XI · Sources & About

The honest part.

This site is a student essay built for a Latin 2 / Greek 1 class. It quotes and paraphrases the Nicomachean Ethics. Below is the accounting — translations used, the small places where the famous "Aristotle quote" is in fact someone else's words, and where to read further.

Primary text

Nicomachean Ethics, translated by W.D. Ross (1908). Public domain. All English quotations on this site, unless marked otherwise, are from the Ross translation.

Greek text

All Greek epigraphs are from the Bekker edition, taken via Perseus. Citations follow standard Bekker numbering (e.g., 1094a 1–2). Polytonic orthography is preserved.

Modern reference

Terence Irwin's translation (Hackett, 2nd ed. 1999) is the modern scholarly standard and is consulted throughout, but not quoted at length — it is in copyright.

A small but important attribution

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."

This is one of the most-quoted "Aristotle" lines on the internet. Aristotle did not write it. It is Will Durant, paraphrasing in The Story of Philosophy (1926), p. 76. Aristotle's nearest formulation, in Book II, is:

"…we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts." — 1103b 1

We flag this because the section on virtue as habit on this site uses Aristotle's own line, not Durant's.

Socrates vs. Aristotle on akrasia

In Protagoras 358c–d, Plato has Socrates argue that no one knowingly does what they believe to be worse. Aristotle takes up this position in Eth. Nic. VII.3 and disagrees: the akratic person does know, in one sense — in another sense, the knowledge is "asleep" or "drunk" at the moment of action. The site's framing follows Aristotle's account; the brief mention of Socrates is for contrast, not exposition.

On eudaimonia

The translation "happiness" is conventional and convenient but thin. "Flourishing" is closer to what Aristotle means — a whole life going well — and is preferred on this site. Cf. Cooper, Reason and Human Good in Aristotle (1975).

The Aristotle in the Lyceum is not Aristotle

The conversational endpoint streams from Anthropic's Claude — the Opus 4.7 model. It is given two things: a system prompt instructing it to reason as Aristotle does — by distinction, by example, methodically — and the complete text of the Nicomachean Ethics (the Ross translation above) inside its context. Because the actual text is before it, the words it quotes from the Ethics are verbatim from that translation, and its Book and Bekker citations to the Ethics are real.

Its interpretation — and anything it says of works it has not been given, the Politics, the Metaphysics, and the rest — remains the model's own reconstruction. It is a careful impersonation, not the man, and not scholarship. Verify anything you would cite.

Build

Built with Astro, Tailwind, Lenis, and GSAP. The Lyceum chat streams from Claude — Opus 4.7 — via the official Anthropic SDK, with the full Ethics held in the model's context and prompt-cached. Set in EB Garamond and Cormorant Garamond (Google Fonts). Diagrams and ornament are drawn in SVG, in-document; the imagery in the akrasia chapter is noted below.

Images

The chapter on akrasia uses three images. Raphael's School of Athens is a public-domain fresco, credited below. The two figures that frame the title are a photograph of a statue of Socrates and an engraving of Aristotle; they are decorative reproductions whose authorship has not been traced, and are noted here rather than formally credited.

Raphael, The School of Athens (1509–11), Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican — public domain.