in the history of literature. But we must observe that what in the first place rendered this train of circumstances possible was the rapid decay of genius in Greece. When Aristotle died, none of his scholars was worthy to succeed him and carry on his work. His school do not seem to have appreciated what was great and valuable in his philosophy. They went off either into rhetorical sermonising on moral questions, or else into isolated inquiries, the solution of problems, or the drawing up of “papers” like those read before the Royal Society. It was perhaps a feeling of contempt for the Peripatetic school which induced Theophrastus, a generation after the death of Aristotle, to give away their whole library, including the great works of their master, to a foreign student. But for their apathy those great works would never have been left in unique copies, and ultimately exposed to such extreme peril. There must, however, have been a corresponding apathy in the external public, else curiosity would have demanded, and the love of science would have preserved, the results of Aristotle’s later years. But the reading world of the third century b.c. seems to have been quite content to be put off with that which was really un-Aristotelian, though it bore the name of Aristotle—with immature, rhetorical dialogues, the work of his youth, or spurious imitations of that work, with excerpts, epitomes, “papers,” and the sweepings of the Peripatetic school.
We may take Cicero, though living two centuries later, as a good specimen of the attitude towards Aristotle of a cultivated man of literature, not devoid of a certain taste for philosophy, of those times. Cicero
