Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: The Cellar Manuscript and the Golden Mean

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Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics was never meant as a published book. It survives as lecture notes or study guides for his students at the Lyceum, probably named after his son or his father, both called Nicomachus. After his death his library passed to Neleus, whose heirs hid it in an underground trench or cellar to keep it from the book-seizing kings of Pergamon. The manuscripts sat there for about 150 years until around 100 BCE, when a wealthy Athenian bought them, and then the Roman general Sulla sacked Athens and shipped the collection to Rome, where scholars pieced it together. The episode lays out Aristotle's case that ethics is practical, that the highest good is eudaimonia, better rendered as human flourishing than happiness, and that it is an active state, energeia, of reason working in line with virtue over a whole life.

The method is habituation: character is not innate, and every virtue sits at a golden mean between an excess and a deficiency. The hosts work through courage, temperance, generosity and the elite virtue of magnificence, which Aristotle said a poor person could not practice, along with greatness of soul, friendliness and honesty about oneself. Finding the mean requires phronesis, practical judgment built from experience, as distinct from sophia, the theoretical wisdom a young prodigy can master. Aristotle also broke with Socrates on akrasia, explaining through a syllogism how appetite can temporarily disable knowledge we still possess, and he ends the work by warning that studying ethics is useless unless it is put into practice.

• Thomas Aquinas leaned on the text so heavily that he usually called Aristotle simply the Philosopher.
• Aristotle used the phrase one swallow does not make a spring to argue that flourishing must be judged across a complete life.
• He held that King Priam of Troy, despite his virtue, could not be called fully flourishing after seeing his city burned and his family killed.
• He considered smallness of soul, shrinking from honors one deserves, a more common and more damaging vice than vanity.
• He compared the person who acts against their own knowledge to a drunk reciting philosophical verses without grasping them.