Edith Hall, 'Facing Down the Furies: Suicide, the Ancient Greeks, and Me', 2024:
"...And what a different example was set by Socrates’ student Aristotle, who died in exile from his chosen homeland of Athens! (He was originally from northern Greece.) Aristotle’s denial that the gods interested themselves in human affairs and his scientific approach to the world made him vulnerable to prosecution on religious grounds. Once his former student Alexander the Great was dead, the Macedonians’ enemies in Athens seized their opportunity and charged Aristotle with impiety, the same crime for which Socrates had been prosecuted eight decades previously. But Aristotle did not court execution and martyrdom as Socrates had done.
In his early sixties, Aristotle was suffering from a serious stomach complaint, probably cancer, but he was not a man to give up on life. He took refuge on the estate belonging to his mother’s family in Chalcis, on the island of Euboea. His companion Herpyllis, mother of his son Nicomachus, accompanied him. Aristotle died there in 322 BCE. He must have been anxious, and he must desperately have missed the life of the Lyceum (the Athenian institute for advanced study he had founded) and the friendship of his confidant and colleague Theophrastus, whom he had left in charge.
But the move to Chalcis provided Aristotle with a beautiful home, complete with garden and guest house, in which to prepare for the death his medical knowledge as a doctor’s son probably led him to expect. He derived emotional sustenance from reading literary works: in one moving fragment, written toward the end of his life, he says that he enjoys the old myths increasingly “the older and more isolated I become.” And Chalcis was and still is a healthful, breezy seaside town. It is cheering to think that in his final illness, Aristotle would have taken his last walks along the long sunny promenade, perhaps with Herpyllis and his children, Nicomachus and Pythias, to discuss how best to face the prospect of his death and their future without him. Grief when a much-loved person dies is the worst emotional pain most humans undergo, and it is worth preparing ourselves for it. By choosing exile over execution, Aristotle ensured that his family knew how hard it was for him to leave them...."
