The Lagoon Page 4

  In another version, politics rather than pique causes Aristotle to flee. Aristotle has close connections to the Macedonian court. Amyntas’ son, Philip II, is flexing his military muscles in the Greek hinterland. He’s just razed Olynthus, an ally of Athens, to the ground and sold its citizenry – along with a garrison of Athens’ soldiers – into slavery. In Athens, Demosthenes is rousing the citizenry to new heights of xenophobia; Aristotle gets out while he can.

  The ancient sources do agree that when Aristotle left Athens, he went east: across the Aegean to the Asian Minor littoral, the edge of the Hellenic world, where micro-states swam precariously in the currents of Athenian, Macedonian and Persian power. Among these was Assos, a city-state on the southern coast of the Troad peninsula. Assos and its sister polis Atarneus were ruled by Hermias, a local strongman. Little is known about him except that he was born in obscurity, held power briefly and died horribly. He is said to have started life as the slave of a banker, the incumbent Tyrant of Assos, who, recognizing his talents, freed him and finally made him his heir. He is said to have been educated at Plato’s Academy. He is said to have been a eunuch. Much of this may be gossip designed to boost or blacken his reputation – the ancient sources are rarely impartial. Whatever his origins, it seems that he was something of an intellectual for when he became Tyrant in 351 he invited several Academicians to his court, Aristotle among them.

  In The Republic Plato speaks of how, in the ideal state, political power would be tempered by the wisdom of philosophy. In pursuit of this ideal, Plato had travelled to Sicily to play the sage to the dissolute Dionysos II of Syracuse, a project that had nearly cost him his life. Perhaps, then, Hermias was another try by the Academicians at the manufacture of a Philosopher King; a late biographical fragment suggests that the three years Aristotle spent in Assos did much to soften the rigour of the Tyrant’s rule. If so, then this project ended badly too. Hermias was sympathetic to Macedon. In 341, threatened by Macedonian expansionism, Athens told Philip to pull his troops out of the Troad. He did. Hermias was left dangling and the Persians, Athens’ temporary allies, trapped, tortured and killed him. Aristotle felt the loss keenly. Years later he erected a statue to him at Delphi which bore the inscription:

  His treatment was outrageous, flouting all respect for divine justice. His killer? The king of the bow-bearing Persians. It was no public contest, no fight to the death by a spear that brought him low. Just the dishonesty of a man he chose to trust.

  It also said that each day he would chant a paean for his murdered friend – perhaps the hymn that Diogenes Laertius records in his Lives of the Philosophers. The sentiment may seem extravagant, but it is also known that Aristotle married a girl called Pythia who was Hermias’ niece or perhaps even his daughter. He was thirty-eight or thirty-nine years old; his bride was probably very young. (In the Politics Aristotle says that the best age for a man to marry is thirty-seven; the best age for a woman, eighteen.) ‘A spray of myrtle and beauty of rose / were happiness in her hands, and her hair / fell as darkness on her back and shoulders . . .’: so Archilochus on another girl, from another place and another time, but I fancy she was like that.

  A GREEK GIRL

  XII

  THE RUINS OF ancient Assos are set upon an extinct volcano that rises steeply from the plain and shore below. A temple to Athena with five standing Doric columns crowns the Acropolis; the foundations of the stoa, bouleuterion, gymnasium, agora and a theatre lie below on the sea-facing slope. In his Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce (1809) Choiseul-Gouffier wrote, ‘Few cities are blessed with a situation as happy and spectacular as that of Assos . . .’ and gave a delightful, if wildly inaccurate, reconstruction of what it looked like in its prime. William Martin Leake said it was the most perfect idea of a Greek city.

  Walk up the slopes of the citadel at dusk, through the Turkish village, jump the fence that surrounds the ancient ruins, and you can still see how beautiful Assos must have been. You cannot, however, see what Choiseul-Gouffier and Leake saw. In 1864 the Turkish government demolished much of the still-intact ancient city and used the stone to build the docks of Istanbul’s Arsenal. By then the French had taken, as a gift of the Sublime Porte, the temple reliefs and put them in the Louvre. This was just as well. In 1881 an American team, excavating what was left, had to cope with villagers carting off newly dug up walls and stoning a marble centaur that the French had missed.

  The temple at Assos was about 180 years old in Aristotle’s day, but the theatre is Hellenistic. The view from the citadel cannot have changed much. The massively immovable eastern wall still stands. The surrounding hills are covered with native scrub and the valleys with oaks – the tourist resorts are further down the coast and there aren’t even many olive groves. Nothing disturbs you bar a Turkish F-16 arrowing above, testing the fragile airspace frontiers, and the occasional bleat of a goat. But it is the island that compels your attention. Lesbos lies directly before you, astonishingly close, in mounting layers of grey and blue. You feel you could swim there and the urge to do so is almost irresistible, though the Strait of Mytilene is, at its narrowest, nine kilometres wide. You cannot see Lesbos and not want to go. It promises discovery.

  ASSOS, RESTORED.

  LESBOS FROM THE CITADEL OF ASSOS, AUGUST 2012

  XIII

  IN 345, WHILE HERMIAS still ruled, Aristotle took his bride to live on Lesbos. Thompson, a romantic, called the two years that Aristotle spent on the island ‘the honeymoon of his life’. Perhaps it was; but, in truth, nothing is known about what, exactly, he did there for he left us no diaries or notebooks and the ancient biographers are silent. Yet, if D’Arcy Thompson is right, it was on Lesbos that Aristotle began the great work of charting, and understanding, the world of living things.

  It may have been a conversation; a chance comment that prompted an excited reply. And then more talk, and yet more, until a vision of the whole enormous, daunting, thrilling thing emerged. It’s an appealing thought – that biology began so. And it’s not an implausible one. For when Aristotle went to Lesbos it seems that he had at least one other philosopher to talk to: a man who would become one of his closest friends and who would inherit his intellectual wealth.

  Tyrtamos was born in Eresos, a town on the south-west coast of Lesbos. The valleys around Eresos (modern Erresos) were green with vineyards; the town was famous for its wine. Today those same valleys are dry and uncultivated, yet the remains of ancient terraces can still be seen. We do not know when and how Tyrtamos and Aristotle met. It’s possible that the younger man – he was thirteen years Aristotle’s junior – was one of Aristotle’s pupils at the Academy who had followed him to Assos. If so then Tyrtamos was now introducing his master to his native land. Or perhaps Tyrtamos was never in Athens at all and only met Aristotle in Lesbos – a fluent young local, out to impress and catch an eminent visitor’s ear. We’re not even sure what his name was: Strabo has it ‘Tyrtamos’, Diogenes Laertius, ‘Tyrtanios’. Actually, the spelling doesn’t matter since Tyrtamos/Tyrtanios is quite forgotten. Aristotle renamed the youth Theophrastus which means ‘Divine Speech’. He would become Aristotle’s closest collaborator. Socrates–Plato–Aristotle–Theophrastus: we have met the next link in a golden chain.

  ‘Divine Speech’ is an odd name for a man whose writings, for all their importance, are as dry as the summer soil. One of his surviving books is Characters, an encyclopaedia of people you’d want to avoid – the Boor, the Penurious Man, the Chatty Man and so on interminably. It’s as dull as it sounds. Theophrastus also wrote books on logic, metaphysics, politics, ethics and rhetoric – the whole Aristotelian gamut in fact – but they haven’t survived. His botany, however, has. It is superb.

  Theophrastus wrote two botanical works. One, Enquiries into Plants, is descriptive. In it Theophrastus identified the parts of plants and used them to classify plants into groups – trees, shrubs, sub-shrubs, herbs – groups that persisted to the Renaissance. The other, Explanations of Plants, is about how plants gr
ow. It examines the effects of environment on their growth, discusses the cultivation of trees and crops and investigates the diseases of plants and why they die. Together, these works are to the study of plants what Aristotle’s works are to the study of animals – the founding documents of their science.*

  It is a charming conceit to think of the two philosophers strolling in an olive grove, not too far from the Lagoon, dividing up the natural world between them; agreeing, as any two scientists might, to collaborate rather than compete: ‘You do the plants, I’ll do the animals – and together we’ll lay the foundations of biology.’ Charming, but too simple. Theophrastus wrote books about animals and Aristotle wrote at least one about plants; but in both cases they have been lost. That botanists look to one as the founder of their science and zoologists the other is, it seems, largely due to the vicissitudes of history – which texts the monks chose to save. Yet it cannot be a coincidence that Aristotle took to studying animals in the native land of the other great biologist of antiquity. Their research programmes and lives are deeply intertwined. Theophrastus succeeded Aristotle as the head of the Lyceum and inherited his most valued possession: his library.

  Yet they are very different thinkers. Where Aristotle rarely shies from a bold explanation, Theophrastus is cautiously empirical; where Aristotle is synoptic, Theophrastus prefers to worry at difficulties. Given this, it’s often supposed that Aristotle dominated the collaboration, and certainly he must have been hard to resist. Even so, placing them both on Lesbos does make one wonder which of them first had the idea to study living things. Who persuaded whom?

  XIV

  TO GET TO LESBOS take the evening ferry from Piraeus. If you are young or poor or hardy, travel deck class – thirty euros will take you across the Aegean. You will have to find a place among the gypsy families encamped in the stairwells, the soldiers returning to their island garrisons who occupy the bar, or else the farmers returning to their olive groves who have taken over the lounge. Or you may want to take a cabin – it’s a twelve-hour trip.

  Athens falls away and you’re in the blue. At three in the morning the ship docks at Chios. She’s as large as the harbour is small and so, turbines thrashing, she rotates on her own 135-metre axis to get in. Under flood-lights white-uniformed Port Police shrill their whistles and wave their arms to choreograph the container trucks and the frankly uncontrollable foot passengers. Yet it’s all implausibly efficient. Thirty minutes later she sounds her horn over the sleeping town, rotates again and faces the Aegean once more.

  Dawn silhouettes the Turkish coast black against red. Lesbos appears in the growing light, first pine-clad Mount Olymbos and then the rocky Southern Shore. Cape Malea is rounded: Lesbos lies to port, Assos off the starboard bow and, soon, Mytilene is before you, the cathedral’s marble dome stark white in the morning sun.

  I have a Mytilenean ritual. As the ship docks, I call Giorgos K. to meet me at a harbour café. A mathematical ecologist at the local university, he is my oldest and dearest friend on the island. The arc of our conversation is always the same: first science, then women – progress and difficulties with both. He has a wayward sensuality, all too generous charm and does not, his friends agree, deserve his beautiful wife. We could mark the years by those talks.

  I mention him now because it was he who first took me to Kalloni. We drove north out of Mytilene, skirted the Gulf of Gera, Kalloni’s grey little sister, and then cut south-west through the pine-covered lower slopes of Olymbos, emerging at Achladeri where the Lagoon unfolds before you surprisingly vast. There is an excellent fish taverna there, olive groves and, it is said, a few remains of the ancient town of Pyrrha that once stretched down the coast to some neighbouring villages, but I’ve never found them.

  Archaeology, however, doesn’t make the argument: the book and the island do. Of all the places in the Eastern Aegean where Aristotle lived, Lesbos is the loveliest. Here, as nowhere else, on this bleak, baked coast the natural world is richly present and seductive; and in Lesbos nowhere more so than by Kalloni. To go down to the quay of one of the villages that dot the shores of Kalloni on a spring morning is to see Historia animalium spring to life. You can see Aristotelian fishes – perkē, skorpaina, sparos and kephalos – gasping in the back of the buyers’ pick-up trucks.* Those are the names that Aristotle used and, for these fish at least, they’ll still work if you want to buy some to grill. You can also buy a bucket of cuttlefish and, following his text, dissect them. You can lean over the side of a quay, reach down and bring up sea squirts, sea anemones, sea cucumbers, limpets and crabs – all of which he describes. The decks of the fishing boats are littered with the shells and egg cases of the murex snails that infest the bottom of the Lagoon and whose reproductive habits puzzled him so. You can walk along the marshes by the saltpans and see the grebes, ducks, ibises, herons and stilts whose anatomies and habits fascinated him so. You can see European bee-eaters, loveliest of the spring migrants, with their turquoise, gold, ochre and green plumage, nesting in the sand banks, just as he says they do. This is how Thompson put it: ‘He will be a lucky naturalist who shall go some day and spend a quiet summer by that calm lagoon, find there all the natural wealth, * and have around his feet the creatures that Aristotle knew and loved.’ I have done so. He is right.

  THE

  KNOWN

  WORLD

  CHAMAILEŌN – CHAMELEON – CHAMAELEO CHAMAELEON CHAMAELEON

  XV

  TO ASSERT THAT ARISTOTLE was a scientist is to suppose that we can recognize one. Sociologists and philosophers have long tried to get the creature in their sights, with indifferent results, for so diverse are their activities and preoccupations that it is hard to find a definition that will embrace them all yet exclude astrologers. Scientists, who are much less exercised about definitions, simply recognize their kin but, if pressed, might offer something like ‘A scientist is someone who seeks, by systematic investigation, to understand experienced reality.’ This definition, a generous one, allows room for theoretical physicists and coleopterists and some sociologists too; and, though we may quibble about the edges, it narrows the field of human activity considerably, excluding gardeners and physicians (no systematic investigation), literary critics and philosophers (no experienced reality), as well as homeopaths and creation-‘scientists’ who fail on both counts. It includes Aristotle, whose investigations were nothing if not systematic and who was deeply committed to understanding experienced reality. To be sure, Aristotle never called himself a ‘scientist’, but he did have a term for ‘natural science’ – physikē epistēmē, literally the ‘study of nature’. And he called himself not merely a physiologos – ‘one who gives an account of nature’ – but a physikos – ‘one who understands nature’.

  XVI

  IN THE COLLECTION OF treatises now called the Metaphysics, Aristotle investigates fundamental reality. His ideas are not easy to understand: exegesis of its fourteen books has kept scholars busy for hundreds of years and will certainly do so for hundreds more. Happily we do not have to follow them to appreciate the luminous quality of its opening words:

  All men, by nature, desire to know. An indication of this is the delight that we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and, above all others, the sense of sight . . . The reason is that this, most of all the senses, acquaints us with, and brings to light, many differences between things.

  Aristotle does not mean ‘know’ just in the sense of ‘understand’; he also means ‘perceive’. Thus in the first instance we should read his words as the claim that men take pleasure in the exercise of their senses, and the reason why they do so is because it allows them to perceive all the different things of which the world is composed. This is merely an opening gambit. For Aristotle goes on to argue that ‘knowing’ in the sense of ‘perceiving’ is the foundation of ‘knowing’ in the sense of ‘understanding’ – indeed, is a requirement for wisdom. The reason, then, that this statement comes at the very start
of the Metaphysics is plain. Aristotle is raising his battle standard and declaring war on the Academy’s idealism. His project is not Plato’s, for it concerns this world – and he wants us to know it.

  To get from perception to wisdom, Aristotle gives us a hierarchy of understanding. When we perceive something, he says, we acquire a memory of it. And many memories of a given kind of thing allow us to generalize about it. Memories of Socrates and Plato, say, allow us to generalize about ‘men’. This is Aristotle opening another front contra Plato who held that we are born with all the knowledge that we have – indeed all the knowledge that we could have, that is, all the knowledge in the world. It’s just that, unfortunately, we have forgotten it; our task, then, is to retrieve that knowledge. Such an epistemology is, of course, a call to empirical quietism. If we already know everything, then we need not actually investigate the world; perhaps if we talk about it enough it will all come back to us. It is no accident that Plato wrote dialogues.

  But talk, for Aristotle, is cheap. Even experience, although necessary for art and science, is not enough. Aristotle explains why it isn’t by imagining a not very bright, but practically minded, physician, the sort of physician who supposes that since a remedy worked on one man it will probably work on another as well, but who doesn’t understand or care why it works at all. Brute empiricism of that sort is useful, says Aristotle, but really not that admirable. In fact, he’s very severe on mere empiricism and compares labourers undertaking tasks learnt by rote to ‘lifeless things’: they do what they do merely because that is what they do.* Master-workmen who understand the whys of their craft are ‘more honourable and know in a truer sense and are wiser’ than such machine-men. (Politics 1253b31: ‘A slave is a living tool . . .’)