H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: PRETESTATO

 G.: Praetextatus again, then. Still Roman, still senatorial, still very high office, and still not securely a commentator on Themistius. S.: You did a further run. G.: I did, and the result is sober rather than sensational. I found good material on Themistius’s paraphrase of the Posterior Analytics and on the manuscript tradition of his Aristotelian paraphrases, but nothing that firmly places Vettius Agorius Praetextatus in the apparatus, testimonia, or prefatory notices as a commentator on Themistius. [eulogikon.org], [jstor.org] S.: So the claim remains unverified. G.: More than that. It becomes increasingly suspect as a positive historical statement. S.: Yet we may still have our conversation. G.: Naturally. Oxford has never waited for total certainty before producing a perfectly good discussion. S.: Then begin with Themistius. These are not Aristotle’s “philosophical speeches.” G.: No. That phrase must be corrected at once. Aristotle did not sit down and write a set of speeches later performed by Themistius. What Themistius wrote were paraphrases of Aristotelian treatises: explanatory, pedagogical re-presentations in smoother Greek prose. [lechiesediroma.info], [eulogikon.org] S.: So if someone said that Praetextatus commented on Themistius, the likely object would be a paraphrase of some Aristotelian work. G.: Exactly. Perhaps the Posterior Analytics, perhaps the Physics, perhaps another of the paraphrases. But that is only what would be likely if the claim were true. It does not make the claim true. S.: And you now have the incipit for one. G.: Yes. The opening of the paraphrase of the Posterior Analytics is secure enough from the digital Greek archive. It begins: Ἐμοὶ συντάττεσθαι μὲν ἐξηγήσεις τῶν Ἀριστοτελικῶν βιβλίων μετὰ τοσούτους τε καὶ τοιούτους οὐκ ἐδόκει πόρρωθεν εἶναι φιλοτιμίας ἀνωφελοῦς ... [eulogikon.org] S.: Translate it, then. G.: In English first: “It did not seem to me far removed from useless ambition to compose expositions of Aristotle’s books after so many authors and such distinguished ones ...” [eulogikon.org] S.: Dry enough already. G.: Dry, yes, and self-aware. Themistius says, in effect, that after so many able predecessors, writing full-scale expositions would look almost vain. S.: And the Latin. G.: Let us make it decently schoolmanlike: Mihi quidem expositiones librorum Aristotelicorum post tot ac tales viros componere non videbatur procul ab inutili ambitione abesse ... S.: Very good. One hears the ancient commentator apologising in advance for commenting. G.: Exactly. Which is one reason I like him. The commentator begins by acknowledging the crowded dignity of the commentarial queue. S.: And then he says, further on, that what is useful is not full rival commentary but a concise extraction of Aristotle’s intentions. G.: Yes. The same opening passage makes that clear. He wants to pick out the βουλήματα, the intentions or purports of what Aristotle wrote, and present them swiftly and briefly for readers who have studied Aristotle once but cannot keep returning to large commentaries. [eulogikon.org] S.: So the paraphrase is pedagogical compression. G.: Precisely. Less a scholion than a civil service of recollection. S.: Then if Praetextatus had commented on Themistius, he would have been commenting on a commentator of Aristotle. G.: Yes, which would already give him a respectable third-rank dignity: Roman senator, pagan grandee, high office under Julian and after, reduced in leisure to glossing a gloss of the Liceo. S.: The Liceo. G.: Or the Lyceum, or as the common room would sooner say, the lizio, if only to keep Aristotle from sounding too school-board. S.: You admit, then, that this would make Praetextatus less a member of an Academy than a third-rate commentator of the Lyceum. G.: If the claim were true, yes. And there is still no evidence that it is. S.: No Academy, then. G.: No securely attested Academy. No evidence from this run that he belonged to any formal Platonic Academy in the relevant sense. He was a Roman senator, priest, initiate, high official, defender of cults, and highly Hellenising aristocrat. That is what we know. [en.wikipedia.org], [mithraeum.eu] S.: Entirely Roman credentials. G.: Entirely Roman, yes. Latin name, Latin civic career, Latin inscriptions, Roman office, Roman city, Roman pagan elite. Greek culture does not subtract Romanity in the fourth century. S.: Yet suppose, for the pleasure of the thing, that he did comment on Themistius’s paraphrase of the Posterior Analytics. Why would a Roman senator be interested in such a dry object. G.: Because dryness is often irresistible to grand men once religion has ceased to suffice and politics has begun to pall. S.: That is a cynical answer. G.: A Roman one. Besides, the Posterior Analytics concerns scientific knowledge, demonstration, first principles. A senator who wished to style himself a cultivated pagan of serious philosophical stamp might well find such a work useful. S.: Useful for what. G.: For appearing not merely pious and politically dignified but intellectually exact. The old senatorial paganism of the fourth century was not only cultic. It was self-consciously learned. S.: Still, the Posterior Analytics and Prior Analytics are not exactly the first things a civilised undergraduate hugs. G.: Heaven forbid. I myself went only so far as the Categories and De Interpretatione with much comfort. The Analytics always looked like the sort of Aristotelian country one visits out of duty and leaves grateful to be alive. S.: So if Praetextatus had written on Themistius’s paraphrase of the Posterior Analytics, he would have gone farther into the Analytics than you cared to. G.: Disturbingly farther, yes. S.: Was he then a traitor to the Roman cause. G.: What Roman cause. S.: The anti-Greek one. G.: There was never a stable anti-Greek Roman cause among educated Romans worth speaking of. There was Roman hauteur, Roman appropriation, Roman impatience, Roman superiority, Roman bilingual vanity. But cultivated Romans had been feeding on Greek philosophy for centuries. S.: Even before Christ. G.: Obviously. And before Julian too, and before your modern sub-faculty of philosophy dreamt of imitating anyone. S.: Ah yes, the Sub-Faculty of Philosophy. G.: Instituted in Oxford in the twentieth century, formally under Literae Humaniores first and later with a more autonomous life, but not, so far as I know, out of any nostalgia for Julian the Apostate. S.: I had hoped they wanted to go back to Julian. G.: Oxford wants to go back to many things and never quite reaches any of them. S.: Yet Julian matters here. G.: He does. Praetextatus flourished under Julian in the sense that Julian’s reign reopened a political horizon for learned pagan aristocrats. But Julian was also, in the old Christian joke, he who gave the victory to the Galilean by trying too theatrically to resist him. S.: Because the attempted pagan restoration sharpened the contrast and failed. G.: Exactly. Julian made pagan seriousness look noble, but also belated. S.: So Praetextatus belongs to that noble belatedness. G.: Very much so. Which is why a hypothetical comment on Themistius would fit him psychologically, even if not yet historically. A late Roman senator proving that Hellenic philosophy still has civilised life in it. S.: And Themistius himself was a statesman-philosopher. G.: Quite. Senator, orator, imperial adviser, pagan under Christian emperors, and a man who managed to make Aristotle useful to public life without turning him into a camp or a sect. [eulogikon.org], [bmcr.brynmawr.edu] S.: So Praetextatus might have liked him. G.: He might well have. That remains a plausible cultural affinity. But affinity is not commentary. S.: Then the incipit again. It is wonderfully modest. G.: Yes. Themistius says that after so many predecessors it would be a form of useless ambition to compose expositions. But he then claims a lesser novelty: not to rival the μεγάλαι ὑπομνήσεις, the large commentaries, but to extract the intentions concisely and help memory. [eulogikon.org] S.: So a Roman senator commenting on that would be commenting on a text that is already a digest. G.: A digest of Aristotle by a statesman-philosopher. Which begins to sound almost too perfect for late-antique aristocratic leisure. S.: Then what precisely is the Posterior Analytics paraphrase about, in opening. G.: It opens with pedagogic conditions of learning. The passage soon turns to the claim that anyone who is going to attend to any scientific learning must already possess certain natural starting-points by which he knows something in advance about the matter; one cannot receive everything from the teacher. The pupil must bring something from home, so to speak. [eulogikon.org] S.: A very tutorial thought. G.: Entirely. Themistius would have been tolerable in Oxford for at least one term. S.: Then perhaps Praetextatus wanted to educate the Roman classes. G.: Not the plebs, surely. S.: Why not. G.: Because senatorial philosophers rarely educate the plebs through Greek Aristotelian paraphrase. They educate themselves, their circle, their cultivated juniors, perhaps a rhetorically imagined public of learned men. S.: So not a democratic project. G.: Heaven no. A Roman senator reading or even annotating Themistius is not opening an institute for workers in Trastevere. S.: Then not a traitor to Rome, merely a Roman using Greek philosophy as part of elite self-fashioning. G.: Precisely. Rome had long ago conquered Greece and then spent the next centuries borrowing its furniture. S.: Yet Aristotle was anti-Roman. G.: Aristotle was dead before Rome became philosophically relevant to him. To call him anti-Roman is to flatter Roman chronology. S.: Fair. G.: Very. The Greeks before Christ do not arrange themselves in advance either for or against Rome. Rome later appropriates them under its own afterlight. S.: Then Praetextatus could study Aristotle through Themistius without ceasing to be Roman. G.: Entirely. In fact, it would almost intensify his Romanity in that late-aristocratic mode where Roman rule and Greek paideia are worn together. S.: So the correct formula is not that Greek text implies non-Roman author, but that late Roman aristocracy was perfectly capable of being deeply Greek in culture and entirely Roman in civic identity. G.: Exactly. S.: Let us linger on the possibility of the apparatus criticus. G.: Yes. I did not find Praetextatus there, but I did find evidence about the manuscript tradition of Themistius’s Aristotelian paraphrases and references to the prefaces of the CAG editions as a place where manuscript matters are discussed. [jstor.org], [archive.org] S.: So if one wanted to settle the matter, where would one go. G.: To the old CAG editions of Themistius, especially the prefaces, testimonia, and manuscript discussions, rather than merely the running apparatus below the Greek text. Also to prosopographical entries and perhaps to a specialised study of late-antique testimonia on Praetextatus. S.: In other words, dusty books. G.: The only proper sort. S.: And the specific work. G.: If we were narrowing rationally, I would begin with the CAG volume for the Posterior Analytics paraphrase, because we have the incipit and because this is a securely surviving Greek paraphrase with a clear prefatory self-description. [archive.org], [eulogikon.org] S.: Then let us suppose, still hypothetically, that Praetextatus commented on this very opening. What might have attracted him. G.: Several things. The relation between teacher and learner. The necessity of pre-existing principles. The compressed pedagogic dignity of Themistius. The chance to appear both Aristotelian and urbane. The whole enterprise of making hard Greek logic civilly teachable. S.: Making dry Greek logic Romanly habitable. G.: Exactly. S.: You sound almost sympathetic. G.: To Themistius, yes. To Praetextatus as hypothetical commentator, conditionally. To the historical claim, no. S.: Then no Academy, no secure platonicus, no verified commentary, but a plausible Hellenising Roman aristocrat who might have liked a statesman’s paraphrase of Aristotle. G.: That is the exact and dull truth. S.: Dullness is often the beginning of scholarship. G.: The middle too. S.: And the Latin translation once more, polished. G.: Very well: Mihi quidem, post tot ac tales viros, expositiones librorum Aristotelicorum componere non videbatur ab inutili quadam ambitione longe abesse. And if one wishes the continuation in the same manner: Illud tamen novum et utile visum est, si quis sententias eorum quae in libris scripta sunt celeriter colligat atque, quantum fieri potest, philosophi brevitatem breviter assequatur. S.: Excellent. One hears the old schoolroom sigh. G.: A useful sigh. Themistius is saying, “I shall not rival the giants; I shall help memory.” S.: Then perhaps the final judgment on Praetextatus is this. Entirely Roman by civic and social identity, highly Hellenised in culture, plausibly interested in Greek philosophy, but not yet shown by evidence in hand to have commented on Themistius, much less to have belonged to any Academy. G.: Precisely. S.: And if someone insists that he wrote a commentary on Themistius. G.: Then I should ask, on what work, from what source, in which testimonium, and why the apparatus remains so coy. S.: Dry enough. G.: Sufficiently Capitoline, with one eye on the lizio.