Born about 371 B.C. to Melantes, a fuller of Eresus on the island of Lesbos, Theophrastus was originally named Tyrtamus by his parents. He was given the name Theophrastus by his teacher Aristotle, just as Aristocles had been renamed Plato years before. Nothing is known of Theophrastus's youth, but in the fourth century B.C. Lesbos was an island culture past its prime. In the fifth century Lesbos had been allied alternately with Athens and Sparta; in 369 B.C., when Theophrastus was an infant, Lesbos broke with Sparta and joined the second Athenian confederacy. As an adolescent Theophrastus saw Lesbos in 357 B.C. forced to submit to Persia and an oligarchy; the domination by Persia lasted until Alexander the Great invaded Asia in 332 B.C.
The only connected account of Theophrastus's life is provided by Diogenes Laertius in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, 5.36-57 (circa A.D. 200); occasional tidbits are preserved elsewhere. Lives records that Theophrastus was first a student of philosophy in Eresus under Alcippus and then a student of Plato; if this is accurate, he must have left Eresus for Athens as a youth, since Plato died in 347 B.C. when Theophrastus was about twenty-four. Because he grew up, from about age two to age fourteen, when Lesbos was an Athenian ally, there is nothing unlikely in that.
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