Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/567

A E I A R I 507 different. The end of life, as is manifest also from expe rience, is the attainment of pleasure, which must be positive or real, not merely absence of pain, as the Epicureans afterwards held. Further, future pleasure, as a gentle motion not yet effected, and past pleasure, as a gentle motion completed and done, cannot possibly enter into our estimate of happiness. Immediate gratification, the pleasure of the moment (/xovoxpovos), is the end of life ; real happiness consists of a succession of moments of intense pleasure. The conception of a life in which, on the whole, pain is over-balanced by pleasure, may certainly be formed, but can never furnish a satisfactory end of action. Varieties of pleasure were, of course, admitted by Aristippus, but his decided opinion seems to have been that bodily pleasures and pains are the most potent factors in human happiness or misery. As to the causes of pleasure, the means by which it was to be attained, these are in themselves indifferent ; an action which gives pleasure is good, whether or not it be opposed to the religion ov laws of the country. The predicates, good and bad, attached to actions indepen dently of their consequences, are merely conventional, and not founded in nature. Yet Aristippus was compelled to admit that some actions which give immediate pleasure entail more than their equivalent of pain. This fact, he thought, was the true ground of the conventional distinc tion of right and wrong, and in this sense regard ought to be had to custom and law. But there is quite another side of the Cyrenaic doctrine, which appears as strongly in the theory as in the practice of Aristippus. Man must not give up himself as a slave to pleasure ; he must be superior to it. True happiness can only be obtained by rational insight, prudence (</>povr;(Tts), or wisdom. Only through this prudence, which is in truth virtue, can man make a proper use of the good things in his power, and free himself from those superstitions and violent passions that stand in the way of happiness. Through this wisdom we are enabled to preserve the mastery of pleasure, to rise superior to past, future, or even present happiness, and make ourselves independent of circumstances. True free dom of soul, real self-sufficiency, is given by wisdom, by mental cultivation. It is evident that at this point Aristippus approximates more closely to Socrates and the Cynics ; and it is a suggestive fact that his followers, who pushed his principles to their logical consequences, landed in a theory of the negation of pleasure, nearly identical with the later Cynic views. (Wendt, DC Phil. Cyrcnaica, 1841 ; H.T. Stein, De Phil. Cyren., pt. i., "Do Vita Aris.," 1855; Mullach, Frag. Phil. Grcec.,ii. 397-438.) ARISTO, or ARISTON, of Chios, a Stoic philosopher and pupil of Zeno, flourished about 250 B.C. He differed from Zeno on many points, and approximated more closely to the Cynic school. He was very eloquent (and was therefore sometimes called the Siren), but was controversial in tone. He despised logic as useless, and rejected the philosophy of nature as beyond the powers of man. Ethics alone he considered worthy of study, and in that only general and theoretical questions. He rejected altogether Zeno s doctrine of things desirable and intermediate between virtue and vice. According to him, there is no medium ; everything that is not virtuous (e.g., external conditions, fortune, health), is absolutely indifferent. There is only one virtue a clear, intelligent, healthy disposition of mind. Aristo is frequently confounded with another philosopher of the same name, Ariston of Julis, in Ceos, who, about 230 B.C., succeeded Lyco as scholarch of the Peripatetics. He appears to have been a man of no weight or originality of mind. ARISTOBULUS of CASSANDRIA, one of the generals who accompanied Alexander the Great, and who after wards, when very aged, wrote a history of the expedition. This work was much used by Arrian, who praises it highly. Only a few fragments remain ; these are given in Miiller s Hist. Grcec. Frag. ARISTOBULUS, a Jew of Alexandria, and a philoso pher of the peripatetic school, flourished about 160 B.C., in the reign of Ptolemy Fhilometer. He is the first repre sentative of the Jewish-Alexandrian philosophy, the aim of which was to reconcile and identify Greek philosophical conceptions with the Jewish religion. Only a few frag ments of his work, entitled Commentaries on the Writings of Hoses, are quoted by Clement, Eusebius, and other theological writers, but they suffice to show its object. He endeavoured to prove that early Greek philosophers had borrowed largely from some parts of Scripture which had become known to them ; in support of this view, he quoted from Linus, Orpheus, Musaeus, and others, passages which strongly resemble the Mosaic writings. These pas sages, however, were mere forgeries, and it is surprising that any of the Alexandrian scholars should have been deceived by them. ARISTOPHANES. The birth-year of Aristophanes is uncertain. He is known to have been about the same age as Eupolis, and is said to have been " almost a boy " (ar-^^ov /j-fipaKio-Kos) when his first comedy was brought out in 427 B.C. The most probable conjecture places his birth in or about the year 448 B.C. His father Philip pus was a land owner in ^Egina. Aristophanes was an Athenian citizen of the tribe Pandionis, and the deme Cydathene". The stories which made him a native of Cameirus in Rhodes, or of the Egyptian Naucratis, had probably no other foundation than an indictment for usurpation of civic rights (fei/t as y/3a</>?/) which appears to have been more than once laid against him by Cleon. His three sons Philippus, Araros, and Nicostratus were all comic poets. Philippus, the eldest, was a rival of Eubulus, who began to exhibit in 376 B.C. Artlros brought out two of his father s latest comedies, the Cocalus and the ^Eolosicon, and in 375 began to exhibit works of his own. Nico- stratus, the youngest, is assigned by Athenseus to the Middle Comedy, but belongs, as is shown by some of the names and characters of his pieces, to the New Comedy also. Plato s Symposium in which Aristophanes has a place at the side of Socrates shows that Plato bore no more ill- will than his master would have borne to the author of the Clouds. At the end of that banquet, " Aristodemus said that Eryximachus, Phaedrus, and others went away; he himself fell asleep, and as the nights were long, took a good rest; he was awakened towards daybreak by a crow ing of cocks, and when he awoke, the others were either asleep or had gone away ; there remained awake only Aristophanes, Socrates, and Agathon, who were drinking out of a large goblet which they passed round, and Socrates was discoursing to them. Aristodemus did not hear the beginning of the discourse, and he was only half awake ; but the chief thing which he remembered was Socrates insisting to the other two that the genius of comedy was the same as that of tragedy, and that the writer of tragedy ought to be a writer of comedy also. To this they were compelled to assent, being sleepy, and not quite under standing his meaning. And first of all Aristophanes fell asleep ; and then, when the day was already dawning, Agathon." Although tragedy and comedy had their common origin in the festivals of Dionysus, the regular establishment of tragedy at Athens preceded by half a century that of comedy. The Old Comedy may be said to have lasted about 80 years (470-390 B.C.), and to have flourished about 56 (4CO-404 B.C.) Of the forty poets who aro

named as having illustrated it the chief were Cratinus,