This book is an exploration of the source: the beautiful scientific works that Aristotle wrote, and taught, at the Lyceum. Beautiful, but enigmatic too, for the very terms of his thought are so remote from us that they are hard to understand. He requires translation: not merely into English, but into the language of modern science. That, of course, is a perilous enterprise: the risk of mistranslating him, of attributing to him ideas that he could not possibly have had, is always there.
The perils are particularly great when the translator is a scientist. As a breed we make poor historians. We frankly lack the historical temper, the Rankean imperative to understand the past in its own right. Preoccupied with our own theories, we are inclined to see them in whatever we read. The French historian of science Georges Canguilhem put it like this: ‘Agreeing to look for, to find, and celebrate precursors is the clearest symptom of a lack of talent for epistemological criticism.’ The ad hominem tone of the epigram may cause us to doubt its veracity. It also ignores the fact, obvious to any scientist, if not to all historians, that science is cumulative, that we do have predecessors and that we should like to know who they were and what they knew. Still, there’s a discomfiting shard of truth there.
All this should be borne in mind as you read this book. But let me also venture a defence, a scientist’s apologia if you will. Aristotle’s great subject was the living world in all its beauty. It seems possible, then, that something might be gained from reading him as a fellow biologist. After all, our theories are linked to his not only by descent but also by the fact that they seek to explain the same phenomena. It may then truly be that they aren’t so different from ours.
In the twentieth century, a generation of great scholars began to examine Aristotle’s biological works not as natural history but as natural philosophy. David Balme (London), Allan Gotthelf (New Jersey), Wolfgang Kullmann (Freiburg), James Lennox (Pittsburgh), Geoffrey Lloyd (Cambridge) and Pierre Pellegrin (Paris) gave us a new, thrilling Aristotle. Their discoveries appear on every page of this book (though each of them will disagree, or would have disagreed, with much of it, not least because they have so often disagreed with each other). And so I make no great claims to originality here. However, I like to think that a scientist may, just occasionally, see in Aristotle’s writings something that the philologists and philosophers have missed.
For sometimes he speaks directly to any biologist’s heart, as when he tells us why we should study living things. We must imagine him in the marble colonnades of the Lyceum, addressing a group of truculent students. He gestures towards a mound of ink-stained cuttlefish decomposing in the Attic sun. Pick one, he says, cut, open, look.
‘. . .?’
Exasperated, he tries to make them understand:
So we should not, like children, react with disgust to the investigation of less elevated animals. There is something awesome in all natural things. Some strangers, so the story goes, wanted to meet Heraclitus. They approached him but saw he was warming himself by the stove. ‘Don’t worry!’ he said. ‘Come on in! There are gods here too.’ One should, similarly, approach research on animals of whatever type without hesitation. For inherent in each of them there is something natural and beautiful. Nothing is accidental in the works of nature: everything is, absolutely, for the sake of something else. The purpose for which each has come together, or come into being, deserves its place among what is beautiful.
Scholars call this ‘The Invitation to Biology’.
SĒPIA – CUTTLEFISH – SEPIA OFFICINALIS
THE
ISLAND
KISTHOS – ROCK ROSE – CISTUS SP.
III
THERE IS A mystery here. How did Aristotle think to do biology? How, after all, do you invent a science?
The story was first told by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson. Or at least he gave it its chronological and geographical bones. Late in life, Thompson became famous for On Growth and Form, the eccentric, beautiful book that he wrote about why creatures have the shapes they do. But in 1910 Thompson was a dilettantish failure. Brilliant at Cambridge, he was only twenty-four when he was called to the Chair of Zoology at University College Dundee. Ceaselessly active, he taught, gave working-men’s lectures, wrote letters to the Dundee Courier, stocked a zoology museum (a platypus was a particular triumph), travelled to the Bering Sea to investigate the seal fishery and submitted philological notes to The Classical Review – but published little scientific research. When he was twenty-eight his old Cambridge tutor warned him to do some science before it was too late. When he was thirty-eight another Cambridge friend wrote: ‘Let me now suggest to you that you should now shew up some more scientific work.’ Thompson agonized and in 1895 published A Glossary of Greek Birds, a work in which he collated and identified all the birds mentioned in the ancient Greek and Egyptian texts. His colleagues weren’t impressed. So in 1910 Thompson published a translation of Aristotle’s Historia animalium.
In Thompson’s hands Aristotle’s worried prose acquires a subdued grandeur: ‘All viviparous quadrupeds, then, are furnished with an oesophagus and a windpipe, situated as in man; the same statement is applicable to oviparous quadrupeds and birds, only that the latter present diversities in the shapes of these organs.’ Or: ‘In the case of oviparous fishes the process of coition is less open to observation.’ Or: ‘In many places the climate will account for peculiarities; thus in Illyria, Thrace and Epirus the ass is small . . .’
Thompson applied his zoology to identifying the creatures that Aristotle described. In Arabia, Aristotle says, there is a mouse that is much larger than our field mouse ‘with its hind-legs a span long and its front legs the length of the first finger-joint’. ‘This’, Thompson footnotes, ‘is the jerboa, Dipus aegyptiacus or allied species’ – which instantly illuminates. At times his annotations threaten to overwhelm the text: is probably the modern genus Rhinobatos, the Squatinoraia of Willughby and other older writers, including R. columnae, and other species common in the Greek markets. is probably the angelfish Rhina squatina (Squatina laevis, Cuv.) which is itself somewhat intermediate between a shark and a skate.’ (Years later Thompson would publish a companion to A Glossary of Greek Birds called A Glossary of Greek Fishes.) As Thompson says, and one detects a note of despair, ‘To annotate, illustrate, and criticize Aristotle’s knowledge of natural history is a task without an end . . .’
The most important lines in Thompson’s Historia animalium are in the Prefatory Note. They arrive with so little fanfare that they are easy to miss:
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 land-locked lagoon at Pyrrha was one of his favourite hunting grounds . . .
Pyrrha, Thompson said, was on the Aegean island of Lesbos.*
IV
TO THE WEST, LESBOS has the stark clarity of the Cyclades. The landscape is a composition in red, ochre and black. The colours come from volcanic tuffs, eroded pyroclasts and basalts produced by volcanic eruptions 20 million years ago. The plant cover, little though there is of it, is the thorny xerophytic flora of the Aegean phrygana amid which a few skeletal sheep try to graze between stone walls that march across the mountains slopes in geometrical grids. To the east, however, the island is lush and green. The slopes of Mount Olymbos, a massif made of schists, quartzites and marbles, are covered in oak (Quercus ithaburiensis macrolepis and Q. pubescens) and, at the highest altitudes, dense stands of sweet chestnut and resinous Turkish pine. Terrapins and eels swim in rivers and storks nest in the chimneys of abandoned ouzo factories. In spring, the valleys are washed yellow by the rare Asian Rhododendron luteum and the olive groves of the plains are carpeted in poppies. Poised between the European and Asian continental landmasses, the island draws its flora from both and is exceptionally rich. In 1899 the Greek botanist Palaiologos C. Cantartzis described sixty new endemic species in his La végétation de l’île de Lesbos (Mytilène) (Univer
sité de Paris, Sorbonne). Nearly all are invalid, but even his more conservative successors count 1,400 plant species, among them seventy-five orchids.
Kolpos Kalloni divides these two worlds. Sheltered from open sea by a narrow, winding strait, it is twenty-two kilometres long and ten wide and cuts the island nearly in two. It is often called a lagoon, but it is really an inland sea of the type that oceanographers call a bahira. It is one of the richest bodies of water in the Eastern Aegean. Nutrients flow down the rivers that run from its surrounding hills and feed the phytoplankton that, in the early spring, turn its waters green. The eelgrass beds of its shallows are a nursery for bream and bass and paddle-legged crabs. The gentle slopes of its muddy bed are interrupted only by ancient oyster reefs – but mention Kalloni to a Greek and he will speak of its pilchards that are best eaten salted and washed down with Plomari ouzo.
The salt comes from the works at the northern end of the Lagoon. There a maze of channels carries brine of ever-increasing concentration from pan to pan. The saturated solutions deposit large crystals on branches and stones that glisten beneath swards of marsh samphire and sea lavender. At the innermost pans the salt becomes a harsh, deserted skin that is then broken and heaped into immense white pyramids. Rusting machinery is scattered about but is hardly ever seen at work, salt collection being a restful industry. The ecology of the saltpans is very simple. Halophilic algae are eaten by brine shrimp and brine-fly larvae that, in turn, are sieved and probed by flocks of greater flamingos, black-winged stilts and a miscellany of sandpipers and plovers. Only one fish, the toothcarp, Aphanius fasciatus, can live in the bitter, hot brine and it is eaten by the black storks and glossy ibis that wade through the channels and several species of tern that wheel down from the sky. In the spring and autumn, the saltpans, and the marshes that surround them, are a resting place for thousands of migrant birds en route between Africa and the north.
V
ARISTOTLE IS NO geographer or travel-writer, but a curiously large number of passages in his work refer to Kalloni, which he knew as Pyrrha, after a town on its eastern shore. It is precisely the frequency of these passages that caused D’Arcy Thompson to suggest that this is where Aristotle did so much of his biological work. Many of them can be found in his great treatise on comparative zoology, Historia animalium. They tell of the animals that inhabit the Lagoon. A collation of these passages into a biological Baedeker would read something like this:
The fishes of Lesbos breed in the Lagoon at Pyrrha. Some of the fishes – mostly the egg-laying ones – are best eaten in early summer; others – the grey mullet and the cartilaginous fishes – are best in autumn. In winter the Lagoon is colder than the open sea so most of its fish, but not the giant goby, swim out of the lagoon only to return in the summer. The white goby is not a marine fish but is also found there. The absence of fish in winter means that edible sea urchins of the strait have more food – which is why they are then particularly rich in eggs and good to eat, although small. There are oysters in the Lagoon. (Some people from Chios came over to Lesbos and tried to transplant them to the waters surrounding their own island.) Once there were also many scallops, but dredging and drought have exterminated them. Fishermen also say that starfish are a particular nuisance near the entrance to the Lagoon. Although the Lagoon contains much life, a number of species are not found: parrotfish, shad, spiny dogfish. None of the other brightly coloured fish are found there either; nor are the spiny lobster, common octopus or musky octopus. The murex snails of Lectum, a mainland cape facing Lesbos, are particularly big.
KŌBIOS – GOBY – GOBIUS COBITIS
Written this way, Aristotle’s remarks about the Lagoon and its creatures make a portrait of the Lagoon as it was twenty-three centuries ago, perhaps the oldest of any natural place that we have.* Little remains now of the ancient town of Pyrrha – Strabo says it was destroyed (by an earthquake in the third century BC) – but the biology still rings true. The Lagoon remains rich in oysters, though today they are exported to Northern Europe by the ton. Until recently there were scallops too. Indeed, a fisherman complained to us that there used to be scallops in the entrance to the Lagoon but that, twenty years ago, dredging had rendered them all but extinct. It seems, then, that the scallop population of Kalloni has been waxing and waning for at least twenty-three centuries, and that the locals have been complaining about it all the while. The fishermen also confirm that fish migrate annually in and out of the Lagoon to breed, and that it contains no parrotfish, shad or spiny lobsters or spiny dogfish. There have been some changes to the Lagoon’s fauna since Aristotle’s day. If there were no octopi then, there certainly are now – I have eaten several myself. And, for all their flamboyance, Aristotle does not mention the flamingos – but that is because they arrived at the Lagoon only a few decades ago.
VI
BUT ALL GREEKS were interested in fish. Even as Aristotle lectured on fish and suchlike in the Lyceum, in Sicily one Archestratus was composing a book about them in verse. It was all about when and where to catch them, and then how to cook them. If you go to the land of Ambracia (Western Greece), Archestratus urges, buy the ‘boarfish’ (catfish) even if it costs its weight in gold! But get your scallops from Lesbos, your moray eels from the straits of Italy and your tuna from Byzantium (slice, sprinkle with salt, brush with oil, bake simply and eat while hot). He titled his book The Life of Luxury. For the Greeks fish were about conspicuous consumption: less objects of philosophy than objects of desire.
So what makes a man stop eating his fish and start dissecting it instead?
VII
IT’S NOT THAT there wasn’t any science – or at least natural philosophy – before Aristotle, for there was an abundance of it. By the time he was born, schools of philosophers deeply concerned with understanding the nature of the physical world had waxed and waned along the Anatolian and Italian littoral. The Greeks called them physiologoi, literally ‘those who give an account of nature’. Many were bold theoreticians. They loved systems that explained, in sweeping terms, the origin of the world, its mathematical order, the stuff of which it is made and the reasons why it contains so many different things. Others were empiricists who tried to measure the heavens or else the intervals of musical scales. Their writings have some of the ingredients of modern science – though we rarely get any sense that they challenged their theories with the observations that they made. Their explanations tended to appeal to natural rather than divine forces.
A comparison of two near contemporaries illustrates the shift in thought. For the mythographer Hesiod (fl. 650 BC) earthquakes are the consequence of Zeus’ wrath; for the first of the natural philosophers, Thales of Miletus (fl. 575 BC), they are the result of the earth’s precarious location, adrift on an expanse of water occasionally roiled by waves. The difference could not be more clear-cut: on the one hand an explanation that invokes supernatural beings of fathomless antiquity; on the other an explanation that depends on purely physical forces – and never mind if it’s wrong.
Yet the comparison is not quite what it seems. For one, we can’t be sure if that was really Thales’ theory.* No texts by him have survived; for all we know he didn’t write any. Seneca the Younger reports the earthquake theory in his Questions on Nature. Since he wrote about 500 years after Thales’ death and is perfectly vague about his sources we may wonder whether Seneca, or we, have any idea what Thales actually thought about earthquakes or anything else – though he is widely credited with having predicted an eclipse in 585 BC. The same is true for much of the rest of early – ‘Pre-Socratic’ – Greek thought. The entire corpus has come down to us in fragments buried with the texts of later thinkers who, as often as not, must be suspected of having done with their quotations what they pleased, or even of making them up. Scholars call these texts ‘doxographical’ and they are their delight and despair.
To be sure, enough fragments can be culled and reconstituted to fill thick books. And those fragments do speak of a new philosophic spirit abr
oad in fifth-century Greece. But distinctions apparently clear to us now, between science and non-science, philosophy and myth, were less so two millennia and more ago. In the Metaphysics Aristotle, himself a rich source of fragments, reviews what earlier thinkers have said about the ‘original causes’ of the world. He attributes to Thales the theory that everything comes from water. This is a perfectly reasonable, if vague, idea that deserves to be discussed in its own right; Aristotle does so – and doesn’t like it. And, he goes on, some think that Thales’ view is quite a lot like that held by the ‘men in the distant past (well before the current generation) who first gave an account of the gods’.
We are suddenly brought up short. Yes, the myths may be ancient history but evidently not so ancient that they do not deserve an airing in a highly technical discussion about the foundational material of the world. And then, just a few paragraphs later, having left Thales to stew with the ancients, Aristotle decides to analyse a bit of Hesiod – ‘Of all things that came to be, the first were Chaos, and broad-bosomed Earth and Love most eminent of the immortals’ – to see if any scientific sense can be made of it. Hesiod may be a mythographer, but for Aristotle he’s still worth a passing glance.
And that is the problem with making naturalism the hallmark of Pre-Socratic thought. The physiologoi do not always ‘leave the gods out’; the Divine can usually be found lurking somewhere in their cosmologies. When they asked, What is the origin of the world?, some gave answers that were as creationist as a Christian’s; others appealed to more remote forces such as Love itself; yet others again were ardent materialists and thought the world just self-assembled. From Hesiod to Democritus, the Creator advances, retreats or sometimes just curls up and contemplates himself.
The Lagoon Page 2
