Peripatetics
The original meaning of the word peripatos was "a covered walking place." The house that Theophrastus provided for the school of Aristotle contained such a peripatos. This yielded a proper name for the school itself—the Peripatos—and its members came to be known as "those from the Peripatos" or "Peripatetics." This derivation should be preferred to that previously current, according to which the term "Peripatetic" referred to a method of teaching while walking about, known to have been used by Protagoras, for example, and assumed to have been adopted by Aristotle. Although this view goes back to Hermippus at the end of the third century BCE, it is now generally regarded as a mistaken inference, based on nothing more than the name itself.
The history of the Peripatetics can be divided into two periods—that immediately following the death of Aristotle and that following the revival of interest in Aristotelian studies resulting from the edition of the treatises by Andronicus of Rhodes in the time of Marcus Tullius Cicero or a little later. When Theophrastus became president of the school in the year before Aristotle's death, he continued to show an interest in virtually the whole range of Aristotelian studies. But whereas it is now generally supposed that Aristotle retained a keen interest in metaphysical questions to the end of his life, it was the shift of emphasis away from Platonic otherworldliness to the phenomena of the world around us, a subject also found in Aristotle, which seems to have attracted Theophrastus most. Strato, Theophrastus's successor, made important developments in physical theory, transforming Aristotle's doctrine into a fairly full-blooded materialism. But after Strato's death about 269 BCE, his successors became almost exclusively concerned with questions about the content of the good life and the way to reach it, with questions of rhetoric, and with the distinctively Hellenistic interest in anecdote, gossip, and scandal. Many of the specifically Aristotelian doctrines were abandoned, and the school had become very much the same as a number of others in Athens by the end of the second century BCE.
The reasons for this disintegration are uncertain. It may be that the concentration of interest upon empirical questions discouraged speculation. Empiricism as such, however, has interested philosophers intensely at other periods of history. Some have supposed that the disintegration was part of a philosophic failure of nerve characteristic of the Hellenistic age as a whole. But this view of the Hellenistic age is probably incorrect, and in any case such a failure of nerve clearly applied less to Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics of the period than it did to the Peripatetics. Thus, their fate would remain unexplained.
It may be that the history of the Aristotelian writings had something to do with what happened to the Peripatetics. According to the well-known story, on Theophrastus' death his copies of Aristotle's writings went to Neleus of Scepsis in the Troad (Asia Minor). In one extreme view this meant that the Peripatetics in Athens thereafter had access only to the published works of Aristotle—namely, the dialogues. In fact, there seem to have been copies of at least some of the treatises available in Alexandria, in Rhodes, and probably in Athens throughout the Hellenistic period. They do not appear to have been much studied in the Peripatos, however, where knowledge of Aristotle came primarily from the writings of Theophrastus when not from the dialogues. Indeed, in a sense the school of Aristotle might more correctly be called the school of Theophrastus. The weakness of its links with Aristotle's own thought may explain its relative failure in philosophy.
Andronicus of Rhodes wrote a special study on the order of Aristotle's works and published an edition of the treatises in the order in which they have survived to us. His edition is the source of all subsequent ones. Andronicus is sometimes dated as early as 70 BCE, but as Cicero never refers to his edition, it may not have been published until after Cicero's death in 43 BCE. Andronicus initiated a revival in Aristotelian studies, and the Peripatos flourished at least down to the time of Alexander of Aphrodisias (about 200 CE). Among those influenced by this revival were the geographer Ptolemy and the physician Galen. Alexander wrote important commentaries on the main Aristotelian treatises, and the tradition of writing such commentaries continued into the Byzantine period through such scholars as Themistius, Ammonius, and Simplicius, who must be classed as Platonists rather than as Aristotelians. All the commentators treated Aristotle's writings as a systematic corpus, and from the start all were influenced in varying degrees by both Stoic and Platonist doctrines.
The general approach, apart from certain unintended distortions, was intensely conservative. From time to time modifications of interest were proposed, however. The successor of Andronicus, Boëthius of Sidon (who is not to be confused with the earlier Stoic of the same name), rejected the doctrine that the universal is prior by nature to the particular and would not grant to form the title of primary substance. In so doing, he took a big step in the direction of medieval nominalism. The pseudo-Aristotelian treatise De Mundo is often regarded as a product of this period. It culminates in a theology in which a transcendent deity maintains order in the cosmos by the exercise of an undefined power, and in a general way the work has affinities with both Stoic writers like Posidonius and Neoplatonists. It seems, however, to imitate the Aristotle of the dialogues rather than the treatises, and it may antedate the edition of Andronicus.
Alexander of Aphrodisias; Aristotelianism; Aristotle; Cicero, Marcus Tullius; Empiricism; Epicureanism and the Epicurean School; Galen; Hellenistic Thought; Neoplatonism; Platonism and the Platonic Tradition; Posidonius; Protagoras of Abdera; Simplicius; Stoicism; Strato and Stratonism; Themistius; Theophrastus.
Bibliography
The earlier Peripatetics, fragments and testimonia, are in Die Schule des Aristoteles, edited by F. Wehrli, 10 parts (Basel, 1944–1959). See also P. Moraux, Les listes anciennes des ouvrages d'Aristote (Louvain, Belgium, 1951); I. Düring, Aristotle in the Ancient Biographical Tradition (Goteborg, Sweden, 1957), Part III, Chs. XVII and XVIII, and Part IV; and C. O. Brink, "Peripatos," in Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, edited by A. Pauly and G. Wissowa, Supp. Vol. VII (Stuttgart, 1940). See also the Aristotelian commentators in Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, 23 vols. and 3 supp. vols. (Berlin, 1882–1909). De Mundo is translated by D. J. Furley with Aristotle's On Sophistical Refutations; translated by E. S. Forster (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1955).
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