Knowing Theo
Theophrastus is known to most contemporary philosophers, if at all, by an idea attributed to him in the Magna Moralia, revived by Elizabeth Anscombe in her monograph, Intention. The idea is that, when you don’t know what you’re doing, your mistake may be one of skill or performance, not—as with faulty speculation—one of judgement.
Laura Beatty’s Looking for Theophrastus is the record of a personal voyage to discover who Theophrastus really was, retracing the conjectured steps of his collaboration with Aristotle at the birth of natural history. Beatty knows what she is doing, and it is not affectless conjecture:
It was a significant moment when Theophrastus, so young, looked for the first time through the keyhole of those blue eyes and found himself falling, with the great spaces of Aristotle’s mind opening out before him. It must have been dizzying.
According to ancient sources, Theophrastus was “naturally of erotic bent”—the sort of man who might experience love at first sight. “They couldn’t have known it at the time,” Beatty writes, “but Aristotle and Theophrastus would spend almost all of the rest of their lives working together, from that moment onwards”—though, as she acknowledges in an endnote, not everyone agrees that Aristotle took Theophrastus with him when he left Athens after Plato’s death in 348/7 BCE.
Theophrastus was born “Tyrtamos” in Eresos, around 372 BCE, and was educated by a student of Plato’s Academy. He went to Athens as a teenager, where he met the 29-year Aristotle, who gave him his new name: “one whose speech is divine.” In Beatty’s narrative, the two were inseparable, traveling to Assos and then Lesbos and Macedonia—where Aristotle taught Alexander the Great—before returning to Athens to found the Lyceum in 335/4.
Theophrastus was an empirical biologist, especially curious about plants, of which he catalogued more than 550 species. (When Linnaeus began to systematize plant taxonomy in 1753, he took Theophrastus as his starting point.) But Theo was interested in all of life, and in the teleology of nature as a whole. He was a vegetarian, arguing that “there is no natural basis for making distinctions among the souls of humans and animals.” And he speculated on the unknown purposes of things:
The ebb and flow of the sea
Dry and moist seasons
Male breasts
The female emission
The list goes on, and items recur, obsessively plaguing the naturalist: “Why do men have nipples?”
Ancombe’s Intention aside, Theo is best-known for Characters, a collection of sharply observed vignettes describing recognizable “types”: the flatterer, the boaster, the penny-pincher, the coward, the chatterbox… His sketch of a shrewish woman influenced Chaucer’s Wife of Bath by way of St. Jerome’s Against Jovinianus; and since the Canterbury Tales were ancestors of the modern novel, Theo belongs to a lineage that leads to Laura Beatty.
Chaucer is the father of the English canon. Is this perhaps why I followed you, Theophrastus, without really knowing—going on instinct—answering the pull of your shadowy presence as the waves follow the shaping force of the moon? … We sense you, Theophrastus, deep in the DNA of our own literature.
Beatty concedes that this is itself half-fiction, or myth: “The feeling of looking back through [time] for someone like Theophrastus is that of a constant, uncrossable thickness, like an anti-magnetic field, a pressure of dark impassability.”
But what is the alternative? Like Theo, we desire to know. Beatty quotes his best line twice:
An intelligent person ought to deal with time as gently as a non-swimmer who has fallen into a flowing stream deals with the water.
Biography thrashes against the current, vowing that the dead shall not be drowned. It’s not a database of facts but an act of empathy, conjuring a character. Its mistakes are ones of judgement, and performance, and imagination—and its knowledge is knowing a person, not just what they did.
BONUS CONTENT: I wrote about Diogenes and Plato for The Atlantic, and about Aristotle here.