The Characters of Theophrastus, Newly Edited and Translated by J.M

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The Characters of Theophrastus, Newly Edited and Translated by J.M THE LOEB CLASSICAL LIBRARY EDITED BY T. E. PAGE, LITl-.D. E. CAPPS, PH.D., LL.D. W. H. D. ROUSE, i.ttt.d. THE CHARACTERS OF THEOPHRASTUS HERODES, CERCIDAS, AND THE GREEK CHOLIAMBIC POETS (except callimachus and babrius) THE CHARACTEKS OF THEOPHRASTUS NEWLY EDITED AND TRANSLATED J. M. EDMONDS LATE FELLOW OF JESUS COLLEGE LECTURER IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS MCMXXIX PA PREFACE The Characters of Theophrastus are a good wine that needs no bush, but it has been bottled anew, and new bottles may need a word of recommendation. The mere existence of an early English translation such as Healey's would hardly justify an archaistic rendering, but the Character, in the hands of Hall, Overbury, and Earle, has become a native genre, and that, I think, is enough to make such a rendering the most palatable. And this style of translation, taunts of ' Wardour Street ' notwithstanding, has a great advantage. Greek, being itself simple, goes best into a simple style of English ; and in the seventeenth century it was still easy to put things simply without making them bald. A simple trans- lation into our modern dialect, if it is to rise above Translator's English, is always difficult and often unattainable. In preparing the text I have discarded rfluch of my earlier work, in the belief, shared no doubt by many scholars, that the discovery of papyrus frag- ments of ancient Greek books has shifted the editor's PREFACE bearings from Constantinople to Alexandria. With the ' doctrine of the normal line,' exploded by A. C. Clark, went much critical lumber, and the dust is only just beginning to clear. The pecuhar char- acter of this text, "s^ith its recurring km and its natural toleration of displacement, makes it an excellent corpus vile to experiment on. It would be too much to hope that my readers Mill come away from my Introduction as confident as I am that our Mss. go back to an 11-letter Hne archetj'pe, but I cannot help feeling that there is a plausibility in the emendations I have based upon my hj'pothesis which is not to be found in the others. My thanks are due to F. C. Burkitt, A. C. Clark, A. B. Cook, A. E. Housman, A. S. Hunt, and R. D. Hicks, for generous help of various kinds ; I grate- fully acknowledge my indebtedness to the labours of D. Bassi, W. Cronert, O. Immisch, O. Navarre, and G. Pasquali ; I would thank Isaac Casaubon if I could and if I dared. J. M. Edmonds. Cambridge, 15th July 1927. CONTENTS PAGE Preface ....... v Introduction— i. The Book and its Author . S ii. The Text . .11 Bibliography ....... 31 Alphabetical Greek Index of the Char- acters ....... 33 Comparative Inde.y of English Titles . 34 Ancient Index ...... 35 Text and Translation . .... 36 General Index . .127 Index of Greek Words, containing the prin- cipal CRUCES . .132 THE CHARACTERS OF THEOPHRASTUS INTRODUCTION I. The Book and its Author Like other unique products of the human spirit, this great httle book has aroused much speculation among those who not knowing how a thing is done must needs find out why. Some measure of re-editing it certainly underwent in after life—^mending rather than emending, or the thin disguise of the name Alexander would not have been maintained after the necessity for it—political apparently—had ceased.** The first editor was in all probability the author. That Theophrastus collected and edited these pieces himself substantially in the order in which we have them, is suggested by certain signs of artistic de- velopment which we may observe in comparing the earlier as a whole with the later. First, the earlier characters are generally the sketchier, not more carelessly drawn but less completely coloured. No. I is any (Athenian) dissembler, and his dissembhngs manifold and anywhere (Athenian). Dissembling is a sepia-wash. With the exception of VIII, the Newsmaker, of whom presently, the same is true, " xxiii. 3 ; for editing in the Peripatetic School c/. Lycon's will (died 225), Diog. Laert. v. 73, and Arcesilaus' unpopular revision of Grantor's works, ibid. iv. 32, cf. vii. 3-4 ; and see Barthelemy-St. Hilaire's Dissertation prefixed to his transla- tion of the Aristotelian Problems, Paris, 1891. THEOPHRASTUS more or less, of all the Characters till we come to XXIII. They, too, are sepia-washes or, at the most, tinted drawings. Pretentiousness, however, has fewer and larger parts ; and CoAvardice, its next-door neighbour but one, though it is one of the longest, contains only two scenes. These are water-colours ; and of the last eight Characters no less than five are of this kind. Secondly, there is development in the smaller matters of style. If we divide the book into three equal parts, (a), (b), and (c), we find that though Setvos appears equally in all, oTos is preceded by Totoo-Se instead of rotovros not at all in (a), once in (b), three times in (c) ; that the qualifying phrase (OS opw XafSelv, or the like, occurs four times in (a), twice in (b), not at all in (c) ; that the word d/^eAet occurs four times in (a), four times in (6), and eight in (c) ; and that the construction wcrre-and-infinitive occurs four times in (a), once in (b), not at all in (c) ; whereas aa or oVws final occurs tA^ce in (a), five times in (b), eleven times in (c). And it may well mean something that the average number of lines to the section in modern texts is two in the first half of the book and two and a half in the second. The general effect of which these minutiae are the outward signs is that the reader somehow feels as he proceeds that what was Anyman in the earlier parts of the book comes to be Somebody in the later. None, probably, of the Characters is really an individual masquerading as a type, yet when we read of the Pretentious Man, the Coward, the Oligarch, or the Friend of Rascals, we feel what we do not feel of the earher Characters, that Theophrastus' contemporaries must have said ' That is meant for so-and-so.' And another thing shows the artist. A mere philosopher 4 INTRODUCTION would have arranged his types scientifically. The Garrulous man, the Loquacious, the Newsmaker, the Backbiter, and still more Penuriousness, Par- simoniousness, and Meanness, should properly be presented in groups. The artist is more likely to arrange his sketches either in the order in which he drew them or as he thinks will be most pleasing to his public. Which brings us back to the Newsmaker. This Character, though it is numbered VIII, belongs in form to the later part of the book ; and it is exceptional in another way. For here Theophrastus breaks his ' rule of the infinitive ' " by no fewer than five indicatives ; the only other instances are halfway through the book, the two potential optatives at the end of XV. Now it is agreed that VIII must have been written after XXIII, because in the former Antipater is dead and in the latter still alive. It is only a matter of a few months, but there it is. We have seen that, apart from Newsmaking, there are clear traces of a trend. Then why this exception ? The reason, like that of the disguising of Alexander's name in XXIII, is very likely political. It may perhaps be connected with the dedication ^ of the book to the adviser of Eurydice, wife of the imbecile king Arrhidaeus, whose rival the four-year-old son of Alexander is made by the Newsmaker—so absurdly as it would seem to the contemporary Athenian reader, and also, let us hope, to Polycles "—^to defeat Casander who was then in favour at Athens. How- ever the exception may be explained, exception it is. " With olo!. ^ If that is genuine, see pp. 37-9, and add that Diogenes' lists of the works of both Aristotle and Theophrastus contain '^ letters ; there was one from T. to Casander. See p. 36. 5 — THEOPHRASTUS The pieces are arranged as none but the author would arrange them, and therefore the pubhcation of the book, as a whole, is the author's. From the order he has adopted we may gather that the object of his book was not primarily scientific. For according to Diogenes Laertius* one of Theo- phrastus' famous sayings was ' As soon trust an unbridled horse as an ill-arranged disquisition,' and his extant botanical books are the work of a great classifier. For whom then, apart from Polycles, were these Characters written ? Like other works of their author they served perhaps, as a part of ' poetic,' to fill a gap in the Aristotelian corpus of human know- ledge.** They seem to have originated a Peripatetic genreJ^ But what capital after-dinner recitations <* they would make ! First the definition with its ' suggestion of the game of etK-acrtat or ' likenesses ' I say,' says the tipsy Alcibiades, ' that Socrates is very like those Silenuses that you see set out in the statuaries' shops ' —and then its so convincing justi- fication in a string of humorously and gently sarcastic examples, extending often to httle scenes—the Unconscionable man at the butcher's, the Coward at sea the touch which makes the whole world —; and kin ' and this done he will away home and tell his wife what a great success he has had.' They may indeed have been, as the use of the word a/xeAet imphes,* answers to 'dinner-table questions,' o-u/xtto- o-tttKai epwTvjcrets, like the dialectic questions addressed " Lives of the Philosophers, v.
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