After an interval of twenty-one years from the original publication of the present book, it seems to me that many of its main theses still stand, such as the general picture it presents of Aristotle, the purpose of the Peripatos, and its institutional nature as a foundation. Other conclusions that I reached in this book can be considered more controversial.
It will be opportune for me to pass in review the most important scholarship published since I last worked on this book. I apologize in advance if I have neglected any important contributions, since I have worked mostly on different topics in the past twenty years.
At about the same time as the first publication of this book, the French scholar P. Louis, who had edited and translated many Aristotelian works, published a biography of Aristotle. Vie d’Aristote: 384–322 avant Jésus-Christ (Paris, 1990). This is a rather strange booklet. Louis writes a novelized biography of Aristotle, in which the few certain facts mix with hypotheses, uncertain elements from tradition, and speculation from passages of the works in the corpus, such as the Meteorologica and the Problems (this latter of uncertain authenticity). Louis thinks he knows what Aristotle’s feelings were toward Plato (a new father to substitute for his own father, who died when Aristotle was very young); he tells us that Aristotle and Philip II of Macedon used to play together when they were children; and he thinks that Aristotle visited the zoo that, according to him, existed at the court of Macedonian kings at Pella. I suspect that all this, and much more, is a product of Louis’s imagination. There are more acceptable pages in his book, for instance, his description of the departure of Aristotle from Athens in 347 BCE, or of the rivalry between Isocrates and the Platonists for the job of being Alexander’s tutor in 343 BCE. But in general his book represents a step backward in scholarship on the subject, because he does not examine the bias and tendency of each of the ancient sources before accepting what they say.
More useful are the articles published in Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques (CRNS Paris, 1994 and onward), a large French encyclopedia edited by R. Goulet, dedicated to collecting data about the life and works of all the known ancient philosophers, major and minor, with bibliography, but without a summary of their theories. Here we find entries about most of the persons named in the present book, beginning with a large entry on Aristotle. The biographical portion of this entry, written by R. Goulet, B. Puech, and M. Aouad (1:413–443) is divided in three main sections, “Prosopography,” “Chronology,” and “Works.” They give a select bibliography and a list of the ancient sources.
In her section on “Chronology,” B. Puech discusses the evidence about the list of the victors of the Delphic games (examined in the present book on p. 60); she thinks that it contained a history of the shrine of Delphi as well as of the games. According to Puech, the inscription was a huge document, larger than has been suspected until now. She thinks also that the inscription was destroyed in 324/323 BCE, before the death of Alexander, in a period of anti-Macedonian feelings among the Delphian priests.
At the end of this portion of the article, R. Goulet discusses the destiny of Aristotle’s works and rightly maintains that the treatises were known also in Hellenistic period, but he concludes that they had no influence on the Peripatetic philosophers of the second and first centuries BCE, because of the conceptual evolution of the school—and its decadence, I would add. For more contributions on the fate of Aristotle’s library, see below in this postscript.
One of the ancient sources about which there is new information is the Arabic Life of Aristotle found in the Istanbul codex, Aya Sofya no. 4833 (mentioned above, p. 120). M. Aouad, the author of this section of the Aristotle article, says that it has been only partially edited and translated, and that, according to Plezia and Gutas, it is not by a Neoplatonist but by a Peripatetic scholar of the fourth century CE, and that the content is different from that of the Neoplatonic biographies of Aristotle. Aouad summarizes the content of the manuscript: a dedication to a certain Gallus, a biography of Aristotle, some aphorisms, and the list of his works. In fact, however, there does exist a full edition and translation of the text, by Christel Hein, on pp. 388–446 of her Definition und Einteilung der Philosophie: Von den spätantiken Literatur zur arabischen Enzyklopädie (Frankfurt 1985). Unfortunately, many scholars, including myself, have overlooked this publication, whose existence was made known to me by Oliver Primavesi’s 2007 article (see below).
In this portion of her book, Hein gives a complete survey of the preceding literature and of the influence of this text in other compilations in Arabic. Ptolemy refers more than once to a book he has read by Andronicus of Rhodes about the works of Aristotle, but which is not in his hands when writing the present summary. Hein thinks that Ptolemy’s catalog respects the division of Aristotle’s works current in the Neoplatonic school in Alexandria. He modifies the ordering of the works and gives a shorter catalog of them; in fact, Ptolemy says, in Andronicus there are a thousand Aristotelian books, but he catalogs only the most important ones, one hundred in number. An edition of the preface and catalog follows (pp. 416–439), with a German translation of the preface and a back-translation of the catalog from Arabic to Greek.
In the first and subsequent volumes of the Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques, there are other important entries dedicated to figures relevant to the topic of this book, namely these: Alexinos, by R. Müller (1:149–151); Andronicus of Rhodes, by R. Goulet (1:200–202); Antigonus of Carystus, by T. Dorandi (1:209–211); Apellicon, Artemon, and Athenion, by R. Goulet (1:266–267, 615–616, 649–650); Callisthenes of Olynthus, by W. Spoerri (2:183–221); Cephisodorus, by L. Pernot (2:266–269); Coriscus of Scepsis, by R. Goulet (2:456–490), who thinks that Erastus and Coriscus had a good influence on Hermias’s character; Demetrius of Phalerum, by J.-P. Schneider and F. Queyrel (2:628–635); Diogenes Laertius, by J. Mejer (2:824–833); Epicurus, by R. Goulet (3:154–181); Eudoxos, by J.-P. Schneider (3:293–302); Hermias of Atarneus, by T. Dorandi (3:650–651); Hermippus, by J.-P. Schneider (3:655–658); and Isocrates, by J. L. Lopez Cruces and P. P. Fuentes Gonzales (3:891–938). As is common for encyclopedia entries, these contributions generally present the mainstream opinion and only rarely present new perspectives or evidence; but they are very useful, because the reader can find there all the facts concerning the ancient philosophers and their works, collected in a clear and concise way.
Some of these entries deserve special mention, such as the entry by Lopez Cruces and Fuentes Gonzalez on Isocrates, with its excellent exposition of Isocrates’ conception of “philosophy,” and his relationship with the “real” philosophers, Sophists, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and so on. The treatment of Callisthenes by Spoerri is extremely detailed and complete; he doubts that Callisthenes had ever been a disciple of Aristotle, but he notes that in his historical works Callisthenes described many aspects and events of nature. In a useful part of his Cephisodorus article, L. Pernot discusses the testimony about the slander made by Cephisodorus against Aristotle (above, p. 25) and notes that the Greek text of the testimony by Athenaeus from Cephisodorus’s book can be understood in two opposing ways; epitimai tōi philosophōi ou poiēsanti logou axion to paroimiai athroisai can mean both “he criticizes the philosopher for collecting proverbs (which are of no value)” and also “he criticizes the philosopher for not collecting proverbs (i.e., for making it of no value to collect proverbs).” He rightly observes, however, that would be strange to attack a philosopher such as Aristotle for not collecting proverbs. The former interpretation seems to me to be the right one.
In his important article “Roman Aristotle,” Jonathan Barnes discusses the evidence about the editorial history of the works of Aristotle in Rome until the first century CE, in J. Barnes and M. Griffin, eds., Philosophia togata II (1997, pp. 1–69). He examines anew the evidence with a clear eye and makes many useful and witty remarks on each of them. He rightly thinks that Athenaeus’s version of the story about the destiny of Aristotle’s library is not compatible with the version of Strabo; but he prefers Strabo’s account, notwithstanding the many impossibilities it contains, because he thinks that Strabo derives from Posidonius and that Posidonius wrote the truth. On the other hand, one could object that Strabo often shows a hostile attitude toward Peripatetics, as his well-known remark on Posidonius shows: “he is much too fond of imitating Aristotle’s propensity for diving into causes, a subject which we [Stoics] scrupulously avoid, simply because of the extreme darkness in which all causes are enveloped” (Geography2.3.8). As narrated by Strabo, the complicated history of the loss of Aristotle’s works over many centuries is hardly neutral and has a clearly anti-Peripatetic flavor.
Barnes rightly contradicts the main point of Strabo’s testimony, that copies of Aristotle’s treatises were not available in the Hellenistic period before the time of Sulla. Barnes also thinks that Andronicus’s work, as editor and as collector of Aristotle’s logoi in larger units, was not so very important. His main contribution to Aristotelian scholarship was the Pinakes, a work in four volumes containing a Life of Aristotle, a catalog of the works, and a discussion about the authenticity of some of them. Barnes’s conclusion is that “we have reason to believe, first, that some at least of Aristotle’s major treatises were put together in something like their present form by Aristotle himself; secondly, that some of the treatises were known in something like the present form to Aristotle’s immediate successors; and thirdly, that some of the treatises were available in some consolidated version in Cicero’s time” (p. 65). According to him, Andronicus’s work was only a single step in a complex history; in fact, the formation of the Aristotelian corpus has been a long process, and was the subject of a continuous discussion among Peripatetics, a discussion that lasted until the Renaissance and beyond.
A book with several contributors, Demetrius of Phalerum: Text, Translation, and Discussion, edited by W. W. Fortenbaugh and E. Schütrumpf (New Brunswick, N.J., and London, 2000), includes an interesting article by H. Gottschalk on the cultural and political activity of Demetrius. He thinks that, although Aristotle would have approved the measures taken by Demetrius when he was chief of the Athenian government, Demetrius never tried to apply Aristotle’s political theory to the real world of political affairs in Athens. He tried only to achieve political stability and economic progress, and only the width and coherence of his political reforms show the influence of his philosophical training.
About the alleged “course on rhetoric” held by Aristotle in Plato’s Academy (see above, pp. 26–29), the traditional interpretation has recently been defended by E. Berti, in “La polemica antiaristotelica di Filodemo a proposito della retorica,” published in C. Natali and S. Maso, eds.,Antiaristotelismo (Amsterdam, 1999, pp. 63–75), though he admits that the image of Aristotle present in Philodemus is much more similar to the mature encyclopedic scholar of later periods. Expressing the contrary opinion is a paper by D. L. Blank, who revises and discusses all the evidence and the wide bibliography connected to this episode, and presents a new edition and translation of the passage from Philodemus, in “Aristotle’s ‘Academic Course on Rhetoric’ and the End of Philodemus’ On Rhetoric VIII,” Cronache Ercolanesi 37 (2007): 5–47. Blank concludes that the evidence preserved in Philodemus gives no support to the thesis that Aristotle gave a course of lectures on rhetoric in the Academy; he thinks that Philodemus’s target was theProtrepticus and other lost popular works of Aristotle, not his teaching activities.
O. Primavesi has recently published an interesting article on the story of the fate of Aristotle’s library, “Ein Blick in den Stollen von Skepsis: Vier Kapitel zur frühen Überlieferung des Corpus aristotelicum,” Philologus 151 (2007): 51–77. He notes that the catalog of Aristotle’s works in Diogenes Laertius distinguishes the different books by numbers (Buchstabenziffern), which is a practice inaugurated in Hellenistic time, whereas the treatises that constitute our corpus are numbered by letters (Ordnungsbuchstaben). The first way of numbering books is older than the second, and Primavesi deduces from this fact that there were two collections of Aristotle’s books, one in Alexandria, whose catalog is in Diogenes Laertius, and the other in a nonprofessional library that still used the older numbering system. He also identifies this corpus with the books hidden in Skepsis by Neleus’s relatives. Our corpus of Aristotle’s works derives then from this second collection, which was brought to Rome by Sulla, according to Primavesi. The hypothesis is attractive, except for the idea that this second collection of books was hidden in Skepsis. As noted before, there are enough clues that some of the major Aristotelian works were known by Epicurus and by the first generation of Peripatetics. It is much more probable, in my opinion, if Primavesi is right, that this second collection of Aristotle’s books never left Athens, but was neglected by later Peripatetics, to be recovered in the first century BCE by Apellicon, as we saw before.
In the first publication of this book, I quoted Wilamowitz 1893 for an optimistic description of Athens during the second stay of Aristotle (p. 56). Now this description should be superseded by Michael Scott’s book, From Democrats to Kings (London, 2009; Italian translation, Roma-Bari, 2012), which gives a more nuanced image of the period and a very sympathetic analysis of the interventions of Isocrates. This book makes much more evident the growing influence of Macedonian kings in fourth-century Greece, and fills in details in the picture of the connections between Aristotle and Macedonian power.
Lastly, I would like to refer the reader to a couple of recent articles of mine, which could be useful for a comparison between Aristotle’s school and other philosophical institutions in the ancient world: “Schools and Sites of Learning,” in J. Brunschwig and G.E.R. Lloyd (eds.), Greek Thought: A Guide to Classical Knowledge (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), pp. 191–217; and “Philosophical Schools,” in Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome (Oxford, 2010), pp. 250–255.
My final word is a warm thanks to Doug Hutchinson, who started and finished the project of translating my original book, and to his various friends and collaborators who helped him in the process of its development. Without his impetus, this book would never have been commissioned by Princeton University Press; and without his editorial and scholarly contributions in the final stages, it would never have seen the light of day.