Aristotle – Politics & Poetics – Easton Press – 1979 100 Greatest Books Ever Written Series Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) was a Greek philosopher and scientist whose work has shaped Western intellectual life more profoundly and more durably than that of almost any other thinker. Born at Stagira in Macedonia, the son of the court physician to the king, he came to Athens at the age of seventeen and studied for some twenty years under Plato at the Academy. In 342 B.C. he was summoned to the Macedonian court to tutor the young prince who would become Alexander the Great. He later returned to Athens and founded his own school, the Lyceum, where he delivered the wide-ranging lectures that survive as the body of his work. Philosopher, logician, moralist, political theorist, and biologist, he wrote on nearly every field of knowledge available to the Greeks of the fourth century B.C., and Dante would later call him "the master of those who know." His original writings did not survive in finished form; the texts that come down to us were reconstructed from lecture notes, neglected for centuries and recovered only gradually, before passing through the Arabic and Latin traditions to become the foundation of medieval and modern learning. He left Athens shortly before his death, which followed the political upheaval brought on by the death of Alexander in 323 B.C. This volume brings together two of Aristotle's most influential works. The Politics is his great treatise on the state, examining the origins and purpose of political community, the forms of government and their corruption, the nature of citizenship, the household, education, and the conditions of stability and change in the city. The Poetics, the briefer of the two, is the founding work of literary criticism in the Western tradition, an analysis of poetry and above all of tragedy, in which Aristotle sets out his account of plot, character, imitation, and catharsis, concepts that have governed discussion of drama ever since. Together they display the range of Aristotle's method, applying close observation and ordered reasoning to human society and human art alike. The Politics is given in the classic translation of Benjamin Jowett, the Poetics in that of S. H. Butcher, with an introduction by the American philosopher Horace M. Kallen. The portraits are the work of the American artist Leonard Baskin. This combination of texts, with Kallen's introduction, Baskin's portraits, and notes by John D. Moore, was first issued by The George Macy Companies of New York in 1964. The frontispiece portrait was specially commissioned for this edition. Bound in genuine leather in deep green Spine divided into panels by raised bands, with gilt-stamped anthemion (palmette) designs, the titles, and the author lettered in gilt Front cover framed by an elaborate gilt anthemion border surrounding a blank central panel All page edges gilt Moiré fabric endpapers Satin ribbon page marker Frontispiece portrait of Aristotle specially commissioned for this edition Further portraits by Leonard Baskin within the text Printed on archival-quality, acid-neutral paper Printed in the United States of America Condition is fine. A handsome, well-kept copy. Ships from Germany. Carefully packed in cardboard book mailer with protective wrapping.