Aristotle's chosen heir, nicknamed the divine speaker, became the father of botany
His real name was Tyrtamus, but Aristotle reputedly renamed him Theophrastus, divine speaker, for the grace of his talk. While Aristotle studied animals on Lesbos, his friend studied plants, and the resulting books were the first systematic attempt to organize the plant world. Linnaeus-inspired admirers still call him the father of botany.
Theophrastus was born around 371 BC in Eresos on Lesbos and came to Athens young, possibly studying under Plato. He befriended Aristotle and probably followed him on his travels, likely including Macedonia when Aristotle went to tutor Alexander the Great. When anti-Macedonian feeling drove Aristotle out of Athens, Theophrastus stayed behind to run the Lyceum. Aristotle's will made him guardian of his children and left him his library and the originals of his writings, a choice that reportedly irritated at least one rival pupil.
He led the school for more than three decades, and it thrived. Diogenes Laërtius claims that at one point it had more than 2,000 students, among them the comic playwright Menander. A charge of impiety against him collapsed completely, and when he died the whole city is said to have followed his funeral procession. He left the school his garden, house and colonnades as a permanent home, and is credited with the rueful remark that we die just as we begin to live.
Diogenes lists 227 titles by him, covering logic, physics, weather, the soul, politics, law and early Greek philosophers, though most are lost. What survives complete includes On Stones and his two great plant treatises. Enquiry into Plants, nine of whose ten books remain, sorts plants by how they reproduce, where they grow, their size and their uses, with books on trees, shrubs, herbs and plants that yield gums and resins. On the Causes of Plants looks at growth, sowing, soil, manuring and the smells and tastes of plants.
His translator Arthur Hort noted the surviving texts have no literary charm and read like lecture notes, and they are often so corrupt that an old story seems plausible: that the manuscripts of Aristotle and Theophrastus spent years mouldering in a cellar. Even so, his botany shaped science well into the Renaissance.
Source: Theophrastus
