A starting-point
What is a commentary?
What distinguishes a philosophical commentary from all other philosophical treatises? Can we pinpoint a set of presuppositions that characterize a commentary? In the colloquial sense, commenting refers to presenting opinions on or reacting to something, be it something scientific or artistic, written or spoken, advanced or ordinary. If this were all there was to commenting, it would be virtually impossible to find any philosophical works that are not commentaries. Thus philosophical commenting – or perhaps all commenting in texts – requires something more than making comments in ordinary speech. Yet some conceptual link remains between the two activities. At the least, in both cases it is vital that comments are presented about something: commenting has an object. However, this is not a sufficient criterion for identifying commentaries. In a sense, any reasonable philosophical activity is about something, whether the object is a literary product (a written or oral text) or reality.
A closer description of a commentary can be arrived at if we require that the object of a commentary be a text, written or oral. Let us call such a text “the object text” of a commentary. Commentaries in this sense can proceed more loosely if only parts of a text are commented on and others are not, and the commentary does not aim at anything like a complete coverage of the text. Such works can be distinguished from linear or formal commentaries, which follow the object text line by line and cover most of its contents. Even though there are interpretive works on oral texts that can be characterized as commentaries, the more extensive linear commentaries require that the culture in which they are produced be sufficiently literate (see also Baltussen 2007). This is also true of the ancient commentaries (exēgēsis, hupomnēma).1 Some less comprehensive and nonlinear commentaries were written quite soon after the death of Plato (Plato’s pupil Crantor apparently wrote such a commentary on the Timaeus; Procl. in Ti. 1.76,1–2), but we have to wait until the first century bce before more extensive linear commentaries emerge. Probably the earliest such commentary is an anonymous commentary on Plato’s Theaetetus (ed. Bastiniani & Sedley 1995).2 In the first century bce, we also find the first linear commentaries on Aristotle’s works. Before the linear philosophical commentaries that we are concerned with in this book, there was an exegetical tradition of interpreting religious statements such as the oracle statements (see e.g. Betegh 2004: 46; Baltussen 2004). In philosophy too, texts closely resembling formal commentaries are found quite early; a famous instance is the section in Plato’s Protagoras (339a–348c) containing an interpretation of Simonides’ poem. Even though this section has humorous or ironical undertones, it must be noted that these can only produce their effect if they sufficiently resemble a real instance of such an interpretive activity.3
As regards commentaries in general, a typical prerequisite is that the object – written or oral text, or an artistic piece – is important or valuable. Further, commentaries are often written because the object is considered difficult to understand. The implicit purpose of a commentary, then, is to convey the valuable text, oral material or artwork to an audience who might otherwise be deprived of the information it provides, its artistic value or the skill of expression with which the piece has been produced, or whatever it might be that the difficult surface of the commented object conceals. A similar idea can also be found in the ancient commentaries. When the commentaries dominated the philosophical scene, special value was attributed to a particular set of (philosophical) texts. The most important such texts were works of Plato and Aristotle, and often other commentaries already written about them.
The supposition that the content of the object text is not accessible because of its obscurity played a role in the ancient commentators’ work. With respect to Aristotle’s treatises, obscurity was even used as an argument for authenticity (see e.g. Olymp. in Mete. 4,16–18, in Sorabji 2004: vol. 2, 46). Olympiodorus responds to those who had claimed that the Meteorologica could not have been written by Aristotle because of its clarity. Olympiodorus’ argument is that this appearance is false: in fact there are many unclear statements in the Meteorologica and hence the treatise must be Aristotle’s. Sometimes a definite function was attributed to the obscurity of the sources. According to Ammonius, Aristotle employs obscurity because for intelligent students it offers an opportunity to stretch their minds even further. By contrast, empty minds will feel aversion when encountering the texts and will not even attempt to understand them (Ammon. in Cat. 7,7–14, in Sorabji 2004: vol. 2, 54–5). Sometimes such a double function of being secretive to some and inspiring to others was also assigned to poetry and myths (Olymp. in Grg. 238,20–239,11, in Sorabji 2004: vol. 2, 52–3).
However, the ancient commentators did not merely aim to clarify the hidden meaning of existent texts. In this sense, we could say that they were not merely commentators. This is important to keep in mind, since describing someone as “a commentator” might suggest that the author is writing just about a text and not about how things really are at all. Sometimes this could even be taken in the sense that commentators are to be distinguished from real philosophers.4 However, in the case of the ancient commentators, the dichotomy does not hold. The ancient commentators did not disregard the question of how things really are. They were interested in the further objective of attaining the truth through their activity of interpreting the classical masters and started from the idea – which is not a completely detrimental one – that in order to attain the truth they needed to consider how previous philosophers had answered the questions they were concerned with. To some extent, this objective can be found in Aristotle and his dialectical accounts of predecessors’ theories at the beginning of treatises such as the De anima and the Metaphysics.5 The fact that the ancient commentators started from object texts did set some limitations on their activity, but this does not mean that they were not philosophers. During the period that we are concerned with, roughly 500 years from the first to the sixth century ce, philosophy was written in the commentaries (see also Baltussen 2007).
In scholarly research in the earlier parts of the twentieth century, the late ancient commentators on Plato and Aristotle were used mainly as sources of information concerning the masters they comment on: they were read as secondary sources for Plato and Aristotle. Since the late 1980s, largely thanks to Richard Sorabji’s translation project and the work done by scholars such as Ilsetraut Hadot, it has become increasingly acknowledged that the commentaries are philosophically important sources as such and that the commentators, even though they work in the Platonist–Aristotelian framework, are critical, original and innovative when it comes to this tradition. In this volume, we are concerned with the commentators as philosophers and their works as philosophical sources, not as secondary sources to uncover the “hidden meaning” in Plato or Aristotle.
The Hellenistic period
By the first century ce writing commentaries had become a well-developed and self-conscious practice. One traditional explanation of the emergence of the linear and comprehensive commentaries is related to what happened to the object texts, especially Aristotle’s specialized works. In an old story related by Strabo and Plutarch (Str. 13.1.54, 13.608; Plu. Sull. 26), Aristotle’s books disappeared soon after his death. They remained hidden in a cellar in Scepsis (being eaten by worms) until, in the first century bce, they were restored by a man called Apellicon, whose philosophical competence the sources find dubious. Another main figure in this piece of narrative is Andronicus of Rhodes, who is reported to have produced a complete edition of Aristotle’s works in the first part of the first century bce on the basis of Apellicon’s initial work (Plu. Sull. 26; Porph. Plot. 24). Doubts have been raised concerning the reliability of this story (e.g. Frede 1999: 773–6; Gottschalk 1990) and many argue that not only is Apellicon’s role dubious, but also that of Andronicus has been seriously overstated (e.g. Frede 1999: 772–6; Barnes 1997; cf. Fazzo 2004).
The dramatic details of the story are fantasy, but it remains a fact that in the time between Aristotle’s death (322 bce) and the first century bce we do not hear of explicit discussions on Aristotle’s so-called esoteric works. Esoteric works are the more specialized philosophical treatises, whereas the works published for wider audiences are called “exoteric”.6 The exoteric works most probably influenced the Hellenistic schools. For example, some scholars have argued that Lucretius attacks not the Stoics but the Platonic–Aristotelian view as it is represented in Aristotle’s lost exoteric treatise On Philosophy (Furley 1980; see also Sedley 1998a). Other important exoteric works by Aristotle are called Eudemus, Protrepticus (Exhortation to philosophy) and On Philosophy. The exoteric works were also known to Cicero and to his contemporaries, but they were not included in the collection attributed to Andronicus (see Moraux 1973: 63). As for Cicero, he refers to the distinction between the exoteric works (he uses this Greek term) and those works that are more specialized (Fin. 5.11–12). Of the more specialized works he mentions Aristotle’s studies on political life, including the collections of the constitutions of city-states, which he attributes to Theophrastus, and the Nicomachean Ethics (which Cicero also claims was not written by Aristotle but by his son Nicomachus, to whom the treatise is dedicated). The commentators knew the exoteric works as well. Simplicius, for example, refers to them occasionally (see e.g. in Cael. 289,1–15 for a reference to On Philosophy) and Alexander of Aphrodisias quotes the Protrepticus in his commentary on the Topics (149,9–17).7
The legend of hidden texts and their restoration may also tell us that Aristotle’s esoteric works were not easily found on the market during the period from his death to the publication of the edition attributed to Andronicus (Fazzo 2004: 4 n.11). It has been suggested that the diminished interest in Aristotle’s esoteric works during this period is due to the fact that the popularity and readability of the exoteric works greatly surpasses that of the much more difficult and demanding esoteric ones containing logical analysis and complex dialectical argument strategies (Johnson n.d.). Further, as Cicero also notes (Fin. 5.12), the more specialized esoteric works were “in the form of a notebook”, which means that their literary quality was not as polished as that of the exoteric works. Ironically, the course of history has deprived us of direct access to almost all of the exoteric works, whereas the esoteric ones come down to us in...