Re: Aristotle's "lost" second book?

From: Amara Graps (amara@amara.com)
Date: Wed Sep 10 2003 - 10:56:33 MDT

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    Discovered something...

    Brett Paatsch:

    >How far did you get towards concluding there might actually have
    >been such a book?

    I think a trip to the National Library in Naples is in my future

    from:
    http://www.oup.co.uk/academic/humanities/classical_studies/viewpoint/janko/

    Richard Janko on Philodemus

    Understanding one of the richest periods in the history of human thought

    <begin quote>

    In 1986, browsing among the new periodicals in a college library in
    America, I came across an article by a recently deceased Italian
    scholar. In it he lamented that nobody had noticed his work on a
    papyrus from Herculaneum, first published in 1955. In his edition he
    had shown that new fragments of Aristotle's lost dialogue On Poets
    are cited in a work on literary theory by the poet and philosopher
    Philodemus, who was the teacher of Vergil and, probably, of Horace,
    the greatest poets of Augustan Rome.

    Two years earlier I had published a book, Aristotle on Comedy,
    arguing that the lost second Book of Aristotle's Poetics, on comedy
    and laughter (celebrated in Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the
    Rose), had not actually perished entirely, but survived in a summary
    in a medieval manuscript in Paris. So new fragments of Aristotle's
    poetic theory, wherever they might be found, were of the greatest
    interest to me. Hence I went for the first time to the National
    Library in Naples, the home of the papyri preserved by the eruption
    of Vesuvius, to restudy this text. Fragile, brittle, black as coal,
    it was the hardest thing which I had ever tried to read. But my
    excitement was great as I managed, using a microscope, to read more
    of the text and thus to confirm the Italian scholar's theory.

    While I was there, I looked at a few other manuscripts in the
    collection. Many were very extensive indeed-and completely
    unpublished. Looking at one which was full of quotations of Greek
    poetry, I said to one of the local scholars that he ought to publish
    it. He said he was too busy with other papyri, and I had to confess
    that I was also. But this made me aware of how much remains to be
    done, even in the absence of finds of more texts from resumed
    excavations at Herculaneum.

    This is the only scholarly library from Greek and Roman antiquity to
    have been preserved in conditions which ensured its physical
    survival. Other ancient texts, like Aristotle's Poetics, survive
    because they were copied and recopied by monks; but not these. They
    are unique in every sense, and do much to bridge the gulf in ancient
    philosophical writing between the time of Aristotle and that of
    Cicero. Philodemus' On Poems, in particular, opens a window onto a
    lost age of scholarship-the period between Aristotle's Poetics and
    Horace's Art of Poetry, the works which define classicism for the
    ancient and modern worlds. I felt that it was time for the On Poems
    to be restored to the world in as complete a state as possible.

    New techniques for reading the papyri-better microscopes, better
    photographs, digital enhancement, infra-red images-came along at
    just the right time. In France and America, two scholars had
    independently rediscovered the key to putting the mutilated
    fragments back into the correct order. The work remained laborious
    and terribly difficult; but it was now possible. As I prepared the
    first volume in Oxford's new series, which aims to edit all the
    aesthetic treatises of Philodemus, the team of scholars whom I
    brought together to undertake this exciting task made other
    discoveries which all contribute to our ability to reconstruct this
    lost library, and with it to understand one of the richest periods
    in the history of human thought.

    Richard Janko

    <end quote>

    -- 
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    Amara Graps, PhD          email: amara@amara.com
    Computational Physics     vita:  ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt
    Multiplex Answers         URL:   http://www.amara.com/
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    "We came whirling out of Nothingness scattering stars like dust."
           --Rumi
    


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