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Theophrastus was a Greek philosopher who lived around 350 BC on the island of Lesbos. And just to get it out of the way, yes, that’s where the word “lesbian” comes from, but that has nothing to do with Theophrastus—it’s a reference to the island’s more famous resident the ancient poet Sappho, who was a lesbian in both senses of the word.
But Theophrastus’ claim to fame is that he was the first philosopher to be really interested in plants. That’s kind of surprising, when you think about it, because of how much the Greek economy relied on olive trees. At this point, philosophy had been happening for hundreds of years, but nobody until now really sat down and thought about what all this green stuff is.
In fact by this time the Greek philosophers didn’t really talk much about biology at all, and those who did, like Empedocles and Aristotle, talked mostly about animals.
Theophrastus was a student of Plato, and it was there that he and Aristotle became good friends. Even though Aristotle would go on to become much more famous, they were both held in roughly similar regard in their own time. But Theophrastus wasn’t as prolific on such wide variety of topics.
He was obsessed with categorizing things, and by studying and categorizing plants he was the very first to come up with a form of taxonomy, which is the classification of organisms. For this reason, Theophrastus is commonly regarded the father of botany, and his books about plants were seen as the definitive textbooks on plant science until the Renaissance.
Theophrastus classified plants into four general types: Trees, shrubs, sub-shrubs, and herbs, and posed interesting metaphysical questions such as whether fruit is part of the plant or just something produced by it. During his time he classified several hundred species.
But plants weren’t the only thing that Theophrastus was interested in categorizing. For example, his book Characters is a list of 30 different types of people, with a paragraph or two of description about each.
And these character descriptions still hold up fairly well to this day. For example, “The Flatterer is a person who will say as he walks with another, ‘Do you observe how people are looking at you? This happens to no man in Athens but you.” Today we might call somebody like this a sycophant.
For example, the Garrolous Man is the type of person who will sit down next to strangers and talk their ears off about a bunch of stuff they don’t care about. The Boastful Man will go around town telling everyone how rich he is, but oddly enough never seems to have any cash on him. He blames his slaves for forgetting to bring it. The Distrustful Man will send his slave to the market and then send another slave to spy on him. You might notice that slavery is a running theme.
The other characters include the Reckless Man, the Shameless Man, the Gross Man, the Officious Man, the Stupid Man, the Surly Man, the Superstitious Man, the Offensive Man, the Gossip, the Coward, and the Boor.
These were mostly negative stereotypes, and it’s not really certain why he wrote the book, since he doesn’t go into any detail about why people are the way they are. It’s likely that he just wasn’t a particular fan of people.
Theophrastus was perhaps the first philosopher to theorise that human beings are a type of animal, or at least that animals have a type of agency similar to how humans have agency. Biology was so central to Theophrastus’ worldview that he saw the entire universe as a type of organism with a soul.
He even described non-living things like rocks as having the properties of life forms, going so far as to say that rocks can be male or female.
It’s speculated from evidence from the time that Theophrastus might have been nearly as prolific and important as Aristotle was and the only reason Aristotle overshadows him so much is because so much more of Aristotle’s work actually survived. In any case, the next time you’re painting some happy little trees, give a thought to the first person who truly admired them: Theophrastus, history’s most underrated lesbian.
Sources:
Adamson, Peter., Classical Philosophy: A history of philosophy without any gaps. Oxford University Press, 2014
Ierodiakonou, K., Theophrastus. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2020, Retrieved 2025.
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