Of impious guilt. But he escaped his hands
By mighty draught of friendly aconite,
And thus defeated all his wicked arts.
Phavorinus, in his Universal History, says that Aristotle was the first person who ever composed a speech to be delivered in his own defence in a court of justice, and that he did so on the occasion of this prosecution, and said that at Athens:—
Pears upon pear-trees grow; on fig-trees, figs.
Apollodorus, in his Chronicles, says that he was born in the first year of the ninety-ninth olympiad, and that he attached himself to Plato, and remained with him for twenty years, having been seventeen years of age when he originally joined him. And he went to Mitylene in the archonship of Eubulus, in the fourth year of the hundred and eighth olympiad. But as Plato had died in the first year of this same olympiad, in the archonship of Theophilus, he departed for the court of Hermias, and remained there three years. And in the archonship of Pythodotus he went to the court of Philip, in the second year of the hundred and ninth olympiad, when Alexander was fifteen years old; and he came to Athens in the second year of the hundred and eleventh olympiad, and presided over his school in the Lyceum for thirteen years; after that he departed to Chalcis, in the third year of the hundred and fourteenth olympiad, and died, at about the age of sixty-three years, of disease, the same year that Demosthenes died in Calauria, in the archonship of Philocles.
VIII. It is said also that he was offended with the king, because of the result of the conspiracy of Callisthenes against Alexander; and that the king, for the sake of annoying him, promoted Anaximenes to honour, and sent presents to Xenocrates. And Theocritus, of Chios, wrote an epigram upon him to ridicule him, in the following terms, as it is quoted by Ambryon in his account of Theocritus:—
The empty-headed Aristotle rais’d
This empty tomb to Hermias the Eunuch,
The ancient slave of the ill-us’d Eubulus.