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31
University of Liverpool
THE FRAGMENTS
OF ARISTOTLE
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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
THE CLASSICAL
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33
evyevefa~
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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University of Leeds
THE OTHER
AINEIAS