BMCR 2009.06.40: Todd on Benakis, Michael Psellos: Kommentar zur Physik des Aristoteles. Editio princeps. Einleitung, Text, Indices. Corpus Philosophorum Medii Aevi, Commentaria in Aristotelem Byzantina 5

Linos G. Benakis, Michael Psellos: Kommentar zur Physik des
Aristoteles.  Editio princeps.  Einleitung, Text, Indices. Corpus
Philosophorum Medii Aevi, Commentaria in Aristotelem Byzantina 5.
Athens:  Academy of Athens, 2008.  Pp. ix, 450.  ISBN 9789604041244.

Reviewed by Robert B. Todd ([email protected])
Word count:  1192 words
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Byzantine Aristotelianism has shared in a recent growth in interest in
Byzantine philosophy,[[1]] with several previously unedited works
appearing since 1994 in Commentaria in Aristotelem Byzantina.[[2]]  A
central figure in this revival, Professor Linos Benakis, has now
augmented this series with the editio princeps of a complete
medium-length and avowedly pedagogical commentary on Aristotle's
Physics  by the eleventh-century polymath Michael Psellus (1018 - ca.
1078).[[3]]  It was previously available in printed form only in a
Latin translation of 1554 (title page reproduced at 450).  It can be
dated to the 1060s, if the person addressed as "the noblest of my
pupils" in the proem (1.7) and on points of detail throughout (see 25
n. 43; e.g. 34.8, 177.2, 177.23, 239.14, 395.26, 430.18-21), is, as
seems certain, the future emperor Michael VII Doucas.

Byzantine Aristotelian commentaries are indisputably inferior to those
of late antiquity and to the major ones from the Arabic and Western
European Middle Ages and the Renaissance.  A century ago they were
represented in Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca (see 10 with nn. 13
and 14) by a small and arbitrary selection.  Benakis, whose labours on
this edition extend back to a Cologne dissertation of 1960 (vii) and
comprise several Vorstudien (12 n. 19), has made accessible one of the
less justifiable omissions from that earlier series.  He has ensured
that important evidence for a philosophical and educational culture in
which the Physics played a continuing role (9-10 and 61-63) can now be
assessed for its intrinsic and historical merits.

The Introduction deals primarily with the work's authorship and its
relation to Psellus' other writings (3-25), as well as its general
character and major themes (26-46; including a case study of topics in
Physics Book 1  at 29-40).  Then an inventory of fourteen manuscripts
(47-59) (six have facsimiles at 443-48) is followed immediately, and in
that regard a little unexpectedly, by the stemma, and by further
observations on the Latin translation and on the work's predictably
limited influence (60-64).  The bibliography (65-94) is extensive and
analytical.  The text (for which book- but regrettably not
chapter-numbers are provided in headers) has an upper apparatus for
both explicit and implicit references,[[4]] and an apparatus criticus
that seems to record all important variant readings.  The choice
between variants in the principal manuscripts is generally
straightforward and, since both the main text and the lemmata can be
emended from the Aristotelian text, the editor has to intervene
relatively rarely.[[5]]  Within exegetical passages the wording of the
Aristotelian text is signalled in expanded type both when quoted, as it
frequently is, and when integrated into a paraphrase, where it can,
however, sometimes be missed: e.g., 155.22-23 (208a15-16) and 375.24-25
(225a30).  There are indices only for names and loci.  An index
verborum would have been helpful.  A list of instances of sullogismos
and sullogizesthai, for example, would have helped pinpoint
formalisations of Aristotelian arguments (e.g., 4.13; 29.12; 164.20;
165.4) rather than leaving only a sub-set of them identifiable from
citations of the Prior Analytics in the index locorum.

In this brief notice (and a major critical edition, especially a first
edition, obviously merits a lengthy review) I can address only three
important general topics: the authorship of the work, the status of its
lemmata, and the genre of commentary represented here.

(1)  On the authorship, Benakis (5-10; 49-50) defends the work's
attribution to Psellus against Pantelis Golitsis' recent claim,[[6]]
made largely on the basis of evidence in the manuscripts, that it is by
a later polymath, George Pachymeres (1242 - ca. 1310), the scribe of
the earliest manuscript (Laur. 87.5).  His counter-arguments, added
when this edition was close to publication (5 n. 8), are three: (i) the
content of the work complements material elsewhere in the Psellan
corpus (5-9); (ii) Pachymeres' unedited paraphrase of the Physics
depends on Psellus' (9-10) (Golitsis has to accept that Pachymeres
engaged twice and in different ways with the Physics);[[7]] and (iii)
the commentary in Laur. 87.5 has errors of a kind associated with
transcription, and also resembles one by Michael of Ephesus copied by
Pachymeres in the margins of another manuscript (Vat. Gr. 261) (49-50).
It is difficult to comment on a disagreement that crucially relies on
manuscript evidence, but it seems safe to say that Psellus' authorship
of this commentary has yet to be conclusively disproved.[[8]]

(2)  On the lemmata, Golitsis 2007 (see note 6), 647-50, has rightly
stressed that in ms. Laur. 87.5 these unusually brief quotations signal
the page divisions of the Aristotelian text beside which Pachymeres
copied (or, as Golitsis would argue, composed) the commentary.  This
situation is reflected in Benakis' edition, where the exegetical
passages are of roughly equivalent length and the lemmata straddle
unrelated material or function purely as guides: e.g., at 31.9, four
words from a conclusion at 187b30 head an exegetical passage that
applies to the following section, 187b30 - 188a6.  I found this anomaly
puzzling until I became acquainted with Golitsis' paper.  Still, since
this commentary follows the Aristotelian text closely (see below),
lemmata do seem to be essential, and so perhaps earlier and better
adjusted ones were replaced in the manuscripts with the inadequate
substitutes derived from Laur. 87.5.

(3)  As for this commentary's genre (31-33), the work is called
"succinct" (suntomos) in its title, and it does include summaries of
the source text, avoids digressions or polemics, and has few references
to post-Aristotelian authorities (Cleomedes, Gregory Nazianzen, and
Simplicius are exceptions)[[9]] and no significant traces of
Christianity (27-28) or of Byzantine culture (Anthemius, an architect
of Hagia Sophia, serves at 83.10 to illustrate Aristotle's beloved
"house-builder").  There are also just a few instances of original
interpretive material (31-32 with nn. 50 and 51, and 37-40 on the
methodology in Phys. 1.1), while the unusually large number of
cross-references to other Aristotelian works are probably intended to
serve didactic purposes rather than being indicative of any special
emphasis on the unity of the Aristotelian corpus (pace Benakis, 37).
What remains is a careful and fairly elementary explication de texte,
roughly two to three times the length of its source texts, and Benakis
(33) rightly distinguishes it from the kind of Aristotelian paraphrase
associated with Themistius (4th century A.D.), whose more discursive
and interventionist treatment of the Physics, which was also aimed at
more advanced students, Psellus does not cite (43).  Elsewhere,
however, he does identify the usual Themistian procedure of adopting
the persona of an Aristotle expressing himself more expansively,[[10]]
but in dealing with the Physics he maintains a consistently
third-person stance towards the language and sequence of thought in the
Aristotelian text.  In this respect his commentary resembles the
analyses that form the first parts of much lengthier comments on
lemmata by Alexander, Philoponus or Simplicius. So in sum Psellus
offers the restrained and reliable account to be expected from a mature
scholar and experienced teacher faced with the chore of taking a pupil
through a difficult text. With a few adjustments his commentary could
probably serve beginners even today.[[11]] It is unlikely to be called
on to fulfil that function, but its text, context and content are now,
thanks to Professor Benakis' edition, finally available for further
study.[[12]]


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Notes:


1.    See, for example, K. Ierodiakonou (ed.), Byzantine Philosophy and
its Ancient Sources (Oxford, 2002), reviewed at BMCR 2002.10.37, though
see also R.J. Hankinson at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2003.05.08
(http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=1275) .  On the efforts made since
the 1960s to supplement the Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca with
Byzantine commentaries, see Benakis, vii-viii.

2.    See my review of the inaugural volume in this series, M. Share
(ed.), Arethas of Caesarea's Scholia on Porphyry's "Isago^ge^" and
Aristotle's "Categories" (Athens, 1994) at BMCR 1995.12.14
(http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/1995/95.12.24.html) .

3.    A passage from a manuscript version of this edition, which I was
kindly allowed to quote in my edition of Cleomedes, Caelestia (Leipzig,
1990), p. xxix (see Benakis, 6 n. 10), was the only part of this work
that I had previously seen.

4.    This kind of apparatus can always be enlarged.  For example, at
28.21-22 Anaxagoras' nickname Nous is noted and could have been
referred to Diogenes Laertius 2.6, who quotes relevant verses by Timon
(= H. Lloyd-Jones and P. Parsons (eds), Supplementum Hellenisticum, no.
798).

5.    This is not the place to examine Benakis' emendations, or the
lack thereof, but I would suggest that at 38.9 if the comma after
<greek>a)/n</greek> is removed the reading in the manuscripts that he
emends can probably be retained, while at 191.26 <greek>e)pei\</greek>
might be emended to <greek>ei)</greek> to complement the optative and
create a clause that expands the elliptical conditional at Arist.
214b28.

6.    See his article "Un commentaire perpetuel de Georges Pachyme\re
a\ la Physique d'Aristote faussement attributee/ a\ Michael Psellos",
Byzantinische Zeitschrift 100 (2007) 637-76, the thesis of which is
presupposed in "Georges Pachyme\re comme didascle: essai pour une
reconstitution de sa carrie\re et de son enseignement philosophique",
Jahrbuch de Oesterreichischen Byzantinistik 58 (2008) 53-68 at 55, 57-8
and 66-7.    In reporting only Golitsis' general view, I am not, I must
stress, doing anything like justice to his arguments, and in particular
to his analysis of the manuscript tradition as it bears on the question
of authorship.

7.    Golitsis 2008 (see note 6 above), 58-60, speculates on how this
duplication might have fitted into Pachymeres' curriculum.

8.    The article "Byzantine Philosophy"
(http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/byzantine-philosophy)  by K.
Ierodiakonou and B. Byde/n in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
has not yet taken account of Benakis' arguments: it currently (as of 8
September 2008) shows some sympathy for Golitsis' position.

9.    The influence of Simplicius need not, of course, be confined to
explicit references (cf. the upper apparatus at 285.1-2, 286.21) but,
that said, Psellus does not, here at least, seem to appropriate earlier
exegetical material as slavishly as other Byzantine commentators: see,
for example, P. L. Donini on Michael of Ephesus' use of Alexander of
Aphrodisias at RFIC 96 (1968), 316-23.

10.    See K. Ierodiakonou, "Psellos' Paraphrase on Aristotle's De
interpretatione", in Ierodiakonou (2002) (see note 1 above) 157-81 at
165 n. 31 for the description of paraphrasing by Psellus in his In De
interpretatione, a work available only in the Aldine edition (first
published  1503) but currently being re-edited (Benakis, 17 with n.
28).  On Themistius' paraphrastic method see my discussion at
Themistius on Aristotle "On the Soul" (London and Ithaca, 1996), 4-7,
and for this commentator's rather different procedures in dealing with
the Physics see the two volumes so far published of my translation of
his paraphrase of that treatise: Themistius on "Physics" 4 and
Themistius on "Physics" 5-8 in the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle
series, London and Ithaca, 2003 and 2008 respectively.

11.    For example, see Psellus' 159-word response at 155.14 - 156.6 to
the 55 words of Phys. 3.8, 208a14-19, where Aristotle rejects an
Atomist (and later Epicurean) argument for the infinite that claims
that we necessarily think of something existing beyond anything finite.
The Byzantine commentator recreates and contextualizes this refutation
rather more thoroughly than Themistius' brisker 149-word summary at In
Phys. 100.23 - 101.5, and his explication stands up well against the
72-word summary (p. 370) and textual ruminations (ad 208a18) in W. D.
Ross, Aristotle's Physics (Oxford, 1936).

12.    I noticed some errors: Introduction: p. 28: the reference should
be to 430.16-21 not 430.19-24; text: 181.13: <greek>e)n</greek> has
obviously dropped out before <greek>to/pw|</greek> where it is needed
to complement <greek>ou)k</greek> and thereby reflect <greek>ou)/
pou</greek> in the lemma at 212b14 (cf. also 212b9 and 22, and Psellus
180.10); 237.8: delete the rho in <greek>prosaxw=s</greek>; upper
apparatus: obsolete editions are cited at 25.6 for Timaeus Locrus (G.
Hermann 1852 rather than W. Marg [Leiden, 1972]), and at 27.12 for
Proclus' commentary on the Platonic Alcibiades I (F. Creuzer 1820
rather than A. Segonds' Bude/ edition [Paris, 1985 and 1986]); 58.13-14
should be 58.14-15; 240.26: supply the reference to "in A3, 187a2" as
24.1-2 (Benakis too often inconveniently cites the text of the
commentary by the Aristotelian reference instead of the page and line
number of his edition). In the apparatus criticus ad 104.2-3: two
entries are conflated; ad 153.16-17, the omission recorded there is not
attributed to any manuscripts.