170 



GREEK PHILOSOPHY. 



were too fragmentary and unsystematic for publication they would 

 remain in the possession of Theophrastus and Neleus, 1 too curious 

 to destroy, too unfinished to make any use of; and if the heirs of 

 Neleus were illiterate men, they would see nothing in them, but 

 so many slovenly and disjointed scrawls, and not dream of putting 

 them among the sumptuous collection of books which they sold to 

 king Ptolemy. But in the time of Apellicon, the state of things was 

 changed. The relics of the founder of the school would have acquired 

 a sacred character ; and unsaleable as they might have been to Ptolemy, 

 who appears to have been a real lover of literature and not a mere 

 book-fancier, would fetch a good price with the purchaser of stolen 

 records. And it is not at all inconsistent with this view, that a 

 person whose acquaintance with philosophy was of such a kind, should 

 mistake the nature of the documents he had got hold of, " attempt 

 to supply the gaps when he transcribed the text in new copies, fill 

 these up the reverse of well, and send the books out into the world 

 full of mistakes." 8 



Such is the theory which, it appears to us, will reconcile the vary- 

 ing accounts respecting Aristotle's writings, and which, while it sweeps 

 away all that is adventitious in the statement of the Greek geographer, 

 will leave his testimony substantially unimpaired. And this theory 

 is, in fact, confirmed by the state in which some of the works of 

 Aristotle have come down to us. For some of these are not merely 

 books kept by the author, and continually worked at, like the 

 ' Rhetoric,' and Theophrastus's ' History of Plants,' nor are they mere 

 notes for lectures, a dry skeleton of the subject, complete in them- 

 selves, and only requiring the illustration and development which would 

 be supplied by the extemporaneous efforts of the instructor. Neither 

 of these two descriptions will explain all the phenomena which strike 

 the reader in the ' Poetics' and the * Politics,' as these two treatises are 

 Nature of the found in our manuscripts. Neither of them complete the discussion 

 'Poetics 8 ' and f *ke ran g e f topics which they promise; and it is impossible to 

 receive as a satisfactory explication of this fact that they are only 

 fragments of complete works of which the remainder has been lost. 

 This is quite incompatible with what we find in them, namely, redun- 

 dancies whole paragraphs recast, and standing together with those 

 for which they seem meant as a substitute. 3 Such appearances are 

 only to be understood on the supposition that the work in which they 



1 Parts of some of them may very likely have been incorporated by Theophrastus, 

 Strabo, and others in works of their own a proceeding which, in those days, would 

 not have been considered a plagiarism. Such, too, was doubtless the case with all 

 mere collections, such as the Problems and the book irepi Qavpaffiuv a/coucr/uaTwj/, 

 which, as we have it now, probably contains additions from several hands. 



2 Strabo, toe. supra cit. 



3 A remarkable instance of this is Politic, iii. p. 1287, col. 1, line 1, col. 2, line 

 36, which the passage p. 1285, col. 2, line 37, p. 1286, col. 2. line 40, is obviously 

 intended to supersede. The latter is a more digested and orderly arrangement of 

 the topics in the former. 



Reconcilia- 

 tion of the 

 several 

 notices on 

 the subject. 



