The fate of Aristotle’s writings

Aristotle evidently intended only some of his works for wider circulation, or ‘publication’; these were the so-called ‘exoteric’ works, mainly dialogues, which are now lost apart from some fragments. The genuinely Aristotelian parts of our corpus Aristotelicum represent an assemblage of collections of notes on particular topics, or more finished treatises, which evidently would only have been available for consultation by individuals, especially (we might suppose) members of his school; if in principle they might have been more widely available, it is hard to imagine a large demand for such a large body of relatively intractable material. It is thus possible to argue that other schools might not have had the direct access to Aristotle’s work that, living in a different age, we might incautiously presume; nor indeed are the fragmentary remains of the later Peripatetics sufficient to prove that in later periods of the school, after Theophrastus, even they had a complete collection in Athens. The first systematic edition was evidently that of Andronicus of Rhodes, at Rome, in the first century bc. Aristotle left his library, which also included a large collection of other books, to Theophrastus, and Theophrastus left it to another Peripatetic, Neleus; and reports in Strabo (XIII. 1, 54, 608–9) and in Plutarch (Life of Sulla 26) suggest that at some point between then and Andronicus’ editorial activity at least a proportion of the corpus was sufficiently ‘lost’, or inaccessible, to need to be ‘rediscovered’ – or to be capable of being described in such terms – when Sulla brought Aristotelian manuscripts back with him to Rome from Asia Minor.