7 March: Aristotle

According to some sources, Aristotle, Greek philosopher and teacher of Alexander the Great, died on this date in 322BC. 10 things you might not know about him.

1. Aristotle's name means "the best purpose" in Ancient Greek.
2. He was born in 384 BC and his father was the court physician to King Amyntus III of Macedonia. He was quite young when his parents died, and was mostly brought up by his sister.
3. At 17, he went away to school - to Plato's academy in Athens, to be exact. He spent 20 years there as a student and later as a teacher.
4. Plato died in 347 BC and it was around this time that Plato left Athens. We don't know if this was because he didn't like the way Plato's nephew Speusippus ran things, or whether he left because there was a lot of anti-Macedonian feelings at the time. He went to live in Lesbos, where he married a woman called Pythias. They had a daughter, who was named after her mother. When she died, he had a relationship with his wife's former slave, Herpyllis, with whom he had a son, Nicomachus.
5. In 336 BC, he went back to Athens and started his own academy in a former wrestling school outside the city, the Lyceum. Aristotle believed that an important part of philosophy was reviewing what other people had written - so the Lyceum also became one of the first great Libraries in the world.
6. Aristotle's students included three future kings - Ptolemy, Cassander and Alexander the Great.
7. While living in Lesbos, he studied biology. He was one of the first people to dissect animals to find out how their bodies worked. Aristotle came up with the idea of classifying plants and animals. His classification wasn't far off the one we use today, although he didn't get everything right. He believed the centre of intelligence was the Heart, rather than the Brain, and that the gender of Goats was determined by the direction of the wind.
8. It's thought that Aristotle wrote about 200 works, but we only have 31 of them. The include a toolkit for philosophers and scientists; treatises on animals, cosmology and metaphysics; works on ethics and politics, the “Nicomachean Ethics”, named for his son, who died young; and works about human creative endeavours like poetry and rhetoric. He wrote about what makes an argument convincing and how tragedies, if written well, can make audiences feel pity and fear. The works we do have are mostly in the form of notes and dialogues - historians believe his best prose works, the ones he prepared for publication, are the ones that were lost.
9. He died of a stomach complaint, and was buried beside his wife according to his request.
10. Aristotle was the first person to suggest that there was a landmass near the South Pole. He named the land mass Antarctica. Today, a range of mountains in Antarctica have been named after him, as was the Aristoteles crater on the Moon.

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