The son of a fuller, or cloth handler, Theophrastus
was born in Eresus on the island of Lesbos. Certain
biographers suggest he studied at PLATO’s Academy
in Athens. By age 25 he had formed close ties with
Plato’s favorite student and successor ARISTOTLE,
whom he accompanied to the court of Philip of
Macedonia when Aristotle was hired to tutor the
young prince Alexander.Upon their joint return to
Athens in 334, Aristotle founded the Peripatetic
school, where Theophrastus became his most
gifted student. After Alexander’s death, the Athenian
democracy experienced civil disorder as various
persons struggled for control of the city.
Theophrastus spent a year in exile when a political
decree banished all philosophers, but in 306, when
the decree was revoked, he returned and took over
as head of the Peripatetic.Under his leadership, the
school enjoyed the peak of its influence and success,
attracting more than 2,000 students.When
Theophrastus died, Athenians accompanied his
bier on foot as a mark of honor.
Originally named Tyrtamus, Theophrastus,
which means “divine speaker,” earned the name by
which he is known through his impressive command
of rhetoric. STRABO said that “Aristotle made
all his students eloquent, but Theophrastus most
eloquent.” Like his mentor, Theophrastus’s interests
ranged from the natural sciences to logic,
metaphysics, rhetoric, poetics, politics, and ethics.
His ideas on philosophy and metaphysics built on
the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, though during
Theophrastus’s tenure at the Peripatetic, Zeno was
formulating Stoic philosophy and EPICURUS
founded his own Epicurean school at the Garden.
Diogenes Laertius, who wrote an early biography
of Theophrastus, called him “a very intelligent
and industrious man . . . ever ready to do a kindness
and a lover of words.” Laertius attributed 224
works to Theophrastus, everything from 24 books
on law to treatises on the winds, types of sweating,
tiredness, plagues, fainting, and dizziness. The
sheer diversity and breadth of topics shows the extraordinary
breadth of his knowledge and the inquisitiveness
of his mind.He wrote on abstractions
such as flattery and piety and on practical activities
such as sleep and dreams, music, and judicial
speeches. He analyzed virtually every aspect of the
natural world, from fruits and flavors to wine and
olive oil. He meditated on emotions, virtue, and
the nature of the soul and wrote manuals on kingship,
the rearing of children, and the art of rhetoric.
Other topics he studied included melancholy,
derangement, slander, metals, fire, and old age, to
name just a few.
What remains of Theophastus’s work, aside from
scattered fragments and quotations in texts of late
antiquity and the MIDDLE AGES, are two treatises on
botany and assorted essays on natural sciences,
sense perception, and metaphysics. His mostremembered
work is what was, perhaps to him, his
most unimportant: the Characters, which became a
paradigm for European literature and contributed
to the development of the English essay.
Critical Analysis
The work Characters consists of a table of contents,
a preface explaining the purpose of the collection,
and 30 chapters, each devoted to a different aspect
of personality. None of the listed traits are very
pleasant or admirable. Each individual chapter is
titled with the trait under attack and commences
with a general definition, leading to a description
of the characteristic actions of a person of this sort.
Some sketches are followed by moralizing epilogues,
which scholars suspect are later additions.
The true worth of Characters lies in the detailed
descriptions of each figure, which read like a series
of lecture notes or scribbles in a personal sketchbook.
The structure of these descriptions is uniformly
peculiar and distinctive: Each begins with
the formula “X is the sort who . . .” and commences
with a series of modifiers listing the behaviors to
which this sort of person is prone. The details are
vivid and often hilarious. There are no virtues featured
in these sketches; the characters are buffoons,
braggarts, tricksters, and examples of all
sorts of vice.
Theophrastus, along with his students, had a
reputation for dressing finely and living well,
which may explain why so many of the characters
he writes about are parodies of stinginess. He was
also known for his elegant manners and sophistication,
so several of the bumbling characters lack
social graces. The work is clearly not meant to instruct,
either on the basis of ethical behavior or as
an example of rhetorical style; alone of Theophrastus’s
compositions, Characters seems designed for
sheer entertainment.What moral judgments that
exist are thought to be the interpolations of later
authors. Theophrastus takes the stance of the natural
scientist—studying, classifying, and remarking
on distinct traits, without attempting to
moralize or rationalize upon them.
The details of the descriptions clearly anchor
them in Athens in the last decades of the fourth
century B.C., revealing the city’s customs, institutions,
practices, and prejudices. The sketches were
likely composed over a decade or so, and most of
the internal evidence, or references within the
work, suggest dates between 325 and 315 B.C. The
descriptions abound with fascinating information
about everyday life in Athens, as can be seen in this
description of the character Obsequiousness:
He gets frequent haircuts and keeps his teeth
white, and discards cloaks that are still good,
and anoints himself with perfumed oil. In the
marketplace he goes frequently to the moneychangers;
among gymnasia he spends his time
at those where the ephebes work out; in the
theater,whenever there is a show, he sits next to
the generals. He buys nothing for himself, but
for foreigners he buys letters of commission for
Byzantium, and Laconian dogs for Kyzikos,
and Hymettos honey for Rhodes, and as he
does so tells everybody in town about it.
Despite the specificity of the detail, however,
Theophrastus’s characters do not belong only to
ancient Greece.When he summarizes the ungenerous
person as “the sort who, if he wins the tragedy
competition, dedicates to Dionysus a strip of wood
with only his own name written on it,” even readers
unacquainted with this practice can guess readily
enough what it means.Many of Theophrastus’s
characters are universal types.
In his approach to the work, Theophrastus uses
a theory of personality predicated on the belief
that traits may be isolated and separately studied.
He inherited from Aristotle the idea that badness
of character resulted from excess or extremes. Excellence
of character—what we would call virtue—
required moderating or balancing between the
extremes.While Theophrastus’s characters borrow
from Aristotle’s Ethics, at least in their examples
of vice, he also incorporates elements of
comedy and satire perfected by the dramatists, for
example ARISTOPHANES. MENANDER’s style of New
Comedy owes much to the philosophy of character
contained in Theophrastus. After Theophrastus,
character writing was often imitated, most successfully
by SENECA and PLUTARCH. The works of HORACE,
MARTIAL, JUVENAL, and LUCIAN all demonstrate
their knowledge of the Characters.
The several existing copies of the manuscript, in
various stages of decay, owe their survival to the
frequency with which the work was anthologized
in manuals of rhetorical instruction. The character
sketch was a rhetorical exercise recommended by
CICERO and QUINTILIAN as a way of developing writing
skill as well as providing an understanding of
human nature. Medieval writers borrowed the
technique of a gallery of personality portraits; the
most notable examples are the Prologue to The
Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, the catalog
of the Seven Sins in Piers Plowman by William
Langland, and Ship of Fools by Sebastian Brandt.
The 1592 edition of Characters by Issac Casaubon
inspired renewed attention to the character sketch.
Renaissance writers showed a keen interest in
the literature and ideals of the ancient Greeks,
among them François Rabelais, Miguel de Cervantes,
Desiderius Erasmus,Michel de Montaigne,
and Ben Jonson. Several writers of the 17th century
attempted their own series of characters modeled
after Theophrastus, most notably Jean de La
Bruyère, who translated Theophrastus and then
continued with his own updated character
sketches. Though the technique of the literary
“portrait” belonged to the 17th and 18th centuries,
the art of describing characters through descriptions
of manners and behaviors was adapted by
19th-century novelists from Charles Dickens to
George Eliot. In many ways, therefore, the technique
of characterization used in the modern-day
novel can be dated all the way back to the height
of ancient Greece and the work of Theophrastus.
English Versions of Works by Theophrastus
Theophrastus: Characters. Edited James Diggle et al.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Theophrastus: Enquiry Into Plants. Translated by
Arthur F. Hort. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1989.
Works about Theophrastus
Baltussen, Han. Theophrastus Against the Presocratics
and Plato. Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2000.
Huby, Pamela and William W. Fortenbraugh.
Theophrastus of Eresus: Sources for his Life,Writings,
Thought and Influence. Boston: Brill Academic
Publishers, 1999.
Van Ophuijsen, Johannes M. and Marlein Van Raalte,
eds. Theophrastus: Reappraising the Sources. Somerset,
N.J.: Transaction Publications, 1998.