern, I say. Leave your prittle prattle, fill us a bottle. You're not so wise as Aristotle. What you probably don't know either is that Cockney slang for an arse, a back end, is an aris.

And the reason for this is extremely complicated because originally bottle and glass is the passing for arse. That goes to just bottle is your arse. But because bottle rhymes with Aristotle, Aristotle ends up as arse and it just ends up as Aris. Intellectual history and then we end up with a bum joke. That's what should be in his poetics about comedy, right? Yeah.

So there we go. 1652 they were doing that pun on bottle. Yeah, there's no new jokes. Apparently. There is no other modern language in which Aristotle rhymes with anything to do with alcohol, except English. It's something to be proud of. In the Greek pronunciation, is it Aristotle? Aristoteles. Aristoteles now. Yeah. But telis does not rhyme with bucala. So what do you know now?

Time now for the So What Do You Know Now? This is our quickfire quiz for Dan to see how much he has learned. We are fired. So much. I forgot about this. Last time out, Dan, you got 9.5 on Napoleon out of 10, which is really good. I mean, really good score. Yeah. I'm going to predict three this time. Three out of 10. Let's aim higher than that. Question one. What was the name of the independent Greek state where Aristotle was born? Paris.

Pass. I have no idea. Do you remember the nickname for it? Was it the snake woman? No. Was it the admirer? The Staggerer. The Staggerer. The horse's person? No. The Staggerer at the Dripping Place. The Dripping Place. The Dripping Place. So that was his hometown. Question two. Which god did a later writer claim Aristotle was descended from? The god of which type of discipline? No.

No, that's gone as well. Asclepius, god of medicine. Okay, question three. Plato had two nicknames for his clever Aristotle student. Can you name one of them? The brain and the walking library. Oh, very good. Well done. Question four. Which scientific field did Aristotle basically invent at the lagoon of Lesbos? Marine biology. It was, yeah. Question five. What name was shared by Aristotle's wife and daughter? Pissy office? Pissy office.

Pythias. Yeah, Pythias. Very good. Yeah, Pythias is correct. Yes, the snake lady. Question six. Why didn't Aristotle take over running the Athenian Academy when Plato died? Because he was a fringe scientist that no one wanted to hear about his weird mushroom theories. Yeah. He was a natural scientist. And there was a Nepo baby ready to take over. A Nepo baby. Yeah. It's a shame that the Nepo baby was not called Nepotism. I feel like that would have been a Greek. True. I don't know. It's Bucipus, wasn't it?

Question seven. Which famous prince did Aristotle tutor? Alexander, not yet, the great. Very good. The brat. The brat, Alexander the brat. Question eight. Aristotle's book, The Nagamekian Ethics, was dedicated to his son. Simply put, what philosophy does it profess? Was it the simple idea that...

You will be happy if you do what makes you happy and do good. Yeah, perfect. Was that it? Yeah, that's it. Question nine. Aristotle was 48 years old when he returned to Athens to found which pioneering school with an outreach programme and public lectures? It was called the Lyceum. It was. Very good. Question 10. Can you name one of the provisions in Aristotle's will? That's...

all of his slaves would be free. That's right. Yeah, absolutely. And he also left all his stuff too with Theophrastus and his furnishings to her pillars. Eight out of ten, Dan Schreiber. Wow. You started slightly wobbly and then you got stronger. It was really worrying at the beginning, wasn't it? And then, yeah.

A confidence took over. Staggerer was hard to remember. That was a tricky question. Well, I mean, we've had a really interesting chat. Are you kind of like on board with Aristotle? Because I think we're both team Aristotle over here. I'm massively team. I mean, outside of the stuff that is very questionable, I think in terms of I'm looking at him purely as someone who,

who was thinking differently, uniquely. What a brain, what an extraordinary footprint to have left on our planet, to have created marine biology, to have been the name of an octopus in the original Addams Family movie. What I would love to do now is just work out how much of modern day life is thanks to his brain, this one brain, this one blip of consciousness that has, yeah, and I think he's got a great champion in you. You wrote a book called The Aristotle's Way. Aristotle's Way. Okay, I'm reading that.

Because ancient wisdom being relevant today, I think, is something we often forget. Lovely stuff. Well, thank you so much, Dan. Thank you, Edith. And listener, for more applied philosophy, check out Edith's previous episode on Pythagoras, which was an absolute hoot. We also did an episode on medieval science. And if you want more Dan in your ears, you can scroll all the way down in the app back to 2019 to the Young Napoleon episode with Dr. Laura O'Brien. It's a really fun one.

And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review, share the show with your friends, subscribe to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sound so you never miss an episode. But I'd just like to say a huge thank you again to our guests. In History Corner from the University of Durham, we had the fantastic Professor Edith Hall. Thank you, Edith. Thank you. And in Comedy Corner, we had the brilliant Dan Schreiber. Thank you, Dan. Thanks, Greg.

To you, lovely listener, join me next time as we return to the classroom for another lesson from the past. But for now, I'm off to go and rewrite Aristotle's lost volume on comedy. I think it's mostly to do with bums. I mean, how hard can it be? Bye!

This episode of You're Dead to Me was researched by Madeleine Bracey. It was written by Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow, Emma Neguse and me. The audio producer was Steve Hankey and our production coordinator was Ben Holland. It was produced by Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow, me and senior producer Emma Neguse and our executive editor was James Cook. You're Dead to Me is a BBC Studios audio production for BBC Radio 4. Best medicine. Dissecting funny and fascinating medicine. I think pain management is the best medicine. Bibliotherapy. Therapy by books. Sleep.

Celebrating medicine's past, present and future. I think transplantation is the best medicine because it can completely change someone's life. Defibrillation. Oh, defibrillation. That's okay. Amazing machines. That much is clear. Sorry. That's the new series of Best Medicine from Radio 4 with me, Kiri Pritchard-McLean. Available now on BBC Sounds.

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