Greek Philosophy

Did ancient commentaries on philosophical texts influence the ancient transmission of those texts? Specifically, were paraphrases and explanations of commentators in the course of the transmission incorporated into the philosophical texts? In this paper, I explore an intriguing case in which we can see that the words of the commentator Asclepius of Tralles (sixth century AD) found their way into what is now our text of Aristotle’s Metaphysics.

Aristotle’s stance on the usefulness of liberal education, specifically music (mousikē), is a contested issue. Some argue that Aristotle locates music’s usefulness in civic or moral improvement (e.g., Lord 1982), others are more inclined to take Aristotle at his word that such education is for the sake of leisure rather than use (e.g., Nightingale 2001, Demont 1993). Aristotle himself is ambiguous, at first separating music from ‘useful’ types of education and then proceeding to enumerate music’s benefits (‘paradoxically’ as Nightingale 2001, 155 suggests).

Aristotle’s reference to “man with arms” at Politics 1.2.1253a34 has usually been taken as metaphorical. I shall argue that it is best understood literally.

“For as man is the best of all animals when he has reached his full development, so he is worst of all when divorced from law and justice. Injustice armed is at its harshest; man is born with weapons to support practical wisdom and virtue, which are all too easy to use for the opposite purposes.” So Saunders, who comments, “The identity of the ‘weapons’ is obscure.”

Scholars writing on Xenophon’s Hieron have usually grappled with the author’s choice of interlocutors: the tyrant Hieron I of Syracuse and the poet Simonides. Leo Strauss, by far the most influential reader of the Hieron in the twentieth century, points to Hieron’s claim that Simonides is a “wise man” (σοφὸς ἀνήρ, 1.1) and all but equates the poet with Socrates.

This paper contextualizes one of the projects of a shadowy set of later-fifth-century musical theorists identified by Aristoxenus as “harmonikoi:” the attempt to identify the smallest audible musical interval. According to Aristoxenus, this smallest audible interval provided a basic measure for constructing a diagram of harmonic space: from this diagram, one could plot and interrelate the many different musical tunings or scales in use in Greek art music.