I. Theophrastus was a native of Eresus, the son of Melantas, a fuller, as we are told by Athenodorus in the eighth book of his Philosophical Conversations.
II. He was originally a pupil of Leucippus, his fellow citizen, in his own country; and subsequently, after having attended the lectures of Plato, he went over to Aristotle. And when he withdrew to Chalcis, he succeeded him as president of his school, in the hundred and fourteenth olympiad.
III. It is also said that a slave of his, by name Pomphylus, was a philosopher, as we are told by Myronianus of Amastra, in the first book of Similar Historical Chapters.
IV. Theophrastus was a man of great acuteness and industry, and, as Pamphila asserts in the thirty-second book of her Commentaries, he was the tutor of Menander, the comic poet. He was also a most benevolent man, and very affable.
V. Accordingly Cassander received him as a friend; and Ptolemy sent to invite him to his court. And he was thought so very highly of at Athens, that when Agonides ventured to impeach him on a charge of impiety, he was very nearly fined for his hardihood. And there thronged to his school a crowd of disciples to the number of two thousand. In his letter to Phanias, the Peripatetic, among other subjects he speaks of the court of justice in the following terms: “It is not only out of the question to find an assembly (πανήγυρις), but it is not easy to find even a company (συνέδριον) such as one would like; but yet recitations produce corrections of the judgment. And my age does not allow me to put off everything and to feel indifference on such a subject.” In this letter he speaks of himself as one who devotes his whole leisure to learning.
And though he was of this disposition, he nevertheless went away for a short time, both he and all the rest of the philosophers, in consequence of Sophocles, the son of Amphiclides, having brought forward and carried a law that no one of the philosophers should preside over a school unless the council and the people had passed a resolution to sanction their doing so; if they did, death was to be the penalty. But they returned again the next year, when Philion had impeached Sophocles for illegal conduct; when the Athenians abrogated his law, and fined Sophocles five talents, and voted that the philosophers should have leave to return, that Theophrastus might return and preside over his school as before.
VI. His name had originally been Tyrtamus, but Aristotle changed it to Theophrastus, from the divine character of his eloquence.[48]
VII. He is said also to have been very much attached to Aristotle’s son, Nicomachus, although he was his master; at least, this is stated by Aristippus in the fourth book of his treatise on the Ancient Luxury.
VIII. It is also related that Aristotle used the same expression about him and Callisthenes, which Plato, as I have previously mentioned, employed about Xenocrates and Aristotle himself. For he is reported to have said, since Theophrastus was a man of extraordinary acuteness, who could both comprehend and explain everything, and as the other was somewhat slow in his natural character, that Theophrastus required a bridle, and Callisthenes a spur.
IX. It is said, too, that he had a garden of his own after the death of Aristotle, by the assistance of Demetrius Phalereus, who was an intimate friend of his.