[1] Codex Venet. ann., 981, and Codex Etchmiaz. of the 11th century.
ARISTIPPUS (c. 435-356 B.C.), Greek philosopher, the founder of the Cyrenaic school, was the son of Aritadas, a merchant of Cyrene. At an early age he came to Athens, and was induced to remain by the fame of Socrates, whose pupil he became. Subsequently he travelled through a number of Grecian cities, and finally settled in Cyrene, where he founded his school. His philosophy was eminently practical (see [Cyrenaics]). Starting from the two Socratic principles of virtue and happiness, he emphasized the second, and made pleasure the criterion of life. That he held to be good which gives the maximum of pleasure. In pursuance of this he indulged in all forms of external luxury. At the same time he remained thoroughly master of himself and had the self-control to refrain or to enjoy. Diogenes Laertius (ii. 65), quoting Phanias the peripatetic, says that he received money for his teaching, and Aristotle (Met. ii. 2) expressly calls him a sophist. Diogenes further states that he wrote several treatises, but none have survived. The five letters attributed to him are undoubtedly spurious. His daughter Arete, and her son Aristippus (μητροδίδακτος, “pupil of his mother”), carried on the school after his death. A cosmopolitan on principle, and a convinced disbeliever in the ethics of his day, he comes very near to modern empiricism and especially to the modern Hedonist school.
ARISTO or Ariston, of Chios (c. 250 B.C.), a Stoic philosopher and pupil of Zeno. He differed from Zeno on many points, and approximated more closely to the Cynic school. He was eloquent (hence his nickname “the Siren”) but controversial in tone. He despised logic, and rejected the philosophy of nature as beyond the powers of man. Ethics alone he considered worthy of study, and in that only general and theoretical questions. He rejected Zeno’s doctrine of desirable things, intermediate between virtue and vice. There is only one virtue—a clear, intelligent, healthy state of mind (hygeia). Aristo is frequently confounded with another philosopher of the same name, Ariston of Iulis, in Ceos, who, about 230 B.C., succeeded Lyco as scholarch of the Peripatetics. (See [Stoics].)
ARISTO, of Pella, a Jewish Christian writer of the middle of the 2nd century, who like Hegesippus (q.v.) represents a school of thought more liberal than that of the Pharisaic and Essene Ebionites to which the decline of Jewish Christianity mainly led. Aristo is cited by Eusebius (Hist. Eccl. iv. 6. 3) for a decree of Hadrian respecting the Jews, but he is best known as the writer of a Dialogue (between Papiscus, an Alexandrian Jew, and Jason, who represents the author) on the witness of prophecy to Jesus Christ, which was approvingly defended by Origen against the reproaches of Celsus. The little book was perhaps used by Justin Martyr in his own Dialogue with Trypho, and probably also by Tertullian and Cyprian, but it has not been preserved.
The literature is cited in G. Krüger’s Early Christian Literature, pp. 104 f.