Library › Greek: Lyric & Elegy › Epigram against Aristotle
Epigram against Aristotle is a short elegiac epigram by Theocritus of Chios, a fourth-century BC orator and sophist known for his biting wit and his hostility to Aristotle. It mocks the empty tomb that Aristotle set up for Hermias, ruler of Atarneus, calling Hermias a eunuch and slave, and accuses the 'empty-minded' philosopher of preferring, for his belly's sake, the Macedonian court at the mouths of the Borboros to the Academy. Diogenes Laertius and other ancient writers quote it.
The poem is a rare contemporary witness to the hostility Aristotle aroused through his ties with Hermias and the Macedonian kings. Its pun on Borboros, a river whose name also means 'mud', shows the sharp personal satire of the period, and the epigram became part of the ancient biographical tradition about Aristotle.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: SH 738). Every word has been analyzed with odyCy, a neural language model for Ancient Greek — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ).