CHAPTER SEVEN

COMPOSITE HARMONY: AN ASPECT OF THE CONCEPTUAL BACKGROUND TO THE PROBLEM

In 1156, Henricus Aristippus finished his translation, from Greek into Latin, of Plato's Phaedo. This translation made available a complete Platonic dialogue in Latin, without abridgment or commentary, for the first time since Antiquity ,1 By the first generation of the thirteenth century, the translation was available in Paris; by 1300 there were copies of the translation at principal locations, such as in the library of the Sorbonne.2 Petrarch, for example, owned a copy of the Latin Phaedo, studied it carefully, as his marginal notes indicate, and complained that he lacked sufficient fluency to compare it with the Greek original.3 We know that Aristippus' Latin translation was sought after, prized.4 Although Robert Grosseteste does not directly quote from or refer to the Phaedo, as he does the Timaeus, as well as the Parmenides, the concept of composite harmony directly coincides with the concept of harmony he himself extends. Composite harmony is the principal theme of the Phaedo, therefore, it is important to consider the newly-translated dialogue as a background to a

1 See Raymond Klibansky's discussion and summary of the literature in The Continuity of the Platonic Tradition during the Middle Ages: Outlines of a Corpus platonicum medii aevi (London, 1939, with new prefaces and supplement repr. Munich, 1981). The fascinating, unresolved problem is whether the medieval reception of Plato's works can be viewed as primarily continuous or full of abrupt, even cataclysmic, changes and what these changes are. Klibansky's "continuity" minimizes the impact of the translation of Platonic texts on the intellectual community of the thirteenth to early fourteenth centuries. The translation of the Phaedo made a complete Platonic treatise available for the first time since antiquity, as the Timaeus was only partially translated by Chalcidius {Timaeus, ed. J. H. Waszink, in the Plato latinus series, IV, ed. R. Klibansky, London, 1975). The principal difference between Chalcidius' translation of the Timaeus and Aristippus' translation of the Phaedo was that Plato's text was extended, one might even say, overwhelmed, by Chalcidius' commentary, whereas Aristippus presented the Phaedo as a whole. This is, of course, not to say that he did not emphasize and focus upon certain concepts by his use of particular Latin expressions in his translation of Greek terms. This aspect will be studied in more detail below. 2 The manuscripts sources are given in detail in: Phaedo interprète henrico aristippo edidit Laurentius Minio-Paluello {Plato latinus II, London, 1950), pp. x-xlx. See also Klibansky, Continuity, p. 29-31: "The Latin Manuscripts and their History." Early manuscripts of the Phaedo include Paris, Bibliothèque nationale fonds lat. 16581 which belonged to Gerard d'Abbeville, who bequeathed it to the Sorbonne where it was accessible to the Latin-reading public after 1271. Codex Vatican Library vat. lat. 2063 was written for, and owned by Coluccio Salutati. 3 Petrarch's copy is Ms Paris, Bibliothèque nationale fonds lat. 6567A. (See A. Hiler, "Petrarch's Greek Codex of Plato," Classical Philology 59 [1964], 270f.) 4 For a more extensive treatment of this aspect, van Deusen, "The Image of the Harp and Trecento Reception of Plato's Phaedo," Florilegium 7 (1985), pp. 155-178. 114 CHAPTER SEVEN distinctive thirteenth-century concept, which differed radically from an earlier medieval view of harmony. The subject we have addressed brings up the entire problem of the transmission and influence of Platonic works in the early university intellectual milieu. Despite acknowledged interest in the newly-available Platonic dialogue, it is not a straightforward matter to find direct traces of the influence of Plato's Phaedo. One of the chief reasons for this is that Plato is difficult to quote.5 His use of the dialogue form and his varieties of exemplification disperse the tenets of his argumentation. The strands of his arguments elude systematization. The reader is invoked—drawn in—by the interrogatio-responsio format; but a good deal is also required of him. He must organize and come to decisions regarding both the meaning and directionality of many of the statements contained in the dialogue, as well as the genre to which these statements belong. Most importantly, the reader must decide whether single passages should be interpreted literally or allegorically. The Phaedo was not a text selected for inclusion in the early university artes curriculum—either at the University of Paris or at Oxford— and, virtually devoid of succinct epigrams, the influence of the Latin Phaedo cannot be traced by means of short, recognizable quotations, as, for example, is the case with the Metaphysica of Aristotle, with its clarion-call opening sentence, "All men by nature desire to know."6 Therefore, in spite of the wide spectrum of quotations to be found in all of the works attributed to Grosseteste, not one extensive quotation from the Phaedo is to be found. The influence of this Platonic work, is, nevertheless, a catalytic one in an emerging thirteenth-century concept of harmony. Where then, and how, can the influence of Plato's Phaedo be found and assessed? What significant points were made within the linguistic framework of the twelfth-century Latin version of this dialogue? In comparing both Greek and modern English versions with the medieval Latin translation, one observes an example of an important general fact concerning the translational process itself. Henricus Aristippus translated into his text what he himself knew, amplifying Plato's text by his own knowledge of Aristotle's Metaphysica.1 Finally, one of the reasons—aside from its

5 See Klibansky, Continuity, p. 25-27 for the indirect tradition of Platonic ideas. 6 The opening line of the Metaphysica, as concise and complete as it is, wherever it may occur, immediately points the reader to the writer's conceptual source, no matter how imbedded the quotation may be. Plato's arguments, on the other hand, are intertwined with myths, their narrative constructs separated by the dialogue form. Since they also require considerable interpretation from the reader, they cannot be singled out for quotation so easily. Several have pointed out that Florilegia, or collections of quotations attributed to Plato, were usually not actually from Plato. 7 Aristippus' knowledge of Aristotle's work can be deduced from the fact that he translated Book IV of the Meteorologica, but there are indirect reasons as well, the vocabulary he uses and the focus of his arguments. This aspect will be treated in part here,