After his death, the school endured for several centuries, drawing students (mainly young Athenian males) from all over the Mediterranean. Aristotle lectured, wrote, and compiled a library here.

Nicomachean Ethics is based on Aristotle’s lecture notes for the Lyceum, the philosophy school he founded in Athens around 334 B.C.

Aristotle himself wasn’t an Athenian citizen, and he had close personal connections with the court of the Macedonian kings, including leadership of the royal academy, where he taught future rulers including Alexander, Ptolemy, and Cassander. Although the Macedonians portrayed themselves as Greeks, Greeks themselves tended to view the Macedonians as foreign invaders, leading to cultural tensions. (The Nicomachean Ethics is probably named for Aristotle’s son and/or his father.) After Alexander the Great’s death in 323, anti-Macedonian sentiment broke out anew in Athens, so Alexander relocated once more, to the island of Euboea, where he died the following year.Īristotle was alive when, under Philip II and later his son Alexander the Great, the kingdom of Macedon conquered Greece and the Persian Empire.

After his wife Pythias’s death, Aristotle had a son, Nicomachus, with a woman named Herpyllis. Sometimes referred to simply as “The Philosopher,” Aristotle’s ideas have borne tremendous influence on subsequent philosophy up to the present day-not just in ancient Greece or Western Europe, but in the medieval Islamic world as well-and for centuries his thought also influenced approaches to the natural sciences, psychology, politics, and rhetoric. Aristotle’s philosophical teaching departed from Plato’s in important ways, especially in his rejection of Plato’s teaching on the Forms, which Aristotle saw as too abstract to be generally useful. In 334, he returned to Athens, where he founded his own philosophical school, the Lyceum. A few years later, he moved back to Macedon, where, in 343, he began tutoring the young Alexander the Great. After that, Aristotle lived in Asia Minor, where he continued studying philosophy under the patronage of Hermeias, a pro-Macedonian ruler, and whose daughter, Pythias, he married. Few details are known of his life before 367 B.C., when he traveled to Athens to study at Plato’s Academy, remaining there until Plato’s death in 347. Aristotle was the son of a doctor named Nicomachus, who served the Macedonian court.

Nichomachean