Aristotle and the Stoics

F. H. Sandback

• Publisher: Cambridge Philological Society
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781913701161
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophers

This study maintains that the extent of influence exerted by Aristotle on the Stoics has often been exaggerated by modern scholars. A collection of all references to him by authors other than Peripatetics, whether contemporary or belonging to the following century, shows that his importance as a philosopher was not then recognised and reveals a lack of evidence that his school-works were known. Professor Sandbach argues that it is a mistake to proceed on the assumption that the Stoics must have known his work, or even an outline of it, and been stimulated, whether to agreement or to modification. If the supposed evidence for Aristotelian influence is examined without this presumption, much is found to be flimsy and some can be confidently rejected. A residue remains of varying degrees of probability, which it is hard to estimate owing to our insufficient information, particularly about Zeno, about the Academy of his time, about Aristotle's exoteric works, and about memory of him in oral traditions.

I. INTRODUCTION

In The Stoics (1975), speaking of the influences on Zeno’s philosophy, I wrote as follows: ‘Many modern writers try to find a connection with Aristotle, but this I believe to be a mistake, due to the tempting supposition that he loomed as large to the generation that succeeded him as he does to us. There is much to suggest that those works of his that are read to-day, works mostly not prepared for publication, sometimes barely intelligible notes, were for the most part not known until they were edited in the first century B.C. There may have been private copies made of some for pupils, but they do not in general seem to have been in the book-trade or to have been part of what philosophers might be expected to read’ (21-2). In this paper I shall expand and attempt to confirm this judgment.

But first it may be desirable to recall the fact that Aristotle did write some works, now lost, of which some were dialogues, intended for a wider public than the students who were attached to his school. Later scholars, and probably Aristotle himself,¹ referred to these as ‘exoteric’. By their very nature they were destined for ‘publication’, a word of which the meaning is considered below. Many are known to have been much read. But it should be observed that ‘exoteric’ and ‘published’ are not synonymous: an accident might prevent the publication of a book intended to be popular; a work not completed or likely to have a very limited audience might nevertheless be ‘published’, that is made available.

The surviving works, which constitute our Corpus Aristotelicum, are not all of a kind, but many of them are clearly connected with courses of lectures given by Aristotle. Modern experience has made us familiar with the way in which lectures become books, and it may be right to see that process at work in some of his writings. Others may even have been composed with book-form in mind from the first. But they are all or almost all primarily intended for his pupils, and I shall refer to them as ‘school-works’.

 

Even a modern philosopher’s influence may be exerted in two ways, by his writings and by word of mouth: he may have pupils or other associates who hear him talk and who may pass his views on again to their friends and acquaintances by word of mouth or to a wider circle by writing books or articles. To-day we are so accustomed to the book and our knowledge of the ancient philosophers is so predominantly derived from books that there is a temptation to think of them also as students of the writings of their predecessors. But in ancient Greece there was more talking and less reading. No-one doubts the decisive influence on the course of philosophy exerted by Socrates and by Carneades; yet neither of these men published a line. The immediate impact they made was by oral means; later those who had heard them committed some of their ideas to papyrus.

But although some philosophers were not writers, it is improbable that any were not talkers. Certainly Aristotle must have used his voice as well as his pen. When we try to estimate his influence upon the Stoics, orally transmitted influence must not be excluded. He was dead when Zeno came to Athens in 312/11 B.C., but pupils were still alive and active, notably Theophrastus, who survived at least until 288/7 B.C. They and indeed, if Aristotle gave public lectures,² men who were not members of his circle may have reported his views. One must therefore bear in mind not only his writings, but also what may have been remembered of his thought.

One must not assume, however, that interest in what he had been expounding during the dozen years he had been able to spend in Athens after 334 B.C. was as great as it deserved to be. His notorious connexions with Macedon made him unpopular, so much so that on the death of Alexander he was accused of impiety and felt it prudent to retire to Chalcis in Euboea, whence he was not to return.³ Political considerations ought not to affect the attention paid to a philosopher; unfortunately they are not always neglected. Hence we may imagine that among his contemporaries desire to discover what he was saying was limited.⁴ Even among the Academics there is, for what it is worth, no sign that Speusippus or Xenocrates paid him any attention, although he himself criticised them.⁵

Theophrastus, who had retired with Aristotle to Chalcis, returned about 317 to an Athens where a pro-Macedonian regime had been installed. He was granted permission to buy a house, perhaps near the Lyceum, like that of Isocrates (Vit.anon. 108-9), and there founded or re-founded the Peripatetic school.⁶ He may have talked about Aristotle, but his prime interest was in the prosecution of his own studies and no doubt in the encouragement of those of his pupils.⁷ There is no prior reason for supposing him to have arranged the publication of Aristotle’s unpublished writings.⁸ He was not the guardian of an orthodox tradition, but an independent thinker, who was critical of some Aristotelian ideas, particularly of the pervasive teleology. He had no cause for disseminating unfinished and sometimes unconvincing work by his master. On the other hand there can be no doubt that Aristotelian influence was prominent in his own teaching and writing.

Fortunately there is no need here to examine the truth of the story that Neleus, to whom Theophrastus bequeathed ‘all his books’, carried them off to Scepsis in the Troad, where they lay unknown until re-discovered in the early part of the first century B.C., and that the legacy included the books of Aristotle, who had left them to Theophrastus.⁹ The enquiry is unnecessary because it may be argued that copies of all the original works of Aristotle must have been made, to be preserved in the library of the Peripatos.¹⁰ In the absence of a catalogue of that library, this must be a matter of faith, but it cannot be disproved. Yet Strabo and Plutarch believed (13.1.54; Sulla 26) that the later Peripatetics had access to only a few of Aristotle’s writings and those (says Strabo) mainly the exoteric.¹¹ Of course these authors may have known only that the school-works were not consulted, and hastily inferred that they could not be. A book in a library is not necessarily a book that is read.

But all this is irrelevant, because Zeno formed his philosophy at a time when Theophrastus was still alive and the books undoubtedly in his possession. The question to be asked is not whether the books were in Athens, but what evidence is there that any of the works of our Corpus Aristotelicum were known, directly or indirectly, to the philosophers of the third century B.C. outside the school of Theophrastus.

That the exoteric and any other published works were available to them must be granted. Yet even here care is needed. The first public library in Athens was established by Ptolemy Philopator some time after 221 B.C. Before that a book had to be bought, or borrowed from a friend. There were booksellers, but little is known about what stock they carried. ‘Publication’ is a word which may mislead. The situation at Athens at the end of the fourth century must have been very unlike that which prevails to-day. An author or bookseller would advertise his wares by reading extracts aloud (Diog.Laert. 7.2). He may have had other copies ready for sale to customers, since an export trade in books (Xen. Anab. 7.5.14) implies speculative production in hope of buyers, as does Aristotle’s report that the booksellers carried around many bundles of Isocratean forensic speeches (Dion.Hal. De Isocrate 18). It may be guessed, however, that a bookseller would often possess but a single copy of a book, which he would cause to be reproduced only on receipt of an order. Further there were probably works of which their authors were willing or even eager to allow knowledge, but which were not included in any bookseller’s stock. For the Alexandrians, writes E. G. Turner, Greek Papyri 112, the word ἔκδοσις, ‘edition’, ‘means that the work in question was available for consultation and presumably for copying, “published” in the sense that its existence was known and that it was “issued” to readers’. It can also be presumed that an author might allow friends or pupils to copy writings which he did not consider suitable for ‘publication’, whatever his reason for not allowing free circulation.¹²

The conclusion must be that whereas ‘publication’ made access to a book possible, it did not necessarily make it easy. A fortiori access to an unpublished book would in theory be possible, but in practice depend upon knowledge of it and its whereabouts, a desire to see it, and the willingness of its owner to make it available.

A further caveat may be desirable. If copies of one work by some author were comparatively numerous, it does not follow that all were equally available, an obvious consideration but one that is sometimes disregarded. As F. Solmsen says, (1981) 104, ‘the acquisition (or possession) of Plato’s works by a head of the school [i.e. by Arcesilaus, Diog.Laert. 4.32] would hardly be noteworthy unless copies of the complete works were either a rarity or uncommonly expensive’.

II. REFERENCES TO ARISTOTLE

The question of Aristotelian influence is bedevilled by the scantiness of the remains of the third-century philosophers, among whom Zeno and Epicurus may be included, although they began to teach in the fourth century. Yet it is important to see what evidence can be had from what little is preserved, and a beginning may be made by reviewing explicit mentions of Aristotle by non-Peripatetic authors, leaving those by Stoics to the end.

Epicurus and the Epicureans

(i) A fragment of Philodemus (Pap. Herc. 1005) partially preserves a few words from a letter of Epicurus. They are often quoted, since they provide the only explicit evidence for knowledge of Aristotelian school-works outside the Peripatos in the earlier third century. In the latest printed edition, that of F. Sbordone, Philodemi adversus [Sophistas] (Naples 1947) 75, reprinted by G. Arrighetti, Epicuro, opere 435 (ed. 2, 473), they run

οἴ] δαμ[εν

εἶναι] πισ [τ]ọ[ν] Kράτη [τ]ọς

καὶ Ἀρ]ιστίππου τὰς πε-

ρὶ τινων το]ῦ Πλάτωνος

διατριβ]ὰ [ς], καὶ Ἀριστοτέ-

λους τ’] ἀναλυτικὰ καὶ

τὰ περὶ] φύσεως, ὅσαπερ

ἐ[κλέγ]ομεν.

The sentence ended there and there is no clue to the context. Modern scholars have guessed what it was and their guesses are sometimes treated as facts.

There is even less to go on than Sbordone’s text suggests. In the first line οἴδαμεν is a form Epicurus is not known to have used; if the reading of the MS B is accepted, he has the correct Attic ἴσμεν at Ep. Herod. 60.2. Moreover Professor A. A. Long, who has kindly examined the papyrus for me, thinks that Sbordone’s δ belongs to a different layer. In line 2, although Arrighetti prints πισ[τ]ό[ν], he regards it as ‘non troppo convincente’. Long could see before κ nothing but traces of which he will say no more than that they are not incompatible with πιστόν. It is surprising that the final words are almost universally taken to mean ‘Aristotle’s Analytics and his Physics, so far as we make extracts from them’. The position of τε between Ἀριστοτέλους and ἀναλυτικά implies that the following work must be by some other author. One might supplement not ἐκλέγομεν but ἐγράφομεν: ‘Aristotle’s Analytics and all that I have been writing about nature’.

I do not suggest this with any confidence, for τε is not a necessary supplement; it would be possible to write τ]ἀναλυτικά, i.e. τὰ ἀναλυτικά, which may be what scholars suppose themselves to translate. But it is clear from Sbordone’s own drawing (72), from a rather less informative one in Herculanensium voluminum quae supersunt collectio altera, tomus primus (Naples 1862) 143, and from Professor Long’s transcript¹³

…[,]κρατ..οσ

ππο..ασπε

υπλατωνοσ

καιαριστοτε 5

αναλυτικακαι

φυσεωσοσαπερ

ε….ομεν επιδευβου

that the supplement in line 6 is too short. To fill the space either λους τά τ’], as W. Croenert has it in Kolotes und Menedemos (Leipzig 1906) 174, or λους τε τ] is needed. 1 see no inevitable reason for excluding the latter possibility, which would restrict the Aristotelian work mentioned to the Analytics, perhaps even to one or the other of the Prior or Posterior. But assuming the former alternative to be correct, Epicurus knew of some work by Aristotle, which he calls τὰ περὶ] φύσεως. This is generally taken to be the Physics. But although Aristotle several times refers to the Physics by the words τὰ περὶ φύσεως he also uses the phrase to refer to de caelo (Met. 989 a 24).¹⁴ In Diogenes Laertius’ list of Aristotle’s books (see below p. 11) περὶ φύσεως is in three volumes, and the title, if it does not indicate de caelo I-III, may refer to a part of the Physics, probably II-IV. So we already have two alternatives to inferring that Epicurus knew of the complete Physics; he may have known of a part or he may have known of de caelo. There is yet a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• List of works cited
• Chapter I: Introduction
• Chapter II: References to Aristotle
• Chapter III: Methods of Estimating Influence
• Chapter IV: Logic
• Chapter V: Ethics
• Chapter VI: Physics
• Chapter VII: Disregard of Peculiarly Aristotelian Ideas
• Chapter VIII: Conclusion
• Panaetius and Posidonius
• Appendix: Ocellus Lucanus
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover