Explore

The portrait busts of me were mass-produced by my followers and sent to communities of Epicureans across the Greek and Roman world. They kept them in their homes and gardens. This was not hero-worship — I had specifically told them not to worship anyone. It was a reminder of the teaching: that the good life is available now, in the garden, among friends,...

Raphael added me to the School of Athens as an afterthought — he had already completed the fresco and had to insert me alone, apart from the others, sitting on a step in the foreground, writing on a stone, leaning on a marble block. The face is Michelangelo's. Raphael was paying tribute to the man downstairs in the Sistine Chapel.

But the position is...

I lived in a large ceramic jar — a pithos, not a barrel — in the Agora of Athens. This was not poverty. It was argument. The Athenians built houses, accumulated furniture, arranged marriages, sought political office, and called this happiness. I sat in a jar and watched them and pointed out that none of it was necessary. They thought I was mad. I thought...

They found this fresco at Pompeii and called her Sappho. Perhaps she is. Perhaps she is simply a woman reading — a poetess, a letter-writer, a scholar. In the ancient world these were nearly the same category.

I taught on Lesbos, in the city of Mytilene. I had a circle of students — young women of good families sent to study music, poetry, and the art of...

The Oath that bears my name is probably not mine. The prohibition against surgery, the reference to Asclepius and Hygieia, the prohibition against providing abortifacients — these suggest a text compiled or revised by a Pythagorean sect some time after my death. The earliest complete manuscript dates from the tenth century AD.

What I taught was simpler...

The Archimedes screw was used in Egypt to raise water from the Nile for irrigation — perhaps I designed it during my time in Alexandria, perhaps I only improved an existing device. Diodorus Siculus credits me with it; I will not argue the point either way.

The principle is elegant: a helix within a cylinder, turned by a handle. Water enters at the bottom,...

They found this fragment in the rubbish heaps of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. A scrap of papyrus, written in the second or third century of your era, containing lines from the Iliad. It was found in 1906 alongside thousands of other fragments — tax records, private letters, horoscopes, early Christian texts, literary works. Rubbish makes the best archives.

I did...

The Alexander Sarcophagus is misnamed — it did not hold my remains. It held the remains of Abdalonymus, whom I installed as king of Sidon after taking the city in 333 BC. He had the sarcophagus carved with battle scenes from my campaigns as a memorial to the man who had given him his throne.

The figure hunting lions on the narrow end — wearing the...

The mosaic from Pompeii — first century AD, found in the Villa of T. Siminius Stephanus — shows seven philosophers gathered under a tree. The central figure, pointing at a globe, is believed to be me. Behind us rises the Acropolis.

The Academy I founded in 387 BC was not a building but a grove — the grove of Academus, a hero whose precinct lay just...

Physicians have used my name for two thousand years. The Oath attributed to me has been recited at medical graduations across the world. I would like to say that the medicine I practised resembles what is now practised under my name — but it does not. I did not know about bacteria. I did not know about cells. I thought illness came from imbalances in four...

Domenico Fetti painted me seventeen centuries after my death, staring at a diagram, absorbed. I appreciate the instinct. I was never more alive than when working on a problem.

The story they tell is that I ran naked through the streets shouting Eureka. I may have been excited when I discovered the principle of displacement — that a body immersed in fluid...

Of all the works I wrote, the Politics is the one I would most want students to read first — before the Metaphysics, before the Nicomachean Ethics, before the biological treatises. Because the Politics begins with the simplest and most important observation: man is by nature a political animal.

This is not a statement about Greek city-states. It is a...