PREFATORY NOTE

IN the following notes I have taken little account of matters of geography, but it seems worth while to call attention to the frequent reference in this book, and in certain other Aristotelian writings, to the island of Lesbos and to places in and near it (cf. Strabo xiii. 2). Thus, for instance, we have mention made of Lesbos (H. A. 621^b 22, G. A. 763^b 1), Antissa (Probl. 1303^a 34, Oecon. 1347^a 25), Arginussa (H. A. 578^b 27), Lectum (H. A. 547^a 5), Mitylene (Pol. 1304^a 4, 1311^b 26, Vent. 973^a 11, fr. 1521^b 3), Pordoselene (H. A. 605^b 29), Proconnesus (Vent. 973^a 20, fr. 1521^b 13), Pyrrha (G. A. 763^b 1), and the Pyrrhaean Euripus (H. A. 544^a 21, 548^a 9, 603^a 21, 621^b 12, P. A. 680^b 1); and I think it, further, not improbable that Μαλέα (H. A. 548^b 25) should be Μαλία, the south-eastern promontory of Lesbos.

We know that Aristotle spent two years in Mitylene, when he was about forty years old: that is to say, some three years after the death of Plato, just after his sojourn with Hermias of Atarneus, just prior to his residence at the court of Philip, and some ten years before he returned to Athens to begin teaching in the Lyceum (Dion. Hal. Ep. I ad Ammaeum, p. 727 R). Throughout the Natural History references to places in Greece are few, while they are comparatively frequent to places in Macedonia and to places on the coast of Asia Minor, all the way from the Bosphorus to the Carian coast. I think it can be shown that Aristotle’s natural history studies were carried on, or mainly carried on, in his middle age, between his two periods of residence in Athens; that the calm, landlocked lagoon at Pyrrha was one of his favourite hunting-grounds; and that his short stay in Euboea, during the last days of his life, has left little if any impress on his zoological writings.

Then it would appear that Aristotle’s work in natural history was antecedent to his more strictly philosophical work, and it would follow that we might proceed legitimately to interpret the latter in the light of the former. And remembering that Speusippus also was a naturalist (to whose writings on fish and shellfish Athenaeus bears abundant testimony), we might permit ourselves to surmise that inquiries into natural history were in no small degree to be reckoned with as a cause of the modification of Plato’s doctrine, alike, though not identically, at the hands of Aristotle and of the later Academy.