Aristotle founds the Lyceum and systematises the sciences
- Date
- c. 335 BCE
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- Greece (Attica)
- Era
- Classical Antiquity
- Significance
Around 335 BCE Aristotle, former pupil of Plato and tutor of Alexander the Great, returned to Athens and founded his own school at the Lyceum, a gymnasium in a grove sacred to Apollo Lyceius. From his habit of teaching while walking its colonnades, his followers were called Peripatetics.
At the Lyceum Aristotle and his associates pursued an extraordinarily wide programme of research, assembling what is often called the first great library and conducting systematic studies in logic, biology, physics, ethics, politics, rhetoric, poetics and metaphysics. Aristotle founded formal logic with his theory of the syllogism, advanced empirical biology through detailed observation and classification of living things, and organised knowledge into distinct disciplines in a way that defined the structure of the sciences for two thousand years. His surviving treatises became authoritative texts in the Hellenistic, Islamic and medieval European worlds, and his methods of observation, classification and reasoned argument helped lay the foundations of the later scientific tradition.
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Empires active in c. 335 BCE
- Macedonian Empire (Alexander)336 BCE – 323 BCE
- Roman Republic509 BCE – 27 BCE
- Achaemenid Empire550 BCE – 330 BCE
- Nanda Empire345 BCE – 322 BCE
- Kingdom of Kush1070 BCE – 350 CE
- Carthaginian Empire650 BCE – 146 BCE
Related science, technology & invention events
- Euclid compiles the Elements at Alexandriac. 300 BCE
- Construction of the Aqua Appia, Rome's first aqueduct312 BCE
- Wootz crucible steel developed in South India and Sri Lankac. 300 BCE
- Archimedes formulates the principle of buoyancyc. 250 BCE
- Eratosthenes measures the circumference of the Earthc. 240 BCE
- Hippocratic medicine separates illness from the divinec. 440–420 BCE
Further reading
The wider story
A Little History of Science
Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.
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