154 GREEK PHILOSOPHY. 



which are necesssary to the argument which he has in hand. And 

 although these references may be, and probably often are, due to a 

 later hand, still this objection cannot lie made in all cases, in those, 

 for instance, where the special work referred to is not named, but de- 

 scribed in such a way that it is impossible not to identify it. 1 



But, after all, these arguments are little else than negative, and 

 although they lead to a probability of a very high order against the 

 truth of Strabo's narrative, they are not absolutely conclusive. In fact, 

 the work of disproof is a most difficult one, from the circumstance of 

 Destruction the whole of the literature of the two centuries after Theophrastus, 

 ot literature. enormous as its extent was, having been swept away, except such 

 scanty fragments as are found here and there imbedded in the work of 

 some grammarian or compiler. This will be strikingly evident from 

 the consideration, that if the works of Aristotle, which have come 

 down to us, had been lost, and a similar story had been related of 

 Plato's works to that which we read in Strabo respecting those of 

 Aristotle and Theophrastus, its refutation would be quite as difficult 

 as that of the one about which we are at present concerned. But the 

 difficulty of the problem did not damp the ardour of the German 

 scholars we have spoken of above. They have searched through the 

 works of the voluminous commentators upon Aristotle, which the 

 learned eclecticism of the third, fourth, and fifth centuries of the 

 Christian era produced, some of them still only existing in manuscripts, 2 

 with an untiring diligence, and have detected in the works of much 

 more modern scholiasts extracts from their predecessors, which prove 

 to demonstration that the notice in Athenaeus is in all probability true, 

 and that certainly so much of Strabo's account as is incompatible with 

 it is false. 



J Ritter, Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. iii. p. 35, gives a list of the passages in 

 which the philosopher alludes to his own writings. Against many of these the 

 objection we have noticed may be made. A more conclusive one is Poetic, p. 1454, 

 col. 2, line 18 (quoted by Stahr, Aristotelia, ii. p. 296), from which it is certain 

 that an Ethics not, however, necessarily the Nicomachean was published at the 

 time the passage was written. But. unfortunately (supposing the work alluded to 

 to be the Nicomachean Ethics), there is, perhaps, no one of Aristotle's writings so 

 independent of all the rest. 



2 The Royal Academy of Berlin were induced, by the advice of Schleiermacher, 

 to publish a complete edition of Aristotle's works, based upon the collation of as 

 many manuscripts as could be made available for the purpose. The execution of 

 this work was placed under the superintendence of two most distinguished men ; the 

 one, Immanuel Bekker, the celebrated editor of Plato, Thucydides, and the Greek 

 Orators a scholar whose piercing intuition into the genius of the Greek language 

 can only be compared to that of Newton into the laws of the universe, or that of 

 Niebuhr into the institutions of antiquity ; the other, Christian Brandis, the friend 

 of Niebuhr, and guardian of his orphan children. The former fulfilled his portion 

 of the task in 1831, by publishing the text of Aristotle's works from the collation 

 of more than a hundred manuscripts, in two volumes, quarto. The latter, to 

 whom the task of collecting and arranging the Greek commentators, and of eluci- 

 dating the philosophy, devolved, published one volume of those (some from hitherto 

 unedited manuscripts) in 1836, and promised in the preface a second, with prole- 

 gomena, as soon as the pressure of bad health would allow. 



