 Aristotle was born in Stagira on the northern Aegean coast in 384BCE. His father Nicomachus was physician to King Amyntas III of Macedon, and his mother was of a wealthy family from the island of Euboea. He was sent at the age of 17 to Athens, where he studied in Plato’s Academy for 20 years, until Plato’s death in 347. By then he had developed his own distinctive philosophical ideas, including his passion for the study of nature. He joined a philosophical circle in Assos on the coast of Asia Minor, but soon moved to the nearby island of Lesbos where he met Theophrastus, a young man with similar interests in natural science. Between the two of them they originated the science of biology, Aristotle carrying out a systematic investigation of animals, Theophrastus doing the same for plants.