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Books

Looking for Theophrastus by Laura Beatty

Chad Trainer hunts for a lost thinker.

In the mid-fourth century BCE, Athens was between its peak as an imperial power and its decline into one more of Alexander the Great’s colonies. The prosperity of Athens’ Periclean age was a century in the past, and had been followed by a twenty-five years war with Sparta, resulting in Athens’ defeat. The renowned Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were by then playwrights of the past.

Philosophy was a comparatively late bloomer. Socrates was executed in 399 BCE.

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