L. Zhmud: Ulacco, Pseudopythagorica Dorica 401 Angela Ulacco: Pseudopythagorica Dorica. I trattati di argomento metafisico, logico ed epistemologico attribuiti ad Archita e a Brotino. Introduzione, traduzione, commento. Boston/Berlin: de Gruyter 2017. X, 200 S. (Philosophie der Antike. 41.) 79,95 €. After a period of comparative neglect the pseudo-Pythagorean literature again finds itself under the spotlight in scholarly research. One sign of this is an international project ‘Pseudopythagorica: stratégies du faire croire dans la philosophie antique’, organized in 2015 by Constantinos Macris, Luc Brisson, and Tiziano Dorandi and run by the CNRS. 1 U., a participant in the project, published an important book that is a revised and enlarged version of her 2010 dissertation written under the guidance of Bruno Centrone, a leading specialist in Pseudopythagorica. Following Centrone’s example, 2 U. offers an edition of four brief treatises, or extracts from them, ascribed to the ancient Pythagoreans Archytas and Bro(n)tinus, with an introduction, Italian translation and running commentary. This edition has already been positively evaluated by Tiziano Dorandi 3 and Riccardo Chiaradonna, who discussed it in great detail. 4 An Introduction (1–16) gives a concise but dense overview of the status quaestionis on research into the pseudo-Pythagorean literature, the main corpus of which was published in 1965 by Holger Thesleff. 5 U. chooses four texts from it written in an artificial Doric dialect: ps.-Archytas’ On Principles, On Opposites, and On Intellect and Sense Perception, and ps.-Brotinus’ On Intellect and Discursive Thought. The Greek text she prints is that of Thesleff’s edition with some minor changes, as these works, preserved by Iamblichus, Stobaeus, and Simplicius, do not have an independent manuscript tradition. U.’s commentary is very balanced, sound, and instructive, running from the meaning and provenance of individual terms to the general framework of the post-Hellenistic philosophy in its relationship to ancient Pythagoreanism, Platonism and Aristotelianism. The bibliography is ample and contains most of the relevant editions and studies; Index verborum is perhaps too ample: there appears to be limited grounds for the inclusion of διά, περί, etc., and even less for nouns in oblique cases: ψυχᾷ, ψυχάν, ψυχᾶς. Index locorum looks good, yet the General index lacks Pythagoras and Philolaus, the Monad and the Dyad, and other relevant names and concepts. Unlike Thesleff, who came to the Pseudopythagorica via his study of the Doric dialects and deduced from this his conclusions about the chronology and provenance of the pseudepigrapha, U. is interested primarily in the philosophical substance and environment of the texts. Joining the prevailing consensus, she rightly maintains that the Doriс pseudepigrapha were written in the first century BC/first century AD in Alexandria in the same narrow circle and contain Platon––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 1 See also A. B. Huizenga. ‘Moral education for women in the pastoral and Pythagorean letters: Philosophers of the household’. Leiden, 2013. 2 B. Centrone. ‘Pseudopythagorica ethica: i trattati morali di Archita, Metopo, Teage, Eurifamo’. Naples, 1990. 3 T. Dorandi. Review of: Angela Ulacco: ‘Pseudopythagorica Dorica’, in: Sehepunkte 18, 2018, Nr. 6 [15.06.2018]. 4 R. Chiaradonna. ‘The Pseudopythagorica and Their Philosophical Background: A Discussion of Angela Ulacco, Pseudopythagorica Dorica’, in: Mediterranea. International journal for the transfer of knowledge 4, 2019, 221–238. 5 H. Thesleff. ‘The Pythagorean texts of the Hellenistic period’. Åbo, 1965. GNOMON 5/92/2020 402 L. Zhmud: Ulacco, Pseudopythagorica Dorica ic, Academic, and Peripatetic doctrines with some addition of Stoic concepts. It would be hard to determine how close these doctrines are to ancient Pythagoreanism (1–7, 15). The present reviewer discussed the last issue in a recent paper, 1 coming to the conclusion that the Pythagorean pseudepigrapha in general contain astonishingly little that is authentically Pythagorean in terms of philosophical and scientific doctrines. The extent of these texts is not unimportant: the longest of them, ps.-Archytas’ On Opposites, is about three Teubner pages. What was the purpose of producing the minimalist scholastic expositions of the Middle Platonic doctrines disguised in ancient Pythagorean clothing? U. suggests two possible motivations: their authors wanted 1) «giustificare una lettura ‘antica’ di Platone, quale quella proposta dai primi Accademici, in particolare da Speusippo e Senocrate», and 2) «riproporre un’immagine sistematica del pensiero platonico, nella convinzione che questo nucleo teorico derivasse, in ultima istanza, da un’antica dottrina pitagorica» (7–8). I share the second view but not the first. There is no firm evidence that the first Academics wanted to ascribe to Pythagoras and the ancient Pythagoreans the Platonic teaching of the Monad and the Indefinite Dyad; 2 this occurred only in Middle Platonism. 3 Besides, Aristotelian doctrines, as U.’s commentary demonstrates, are so abundantly presented in the post-Hellenistic Pythagorean pseudepigrapha, and his view of Plato as a follower of the Pythagoreans is so firmly rooted in this literature (cf. 11 n. 42), that a wish to justify the reading of the first Academics can be considered a significant motivation only if we count Aristotle as their principal speaker. Incidentally, this is close to the Middle Platonic view on Aristotle. The decisive move in this direction was made by Antiochus of Ascalon (ca 135/130 – ca 68 BC), who included Aristotle and his students in the Old Academy (Cic. De fin. 5.7). He also conceived the Pythagoreans, especially Archytas, as one of Plato’s major teachers, 4 which made of Archytas the principal link between Platonism and Pythagoreanism and explains why most pseudo-Pythagorean treatises bear his name. To present a Platonic pair of principles, the Monad and the Indefinite Dyad, as a Pythagorean doctrine was one of the ways Middle Platonism constructed its past and, in turn, constructed itself. This doctrine is attested, for example, in the Neopythagorean biography of Pythagoras known as the Anonymus Photii (late first century BC – first century AD), where Plato, a student of Archytas, figures as the ninth diadochos in the Pythagorean school and Aristotle as the tenth (237.5–7 Thesleff). Aristotle’s chief theoretical works were not yet available to Antiochus, and their presence in the pseudepigrapha discussed by U. can narrow their dating. Unlike other Neopythagorean apocrypha, e.g. the ‘Pythagorean notes’ transmitted by Alexander Polyhistor (Diog. Laert. 8.25–33), they could hardly have been ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 1 L. Zhmud. ‘What is Pythagorean in the pseudo-Pythagorean Literature?’, in: Philologus 163, 2019, 72–94. 2 As suggested in the seminal book: W. Burkert. ‘Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism’. Cambridge, MA, 1972. 3 L. Zhmud. ‘Pythagorean Number Doctrine in the Academy’, in: G. Cornelli, R. McKirahan, C. Macris, eds. ‘On Pythagoreanism’. Berlin, 2013, 323–343. 4 Cic. Resp. 1.15–16; Tusc. 1.39: Platonem ferunt… didicisse Pythagorea omnia; De fin. 5.86–87 = H. Dörrie, M. Baltes. ‘Der Platonismus in der Antike. Bd. 4’. Stuttgart, 1996, 250–256, 526–536. GNOMON 5/92/2020 L. Zhmud: Ulacco, Pseudopythagorica Dorica 403 written before the mid-first century BC. Whereas the earliest Neopythagorean apocrypha professed the Zweiprinzipienlehre, later it was supplemented by Dreiprinzipienlehre with one supreme principle above the two opposites, which is to be found both in ps.-Archytas’ On Principles and in an overview of the ‘Pythagorean’ doctrines by Eudorus of Alexandria (fl. ca 25 BC). This Middle Platonist often appears in U.’s commentary as an important parallel to the doctrines presented in the Neopythagorean apocrypha. U. does not employ the term Neopythagorean/ism, perhaps keeping to the position of Centrone who argued convincingly that no Neopythagorean philosophy distinct from Middle Platonism existed at this time. 1 This is correct. Yet Neopythagoreanism is not so problematic a category that it should be abandoned. Viewed as a substream of Middle Platonism (a term that some scholars also tend to avoid) and later of Neoplatonism, it can help us to usefully distinguish between pseudo-Pythagorean texts of the late fourth/second centuries BC and Neopythagorean pseudepigrapha with a totally different agenda. We merely have to bear in mind that unlike other philosophical currents Neopythagoreanism started from the anonymous or pseudonymous apocrypha, and only in the mid-first century AD produced authors writing under their own names (Apollonius of Tyana, Moderatus of Gades). Ps.-Archytas’ On Principles (19–20) is a one and a half page treatise on Dreiprinzipienlehre, or an extract from it: Stobaeus says Ἐκ τοῦ Ἀρχύτου Περὶ ἀρχῶν. Cautiously discussing both options, U. adduces parallels from Syrianus (23) that persuade me in favor of the second option. The three principles are the opposites, form and matter, and god as a moving and harmonizing force. This Aristotelian triad is typical for Middle Platonism, though its presentation contains, according to U., some original features. To U.’s thorough discussion (22– 54) of the text I would add one parallel. This text notably contains an expression of Philolaus, ἐστὼ τῶν πραγμάτων (44 B 6), which is a very rare thing in the Pseudopythagorica. Meanwhile, the harmonizing function of the third principle: τὰ δ’ ἐναντία συναρμογᾶς τινος δεῖται καὶ ἑνώσιος (20.4), ἃ καὶ συναρμόσαι καὶ ἑνῶσαι τὰν ἐναντιότατα δυνασεῖται ἐν τᾷ ἐστοῖ τῶν πραγμάτων (20.6–7), strongly reminds me that (συν)αρμόζειν and ἁρμονία also often occur in Philolaus (44 B 1–2, 6–7), who persistently argued that two opposite archai, ἄπειρα and περαίνοντα, need a third one, fitting them together. One should weigh whether this is a direct reminiscence of Philolaus or merely a structural resemblance. Neopythagorean pseudepigrapha constitute one of the most successful cases in ancient philosophical history: very few people disbelieved their authorship and even such a connoisseur of the ancient texts as Simplicius was not among them. To what extent did it depend on the skillfulness of the forgers? U. envisages the possibility that by introducing the third cause ps.-Archytas probably indirectly responds to Aristotle’s criticism of the Pythagorean-Platonic doctrine of principles, «‘rivelando’ un testo che, in realtà, anticipa questa critica annullandola alla radice» (41). This technique that U. detects also in two more of ps.-Archytas’ treatises (50, 137) looks utterly anachronistic, but matches the general manner of the pseudo-Pythagorean writers in projecting into the distant past the topics of ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– B. Centrone. ‘Medioplatonismo e neopitagorismo: un confronto difficile’, in: Rivista di storia della filosofia 2, 2015, 399–423. 1 GNOMON 5/92/2020 404 L. Zhmud: Ulacco, Pseudopythagorica Dorica the latest philosophical discussions. Thus, Simplicius believed that Aristotle borrowed his discussion of the so-called postpraedicamenta (ch. 10–11 of the Categories) from Archytas’ book On Opposites that served as a model for him (57, T1–2). It is due to this belief, based on the authority of the ‘divine Iamblichus’, a strong believer in authenticity of everything pseudo-Pythagorean, that five fragments of ps.-Archytas’ book are preserved in Simplicius’ commentary on the Categories (57–60). The purpose of the apocryphal author, according to U., was probably to reconstruct this section of the Categories, adjusting it for a Pythagorean-Platonic system and thus indirectly revealing the Pythagorean model of Aristotle. He paraphrased Aristotle’s text, updated it in the light of recent debate and systematized the material according to the method of division (65). U.’s assessment of the text is convincing, and throughout her detailed commentary on it (65–98) she effectively resists the temptation to make it more original or more Pythagorean than it was, a tendency that is visible in some recent works on the Pseudopythagorica. The next text considered by U. comprises two excerpts from ps.-Archytas’ On Intellect and Sense Perception in Stobaeus and Iamblichus (101–103). To be sure, the attribution of the first excerpt to this treatise is problematic: Stobaeus’ title is Ἀρχύτου ἐκ τοῦ Περὶ ἀρχᾶς. Thesleff, however, published it as the first fragment of On Intellect, noting in the apparatus that it «fits with the De intel. better than with the De princip.». 1 Indeed, the fragment presents a Peripatetic theory, known from Aristocles of Messina (114), that intellect is the criterion of intelligible things and sensation is the criterion of sensible things. Before U., Thesleff’s attribution has been accepted by several scholars, among them Centrone and Carl Huffman, but recently disputed by Jaap Mansfeld, 2 who argues in favor of On Principles. Mansfeld shows obvious structural parallels between an outline of Pythagoras’ principles in the Vetusta placita (Aët. 1.3.8) that includes both ontology and epistemology, and two fragments of Archytas’ On Principles according to Stobaeus, the first ontological and the second (disputed) epistemological. This increases the possibility that the second fragment also belonged to On Principles, but its content and terminology are so close to another fragment of On Intellect that it is very difficult, indeed, to separate them. One feature these two extracts have in common is that their author reveals an unusual interest in mathémata compared with the other pseudo-Pythagorean texts, which are rather shallow in this respect. Examples from geometry, arithmetic, harmonics, and mechanics are scattered throughout the text, and I wish U.’s commentary on these issues was as extensive as on the other. Ps.-Brotinus On Intellect and Discursive Thought is a seven-line quotation from Iamblichus (157) on the difference between two upper segments of Plato’s divided line, dianoia and nous. U. regrettably omits Iamblichus’ introductory sentence containing the name and title, διόπερ καὶ Βροτῖνος ἐν τῷ Περὶ νοῦ καὶ διανοίας (55.20 Thesleff) and prints only his quotation. Her commentary (158– 164) places this Middle Platonic exercise in the context of contemporary philoso––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Thesleff, op. cit., 36. J. Mansfeld. ‘Pythagoras’ and ps.-Archytas On Principles’, in: Elenchos 40, 2019, 123– 135. 1 2 GNOMON 5/92/2020 L. Zhmud: Ulacco, Pseudopythagorica Dorica 405 phy which did not feel any need to ask how Pythagoras’ father-in-law could have known about Plato’s Republic. U.’s book is fine and solid scholarship, it will be welcomed by all interested in the pseudo-Pythagorean literature and more generally in post-Hellenistic philosophy. St. Petersburg Leonid Zhmud * Gregor Staab: Gebrochener Glanz. Klassische Tradition und Alltagswelt im Spiegel neuer und alter Grabepigramme des griechischen Ostens. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter 2018. XII, 412 S. 27 Abb. (Untersuchungen zur antiken Literatur und Geschichte. 130.) 109,95 €. Staab has made an excellent addition to the burgeoning field of Greek epigram studies. Students of inscribed epigram will welcome his detailed treatment of verse epitaphs on stone from Asia Minor in the Imperial period, an era not as intensely worked over as earlier times have been. Moreover, although the texts owe most of their literary debt to Homer and other pre-Hellenistic authors, the ‘klassische Tradition’ of Staab’s subtitle includes literary epigrammatists as well as Callimachus. Staab’s book also aims, successfully, at audiences interested in the continuing vitality of Classical literary education and culture in the Imperial East and in that tradition’s integration into the experiences of the people who composed epitaphs, set up markers, and were honored by them. Continuing a trend that began in the fourth century BCE, these texts are more informative about the lives and deaths of a wider range of people than was typical earlier, and they therefore constitute important sources, not only of intellectual or literary history, but also of social history (the ‘Alltagswelt’ of the subtitle). The title’s ‘Gebrochener Glanz’ refers to the radiance of Classical literature that glimmers in these often incomplete and imperfect texts (when compared to literary epigrams) and lends its sheen to the deceased and their families. This revision of Staab’s 2016/2017 Köln Habilitationsschrift offers an in-depth treatment that stands on its own; but the book is also designed as a supplement to the monumental, but rather laconic SGO: R. Merkelbach and J. Stauber, ‘Steinepigramme aus dem griechischen Osten’ (Stuttgart, Leipzig, Munich, 1998– 2004, 5 vols.). Readers of this volume should have SGO to hand. The ‘old grave epigrams’ of Staab’s subtitle appear in SGO; he draws heavily on them in his commentaries as well as in Part I, which offers a synthesis of the kind not found in SGO. Staab’s ‘new epigrams’ do not appear in SGO; most are recently found and have been edited since SGO appeared, several by Staab himself over the last decade. For these ‘new’ texts, Staab extends the triple numbering system of SGO, which indicates ‘region/city/item’, but entries are preceded by an asterisk. Thus, *01/01/14 (p. 328) follows SGO 01/01/13, the last complete epitaph from the Karian coast (region 01), specifically Knidos (city 01 in that region). While Staab has identified some 400 ‘new’ epigrams and is preparing a complete collection (p. 328), this book concerns itself with a selection of them, mostly Imperial-era epigrams from Asia Minor: in Part II, he presents editions of and commentaries on nineteen sepulchral epigrams, of which *17/11/03 (pp. 186–94), *04/14/02 GNOMON 5/92/2020