The dates of the chief events in the life of Aristotle, extracted from the ‘Chronology’ of Apollodorus (140 b.c.), have been handed down to us by Diogenes Laertius in his ‘Lives of the Philosophers;’ and from various other sources it is possible to fill in the outline thus afforded, if not with certain facts, at all events with reasonable probabilities. Aristotle’s own writings are almost entirely devoid of personal references, yet in them we can trace, to some extent, the progress and development of his mind. On the whole, we know quite as much about him, personally, as about most of the ancient Greek writers.
Aristotle was born in the year 384 b.c., at Stageira, a Grecian colony and seaport town on the Strymonic Gulf in Thrace, not far from Mount Athos—and, what is more important, not far from the frontier of Macedonia, and from Pella, the residence of the Macedonian
