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‘WHY ARE DIONYSIAN ARTISTS MOSTLY WORTHLESS PEOPLE?’ ARISTOTLE'S ΠΡΟΒΛΗΜΑΤΑ ΕΓΚΥΚΛΙΑ IN CONTEXT*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2016

Michiel Meeusen
Michiel Meeusen*
Affiliation:
Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO), KU Leuven
*
[email protected]
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Extract

ὥστε καθάπερ τοὺς ὑποκρινομένους,

οὕτως ὑποληπτέον λέγειν καὶ τοὺς ἀκρατευομένους.

Arist. Eth. Nic. 7.3.1147a22-4

In Attic Nights (= NA) 20.4, Aulus Gellius reports how his Athenian teacher, the Platonist L. Calvenus Taurus (fl. c.a.d. 145), advised one of his pupils to temper his devotion to stage actors and to turn his attention to the study of philosophy. Wishing to divert his (rich) student from associating with theatre people (hominum scaenicorum), Taurus assigned the daily reading of a specific chapter from Aristotle's Προβλήματα Ἐγκύκλια (= fr. 209 Rose). He sent his student an extract from the book, which Gellius quotes (in Greek): ‘Why are Dionysian artists mostly worthless people?’—the problem is still extant in the Aristotelian collection of Problemata physica that came down to us (Pr. 30.10.956b11–15). The explanation Aristotle suggested (in Gellius’ version) is that ‘these men are least familiar with reason and philosophy (λόγου καὶ φιλοσοφίας), since they devote most of their life to the necessary arts (ἀναγκαίας τέχνας), and because they are in an intemperate state (ἐν ἀκρασίαις) most of the time, sometimes even in difficulties (ἐν ἀπορίαις), both of which conditions cause meanness (φαυλότητος)’.

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Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 66 , Issue 2 , December 2016 , pp. 781 - 785
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Copyright © The Classical Association 2016 

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Footnotes

*

Many thanks are due to Robert Mayhew for his helpful comments and suggestions (any remaining errors are my own).

References

1 Gell. NA 20.4.4: διὰ τί οἱ Διονυσιακοὶ τεχνῖται ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πολὺ πονηροί εἰσιν; Although the opening question is identical in Pr. 30.10 and in NA 20.4, in other parts of Gellius’ quotation, there are variations (some of which will be touched on later). Cf. M.-L. Lakmann, Der Platoniker Tauros in der Darstellung des Aulus Gellius (Leiden, 1995), 205 (also 199–205 more generally for further commentary on this passage). Lakmann believes that we are dealing with an ‘echt aristotelisches Problem […], so daβ die negative Beurteilung der Bühnenkünstler auf Aristoteles selbst zurückzuführen ist’.

2 J.C. Rolfe, The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius (Cambridge, MA and London, 1967), 3.431 translates λόγου as ‘reading’, but it seems more suitable to interpret it in relation to φιλοσοφίας (as I do), the καὶ between both nouns implying a close semantic connection (this καὶ was added in Arist. [Pr.] 30.10.956b12 on the basis of Gellius’ text by H. Bonitz, Aristotelische Studien [Vienna, 1866], 4.419). It is only likely that the roles these actors rehearsed were written out in full text.

3 Rolfe (n. 2) translates ἀπορίαις as ‘poverty’, but a denotative interpretation seems preferable.

4 Viz. in Gell. NA 19.4.1 (see n. 19); simply Problemata in NA 1.11.17; 2.30.11; 3.6.1; 19.6.1. See H. Flashar, Problemata physica (Berlin, 1962), 314–15.

5 See Flashar (n. 4), 303–58; P. Louis, Aristote, Problèmes (Paris, 1991), xxiii-xxxv.

6 See n. 26.

7 Cf. Flashar (n. 4), 312–14; L. Holford-Strevens, Aulus Gellius: An Antonine Scholar and his Achievement (Oxford, 2003), 271 n. 39: ‘Gellius […] knew the Problems in a different editorial disposition from ours’.

8 Aristotle sporadically refers to his Problemata throughout his writings: see Mete. 2.6.363a24 (cf. also 4.3.381b13); Somn. vig. 2.456a29; Iuv. 5.470a18; Part. an. 3.15.676a18; Gen. an. 2.8.747b5, 4.4.772b11, 4.7.775b37.

9 The Rose fragments (209–44) probably originate from it. See Flashar (n. 4), 312–14; Louis (n. 5), xxxi-iii.

10 For the place of the Ἐγκύκλια in the lists of Aristotle's writings, see P. Moraux, Les listes anciennes des ouvrages d'Aristote (Louvain, 1951), 118–20; S. Menn, ‘Democritus, Aristotle, and the Problemata’, in R. Mayhew (ed.), The Aristotelian Problemata Physica: Philosophical and Scientific Investigations (Leiden and Boston, 2015), 10–35, at 13–15.

11 Pace Marenghi, G., ‘Per una identificazione e collazione storica del fondo aristotelico dei Problemata ’, Maia 13 (1961), 34–50 Google Scholar, at 42–3, who interprets ἐγκύκλια in Gellius’ account as the genus of the collection of Problemata as a whole (more precisely as a reference both to the various and non-technical nature of the work, as well as to its potential use ἐν κύκλῳ: see further), and not just of one subsection in it.

12 Cf. V. Rose, Aristoteles Pseudepigraphus (Leipzig, 1863), 215 (‘usque ad λη’); Marenghi (n. 11), 36–7. Cf. also LSJ, s.v. κατά: ‘with Acc., of motion downwards, κ. ῥόον down stream’: hence κατὰ στοιχεῖον λη perhaps implies ‘reading in a downward fashion from book α infra to book λη’? In any case, the list-maker probably found it too laborious to mention the letter of each book separately (α, β, γ, δ, …, λη), as he normally does for works in fewer books. This is again the case with Theophrastus’ Νόμων κατὰ στοιχεῖον κδ (= Diog. Laert. 5.44 #69).

13 Cf. Moraux (n. 10), 116 (‘ordre alphabétique’—he draws a sharp distinction between κατὰ στοιχεῖον and κατ’ εἶδος, found in the manuscripts, but if we may assume that the former refers to the organization and the latter to the content of the different books, the distinction is not necessarily strict); Flashar (n. 4), 311 n. 1 (‘in aufgereihter Form’, ‘in sukzessiver Anordnung’).

14 See the authoritative opinion of Flashar (n. 4), 313–14.

15 Menn (n. 10), 14–15.

16 Cf. Mayhew, R., ‘The title(s) of [Aristotle], Problemata 15’, CQ 62 (2012), 179–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar and id., ‘Aristotle on fever in Problemata I’, Apeiron 48 (2015), 176–94Google Scholar, at 176.

17 Menn (n. 10), 14 (with hesitation). Cf. also, for example, Moraux (n. 10), 118–19 (‘Problèmes ordinaires’).

18 Cf. also Flashar (n. 4), 317: ‘Wollte man den Titel “Problemata Physica” mit der Überlegung rechtfertigen, daß Ethik nicht an sich unbedingt den Bereich der Physis überschreitet, so ist zu bedenken, daß in den Probl. von Ethik im engeren Sinne kaum die Rede ist. Fast überall herrscht nämlich eine praktische Tendenz vor, die dazu führt, daß sich die behandelten Phänomene in den Zusammenhang einer Fachwissenschaft (!) einordnen lassen. Das ist besonders in XXIX der Fall, wo Fragen der Gerechtigkeit den Erfordernissen der Gerichtsspraxis untergeordnet werden.’ For further reading on Arist. [Pr.] 29, see R. Mayhew, ‘On Problemata XXIX 13: Peripatetic legal justice and the case of jury ties’, in B. Centrone (ed.), Studi sui Problemata Physica aristotelici (Elenchos, 58) (Naples, 2011), 275–307.

19 Gell. NA 19.4.1: Aristotelis libri sunt, qui problemata physica inscribuntur, lepidissimi et elegantiarum omnigenus referti.

20 Cf. also the reference to the state of ἀκρασία in which stage actors live (LSJ s.v.: ‘bad mixture, ill temperature’).

21 See Moraux (n. 10), 119–20; Marenghi (n. 11), 36.

22 Trans. D. Konstan, Aspasius: On Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1–4, 7–8 (London, 2006), 12. Konstan ([this note], ad loc. n. 22) notes: ‘The explanation is fatuous; in addition to “circular”, enkyklion means “popular”, and Aristotle uses it to refer to his exoteric works (cf. De caelo 279a30)’; (see above). Cf. Simpl. in Cael. 288.31–289.1.

23 See Flashar (n. 4), 310 n. 4: ‘Vielleicht hat sich in dieser Bemerkung eine Kenntnis von der Entstehung und ursprünglichen Funktion der Problemata im Schulbetrieb erhalten. Denkbar wäre auch der Bezug auf die Vorstellung der ἐγκύκλιος παιδεία […]. In der vita Marciana 427,8 R³ […] werden u. a. die Problemata mit dem Begriff ἡ τῶν ἐλευθέρων παιδεία in Verbindung gebracht.’ Cf. also D. Konstan, ‘The active reader and the ancient novel’, in M. Paschalis, S. Panayotakis and G.L. Schmeling (edd.), Readers and Writers in the Ancient Novel (Groningen, 2009), 1–17, at 13 n. 23.

24 Cf. Louis (n. 5), xix-xx.

25 This procedure of reading and discussing texts together in a school context can be connected with the educational practice of συνανάγνωσις that was common in intellectual milieus of the Imperial era. Cf. K. Oikonomopoulou, ‘Plutarch's corpus of quaestiones in the tradition of Imperial Greek encyclopaedism’, in J. König and G. Woolf (edd.), Encyclopaedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Cambridge, 2013), 129–53, at 137. For further commentary on this passage, see Lakmann (n. 1), 192–8.

26 Marenghi (n. 11), 40. Aristotle's Problemata are quoted by a wide range of Imperial authors, such as Apuleius, Athenaeus, Cicero, Clement, Galen, Gellius, Macrobius, Pliny, Plutarch, Seneca and Strabo. It is especially Plutarch's natural problems which have received much attention in recent scholarship: see, for instance, J. König, ‘Fragmentation and coherence in Plutarch's Sympotic Questions’, in J. König and T. Whitmarsh (edd.), Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire (Cambridge, 2007), 43–68; F. Klotz and K. Oikonomopoulou (edd.), The Philosopher's Banquet. Plutarch's Table Talk in the Intellectual Culture of the Roman Empire (Oxford, 2011); M. Meeusen, Plutarch's Science of Natural Problems: A Study with Commentary of Quaestiones Naturales (Leuven, forthcoming).