Aristotle's ethics survived a century and a half hidden in a cellar
After Aristotle died, his writings passed from student to student until heirs, fearing a king's book collectors, hid them underground for about 150 years. Among the survivors was the Nicomachean Ethics, a ten-book inquiry into how to live well that later made Aristotle simply the Philosopher to medieval thinkers.
The work asks what the good life is: the end at which all human action ultimately aims. Plato, Aristotle's friend and teacher, had pursued the same question, and Aristotle credited Socrates with steering philosophy from natural science toward human concerns. He pairs the Ethics with his Politics. The first looks at how an individual should live; the second takes a law-giver's view of the good of a whole community and the institutions that help people become good.
The name is a small mystery. It is usually tied to his son Nicomachus, either as dedicatee or as editor, although the son probably died young. His father shared the name too. The earliest known use of the title comes from Atticus around 175 CE. Three of its books are identical to three books of Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics, and scholars disagree over how the two works relate. Dating is also unsettled: a mention of a battle in 353 BCE gives an earliest possible date for part of the text, while the traditional view places it in his final Athenian period.
The survival story is precarious. Strabo and Plutarch report that the library went to Theophrastus, Aristotle's successor at the Lyceum, and then to Neleus of Scepsis. When the kingdom of Pergamon began seizing books for a royal library, Neleus's heirs stashed the collection in a cellar in poor conditions, where it lay for roughly a century and a half.
Its influence was enormous. It became a core text of medieval philosophy, shaping law and theology; Thomas Aquinas refers to Aristotle as the Philosopher. Protestant universities still treated it as the main authority on ethics into the seventeenth century, producing more than fifty commentaries before 1682, until Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes attacked the tradition. The modern virtue ethics revival, including Alasdair MacIntyre and Martha Nussbaum, has brought it back.
Source: Nicomachean Ethics
