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Updated: June 24, 2025
I am, however, glad that they do not know that I have read Theophrastus' 'On beasts that bite and sting' and Nicander 'On the bites of wild animals'; otherwise they would have accused me of poisoning as well! As a matter of fact I have acquired a knowledge of these subjects thanks to my reading of Aristotle and my desire to emulate him.
In 1592 Casaubon edited Theophrastus in Latin. Thereafter the character sketch became a literary form, as in Hall, Overbury, and Earle, instead of remaining merely a rhetorical exercise. In the theory of the drama the rhetorical method of characterization, fixed as the law of decorum, flourished throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In England from Whetstone on it was made much of.
Not less surprising is the change when we leave off to speak of generalities the bad, the good, the miser, and all the characters of Theophrastus and call up other men, by anecdote or instance, in their very trick and feature; or trading on a common knowledge, toss each other famous names, still glowing with the hues of life.
But to us that arrangement appears to be more convenient which divides it under five heads; and that is the one which all those who come from the school of Aristotle, or of Theophrastus, have chiefly followed.
We have already seen it occupying a more ancient author, and it had also been one of the chief preoccupations of Aristotle. It is thus not remarkable that the process should impress Theophrastus, who has left on record his views on the formation of the plant from the seed. Ibid. i. 1, iv. Historia plantarum, ii. 1, i.
For one of them flows on like a tranquil river, without any attempts at facetiousness; the other is borne on in a more impetuous course, and relates warlike deeds in a warlike spirit; and they are the first men by whom, as Theophrastus says, history was stirred up to dare to speak in a more fluent and adorned style than their predecessors had ventured on.
Lucretius attributes to accident the discovery of the fusion of the metals; a person in touching a shell-fish observes that it emits a purple liquid as a dye, hence the Tyrian purple; clay is observed to harden in the fire, and hence the invention of bricks, which could hardly fail ultimately to lead to the discovery of porcelain; oven glass, the most perfect and beautiful of those manufactures you call chemical, is said to have been discovered by accident; Theophrastus states that some merchants who were cooking on lumps of soda or natron, near the mouth of the river Belus, observed that a hard and vitreous substance was formed where the fused natron ran into the sand.
The prophesy of Theophrastus Such seems to have been already fulfilled, and any new machine added to those already in power in the Parliament of Machines can scarcely add to the worker's sense of his own impotency.
Cato, at fourscore, began his study of Greek, and the same age saw Plutarch beginning, with the enthusiasm of a boy, his first lessons in Latin. The Character of Man, Theophrastus' greatest work, was begun on his ninetieth birthday. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales was the work of the poet's declining years.
And Theophrastus is reported to have reproached nature at his death for giving to stags and crows so long a life, which was of no use to them, but allowing only so short a span to men, to whom length of days would have been of the greatest use; for if the life of man could have been lengthened, it would have been able to provide itself with all kinds of learning, and with arts in the greatest perfection.
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