The Fragments of Aristotle

Aristotelis Opera III: Librorum Deperditorum Fragmenta by Olof Gigon

Review by: H. B. Gottschalk
The Classical Review, New Series, Vol. 41, No. 1 (1991), pp. 31-34
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association
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31

THE CLASSICAL REVIEW

leadsherto acceptthatcertaingroupspassfromone sectionto anotherof Aristotle's

fundamentaldivision.She appearsto thinkthat Aristotledoes this deliberately.It is
easierto acceptKirwan'sapproach.
N. follows more familiarpaths, enteringinto the standardargumentsabout the
interpretationof this book and its placein Aristotle'sthought.He relatesit especially
to Plato, and in particularto the Theaetetusand the Sophist.The danger of the
approachof both C. and N. is to thinkof Aristotleas primarilyconcernedwith the
Presocratics,the Sophists and Plato, and less with the subjectabout which he is
arguing,and withhis studentsto whomhe is tryingto makehis pointsclear.It is true
that sincehe believedthat he could learnfromhis predecessorshe did bringthemin,
but philosophyin his time had reachedthe point where it was possible to see a
and
problemas a problem,and thejustificationof the principlesof non-contradiction
of the excludedmiddlewouldbe questionsin theirown rightwhoeverhad dealtwith
them before.Further,they are naturallylinkedwith the problemsabout the nature
of realityalso consideredin both Plato and Aristotle,and especiallyconnectedwith
the name of Protagoras.
C. claimsoriginalityfor the idea that all Aristotlewantsin orderto refutesceptics
is significanceand not affirmationor denial from his supposedinterlocutor,who
could, for instance,just say 'Good morning', and that would be enough to get
Aristotlestarted.She is interestingon the word semainein,distinguishingbetweena
man as signifierand a word as signifier.Men use words to signify things: words
signifya meaningor a definition,and significancehereis a relationbetweenwords.
She brings in the treatmentof goatstag in Post. Anal.2.7, denying that we must
divorcethe two treatmentsof meaning,and rangeswidelyover Aristotle'sremarks
about semantics.
P A M ELA M. H U BY

University of Liverpool

THE FRAGMENTS

OF ARISTOTLE

OLOF GIGON (ed.): Aristotelis Opera (ex recensione I. Bekkeri, ed.

2), III: Librorum Deperditorum Fragmenta. Pp. viii + 875. Berlin and
New York: De Gruyter, 1987. DM 780.
Gigon's long-awaitedreplacementfor Rose's collectionof Ar(istotle)'sfragmentsis
a massivequartovolume,nearlyfourtimesas long as its predecessor;allowingfor the
inclusionof a good deal of explanatorymatterin the form of introductionsand
headnotesto variousgroupsof fragments(but no commentary;this is promisedfor
later), it must contain more than three times the amount of text. Even so G. has
excludedsometextsprintedby Rose. Rose believedthat all the writingsattributedto
Ar in antiquity,exceptfor the extantpragmateiai,wereapocryphal,and whenhe set
out to collect their remains,includedsome fragmentswhich no-one ever seriously
regardedas Ar's work, some of them not even ascribedto Ar in our sources.G.
howeverwould claim that all the texts in his collectionare connected,directlyor
indirectly,with genuinelost writingsof Ar, even if few give Ar's own words,and he
has omittedthose whichfail to satisfythis criterion.Most of these are unimportant
remarksabout non-philosophicalsubjects not attributedto Ar in the sources,
and even the
includingsome ascribedto -Theophrastus
(from the Hepi iLErdAAcov
Hist. Plant.);also omittedare Ar's apophthegmsand the fragmentsof his speeches
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32

THE CLASSICAL

REVIEW

and letters, except for those included in his Lives (which are reprinted entire), and the
Peplos. On the other hand G. has admitted some passages not attributed to Ar by
name where there are grounds for believing that they refer to his lost writings, e.g. fr.
712; the most numerous of these are from Ar's own extant works (together with the
relevant ancient commentaries), referring to the IlEpi T-j loEas (as G. prefers to call
it), I7ep[ TOVayaOov, Anatomai, Problemata Physica, Iep[ ckv-Tbvetc. Other major
additions come from papyrus texts discovered since Rose's last edition was published,
including the whole of the Ath. Pol. (fr. 474), a large part of the Anonymus
Londinensis(fr. 355) and a section of Philodemus' Rhetorica (fr. 130-2). A welcome
feature of the edition is that G. has generally printed more of the context than
previous editors.
Nearly one third of the work (pp. 1-254) is devoted to testimonia: the ancient Lives
and other biographical passages; Dionysius' Letter to Ammonius; the Arabo-Latin
dialogue De pomo; various reports concerning the fate of Ar's works after his death;
the Neoplatonic prolegomena to Ar's pragmateiai; the Aristotelian doxographies of
Areius Didymus and Aetius and three passages of Cicero dealing with Aristotelian
philosophy (Acad. 1.1343, Fin. 4.2-13, 5.6-96); the fragments of Atticus' Against
Ar; finally those passages in Ar's pragmateiai containing references to his exoterikoi
logoi, with the extant Greek commentaries thereon and a selection of other relevant
texts. Here we have most of the available material for a Rezeptionsgeschichteof Ar's
philosophy in the Hellenistic and early Roman period. The prolegomena to this
section (pp. 3-17) gives an indication of the way in which G. would have these texts
understood; his views on the main issues are judicious and balanced, although there
is room for disagreement on details.
Unlike Rose, G. tries to assign the extant fragments to known titles as far as
possible, and has succeeded in grouping 788 texts in this way; a further 232 are
printed at the end of the collection as Fragmente ohne Buchangabe (789-982) and
Nachtrage (983-1020). Each known title is treated as belonging to a separate work;
G. is chary of identifying any of the titles in the ancient catalogues with others from
the same lists or with extant works or parts of extant works (p. 213). With each title,
including those for which there are no surviving texts, G. has furnished a headnote
listing works by other authors with the same or related titles and discussing the
meaning of the terms which occur in them, and an end-note listing passages in Ar's
extant writings dealing with the same or related subject-matter and suggesting what
topics may have been raised in the lost work. These hints are valuable, although their
scope is limited. G. does not claim to give anything like a 'reconstruction' of Ar's lost
works, but only to set the limits which such a reconstruction must observe. This
warning is particularly necessary in the case of Ar's dialogues. As G. explains in his
Prolegomena (pp. 236ff.), he believes that many of the fundamental doctrines of the
pragmateiai were also discussed, often in greater detail and in a more systematic way,
in the dialogues and that the pragmateiai presuppose a knowledge of these
discussions. The danger of falling into a circular argument is obvious and I do not
find G.'s view entirely convincing: if the dialogues were so important for
understanding the pragmateiai, why did later Aristotelians not refer to them more
often and more explicitly in their commentaries?
It is in assigning fragments to the extant titles that a degree of arbitrarinesscreeps
in. G. rightly insists that the starting-point for such decisions must be the ascription
of fragments in our sources, but since these are comparatively rare, he uses the context
in which unassigned fragments are quoted as an additional criterion (see pp. 216f.).
This sounds reasonable enough, but the result can be disconcerting. For example, of

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THE CLASSICAL

REVIEW

33

the four references to Sardanapallus traditionally assigned to the Protreptikos (fr. 16

Ross) one, from Athenaios, is placed with the fragments of the /epl 8LKamoav71Sby
G. (fr. 5), enlarged by a long quotation from Archestratos whose immediate source
is given as Chrysippus, not Ar; two from Cicero are printed among the unplaced
fragments and the last, from Strabo, is dropped (rightly); but a scholion on Juvenal,
which says only that Cicero made a derogatory remark about Sardanapallus in the
De republica which echoes, but does not reproduce exactly, the one attributed to
Ar by Athenaios, is accepted as /7. $tK. fr. 4. The link between the passages assigned
to the /7. 8iK. is that Athenaios quotes Chrysippus on Sardanapallus immediately
after Ar, and Plutarch reports that Chrysippus wrote against Ar ~repi3tKatoo6vvrs;
but it is not certain that these words refer to the title of a book, and G.'s assumption
that Ar must have referred to Sardanapallus in several different works, but all the
non-Platonic material in Cicero's De republica was taken from his /7. &IK.,is
unproved and unprovable. The 'fragments' of this work are further bulked out by
four columns of miscellaneous information about the burglar and/or traitor
Eurybatos and other rogues associated with him in the tradition; of all this only one
anecdote is attributed to Ar by our sources and deserves to be included in a collection
of his fragments (fr. 2 Ross, 84 Rose3). Similarly, G. includes all the words and
phrases from Ar, except those from his letters, quoted by Demetrius to illustrate
stylistic points, although they are scattered over many pages and only the first (28 =
fr. 8 G) is said to have come from the /7. &K. In both cases G.'s 'principle of
economy', that our authorities are unlikely to have used more than one source for
each work, makes too little allowance for the magpie habits of ancient grammarians.
By way of contrast, only the first two of the fragments traditionally assigned to the
Protreptikos have survived as such, the others being relegated to the 'unplaced'
fragments or a special appendix of Tortot rrporperTmKol(fr. 73-83). This category is
stretched to include the so-called Aristotelian Divisiones (fr. 82-3); in his headnote G.
argues that these consist of extracts from the dialogues, but he gives no crossreferences to them in his end-notes, not even in what would be obvious cases such as
the /7epl

evyevefa~

and Div. 10.

Among the other fragmentary writings G.'s treatment of the /ep[ ~cov is most
striking and a good example of his approach. Diogenes lists this work as having nine
books and has generally been thought to refer to a work consisting of books 1-9 of
the extant HA. On G.'s reckoning there are 115 'fragments' (180-294) occupying,
with their contexts, 72 quarto pages, derived from this work; some of these are so
close to passages of Ar's extant zoological works that they have usually been regarded
as quotations of them, while others do not correspond to anything in them (the
situation is similar in the case of Theophrastus' botanical writings). Our only
authority to attach any titles to his quotations is Athenaios and he gives many
variants which may or may not belong to the same work. G. despairs of finding any
order in this confusion and reprints the fragments in the order in which they occur
in Athenaios and the other sources; but true to his 'principle of economy' he takes
the view that all the fragments are derived from the same original, a Hellenistic
recension of Ar's zoological works much of which coincided closely with the text of
the pragmateiai as edited by Andronicus, but which also contained matter not
included in the later recension, and that the title 77?pi co3wvrefers to the older
recension, not the extant one.
In his choice of text G. generally follows the standard modern editions, with some
modifications; he is especially prone to postulate short lacunas or to insert odd words
which certainly make the text read more smoothly, but are often not really necessary.

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34

THE CLASSICAL

REVIEW

Unfortunately no apparatuscriticus is provided in most cases, so that it is not always

clear which changes are due to G. and we are not informed if there are any manuscript
variants or if any other conjectures have been proposed. Sometimes he has not used
the most recent printed material, e.g. the readings of two manuscripts of the
Divisiones reported by Boudroux in 1909 and Moraux in AC 1977, the additional
fragments of the Anon. Lond. published by Diels and Kenyon in the SBB for 1901 and
Harlfinger's critical edition (1975) of the Alexander fragments of the De ideis;
Philoponus' commentary on the Categories is ascribed to ps.-Ammonius and quoted
from the second Aldine edition of 1546.
Some faults of presentation make his edition more difficult to use than it might
have been. The most serious is the absence of the original line-numbers from some of
the papyrus texts (particularly the Anon. Lond.) and the extracts from the Greek
commentators on Ar, the most irritating that the numbering of fr. 56-143 in the body
of the text differs from the numbering in the edition of Diogenes' catalogue given as
part of T 1. These blemishes are partly redeemed by the beautifully clear type. There
is a moderate number of misprints, but I found no seriously misleading ones.
In spite of its defects, this is a monumental work of scholarship summing up an
important area of twentieth-century Aristotelian studies. While its avowed purpose is
to present the texts with a minimum of editorial matter, its introductions and notes
raise many important questions and will certainly be the starting-point for future
research; one hopes that the promised commentary will provide at least some of the
answers.
A fuller review, with a detailed discussion of the papyrus fragments, dialogues and
logical fragments, by T. Dorandi, E. Berti and C. Rossitto, can be found in Elenchos
10 (1989), 193-215.
H. B. G O T T S C H A L K

University of Leeds

THE OTHER

AINEIAS

DAVID WHITEHEAD (tr.): Aineias the Tactician, How to Survive

Under Siege. Translated with Introduction and Commentary. (Clarendon Ancient History Series.) Pp. xxi+214. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1990. ?27.50 (Paper, ?10.95).
The best tribute I can pay this book is to confess that I began to read it thinking
Aineias the Tactician a bit of a bore, and ended by being fascinated. The Introduction
sets the tone, taking the reader briskly and clearly through the problems of who the
author was and when he lived, but above all, without claiming too much for him,
alerting one not only to his significance as a pioneer in military literature, but also to
how much he can tell us about the ordinary Greek city, and not only when it was
under siege. The translation that follows is crisp and clear, and the commentary not
only does its proper job of explaining the translation and elucidating what Aineias
says, but constitutes a rich quarry for references to the modern literature.
I have only three general criticisms. The first is really of the series rather than this
volume, and Dr Whitehead may well share my feeling that it is a pity that a Greek
text was not included: it is a nuisance for those of us who can and want to consult
the original, to have to look elsewhere for it. More seriously, I feel that diagrams
illustrating some of the devices to which Aineias alludes, should have been included
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