Pod Insights You're Dead to Me Aristotle (Radio Edit) About this episode 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.
This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed.
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
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:52 Greg 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 bearded 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 Nathi Haynes Stand Up For The Classics or Radio 4's Great Lives. Maybe you've read one of her many books, including Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life, and her most recent book Facing Down The Furies. And you'll know her from
2:35 Greg Jenner? our episode on Mr. Triangle himself, Pythagoras, it's Professor Edith Hall. Welcome back, Edith.
2:39 Speaker 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.
2:46 Greg 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. And you'll definitely remember him from our episode of You're Dead To Me, all the way back in series one on Young Napoleon. It's Dan Schreiber. Welcome back, Dan.
3:07 Speaker 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.
3:20 Greg 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.
3:27 Speaker 06 Yes.
3:28 Greg Jenner? How do you feel about ancient Greece? Is this a comfort area for you?
3:32 Speaker 06 No, I'm equally as ignorant in ancient Greece as I am at that time.
3:44 Greg Jenner? 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. But who was this philosopher who changed intellectual life in the West forever? How did he get to be so brainy and so important? And what do you do when a king orders you to tutor his frat boy's son? Let's find out. Right, Professor Edith, let's start at the beginning. Where and when was Aristotle born?
4:29 Greg Jenner? What was his family situation like?
4:32 Speaker 05 Aristotle actually had a really boringly normal personal life. So he's a GP's son. He's the son of the GP in a little town called Stagira, which means the dripping place, because it's high up on a cliff where the waters drip down into the sea.
4:48 Greg Jenner? And dad's called...
4:49 Speaker 05 Niacomicus.
4:50 Greg Jenner? Niacomicus.
4:51 Speaker 05 Yeah.
4:52 Speaker 06 He's definitely real, right, Aristotle?
4:54 Speaker 05 Yeah.
4:54 Speaker 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.
5:04 Speaker 05 He is very, very real.
5:06 Speaker 06 Yeah.
5:06 Speaker 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.
5:14 Greg Jenner? Oh.
5:15 Speaker 05 Take it from me, not the Chinese internet. So his mother was called Festus, and he seems to have been very fond of her. But very sadly, his parents died when he was about 13, both of them. We don't quite know why.
5:28 Speaker 06 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?
5:36 Speaker 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 Helenist. Dick World, which is after the Macedonian takeover of the Persian Empire.
5:56 Greg Jenner? What do you think he does with his time, you know, thirteen, fourteen?
5:59 Speaker 06 Was there any sports at the time?
6:00 Greg Jenner? Oh, yeah.
6:01 Speaker 06 I'm sort of going off Monty Python sketches here, but yeah.
6:04 Speaker 05 You went to the gymnasium. You threw, you did all the things that you do in track and field at the Olympics. He's got huge respect for athletics and health and training in all of his works. I suspect that it was just he was very good at athletics, but even better at intellectual things.
6:20 Speaker 06 Yeah.
6:20 Greg Jenner? 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?
6:29 Speaker 05 Absolutely. Otherwise, he would undoubtedly have become the general practitioner in Stegera because these things were hereditary.
6:36 Greg Jenner? Right.
6:37 Speaker 05 And in fact, 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 the son of Asclepius, the actual god of medicine. 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? So they say, okay, we got money. What's the best university in the world? Oh, we know it's Plato's Academy in Athens.
7:08 Speaker 06 Yeah, right.
7:08 Speaker 05 Sent him off at seventeen.
7:10 Greg Jenner? So Aristotle rocks up to Plato's Academy. He's going to learn from this superstar philosopher and Plato had been taught by Socrates.
7:16 Speaker 06 That's wild. Was there a fourth after Aristotle?
7:18 Speaker 05 The Fraster?
7:19 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
7:21 Speaker 05 Oh, he's not impressed.
7:22 Speaker 06 Not as big a name as the other three, no.
7:25 Speaker 05 Aristotle was his star pupil. He stayed on and became a teacher, you know, because he stayed there for 20 whole years.
7:32 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
7:32 Speaker 05 Plato died, I think he was perfectly happy there, but he gradually became more and more important.
7:36 Greg Jenner? And he studies a variety of things at the academy, right? So it's not just philosophy, it's astronomy, natural science.
7:42 Speaker 05 Wow, he studies lots of things that Plato really wouldn't have approved of. I mean, I think, I think that's the really important thing. So Plato's Academy did not study natural science at all.
7:50 Greg Jenner? Oh, really?
7:51 Speaker 05 No, no, no. I think Aristotle was out there sort of picking up mushrooms and stones and sort of measuring plants and trees.
7:58 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
7:59 Speaker 05 And doing all kinds of things which Plato wouldn't have. I've approved of.
8:02 Greg Jenner? Because Plato's just hardcore theory.
8:04 Speaker 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? It's hardcore philosophy.
8:16 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
8:17 Speaker 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.
8:29 Speaker 06 How interesting.
8:30 Greg Jenner? So he writes about lyric poetry, he writes about drama, he writes about epic, which I guess is the Iliad, the Odyssey.
8:36 Speaker 05 Yeah.
8:37 Greg Jenner? He writes about comedy, but we don't have it, which is devastating to me. We're all, yeah, because you and I both love comedy.
8:43 Speaker 06 Yeah.
8:43 Greg Jenner? We don't have his book on comedy.
8:44 Speaker 05 We've lost book to the poetics.
8:46 Speaker 06 How did we lose it? Where did it go?
8:48 Speaker 05 Most of the stuff we lost because Byzantine monks didn't like it.
8:51 Speaker 06 Didn't get the job.
8:52 Greg Jenner? Oh, you think, you think trashed.
8:53 Speaker 05 We've lost almost all of Sappho because various Christian bishops said, we don't want any of that lesbian pornography.
8:59 Speaker 06 Right.
8:59 Speaker 05 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.
9:08 Speaker 06 Yeah.
9:09 Speaker 05 So I don't know what was in it. I have read everything that Aristotle wrote in his surviving works about humour. 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. There is a mean, which is just to be appropriately witty. And that isn't very promising.
9:31 Greg Jenner? Yes, Dan, appropriate wit.
9:32 Speaker 06 Appropriate wit. Well, did he label himself as? Was he appropriate?
9:35 Speaker 05 I think he thought he was an appropriate wit.
9:37 Greg Jenner? 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.
9:54 Speaker 06 I wouldn't assume that.
9:55 Greg Jenner? No? Okay, what?
9:56 Speaker 06 Well, no, because clearly he's gone into the natural sciences.
9:58 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
9:59 Speaker 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, the brain's gone faulty. 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?
10:14 Greg Jenner? 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?
10:21 Speaker 05 Yeah, which means enthusiast for horses.
10:26 Speaker 05 He was, to my mind, a rather boring mathematician. And nobody's ever heard of him, but he was also related to Plato.
10:32 Greg Jenner? Oh, nepotism, classic.
10:34 Speaker 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.
10:50 Greg Jenner? So, he doesn't get the gig and instead he gets an invitation to go to a new place.
10:54 Speaker 05 He does.
10:54 Greg Jenner? And this place is called Asos.
10:56 Speaker 05 Yeah.
10:56 Speaker 06 Okay.
10:57 Greg Jenner? And off he goes to Asos, which is where?
10:59 Speaker 05 It's absolutely stunning. It's on the western coast of Turkey, but further down. The nearest island is Lesbos, so if you can see, it's about sort of halfway down.
11:08 Greg Jenner? And he's invited by a guy called Hermias.
11:10 Speaker 05 Yes.
11:10 Greg Jenner? Who is a former slave who's now ended up as king?
11:13 Speaker 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 or tyrant, which means somebody who's come into monarchical power, but not through hereditary.
11:26 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
11:26 Speaker 05 And he invites Aristotle over, apparently, to help him write a constitution.
11:30 Greg Jenner? Which sounds very progressive and modern, doesn'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.
11:40 Speaker 06 That would be an Aristotle joke.
11:42 Greg Jenner? That's appropriate wit, everyone.
11:44 Speaker 06 I bet there was an equivalent joke to that, though.
11:46 Greg Jenner? So Asos, he goes there and he finds love.
11:49 Speaker 05 He does. It's either Hermias's daughter, or his adopted daughter, or possibly his niece. But anyway, it's a posh woman in his court.
11:58 Greg Jenner? Called Pythias?
11:59 Speaker 05 Called Pythias. He marries her and it seems to have been very happy.
12:03 Greg Jenner? 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".
12:09 Speaker 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.
12:16 Greg Jenner? Oh, that's sad. But they move to the Isle of Lesbos.
12:19 Speaker 05 They do.
12:19 Greg Jenner? Which is not far from Asos. And we've got this single dad with his little girl. What do you think they get up to on Lesbos? What do you think Aristotle's gonna do?
12:27 Speaker 06 I'm not gonna take the bait, buddy. Nice try. Well, I don't know. Give me a bit more about Lesbos. What is the island like? Is it populated at this point?
12:37 Speaker 05 Very much so. There are three big cities. The biggest is Mitellini.
12:41 Greg Jenner? And it's a very cultured, it's a place of great culture.
12:43 Speaker 05 It's deeply cultured.
12:44 Speaker 06 Right.
12:45 Speaker 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, botanists today will say it's got outstanding amount of really interesting plants that don't exist anywhere else. And it's got this massive lagoon, which is a lake, which is mainly freshwater. But it actually blurs into saltwater and meets the sea. And it had such an amazing amount of interesting creatures living in it that Aristotle said, I know what I want to be now. I'm going to be a marine zoologist.
13:21 Speaker 06 Did he invent that?
13:22 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
13:22 Speaker 05 Yeah.
13:23 Greg Jenner? Wow.
13:24 Speaker 06 The question of what did he do with his daughter? 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.
13:42 Speaker 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 17 years younger than him, so about 20, called Theo Fraster. And he is a lesbian. He lives on Lesbos. Stop it.
13:59 Speaker 06 I'm just mirroring what you're saying.
14:00 Speaker 05 He is obsessed with plants. And I think they quite literally decided to invent zoology and botany together.
14:09 Greg Jenner? He's not desperately trying to get his job back in that.
14:11 Speaker 05 No, if life gives you lemon, you know.
14:13 Greg Jenner? Study that lemon and write a book about it.
14:15 Speaker 05 Right, exactly.
14:15 Speaker 06 Invent lemon studies. Yeah. But it does sound like it doesn't matter what his life circumstance would have been. The curious mind would have just explored any surrounding.
14:24 Speaker 05 I think that's exactly right.
14:25 Greg Jenner? Right. And so when he's there, he describes 500 species of animal. He's looking at plants as well.
14:31 Speaker 06 Yeah, but it was easier back then. There was so much, nothing had been described. When you invent something.
14:35 Speaker 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.
14:51 Speaker 06 Yeah. Oh, wow.
14:52 Speaker 05 He actually says that. That's the first reference in world literature to human industrial farming or anything actually killing off a species.
15:02 Greg Jenner? And extinction is an idea isn't really rediscovered until the 18th century.
15:04 Speaker 05 No, so he's now actually quite big in green circles.
15:08 Speaker 06 Guys, controversial theory. I think he might have been a time traveller. This feels like someone who's like almost a glitch.
15:15 Speaker 05 Yeah.
15:15 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
15:16 Speaker 06 Like too much information just poured out.
15:18 Greg Jenner? You think he's got a wristwatch. You think there's.
15:20 Speaker 06 I think if we are living in a simulation, he got the extra weapons.
15:23 Greg Jenner? I knew you'd make it weird. I didn't think it would be this far in.
15:26 Speaker 06 Well, I needed to hear the evidence first and clearly.
15:29 Speaker 05 It's like cyborg Aristotle.
15:30 Speaker 06 Something's going on.
15:31 Greg Jenner? Yeah. He's on Lesbos. He's doing all this. He's having a great time. He's written stuff and then suddenly he gets a job offer.
15:35 Speaker 05 Oh, dear.
15:36 Greg Jenner? From a man called Philip of Macedon. He was 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?
15:47 Speaker 06 Alexander the Great.
15:48 Greg Jenner? Not yet great.
15:49 Speaker 06 Not yet great. Alexander the.
15:50 Greg Jenner? The brat.
15:51 Speaker 06 The brat.
15:52 Greg 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.
15:59 Speaker 05 Absolutely.
16:00 Greg Jenner? You never know you're going to survive through adulthood and Aristotle gets the gig and he decides to go. Why?
16:06 Speaker 05 Well, he gets the gig and decides to go is that's how it's always put in his biography is I, we don't know any more about it. But I would say when you get a letter from Philip, the greatest murderer, you know, the great 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.
16:25 Greg Jenner? So you think he's a threat.
16:26 Speaker 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.
16:39 Greg Jenner? Cause he does, Alexander is told, you don't have to be a philosopher, but please do listen to the philosophers, which feels like a compromise. Like, okay, all right, you're not, you're not going to be a philosopher. I get it. But can you at least listen to them?
16:49 Speaker 05 Well, he will have definitely taught him ethics, politics and rhetoric. This is a sort of curriculum, how to behave.
16:56 Greg Jenner? So rhetoric is speech making.
16:57 Speaker 05 How to govern your country and how to speak in public. Yes, this has been, been the basis of it. 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 Macedon. He does talk about things like really evil, very rich people. Or what happens in tyrants' households, you know, that kind of thing. But he doesn't put names to it usually.
17:25 Greg Jenner? It's aged 48 that we get Aristotle returning to Athens, you know, and he's lived life by this point. He has written a new constitution, he's fallen in love, he's become a new dad, he's been widowed, he's invented zoology, he's invented marine biology, he's tutored a chosfond brat and survived the most dangerous place 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.
17:49 Speaker 05 No, it's not petty.
17:51 Greg Jenner? No?
17:51 Speaker 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.
17:55 Greg Jenner? But that school is called the Lyceum.
17:57 Speaker 05 And because Theophrastus was natural science and he did it with Theophrastus.
18:00 Greg Jenner? So he brings Theophrastus with him.
18:01 Speaker 05 Utterly loyal to Theophrastus, yes, they do it together.
18:03 Speaker 06 Has he received back into Athens as a, as a kind of returning hero?
18:07 Speaker 05 Well, not as a returning hero, I don't think, but as a perfectly welcome resident alien. He never got citizenship.
18:13 Greg Jenner? Never, really?
18:14 Speaker 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.
18:28 Greg Jenner? And then puts the money into the school.
18:30 Speaker 05 Yes.
18:31 Greg Jenner? So the Lyceum is arguably the first teaching university. The academy is, is a philosophy class, but this, this has got a library, this has got, this feels like it's something different.
18:40 Speaker 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, but he only stayed alive for about 13 years. But in that 13 years, my goodness, what he did.
19:06 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
19:07 Speaker 06 Where's his daughter at this point?
19:08 Speaker 05 Oh, she's, she's with him and he's got a new girlfriend.
19:11 Greg Jenner? Yes.
19:12 Speaker 05 Who he never seems to marry. She's called her Pylis, 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 Stagre, he was very, very attached to her, and he had his son, Nychomachus, named after, in the Greek way, his father.
19:31 Greg Jenner? Yeah, so the father of the GP.
19:32 Speaker 05 Yes, after whom the Nychomachian ethics is named.
19:36 Speaker 06 You're holding up a book?
19:37 Speaker 05 I am holding up the Nychomachian ethics.
19:39 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
19:39 Speaker 05 Which I, you know, just happen to have in my pocket.
19:41 Greg Jenner? So this is one of, so he writes 160 books or treatises?
19:44 Speaker 05 Yeah, and a lot of them, I think, in that time, or finished them in that time.
19:48 Speaker 06 How big, how big are these books? Like, are we talking, like, word count per book?
19:52 Speaker 05 Oh, God, they vary between 5,000 to 120,000.
19:57 Speaker 06 Okay.
19:58 Greg Jenner? And he's writing books on physics, on 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, it'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.
20:17 Speaker 05 Yeah.
20:18 Greg Jenner? How would you sum, I mean, it's a big subject, how would you sum that up quickly on a comedy podcast?
20:22 Speaker 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.
20:35 Greg Jenner? Job done.
20:36 Speaker 06 Yeah, that's beautiful.
20:37 Speaker 05 It's so sensible.
20:39 Greg Jenner? It's sensible centrist politics, is what we want. And there are words that are used in philosophy, eudaimonia?
20:45 Speaker 05 Yeah, that means.
20:46 Greg Jenner? Flourishing.
20:47 Speaker 05 Flourishing, it's more a verb than a noun.
20:49 Greg Jenner? Oh, is it?
20:50 Speaker 05 It's be, it's not happiness, but living your life in a way that will conducive to happiness.
20:55 Greg Jenner? So be good, be happy, and you will be good. And if you be good, you'll be happy.
21:00 Speaker 05 Basically.
21:01 Greg Jenner? It's pretty good, isn't it?
21:03 Speaker 06 It's very simple, yeah. I think it's true as well, not to, he doesn't need my backing, but.
21:08 Speaker 05 And there's no life after death, it's all about now, that's very important.
21:11 Speaker 06 So, ah, so be here now, he's very zen, isn't he?
21:13 Speaker 05 He's very zen. It's now, it's now.
21:15 Speaker 06 Yeah, this is it.
21:16 Speaker 05 You won't get punished afterwards, you'll just be miserable now if you're nasty.
21:20 Greg Jenner? Does he believe in the gods?
21:21 Speaker 05 Sort of, but they're kind of these weird things that live far away on the planets.
21:24 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
21:25 Speaker 05 No interest, he's the unmoved mover.
21:27 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
21:27 Speaker 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 can't look to the beyond for any moral answers.
21:40 Speaker 06 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...
21:53 Greg Jenner? Well.
21:54 Speaker 06 What would he be saying there? Is that a...
21:56 Speaker 05 I think he was a bit of a flirt, actually.
21:57 Greg Jenner? Hmm, interesting.
21:58 Speaker 05 He constantly cites the example of what to do if you really, really fancy your neighbour's wife.
22:03 Greg Jenner? Hang on a minute, you've said adultery was a bad thing.
22:05 Speaker 05 No, he don't.
22:06 Greg Jenner? He's covering his neighbour's wife.
22:07 Speaker 05 He says what to do, and then he gives you the example of Helen of Troy.
22:11 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
22:11 Speaker 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.
22:18 Greg Jenner? Wow, okay.
22:19 Speaker 05 He says, do with your lady you're infatuated with, or man you're infatuated with.
22:25 Speaker 06 Yeah.
22:25 Speaker 05 Do Helen, you say, yes, you're gorgeous, I'll bugger off.
22:30 Speaker 06 That's a shame because Helen's also at my dinner party, so. Sorry, Helen, gotta go.
22:35 Greg 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.
22:44 Speaker 05 Absolutely.
22:45 Greg Jenner? One of them was that he did not believe women were as intellectually capable as men, right?
22:49 Speaker 05 No.
22:49 Greg Jenner? So he thinks women are not as smart.
22:51 Speaker 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.
22:58 Greg Jenner? He's also, he's ancient Greek, so he is a slave owner.
23:01 Speaker 05 He came out with the big justification of slavery that I'm afraid was wheeled out ever from the 15th century.
23:07 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
23:08 Speaker 05 To the American Civil War.
23:09 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
23:09 Speaker 05 He was responsible for that.
23:11 Greg Jenner? I think the slavery thing is the thing where we really struggle with.
23:14 Speaker 05 It's a very big one, yeah.
23:14 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
23:15 Speaker 05 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.
23:35 Speaker 06 Okay, and is that?
23:37 Speaker 05 Most unusual.
23:38 Speaker 06 That's unusual, okay. There still is a bit of a plot twist on Aristotle, but you know, that is gonna happen.
23:44 Greg Jenner? We do have to kill Aristotle off. He sort of dies slightly enigmatically. He's sort of chased out of Athens.
23:50 Speaker 05 Yes.
23:50 Greg Jenner? Why?
23:51 Speaker 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 infertling the youth, bringing in, you know, it's what he did to philosophers he didn't like.
24:12 Greg Jenner? Okay.
24:13 Speaker 05 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, and seems to write a very detailed will and dies, apparently has stomach cancer about a year later.
24:41 Greg Jenner? And Theophrasus stays behind in Athens and keeps his books, and that's how we have them, right?
24:46 Speaker 05 That's how? 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 an icon because he's still very young. He's got a very adult son who's been his best friend for a very, very long time.
25:03 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
25:03 Speaker 05 Wonderful relationship.
25:04 Greg Jenner? So he died soon after, sort of exile from Athens, and his reputation immediately after is not that burnished with glory. It takes a little while for people to re-discover his brilliance, I think. Is that fair?
25:16 Speaker 05 Yeah, because other more new and shiny philosophical schools took over, especially Stoicism.
25:23 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
25:23 Speaker 05 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, no.
25:36 Greg Jenner? So there you go, Dan. Aristotle. Pretty good life?
25:38 Speaker 06 Yeah, he's all right.
25:41 Speaker 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.
25:51 Greg Jenner? But when we did the Pythagoras episode, you were able to sort of knock down quite a few myths.
25:55 Speaker 05 Well, Pythagoras himself left such, so little. We have actually, almost everything I've said, almost 80% of it, is out of his own works.
26:03 Speaker 06 Yeah.
26:03 Speaker 05 Right, so this is solid testimony. The nuance window!
26:11 Greg 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.
26:23 Speaker 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
27:06 Speaker 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.
27:43 Greg Jenner? Intellectual history, and then we end up with a bum joke. That's what should be in his poetics about comedy, right?
27:48 Speaker 06 Yeah.
27:48 Greg Jenner? Are you kind of like on board with Aristotle? Because I think we're both team Aristotle over here.
27:52 Speaker 06 I'm massively team. I mean, outside of the the stuff that is very questionable.
27:57 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
27:57 Speaker 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.
28:21 Greg 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 Your 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.
28:55 Speaker 05 Thank you.
28:57 Greg Jenner? And in comedy corner, we had the brilliant Dan Schreiber. Thank you, Dan.
29:00 Speaker 06 Thanks, Greg.
29:01 Greg Jenner? To you lovely listener, join me next time as we return to the classroom for another lesson from the past. But for now, I'm off to go and rewrite Aristotle's Lost Volume on comedy. I think it's mostly to do with bums. Bye.
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