ARISTOTLE TO AUGUSTINE entitled Characters, modelled on Aristotle’s delineation in his Ethics of individual virtues and vices, but sketching them with greater reWnement and with a livelier wit He was a diligent historian of philosophy, and the part of his doxography that survives, On the Senses, is one of our main sources for Presocratic theories of sensation One of Theophrastus’ pupils, Demetrius of Phaleron, was an adviser to one of Alexander’s generals, Ptolemy, who made himself king of Egypt in 305 It is possible that it was he who suggested the creation in the new city of Alexandria of a library modelled on that of Aristotle, a project that was carried out by Ptolemy’s son Ptolemy II Philadelphus The history of Aristotle’s own library is obscure On Theophrastus’ death it seems to have been inherited not by the next head of the Lyceum, the physicist Strato, but by Theophrastus’ nephew Neleus of Skepsis, one of the last surviving pupils of Aristotle himself Neleus’ heirs are said to have hidden the books in a cave in order to prevent them from being conWscated by agents of King Eumenes, who was building up a library at Pergamon to rival that of Alexandria Rescued by a bibliophile and taken to Athens, the story goes, the books were conWscated by the Roman general Sulla when he captured the city in 86 bc, and shipped to Rome, where they were Wnally edited and published by Andronicus of Rhodes around the middle of the Wrst century bc (Strabo 609–9; Plutarch, Sulla 26).10 Every detail of this story has been called in question by one or another scholar,11 but if true it would account for the oblivion that overtook Aristotle’s writings between the time of Theophrastus and that of Cicero It has been well said that ‘If Aristotle could have returned to Athens in 272 bc, on the Wftieth anniversary of his death, he would hardly have recognized it as the intellectual milieu in which he had taught and researched for much of his life.’12 It was not that philosophy at that date was dormant in Athens: far from it Though the Lyceum under Strato was a shadow of itself, and the 10 Puzzlingly, our best ancient catalogue of the Andronican edition appears to have been made by a librarian at Alexandria Is it possible that Mark Antony acquired the corpus from an heir of the proscribed Sulla and shipped them oV to Cleopatra to Wll the gaps in her recently destroyed library, just as her earlier lover Julius Caesar had pillaged the Pergamum library for her beneWt? 11 See J Barnes, in J Barnes and M GriYn, Philosophia Togata, vol ii (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 1–23 12 Introd to LS, 93