Aristotle: Ancient Greece’s greatest philosopher?

Greg Jenner is joined in ancient Greece by Professor Edith Hall and comedian Dan Schreiber to learn all about famous philosopher Aristotle and his world changing ideas. Born a doctor’s son in the coastal settlement of Stagira, Aristotle would go on to revolutionise intellectual life in the west, writing on everything from theatre and the arts to politics, moral philosophy and zoology. After studying under Plato at his academy, Aristotle became a teacher himself, tutoring none other than a young Alexander the Great in Macedon before returning to Athens to found his own school, the Lyceum. And yet this extraordinary life came to an end in exile, after he was banished from his beloved Athens. This episode charts Aristotle’s incredible rise and fall, exploring his intellectual career and philosophical ideas alongside his friendships and romances, and asking whether despite his views on women and slavery he deserves the title of the greatest Greek philosopher. If you’re a fan of ancient academic rivalries, bloodthirsty kings, and incredible scientific discoveries, you’ll love our episode on Aristotle. If you want more Greek philosophers with Professor Edith, check out our episode on Pythagoras. And for more from Dan Schreiber, listen to our episode on Young Napoleon. You’re Dead to Me is the comedy podcast that takes history seriously. Every episode, Greg Jenner brings together the best names in history and comedy to learn and laugh about the past. Hosted by: Greg Jenner Research by: Madeleine Bracey Written by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Production Coordinator: Ben Hollands Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse Executive Editor: James Cook

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Greg Jenner?

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• 1:30Greg Jenner?

  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 Natalie Haines' 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.

• 2:15Greg Jenner?

  It's Professor Edith Hall. Welcome back, Edith.

• 2:17Speaker 05

  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.

• 2:24Greg Jenner?

  Okay, 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 Yours Dead To Me, all the way back in series one on Young Napoleon. It's Dan Schreiber. Welcome back, Dan.

• 2:47Speaker 06

  Hey, thanks for having me. I have to say Aristotle, from what you were saying just before we started recording, absolutely the time person I'd want to sit down and ask weird questions to. He sounds really interesting.

• 3:00Greg Jenner?

  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.

• 3:07Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 3:08Greg Jenner?

  How do you feel about ancient Greece? Is this a comfort area for you?

• 3:12Speaker 06

  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 is often called the first scientist. So what I love is a mixture of both interesting and true facts that have come through to today, and then outrageous claims that were so verifiable at the time that seemed to have just been taken as fact. And actually, that's my sweet spot. I think that's where I would have preferred to have lived.

• 3:41Greg Jenner?

  So, what do you know?

• 3:48Greg Jenner?

  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 bearded 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?

• 4:30Greg Jenner?

  And what do you do when a king orders you to tutor his frat boy's 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?

• 4:43Speaker 05

  Aristotle actually had a really very boringly sort of normal personal life. So he's a GP's son. He's a 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 north-eastern Greece.

• 5:07Greg Jenner?

  And dad's called...

• 5:08Speaker 05

  Niacomicus.

• 5:09Greg Jenner?

  Niacomicus?

• 5:10Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:11Greg Jenner?

  And so what does that mean?

• 5:12Speaker 05

  It actually means victory in battle.

• 5:14Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, because Nike is the goddess of victory.

• 5:16Speaker 05

  That's the one.

• 5:17Greg Jenner?

  And Marcus means war?

• 5:18Speaker 05

  Fight.

• 5:18Greg Jenner?

  Fight.

• 5:19Speaker 05

  Battle, die.

• 5:20Greg Jenner?

  So he's a GP who's actually pretty hardcore.

• 5:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, 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.

• 5:34Greg Jenner?

  Best purpose.

• 5:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:36Speaker 06

  He's definitely real, right, Aristotle?

• 5:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:39Speaker 06

  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 he, was that a real guy? Aristotle's like, we know he's real.

• 5:49Speaker 05

  He is very, very real.

• 5:50Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:51Speaker 05

  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, oh, take it from me, not the Chinese internet. 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... Had married a very nice and very rich guy who lived actually in what's now northwest

• 6:33Speaker 05

  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.

• 6:42Greg Jenner?

  So at thirteen, his sister takes him in, he goes to sort of live with his uncle and his-

• 6:47Speaker 05

  Well, it's his brother-in-law.

• 6:48Greg Jenner?

  His brother-in-law, sorry.

• 6:49Speaker 05

  His older brother-in-law.

• 6:50Greg Jenner?

  Right, and they're in Turkey, so-

• 6:51Speaker 05

  They're in northwest Turkey.

• 6:52Greg Jenner?

  So the Greek world as we know it isn't just Athens and Sparta?

• 6:55Speaker 05

  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.

• 7:22Speaker 06

  What was, is, 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?

• 7:31Speaker 05

  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, the new, 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.

• 7:54Greg Jenner?

  So at thirteen, he lives through tragedy. His parents die, he goes to live with his sister, you know, he sort of, he's a young man. What do you think he does with his time, you know, thirteen, fourteen?

• 8:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, I don't fully know what a Turkish life when you're thirteen is like. Okay, so what was he doing? Was there any sports at the time?

• 8:11Greg Jenner?

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:12Speaker 06

  I'm sort of going off Monty Python sketches here, but yeah.

• 8:15Speaker 05

  You went to the gymnasium. You went to the gymnasium and you threw, you did all the things that you do in track and field at the Olympics.

• 8:22Speaker 06

  I was gonna say, because if his name's a great goal, then.

• 8:25Greg Jenner?

  You run, you run around, you throw spears, javelins, discuses.

• 8:29Speaker 06

  Right.

• 8:30Greg Jenner?

  Uh, you also, he seems to know an awful lot about horses.

• 8:33Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 8:33Greg Jenner?

  I think he knew a lot about horses, so I suspect that he was quite a good chariot driver.

• 8:37Speaker 06

  You say he 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 fertilize your horse?

• 8:46Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 8:46Speaker 06

  So you sort of had to keep them out of.

• 8:48Greg Jenner?

  We'll get to that later, actually. There's, there's some interesting stuff. We'll, we'll come to the biology.

• 8:52Speaker 06

  This is why I love him so much.

• 8:53Speaker 05

  There's usually an empirical explanation for why he came up with this theory, at least.

• 8:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, okay, right.

• 9:00Greg Jenner?

  So, so put a pin in that one, come back to it later.

• 9:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:02Greg Jenner?

  Um, so yeah, you've, you've gone for sports, and I think that's, 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, the good warfare name.

• 9:11Speaker 05

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

• 9:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 9:53Greg Jenner?

  What's interesting about Aristotle is he doesn't have a kind of rebellious bad boy phase. He's not wearing a leather jacket with his, with his tunic.

• 9:58Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 9:59Greg Jenner?

  It's not really a good look anyway, but you know, he's, he's not doing that. Instead, he's, he's absolutely excellent everywhere. And so his brother-in-law and his sister spot the talent and go, this kid needs proper training, right?

• 10:11Speaker 05

  Absolutely. Otherwise, he would undoubtedly have become the general practitioner in Stagira, because these things were hereditary.

• 10:19Greg Jenner?

  Right.

• 10:19Speaker 05

  And in fact, he's, uh, his father came from generations and generations of doctors, to the extent that he's supposed to be descended from Makaon, who is a mythical doctor in the Iliad, who was, you know, the son of Asclepius, the actual god of medicine.

• 10:35Greg Jenner?

  Oh, really?

• 10:35Speaker 05

  Yes. So if you were a practicing 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 a feistist. You know, direct descent, which was part of the the marketing spiel.

• 10:48Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 10:49Speaker 05

  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?

• 11:00Greg Jenner?

  You say fed up. I think I think they're going, this kid's got, he's got, he should, he should go places.

• 11:04Speaker 05

  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.

• 11:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, right.

• 11:10Speaker 05

  Sent him off at seventeen.

• 11:12Speaker 06

  Did he possibly invent the, but why?

• 11:16Greg Jenner?

  That's Socrates. That's Socrates.

• 11:17Speaker 06

  That's Socrates, right, OK.

• 11:18Greg Jenner?

  But why is Socrates? So Aristotle rocks up to Plato's Academy in Athens.

• 11:22Speaker 05

  At seventeen.

• 11:23Greg Jenner?

  Or rather, he's a good boy, so he queues up politely and waits to be let in. But he he arrives, he's he's there, he's going to learn from this superstar philosopher. And Plato had been taught by Socrates. So you're you're learning from the guy who learned from Socrates.

• 11:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's wild.

• 11:36Greg Jenner?

  It's pretty good.

• 11:37Speaker 06

  Yeah. Who came after, I know we might get into it later, but was there a fourth after Aristotle?

• 11:42Speaker 05

  Theophrastus.

• 11:43Greg Jenner?

  Yeah. Oh, he's not impressed.

• 11:46Speaker 06

  He's not as big a name as the other three, no.

• 11:48Greg Jenner?

  So Plato has a couple of nicknames for Aristotle, his his new student. Do you want to guess what they are?

• 11:55Speaker 06

  Son of a doctor, great mythical god as a as a great, great, great grandparent. Were they buddies? Did he? Did he bring him in to make him?

• 12:04Greg Jenner?

  I think that's fair.

• 12:05Speaker 05

  Well, they became buddies. So I think Aristotle was his star pupil. That's a very interesting bit. So 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? And because Aristotle later wrote the Poetics, which is a prose treatise defending the art. You actually get, you actually can quite often almost hear him talking to to the brightest boy. You know, you know, the little boy who's who's stretching his arm up really, really high? I know the answer. I know the answer.

• 12:40Greg Jenner?

  Sir, sir, sir, I know, I know.

• 12:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. So you do quite get often get that sense that that Plato's talking directly to him.

• 12:47Speaker 06

  Would he been young? As in, would everyone else been in their twenties and thirties?

• 12:51Speaker 05

  Yes, he would have been young to go there at seventeen.

• 12:53Speaker 06

  Right, OK.

• 12:54Greg Jenner?

  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.

• 13:02Speaker 06

  Okay, very good.

• 13:02Greg Jenner?

  Which is quite nice, and just the brain.

• 13:04Speaker 05

  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 since Plato died. 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.

• 13:19Greg Jenner?

  And he studies a variety of things at the academy, right? So it's not just philosophy, it's astronomy, natural science.

• 13:24Speaker 05

  Wow, 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 at all.

• 13:33Greg Jenner?

  Oh, really?

• 13:34Speaker 05

  No, no, no. I think Aristotle was 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 have particularly have approved of.

• 13:45Greg Jenner?

  Because Plato's just hardcore theory.

• 13:48Speaker 05

  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, what is existence, right? So it's hardcore philosophy.

• 14:01Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 14:02Speaker 05

  He liked maths, yeah, all theoretical, but the 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.

• 14:14Speaker 06

  How interesting.

• 14:15Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 14:15Speaker 05

  So I think Aristotle was this sort of sneaky, he's basically 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 grass or something.

• 14:28Speaker 06

  Was it Aristotle who thought that maybe the plant life had souls?

• 14:31Speaker 05

  Oh, that...

• 14:32Speaker 06

  He did?

• 14:32Speaker 05

  No, he didn't think it had souls. He didn't think it had souls. That's much more Pythagorean, actually.

• 14:37Speaker 06

  Okay, right.

• 14:38Speaker 05

  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?

• 14:53Speaker 05

  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 zoon, like our word zoo. And then he gradually refines and refines and refines what's different about the human animal.

• 15:11Greg Jenner?

  So he's the ultimate postgrad because he comes at seventeen and he is there twenty 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.

• 15:26Speaker 05

  What tragedy.

• 15:27Greg Jenner?

  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.

• 15:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 15:39Greg Jenner?

  We don't have his book on comedy.

• 15:40Speaker 05

  We've lost but 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.

• 15:50Greg Jenner?

  Oh, you think trashed.

• 15:51Speaker 05

  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.

• 16:31Speaker 05

  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.

• 16:47Greg Jenner?

  Yes, Dan, appropriate wit.

• 16:49Speaker 06

  Appropriate wit. Well, did he label himself as?

• 16:51Speaker 05

  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.

• 17:17Greg Jenner?

  Bring that back.

• 17:18Speaker 06

  Bring it back.

• 17:19Greg Jenner?

  The hedgehog clock, perfect. In 348, a big thing happens to him, the death of Plato, 348 BCE. His tutor, his sort of, 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.

• 17:38Speaker 06

  I wouldn't assume that.

• 17:39Greg Jenner?

  No? Okay, what?

• 17:40Speaker 06

  Well, no, because clearly he's gone into the natural sciences.

• 17:42Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 17:43Speaker 06

  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.

• 17:53Greg Jenner?

  He'd be in your book, wouldn't he?

• 17:54Speaker 06

  Oh, absolutely, yeah. No, I, 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?

• 18:04Greg Jenner?

  That's, well, you've clearly, 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?

• 18:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, which means enthusiast for horses.

• 18:17Speaker 05

  He was, to my mind, a rather boring mathematician. And nobody's ever heard of him, but he was also related to Plato.

• 18:23Greg Jenner?

  Oh, nepotism.

• 18:25Speaker 06

  Classic.

• 18:25Speaker 05

  Partly nepotism, but I suspect he 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.

• 18:41Greg Jenner?

  So he doesn't get the gig and he instead, he gets an invitation to go to a new place.

• 18:45Speaker 05

  He does.

• 18:46Greg Jenner?

  And this place is called Asos.

• 18:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 18:48Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 18:48Greg Jenner?

  And off he goes to Asos, which is where?

• 18:50Speaker 05

  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 if you can see, it's about sort of halfway down.

• 19:01Greg Jenner?

  And he's invited by a guy called Hermias?

• 19:02Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 19:03Greg Jenner?

  Who is a former slave who's now ended up as king?

• 19:05Speaker 05

  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. King and or tyrant, which means somebody who's come into monarchical power but not through hereditary.

• 19:20Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 19:21Speaker 05

  And he invites Aristotle over apparently to help him write a constitution.

• 19:25Greg Jenner?

  Which sounds very progressive and modern, isn't it? So he heads off to Asos. I spent most of my 30s on Asos too, but I was mostly trying to buy skinny jeans. That would be an Aristotle. That's appropriate wit, everyone. I bet there was an equivalent joke to that, though. So Asos, he goes there and he finds love.

• 19:43Speaker 05

  He does. It's either Hermes's daughter or his adopted daughter or possibly his niece. But anyway, it's a posh woman in his court.

• 19:52Greg Jenner?

  Called Pythias?

• 19:53Speaker 05

  Called Pythias.

• 19:55Greg Jenner?

  Yeah. What's that mean?

• 19:57Speaker 05

  Well, it means like the sort of big snake at Delphi. The python.

• 20:01Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 20:02Speaker 05

  Python, yeah.

• 20:03Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 20:04Speaker 05

  But that's okay, sort of snaky lady.

• 20:05Greg Jenner?

  Which is a snaky lady. What should we call our daughter? Snake lady.

• 20:08Speaker 05

  Snake lady, yeah. Anyway, he marries her and it seems to have been very happy.

• 20:10Greg Jenner?

  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.

• 20:17Speaker 05

  Well, that's possible, but it's also possible that she actually died in childbirth, in which case it would have been very natural to call the little girl.

• 20:24Greg Jenner?

  Oh, that's sad. Oh, right. So we don't know?

• 20:27Speaker 05

  We don't really know.

• 20:28Greg Jenner?

  Interesting what we know and don't know.

• 20:29Speaker 05

  It's only lasted a couple of years.

• 20:30Greg Jenner?

  So he, okay, so he's raising the baby on his own?

• 20:33Speaker 05

  Apparently.

• 20:34Greg Jenner?

  Ah, it's suddenly taken a turn, isn't it? Suddenly.

• 20:37Speaker 05

  He does refer, though, to people who send babies out to wet nurses quite often, so.

• 20:41Greg Jenner?

  Okay, so he's got some help, but. He's got a constitution, all right. He has, he has. But they move to the Isle of Lesbos.

• 20:49Speaker 05

  They do.

• 20:50Greg Jenner?

  Which is not far from Asos. And we've got, you know, this single dad with his little girl. What do you think they get up to on Lesbos? What do you think Aristotle was going to do? I'm not going to take the bait, buddy. Nice try.

• 21:02Speaker 06

  Well, I don't know. Give me a bit more about Lesbos. What is the island like? Is it populated at this point?

• 21:08Speaker 05

  It is. Very much so. There are three big cities. The biggest is Mitellini. And it's a very cultured, it's a place of great culture. It's deeply cultured.

• 21:16Speaker 06

  Right.

• 21:16Speaker 05

  Very ancient. It's had the poet Sappho. It's had another very famous poet called Alcayus. 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 fresh water, 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."

• 21:54Speaker 06

  Did he invent that?

• 21:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 21:56Speaker 06

  Wow. "I'm going to be a thing I've just invented."

• 21:59Speaker 05

  At thirty-seven, he's like, "I'm just going to invent marine biology." You know, the original Addams Family movie, not the TV series, they have a pet octopus.

• 22:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 22:06Speaker 05

  Because it's a cephalopod. Do you know what they call it? Aristotle. Yeah.

• 22:10Speaker 06

  Who would have, imagine if you were able to tell him the influence he's had on the world. That included 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 the daughter from the mainland so as to just bring her up believing in weird stuff? But possibly not.

• 22:39Speaker 05

  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, he was seventeen years younger than him, so about twenty, called Theophraster, who means speaks like a god. And he is a lesbian. He lives on Lesbos. Stop it.

• 22:59Speaker 06

  I'm just mirroring what you're saying.

• 23:00Speaker 05

  He is obsessed with plants. And I think they quite literally decided over whatever the ancient Uzo was to invent zoology and botany together. And I think he's probably living off the Ephrasis 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, okay, 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?

• 23:29Greg Jenner?

  He's not desperately trying to get his job back in that.

• 23:31Speaker 05

  No, if life gives you lemon, you know.

• 23:33Greg Jenner?

  Study that lemon and write a book about it.

• 23:35Speaker 05

  Right, exactly.

• 23:36Speaker 06

  Invent lemon studies. Yeah. He, 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.

• 23:44Speaker 05

  I think that's exactly right.

• 23:46Speaker 06

  Right.

• 23:46Greg Jenner?

  And so when he's there, he, he describes 500 species of animal. He's looking at plants as well.

• 23:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, but it was easier back then. There was so much, nothing had been described when you invent something.

• 23:56Speaker 05

  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 has killed it. It is extinct.

• 24:12Speaker 06

  Yeah. Oh, wow.

• 24:13Speaker 05

  He actually says that. That's the first reference in world literature to human industrial farming or anything actually killing off a species.

• 24:23Greg Jenner?

  And extinction is an idea, isn't really rediscovered until the 18th century.

• 24:25Speaker 05

  So he's now actually quite big in, in green circles.

• 24:29Speaker 06

  Guys, controversial theory. I think he might've been a time traveler. This feels like someone who's like almost a glitch.

• 24:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 24:37Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 24:37Speaker 06

  Like too much information just poured out of one.

• 24:39Greg Jenner?

  You think he's got a wristwatch? You think it is?

• 24:41Speaker 06

  I think if we are living in a simulation, he got the extra weapons.

• 24:45Greg Jenner?

  I knew you'd make it weird. I didn't think it would be this far in.

• 24:47Speaker 06

  Well, I needed to hear the evidence first and clearly.

• 24:50Speaker 05

  It's like cyborg Aristotle.

• 24:51Speaker 06

  Something's going on.

• 24:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 24:53Speaker 06

  But we're ready, you know? This is, this is not your average human. People listening are going to be like, yes, Dan, it's Aristotle.

• 25:00Greg Jenner?

  That's why we're talking about it.

• 25:01Speaker 06

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 25:01Greg Jenner?

  No, but you're right. He, 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. 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 the little girl. It's like a really charming rom-com.

• 25:16Speaker 05

  Two men, a baby and a hundred doctor pussies.

• 25:20Greg Jenner?

  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. Theotherastus 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?

• 25:41Speaker 06

  Fantastic.

• 25:42Greg Jenner?

  It's amazing sort of place. But sticking with Aristotle's sort of scientific work, I mean, he gets things wrong. Mini quiz for you, Dan.

• 25:49Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 25:50Greg Jenner?

  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?

• 26:15Speaker 06

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

• 26:43Greg Jenner?

  Another good novel, Elephants on Lesbos.

• 26:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 26:46Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, remember, he's getting information from other people as well.

• 26:49Speaker 05

  Later.

• 26:50Speaker 06

  But everyone, everyone else is an idiot compared to this guy. He's just gonna take that. I'm gonna say the elephants one is the one that he disproved.

• 26:57Greg Jenner?

  You're right.

• 26:58Speaker 06

  Oh, really?

• 26:58Greg Jenner?

  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.

• 27:03Speaker 05

  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 an elephant bending a knee in India.

• 27:13Greg Jenner?

  So he believes that women have fewer teeth than men.

• 27:16Speaker 05

  But the point about that one is that it's a result of doing some empirical studies and drawing a false inference from them. So I know, because I've, 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, had four children, which most women will have done in ancient Greece, they will have all lost one, two, three each child, because you do. And he'll have counted fewer, and if he did a test case of 30 women... And they all had four fewer teeth than men. That is actually a perfectly valid inference from an empirical survey.

• 27:49Speaker 06

  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 realise, I'm not sure, is he?

• 27:59Speaker 05

  Well, you didn't have women at dinner parties.

• 28:01Greg Jenner?

  Yeah. The symposium is just.

• 28:04Speaker 05

  Symposium, but he would have looked in any woman who was prepared to open it up and show him.

• 28:09Greg Jenner?

  You there, come and show me your teeth.

• 28:11Speaker 06

  Including his daughter, presumably.

• 28:12Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, presumably, who wasn't a woman yet, because she was any little.

• 28:14Speaker 05

  And I think it may even be the same with eels, because I don't know an awful lot about eels and reproduction. But 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 how, what happened to it.

• 28:27Greg Jenner?

  Because he did anatomy, didn't he? He did dissection.

• 28:28Speaker 05

  He also did dissection.

• 28:29Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 28:29Speaker 05

  He will have watched those eels and never actually seen them copulate or something, and therefore inferred.

• 28:35Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 28:36Speaker 05

  So I'm not, I'm not, I think, I think laughing at him is wrong, because he was drawing sometimes false inferences from studious empirical observations.

• 28:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, I don't think it should be laughed at. Anyway, I think this, this is a genius who was doing a lot of stuff. And then, yeah, you're occasionally gonna have to abandon the latest thing.

• 28:55Speaker 05

  And not everybody's prepared to, to, to watch a tank full of eels for several days.

• 28:59Speaker 06

  There you go. That's, that's.

• 29:00Speaker 05

  Dedication.

• 29:01Speaker 06

  That's the dedication. Didn't he ever think about flies as well? Wasn't that another thing?

• 29:04Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, he, he looks at flies. He was interested in, he really was interested in crustaceans, wasn't he?

• 29:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 29:08Greg Jenner?

  Like crabs, cuttlefish, lobsters, fish. So your podcast is called No Such Thing As A Fish?

• 29:13Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 29:14Greg Jenner?

  He would have, he would have had such an argument with you about that. 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? Because.

• 29:24Speaker 05

  Are they mammals? Yes, exactly.

• 29:25Greg Jenner?

  Right.

• 29:26Speaker 05

  He's got confused with warm-blooded.

• 29:28Greg Jenner?

  And he, 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 was like, no, no, no, it's way more complex. You've got to look at every small.

• 29:36Speaker 05

  He invented the spreadsheet, mate. Yeah, you can tell that from his work on volcanoes. He takes a test case. He builds up a relational database, which is no mean feat on ancient papyrus.

• 29:51Speaker 07

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• 30:53Speaker 02

  It's the film that convinced Americans the Second World War was worth fighting.

• 30:58Speaker 03

  A reason to be in Hollywood that is really quite a terrifying situation.

• 31:02Speaker 02

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• 31:28Greg Jenner?

  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.

• 31:32Speaker 05

  Oh dear.

• 31:33Greg Jenner?

  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?

• 31:44Speaker 06

  Well, I've heard his name being mentioned a few times this episode. Alexander the Great.

• 31:47Greg Jenner?

  Not yet great.

• 31:48Speaker 06

  Not yet great. Alexander the.

• 31:50Greg Jenner?

  The brat.

• 31:50Speaker 06

  The brat.

• 31:51Greg Jenner?

  So he's the heir to the throne. He's the son of Philip's fourth wife, Olympias. Complicated court politics, murder, poison, intrigue.

• 31:59Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 31:59Greg Jenner?

  You never know you're going to survive through adulthood. And Aristotle gets the gig and he decides to go. Why?

• 32:05Speaker 05

  Well, he gets the gig and decides to go. That's how it's always put in his biography. It's I, we don't know any more about it. I would say when you get a letter from Philip, the greatest murderer, you know, 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.

• 32:24Greg Jenner?

  So you think he's a threat?

• 32:25Speaker 05

  Also, it did mean 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.

• 32:38Greg Jenner?

  So, so Dan, what would your curriculum be if you, if you were going to have to educate a sort of tyrant's child?

• 32:44Speaker 06

  Wow, well, if I, if I was Aristotle.

• 32:46Speaker 05

  Well, you've got three sons, right?

• 32:48Speaker 06

  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. Um, okay. Class on Excel spreadsheets.

• 32:57Speaker 05

  Nice.

• 32:57Speaker 06

  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.

• 33:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 33:06Speaker 06

  I believe that, do you think he has the mind of a tyrant?

• 33:10Speaker 05

  Thirteen, fourteen.

• 33:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, but if you're, I always get the impression that the children of a dictator are a bit scary at that age.

• 33:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 33:19Speaker 06

  Because they feel they can push everyone around.

• 33:21Greg Jenner?

  It's very Joffrey Game of Thrones sort of risk, isn't it? It's sort of like slightly a psychopathic teenager.

• 33:26Speaker 06

  Yeah. So the question is, is your, this is not normal teaching circumstances. You put your foot wrong, you might get killed, right?

• 33:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 33:33Speaker 06

  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. But you also want to put love and interest into that.

• 33:45Greg Jenner?

  Aristotle doesn't want to raise, he doesn't want to raise someone dangerous.

• 33:49Speaker 06

  No, he wants to put, well, you've got the most curious man, curious man alive.

• 33:52Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 33:52Speaker 06

  Who's been tasked with a fertile brain who could change the world.

• 33:56Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 33:57Speaker 06

  I mean, that's, that's a perfect combo, really.

• 33:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, must have been incredibly difficult.

• 34:01Speaker 06

  It must have been so hard to toe that line and maybe get in the subtle lessons of goodness while also 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 is what I would do.

• 34:21Greg Jenner?

  Prepare for the workplace.

• 34:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 34:23Greg Jenner?

  Because he does, Alexander is told, you don't have to be a philosopher, but please do listen to the philosophers.

• 34:29Speaker 05

  Well.

• 34:29Greg Jenner?

  Which feels like a compromise, like, all right, you're not, you're not going to be a philosopher, I get it, but can you at least listen to them?

• 34:34Speaker 05

  Well, he will have definitely taught him ethics, politics and rhetoric, this is the sort of curriculum, how to behave.

• 34:41Greg Jenner?

  So rhetoric is speech making.

• 34:42Speaker 05

  How to govern your country and how to speak in public. Yes, this has been, 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.

• 35:05Speaker 05

  Or, or what happens in tyrants' households, you know, that kind of thing, but he doesn't put names to it usually.

• 35:11Greg Jenner?

  Yes, we don't, we don't get a sense that he had a good time in Macedonia.

• 35:14Speaker 05

  Uh-uh, no.

• 35:15Speaker 06

  Do we, do we know much about what Alexander the Great mentioned about him in his?

• 35:20Speaker 05

  No, because Alexander the Great, we know even less about than Aristotle, all the sources are so late.

• 35:26Speaker 05

  And myths were being made because he died out there, he never came back.

• 35:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 35:30Speaker 05

  He crossed the Hellespont and never came back.

• 35:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 35:33Speaker 05

  He liked being on campaign with all his male mates and drinking himself stupid.

• 35:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 35:39Speaker 05

  I mean, he did. And, and I think that's one thing Oliver Stone got over quite well in, in that movie.

• 35:45Speaker 06

  Right.

• 35:46Speaker 05

  He liked that life.

• 35:47Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 35:47Speaker 05

  He never wanted to come back and be a responsible ruler.

• 35:49Speaker 06

  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 story.

• 36:06Speaker 05

  You have a natural authority. You do.

• 36:08Speaker 06

  And in this day and age, unfortunately, people can Google it and tell me I'm wrong.

• 36:12Greg Jenner?

  So it's aged 48 that we get Aristotle returning to Athens. 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 opening a rival school, which I don't know if that's petty.

• 36:36Speaker 05

  No, it's not petty.

• 36:37Greg Jenner?

  No?

• 36:38Speaker 05

  He just wanted to run his own show. I completely get it. He didn't want to go back to all those old rivalries.

• 36:42Greg Jenner?

  But that school is called the Lyceum.

• 36:43Speaker 05

  And because Theophrastus was natural science and he did it with Theophrastus.

• 36:47Greg Jenner?

  So he brings Theophrastus with him.

• 36:48Speaker 05

  Utterly loyal to Theophrastus. Yes, they do it together.

• 36:50Speaker 06

  Is he received back into Athens as a, as a kind of returning hero?

• 36:54Speaker 05

  Well, not as a returning hero, I don't think, but as a perfectly welcome resident alien. He never got citizenship.

• 37:00Greg Jenner?

  Never? Really?

• 37:01Speaker 05

  No. But I think he got loads of money. This is, 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.

• 37:16Greg Jenner?

  And then puts the money into the school.

• 37:17Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 37:17Greg Jenner?

  So the Lyceum is arguably the first teaching university. The academy is a, is a philosophy class, but this, this has got a library. This has got, this feels like it's something different.

• 37:29Speaker 05

  It is something different. One of the things that he did was lectures to the public in the afternoons. They had public lectures. I mean, he, he saw it as a public facing institution. And he wrote lots of books that 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... 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. Um, but he only stayed alive for about thirteen years.

• 38:02Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 38:02Speaker 05

  Um, but he, in that thirteen years, my goodness, what he did.

• 38:07Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, and his followers were called the peripatetic.

• 38:09Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 38:09Greg Jenner?

  Which means people who walk.

• 38:10Speaker 05

  Yes, there's two theories about that. There were two theories in antiquity. One is that there was a covered, uh, thing like, um, a cloister.

• 38:18Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 38:18Speaker 05

  At the, which is called the peripatos.

• 38:20Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 38:21Speaker 05

  So that they could walk around even in the rain, which is what monks do. It's very useful. You know, you go, you go to Bologna, everything's like that. Or it's because he liked hiking and the Greek for going for, for walking even today is per, per pata. It's, it's the same word. I, I go walking, but it could be both.

• 38:38Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 38:39Speaker 05

  He could like walking in his cloister and going out hiking.

• 38:41Greg Jenner?

  Right. Where's his daughter at this point?

• 38:44Speaker 05

  Uh, she's, she's with him and he's got a new girlfriend.

• 38:46Greg Jenner?

  Yes.

• 38:47Speaker 05

  Um, who he never seems to marry. She's called her Pillis 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, Nychomachus, named after, in the Greek way, his father.

• 39:08Greg Jenner?

  Yeah. So the father of the GP, Nychomachus.

• 39:09Speaker 05

  After whom the Nychomachian ethics is named.

• 39:13Greg Jenner?

  You're holding up a book?

• 39:14Speaker 05

  I'm holding up the Nychomachian ethics.

• 39:16Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 39:16Speaker 05

  Um, which I, you know, just happen to have in my pocket.

• 39:19Greg Jenner?

  So this is one of, so he writes a hundred and sixty books, or treatises.

• 39:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, and a lot of them, I think, in that time or finished them in that time.

• 39:25Greg Jenner?

  How big, how big are these books? Like, are we talking, like, word count per book?

• 39:30Speaker 05

  Oh God, they vary between five thousand, a hundred, a hundred and twenty thousand.

• 39:35Greg Jenner?

  Okay. Yeah, I mean, we've got a lot of his, we've only got thirty-one of his hundred and sixty 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 and metaphysics, on Nychomachian 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, he's like, 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.

• 40:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 40:06Greg Jenner?

  How would you sum, I mean, it's a big subject. How would you sum that up quickly on a comedy podcast?

• 40:10Speaker 05

  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.

• 40:23Greg Jenner?

  Job done.

• 40:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's beautiful.

• 40:25Speaker 05

  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, so.

• 40:49Greg Jenner?

  Which he calls the golden mean, right?

• 40:50Speaker 05

  Well, he calls it the mean. The Romans then called it the golden.

• 40:53Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 40:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a mess on.

• 40:55Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, which, which based.

• 40:57Speaker 05

  It's so sensible.

• 40:58Greg Jenner?

  It's sensible centrist politics is what we want. And there are words that are used in philosophy, eudaimonia.

• 41:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, that means.

• 41:06Greg Jenner?

  Flourishing.

• 41:07Speaker 05

  Flourishing. It's more a verb than a noun. It's be, it's not happiness, but living your life in a way that will conducive to happiness.

• 41:15Greg Jenner?

  And you means good and daimonia means spirit or, yeah, so.

• 41:19Speaker 05

  I like the word felicity, which was the Romans translated it now, felicity.

• 41:23Greg Jenner?

  And then the other one would be arite, which means moral excellence, I suppose. Yeah. So those are the two Greek ideas.

• 41:28Speaker 05

  And your telos, your goal.

• 41:29Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 41:30Speaker 05

  Your end, your dunamis is your potential.

• 41:33Greg Jenner?

  And he's called Aristotle. He's called the ultimate goal.

• 41:35Speaker 05

  Yes, he's called the ultimate, best goal.

• 41:37Greg Jenner?

  So be good, be happy, and you will be good. And if you be good, you'll be happy.

• 41:41Speaker 05

  Basically.

• 41:43Greg Jenner?

  It's very good, isn't it?

• 41:44Speaker 06

  It's very simple. Yeah. I think it's true as well. Not to, he doesn't need my backing, but.

• 41:49Speaker 05

  And there's no life after death. It's all about now. That's very important.

• 41:52Speaker 06

  So be here now. He's very zen, isn't he?

• 41:54Greg Jenner?

  He's very zen.

• 41:55Speaker 05

  It's now, it's now.

• 41:56Speaker 06

  This is it.

• 41:57Speaker 05

  You won't get punished afterwards. You'll just be miserable now if you're nasty.

• 42:01Greg Jenner?

  Does he believe in the gods or does he?

• 42:02Speaker 05

  Sort of, but they're kind of these weird things that live far away on the planet.

• 42:05Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 42:06Speaker 05

  No interest. It's the unmoved mover.

• 42:08Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 42:08Speaker 05

  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.

• 42:22Speaker 06

  Was that a wild concept to not have the gods as a... Right, and to say that there's no life after death. So again, a fringe sort of like idea.

• 42:30Greg Jenner?

  He's a maverick, isn't he?

• 42:31Speaker 06

  He really is.

• 42:31Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 42:32Speaker 05

  But you've got to take charge, this is it, you've got potential, you've got your life.

• 42:36Greg Jenner?

  So he's all about self-knowledge, he's all about moderation. He's trying to create a better world by creating better individuals.

• 42:43Speaker 05

  Starting from the individual, exactly. Plato's starting from dictating the look of the state from top down.

• 42:47Greg Jenner?

  Yes, Plato's writing about the polis, the city, the empire.

• 42:52Speaker 05

  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.

• 43:02Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 43:03Speaker 05

  And he is prepared to envisage gay couples, right? There is a couple, the partnership comes before even the children. And he says, if that is corrupted by disloyalty or lies, then you've corrupted the foundation.

• 43:16Speaker 06

  He said, so you know that classic question of if you could have a dinner party, yes, sorry, 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...

• 43:30Greg Jenner?

  Well.

• 43:30Speaker 06

  What would he be saying there? Is that a...

• 43:32Speaker 05

  I think he was a bit of a flirt, actually.

• 43:34Greg Jenner?

  Hmm, interesting.

• 43:35Speaker 05

  He constantly cites the example of what to do if you really, really fancy your neighbour's wife.

• 43:40Greg Jenner?

  Hang on a minute, you've said adultery was a bad thing.

• 43:41Speaker 05

  No, he don't.

• 43:42Greg Jenner?

  He's covered in his neighbour's wife.

• 43:43Speaker 05

  He says what to do, and then he gives you the example of Helen of Troy.

• 43:47Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 43:48Speaker 05

  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.

• 43:55Greg Jenner?

  Wow, okay.

• 43:56Speaker 05

  He says, do with your lady you're infatuated with, or man you're infatuated with.

• 44:01Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 44:02Speaker 05

  Do Helen, you say, yes, you're gorgeous, I'll bug her off.

• 44:06Speaker 06

  That's a shame because Helen's also at my dinner party, so. Sorry Helen, gotta go.

• 44:12Greg Jenner?

  I think we do, I mean, we've spent a lot of the episode saying what an extraordinary man, and I'm not gonna back away from that, but he has flaws, he's not a saint, there are things that he believed that we would find repellent.

• 44:20Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 44:21Greg Jenner?

  One of them was that he did not believe women were as intellectually capable as men, right?

• 44:25Speaker 05

  No.

• 44:26Greg Jenner?

  So he thinks women are not as smart.

• 44:27Speaker 05

  We do not have a deliberative capacity, we can't think things through, we're all in motion, therefore we cannot have full citizenship.

• 44:34Greg Jenner?

  So it's the idea of logos, is it, or logic?

• 44:37Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 44:38Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 44:38Speaker 05

  We don't have, well, it's a thing called tabula luta, which is precisely deliberative.

• 44:43Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 44:43Speaker 05

  That you cannot think through decisions rationally.

• 44:46Greg Jenner?

  He's also, he's ancient Greek, so he is a slave owner, because they all are.

• 44:51Speaker 05

  Well, he also came out, he 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.

• 45:02Greg Jenner?

  I think the slavery thing is the thing where we really struggle with.

• 45:05Speaker 05

  It's a very big one.

• 45:06Greg Jenner?

  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.

• 45:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, but he does even, I mean, I'm not minute 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.

• 45:34Speaker 06

  Okay, and is that?

• 45:36Speaker 05

  Most unusual.

• 45:37Speaker 06

  That's unusual, okay.

• 45:38Speaker 05

  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.

• 45:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 45:49Speaker 05

  You have no idea who you're going to, so he made sure that didn't happen.

• 45:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, this still is a bit of a plot twist on Aristotle, but you know, that is gonna happen.

• 45:59Greg Jenner?

  We know what Aristotle looked like, which is quite rare.

• 46:02Speaker 06

  We know what he looked like.

• 46:02Greg Jenner?

  We have a copy of a sculpture done by him, by someone who knew him, so the guy was called Lysippus.

• 46:08Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 46:09Greg Jenner?

  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?

• 46:14Speaker 06

  Very lovely beard.

• 46:15Greg Jenner?

  Yes.

• 46:16Speaker 06

  Very curly, his hair is, hmm, I don't know if anyone's seen modern day Ron Weasley at his age. It's got this floppyish look about it. He's got quite a pronounced upper forehead, I would say.

• 46:31Greg Jenner?

  Big brain.

• 46:32Speaker 06

  For that big old brain, walking library.

• 46:34Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 46:35Speaker 06

  His nose, quite dented. I'm not going to say substance abuse, but it looks like the old white powder might have gone there.

• 46:44Greg Jenner?

  Surely that's an athletic injury from his teenage years.

• 46:47Speaker 06

  Yes, exactly.

• 46:47Greg Jenner?

  He was a jock, yeah.

• 46:49Speaker 06

  No, it's very white eyeballs, no pupils.

• 46:52Greg Jenner?

  They would have been painted in. Ancient statue.

• 46:54Speaker 06

  This would have been a painted statue.

• 46:57Speaker 05

  Shall I say he looks exactly like my husband?

• 46:59Greg Jenner?

  Oh, congratulations.

• 47:00Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 47:00Speaker 05

  It took me a very long time. I was 32 till I found one who looked exactly like Aristotle.

• 47:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, can I?

• 47:07Greg Jenner?

  And you locked him down. It's quite rare for us to have a portrait of a Greek philosopher.

• 47:11Speaker 06

  That's amazing. So this is a statue?

• 47:13Greg Jenner?

  This is a statue done by someone who knew him.

• 47:15Speaker 05

  Well, he must have known him because he was at the court in Macedonia at the same time as he was.

• 47:18Greg Jenner?

  We do have to kill Aristotle off. He sort of dies slightly enigmatically. He's sort of chased out of Athens.

• 47:24Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 47:25Greg Jenner?

  Why?

• 47:25Speaker 05

  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 inferring the youth, bringing in, you know, it's what he did to philosophers he didn't like.

• 47:47Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 47:48Speaker 05

  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 girlfriend, Herpylis, and apparently his children.

• 48:13Speaker 06

  So he's got more kids at this point?

• 48:14Speaker 05

  Well, you know, he's got the two.

• 48:15Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 48:15Speaker 05

  He's got Nicomachus and the older girl, Pythias.

• 48:19Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 48:20Speaker 05

  And seems to write a, he has this very detailed will and dies, apparently, of stomach cancer about a year later.

• 48:26Greg Jenner?

  And Theocles stays behind in Athens and keeps his books. And that's how we have them, right? That's how.

• 48:32Speaker 05

  Well, there's a very long story behind that. But yes, he's got Theophrasus to leave everything to. And that must have been a very great comfort. I mean, Theophrasus was, you know, Nikeomachus is still very young. He's got a very adult son who's been his best friend for a very, very long time. Wonderful relationship.

• 48:51Greg Jenner?

  So he died soon after 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?

• 49:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, because other more new and shiny philosophical schools took over, especially Stoicism and Epicureanism, which the peripatost that the academics at the Lyceum carried on and became one of the most dominant schools of antiquity, but not immediately after.

• 49:23Greg Jenner?

  It took a century and a half or so, didn't it? For people to go, oh, this guy was pretty brilliant, actually. And then, of course, he was a huge deal in the Middle Ages.

• 49:29Speaker 05

  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.

• 49:51Greg Jenner?

  Of how to live a good life.

• 49:52Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 49:52Greg Jenner?

  Yeah. So there you go, Dan, Aristotle, pretty good life.

• 49:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, he's all right.

• 49:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, what an incredible, what an incredible life. It feels silly again saying that because obviously it must be 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?

• 50:10Speaker 05

  Sixty-three.

• 50:11Speaker 06

  Sixty-three.

• 50:12Greg Jenner?

  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. Here, we've just, we've just got so much.

• 50:21Speaker 05

  Well, Pythagoras himself left so little. We have actually, almost everything I've said, 80% of it, is out of his own works. Right, so this is solid testimony.

• 50:31Greg Jenner?

  And we've only got 31 books out of 160. Maybe one day others will show up somewhere, who knows?

• 50:36Speaker 05

  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 Staggera.

• 50:43Speaker 06

  With your husband cosplaying alongside you as you're there.

• 50:46Speaker 05

  Actually, no, it was my 16 year old daughter who made the movie that you can find on YouTube.

• 50:51Speaker 06

  Okay, nice. If there was an, 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?

• 50:59Speaker 05

  I would get History of Animals.

• 51:00Greg Jenner?

  I would too. I read it this weekend. It's brilliant.

• 51:02Speaker 05

  It's such a read, isn't it?

• 51:03Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 51:04Speaker 05

  It's a very good one to start like kids off on as well.

• 51:06Speaker 06

  Oh, great.

• 51:07Speaker 05

  It's a lot of narrative and description. It's not too full of logistical sologisms.

• 51:11Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 51:12Speaker 07

  The Nuance Window!

• 51:18Greg Jenner?

  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.

• 51:30Speaker 05

  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 were being 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

• 52:13Speaker 05

  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 arris. 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 stands up as arris.

• 52:50Greg Jenner?

  Intellectual history and then we end up with a bum joke. That's what should be in his poetics about comedy, right? So there we go.

• 52:57Speaker 05

  1652, they were doing that pun on Bottle.

• 52:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's no new jokes.

• 53:01Speaker 05

  Well, 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.

• 53:10Greg Jenner?

  In the Greek pronunciation, is it Aristotle?

• 53:12Speaker 05

  Aristotle. Aristotle now.

• 53:15Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 53:16Speaker 05

  But telis does not rhyme with buccala.

• 53:20Greg Jenner?

  So what do you know now?

• 53:27Greg Jenner?

  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.

• 53:34Speaker 06

  Forgot about this element of the show.

• 53:37Greg Jenner?

  Last time out, Dan, you got 9.5 on Napoleon out of 10, which is really good, I mean, really good score.

• 53:43Speaker 06

  Yep. I'm going to predict three this time.

• 53:46Greg Jenner?

  Let's aim higher than that. Question one, what was the name of the independent Greek state where Aristotle was born?

• 53:53Speaker 06

  Pass. I have no idea.

• 53:55Greg Jenner?

  Do you remember the nickname for it?

• 53:57Speaker 06

  Was it the Snake Woman?

• 54:00Greg Jenner?

  No.

• 54:02Greg Jenner?

  The Stagira.

• 54:03Speaker 06

  The Stagira of horses?

• 54:06Greg Jenner?

  The Stagira, the dripping place.

• 54:08Speaker 06

  The dripping place.

• 54:09Greg Jenner?

  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?

• 54:18Speaker 06

  No, that's gone as well.

• 54:20Greg Jenner?

  Asclepius, god of medicine. Okay. Question three, Plato had two nicknames for his clever Aristotle student. Can you name one of them?

• 54:27Speaker 06

  The brain and the walking library.

• 54:28Greg Jenner?

  Oh, very good. Well done. Question four, which scientific field did Aristotle basically invent at the lagoon of Lesbos?

• 54:35Speaker 06

  Marine biology.

• 54:36Greg Jenner?

  It was, yeah. Question five, what name was shared by Aristotle's wife and daughter?

• 54:41Speaker 06

  Pisciaus? Pythias.

• 54:44Greg Jenner?

  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?

• 54:53Speaker 06

  Because he was a fringe scientist that no one wanted to hear about his weird mushroom theories.

• 55:00Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 55:00Speaker 06

  He was a natural scientist.

• 55:01Greg Jenner?

  And there was a nepo baby ready to take over.

• 55:03Speaker 06

  A nepo baby. It's a shame that the nepo baby was not called nepotism. I feel like that would have been a Greek.

• 55:07Greg Jenner?

  True, yeah. Yeah, spucipus, wasn't it? Question seven, which famous prince did Aristotle tutor?

• 55:13Speaker 06

  Alexander, not yet the great.

• 55:15Greg Jenner?

  Very good.

• 55:16Speaker 06

  The brat.

• 55:16Greg Jenner?

  The brat, Alexander the brat. Question eight, Aristotle's book, The Nagmecian Ethics, was dedicated to his son. Simply put, what philosophy does it profess?

• 55:25Speaker 06

  Was it the simple idea that you will be happy if you do what makes you happy? And do good?

• 55:31Greg Jenner?

  Yep, perfect.

• 55:32Speaker 06

  Was that it?

• 55:32Greg Jenner?

  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?

• 55:41Speaker 06

  It was called the Lyceum.

• 55:43Greg Jenner?

  It was, very good. Question 10, can you name one of the provisions in Aristotle's will?

• 55:48Speaker 06

  That all of his slaves would be free.

• 55:50Greg Jenner?

  That's right, yeah, absolutely. And he also left all his stuff to Theophrastus and his furnishings to her pillars. Eight out of 10, Dan Schreiber.

• 55:57Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 55:58Greg Jenner?

  You started slightly wobbly and then you got stronger.

• 56:00Speaker 06

  It was really worrying at the beginning, wasn't it? And then, yeah, confidence took over.

• 56:04Greg Jenner?

  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.

• 56:13Speaker 06

  I'm massively team. I mean, outside of the stuff that is very questionable.

• 56:18Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 56:18Speaker 06

  I think in terms of, I'm looking at him purely as someone who was thinking differently, uniquely, what a, 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. I, 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 Way.

• 56:49Greg Jenner?

  Aristotle's Way.

• 56:50Speaker 06

  Okay, I'm reading that because ancient wisdom being relevant today, I think, is something we often forget.

• 56:55Greg Jenner?

  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 is 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 Sounds 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 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.

• 57:35Speaker 06

  Thanks, Greg.

• 57:36Greg Jenner?

  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!

• 57:51Greg Jenner?

  This episode of You're Dead to Me was researched by Madeline Bracy. It was written by Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow Emma Nagouse and me. The audio producer was Steve Hankey and our production coordinator was Ben Hollands. It was produced by Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow, me and senior producer Emma Nagouse, and our executive editor was James Cook. You're Dead to Me is a BBC Studios audio production for BBC Radio 4.

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