La vocazione tardiva di Aristotele: storia di un motivo biografico

According to Epicurus’ letter On Occupations (101 Arrighetti2), after having squandered the family property in his youth, Aristotle devoted himself, without success, to military life and to the trade in drugs. He began with the profitable practice of philosophy only later, attending the school of Plato. The fragment of Epicurus can be compared with a page of Timaeus of Tauromenium (FGrHist 566 F 156), preserved by Polybius (12, 8, 1-4), where the Sicilian historian quarrels violently with Aristotle about the origin of the city of Locris. It has been argued that one text derives from the other but the differences between the reports of Timaues and Epicurus and the different perspective in the representation of the story suggest that they both derive from a common source. This source applied the biographical method, known today as the «method of Chamaeleon», consisting in the imaginative reconstruction of the life of the great figures of the past, starting from some recurrent elements in their works. More specifically, the character of Aristotle ἄσωτος may have been deduced from a famous passage of the Nicomachean Ethics (4, 3, 1121a 8-b 12). A role of the Comedy in the genesis of this tradition cannot be ruled out and it is possible to identify a link between the Comedy and the peripatetic tradition in the obscure figure of Eumelus, probably a peripatetic himself, author of a treatise Περὶ τῆς ρχαίας κωμῳδίας (FGrHist 77 F 2). From a chronological point of view, Eumelus is a plausible candidate as the lost source of Epicurus and Timaeus, for the biographical motif of the late conversion to philosophy by Aristotle.