A FRAGMENT OF CARNEADES THE CYNIC?
by
G.R. BOYS-STONES
According to the 5th century commentator Fulgentius, Virgil’ s Aeneid is a text of moral philosophy, and Aeneas himself is the type of the virtuous man. With Virgil as his spokesman, he argues that this becomes clear from the very rst words of the epic, in which ‘arms’ and the ‘man’ stand respectively for human virtue and wis- dom. The following lines support his point: Virgil, he says, called Aeneas a ‘refugee through fate’ ( Aeneid 1.2) and subject to ‘the power of the gods’ (1.4) all to show ‘ that fortune was to blame for his ight, not any weakness in his virtue; that the gods, not his wis- dom were to blame for his undergoing dangers’. 1 ) This, says Fulgentius, accords with an ancient maxim in Plato (which he quotes; but see below withnote 3), and is echoed in the writing of Carneades ( VC 88.5-8 Helm):
nam et Carneades in libro Telesiaco ita ait*: psa tæxh aàsyhsin fronÛmoiw katoikeÝ , id est, omnis fortuna in sensu habitat sapientis. *telesiacogita ait EL It is this reference to Carneades and the quotation ascribed to him that I want to examine here. When we think of Carneades we think, most naturally, of Carneades of Cyrene, head of the Sceptical Academy in the 2nd century B.C. But there are good reasons to doubt that he wrote the book men- tioned in this passage or, indeed, that he was responsible for the quotation purportedly taken from it: Carneades, after all, was a Sceptic, and the quotation we are given is apparently rather Dogmatic
1)See Fulgentius, Virgiliana Continentia (henceforth VC ) 87.11-88.2 in R. Helm’s edition = Fabii Planciadis Fulgentii V. C. Opera (Leipzig 1898; reprinted Stuttgart 1970 with updated bibliography by J. Préaux). For translations of the VC, cf. L.G. Whitbread, Fulgentius the Mythographer (Columbus 1971), 119-35; A. Preminger, O.B. Harrison and K. Kerrane (edd.), Classical and Medieval Literary Criticism—Translations and Interpretations (New York 1974), 329-40; and (with text) L.C. Stokes, Fabius Planciades Fulgentius: Expositio Virgilianae Continentiae , Classical Folia 26 (1972), 27-63.
©Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2000 Mnemosyne, Vol. LIII, Fasc. 5 A FRAGMENT OF CARNEADES THE CYNIC? 529
(whatever, for now, its precise meaning). This is not, of course, con- clusive: it is possible to imagine a context in which Carneades might have said something like this. It might, just for example, represent a dialectical position he adopted against some particular Dogmatic opponent. So it is perhaps more to the point to note that Carneades published no books in the rst place.2) If Carneades of Cyrene is meant here, then Fulgentius has simply got it wrong. Fulgentius, it has to be said, is not the most reliable of witnesses: his reference to ‘Carneades’ is preceded by an ‘ancient maxim’ which he purports to quote from Plato, but which is actually to be found in the Hermetic corpus; 3) and he is capable even of mis- placing references to Virgil, who is, after all, the focus of his study. 4) But if it is possible that his reference to Carneades is mistaken as well, it is hardly charitable to make that assumption. Fulgentius is by no means always wrong; and to assume that he is wrong here would not in any case solve the most di Ycult questions raised by this passage. It would not, for example, cast any light on the ori- gin or sense of the title he gives, or help with the meaning of his quotation. Furthermore, there is no good reason why we should assume that Fulgentius thought he was quoting from the Academic: there were other philosophers called ‘Carneades’ in antiquity—and one in particular ts the bill here rather well. According to Eunapius (Vitae Sophistarum 2.1.5) one of the more notable of the Cynics was a philosopher called Carneades, ranking (he says) with Demetrius,
2)See DL 4.65. Of course it does not follow that Fulgentius knew this (cf. on Aulus Gellius in n. 13 below): but the hypothesis that he falsely attributed a quo- tation and title to a philosopher he knew nothing about (cf. n. 6 below) is cum- bersome as well as unkind. Cicero refers at TD 3.54 to a lecture by Carneades recorded in the pages of a work by Clitomachus, and B. Baldwin has suggested, rather optimistically, that “Fulgentius could have seen something by him similarly preserved”: see Fulgentius and his Sources , Traditio 44 (1988), 37-57 at 43. But cf. M. Zink, who had already considered and rejected the possibility (believing, for his own part, that the citation is entirely spurious): Der Mytholog Fulgentius. Ein Beitrag zur römischen Literaturgeschichte und zur Grammatik des afrikanischen Lateins (Würzburg 1862), 80-1. 3)The maxim, according to Fulgentius ( VC 88.2-5 Helm) is: noèw nyrÅpinow yeñw: oðtow ¤Œn gayñw , yeòw eï ¤r