Democritus, Aristotle, and the Problemata

chapter 2 Democritus, Aristotle, and the Problemata

Stephen Menn1

1 Aristotle’s Problem-Works and Democritus

There might seem to be nothing to say on our topic, since Aristotle, or the Peripatetic authors whose work is collected in our thirty-eight books of Problemata, never mention Democritus in that treatise. On the other hand, the Hellenistic catalog of Aristotle’s works, transmitted in slightly different forms in Diogenes Laertius and in the Anonymus Menagii, lists alongside a Physics [φυσικά] in 38 books which must be our Problemata (D.L. #120, Anon. #110) also two books of Democritean Problems (Anon. #116) or Problems from the [Writings] of Democritus (D.L. #124).2 This might be dismissed as irrelevant to our Problemata: after all, Aristotle also wrote Homeric Problems (ten books, listed in the Anonymus’ “appendix,” #147, perhaps the same as the Homeric Aporemata in six books, D.L. #118, Anon. #106), and since Homeric Problems certainly have nothing do with our Problemata, why should Democritean Problems be any more relevant?

1 I would like to thank István Bodnár, Andrea Falcon, Robert Mayhew, and Katerina Oikonomopoulou for written comments, and Pieter Beullens and Jim Lennox for discussion, Pieter also for sending me his work on the On the Flooding of the Nile. I have learned much from Robert’s and Katerina’s work on the Problemata and kindred texts. 2 We have three ancient catalogs of Aristotle’s writings, those given in the Lives of Aristotle by Diogenes Laertius (his Life of Aristotle is 5.1–35, the catalog is 5.22–27), by the so-called Anonymus Menagii (the text is also called the Vita Hesychii), and by someone called Ptolemy al-Gharîb, extant in Arabic translation. The catalogs in Diogenes Laertius and in the main body of the Anonymus both follow, with differences, a Hellenistic catalog (which has been attributed by different scholars to Hermippus or to Ariston of Ceos); the Anonymus also has an appendix taken from a different source or sources. Ptolemy is apparently following Andronicus’ lost catalog. These catalogs are discussed in Moraux (1951), and are presented along with the Lives in which they are embedded by Düring (1957), except that for Ptolemy al-Gharîb Düring cites later sources (Ibn al-Qiftî and Ibn abî Usaibiʿa) rather than the origi- nal text, which had not yet been published at that time. I cite the Anonymus Menagii = Vita Hesychii and also the Vita Marciana from Düring, and Diogenes Laertius from Dorandi (2013), but with Düring’s catalog numbers. I cite Ptolemy al-Gharîb from Hein (1985, 414–39); she prints the Arabic text, and, on facing pages, translates the introductory material into German and the catalog into Greek.

But a Homeric problem, or more generally a poetic problem, means something different from a Democritean problem. Poetic problems and solutions (discussed in Poetics 25) are problems and solutions which can be raised about texts from the poets: Homer or some other poet seems to say something logi- cally or linguistically or morally objectionable, and we see whether he can be saved from the objection, perhaps by reinterpreting or repunctuating or if necessary by emending or deleting. Aristotle seems to have written about problems of this kind, not only in Homer, but also more briefly in Hesiod, Archilochus, Euripides, Choerilus and other poets (Anon. #143–45), but there is no sign that he thought prose writers deserved this kind of treatment.3 A Democritean Problem is, rather, a Problem from the [Writings] of Democritus— not a problem about Democritus but a problem that Democritus himself had raised, which is the sort of thing that Democritus did, and Homer did not. The Problems from the [Writings] of Democritus would thus be like the [Extracts] from Plato’s Laws in three books (D.L. #21, Anon. #23), or the [Extracts] from the Republic in two books (D.L. #22), or the [Extracts] from the Timaeus and the [Writings] of Archytas (D.L. #94, cf. Anon #85), or the works Περί or Πρός earlier philosophers (Περί the Pythagoreans, Archytas’ philosophy, Speusippus and Xenocrates; Πρός Alcmaeon, the Pythagoreans, Xenophanes, Melissus, Zeno, Gorgias), amidst which the work on the Timaeus and Archytas is listed (D.L. #92–101, Anon. #83–89).4 The difference between the Democritean Problems

3 Plutarch’s Πλατωνικὰ ζητήματα will be perhaps the first such treatise devoted to a prose author, and certainly the first extant one. But see Schironi (2005) for purely philological work on Plato by Alexandrian grammarians. 4 Presumably the Πρός works would either rely on, or else incorporate, the extracts or sum- maries of these philosophers’ views and arguments in the Περί works. The works listed πρός Xenophanes, Melissus and Gorgias are presumably the extant On Melissus, Xenophanes and Gorgias. The manuscripts reported by Diels (1900) give its title with Περί, but in fact it includes distinct sections περί and πρός. Diogenes Laertius and the Anonymus Menagii give a Περί the Pythagoreans in one book (d.l. #101, Anon. #88), Diogenes Laertius also a Πρός the Pythagoreans in one book (#97), while Ptolemy may well have a Περί [the Philosophy of?] the Pythagoreans in two books (#23): here the transmitted text has “On the Art of Poetry accord- ing to the Opinion of Pythagoras and his Followers,” but Hein, following Düring, thinks this is a conflation of two titles, Poetics and On [the Philosophy of ] the Pythagoreans. If this is right, the two-book Περί might be the one-book Περί together with the one-book Πρός, and this would be an instance of Andronicus’ preference for dividing the corpus into longer treatises than the Hellenistic Peripatetics. (I owe this point to Oliver Primavesi: see Primavesi, forth- coming.) Nothing depends for me on how many of these works are actually by Aristotle, rather than by other early Peripatetics. While the catalogs of Aristotle’s works do not contain an On Democritus, Diogenes Laertius’ catalog of Theophrastus’ works does list an On Democritus (#184) and, separately, an On Democritus’ Astronomy (#22), and his #23–27 are also clearly