ARISTOTLE TO AUGUSTINE could achieve the same purpose there would be no need for slavery ‘If every instrument could achieve its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus if the shuttle could weave and the plectrum pluck the lyre in a similar manner, overseers would not need servants, nor masters slaves’ (1 1253b35–54a1) So perhaps, in an age of automation, Aristotle would no longer defend slavery Though not himself an aristocrat, Aristotle had an aristocratic disdain for commerce Our possessions, he says, have two uses, proper and improper The proper use of a shoe, for instance, is to wear it: to exchange it for other goods or for money is an improper use (1 1257a9–10) There is nothing wrong with basic barter for necessities, but there is nothing natural about trade in luxuries, as there is in farming In the operation of retail trade money plays an important part, and money too has a proper and an improper use The most hated sort of wealth-getting is usury, which makes a proWt out of money itself, rather than from its natural purpose, for money was intended to be used for exchange, not to increase at interest It got the name ‘interest’ (tokos), which means the birth of money from money, because an oVspring resembles its parent For this reason, of all the modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural (1 10 1258b5–7) Aristotle’s hierarchical preference places farmers at the top, bankers at the bottom, with merchants in between His attitude to usury was one source of the prohibition, throughout medieval Christendom, of the charging of interest even at a modest rate ‘When did friendship’, Antonio asks Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, ‘take a breed for barren metal of his friend?’ One of the most striking features of Aristotle’s Politics is the almost total absence of any mention of Alexander or Macedon Like a modern member of Amnesty International, Aristotle comments on the rights and wrongs of every country but his own His own ideal state is described as having no more than a hundred thousand citizens, small enough for them all to know one another and to take their share in judicial and political oYce It is very diVerent from Alexander’s empire When Aristotle says that monarchy is the best constitution if a community contains a person or family of outstanding excellence, there is a pointed absence of reference to the royal family of Macedon Indeed, during the years of the Lyceum, relations between the worldconqueror and his former tutor seem to have cooled Alexander became 86