Aristotle

Aristotle (384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher born at Stagira in Macedonia. He studied for twenty years in Plato's Academy at Athens, served as tutor to the young Alexander the Great and founded his own school, the Lyceum, whose members walked as they talked and so came to be called Peripatetics. His surviving works, mostly lecture notes, cover logic, physics, biology, psychology, ethics, politics, rhetoric and poetry, and for nearly two thousand years they formed the framework of educated thought in Europe and the Islamic world. The Poetics, his short treatise on tragedy and epic, is the oldest work of literary criticism we have.