acroamatic

Acroamatic, -al, ak-ro-a-mat′ik, -al, adj. oral, esoteric, secret—applied to the lectures of Aristotle delivered to a select circle of students as opposed to his more popular lectures.

But there was no doubt a tendency to extend the term “exoteric” from the dialectical to the more popular of the scientific writings of Aristotle, to make a new distinction between exoteric and acroamatic or esoteric, and even to make out that Aristotle was in the habit of teaching both exoterically and acroamatically day by day as head of the Peripatetic school at Athens.

The answer to the first three points is that Aristotle did not make any distinction between exoteric and acroamatic, and was not likely to have any longer taught his exoteric dialogues when he was teaching his mature philosophy at Athens, but may have alternated the teaching of the latter between the more abstruse and the more popular parts which had gradually come to be called “exoteric.”

As regards the last point, the authority of Andronicus proves that he at all events did not exaggerate his own share in publishing Aristotle’s works; but it does not prove either that this correspondence between Alexander and Aristotle took place, or that Aristotle called his philosophical writings acroamatic, or that he had published them wholesale to the world.

But even so, Alexander’s complaint would not justify writers three centuries later in taking Alexander to have referred to mature scientific writings, which were not addressed, and not much known, to him, the conqueror of Asia; although by the times of Andronicus and Aulus Gellius, Aristotle’s scientific writings were all called acroatic, or acroamatic, or sometimes esoteric, in distinction from exoteric—a distinction altogether unknown to Aristotle, and therefore to Alexander.