Works of Aristotle

According to Strabo and Plutarch, after Aristotle's death, his library of writings went to Theophrastus (Aristotle's successor as head of the Lyceum and the Peripatetic school).^[7] After the death of Theophrastus, the peripatetic library went to Neleus of Scepsis.^[8]: 5

Some time later, the Kingdom of Pergamon began conscripting books for a royal library, and the heirs of Neleus hid their collection in a cellar to prevent it from being seized for that purpose. The library was stored there for about a century and a half, in conditions that were not ideal for document preservation. On the death of Attalus III, which also ended the royal library ambitions, the existence of the Aristotelian library was disclosed, and it was purchased by Apellicon and returned to Athens in about 100 BCE.^[8]: 5–6

Apellicon sought to recover the texts, many of which were seriously degraded at this point due to the conditions in which they were stored. He had them copied out into new manuscripts, and used his best guesswork to fill in the gaps where the originals were unreadable.^[8]: 5–6

When Sulla seized Athens in 86 BCE, he seized the library and transferred it to Rome. There, Andronicus of Rhodes organized the texts into the first complete edition of Aristotle's works (and works attributed to him).^[9] The Aristotelian texts we have today are based on these.^[8]: 6–8

Diogenes Laërtius lists, in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 230 CE), works of Aristotle comprising 156 titles divided into approximately 400 books, which he reports as totaling 445,270 lines of writing;^[10] however, many of these are lost or only survive in fragments, and some may have been incorrectly attributed.^{[8]: 9–11}

Bekker numbers, the standard form of reference to works in the Corpus Aristotelicum, are based on the page numbers used in the Prussian Academy of Sciences edition of the complete works of Aristotle (Aristotelis Opera edidit Academia Regia Borussica, Berlin, 1831–1870). They take their name from the editor of that edition, the classical philologist August Immanuel Bekker (1785–1871).

Surviving fragments of the many lost works of Aristotle were included in the fifth volume of Bekker's edition, edited by Valentin Rose. These are not cited by Bekker numbers, however, but according to fragment numbers. Rose's first edition of the fragments of Aristotle was Aristoteles Pseudepigraphus (1863). As the title suggests, Rose considered these all to be spurious. The numeration of the fragments in a revised edition by Rose, published in the Teubner series, Aristotelis qui ferebantur librorum fragmenta, Leipzig, 1886, is still commonly used (indicated by R³), although there is a more current edition with a different numeration by Olof Gigon (published in 1987 as a new vol. 3 in Walter de Gruyter's reprint of the Bekker edition), and a new de Gruyter edition by Eckart Schütrumpf is in preparation.^[11]

For a selection of the fragments in English translation, see W. D. Ross, Select Fragments (Oxford 1952), and Jonathan Barnes (ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, vol. 2, Princeton 1984, pp. 2384–2465. A new translation exists of the fragments of Aristotle's Protrepticus, by Hutchinson and Johnson (2015).^[12]

The works surviving only in fragments include the dialogues On Philosophy (or On the Good), Eudemus (or On the Soul), On Justice, and On Good Birth. The possibly spurious work, On Ideas survives in quotations by Alexander of Aphrodisias in his commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics. For the dialogues, see also the editions of Richard Rudolf Walzer, Aristotelis Dialogorum fragmenta, in usum scholarum (Florence 1934), and Renato Laurenti, Aristotele: I frammenti dei dialoghi (2 vols.), Naples: Luigi Loffredo, 1987.

Aristotle's works have been published in many printed editions, either as complete editions of all surviving writings or as partial collections. English complete editions include:

• W. D. Ross translation, 12 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1955)
• Jonathan Barnes translation, 2 vols., 1984

Works cited

 

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Works of Aristotle

 

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Αριστοτέλης

• Aristotle's theory of state
• The Ancient Catalogues of Aristotle's Writings. A Survey of Current Research
• The Rediscovery of the Corpus Aristotelicum with an annotated bibliography
• Bekker's Prussian Academy of Sciences edition of the complete works of Aristotle at Archive.org

  • vol. 1
  • vol. 2
  • vol. 3
  • vol. 4
  • vol. 5

• Lazaris, S. "L’image paradigmatique: des 'Schémas anatomiques' d’Aristote au 'De materia medica' de Dioscoride", Pallas, 93 (2013), p. 131-164 ext. link
• Oxford Translation of The Works of Aristotle at Archive.org

  • vol. 1
  • vol. 2
  • vol. 3
  • vol. 4
  • vol. 5
  • vol. 6
  • vol. 7
  • vol. 8
  • vol. 9
  • vol. 10
  • vol. 11
  • vol. 12