This chapter contains an outline of the book and of its main argument. It concentrates on the deep structure of the Peripatetic science of perishable living beings, which consists in separate but coordinated studies of animals and plants. It provides the reader with an initial idea of the contents of the book with an emphasis on the epistemic requirements that shape the Peripatetic study of perishable life.

Theophrastus shares Aristotle’s methodological insight that the scientific inquiry unfolds in stages, and that the two main stages of any scientific inquiry are the collection of the relevant data followed by their explanation – the pre-explanatory and the explanatory stage of inquiry, respectively. This chapter shows that we should speak of two main stages of inquiry because the explanatory stage itself may unfold in various stages. In other words, the work that is required to arrive at an adequate (i.e., scientific) explanation may take place in steps and may require accomplishing different tasks. The chapter looks in some detail at how Theophrastus adopts this style of inquiry in his explanation of the various ways in which plants propagate.

This chapter introduces the reader to how Theophrastus approaches the topic of plants by offering a selective discussion of the first book of History of Plants. This book is a prolegomenon to the study of plants. It is also a liminal space where Theophrastus negotiates the transition from the study of animals to the study of plants. From the very way Theophrastus refers to animals, we can infer that Theophrastus builds his whole edifice on the results achieved in the study of animals. This overall approach not only confirms that the Peripatetic study of perishable living beings is approached via separate studies of animals and plants but also suggests that the relevant order of study is first animals, then plants.

The third chapter suggests that The Spectator’s characters set important precedents of diversion, originality and realism for the caricature talk that constituted realist character in the critical recognition and writing of the Romantic novel. The second part of the chapter shows how anti-caricature rhetoric became conventionalised in late eighteenth-century essays that sought to explain and promote the appeal of Addison and Steele’s character ’Sir Roger De Coverley’.

The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate that Theophrastus, in De ventis 56, employs material principles to explain certain features of both living beings and inanimate things, and that the unknown author of Problemata physica 1.24, having been influenced by Theophrastus, uses these same principles but in a different way, treating the parts of certain artifacts as models of, or analogous to, parts of the human body. Special attention is given to both Theophrastus’ discussion of Notos, the south wind, and to De ventis 56–58, in which he deals explicitly with the effects of winds on the human condition. (A revised version of Mayhew’s edition of the text of De ventis 56, with a detailed apparatus criticus, is included in an appendix.)

The opening sequence is a delicate phase of any conversation. Through ritualized acts, interlocutors come into contact, reveal their respective stances toward each other and prepare themselves to broach the first topic of the discussion. Their positioning in the opening sequence influences the subsequent phases of the interaction. An integrated pragmatic approach that combines Conversation Analysis, Speech Act Theory and Im/Politeness Research is well-suited to studying this communicative stage in its complexity.

This chapter examines the opening phase in the dialogues of Menander’s comedy from such a perspective. After showing that, in Menander’s Athens, conversational openings follow rules analogous to those in our society, it then demonstrates how Menander exploits the social delicateness of the phase. Clear patterns in the development of Menandrean conversational openings are identified, which are linked to the communicative situation as well as to the speakers’ state of mind and relationship. Finally, the chapter discusses how in Dyskolos the poet plays with im/politeness in conversational openings to characterize the protagonist, structure the plot and generate humour.

Greek agriculture took place within a largely Mediterranean regime of annual, dry-farmed grains and pulses, alongside perennial vines and olives. Hesiod’s Works and Days, Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, the Attic orators, inscriptions, intensive survey, and comparative data from before 1950 form the main evidence. The agricultural year centred around winter sowing and summer harvest. Scholars propose two competing models of agriculture. Extensive agriculture used draft animals and biennial fallow and was more suited to at least mid-sized holdings, nucleated settlement, and transhumant livestock. Intensive agriculture required greater hand-cultivation and was suited to smaller plots, dispersed settlement, and mixed farming to provide year-round animal manure. High risk of crop failure made intensification, diversification, and storing a ‘normal surplus’ a rational subsistence strategy for smaller landowners. However, there is also evidence for connectivity and production for market. Debates over agricultural slavery, settlement, and possible intensification from the fifth century BCE intersect with the question of market participation.

The phenomenon of reflective awareness, i.e., perceiving that we perceive, has often been at the center of Aristotelian scholarship, whereas that of perceptual attention, i.e., focusing on something we perceive, has been much less studied. I examine in parallel the textual evidence for these phenomena and offer a concurrent analysis of them in order to understand better how Aristotle conceives them. I argue that the Aristotelian notion of the common sense lies at the basis of the explanation of perceptual attention as much as of that of reflective awareness. In the former case, the common sense perceives the special or common perceptible that it pays attention to in its own right, whereas in the latter case it perceives the act of perceiving coincidentally along with the respective special or common perceptible. Following Aristotle, the Peripatetics defended the view that the phenomenon of reflective awareness is due to the common sense, but paid no heed to perceptual attention. On the other hand, the Neoplatonic commentators conflated the two phenomena and explained both of them by postulating either a rational character of the senses or an attentive part in the rational soul.

This chapter examines the reception of Aristotle’s biological work from his immediate successors to Roman intellectuals in the late Republic and early Empire. The Peripatetics, notably Theophrastus and Eudemus, endorsed many hallmarks of Aristotelian biology (e.g. classification by differentiae in Theophrastus’ Researches into Plants), and their works on animals focused mainly on areas that were relatively underexplored by Aristotle, such as animal behavior and “character.” Readers and users of Aristotle’s biological works outside philosophical circles were mainly interested in the wealth of facts collected in the Historia Animalium especially, and much less in Aristotle’s causal investigations. The main product of this scholarly engagement with Aristotle’s biology was the Epitome by Aristophanes of Byzantium, librarian at Alexandria around 200 BCE: it does aim to collect facts arranged by individual animals, but it also shows an interest in the main problems raised in GA. In Rome, Lucretius and Cicero were able to draw on Aristotelian biology to bolster arguments for Epicurean materialism and Stoic providentialism respectively. Finally, it is noteworthy that the now-lost Dissections played an important role in the early reception of Aristotle’s biology, at least until Apuleius in the second century CE.

We know about the benefactors of Greek cities primarily from inscriptions that mark the honours given to them for their benefaction. But the act of benefaction, which is nothing other than the giving of a gift to a corporate body, existed independently of the honour, and this chapter seeks to turn attention to why it was that institutions needed benefactors, and the different needs of institutions of different sizes. Corporate bodies had a number of ways, including direct and indirect taxation and requiring contributions, to meet their financial and other needs, but the smaller the corporate body, the more important it was for it to cultivate benefactors. The particular need felt by Athenian demes can be seen to be reflected in the indications in the epigraphic record that they were precocious in developing ways of encouraging benefaction. But how a group relates in size to other groups is important in determining the attitudes that potential benefactors take to it, so that relative as well as absolute size matters.