STRATO AND STRATONISM

Little is known for sure about the life and work of Strato of Lampsacus, third head of Aristotle's school. He lived in Alexandria as tutor to the young Ptolemy Philadelphus for some time before he took over the leadership of the Peripatos; during this time he likely came into contact with the doctors and scientists patronized by the Ptolemaic court. He was head of Aristotle's school in Athens from Theophrastus's death in 286 BCE until his death in 268 or 269 BCE. The school seems to have dwindled into obscurity after Strato's time: Explanations offered for this include a suspect story that the school lost its library after Theophrastus's death.

Strato was known in antiquity as "the natural philosopher," possibly because of his insistence on separating the study of the natural world from any dependence on the divine. He reportedly ascribed all natural events to forces of weight and motion. He rejected Aristotle's doctrine of the fifth element, and also the idea that air and fire have an independent tendency to move upward, claiming instead that they are squeezed out by the fall of heavy bodies. His physics seems to have been basically Aristotelian, because he stressed the role of hot and cold in effecting change; yet he seems to have made changes in the doctrine of the void, because he held that it is at least possible within the cosmos. One report claims that he held that matter has passageways to allow the passage of light and heat. Controversy surrounds the relationship between Strato's view of the void and that of later Hellenistic theories of pneumatic effects. His best-known contributions to natural philosophy include attempts to prove the downward acceleration of falling bodies.

Besides work on logic, metaphysics, and ethics, Strato wrote a number of works on medical topics. Perhaps following Hellenistic medical research, he seems to have offered a naturalistic account of the soul, ascribing its functions to a substance, pneuma, carried in passageways throughout the body. He located the center of the soul's activity between the eyebrows, rejecting Aristotle's view that the heart is the center. He regarded reasoning as a causal movement in the soul, and offered lists of objections to Plato's arguments for the immortality of the soul.

Strato may have had some impact amongst the scientific figures in Alexandria, but his greatest notoreity was acquired some two millenium later. Ralph Cudworth characterized Strato's approach—which he called "hylozoism," the idea that matter is inherently alive—as a particularly pernicious brand of atheism. Although there is little evidence that this is Strato's view, his name became identified in the Enlightenment with a kind of naturalistic atheism.

See also Aristotelianism; Aristotle.

Bibliography

Until the expected reedition of the fragments of Strato of Lampsacus by R. W. Sharples, Rutgers University Studies in the Classical Humanities, the standard edition is F. Wehrli, Die Schule des Aristoteles. Vol. 5: Straton von Lampsakos. 2nd ed. (Basel, Germany: Schwabe, 1969). Recent studies include David Furley, "Strato's Theory of Void," in his Cosmic Problems: Essays on Greek and Roman Philosophy of Nature, 149–160 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1989), and H. B. Gottschalk, "Strato of Lampsacus: Some Texts," Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society 9 (1965): 95–182.

Sylvia Berryman (2005)