Salve! You asked me to send postcards, but last time I tried to send one from hereabouts they covered it with stamps—not just over the lovely picture on the front, but even over the top of my message. So it has to be a letter. Nice to have leave from teaching so that I have time to travel and to write. Even sending a letter’s not easy, mind you. On Friday I went to the Post Office to mail one—no more post-boxes to be seen—and had the most typical experience: they’ve abolished stamps too! The woman asked where my letter was going, typed out the whole address herself, made me tick a box on a form saying what the content was (‘documenti’, we put, but it was actually a cheque, not passports), printed a sticker for the right amount, and stuck it on. All unbelievably inefficient, but all done efficiently, with a nice smile, and at a fraction of the cost of posting an international letter from my usual points of origin. Still, I’ll find a different way to send you this one.
Yesterday it rained. Not the gentle but dismal drizzle of London (not to mention Michiganian ice-pellets), but the whole hog, cats and dogs, stair-rods and bucketfuls. A perfect day for the library—except, yes, the most important news, her hand is better; thank you for asking. Admittedly we had to climb up the via Medici, inside the ancient wall, with cooing pigeons and mewing seagulls along the top, past the breach in that wall to Salvator Mundi. A bit of a wait, enough for a page or two of the Ethics. To dress the wound, they had said. Some dressing, that: half an hour’s procedure. The surgeon looked just like Vespasian; did Latin but not Greek. An American medical student in attendance, plus the nice nurse who brought the wrong tweezers and had worked in London. I told the ladies what my first-year students hear about Hippocrates: the Epidemics, the Oath, including its insistence on honouring one’s teacher. Vespasian laughed so much that he thought he was becoming a god. Then down to the greengrocer’s stall on the street (bought puntarelle with no idea what they were or how to prepare them) and the forno for their lovely bread. Then at last the library, with Aristotle on the menu.
Ethics, yes Ethics. The world needs ethics right now. Not the ethics so much quoted by all the cynics—‘the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must’—thanks, Thucydides, but the people who quote you to excuse their barbarities don’t recall what happened to the folks who said that (Alcibiades must have been on that evil mission to Melos). No, we need an ethics grounded in reason: not the reason that knows only how to calculate the price of everything and the value of nothing, but the reason of a philosopher who knows that human happiness is a social thing: otherwise one is either a god or a beast (best not to ask him where the slaves fitted in). Justice: yes, Ethics book five—or, depending on which Ethics you mean, book four. Everyone thinks the text is cut and dried, that we can just pick up the OCT and read what Aristotle said: but it isn’t—the scholars who edited it never even heard of Lachmann and his method, let alone applied it, even though they worked in the late nineteenth century (and nobody has bothered since, though I hear there is a new Spanish edition). I pick out a codex that only one scholar of the Ethics has ever bothered with: very late, copied in Florence, John Rhosus. A few clicks to reach the Laurentian Library site. Lovely writing, some bad spelling. A bit of a slog. Is there anything new in this? Why so many words left blank or only partly transcribed? John was copying a damaged exemplar, surely. Could he have used that late antique copy in capitals which, as I deduce, was still in Magna Graecia in 1279? Hours of collation will tell me, if I can stay awake. That espresso after lunch really helped—but I still didn’t finish. The work wasn’t worth it, was it? Oh yes it was. How about this passage:
That’s why we don’t let a human being rule, but Reason, because he does this for himself and becomes a tyrant. The ruler is the guardian of what is just ... For he deems nothing more for himself, if he is just; for he does not allocate to himself more of what is absolutely good, unless it is not proportionate to him. Hence he toils for another. For this reason they say that justice is another’s good, as we said before. So some recompense must be given, and that is honour and privilege. But the person for whom such things are not enough, these people become tyrants.
Those two scoops of ice-cream said it all. Worth the slog just to read that passage again. Quite a timely insight. Perhaps this wretched manuscript will let me grasp it a bit more clearly. For instance, shouldn’t ‘Reason’ (ΛΟΓΟϹ) be ‘Law’ (ΝΟΜΟϹ), which is what the rest of the paragraph is about? Perhaps via that Roman abbreviation for λόγος, ⟑ΟϹ, that explains corruptions in the Poetics ...?
The rain let up in late afternoon. Out for a quick walk. No stupendous view this time, and even last time we couldn’t make out where the Coliseum must be: too much fog, and rain again before we got back. The puntarelle were delicious.
Bright and beautiful this morning. The world is drenched. Steam wisps off the trunk of the pine outside our window under the hot rays of dawn. Behind, the massive bulk of the Alban hills, in fact the sinister outline of the huge extinct volcano that shaped this place, with mist coating the plain below in white. Chilly air flows in, with the squawks of those lime-green parrots with pointed tail-feathers; from the roof-terrace we’ve seen flocks of them flying between the umbrella pines. We know them from London; we saw them in Paris too, as we took the train for Milan. Do they have to be here as well? Actually, they’re charming, just a little unexpected, better than those lime-green scooters that clutter the streets here too.
A different menu for the library today. Last night my collaborator sent me a bunch of corrections to his translation from the Syriac. You didn’t know, did you, that Barhebraeus, maphrian of the Jacobite church, wrote a summary of Aristotle’s Poetics in the year he died in Mosul, 1286? Nor did I until I really dug into the matter. Nor did I have any inkling that he used the same epitome, presumably in Syriac, on which Avicenna based the summary of the Poetics that he wrote in Isfahan in 1024–1027. Only by knowing what Barhebraeus wrote could I see that Avicenna was somehow exploiting that same epitome (as he knew no Syriac, there was an Arabic intermediary). Together they clarify all sorts of problems in the text: for instance, when our texts say, absurdly, that, if poets had to compete with a hundred (hekaton) tragedies, they’d have to compete against the clock (klepsydra), Aristotle really said that, if each (hekaston) poet had to compete with tragedies ‘for three hours’, they’d have to compete against the clock. I had to send my edition to the Press before the Appendix on Barhebraeus was finished, so any revisions to the Greek text that I’ll need to make will have to go in during copy-editing. Still, I’d better go through these changes while that project still lingers in my head. If I’m lucky I may even remember how to type the occasional Syriac word into the app. crit.
But first I’ll finish my letter. It’s amazing how libraries focus the mind. All those great spirits of the past fostering one’s thoughts, even when their books still slumber on the shelves round about. This beautiful library at the American Academy even has creaking floorboards and busts at the ends of the bays. Not of Aristotle, like the one Cicero sat under in Atticus’ library, where he preferred his humble seat to the curule chair of state. He tells us when first saw Aristotle’s Ethics. (So nice not to have to put a footnote with the reference.) He was in Faustus Sulla’s library on the Bay of Naples. Faustus had his father’s collection of Aristotle’s autograph manuscripts. Loot from the sack of Athens, of course, carried in the triumph. An amazing collection of book-rolls, put together by that billionaire book-collector Apellicon: must tell Tyrannio about them, thought Cicero—well, anyway, it was Tyrannio who went through them after Cicero’s death and tried to sort them all out. Andronicus of Rhodes then wrote up his results. What a mess those book-rolls were in! It was hard to know which ones went together. The Ethics weren’t by Aristotle, Cicero knew—after all, he saw how the scribe put Ethics of Nicomachus at the beginning and end of each roll. The son must have been just as good as his father, he reasoned, even though others say the father wrote them. And then there was the ‘great’ ethics, that the neoplatonist Elias says Aristotle addressed to his father Nicomachus, and the Ethics ‘of Eudemus’ too! Confusions persist to this day. We call those Ethics ‘Eudemian’—a Byzantine misspelling: it’s ‘Eudemean’ like ‘Nicomachean’. The whole text still in a terrible state, despite Christopher Rowe’s best efforts in his new OCT. If I can just get a bit closer to that late antique archetype of it that survived in Italy, perhaps down to the 1480s ... Is it still in Italy somewhere, like the codex of Empedocles’ Purifications that Giovanni Aurispa brought here from Constantinople in 1423? Nobody believes Aurispa, but Theodore Prodromus records that one of the patriarchs found a copy of Empedocles and had many copies made of it. That was in the 1120s, so Aurispa was not inventing things. There’s so much yet to discover, if we can just live long enough. So it’s time to sign off and get down to work. Salve, as the Romans still say.
Richard Janko is Gerald F. Else Distinguished University Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of (most recently) Philodemus: On Poems Book Two, with the Fragments of Pausimachus and Heracleodorus (2020) and of two studies in G. W. Most (ed.), Studies in the Derveni Papyrus II (2022).