[16.xii.19]

Kindly consider the following illustration, taken from, a treasure, 304 Ashmole by title , the prognostica Socratis basilei .  Do we need to picture our neo-Socrates with a crown on his head?    Like the two men from Plautus’s TWINS, a crown helping us keep them distinct ?   One has the suggestive (alternate) name ‘SOSICLES’ !  D. Robinson’s 1995 OCT Plato text of ‘Politicus’ wants us to recycle the new Socrates backwards to his namesake [recall text of Theaetetus where Elder Socrates experiences a term with a possibly deeper meaning   he uses the academicallly specialist term ‘homonym’ .   A prophesy of what especially ?  Focal meaning of mid 20th century AD, and  GELOwen as focuser ]  This resides at their Bodleian Library, its 1937 annex and is under the care of Mr, Bruce Barker-Benfield.   One attribution of the character at stage-right is Aristotle.   My preferred attribution is astronomer-friend and teacher-of-Socrates, that is, PLATO.

Socrates astrolabe observer — with Plato (qu.)

 

A detailed sequence of arguments needs further spelling out,  — preferably here at youngersocrates.com, — on the point here in Epinomis related to naming pollcy or ‘onomasia‘.

LAWS 12,10, saving power even for ANIMALS, sub-political , yet within the picture(s)

LEODES – root verb leidzesthai [ Aristotle’s ] probls 29,4 ethical gradients & swteria too

SWTHRIA eight times in 2 successive pp

 

Our best Plato ms., the Paris “A”, exhibits this rare word from Philip’s writing this way:

Epin Chapt 2, ‘onomaseia’ fol 292v col A, rev 2

Do please consider the close resemblances of the term somewhat misleadingly reported by both the indexes, those of Brandwood and Radice.   Some of the evidence is on exhibit here:

Polit 275D, ONOMASIA(n) near-hapax in Plato

It is a striking point about a proposition in Euclid (namely Bk X, Prop. 38 that an explanatory note attaching to it in our best mss. includes the word ONOMASIA.   It is the name ‘Minor’ or ‘Lesser’ in the technical meaning of an irrational line-length which is at issue in Prop. 38.   But this proposition, leads promptly (via X, 104) to the very chapter of its final Book in which we find the (Theaetetus-sourced)  constructions of the ‘platonic solids’.    This is exactly the Book X which treats of various compounded quadratic irrrationals, including the so-called ‘MAJOR’ and its compatriot ‘MINOR’ both deployed by Theaetetus  in Book XIII, constructing the Platonic Solids.    X, 38is part of this same sequence (see logical stemma diagrammed here)    Plato’s friend Theaetetus, was both the man Bulmer-Thomas held to be closer to Plato than any other mortal — Elder Socrates excepted — and the likely author of this entire Euclidean sequence.   Back in its initial chapter there are seven (7) manifests of pre-euclidean and pre-socrates (h.e. Thucydides-era) AIEI.   Statistically this is a serious anomaly within Euclid’s text — but naturally explained if this companion of Younger Socrates (himself from Sunium near Athens) was its initial author.

This chapter of Philip’s dialogue has distinctive elements which echo both thought and language in Chapt. 10 of LAWS Book 12.   Notably there is a the theme which we may call, following Aristotle’s report in Metaphysics. Zeta about Younger Socrates:   his ‘repeated use of his parable of the animals’.  the way this same theme continues in the vicinity of Plato, Younger Socrates and Aristotle will need to be brought into sharper focus, following up on Shorey’s remark that Aristotle is being alluded to here in Epinomis.    Several other elements, these being of a more literary sort, will need to be added to the analysis.   This will bring in the outcropping of allusion to the man named Amphinomus at the Academy, referred to multiple times by Proclus in his commentary on Euclid Book I.   This is the Homeric character who appears alongside his fellow suitor [of late in Odyssey] — the suitor named Leiodes.   Both figures taken from the epic background often turning up the late writings of Plato.  Both can add detail to our Academic scene where various so-called ‘successors’ or quasi-successors to Plato worked alongide both Plato and one another.   This energetic collaboration which caused one and another comic poet — not just Epicharmus, but possibly Eubulus, whose work Stallbaum found closely relevant to explaining Republic Book VII.   The pair of names Speusippus and Amphinomus are arranged together in the history by Eudemus of Rhodes — a work alas only extant in small fragments today.   They are ranged in opposition to a familiar of Plato’s, Menaechmus.   Both of the pair were anxious to protect mathematics against any tarnish of our lower world of time and change.   Keep our Academic mathematics pure, keep it radically separate from physics and mechanics.

More work may be called for here deciphering Plautus’s play of mistaken identity, the Menaechmus Twins.   It is suggestive that the civilian name of one of this latter pair is ‘Sosicles’.    But others of these quasi-successors at Plato’s elbow carved out well-deserved writing careers, there in Athens and beyond.  I refer especially to Eudoxus and Aristotle.    We may describe any of these 3 men as ‘quasi-Diadochoi’ of Plato’s(decoding the ‘quamsi’ we may translate ‘as-if’ successors) — even Eudoxus and Aristotle — were some of the Athenian suitors familiar to Plato.   The theme is general:  how to guarantee to one’s inheritance and legacy a special kind of safekeeping  ( σωτηρία )   [John Adam in his magisterial edition [when he was still in his forties!] of Republic permitted himself a momentary fit of zeal when he divined a ‘prophetical import’, in pneumatic dimension, underlying Platos logos here.  Quite likely neither Shorey nor Slings nor Calder would do the same  divining, I judge.]

 

Do please have patience to study the following graphic, with care for Aristotle’s special use of safeguarding or guaranteeing Truth:     the key concept is Greek  σωτηρία .  Point of view history of language, this Hellenic word underlies less ancient words such as ‘soteriology’ and musician’s band name ‘Soterios Johnson’.   Also underlying the name of political theorist ( possible Strauss follower ? possibly an independent thinker, say I) , ‘Sotirios Barber’ the named man now at Notre Dame’s Dept of Political Science.

Rudy Rucker, actual and possible 02022020

It is precisely this theme and its effectuating of a saving-and-safekeeping process, which turned out to sustain Plato’s early Academy, and cause it to manage to leave a ricich additional tradition of many centuries of illustrious history.   Something of the same associations with Plato’s mathematical motto ‘save the phainomena’ is encapsulated here also.   The Academy’s strong survival for many centuries seems to have drawn heavily upon this initial era before Aristotle departed.  In any case Plato, Philip and Aristotle all played large roles in the earliest part of this near-miraculous institutional history.     The challenges it overcame and built upon included internal disputations of great intensity.    Thus we can align this Early Academy group with those of Homer’s Ithaca on the side of epic story.   Its strength will have been originally based, however, on strengths of Plato, Younger Socrates and the very young Aristotle.   This means strengths in various mathematical and physical sciences.    Astronomy, mathematics, physical sciences. and the ‘quadrivium’, from Archytas on down.   Rather than do damage to the Academy as an institution, its traditions of vigorous intramural disputes will be key for the later chapters of this success story.     Amphinomus and Telemachus lent their untiring efforts to Homer’s story;   Younger Socrates (= Academy’s Amphinomus) and young Aristotle were equally full of energy and skill on the side of the Early Academy. main to which the legends of Pythagoras and his early followers are central characters.

The scholarly world might meantime be so lucky as to experience a strong boost, if some or all of his literary remains got published, — those of the late B.  Einarson, deceased in 1978 before finishing his critical edition of Philip’s dialogue, with his notations.   Very likely Chapt. 2 of this work will have drawn special attention and writing from Prof. Einarson.

You may be interested in seeing the handwritten text of an October 1974 scholarly letter to me expressing his ‘long regretted’ omission of some points about Plato and his companions. isn’t it rich to have a man of Icelandic descent writing an exotic angloGreatLakes word ‘uneed’ ?   I omit to mention this word — or at least praeteritively omit  ‘UNEED‘ (p.1)   His death just some 3 or 4 years later left our scholarly community much diminished.   His students from William M Calder III on still miss him   So do I.

Einarson ltr to me of 22 Oct 1974, p. 1

Einarson ltr to me of 22 Oct 1974, p. 2 & env, copy2

May our beloved Chicagoan Einarson rest fully in peace, unless just in a trifling way stirred by his unorthodoxy with Paul Shorucydides.ey’s second-favorite language  English.   Let me repeat his word again or praeteritate it for the record:  ‘UNEED’  May we not attune ourselves in hopes of catching Einarson’s response to what Philip  and his best student Aristotle called the AITHER, now called by post-Einstein ‘ETHER’ ?  [These post-Einstein physicists are stunningly adventurous at last count their non-Aristotle logics had 8 truth values — twice the number, coincidentally, of Plato’s aether-free universe.   Earnest McClain of Brooklyn College may also be stirred by such ideas ? ]

This is the small chapter including what we may call a ‘parable on the animals’.   It runs fewer than 90 lines in each of its various editions.

 

Most especially and peculiarly notewworthy in this image, it makes you free to inspect directly the Plato ms. A.   This contains a segment with an example of one of those ‘exertional’ or ‘effortful’ or ‘struggling to X’ or ‘take pains to X’   All of them struggles to carryout X’ing.    We see this pattern, oddly enough, in a strongly infectings by the {=Philip} author into the imperfect tense :  ὀνομάσειαν   Do notice how this inflection — in this case of an Einarson-arresting verb  ‘to give a name to’, ὀνομάζω .  It follows the platonic preference for the old-Attic variant pattern, exhibited by Euripides in his Alcestis — two of Euripides’s characters struggling to hold back anguished tears .

 

Epin Chapt 2, ‘onomaseian’ fol 292v col A, rev 2

[24.xi.19]rof. Joseph Arel has recently published an insightful piece elaborating on recollection in Meno and bringing in connections between self-awareness and blindness averted or inverted.  He does this with much vigor and clarity, without swagger.    He also and makes ample references to Derrida’s work the ‘aveugle’

Here, in this pair of links, you will see a set of singular signs of A. De Morgan’s achieving witty results based upon subjects in ancient physics, especially the ideas of Thales of Miletus.  He plays artfully on the word ‘niemand‘.    If we take this word (improperly) as a proper name, we are reminded of ancient models of such impropriety, either Plato’s disapproved predecessors the Atomists or his much approved classical Homer and Homer’s many troped hero Odysseus.   Recall the adopted proper name :  when our hero is imprisoned inside the Cyclops Polyphemus’ lair.  Odysseus is not often credited with a Sisyphus kind of  wit there in Polyphemus’s auditorium.    Odysseus has a logician’s mask or guise:    ‘ou-tis‘ [ Οὔτις ] is my (improper)  name.    The giant’s infinite appetite (alas for us all, a specifically anthropophagous appetite !) is heard to reach its end with this very mortal.   The logician guise — one of many in the set of guises behind which Odysseus disguises himself functions yet once again inside Polyphemus’s cave.   How can ‘Mr. Nobody’ serve as the limiter (sic) to this no-upper-bound appetite?    One of this Poly-appetitive giant’s habits is, we must recall, that he continually REGURGITATES the humans he had just swallowed.   Like Archytas, he manages to conflate an infinity into a Truth of which the potentiality and the actual being are Same with each other.   Archytas A24 in Diels & Kranz, — when fleshed out into a kind of B0 fragment by Heath — includes this conflation explicitly.   Heath does this in his History of Greek Mathematics Vol 2, his write-up of Archytas there.   Likely Aristotle, when sufficiently mature in age and thinking-power, would know how to accommodate such a conflation of potentiality and actuality, if someone led him onto it, perhaps via the Robinsonian work on hyperreality and his associated hyperreal numbers.   Below I analyse further a few ideas provoked by reasonings like this:

point at infinity, analysed by R. Goldblatt (2012)

I am aware of several serious hazards here, to do with aggressive anachronism.   Yet the formula ‘… had anyone led him onto it’ certainly guides some wary walking in the forward direction of poetic license.   And the e-environment allows for scholarly and other safeguards (even ‘sOteria’ as Plato calls this in Chapt. 10 of LAWS 12, where he permits himself a specialist term for a disguise or mask, the word  προσρήματα .

Much of this story of Odysseus, known also as Son-of-Sisyphus can be better understood under the guise of his ‘prosrhEma’.    Holger Thesleff strongly approved of my rendering this alternate father’s name under the English phrase ‘Mr. So So Savvy’.   It is something I would delight to learn personally of, but to date this remains untrue, that D.S. Hutchinson of the Hackett COMPLETE WORKS OF PLATO, translator of ‘Sisyphus’ dialogue there — to learn personally that the author of ‘Sisyphus’ was in fact Younger Socrates.    He will have been among the few at the Early Academy, a few too small to include young Aristotle, who understood the then-new solution to  the Deliac Riddle about cube-doubling.    I have argued separately [‘Plato on Doubling the Cube’ 1987]  that within Plato’s immediate circle there were at least a few who fully understood the problem and understood the Academy-linked solution.     is a rare word for ‘name’ in Plato, found only 6 times in any of its inflected forms singular or plural — extreme rarity when compared to over 450 specimens of onoma/onomata in the entire Plato.    Cratylus  positively overflows with the terms onoma/onomata  this is natural and also nearly necessary from its subject: one specimen of onomata is its very title.    It is not until Chapt 34, however, that we find the first specimen of ‘prosrEsis’. ( =προσρήσις)     But it is not only its striking rarity, this term for a mask or guise or moniker pops up.

More emphatic does this rarity become in what Crat. Chapt XXIV brings along behind  the mask or guise.    We can safely indulge in language and coding on which John Cooper has expressed his strong scepticism and aversion:    the code-encrusted  shudder-quotation markngs , thus my temporary willingness (pace JCooper — he will please count me as sharing his strong aversion to the DRobinson and Oxford Text conventions).     Sedley’s work on Cratylus indicates that he too shares this feeling of aversion to the code-encrustings, i.e. the cumbrous and non-Plato encrustations I am temporarily seeming willing to use):   ταύτης τῆς προσρήσεως  “τοῦ εἶναι”  (‘this moniker “Being” ‘) Crat. 423e4, with the inclusion of my intrusive encrustation.

Now to return from fancy to fact.   In the mere 90 lines — plus or minus a few lines in varying editions — the roughly synonymous ‘onoma’ words outnumber prosrEma’s by a 10:1 ratio.   Imagine the fate of poor Odysseus were his guise and mask  “τὸ μὴ εἶναι”  removed from the front of his prosopon (call this ‘his polytropic face’).    It would require a veritable Truth Team to do just the correct unmasking of this Person.   Perhaps such experts as we have been recently been calling by Rep. I‘s moniker “hoi to onti logistikoi” , Kripke, Wiggins, Barnes and the vestiges or shadows or ‘hyperreal neighbours’ of WVQuine — to borrow language from R. Goldblatt on hyperreal numbers).   It might be tempting, —  if also a properly resisted temptation — to go along with recent writers on Neutrosophy.   This would allow us, improperly enough. to seek out a middle (neutral) value halfway between   ” τοῦ εἶναι ”  and  “τὸ μὴ εἶναι”    Albert M. Sweet’s 3-valued  system of mathematical logic assigns a third value after 1 and 0 (he assigned the prosrEma ‘2’) ,  but I believe he always denied that this was to be halfway between 1 and 0.   He and I were fond of calling it ‘shrug’.    Clearly Sweet should be on the Truth Team for our neo-Socratic purposes.

Plenty of logical caution is naturally required if one ventures to add-one atop one’s two valued logic.   At every border there are absurdities lurking, serious enough to draw a stern rebuke from the man gaining maturity by the day and contemplating his role as ‘founding the sciences of logic (and zoology)’ as J Barnes rightly describes Aristotle.  “You might as well be arguing against a vegetable or other plant-based subhuman as argue against the man who toys with the fancy that he will disregard Non-Contradiction.”  (my paraphrase, but the text is not remote from this, in Metaphys Gamma if I recall correctly).

For the purposes of this present website on Socrates-Alternate (yet other alternate masks being ‘Amphinomus’ of unknown city — say Ithaka, or ‘Krates’ of unknown city — say Ithaka)This rare usage notably includes the case of , including notably a specimen at the beginning of Chapt. 10 in LAWS XII,  This usage is striking, and deserves scholarly attention, especially here, where Philip of Opus tips his hand, so to speak unmasking himself. ) was said to be ‘Outis‘.    Thales’s publications — none are now extant —  are illustrative of the atomists’s prosrhEma for the void, h.e.  the ou- part of their ou-den.  Democritus exercised his wit in having each half of the guise refer separately, the first ‘ou‘ to the Void and the second (only in fancy separable) ‘den‘ to the Beings in his reductive universe.

Siem Slings devoted some intensive scholarly attention in his interpreting of Rep. VI, and its elaborate wordplay on ‘ourano’ and a soundalike word ‘orato’, signifying seeing.  Here Slings can rely on having divined Plato’s intent in this witty byplay, in that Plato’s text confesses to the peccadillo in point.   That is the little prank on the reader which is to shift about amongst the cognate sounds and not-remote meanings.    [an extremely recent display of a heavenly kilonova event by laser interferometry observatory has drawn special notice, in that for millenia now the heavenly motions and changes have only been observable via humans’s sense of sight.  As of two very recent decades, these hyper-special devices are able to deliver observations to the human EAR, thus putting the first quarter of the XXI century A.D. into a quite different position and posture in re our celestial surroundings.  Perhaps there had been a singular example of human sense of touch in the case of the mid XX century moon-walk).   In any case seeing or hearing observational data from a carefully anticipated gravity-wave is truly quite new, and will remain amazing even to experts for decades to come.

We  owe it to the special dedication and sophisticated graphic work based at the New York Times, and to the careful reporting by Dennis Overbye, that we are able to visualise something not appreciably removed (physically or mathematically) from what R. Goldblatt’s ‘Lectures on the Hyperreal Numbers’ referred to, to be sure with shudder-quotes surrounding his phrase:  ‘the point at infinity’.    Please do have a look, at the same time understanding that the sphere-shaped blackish object and its rapid plummeting down through our local universe’s space-time matrix:

point near-infinity by ek-tenouse and Archytas2

Soon I plan to offer further analysis of Plato’s uses — especially in late dialogues — of terms closely linked to the extremely rare word for masks or disguises, προσρήματα  , as it surfaces very near the end of Plato’s LAWS (XII, 10)    Do please exercise your patience.   Exercise that singular variant of patience I have come to call Cufalo-patience.    This is a coinage or a prosrEsis based on my admired colleague in Pisa, Domenico Cufalo, whose second volume of the plato mss. Scholia is eagerly awaited, including over here in the USA.  Can the ‘rhEma’ part suggest the predicate term in a paired onoma-rhEma, where the onoma named the root cause (in this case the -krateia) and the rhEma its actual effect (in this case Swdzein or Swteria).      John Adam found such power to save hinted at in Book VI of Republic, and even pressed the analogy it suggested to his mind via Plato’s words of ‘prophetical import’.    But he stopped short of mentioning Nazareth.   Prudently enough we may here add, in the plain and sober line of unprophetical terms.

Philip, a.k.a. Amphinomus as author of De Mundo, ‘Epinomis’ ‘p. Thewn’

But the gravity-wave emanating from that mysterious point some 2 billion light-years distant continues to experience a mysterious aura about it.   There may occur a few dozens or scores of confirming LIGO observations before this new century ends, but ‘point at infinity’ may still seem a mere trick of words, rather than a scientific reality or hyperreality.   Here in our Anglo-American speaking community it is customary to have speakers offering their ‘apologies’ for seeming to perpetrate a pun or play a trick of words.   And clearly in Plato’s Athens one could find those offended by exhibits of similar philological theatrics.    Plato locates this wicked word-play in the penultimate chapter of the key middle Book 5 of his masterwork, Republic.   Notice how Plato signals his own self-consciousness and his conscientiousness over this  remark near this seeing-or-heaven passage:

εἰπὼν σοι σοφίζεσθαι περὶ τὸ ὄνομα [509d3]  [=  ‘I seem to be speaking a sophism over the word.’ ]

In the myth at the end of Phaedo, recall, the soul is meant to see with newfound power after being freed from its erstwhile body;  it is calculated to be advantaged with a new heaven-specific clarity of vision.   One will see well enough, soon enough (I might echo some idiomatic present-day French.)

Plato’s own wit, especially when challenged by his two students Aristotle and Philip of Opus, gave rise to published writing.   To include the π. κοσμου.   I judge the little work to have been authored by Philp of Opus, a.k.a. Younger Socrates.   Some of my arguments are supplied elsewhere.  In any case this work makes efforts at witty etymologies, especially in its seventh and final chapter, analysing the names of gods.  I refer to Chapt.. 7 of the π. κοσμου (=De Mundo).

One argument is as follows.   We are entitled to a good decipherment of the little anacoluthon of our best texts of Timaeus 28b, a little aside which  seems to be executing a play of wit:   call your book what you may, they both look to me to be about The All.   This little aside continues ‘. . . or whatever else we may opt to entitle it’.   The text uses the optative of urbanity here, a usage which earned the title optativus urbanitatis.  It is a common urbanity within Plato, often one he has issuing from an Athenian and addressing another speaker from that same city.    But it is just as fitting if a Londoner such as Jonathan Barnes is addressing a fellow Oxonian J. Annas.    Something we might imagine Plato to have added here might read this way :  ‘. . .my good and early editors might one day want to add the alternate title :  π. πύσεως ( p, Physews ) .

This last title would match nicely our Timaeus phrase ‘or whatever else we may opt to name it’  Were Plato to emulate Philodemus and his tradition he might opt for the Latin version, De [rerum] Natura.    Each of you two, my early academic disciples may opt differently, Aristotle in certifiable fact opting for  Π. οὐρανοῦ  (De Caelo) and Philip on my authorship hypothesis Π. κόσμου   It now appears in Aristotle’s Bekker edition, the roughly 10 Bekker pages prior to and including the final theological chapter, on p. 401.  There continues to be lively scholarly debate, including by J. Barnes of France about its true authorship.  A moderate view mediating between those who have it written centluries after Aristotle, and the extreme view that it comes directly from Aristotle is the position here:  it comes direct from Aristotle’s early days at the Academy, near to the date of his DeCaelo, from the hand neither of Aristotle nor his famous teacher.  Rather from the teacher assigned him by the Vita Marciana, Socrates Alternate.

An additional follower of Plato, Holger Thesleff, has for many decades now admired Plato’s wit.   There are many of us Plato-admirers, both “Quick and Dead”  as A.E. Taylor wrote.  He exercised a specialist wit in thus including himself as one amongst the dedicatees, even today.   Some of us are still quick today.  Plato, the man and his work.    One can reasonably say even that Holger is a major participant in the platonic Ideal of Platonic Wit.   Thesleff’s admiration of Plato is very durable indeed, and he exhibits many of the virtues of Plato-lovers all.   A notable virtue, which Thesleff is witty in his own naming of it.    I feel sure he will plead guilty, before St. Peter, of the seeming vice, ‘The Over-Attentive Reader’.    Where do we find a more worthy subject for such extreme reading, than the writer Plato ?   A subject author of very distinctly lower value, the author of Epinomis and De Kosmou.  can be compared.  Each stands as by a  ‘pseudigraphos’ in their appendings, — one to Plato’s corpus and one to Aristotle’s.   I believe the author of both to be the same man, namely Philip of Opus, a.k.a. Younger Socrates.   Below I will offer my opinion that the ps-platonic Sisyphus

Denniston’s posthumous book on Greek Prose Style made various depreciatory remarks about Plato’s very latest writing, especially in LAWS.  One could hardly seek out in a more likely place for samples of what Denniston calls puerille writing by Plato near the end of his life.  Consider a case, here exhibited in our best ms. (75 years prior to Ephraim’s fine ms. T).   It manifests at the end of the end chapter (#14) of the end book (#12) of all Plato’s writings.  Philip of Opus can well be awaiting the two events, Plato’s writing his final lines and his personal death, so that he can both add on his own little piece ‘Epinomis’, and perhaps trim away mercifully any embarrassing childishnesses on the part of his teacher.   Denniston has it that puns and overelaborate wordplay, such as he had formerly mocked mocking when critically of Gorgias or Prodicus  are signs of the very old man indulging himself in juvenilities ?  Consider this example where so hyperrefined a wordplay as shortening a word’s initial vowel, then pleonastically letting it redound in the listener’s ear with near nothing added to the content:   ἤθεσιν καὶ ἔθεσιν·   It is only a minor addition to the cognitive vacuousness of this formula that its author, — perhaps a Plato very near his death — seems to want to locate it at the endpoint of this sentence, near the end of Chapt. 14, the work’s final chapter.   Plato’s own life seems to have been very near its end as he wrote this final work.   This is precisely what Campbell had noted under his topic of late-Plato diction, its fondness for ‘pleonasm’.

It would not be a surprise if some part of this mannerism were to be explained by the very old man struggling to remember which of a pair of similar locutions he had recently been preferring — say the draft which began ‘yesterday I descended’ or the one with ‘I descended yesterday…’ and safeguarding his hand against mistakes by writing BOTH down, pending expected authorial emendation to remove the pleonasm.    In the natural course of things, the authorial emendation may have failed to occur.   writing against  in the ‘sunset years’ Plato, nearing or passing his 80th year and still writing furiously, toward an end-point where his final work would remain just ‘in the wax’ when he died.

Let me permit myself an excursus here, by way of innoculating this website against an alas not uncommon error of judgment.   I mean the error which amounts to the overbold and even arrogant manner sometimes found here on the American side of the Anglo-American field of Plato scholarship,   Some brash youngster presuming that he or she can command respectful attention in the larger world just by levelling sharply critical remarks about a writer so masterful as Plato (or Shelley or Homer).   This rashness is alas not restricted to us ‘overseas’ anglicans: witness the overbold and harsh deprecation of Plato words from KJ Dover in his 1980 edition of Symposium.   AJ Ayer was an anglican apostle from Vienna.    He experienced what many in the english-speaking world found lacking in judgment.

Please take it as an innoculant against any such rashness here on the worldwide web [such a grand claim — I am old enough to remember confidently asserting to many friends in the late 1950s,  HUMBUG, how can this little coterie of dreamers, so went my skeptical argument, writing in their multi-versioned Whole Earth Catalogue in San Francisco, how can they possibly delude themselves to think such a science-fiction world-wide network can spring up during my lifetime ?   These wild speculators they will have it sprouting up and becoming so vast as to put Kiev and San Francisco into a kind of worldwide ‘neighborhood’, or Hull Mass. USA and Pisa, Italy etc., etc.   Skeptical wisdom, as deeply wrong as I was then emphatic in offering it to my listeners.   Now today I experience a parallel skepticism — which I really want to be as deeply wrong as that other — the current skepticism is centered on what can be called ‘neighbourhoods’ by the school of Abraham Robinson.   These followers, R. Goldblatt among them, think with a wondrous coherence about making a kind of ‘neighbourly’ gathering, pairs that are all-but-continuous, being only infinitesimally disjoined.   Hyperreally close neighbours, in other words.    We must look ahead to a descendant of one or another of today’s Socrates-Alternates to get a good grasp of all of this.   Meantime let me say here that an offprint I sent Robinson in 1972 provoked a short but supportive reply from him — he mentioned Euclid’s Book 5.

point at infinity, analysed by R. Goldblatt (2012)

Well these words I used to utter some 60 years ago now went something like this.   How can they possibly be so bold, to write in their  Whole Earth Catalogue  this claim about anything  worldwide of such an unimaginable sort?    Surely the www people are bold, but also delirious.    But do look at the gracious words from Cornford’s student WKC Guthrie, so gracious and urbane even as he condemns a work by Plato as follows:

Guthrie ltr abt Plato nodding, 31 Jan 72

I may cite this remark written in a letter of date nearly 58 years ago (January 31, 1972).   [a recently written podcast bears the provocative title “Back when I was older”.   Is its pronoun non-referring ?   Dover’s edition of Symposium came out some decade later, when Guthrie’s volumes on Plato and Aristotle had been finished.   Citing Guthrie’s letter now:  “I don’t see why Plato shouldn’t nod if Homer could”.  I am lifting this from a letter to a youngish man by an then-elderly scholar, W.K.C. Guthrie of Cambridge.  I will insert here a facsimile of his letter, to give it some context and added color.   Certainly the gracious manner of his disparagement is vastly less unfriendly to Plato than that in K.J. Dover’s 1980 edition of Symposium.  Dover’s deprecating preface leaves the reader  wondering why he even troubled to put out an edition of a writer whose cherished doctrine of Forms might be meaningless.   Dover writes as if he thought: “Plato is forever, maybe even eternally, nodding”.      It bears repeating, about Guthrie’s humble remarks.   They are respectful and even gracious as he expresses his disapproval.  Do consider his eloquent

Guthrie ltr abt Plato nodding, 31 Jan 72

Here at the very end of Plato’s LAWS, where this same disciple was to fasten on his respectful but divergent appendage to the work (=Epinomis) may have been already doing some editing.   It is not one of the more common opinions in Plato scholarship, but still there are a few of this number who even suppose Philip to have been the primary author of the LAWS themselves.

Here is our best ms. which I am so bold as to say,  Plato did not himself write them (perhaps Philip did), or Plato did but was for the moment nodding :

final 2 cols. of LAWS XII, 14, near 968d2

In any case it can be reasonably proposed that it was this same Philip with such broad expertise in astronomy that his name is cited repeatedly in F. Lasserre’s collection of ‘Die Fragmente des Eudoxos’, this same Philip will have written appendages books of ‘Elements’ due to be assembled and edited into more finished form by Euclid in Alexandria two generations later.   There are strong evidences that someone attached to the ends of to Books IV and VI and XIIA of this later work, Elements.  In this last case — that of Euclid XIIA —  he published a tract which we could rightly give the title ‘stereometric Episkepseis, based on its repeated application of its specialist usage of the phrase ‘toioutes gignomenEs episkepsews’ [].  In bulk it contains more than Euclid’s standard Book XII, in that it supplies duplicates of the final theorems of stereometric Book XI, as well as the ‘episkepsis‘ version, which has no episkepsis arguments at all.

He contrived to make it over-attentively Platonistic.   I spell out elsewhere more about this last case.   It may be that the Academic-sounding neologism ‘epidhmiourgein’, now found in scholia to Euclid, is also responsibly traced back to the writings of Philip.   If so, he will have earned our descriptive name ‘pseudo-Eudoxus’.   One very modernistic way to put a formula on his Episkepsis arguments is to say of them that they at once stand as falsely Eudoxus-like arguments, which contrive to claim a kind of hyper-platonic position in number theory where, in the words of Feynman ‘we find a way to sweep infinities under the rug.    Current day work in mathematics, cosmology and logic is continuing.   Some of this research today proudly claims to prosper, and even to have helpful theological results, ‘without any need to sweep infinities under the rug.’   A byproduct is related to ‘fuzziness’ of logic,  regularly called ‘Neutrosophic Logic’.  But this 2019 speculation seems to me ‘over the top’, especially its efforts at ‘neutroscopic’ logic not limiting itself to 2 values, and best left at some distance from speculations offered here, neither under any rug nor off any wall, but grounded in solid texts from the early Academy.

De Morgan, blind on right side since 1806, birth year

De Morgan, blind on right side since infancy

 

[19.ix.19]

The add-on book at the end of Plato’s LAWS is named from its position as an add-on, “Epinomis“.  In antiquity it was reported to have been written by Plato’s student, Philip of Opus.  It was the part of the platonic corpus on which B. Einarson was doing a commentary when he died in the late 1970s.   We can reasonably hope that one of his students and followers, — say Wm M. Calder III — might publish an edition of all or portions or portions of Einarson’s not-completed work.  Elsewhere on this site there are a few venturesome remarks on a bit of colloquial American language “would’a/could’a/should’a” this agglomerative term intends to point away from actuality and toward a thing (if there be such a thing) as counterfactual history.   As sober and sensible a writer as Plato’s student Aristotle at least twice ventures locutions pointing to such impossible history:  once when he conjectures what Anaxagoras “would’a” agreed to had he been told of the Four Causes theory of Aristotle himself.    Another time, late in his Metaphysics, he tries this thought experiment “What would follow were it true that we found amongst eternal beings an Eternal Socrates ?   Do please recall Lord Russell’s pointedly counterfactual phrase of A.D. 1912 “the present King of France”.    France could’a been so lucky as to have recently (and temporarily too!) coronated a citoyen-roi.     But as chance would have it, they would’a been scandalised and offended at the factual histories to which this would’a happened.     [A further little excursus here will show, stage left,, a seated figure TychE.   Can this hand manage to commit a herky-jerky series of entropic motions — Brownian they’re called, perhaps after Rev. Andrew C. Brown of the late 19th Century?

 

To resume:  Were to be so lucky as to have this ‘anacyclOsis’ of the Wheel of Fortune spill out something of the great power of Benedict Einarson, writing on EPINOMIS would likely result in more light than we today get from many actual scholarly  publications,  Here following you will see an excerpt from its final chapter, from folio 299r of our best ms.,(A):

(bis5) semi-Aeolic AIEI in final chapt. of Epinomis, at 992c1 length=3.5, rev6

Epin Chapt 2, ‘onomaseia’ fol 292v col A, rev 2

[06.ix.19]

 

Further, if you care to, please consider also my own marginalia.   Depending on your connections, these will appear alongside Popkin’s text. [Ancients called marginalia not by the Microsoft standard words,  ‘comments’ and ‘balloons’, — rather they were called para-sEmeiWseis , παρασημειώσεις .]   We may draw upon a standard position around the later Academy, the Consolatio form, in dialogue form the ps-platonic Axiochus.   It works from the root significances of ‘sEma/swma’.   We may take this from the mix of stoic, epicurean and platonic sententiae:  ‘alongside the grave-marker, Plato when he was temporarily imprisoned inside an Athenian-sited body’.

Please consider the sober and solid judgments (nearly all of which I agree with wholeheartedly).  Here is a link to this valuable essay:

plato._the_columbia_hist-c-1999-5 (3)

The excellent Euclid MS at the Laurentian in Florence (=F) has a cluster of 7 this Early Attic dialect ‘aiei’.   These 7 occur in the first chapter of Book X.  It also has a little cluster of Early-Attic diphthongal spellings, ‘aiei’ and ‘eggeion’ in Book III, 7 and 8.    This book, which would accurately be named ‘On the Circle’ has one diphthongal ‘aiei’, four diphthongal ‘eggeion’s, and over a dozen non-koinE spellings — especially ‘elatton’.   All this inclination away from the Euclid compatriots whose dialectal preferences will come to bear later adds up to a strong argument that Plato, with his singling out of The Circle just itself was given close attention at the Early Academy.   Many  external pointers make the ‘youngersocrates’ inferences more plausible.    This is true pointedly in the famous Catalogue of Geometers echoed by Proclus — echoed from Aristotle’s immediate student Eudemus of Rhodes.  One such pointer is the provocatively named author of a book clearly tracing to the times of Plato or a bit further back.     The book’s tile is PROGNOSTICA.   The author is given the provocative name is ‘King Socrates’.   In a copy held by the Bodleian I personally saw, being there at beginning of September 2010, a moveable crown atop the head of its presumed author.   This copy of  is held in the 1937 wing of Oxford’s Bodleian Library — which its curator Mr  Bruce Barker Benfield allowed me study directly on that day.   I have included a snapshot of myself taken that same day, here atat this website’s page ‘about’)

Recent scholarship by Sedley and Ademollo on Plato’s Cratylus asks us to look further amongst the Ionian writers.   Plato appears to be reverting to his early affinities with a Heraclitus-Cratylus attitude toward more respectful of fluid phenomena and change

 

 

 

 

 

 

[30.viii.19]

Are there examples from antiquity of this odd Venetus (=Ephraim) position-switching inside a numeral ?  This occurs within a numeral (or other numeral sign) — the tens position reversed with the units position ?  A precise analogue within our present (Arabic) numeral system, if we were to write ’91’ when intending ’19’ or ’81’ when intending ’18’.  This amounts to a major dislocation, truly.

Yes, in John the Syrian (=Lydus). numeral words written out in full [no inflection].   John does this switching frequently.   He is also known for his  high esteem (perhaps exaggerated) for greater antiquity in his style and manner.  Please look:

(bis9.9) John Lydus De Mensibus IV, our ’14’, one Ephraim, one un-reversed

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We can rely upon the excellent MS at the Laurentian in Florence(F) for the following.  Not only has it a cluster of 7 this Ionian ‘aiei’ in the first chapter of Book X, — it also has a little cluster of paired Ionian spellings, ‘aiei’ and ‘eggeion’ in III, 7 and 8.  Recent scholarship on Plato’s Cratylus asks us to look for sources in Ionian writers (Plato reverting to his earlier affinities to a Heraclitus-Cratylus attitude toward phenomena and changet a special insight into Plato’s writing efforts if we follow the good example of E.R. Dodds’s introduction to his text of Gorgias.    Dodds allow himself to start from the position of that singular editor, Plato himself, editing an earlier version of this text.   He puts this later Plato into his editor’s chair at roughly the time of his authoring Seventh Letter.  Diogenes of Halicarnassus gives the Dodds attitude a serious backing.  DH has Plato curiously still continuing his self-editing — perhaps just a few words, such as the opening words of Republic — when on his death bed.   Another example is that of an editor of Euclid, who may be identical to the man traditionally located in Alexandria after Aristotle’s time.   But do we know if this dating and placing are true?  Holger Thesleff once said to me he has the doubt:  the character in Phaedo, Euclides may be what we have come to recognise as Euclid.    Be this as it may — Non liquet, we may say, drawing on another of Thesleff’s curiously Finnish locutions — editors  or self-editors have regularly found choice locations within the work at hand, to execute their emendations or supplementings.

These choice locations are ‘at the joints’, as Plato himself writes of the articulations inside a piece of literature.   This means at the very end of the work or at the end of an internal articulation, such as Book- or Chapter-ending.   This way there is less risk of spoiling the work’s organic integrity.   Three examples come to mind, two from Euclid’s Elements, one from Plato’s Laws.    In Euclid the editor or self-editor has added a final proposition at the end of Book VI (proportion as applied to plane rectilineal figures).    Here there is direct reporting from a copyist, who makes it a notable feature of this book that it had an earlier edition, lacking the proposition altogether.   Fortunately, we have excellent quality mss. both with the added [‘by Theon’] and the same work in its pre-edited form.  In the case of Laws there are ancient reports attributing the entire final book, Epinomis, to a different author: Plato’s student and secretary, Philip of Opus.  The other notable example from Euclid is the final proposition of Bk IV (planimetric constructions aimed toward Bk XIII, its ‘Five Platonic polyhedra’).  That final planimetric proposition consists of the construction is of a regular ‘pentakaidekagon’, or 15-sided polygon, useful in astronomy as charting out the ecliptic, —  but it is entirely gratuitous here in the Elements of Geometry.   It only adds a further pair of oddities in this supplemental proposition that it twice mis-spells ‘pentakaidekagon’ πεντεκαιδεκάγωνον [an error noted by Heiberg] and that it draws on 3 non-Euclid expressions    (1)  δείξις , (2) οἷων. . . τοιούτων  (3)   τε. . . καὶ        (1) DEIXIS, (2) HOIWN …TOIOUTWN and (3) TE KAI (rare outside of verse, as being too pleonastic, according to Denniston.) (4)  (use of ‘epi+genitive’ rather than ‘peri+genitive’ in titles of works in the listing of Palatine ms., its list of works.    This strikingly co-occurs in the ‘epi+genitive-of pentagon’ here at the Philip of Opus ending of Euclid IV.

The second of these three features is a close match to a line in Timaeus Chapt VII : 

“that which [A has relative to B, this [C has to D] ὅτιπερ τὸ πρῶτον πρὸς [δευτέρον], τοῦτο αὐτὸ πρὸς τὸ ἔσχατον” (=32a1,f).

At the same time feature (2)  mismatches Euclid’s standardised phrasing, which reads as follows:

ὥσπερ [=as] τὸ Α πρὸς Β, οὕτω [=so]  Ξ πρὸς Δ.   This difference in phrasing offered for the two halves of this relation of ‘analogia’, though slight, stands out when we are making a close comparison between this pair of tightly textured, highly technical works.  One is meant to express the 4-term relation fundamental to the ‘binding together’ of Plato’s cosmology; the other is meant to express the relation equally fundamental to planimetry or stereometry — Analogia.   In all three authors, Plato or Aristotle or Euclid,  this overall relation goes by the name Analogia.       and strongly mismatches Euclid’s standard wording for a proportion.    We might put Euclid’s phrase into colloquial English this way:   (2) as. . . so.Quite possibly it is a pure co-incidence, the point that Philip of Opus, alongside his known interests in ethics (his tract ‘De Ira’) and likely mineral sciences, this same Philip was an accomplished writer on astronomy (On Eclipses, a work listed in the SUDA).

This editing had once been boldly thought to give us indicators as to earlier and later drafts, due to Plato’s student Philip of Opus.  Some German scholars of the late 19th Century were bold enough to think of our now restoring this last work of Plato’s to discriminate between Plato’s own writing and that of Philip.   This seems a heraclean task, not likely to be moved forward in this website.  On the other hand, various indicators outlined here point toward identifying ‘Younger Socrates’ both with Aristotle’s teacher and with Plato’s immediate student, namely the locrus-born Philip of Opus.   He may have arrogated to himself this exact academic/socratic identity there by the elderly Plato in Athens.  This will have put him into direct contact with the young Aristotle.

This dating and identifying would also put Younger Socrates late enough to help Plato re-edit his final Laws, as we know Philip did.   Yet he will have been early enough to be a kind of ‘Socrates-the-Teacher’ to Aristotle.   Epistle II tends to corroborate these identifications when it outlines a claimed ‘Socrates Reborn’.    This gives the concept a footing in antiquity, perhaps as early as the Olympic Games of -364.    And it would or ‘the Second Socrates’ or ‘Alternate Socrates’ (this last is a name interchanged with ‘Younger Socrates’ in our Venetus T ms, at its folium 67r.   There seem to be touches of the Locrian or Heraclean dialect curiously strong amongst the various late-dialogues.   This idea becomes especially confirmed if we take as relics from antiquity, somewhat before the famous copper plates ‘tavole di Eraclea’, as preserving an assortment of Locrianisms.   Some of this backward-looking evidence points in just the right direction.   That is the direction of the epizephyrian Locrus, and its nearby towns Heraclea and Tarentum.

I am offering a snapshot from the Paris A ms., [digital image courtesy of the Mitterand National Library] in support of these claims.]  It has no parallel or rivalry with Venetus T when it comes to most of Tetralogy VIII plus all of Tetralogy IX.   In those parts our Venice ms. is lost. The dating of this fine ms. is regularly put to some two generations before our Ephraim, copyist of Venetus T.  This Paris ms. is perhaps our best Plato ms.  Please click on this excerpt from Paris A:

Superscripted Iota in AIEI of Epin, final chapter, notes on Symp Phdr Euthyd and Minos

 

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the Venetian San Marco ms. is now online   here:

http://www.internetculturale.it/jmms/iccuviewer/iccu.jsp?id=oai%3A193.206.197.121%3A18%3AVE0049%3ACSTOR.241.10700&mode=all&teca=marciana

 

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Prof. Gaiser published a monograph in 1980 with Heidelberg University, on this image and other closely linked images handed down from late ancient times.   He rightly dissociates the cluster of seven men in this ‘philosophenmosaik’ from the tradition sometimes brought in, the tradition representing The Seven Sages.   He appeals to his readership to identify Helicon of Cyzicus as represented by the figure to the extreme left of stage.   He uses the report that Helicon suffered from a snake-bite to support his claimed identity.   To be sure, one of the family of early exemplars of this image here has a manifest serpent being held on his right forearm.    There are reasons, however, for keeping the iconography aimed at astronomical matters, and quite specialised reasons for thinking of the celestial constellation Serpent-Bearer as  an especially curious strong likelihood.   It and its snake are equatorial constellations, which will have been familiar to our group of observational academic astronomers.    For one, we must find a reason why every mortal human depicted except this one is wearing shoes.   Other than our famous barefoot sage of the marketplace in Athens, whom this figure emphatically fails to represent (he is young, and good looking, like the fictional ‘reincarnation’ of Socrates in Plato’s Second Letter, its enigma.

A quite different category of reason is strongly reinforcing, in that Ophi-ouchos [=Mr. Snake-Holding] has a First Magnitude star easily seen and measured by our ancient observational astronomers from Thales onward.  Still today this remains the same, as does this star’s position in the firmament.   It is called Alpha-Ophiouchos, and will have been bright enough in the time and place of Plato’s earliest grove of Academe – bright enough, if moonshine didn’t interfere to cast a shadow in the lid-ajar box to which SerpentBearer’s left-hand-held pointer stick is pointing.   One only need have made this box’s fixed opening pre-set to run parallel to the equator, the lip of the lid.   This pre-arrangement, easy to compare with Alpha’s known elevation above the equator, brings another item in our mosaic into a particular significance of Alpha.   There is a large number of devices, perhaps to include the somewhat mysterious ‘sticks of Eudoxus’, depicted in our image of this laboratory, devices either primarily or otherwise aimed at measuring time.  More on the Eudoxan sticks will appear later

We may conveniently skip over the close-knit mathematical sequences in this following calculation, and just take note of how Alpha will have been a kind of Belwether star, one of the first to culminate and also be visible, around 8:30 PM local time at the Academy’s observatory  one of the several days observationally alike and very near summer solstice, of 353 B.C.

calculation for June 20, -353 culmination of Alpha Ophiouchos-3

 

 

At the Old Academy, Philip of Opus’s nickname appears to have been “Amphinomus”.  possibly he had a plurality of speaker-names, a pair of lead examples being :  “Younger Socrates” and [this latter is in truth made standard in Venetus T, its folio 67, beginning of Polit., and it is further echoed in the also authoritative Plato ms. W in Vienna] “Socrates Alternate”  Σωκράτης Ἄλλος  .   This second variation on the name of this quasi-renewed man there beside the late Plato, this second name ought be followed down carefully & methodically, when a website like youngersocrates.com [note: this is now online!  — D. Cufalo supplies this web link, as of Apr 2019] comes into existence and is hospitable to this.

257 a1 – 257 c9 Politicus begins end of col B only, 25ll. ( 67r) Socrates-Alternate Polit naming

In olden days an innkeeper was called a ‘pandoxos’.   Plato may well be executing a play on words and names when he brings in this very word as he writes to Dionysius I of Syracuse, head of the family Plato has hopes can cultivate a ‘philosopher King’ somehow during his own lifetime.   Plato there urges the tyrant to take advantage of guests he has invited from Athens.  These ambassadors come direct from Plato’s Academy, the letter claims.   Of singular importance, the ambassadors include a young man ‘Helikon of Cyzicus’, a close disciple of the man named Eudoxos.   Already Plato has prepared the way for his philological trick, making Pan-Doxos prepare us for the rhyming assonant name,  Eu-Doxos.

What specifically can the king profit from in receiving hospitably (pandoxically) Plato’s emissary ?   Plato, the very man who executes word-plays on my name Eu-Doxos.  The gist of what our philosopher and wordsmith writes to the king-in-prospect is this:  ‘ take the opportunity to learn, and thus you may “eu-doxise yourself”‘  εὐδοξῆις   Epistle XIII 360e3.   The pun is multilateral, in that ‘doxa’ refers most directly to the ‘doctrines’ or ‘opinions’ (this meaning is embedded in our modern word ‘doxographies’), but also points towards the meaning of ‘fame’ or ‘reputation’, as in our presentday expression ‘doxology’, a proclamation of glory or fame.   One of the standard ancient nicknames for Eudoxos makes that second meaning central:   ‘Endoxos’ or ‘Mr. Famous’.

Therefore the suggestions carried along here in Epistle XIII include :

(a)  you may seem to yourself and your court to be a great eminence in Sicily today, but my playful epistolary tropes and metaphors will demote you to the status of mere hotel-owner ;

(b)  the guests whom I send to you include a minor luminary, who has sat at the feet of the true luminary, one might even call him ‘The Real Astronomer’ who is head of the world’s first ‘Astronomy Dept Head’, whose nickname back home is ‘Endoxos’, or ‘Mr. Famous’ ;

(c)   “you, — my prospective Philosopher King, — can promote yourself from (relatively ignorant) tyrant and (relatively low-social-station) hotel-owner, if you will sit at the feet of the man who knows as much about the ancestry of ‘Eudoxus Real Numbers’.  These seemingly modern numbers a re-derived via a Dedekind-independent formalism, from the integers, in Notre Dame Journal for Symbolic Logic, A.D. May 2004.    Consider yourself promoted to Honorary Eudoxan  or Epistle XIII’s Mr. εὐδοξῆις “

It will not have been a great distance, in time or in geography, if young Helikon should do what Prof. Nancy Demand puts under ‘metoikEsis’, or ‘moving out to a Colony’, taking Eudoxan Real Numbers and their author with him.   Moving to where, exactly ?   Cyzicus.   Some late Platonist reporting has displaced academic diaspora — in the Hellespont.

In any case it does seem historical that a certain bone-&-blood man was well acquainted with mathematics,  was personally known both to the elderly teacher Plato and to the very young pupil, Aristotle of Stagira.   Aristotle is reported (scholars judge this to be some kind of error) to have been a student of  a “Socrates”.    Ingmar During and others, however, leave room for a Socrates Alternate.   And history itself is here, as often, hospitable to many guests.

A blood and bone person is strongly suggested by Aristotle’s writing a sharply worded criticism of the “parable about the animals” and then attributing this parable to this very man Σωκράτης νεώτερος   .   In a separate place I will bring forth arguments for identifying the scholion on folio 259r, attaching as it does to Tim. 42b, identifying the scholiast with Plato’s colleague Socrates Younger, or Socrates-reborn-once-or-twice as Plato’s ‘parable on animals’ and transmigration of individual souls.  His willful and sometimes truculent student Philip, will have earned a kind of turbulent stay — Philip’s soul exhibiting a character earning him in his first rebirth to becoming a woman.   In any case Aristotle writes him up under the name He calls him “Socrates Junior” or “Socrates the Younger”  Σωκράτης νεώτερος    This text comes from Metaphysics Z, 11.  The parable in question, which we may rightly get further clarity about from the chapter on re-incarnation in Timaeus one which this very soul, incarnated for the time neither as a woman or as a sub-human animal. We have independent reason for associating Philip with the early Academy group John Adam calls (his notes on Rep. Bk ix)’Pythagorean Preachers’. We may then safely presume Socrates Junior did these repeated remarks at the Academy, quite likely not far from Plato himself.

This report by Aristotle has all the symptoms and signs of a matter-of-fact statement from his memory records, — not something he is inventing or imagining.   We need hardly remind ourselves that this matter-of-fact turn of mind is deeply ingrained in Aristotle’s own character, so to speak within his very own blood and bones.   We are right to think of a Plato or or a Heraclitus or an Empedocles, or a Parmenides — all men of poetico-imaginative ‘natures’ or ‘temperaments’ — that they pictured or imagined things, including their immediate surroundings, imaginatively and perhaps over-vividly.  The term  ‘physis’ is a standard term at Plato’s and Aristotle’s time for what we now tend to call ‘temperament’ or ‘personality type’.  It is so used in ps.-Aristotle, Problems 30, 6, quite certainly .      So this remark from our customarily understood Aristotle, writing in his characteristic matter-of-fact manner according to his own nature, points toward an associate of Plato’s at the early Academy — with a noteworthy temperament.   We will review below an outburst of rage from several of Plato’s good mss., mocking and scorning the passage at Timaeus 42c, f about the man who earns, by his volatile temperament, re-incarnation as a lower animal (or otherwise re-incarnation as a woman  — so Plato, on our best evidence!)

“Younger Socrates” used to put forward this parable “repeatedly”   No, it is not at all persuasive to Aristotle, but one bit of Academic behavior just as characteristic of Aristotle as his factual reporting opinions, was his willingness to subject these one and all to vigorous criticism.       I will be suggesting that the man he is criticising also went by the nickname (likely an intramural name), “Amphinomus”.   Anyone from that same Early Academy will have associated Amphinomus with LeiOdEs, linked as the two figures are in Homer’s stories the tradition of Homer.   LeiOdEs is the ‘doublet’ character to Amphinomus.   [so B. Fenik ‘Studies in the Odyssey’ (Mnemosyne 1974), esp. pp. 192-196.].

Philip is credited with a Euclid-like work “Optics” (noticed by Burnyeat in his recent piece reviving Archytas’s “Optics”).   He may also have been the same man under reference in the puzzling “twn sophwn tis” in Rep. IX,ix, 583B,ff.   Adam’s App. IV makes a mighty effort to identify this  τις  “=tis”, spoken of as one of the “sophoi”, likely with a hint of irony.    The two leading nominees whom Adam  reviews are Antisthenes and Democritus.   Then there is – paradoxically —  Plato Himself – Philebus 44 B,ff, where we can identify the attitudes toward Pleasure to be distinctly less preacherly.    Prof. D. Frede may possibly agree with our understanding here.     I can only speculate on point, having not consulted her.  If not, nevertheless her ‘adoxotera’ ‘endoxa’ will find a kindly-minded Innkeeper here at this website.   Men at or near Plato, Amphinomus and Eudoxus, are all kindly Pandoxoi.

But amongst the various men writing on Pleasure at the Old Academy, one further man (so says SUDA), apart from Plato himself, who wrote at some length about Pleasure, was called ‘The Philosopher’, alias Philip of Opus.   He seems rarely to get much notice, especially in the matter of writing on Pleasure, and seems wrongly overlooked here.   If we trust the SUDA report (you might as well say  [kaitoige] ‘surely you don’t want to give preference to trusting ourselves, critics from 11 centuries later ’).   Philip is credited with a treatise   π. ἡδονῆς   α.  (“p. HEdonEs, 1 book”.)    Our present-day vantagepoint does not allow us to say confidently that no part of that book of Philip’s found its way into what we now call Plato’s Philebus .    Nor can we be sure none of it found its way, alongside material from Eudoxus, into the relevant portions of the book by the student of “Younger Socrates” —  in E.N. Books I and X.  

It may be helpful to insert here a brief discussion , based upon a series of Scholia to Euclid I, 15 (esp. Scholl. ##59-62).   This will take us along a path JL Heiberg laid down.   He collected and published with Teubner in 1888, the scholia to all of Euclid’s Elements.      The Scholion of greatest interest in our present context is the one leading toward the Philip-like sentiment also expressed in Schol. #18 (skeptical towards ‘poiEsis’, on the grounds of its debatable concessiveness to ‘time-dependence’ inside mathematics).     It includes a quite special and distinctive verb ‘diamphisbEtein’ also written by Aristotle in his piece ‘On Friendship’.   This is material from Aristotle’s early years, some of which will have found its way into EN, at Bk IX, 2 1155 a 32ff.   Now Lewis Campbell the Plato scholar had called attention to the relative novelty of this specialist term  διαμφισβήτειν   at the time of Plato’s late dialogues.

In Aristotle himself, however, it occurs several times, once in the suspect book of the Metaphysics, namely  Book Kappa.     This is the book that repeats  earlier material from the same treatise, and that is further peculiar in suffering from a rash of DeMundo-style phrasings   ge mh\n  ( γε μὴν  ).     Book Kappa is so fully stocked with unAristotelian features that scholars beginning with W. Christ and continuing past W.D. Ross have tended to agree that Book Kappa should be deleted from Aristotle’s text.     Herbert Granger has recently shown a disinclination to comply  with this scholarly consensus, but in the main these two eminent Aristotle scholars have carried the day.   All six of its γε μὴν  ‘s and all of its other irregularities have been removed (alongside the removal of the entire tract also rich in γε μὴν ‘s ,  the DeMundo).   This latter tract is of astronomical and meteorological purport, with side excursions into unAristotelian issues such as varieties of celestial names.   In Mystery religions of Plato’s time, multiple naming for a given soul was not uncommon.

There is a good sense of ‘halfway’ which permits us to say that “Halfway back to Plato”, beginning from Aristotle,  we may find evidence of an Early Academic writer of significance for both Plato and Aristotle.   We can take our starting point at a text in Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics.   He is doing some philological surgery, on words prefixed by “philo-“.   Not at all unlike the way Plato finds ‘philo-sophos’ in Republic Book V, by factoring out the ‘-of-such-and-so’ from the words ‘lovers-of-such-and-so’ and then adding ‘-of-wisdom’.    In Ethics Book I we have  filo-qeamw=n( φιλοθεαμῶν ) put adjacent to the analysis of  fil[o]-   ἱππος    “Phil-ippos” .    Can he be conveying a critical attitude toward his own teacher, a writer half-way back to Plato, a he points to as “Philip the Philo-theamwn” (φιλοθεαμῶν)?

The possibility cannot be ruled out, that Aristotle (J. Barnes calls him an ‘allusive’ writer) is here behaving characteristically.   Thus allusively.   The third of this threesome of teachers and learners, Plato, is at least as likely to be asking the reader to this analysis of it is much strengthened if we compare Aristotle’s ‘philological’ surgery on the name ‘Philippos’ to a set of remarks about an assemblage of  friends-of-X, made that of a master surgeon, Plato.   Teacher of both Socrates Junior and young Aristotle.  This occurs inside Plato’s dialogue Lysis,  212 d.  disengage the ‘philo-‘ prefix from suffixes such as ‘-dogs’, ‘-wine’ and ‘-wisdom’.   Granted, Plato is en route to making some points about the here prefixed concept, especially contexts where a friend has his friendliness returned.   All the same, our threesome of academicians, Plato, Philip and Aristotle would be unlikely to miss a sly reference to that name also recited early in Symposium, “Phil-Ippos”.

Οὐδ’ ἄρα φίλιπποί εἰσιν οὕς ἂν οἱ ἵπποι . . .γε καὶ φίλοινοι. . .καὶ φιλόσοφοι κτλ

Rather than simply present our standard Plato text from the OCT (1995) edition by itself, I may be permitted to present the folio [with notes] from the Venice ms.  T:

lysis 212DE

Certainly when writers’ conventions strongly discouraged using the names of living people (say Eudemus or Eudoxus or Theophrastus or Dicaearchus), we are unsurprised not to find those names in either Plato or Aristotle.  Even a Speusippus or an Isocrates is likely to appear only very rarely.      Is Aristotle intending an oblique reference to one of his teachers, a student and friend of Plato’s ?I would suggest that there is already allusiveness in Aristotle’s dissecting the name of the man ‘halfway’ between himself and Plato, Philip [of Opus].   But we can find much more in the vicinity of this allusion if we include the point that the word   filoqeamw=n [‘philotheamOn’] is more likely what Aristotle wrote at 1099 a 10.    We need not follow I. Bywater, who not only does not keep this word in his text, but also declines to mention its having  ms. authority,  declines to report this in his apparatus criticus.     H.H. Joachim’s high admiration for Bywater and the other  ‘Aristotelian Society’ scholars of his day was well founded [I refer to Joachim’s preface to the 1922 edition of the O.U.P. De Gen. et Corr.].

All the same we ought to follow the example of Slings (his Clitophon, p. 342,f) in keeping the door open to the idea of an ‘ancient tradition’ behind any of various manuscript peculiarities which have survived these dozens of centuries in our textual transmissions.   In any case the present Oxford edition has the [considerably less plausible] reading filo-qeorw=n  (‘philo-theorwn’).    And, alas, Bywater did not preserve the Bekker note listing the “philo-theamwn” varia lectio.    This imports a quite different meaning, a difference of substance.   It is as if we let a ‘theoretician’ be put in for a theater-goer.      A lover-of-abstract-knowledge  (  θεωρήμα   qeorhma)  for a lover-of-a-spectacle qea/ma  (‘  θεάμα ’).      ‘Theama’ is in fact the root word which is clearly intended by Aristotle to be echoed in the text of  Bekker  1099 a10, pace O.U.P. and Bywater.     So   φιλοθεαμῶν   (filotheamwn) has commensurate authority at   a10.    Bywater’s omitting it was a case of ‘Bywater nods’.   I fancy that Dr. Cufalo, powerful textual scholar, would agree with me, against Bywater and Jonathan Barnes [the latter of whom I consulted in correspondence; he follows the Bywater-Oxford line].

We need to focus on that same Early Academy period (Olymp. 106, when Philebus  is being composed, and Plato is in his very advanced years – those poignantly called ‘our sunset years’ in Laws VI, xiv  — see Slings on Plato’s using the first-personal plural form, in Clitophon for example, to indicate ‘myself’ at 406 a10.    Around this date we have Phil. 44B, referring to ‘some wise someone’ who is further described as  ‘deinos peri physin’.    John Adam made penetrating suggestions on the type of man here alluded to by Plato.   ‘Pythagorean preachers’, says Adam (app. x to Rep. Bk IX.   This would put our author at the Academy and make him not unlike the Empedocles referred to by Aristotle here in EN IX,2.     A threesome of men is put together in Problems 6, 30.    They have attributed to them a shared temperament or ‘personalilty-type’.     Something about their black bile.   This list has oddities of various sorts.  But one striking point is its listing Socrates after Plato:     Empedocles, Plato and Socrates.     The Elder Socrates kept his bile pretty well controlled, we might think:  “Go ahead and condemn me to death, O Athens !    As far as I know this may be a not so severe penalty, especially for a peaceable man, a reflective and perhaps even phlegmatic old man, now aged seventy”.

Can Younger Socrates, or Socrates Alternate have had something more bilious, even choleric, about him ?    He would have to have had considerable personal energy and a willingness to thrust himself forward there at the Academy, claiming  a position in that succession of eminent men beginning back at Socrates Simpliciter, moving forward via Plato and pointing ahead to such prominent men as Eudoxus, Aristotle and Theophrastus.    Again, as we have reliable evidence to inform us, Philip put himself forward as having opinions worth publishing on topics under vigorous debate, such as pleasure, the passion of anger, and On Writing (p. graphein).    Either of the standard meanings of ‘graphein’ here would make Philip a bold man:  “On proving [as in geometry] or On Writing [as in Plato’s Phaedrus”].

Returning now to Aristotle’s seemingly polyonymous teacher, call him Amphinomus, call him LeiOdEs, call him Younger Socrates (basileia is among the things Aristotle has under DiamphisbEsis, not so  ?)       In that same DeMundo Chapt 7 spirit of Polyonymising I’d like to add to Philip’s names.    We have it in our best ms. of the Euclid scholion (Heiberg de-prefers this reading, demotes it to his apparatus criticus):   “AristoclEs”.   In Schol. #15, nearby to both #11 and #18 (each of these two latter has peculiarities which may be  signs of Philip’s style) – we have a report about A)risto/lhj kai\ oi( gewme/trai  (‘Aristo/lEs and the geometers’) .   Whoever they were, they came up with their own favorite technical terms for various forms of initial hypotheses or  “anapodeikta”.      Whilst JL Heiberg has printed ‘AristotelEs’ here in Scholion  #15, he is characteristically methodical, and retains in his Critical notes the true reading from our single MS source ( “P”):   ‘Aristo/lhj’(sic)    Call him AristoclEs, say I, not far from either SosiclEs (Plautus), or NeoclEs (Problems, XXX, Ch. 6), an otherwise unfamiliar name at Old Academy.   It gives all this fine detail of grammatical surgery a more intimate connection to Plato if the -cles suffix (like Hera-cles, and Iphi-cles and patro-cles of Euthydemus, the grammatical surgery Plato performs there.

Amphinomus is like the author of the De Mundo, who is emphatic about how Zeus manages his “polyonymy”.   (some of us moderns experience shock at Zeus’s polygamy; others at his polyonymy.  Philip piously admires both.   Amphitryon is as admirable as Amphinomus at this time of Old Academy rivalries and jealousies.   Zeus seems positively to luxuriate in his variety of names as we see him there in DeMundo #7 — even in its sheer variety.   The author, whoever and whenever he was, passes many names of Zeus in review there in the work’s final chapter (Bekker p. 401).    He and Zeus co-luxuriate in the polymorphic variety of all of this.  It is only better if Zeus should have a son younger than Apollo, the cunning and contriving and thieving youngster.   He will steal cattle early on.   Later he will steal names and inspire others to such stealing.   For example the forger of ps-Plato’s Letter #2, if he can be a ‘Socrates re-born’, can steal the name of Socrates and then (having had Plato confess that all of his written work was not truly his own, but rather belongs to Socrates) steal Plato’s entire oeuvre, including the Epinomis and the Minos !

Returning again to the man known to his mother as Philip:   he and others near him at the Old Academy is a lively nominee to be author of the De Mundo.   (My analysis, which draws on work by  D. Schenkeveld, presses hard on the identity of this author.  I end by finding Philip of Opus, the same author revealed behind mask of Plato, at the the ps.-Platonic “Epinomis”.    My conclusion is that Philip was also known as ‘Amphinomus’, particularly where he and Speusippus try to combat a band of mathematicians in the immediate vicinity of Plato and the young Aristotle.   [so reports Proclus, On Eucl Bk One] and therefore, intimately linked (as a ‘doublet’ to Homer’s Leiw/dhj (‘LeiOdEs’) figure. — See B. Fenik, “Studies in the Odyssey”, 1974.

Eudoxus, Speusippus and Aristotle, all joined Philip in writing on the Pleasure Question, the date of all of this Early Academy writing (including notably Philebus) : the 106^th Olympiad at the latest.    Rep. IX can easily have been under revision [recall D.H. on Plato’s continually revising his writings until on his death-bed.]    This writing activity – including notably Plato’s own – was likely to be going forward at a rapid pace in Olympiads 104-106, at and after the date of Seventh Letter.

Amphinomus, a somewhat evangelical Friend of Forms’ seems the most plausible candidate for this man behind the mask of tw=n sofw=n tij  (‘twn sophwn tis’).   Our text of 583 B includes a case of ‘kaitoi’, a favorite of Plato’s quasi-friend.    A way of decoding the nickname ‘Amphinomus’ leads via the epithet applied to the suitor Amphinomus in Odyssey XVIII, 152 :     kosmh/twr laou=  (‘kosmEtOr laou’).    It is all the more ironic that it should be Odysseus himself who calls Amphinomus by this mis-placed epithet.   The mis-placing has the effect of promoting Amphinoms to the stature of Hero.   But our Academic ambassador and voyager Plato, at Rep. 422C had raised a storm of ridicule against mythical Agamemnon, “do you say, absurdly, that our great strategist didn’t even know how to count the number of his own feet?”     Plato uses the ‘kaitoi’ phrasing there too, keeping his tone jocular and vernacular.

Our author on Optics, on Pleasure, On Friends and Friendship — the Pythagorean mathematician very close to Plato as he begins his Laws does well here.

Adam is looking for a suitable nominee to be a  “preacher of the Orphic-Pythagorean type”, thus someone at once somewhat admirable and a bit suspect in Plato’s eyes.   But   again,  textual and interpretive difficulties abound near 583B,ff.    They provoke Adam to write explanatory appendices to his text there.  It is clearly a heavy-hearted interpreter Adam who writes this complaint in his Appendix IX to Bk IX, about 585 C,f “the following sentences are among the most perplexing in the whole of the Republic, or indeed in the whole of Plato’s writings” (II, p. 354).   Adam struggles, and then reconciles himself to “the least unsatisfactory solution” to his interpretive troubles.  (ibid.)

This may be another case where the world needs to guard our text against the contaminations from outside manipulators — say Amphinomus or his over-zealous ‘friends of the Forms’.   They will be losing their bearings when fighting pitched battles against “Friends of the Earth”.   This bad habit of later Platonists – the habit of ‘tampering’ with texts, say of Aristotle when combatting Plato or others, — or alternatively those of Plato when combating Aristotle or others.   These tamperers or hybridisers or contaminators — they may not hesitate to tamper [see J. Dillon and J. Whittaker on the well-documented later tampering with Academic texts, aimed at scoring polemical points.   This form of argumentative misbehavior often goes by the nickname ‘Straw Man’ ]      It is a serious over-simplification if we think that all intra-Academy polemics, — even when the Academy had yet to complete its first Pentekontaetea, — were variations on the Plato vs. Aristotle wars there.   Yes, as Cherniss argued influentially in the early 20th century, Aristotle’s polemics may at times have targeted a Straw Plato, a more convenient target for Aristotle’s polemics.   But problematic though it is to put full trust in Aristotle’s reporting.  My own view follows that of W.K.C. Guthrie, his piece “Aristotle as Historian”, which credits him with much careful reporting about his predecessors, including those he regarded as misguided or as lisping childishly in groping to anticipate Aristotle’s own “more mature” or truer analysis.   Yes, even when targeting his beloved teacher Plato we do well to trust Aristotle’s reporting.  An extreme case is (where his polemics often have a sharp edge, say when in the middle of a sharply worded  attack on Plato he deploys the little phrase “hws epos eipein”, a favorite locution of Plato’s own, perhaps even an intimate creation of Plato’s.   When Aristotle was writing his (Brunschwig edited) Topics, (Huby convincingly placed this near the 103d Olympiad) he was not ready to give leadership, or misleadership, to little  armies.  Little and little-minded as are most intra-Academic armies, from whatever nation.   A recent staging of such smallness, vivid and telling in its imagery, was the movie “The Man who Knew Infinity”.   A real war such as was being waged by England and others against Germany, but within Cambridge University’s walls the polemics raged about number theory and what credit to give a “foreign” voice.

D.A. Campbell reviews academic battles amongst literati which raged “with brief interruptions for two real wars” during the 20th century.    We may reasonably offer this:   it should be ‘axiomatic’ for any modernday academic [I mean ‘axiom’ in the senses of Scholl. 11 and 15 to Euclid I, as edited by J.L. Heiberg]  that Academic wars can break out in many directions.  They will be wildly various, as alliances form and sub-sectarian quarrels devolve from earlier and different battles of the larger sectarian units or tribes.   Scholl. 11 and 15 bring out the etymology of ‘axiom’:   “something which  I or one of my colleagues currently think valuable,   ἀξιούμεν  (‘axioumen’)”].       In a letter a couple years ago I asked a colleague formerly from Balliol College – a widely respected Aristotle scholar, in fact —  whether he had come up against such a local and party-quarrel context at or near Balliol, for such an august term as Aristotle’s word.    Ἀξιώμα (Axioma).   From his silence I infer that such a party-quarrel was something he had never witnessed at Balliol, nor heard tell of on his island, — say at Kings College Cambridge.

F.M. Cornford’s little tract, written down in a compressed 2-week period, gives a further perspective on academic in-fighting.  He entitled it “Microcosmographia Academica”, echoing a title from the 17th century.   Some decades later it came out in a second edition, where there will have been more intensity of historical scholarly research at work.   The tract includes a large-scale photograph of a large collection of early 20th century “friends of the University[ sc. Cambridge]”.   Stage-left in the photograph is a diminutive but head-held-high man, “the Orator”, and stage-center is the fully vested figure, that of the national and imperial Monarch himself.   A curious and comedic variant on Plato’s ideal of political power intimately linked with Rhetorical Art.    Dr. Henry Jackson was perhaps not on that photographer’s exact scene, but he will have had a pretty full comprehension of various of its details.  Also, of its iconic value representing Plato’s phrase for party conflicts within philosophy,  a scene of battles carried out   ἀνδρειῶς καὶ ἐριστικῶς  Rep V. 454 b5.   This is where Holger Thesleff found Plato’s prose betraying an “onkos” style, the style of his latest dialogues, when Philip and his entourage were busy executing their intra-Academy “epistasis”, or “uprising”.    Dr. Jackson got personally involved to such a depth in the intra-Cambridge issue over co-education there that he had to be (personally) carried into the Senate chambers to cast his vote (pro-women) there in 1921.   Here is a glimpse of the Cornford-Jackson era at Cambridge:

Here is a curious sidelight on the history of this Universal, academic eristic.  It goes back to fall of 1902 and spring of 1903 in Cambridge, England.  Late in 1902 lectures were given by Dr. Henry Jackson in Cambridge on Aristotle.  Notes were taken  by then-young-scholar Leonard Hugh Graham [=LHG] Greenwood.   He took them from Dr. Jackson’s lectures on Aristotle’s Metaphysics.  They have Jackson referring to Aristotle’s phrase   κατὰ ξυμβέβεκος  in a peculiarly dismissive way.  Jackson called Aristrotle’s phrase “slang”. [these Greenwood notes are unpublished, but are contained in Greenwood’s minute letters, lovely multi-colored red and black inks, in his personal interleaved copy of the OCT text, later owned by Hamish Wilson and for a time owned by myself.   I last saw this volume in summer of 1984, having relayed it, via G.E.R. Lloyd, to Kings College Cambridge library.      Jackson is there reported to have dismissed a series of chapters in Aristotle’s Book Zeta “with abuse”.    Alas, these included the chapter Z, 11 where Aristotle has mentioned a “Younger Socrates” and where he described, and criticised, his habitual ‘parable’ about animals.   Some of this material, net of Greenwood’s colorful red and black inks, will soon be published here on this website.

Whatever the accidentalities of the thing known as Academic quarrels, they do seem an essential and unremovable parts of  what we may call our professsorial Herebelow.  They are universal enough to counter the line-against-all-metaphysics, the Vienna line passively rehearsed and repeated by K.J. Dover in his Introduction,  his 1980 edition of Symposium, p. 6.  Consider this from Dover’s own hand:

“[Plato believed in] something more, something that ‘really exists’, unchanging, independent of our indefinitely adjustable and pragmatic definitions.   Whether this belief happens to be right, happens to be wrong, or is insufficiently meaningful to be called either [emphasis my own]. . .”   

As surely as the apostle Paul brought us doctrines from earlier sources, so surely does the scholar Dover here echo doctrines sourced from the Vienna of the 1920s and 1930s.   The apostle in our case went by the name Alfred J. Ayer.    Perhaps contrary to their wishes, the acolyte and the apostle help us overturn the dogmatism flowing down out of their circle’s center, Vienna.

To resume the story of our men very near to Plato in time and place.  Some of their later followers seem to have felt free to “tamper” with rival texts (so Dillon, following Whittaker)  in what we may call, following Campbell, the art of “victorious analysis”.

A lead example here is one Philip had a special interest in.   It is a close parallel to — perhaps it was in fact identical — what is at stake back at Schol. #18 to Book I of ‘Elements’.   The Scholiast wants to uplife and edify the reader by raising up his gaze to a level of more purely noetic reality.   We must discipline ourselves to make sure we are gazing only upon the pure and purely mathematical.   But this requires us to avoid so to speak “soiling our hands” on anything like with production-or-making.    The famous ‘Divided Line’ calls on us to section off (a recently trendy formula for this is ‘draw a bright line’) — between those ‘lower’ applications of the human mind, where ‘gross matter’ is managed, manoeuvered, manipulated and so forth.   What it is customary to entitle or label (epiklEsis is the word in Epinomis 973b) ‘PoiEsis’.   Some ‘corrector’ seems to have made of Plato’s bright line between ‘dianoeta’ and ‘noeta’ full stop far less bright.  Thus the blurring of boundary between mathematical objects and truly ideal objects there at Rep. VII, 511d2, now made brighter again by Slings’s valuable removal of the 5-word “kaitoi” clause, in his 2003 OCT edition.

The very label Q.E.F., or in the ancient form   ὅπερ ἔδει ποιῆσαι , says Philip or the Philip-like commentator there, invites us to depreciate the thing ‘made’ or ‘produced’.   The phrase “hoper edei poiEsai” implies our platonist demotion of its status as ‘mere product’.    Essences are a whole world different.   They are “there”, not “here” to paraphrase a retort to the young Aristotle’s challenge.   An object of ‘Thewrein’ is just there for us to gaze upon.    It makes no sense to say of The Triangle-as-Itself that it was ever “made”.    Here we are encountering a variant of the same issue that created a schism within the Academy, that which had the “eternal cosmos” only in a figurative or ‘pedagocical’ sense a thing “made” or “constructed“.    Early in 1970 I paid a visit to the Princeton office of Harold Cherniss, in company with Aristotle scholar Walter Leszl.   The two of us asked if the Sophist phrase ‘historikE tis mimesis’ might be an oblique reference to his own Timaeus, thus parallel to the oblique references to Aristotle’s p. Ouranou and ps-Aristotle’s p. Kosmou.   I recall his taking offense at my suggestion.   Perhaps others in the past 50  years will have witnessed such an outbreak of Cherniss-Ire, I am not at all sure.   It was near that same season, some half-century ago now, that I observed a non-irritable, even supportive, attitude in Plato scholar Hannah Arendt to something parallel I was arguing to be locatable inside the late Plato, even in his Timaeus.   I mean an event directly following my lecture entitled ‘Knowing and Making in the Sophist‘, delivered at the New School for Social Research.    That was where I reviewed some of this same material about Aristotle’s criticism of Plato, and my efforts to uriddle the Early Academy, and to find a middle position between the high Platonism of Republic and the much modified position he took in LAWS.

As an example, in the case of Prop. 1 of Euclid, the ‘once triangle’ is only said of a figure ‘just now constructed’.   Mathematical constructions, like cosmological ones, can only be metaphorical.   If the lectures at Harvard’s Science Center in 2016 speak of the “origin” of gravity or the gauge/gravity duality, they must be taken to be exercising imagination, not pure mathematico-physical intellection.  Thus we need to keep bringing out for ourselves, an epi-demiourgic dimension in all this.  This means we must remind ourselves that mathematical objects must be kept timeless and changeless.     Full-strength Platonic, in short.    This matches precisely what Speusippus’s colleague Amphinomus presented in disputing against the “Friends of the Earth” there at the Academy near the time of Sophist.  As if ignoring Diotima’s warning about the term  about “poiEsis” being multiplex in its meaning, the mathematician should abstain from the time-referring language of “making”.

A statue in alongside Boston’s Tremont St. carries the caption “Industry”, and shows a dodecahedron under construction.   Here is a snapshot of this Theaetetus-like man, at work:

Diotima to the elder Socrates ideality which “poiesis” is a threat to.   Thus we must continue to divide in a bright-line way between then-triangle(s) and the kind Scholion #112 formulates the essential triangle :    τὸ τρίγωνον ᾕ ἑαύτῇ (to\ tri/gwnon h(=| e(auth=|)  , in other words the one resident amongst the Ever-Similar range of things.    To be sure, the classical locus of this complaint from Philip is in Proclus.    It may be natural to suppose that Heiberg’s Schol. #112 to Euclid Book I derives from Proclus.   This would mean it had only a slim chance of being traceable to something written while Plato was still alive, or even anything as early as (say) Plutarch or Chrysippus.     An argument is wanting, in the spirit of “let us philologues be as keen to avoid the rash extreme of uncritical skepticism as we standardly are in avoiding incaution” – the spirit, let us call this, of Walter Burkert.      A philologue’s behavior can rhyme with “Vorsicht”, to be sure.   But rational Vorsicht may call on him to restrain his over-restraint, and test out impartially the likelihood (however slim) that, as Slings has put it recently “something ancient”  may lie behind the peculiarities we now and then in texts we have before us today.

We may express this in at least two ways, where the parallelism will be manifest.  (1) The Triangle ‘hE heautE’ has never known a time when it Was Not, or when it (so to speak) ‘stood in need of being constructed’ and (2) that is by nature a thing of which we may not legitimately ask the question e)/c ou(=( ‘ex hou’ )  question – unless we are prepared to accept a somewhat paradoxical form of answer.   ‘Mathematical’ or ‘geometrical’ matter is an answer with the air of paradox about it;  the puzzling phrase ‘noEtic matter’, coming down to us from the Old Academy when Aristotle and Younger Socrates were there debating mathematical platonism in the way rival ‘diadochoi’ or ‘heirs’ might debate (even quarrel) over rival heritages they were prepared to draw from Plato himself.    There will be another view of this same subject – drawn from a man we may identify with the anonymous ‘someone’ of Proclus’s Friedlein p.

You may ask:   “but where do you find a text carrying that phrase of yours ‘geometrical matter’?”     There is an answer, thanks to careful scholarly work such as that by G. Friedlein (Teubner), his edition of Proclus “In primum Euclidis…”, esp. p. 49, line 5,  and p. 50 lines 7,f.     We’ll be equivocating (cf. speaking perabusively, in the manner of the ‘diakatachrEstikoteros’ of Schol. 30 to Eucl. Bk V, if we act like we have just a single ‘middle’ between pure NoEsis and that extremely movable/variable contact with the multiple “ekgonoi’ [cf. pg. 53,26] amongst material things.   [was it not likely to be Philip who wrote that suite of Scholia, — perhaps in various works done to various ends originally —  drawing out a metaphor of ‘mothers’, ‘ancestors’, ‘offspring’.   I mean Schol. to Chapt IV of Bk X.   Likely so, I  now judge – 04.iv.12]

Geometrical matter is an ‘out of which’ for (a) triangle, (b) circle or (c) [definition of] SchEma ‘out of [dia]noEtic matter’, and (you might as well say) ‘out of geometric matter’ or ‘out of noEtic matter’.     Now it is a wholly unintrusive ‘looking upon’ that the mathematician, at his full dianoEtic cognitive exertion can be captured.   “PoiEton” is replaced by Philip with  “noEton” at Tim. 92 C, as fits well with a ‘pythagorean knowledgeable about Nature’.    It takes a proud and self-assured “preacher” to tamper thus with any text in the Eighth Tetralogy.   The deeply inventive mind of Philip (Younger Socrates) was such a preacher, I believe, and did much of his work near Olympiad 105-106.

24.xi.12:    Examples #6 and #7 of this TLG search report on the Scholia to Euclid.   These are lead examples of the combination particle “kaitoi”.    This is in turn followed immediately by a participle (in the genitive case).    A similar clause seems to have been intruded into Plato’s text, perhaps by Philip of Opus,  at Rep. VI, 511 D 2.

At the Old Academy, Philip’s nickname appears to have been “Amphinomus”.  possibly he had a second speaker-name, h.e.  “Younger Socrates”.   This possibility should be followed down by someone, perhaps myself, when a blogsite like youngersocrates.com exists and is hospitable to this.   Each was well acquainted with mathematics, each was personally known to the elderly Plato and the juvenile Aristotle.   Anyone from that same Early Academy will have associated Amphinomus with LeiOdEs, in the tradition of Homer being the ‘doublet’ character to Amphinomus.   [so B. Fenik ‘Studies in the Odyssey’ (Mnemosyne 1974), esp. pp. 192-196.].

Philip is credited with a Euclid-like work “Optics” (noticed by Burnyeat in his recent piece reviving Archytas’s “Optics”).   He may also have been the same man under reference in the puzzling “twn sophwn tis” in Rep. IX,ix, 583B,ff.   Adam’s App. IV makes a mighty effort to identify this “tij”, spoken of as one of the “sophoi”, perhaps with a hint of irony.    The two leading nominees whom he reviews are Antisthenes and Democritus.   Then there is – paradoxically —  Plato Himself – Philebus 44 B,ff, where the attitudes toward pleasure are distinctly less preacherly.

But one particular man at the Old Academy who, apart from Plato, wrote at some length about Pleasure seems overlooked here.   If we trust the SUDA report (you might as well say  [kaitoige] ‘surely you don’t want to trust ourselves, critics from 11 centuries later !’).   Philip is credited with a treatise  p. h(donh=j a.  (“p. HEdonEs, 1 book”.)    Our present-day vantagepoint does not allow us to say confidently that no part of that book found its way into what we now call Plato’s Philebus.    Nor can we be sure none of it found its way, alongside material from Eudoxus, into EN Books X and IX. 

It may be worthwhile to insert an excursus here, Scholia to Euclid I, 15 (esp. Scholl. ##59-62).   This will take us down a path JL Heiberg laid down.   He collected and published with Teubner in 1888, the scholia to all of Euclid’s Elements.   the one leading toward the Philip-like sentiment expressed in Schol. #18 (skeptical towards ‘poiEsis’, as making concessions to ‘time-dependence’ inside mathematics).   We might take steps to follow the distinctive verb ‘diamphisbEtein’ written by Aristotle in his piece ‘On Friendship’, — on some good accounts of Aristotle’s early writing this will have found its way into EN, at Bk IX, 2 1155 a 32ff.   As far back in time as Plato this rather specialised verb was a striking one, on account of its rarity.   In Aristotle himself, however, it occurs several times, once in the suspect Met. Kappa.   This is the book that repeats much earlier material from the same treatise, and that is further peculiar in suffering from a rash of DeMundo-style phrasings   ge mh\n  (‘ge mEn’).     Various of these peculiarities were too much for Aristotle scholars beginning with W. Christ and continuing past W.D. Ross.   They agreed that Book Kappa should be deleted in its entirety.    Herbert Granger has recently shown a disinclination to comply  with this scholarly consensus.

There is a good sense of ‘halfway’ which permits us to say that “Halfway back to Plato, — if we began from Aristotle, — we have our filo-qeamw=n(“ PhilotheamOn”) adjacent to Aristotle’s chancing upon the etymology   fil[o]-ippoj  “Phil-ippos” of Plato’s student, Philip of Opus, Aristotle’s teacher in turn [see 1099 a 10 in the ‘E’ MS, commended by myself in a letter to J. Barnes, mine of early Feb 2010].

There is already some allusiveness in Aristotle’s alluding to the name of the man between himself and Plato, Philip of Opus.   But there is more to the allusion if we include the point that the word   filoqeamw=n [‘philotheamOn’] is more likely what Aristotle wrote at 1099 a 10.    We need not follow I. Bywater, who not only does not read this word, but also declines to mention its having some ms. authority,  even in his apparatus criticus.    In any case the present Oxford edition has the [somewhat less plausible] reading filo-qewrw=n  (‘philo-theorwn’).    But this imports a quite different meaning, a difference of substance.   It is as if we let a ‘theoretician’ be put in for a theater-goer.      A lover-of-abstract-knowledge  (qeorhmata)  for a lover-of-spectacles qea/mata  (‘theamata’).      ‘Theama’ is in fact the root word meant to be echoed at  Bekker  1099 a10.     So  qeamw=n  has commensurate authority at   a10.

Roughly that same time (say early Olymp. 106, when Philebus  is being composed, and Plato in his very advanced years – those poignantly called ‘our sunset years’ in Laws VI, xiv  — see Slings on Plato’s using the first-personal plural form, in Clitophon for example, to indicate ‘myself’ at 406 a10.    Around this date we have Phil. 44B, referring to ‘some wise someone’ who is further described as  ‘deinos peri physin’.    John Adam made penetrating suggestions on the type of man here alluded to by Plato.   ‘Pythagorean preachers’, says Adam (app. x to Rep. Bk IX.   This would put our author at the Academy and make him not unlike the Empedocles referred to by Aristotle here in EN IX,2.     A threesome of men is put together in Problems xxx, 6.    They have attributed to them a shared temperament or ‘personalilty-type’.     Something about their black bile.   This list has oddities apart from mentioning Socrates after Plato:     Empedocles, Plato and Socrates.     The Elder Socrates kept his bile pretty well controlled, we might think.    Can Younger Socrates have had something more bilious about him ?

Returning now to Aristotle’s seemingly polyonymous teacher, call him Amphinomus, call him LeiOdEs, call him Younger Socrates (basileia is among the things Aristotle has under DiamphisbEsis, not so  ?)       In that same DeMundo Chapt 7 spirit of Polyonymising I’d like to add to Philip’s names.    We have it in our best ms. of the Euclid scholion (Heiberg de-prefers this reading, demotes it to his apparatus criticus):   “AristoclEs”.   In Schol. #15, nearby to both #11 and #18 (each of these two latter has peculiarities which may be  signs of Philip’s style) – we have a report about A)risto/lhj kai\ oi( gewme/trai  (‘Aristo/lEs and the geometers’) .   Whoever they were, they came up with their own favorite technical terms for various forms of initial hypotheses or  “anapodeikta”.      Whilst JL Heiberg has printed ‘AristotelEs’ here in Scholion  #15, he is characteristically methodical, and retains in his Critical notes the true reading from our single MS source ( “P”):   ‘Aristo/lhj’(sic)    Call him AristoclEs, say I, not far from either SosiclEs (Plautus), or NeoclEs (Problems, XXX, Ch. 6), an otherwise unfamiliar name at Old Academy.

Amphinomus is like the author of the De Mundo, who is emphatic about how Zeus manages his “polyonymy”.   (some of us moderns experience shock at Zeus’s polygamy; others at his polyonymy.  Philip piously admires both.   Amphitryon is as admirable as Amphinomus at this time of Old Academy rivalries and jealousies.   Zeus seems positively to luxuriate in his variety of names as we see him there in DeMundo #7 — even in its sheer variety.   The author, whoever and whenever he was, passes many names of Zeus in review there in the work’s final chapter (Bekker p. 401).    He and Zeus co-luxuriate in the polymorphic variety of all of this.  It is only better if Zeus should have a son younger than Apollo, the cunning and contriving and thieving youngster.   He will steal cattle early on.   Later he will steal names and inspire others to such stealing.   For example the forger of ps-Plato’s Letter #2, if he can be a ‘Socrates re-born’, can steal the name of Socrates and then (having had Plato confess that all of his written work was not truly his own, but rather belongs to Socrates) steal Plato’s entire oeuvre, including the Epinomis and the Minos !

Returning again to the man known to his mother as Philip:   he and others near him at the Old Academy is a lively nominee to be author of the De Mundo.   (My analysis, which draws on work by  D. Schenkeveld, presses hard on the identity of this author.  I end by finding Philip of Opus, the same author revealed behind mask of Plato, at the the ps.-Platonic “Epinomis”.    My conclusion is that Philip was also known as ‘Amphinomus’, particularly where he and Speusippus try to combat a band of mathematicians in the immediate vicinity of Plato and the young Aristotle.   [so reports Proclus, On Eucl Bk One] and therefore, intimately linked (as a ‘doublet’ to Homer’s Leiw/dhj (‘LeiOdEs’) figure. — See B. Fenik, “Studies in the Odyssey”, 1974.

Eudoxus, Speusippus and Aristotle, all joined Philip in writing on the Pleasure Question, the date of all of this Early Academy writing (including notably Philebus) : the 106^th Olympiad at the latest.    Rep. IX can easily have been under revision [recall D.H. on Plato’s continually revising his writings until on his death-bed.]    This writing activity – including notably Plato’s own – was likely to be going forward at a rapid pace in Olympiads 104-106, at and after the date of Seventh Letter.

Amphinomus, a somewhat evangelical Friend of Forms’ seems the most plausible candidate for this man behind the mask of tw=n sofw=n tij  (‘ τῶν σοφῶν τις  ’).   Our text of 583 B includes a case of ‘kaitoi’, a favorite of Plato’s quasi-friend.    A way of decoding the nickname ‘Amphinomus’ leads via the epithet applied to the suitor Amphinomus in Odyssey XVIII, 152 :     kosmh/twr laou=  (‘kosmEtOr laou’).    It is all the more ironic that it should be Odysseus himself who calls Amphinomus by this mis-placed epithet.   But our Academic ambassador and voyager Plato, at Rep. 422C had raised a storm of ridicule against mythical Agamemnon, “do you say, absurdly, that our great strategist didn’t even know how to count the number of his own feet?”     Plato uses the ‘kaitoi’ phrasing there too, keeping his tone jocular and vernacular.

Our author on Optics, on Pleasure, On Friends and Friendship — the Pythagorean mathematician [Philip] very close to Plato as he begins his Laws does well as a candidate here.

Adam is looking for a suitable nominee to be a  “preacher of the Orphic-Pythagorean type”, thus someone at once somewhat admirable and a bit suspect in Plato’s eyes.   But   again,  textual and interpretive difficulties abound near 583B,ff.    They provoke Adam to write explanatory appendices to his text there.  It is clearly a heavy-hearted interpreter Adam who writes this complaint in his Appendix IX to Bk IX, about 585 C,f “the following sentences are among the most perplexing in the whole of the Republic, or indeed in the whole of Plato’s writings” (II, p. 354).   Adam struggles, and then reconciles himself to “the least unsatisfactory solution” to his interpretive troubles.  (ibid.)

This may be another case where the world needs to guard our text against the contaminations from outside manipulators — say Amphinomus or his over-zealous ‘friends of the Forms’.   They will be losing their bearings when fighting pitched battles against “Friends of the Earth”.   This bad habit of later Platonists – the habit of ‘tampering’ with texts, say of Aristotle when combatting Plato or others, say of Plato when combatting Aristotle or others — they may not hesitate to tamper [see J. Dillon and J. Whittaker on the well-documented later tamperings with Academic texts, aimed at scoring polemical points.]      It is a distortive simplification to suppose that all intra-Academy polemics, — even when the Academy had yet to complete its first PentekontaEtea, — were variations on the Plato vs. Aristotle wars there.   We may even see evidences of disturbances to Plato’s crowning work Timaeus, aat its 42b, ff.

We may even say further this:   it should be ‘axiomatic’ [in the senses of Scholl. 11 and 15 to Euclid I] for any modernday academic that Academic wars can break out in many directions, earlier and later, varying wildly as alliances form and sub-sectarian quarrels devolve from earlier and different battles.   Scholl. 11 and 15 bring out the etymology of ‘axiom’:   “something of which  I or one of my colleagues have recently held  a)ciou/men (‘axioumen’)”].       In a letter a couple years ago I asked a colleague formerly from Balliol College – an Aristotle scholar, in fact —  whether he had come up against such a local and party-quarrel context for such an august term as Aristotle’s word  A)ciw/ma .   From his silence I infer that such a party-quarrel was something he had never witnessed at Balliol, nor heard tell of at Kings College Cambridge either.

These men seem to have felt free to “tamper” (so Dillon, following Whittaker).

A lead example of a motivation is one Philip had a special interest in.   It is a close parallel to what is at stake back at Schol. #18 to Book I of ‘Elements’ our intentions are only pure and purely mathematical if we don’t (in a manner of speaking) soil our hands with production-or-making.    The famous ‘Divided Line’ calls on us to section off those ‘lower’ applications of the human mind, where ‘gross matter’ is managed, manoeuvered, manipulated and so forth.   What it is customary to entitle or label (epiklEsis is the word in Epinomis 973b) ‘PoiEsis’.

The very word, says Philip there guides us to deprecate the thing ‘made’ or ‘produced’.   The phrase “hoper edei poiEsai” implies our platonist demotion of its status as ‘mere product’.    Essences are not like that.   An object of ‘Thewrein’ is just there for us to gaze upon, by contrast.    It makes no sense to say of The Triangle-as-Itself (hE heautE).

the ‘once triangle’ is only said of a figure ‘just now’ constructed – in order to bring out this fundamental falling short of being and ideality, and to divide between then-triangle(s) and the kind Scholion #112 formulates the essential triangle : to\ tri/gwnon h(=| e(auth=|  , in other words the one resident amongst the Ever-Similar range of things.    To be sure, the classical locus of this complaint from Philip is in Proclus.    It may be natural to suppose that Heiberg’s Schol. #112 to Euclid Book I derives from Proclus.   This would mean it had only a slim chance of being traceable to something written while Plato was still alive, or even anything as early as (say) Plutarch or Chrysippus.     An argument is wanting, in the spirit of “let us philologues be as keen to avoid the rash extreme of uncritical skepticism as we standardly are in avoiding incaution” – the spirit, let us call this, of Walter Burkert.      A philologue’s behavior can rhyme with “Vorsicht”, to be sure.   But rational Vorsicht may call on him to restrain his over-restraint, and test out impartially the likelihood (however slim) that, as Slings has put it recently “something ancient”  may lie behind the peculiarities we now and then in texts we have before us today.

We may express this in at least two ways, where the parallelism will be manifest.  (1) The Triangle ‘hE heautE’ has never known a time when it Was Not, or when it (so to speak) ‘stood in need of being constructed’ and (2) that is by nature a thing of which we may not legitimately ask the question e)/c ou(=( ‘ex hou’ )  question – unless we are prepared to accept a somewhat paradoxical form of answer.   ‘Mathematical’ or ‘geometrical’ matter is an answer with the air of paradox about it;  the puzzling phrase ‘noEtic matter’, coming down to us from the Old Academy when Aristotle and Younger Socrates were there debating mathematical platonism in the way rival ‘diadochoi’ or ‘heirs’ might debate (even quarrel) over rival heritages they were prepared to draw from Plato himself.    There will be another view of this same subject – drawn from a man we may identify with the anonymous ‘someone’ of Proclus’s Friedlein p.

You may ask:   “but where do you find a text carrying that phrase of yours ‘geometrical matter’?”     There is an answer, thanks to careful scholarly work such as that by G. Friedlein (Teubner), his edition of Proclus “In primum Euclidis…”, esp. p. 49, line 5,  and p. 50 lines 7,f.     We’ll be equivocating (cf. speaking perabusively, in the manner of the ‘diakatachrEstikoteros’ of Schol. 30 to Eucl. Bk V, if we act like we have just a single ‘middle’ between pure NoEsis and that extremely movable/variable contact with the multiple “ekgonoi’ [cf. pg. 53,26] amongst material things.   [was it not likely to be Philip who wrote that suite of Scholia, — perhaps in various works done to various ends originally —  drawing out a metaphor of ‘mothers’, ‘ancestors’, ‘offspring’.   I mean Schol. to Chapt IV of Bk X.   Likely so, I  now judge – 04.iv.12]

Geometrical matter is an ‘out of which’ for (a) triangle, (b) circle or (c) [definition of] SchEma ‘out of [dia]noEtic matter’, and (you might as well say) ‘out of geometric matter’ or ‘out of noEtic matter’.     Now  is a wholly unintrusive ‘looking upon’ or ‘surveying’ that the mathematician, at his full dianoEtic  “PoiEton” is replaced by Philip with  “noEton” at Tim. 92 C, as fits well with a ‘pythagorean knowledgeable about Nature’.    It takes a proud and self-assured “preacher” to tamper thus with any text in the Eighth Tetralogy.   The deeply inventive mind of Philip (Younger Socrates) was such a preacher, I believe, and did much of his work near Olympiad 103-106.

Older Attic dialect preferred in Venetus ‘T’ of Plato — copying Thucydides

The issue of word-formation out of letters is addressed by Aristotle in Met Nu  6 in a passage to which Bonitz’s index makes reference under the word-listing ‘xi’ or (in TLG coding) ‘C’.  Here is the Bonitz excerpt, which you can see gathers a set of 3 double-sound consonants, (we might pronounce these psi, ksi and dz).  These are all matters which the of the trivium of the day used to call ‘grammatikE’, closely attended to by Plato in his ‘letters and syllables’ passages in Theaetetus.

Aristotle on sound-sameness of C, Y and Z, i.e. ks, ps, dz, Met Nu6

 

++++++++++++++++

Who appropriated the name ‘Younger Socrates’ for himself near the time when Plato was writing STATESMAN and LAWS ?  I find it likely to be a ‘diadochos’ or ‘successor’ in the sense of LAWS VI, Ch. xiv, — in this case a self-appointed Nomo-phylax.   This self-appointed man also composed the pseudo-Plato ‘Epinomis‘, possibly also the ps.-Aristotle De Mundo, arrogating to himself the role of lawful Successor, the heir-apparent to Plato Himself at the Academy, a compound of Astronomer-Plato- follower-Philosopher-King.   This singular man would  make it no longer required for Plato to author his promised dialogue The Philosopher.

The key will be to hunt down the King [think of the king at Tht. 146 a 4,  βασιλεύσει ἡμῶν ].     A medieval MS in the Ashmolean collection at Bodleian Library Oxford carries the name of its author:    ‘Socrates Basileus’.    This names  ‘Socrates the King’.   Possibly we are getting a pointer to a ‘Socrates’, a man skilled in astronomy and present at the Old Academy.   I believe this to be Plato’s intention.    This would be a man, with quite direct lines of influence on the young Aristotle, bold enough to apply the nickname  ‘Younger Socrates’ to himself personally.     Several events reported from near Plato can be better explained if we understand the name ‘Younger Socrates’ — Plato’s own stage-name or mask for someone likely personally close to himself and very skilled — as ripe for exactly such an appropriation, especially by a nearby man skilled in astronomy.    This stage-name  will have certainly been at least theoretically to any of the little set of broadly knowledgeable ‘mathematikoi’.   Top ranked amongst these will have been those skilled at astronomy and also ambitious to cross the boundary and promote himself to the rank of dialectician.  

That is to say, a man whose specific skills lie precisely at the border between the lower and the higher rank of ‘noEta’ [ νοητὰ ].   It is as if objects of mathematical cognition could suffer their subordinate rank amongst ‘noEta’ to be overruled, even at the cost of Plato’s contradicting himself late in Book VI.   Both Adam [Appendix XI to Bk VI] and Campbell [Vol II, p. 16] think Plato himself was in this way falling into contradiction,  R. 511 d2.   Slings salvages truth and Plato by excluding the entire phrase ‘kaitoi… archEs’ from his OCT text [Slings drops this and his reasons are published in the posthumous notes assembled by Boter et al.]         Slings advanced an abundance of reasons for his excision, his explanation running to the greatest length of any of this volume’s notes].    Venetus T includes a suggestive erasure and copyist’s overstrike exactly where Slings calls for the dropping of the crucial 5-word phrase, begun with the ‘kaitoi’.    

If several of these bold initiatives from Plato’s subordinates there during Olymp. 106 be taken together, we may bring together a rebellious attitude here surfacing as an interpolation.  (late in Chapt xxi of Bk VI ).    More detail is naturally needed here, to bring together the concentration of these various overturnings and reversals.   If these lightly veiled references to  “disturbing and wandering” effects can be responsibly traced to a single cluster of causes, we have major landmarks to guide us in doing some reconstruction of these troubles.  In  Timaeus, in Euthydemus, in a puzzling string of light irregularities late in Bk. II of Republic, and in various of the ideas of the young Aristotle as he works on early works such as Rhetoric,  Analytics, De Gen. et Corr. and De Caelo.

Further, it may be that this presumptuous King Socrates will have pushed his personal self-assertion to the point where he imagines substituting himself for Plato, the underling for the Master, somewhat in the pattern of the Bodleian Library’s medieval ms., a writing Socrates displacing a temporarily non-writing (and clearly perturbed) Plato.    Another way of describing this gradually advancing habit of insubordination within the Academy near to Olympiad 106:   ‘insurrection’ or ‘insurgency’ or ‘epanastasis  [ἐπαναστάσις]  ‘ as outlined early in Chapt. xviii of Republic IV.  

It will be fitting to pause here to deal with the delicate subject of “chapter divisions” and the scholarly uneasiness about these and other divisions within our texts.  The recently published (2013) non-Shorey edition of the Loeb Republic lands in an extreme (and in my judgment untenable) view of such matters.   It is illustrative of the extreme of over-caution and routine skepticism against which W. Burkert warned his fellow philologists.   Here is their routinised hyperskeptical statement .   You be the judge:

“The division of Republic into ‘books’ was almost certainly [italics mine] not made by Plato himself, but at some later date in the history of transmission.” [vol. I, p. ix, fn. 5].

It ought not be left as mere dogmatic assertion on my part to issue (as I do) my wholehearted rejection of this.   For consider my argument:

1.  these same editors and translators, — who have moved been party to Harvard’s moving aside Paul Shorey’s abundance of judicious notes, — translate R. VII, xvii, its final words , this way [II, p. 203]    “Are we satisfied now with our discussion of this state [sc. kallipolis] and the man who resembles it ?. . .  Clearly, and to answer your question, I think we’ve reached the end.”    Our editors agree with Shorey here in printing the emphatic word   τέλος  at  541 b5.    The agreement of Republic scholars  is overwhelmingly favorable to attributing this word “telos” to Plato himself, and to take him as authorising all his editors to entitle the beginning of a new Book (h.e. Book 8) at precisely this point.  A man of Shorey’s stature would not  translate a phrase recently excised from a respected text before him, the excision performed by a man of the stature of  S. Slings.

2.  consider some evidence taken from our Venetus T, its fol. 235r :

    FINAL 10 LINES OF REP. BK VI (VENETUS T)

3.  A reinforcing argument can be drawn from the series of “entitling” markers placed before each of the three final chapters in Republic Book IV.  It is no harm to the text’s word ‘teleutaion’ [ τελευταῖον] at Rep IV’s 443  b7 that it has textual variants; on the contrary, this special marker-word [variant  ‘teleon’  τέλεον] amounts to a ‘rule-probing exception’.  For Book IV’s Chapters xviii and xix have definite markers also [recognized in all 3 of the agreeing editorial work of the Dies-Paris, the Adam-Cambridge, and Shorey-Harvard editions]:  the distinctive sequence of three markers set off (a) prope-prope-final (b) prope-final segments, and then segment off (c) the left-over topic of injustice, treated as an afterthought.

Each of these last-named units of Plato’s prose has a  strong textual marker pointing to an authorial chapter unit.   Chapter xvii had begun with the word ‘teleutaion’ [ τελευταῖον ] at 443 b7.    Chapter xviii begins with the emphatic transition words ‘estw dE’ [ Ἔστω δή ] of 444 a10.   We might as well complain of a 19 chapter book’s speaking of ‘ultimates’ 2 stages before its true end, (h.e. in each of Ch. 17 and 18) as accuse the word ‘antepenult’ of lacking in true the necessary ultimacy.   Nor is a ‘postscript’ (Ch. 18) forbidden to have in its turn a post-postscript (Ch 19 of the postscripted Ch 18)   At 444 e6 Ch 19 begins with “to dE loipon” [ τὸ δὴ λοίπον ]  after the preceding  definite marker heading Ch. 18.

 (Schneider’s edition does not use any variant of our word ‘book’, but rather entitles each of the work’s major divisions as a “Logos”.   Authorial divisions stand behind much of the textual work of our powerful continental editors of the past two centuries and more.   Stallbaum’s note fairly rings out, at his 1859 text of Republic, its Book VII, the opening two words of its Ch. 10: “statim post     Τί δαί … “.   He was refusing to retract a special dialectal utterance by Socrates, which continued with the striking words  … τρίτον θῶμεν ἀστρονομίαν .    All of this special emphasis tends to go lost if one puts overmuch trust in the Oxonian viewpoint — so at least say I.  [Similar critical words were written, but with much more fiery rhetoric, both by Slings in his 1998 review for Mnemosyne and by ER Dodds in the introductory materials to his 1959 edition of Gorgias, in relation to the OCT mode of editing Plato. ]  

If I have decoded rightly Gaiser’s ‘Philosophenmosaik bei Neapel’, there will be no anomaly in thinking of both Plato and Aristotle as direct witnesses to some of Philip’s presumption and presumptuous writing.  Even his offering to tamper with Plato’s text of 511d2 and to leave small markers of Locrian style such as  Τί δαί   or   Τί δαί δὴ either here at VII,10 or in each of 3 chapters in a close sequence (all relayed by Ephraim in his early books of Republic, its II, 19, II, 21 and III, 1.   More on this other set of markers — also seeming to indicate dialectical variants, in this case of the Dorian-Locrian variety).    Much more needs to be explored here, some with help from some anticipated work in collaboration with the Perseus Digital Humanities and the Open Philology project at Tufts (and at Leipzig, spring of 2016).

Yes, some of these Continental ways of editing, now and then found to resonate within souls from Ireland such as Dodds and MacKenna — and even Derry Man R.G. Bury — may fine some new impetus toward ‘Entwicklung’ here in the Medford-Cambridge region of Eastern Massachusetts.    But perhaps only ‘Socrates basileus_prognosticus’ who had True Opinions about the Gods and a neo_Euthyphronian aspect to his Theology and Dialectic (were both Bury brothers protestant Irishmen ?  Did R.G.’s brother know a good bit about the philological side of Xenophon or Thucydides ?   For example, even prior to  the  newer    OCR    results revealing the  AIEI   prevalances within Euthydemus and Symposium, (the first having only some 28 Steph pages whilst the second has a little over 51)     . . . especially striking if Plato were in the presence of the astronomer Philip or perhaps Philip with a draft of either his Epinomis, his P. Thewn or his “Little Timaeus, the Locrian version”) note at the precise marker-point of Ch. 10 to Bk VII (h.e. 527 d1)

 To resume.        Such arrogant behavior would have amounted to something like a “slave-revolt”, or an irritating or satirisable insurrection, its leader being rightly named  — a stasiarch (leader of insurgents).   This disorderly interlude at the Early Academy after the third Sicilian travels of Plato can rightly also be named by Plato’s specially coined word in LAWS, ‘StasiOteia‘ [ Στασιωτεία ].   A.E. Taylor interprets this word with his  own fabrication “no-constitution”, an apt interpretation.   Top people who head up factions in epoch’s of intense civil unrest are winners in the Race to the Bottom, Leaders and Followers suffering this form of ‘perturbation’.    This will mean that this temporarily-coronated King (cartoon image supplied below) risks a satirico-comical treatment.   F.M.  Cornford’s ‘Microcosmographica Academica’  had its 17th century prototype behind it.   This present picture suggests it may also have faintly forewarning indicators in antiquity.   The scene will have been set approximately in the 106th Olympiad when Aristotle had yet to produce any of his major work, but was present and active, active and writing.   Some of the enigmatic features of that Early Academy may find partial unriddling here. 

Plato is likely to have been still at work writing or revising Republic in Olympiad 106 when he was also at work on Statesman and Laws.    E.R. Dodds’s edition of Gorgias implies that he was still revising that as late as 354 BC.  If so, we would expect our texts of Republic to be subject to repercussions of this micropolitan disturbance and trepidation and wandering.     We may gather some unusual phrasings from Books I, IV and VII of Republic and its discussions of ‘the true Astronomer’ [ Book VII:  ὁ τῷ ὄντι ἀστρόνομος  ] or ‘the True Calculator [Book I:  ὁ τῷ ὄντι λογίστης ] to give some of these hypotheses a particular footing in Plato’s texts.    Some puzzles about the cosmic layers within the De Generatione et Corruptione will be made less puzzling, on this hypothesis.    This blood-and-bone man, — King Socrates as he did not shrink from calling himself —  risked creating a fundamental per-disturbance inside that late-Plato period of the Earliest Academy.    A significant linguistic signal from that same Olympiad:  the poorly attested specialist word  diatarassw [ διαταράσσω ] of Laws 693 e, echoed in Plutarch, but very rarely found elsewhere.    More on this specialist language and its background in the usage of early mathematics is pursued below.

Two other specialist words descriptive of similar kinds of disturbance should  be drawn from a list at the end of Book IV of Republic.   These all  allude to a pattern of human behavior, likely manifest within this same this man’s disruptive activities at the Academy.   One of these two terms is extremely uncommon and the other (on which the first is clearly patterned) is rather common.      allotriopragmosunE,  [ ἀλλοτριοπραγμόσυνη : ‘behaving like someone foreign to our family group’] and ‘polypragmosunE’ [ πολυπραγμόσυνη : ‘behaving in a meddlesome or interfering way’ ].     The former word is a great rarity, a ‘PAWAG’ we will call it if we follow the suggestion of a recent scholarly coinage, h.e.  a PoorlyAttestedWordinAncientGreek).    This word not only lacks any recognised examples outside its unique-within-Plato Republic IV passage.   Even within Plato’s lexicon it has a further distinction:   the relay of this Book IV passage by Stobaeus simply drops out this word from Plato’s text [Slings’s 2003 note repairs the lack of scholarly notes to Plato’s official OCT text;  Burnet had remained silent in his OCT of 1901 — also silent Adam’s Cambridge text and the Bude text and Shorey’s Loeb, all major editions from the first part of the XXth century].    The prevailing consensus of the Plato mss. however does carry all three of Plato’s list (1) “polypragmosunE”, (2) “allotriopragmosunE” and (3) “epanastasis”;  all of them making reference to insurgencies of one sort or another.   The second of these words stands out here for its lexical rarity:  it is the only  PAWAG.     It creates an echo of “polypragmosunE”, the sensitive word from Elder Socrates’s older accusers, who made him out to be guilty of punishable political meddling.

The word ‘taraxh’, which is closely associated with the broader context of this rare word,  is itself not at all a rarity.   It is commonly translated with terms such as ‘perturbance’ or ‘disturbance’ or ‘turbulence’ or ‘turmoil’.  We might think of it as a polar opposite to the related term ‘ataraxy’ — from which a modern-day drug called ‘Atarax’ has borrowed its name.    Ataraxy amounts to the suppression of ‘taraxh’ [ταραχὴ ]; so it is the same as  the psychic calm which has to do with a person’s  self-protection from various troubling passions, anxieties, turmoils or perturbed states of mind.    

We may pause to follow down a specialist usage of this ‘perturbance’ word, within mathematics.    An early book of Euclid (Book V) has roots in the Early Academy, its original author being Plato’s colleague Eudoxus of Cnidus.  Sir T.L. Heath wrote notes on this term, in his 1921 History of Greek Mathematics, echoed in the 1996 edition of LSJ.   The usage comes from ratio theory, where it appears in Elements Book V, Def. 18.     It is the same same root word   ταράσσω  from which this definition draws its ‘tetaragmenh analogia’.   This definition refers to a disturbed order in ratios within the “ex aequali” operation. In specific, it involves the reversal-of-order of the ‘leader’ and ‘follower’ terms within a suite of ratios.     Now Book V is a book whose origins we can trace with confidence to a pre-Euclidean source; a well-informed scholiast writes “this book is by Eudoxus”.   LSJ singles Def. 18 out, alongside a somewhat similar usage by Archimedes, as the “math.” usage of  the verb ‘tarassw’ [ταράσσω   see LSJ s.v. I, 7]

This particular Book authored by Eudoxus puts us in touch in turn with the young Aristotle, who was on intimate terms with Eudoxus.      There is a pointed meaning to  ‘taraxh’  in Rep. IV’s and the Academy’s particular human context, since on the mathematical side of it we find pairs of ratios which share a ‘middle’ term.    The special kind of disturbance involves displacing something from the ‘follower’ position (we now call this the ‘denominator’) in a ratio, re-locating it to the ‘leader’ position (now called ‘numerator’).   Thus  Plato’s use of ‘taraxh’ in a polital or micro-political context, if we keep in mind the Eudoxan connotations, will give more detailed significance to ‘allotriopragmosunE‘.  

Now we may usefully pause here to anticipate a serious objection.  There are scholars who get much troubled by anyone’s suggesting (via use of terms such as ‘numerator’ or ‘denominator’) that anything so incipiently German as ‘rational numbers’ would be remotely relevant to our ancient Greeks before and at Euclid’s time.  Let such troubled scholars, however, undertake to prove that our best texts of Euclid have no Scholion #30, to Bk V, Def. 9, that Eudoxan book’s definition of ‘diplasion’.  Let them meantime stay calm and ataractic at our apparent anachronism, and give us all a full explanation of the Scholiast’s examples.  I mean the example he uses by taking a 1:3 ratio “meta_itself” and getting something he here puts forward as ‘double’, which is 1:9 .   Our scholiast wants us (recall that he is writing good classical Greek and thus writing at a distinctly pre-German era within our indogermanic languages) clearly wants us to compare A meta B [or A meta A] where the ‘meta’ is multiplying a pair of rational numbers to a slightly different operation.  For he offers the other result on the 1:3, namely 1:6, asking us to note that 1:6 is not identical to 1:9.  He draws the logical moral too:  what is here set down as a ‘l e g e t a i’ [perhaps by Eudoxus?] appears to conflict with Truth, ‘a l E th e i a’ (!)   All this delicate paradoxing and the man never uses anachronistic words such ‘doch’, ‘nicht’ or ‘estaunlisherweise’.

 [Bringing in Book V of Euclid sets up in me a special feeling of personal pride, in that I had a brief exchange of letters in spring of 1972 with Prof. Abraham Robinson,  then at Yale, about Book V of Euclid, and its concept of Equality.  Not surpisingly, I have carefully held onto the original of Prof. Robinson’s brief letter to me these past 43 years.   Sadly for the world of philosophy and of mathematics (and for Plato scholarship) the past 41  years have suffered from the sad fact of Robinson’s very premature death in 1974.   Robert Goldblatt in his 2012 book on the ‘hyperreals’ calls Robinson’s 1966 book  Non-standard analysis “immortal”.   In the personal collection of letters dating back to the 1960, Robinson’s short letter to me mentioning Euclid Book V it is hard for me personally to think of its surviving the man.    It gives me the personal feeling of having been in close touch with at least three immortals, Euclid, Eudoxus and Robinson.  

Rudy Rucker formulates a list of logicians working on Foundations, at the end of his recent book “The Lifebox, The Seashell and the Soul” (2005).   His list (call it the number-theory-sequence) runs from the Russell-Whitehead optimisms about formal systems, via Hilbert’s equally optimistic pronouncement about “no ignorabimus” [“you have to love a guy so scholarly that he can’t avoid lapsing into Latin”] and then on via the explosive work of Goedel,  Turing and Rucker himself (formal systems are shown in repeated examples to be incomplete as they apply to the natural world, says Rucker, instances that are impossible either to prove true or to prove false, “thanks to my analysis of computation”, Op. cit., p. 442.    Rucker is here not colliding with the advice of Plutarch in his recipes for “Executing self-praise whilst avoiding giving offense”.)    Unhappily Rucker omits Robinson from this sequence of number-theorists.   But General Quantification Theory and its revisions to Russellian denotation can helpfully look back via the shadows or halos or monads  or overlapping_neighbourhoods of Robinson’s work toward hyperreals and the non-standard sign of Identity  [≅], helpful in reconstructing denotation and the quantifier  Q^(the).   Douglas Hofstadter coined the specialist phrase “SeekWhence” to encode the inverse of the relation of “Sequence”. ]

Let us return to that concept of ‘uprising’ or ‘overturning’ or ‘turning upside down’.  Plato is likely to be taking up  Eudoxan connotations of this usage as he borrows from the mathematician’s language.    The Eudoxan usage of ‘tetaragmenE’ occurs, as noted above, in the same famous list of Definitions in which the so-called “Archimedean Axiom” appears as Def. 3.   “Perturbed proportion” as defined in Def. 18, carries the precise sense of a suite of ratios in which we encounter the interchanging (within a ratio or ex aequali proportion) of the positions of  the Leader-Term (hgoumenon, [ ἡγούμενον ]) and the Follower-Term (‘epomenon’ [ ἑπόμενον ]) in relation to a ‘something else’ [‘allo ti’:   ἄλλο τι ].    LSJ cites V, Def. 18 as his mathematics example — the all-but-singular example he finds — of the mathematical use of “tarassw”  [ταράσσω].   ‘Leaders’ and ‘followers’ of course can be quite easily exchanged in the context of leaders and followers within the Early Academy.  We have the mathematics-admiring Plato working to formulate political disturbance or turmoil or position-exchanges, amongst men he was consorting with, some of them named in Letter #7.   Here the concept of ‘following’ is not at all distant from that phrase in the Phaedo,  [ ” ‘following’  the rational” ἑπομενή τῷ λογισμῷ , the phrase which gives Barnard College at Columbia University her motto].     It is rationality positioned as the Leader, the individual human (in this case a female) the Follower, [perhaps not unlike one of the nymphs from the Epizephyrian Locrian caves near Rhegium, which fascinate poet and archaeologist Howard Baker of Washington DC.]   The Hermes figure in the recently reported mosaic from Amphipolis in IVth century BC Macedonia appears to be leading one individual soul (his vehicle following in turn).   A nomo-phylax as in Laws VI will lead a whole Cretan City — or perhaps a whole Atlantis or Athens — after exercising his freedom to edit the versions of the now-deceased lawmaker’s best efforts, in his final version of them.  They will have been perfected as best the Lawmaker was able, may his soul be led on to still more perfect versions on the other side of death’s door [see LAWS VI, xiv.

Much life is present inside this following example:  London’s Oliver Sacks, still alive in August 2015, had been deeply disaffected by the ‘bigoted and cruel’ law in Leviticus imposed upon him by his mother back around 1950, so his words say.   Sacks was writing in the 16 August 2015 (Sunday) edition of NY Times, about the ‘seventh day’ of one’s life.   His metaphor is quite parallel to that of LAWS VI, xiv “en dusmais [etais] tou biou” [  ἐν δυσμαῖς  τοῦ βίου ]  Sacks was still alive on 16 August, as a million or more of us learned from that newspaper that same ‘seventh day’.

A parallel that may be worth drawing here.  It may lend some strength to the present hypothesis of “Socrates-Alternate”, this being one of the aliases for Philip of Opus, yet another alias being “Amphinomus”.   Someone associated closely with “Younger Socrates”,  namely his fellow student of the geometer and astronomer Theodorus of Cyrene, namely Theaetetus of Sunium, is reported (in the Vita Pythagorica) as having “written laws” for Rhegium.   This is a town not much distant from Epizephyrian Locris.  This same report about such a man had authority enough to provoke Ivor Bulmer-Thomas in his 1968 article in Dictionary of Scientific Biography entitled “Theaetetus” to come forward with the idea of a kind of Theaetetus_Junior, son of Plato’s mathematician of distinction.   An anonymous Scholiast mentions the elder Theaetetus by name in the margin of our very fine ms. of Republic VII, Paris A (#1807, now viewable online at the French National Library).   This scholion uses the imperfect tense of when describing him, and also the masculine pronoun ‘hoios’ as if Theaetetus himself were someone (now no longer alive),  known to him personally.    It is located in the margin of our best Plato ms., Parisinus #1807, adjoining its Rep. VII, 525  e.   Greene of Haverford had published it  in 1938, likely to be re-published in the much expanded critical edition of the scholia, unless an obstacle reported by him on his LinkedIn page blocks this, before 2017 —  by Domenico Cufalo of University of Pisa.

Meantime the Bibliotecque Nationale de France has a good quality digital edition of Parisinus A up on its website for all to inspect directly.  Its “iota superscripts” inserted frequently in the word Leon Robin found so fascinating — but uniformly unreported by the OCT edition — is of great philological and historical interest.   All 38 specimens read   That word occurs 38 times in the Venice ms. of Symposium, in all cases “misspelled” from the OCT’s point of view.  Including its superscripted Iota’s, the word  is  αἰεὶ    .    Various points will need to be made about this special bit of lexical texture in the Venice ms., not just in Symp. and Phaedrus , where Leonard Brandwood called special attention to it in 1976, but also in Euthydemus, where the OCT commits errors of both omission and commission about it.  I will be saying more about this matter below.

Can there have been a man assuming the name Theaetetus_Alt. parallel to Socrates_Alt. ?  Plato’s recognised “anger” against the “Socrates” doing upside-down or “Earth-OverFriendly” astronomy in Bk VII, Chapters x-xi are in point here, as is the anger J. Adam finds against “your” Socrates, the one with the polypragmosunE-prone gape-mouthed fascination with looking downward.   That ‘other’ Socrates_Alt. or ‘SwkratE tina’ of Apol. 19c, was ready (whether comically floating on the earth or just as comically floating on the sea) bending his attention downward toward the sensible order, as it were from clouds of Aristophanes.   The new polypragmosunE, Plato is saying or implying is expresseed in this exotic word ‘allotriopragmosunE’.   A mathematical thinker bending his thoughts downward toward Earth, but claiming to be the newly-come-down-from-Heaven dialectician, — from Boeotia, not far from Thebes, where Locrian and Tarentine dialects may well have been well understood, pythagoreans doing the lexical bridgework.    Recall the ittw Zeus Theban exclamation of Seventh Letter [ἴττω Ζεύς , 345  a3] likely written some years prior to Plato’s completing his revisions,  — on my ‘chorizontic’ view of it at least — of Republic.   There is a harmony-of-effects with this present interpretation if the year -354 is that of Letter 7 and if Dodds is right to surmise Plato’s re-editing Gorgias near that date and also making serious revisions to Republic.    

We have an irritable young comic named Crates taunting Plato from the Theban side [ ἴττω Ζεύς , 345  a3 would be an echo of this within the the thrice-enraged-Plato passage of Letter VII 345 d – 346 c ].   These cynical provocations may have come via the literary side.   This is to say (for example) via the comic stage or via letters and diatribes of the usual uninhibited or cynical rudeness [see our ‘Arteno=l’ drawing of the provocative young Crates and his mentor Diogenes of Sinope, with a book of diatribes and letters opened before him; Socrate et Denys might be thought of under the rubric of ‘Twins’ or ‘Gemini’, perfectly willing to take up images and interpret them, say pictures from Homer’s epic stage or Aristophanes’ more vivid stages, or conceivably a ‘cave’ or ‘well’ such as Plato imagines in the dialogue “Theaetetus”, Thales at the bottom and a Thracian maid_or_nymph looking down mockingly at him.    J. Adam glossed a difficult passage about astronomy within Republic VII by surmising that the astronomer might be looking downward into the ritual water-trough there in the ‘pit’ or ‘cave’, conceivably getting more precision into his star_charts with help. from the nearly vertical walls.    If we shift attention from the half-mythical Thales figure forward to the fully blood_and_bone man Eudoxus, we may get a good rationalisation of the report on him “at the moment he died, he was logging data inside his observatory”.   Did the sun have a “third motion” ?  Eudoxus said “yes”, but when asked HOW LARGE was the little trepidation or anomaly, at the solsticial horizon point (say at the observatory at the Academy) he would only say “very little”.

This would be like saying that Aubrey Diller, when he died, was searching out new botanical specimens in the woods in Bloomington, Indiana, near his beloved Indiana University.   Prof. Diller, amongst his many other acccomplishments, identified Ephraim of the Souris scriptorium as the copyist of our  Marciana Library’s “Venetus T”.   Diller found many botanical treasures, and also several medieval manuscript treasures before he died, much praised by his Indiana colleagues — he died in he woods, on a botanical mission, “with his boots on”.

Returning now to the approximate scene of Eubulus’s play “Dionysius”, which included a character named “Philip”.   More irritating and insulting yet to the aging Plato would be the pseudo-philosophical pseudo-kings, the tyrants of imperial Syracuse.   These men (at the time of Seventh Letter anyway) will be straying young pseudo-platonists, thinking themselves fully equipped to recruit ‘followers’ after having heard Plato’s theories just a single time, and having not really digested the philosophical content, which is to say having not truly reflected upon them or taken counsel in the appropriate way.   This might be something like a junior mathematician experimenting with cube-doubling perhaps using a mechanical device or two.   Or like a precocious philosopher, deciding on which “enemy combatant” to subject to a targeted character_assassination, presuming to call such tyrannical and impulsive decisions by the name Philosopher_Emperor).

All this could be put under the name “science and knowledge” if one were in such an immmature way ready to interchange night-time alchemical guessing with true quadrivial knowledge, or hypothesis-based science with unhypothetical dialectical ascent to the ideas themselves.   We do have fragments of the tract by a pair of authors “Socrates and Dionysius”, fragments of material Plato might have scornfully put under the name “scientific-ish” little_technia [ τέχνια ].    Such are the tracts recently published in France, and analysed under the authors’ names “Socrates and Dionysius [Socrate et Denys]”, by French scholars Halleux and Schamp in their collection “Lapidaires Grecs” (Paris, Les belles lettres, 1985).  These tracts have approximately the value that Sir Isaac Newton’s night-time researches into Alchemy have to that same author’s day-light hour theories about the Three-Body problem and the Moon’s motions — and about fluxions of his pre-Robinsonian form.

The poet’s line “let Newton be, and all was Light” does not truly describe today’s situation (according to Curtis Wilson’s recent book, “The Hill-Brown Theory of the Moon’s Motion”, from Springer)  — describing with precision and fearlessness the precarious situation of our best present-day knowledge of the moon’s motions.    This is Sir Isaac’s Earth and his Moon.  Still less do Sir Isaac’s researches into Alchemy tell the entire scientific story about muriatic acid and various stones.   A late 2015 striking NASA photograph with the “dark side of the moon” in the foreground, our Earth in the background will have allowed today’s astronomers to pin down that moment’s position of the moon, relatively to a selected latitude_longitude on Earth, and will have helped resolve and regularise what Curtis Wilson refers to as a remaining and intellectually unpalatable irregularity (h.e. a “wobble”) in relation to our very best Einsteino-Newtonian theories, applied to the Jet Propulsion Lab’s data.

We may well have revealing cross-connections amongst these following 3 seemingly unrelated points:

(a) a young Aristotle’s De Caelo I, x , a middle-aged Philip’s De Mundo chapt 7, pointed to in  Archer-Hind’s note to Tim. Chapt V,

(b)  Timaeus Chapt V itself, where we find a manifest of the ‘inciser’ critical instrument in the anakolouthic remark about the terms ‘Heaven’ and ‘World’,  and again

(c)  that portion of Rep. where Holger Thesleff detected an “onkos” style of the late-Plato:  Republic V, Chapt     Plato may be pointing to an ‘valorous and eristic’ [ ἀνδρειῶς καὶ ἐριστικως ] phase of growth at his own Olympiad 106-107 Academy of ‘that noble power of empty verbal disputes’ [ἡ γενναίη δύναμις τῆς ἐριστικῆς τεχνῆς ]   These phrasings both occur in the same chapter of the same book of Rep.(V,iv) — the same chapter where Thesleff found the surprising “onkos” style of the late Plato asserting itself.   This can only help boost the ‘chorizontic’ argument, that some of Books IV and V were written rather late (Thesleff allows a time-range for composing of Rep.  to extend into Olympiad 106.

A further point of  Plato’s language  in Rep. V needs emphasis.  The term ‘gennaios‘ is listed by L. Campbell (Republic Essays II, p. 290) as among Plato’s “facetious” usages.   It may also be facetious when used by the wayward [disaffected?] Platonist — possibly as early as Olympiad 106 — who used the phrase “καθάπερ ὁ γενναῖος Πλάτων φησίν ” at De Mundo 401 b, — where he proceeds to mis-quote the Timaeus.     We will be seeing symptoms of the same ‘eristic’ stresses on that Early Academic scene, as Philip gains authority and men such as Menaechmus, Heraclides, Eudoxus and Aristotle are maneuvered into positions of lesser influence (or they opt to move elsewhere) — symptoms of this wayward behavior are properly described in in the exact language of Republic IV, Ch. xviii with its suggestive phrase  “ταραχή καὶ πλανή  [tarachE kai planE” ,   ‘Turmoil and straying’].

F.M. Cornford’s ‘microcosmographia’ tract, its recent new edition, carries a snapshot of Royalty on a suitable carpet in front of Cambridge University in 1894, calling the King one of Cambridge University’s “influential friends”.    There are naturally many ways of  decoding that Cornford pamphlet, some of which lead back to the blood-and-bone man who served as a kind of personal secretary to Plato when he was composing his LAWS.   His mother, from Opus, called him “Philip”.   As with the character late in the Odyssey, birthname Arnaios, but nicknamed “Iros”, we need to some decoding, some de-Iros’ing as a verse in our epic puts it.    Eudoxus’s peer in that early department of Astronomy, who may have bequeathed to Eudoxus some of the disturbing controversies involving both Plato and Philip (see the anticipated Ire of the man whom Plato says he is attacking personally under the scornful term “philodoxos” (479 a), in Republic Book V (likely written very near in time to Statesman and LAWS).   Plato will have been Number Zero in the natural sequence of ‘chorizontics’, on this accounting, beginning to separate his own final edition of Republic from its various earlier editions. in the final three chapters of our Adam-Shorey-Slings edition.   Sadly, Slings drops the Chapter designations, or we could call them Chapts. xvii-xviii-xix.    More on this topic of chapter divisions in Republic below.

This new (or, as our Venetus T  ms. calls him, ‘Socrates Alternate’) Socrates will be running the risk of ‘incurring a sinning’ by Athens’, to give it an easily decoded but ironic name.    Plato’s name for it, if he had one,  was ‘allotriopragmosunE’.   Do please check the solitary outcropping of this term, occurring as it does alongside the equally technical term ‘polupragmosunE’.   In the text of Stobaeus, this solitary outcropping does not occur, as Slings’s 2003 edition makes clear.  The pair of specialist-words (adapted to the law-court) point to something like this decoding.   You will find the two of them adjacent,  in the same passage within Chapt. XVIII of Adam’s (and Shorey’s) edition, — most especially its  lines 444 b1-b8.   These deserve a most careful reading, and even some checking of the best 3 families of mss.   Venetus T is the chief ms. from Family II.    If all goes well, this dark-horse ms. will soon be made much more available via digital images.   Projects such as those at the Polonsky Foundation and Roger Pearse’s various websites aim to put all such materials up onto the internet.   Conceivably Venetus T might be accessible in its archival quality, some 83 MB per image.

This name ‘Younger Socrates’ will in theory no longer name only a literary character, internal to Plato’s late-dialogue pair Sophist-Statesman.  Rather, it will begin to refer to a blood-and-bone human individual there at the Academy when Aristotle had recently arrived, eligible to become one of Aristotle’s early teachers.   In the subjects of astronomy and theology especially, but possibly also in geometry and spherics.   I have it pictured (but tentatively so) that Philip indulged in digressions.   I mean mental gymnastics and word-magic, numerology such as you find in Epinomis, and sorties into his own ‘true opinions about the gods’.     This would mean we should find echoes of a Euthyphro Alternate to go along with ‘Socrates Alternate’.    It fits with this that there are echoes  about the Euthyphro-inspired new understandings of language in Cratylus.    The man sometimes called ‘newer Socrates’ and sometimes (in Venetus T) called ‘Socrates Alternate’ is companionable with this alternate Euthyphro.

There is much work needed on Chapt XVIII of Republic IV.    What are we to make of the text’s phrase ‘tarachE kai planE’ ?    Philip of Opus wrote many treatises, one provocatively entitled ‘p. Graphein’.    Can this mean About Writing ?  Not likely, at least in the conventional meaning of this, since he was  a rather clumsy writer.   Denniston wrote things (about the late-Plato clumsiness) that suggest that he agrees.    Then can it be about Proving ?  This is a perfectly possible meaning, and somewhat more likely for Philip, since he did a treatise on Optics, where he wrote out proofs [some of these may even have chanced to survive, inside the corpus attributed to Euclid, alongside material which Burnyeat attributes to Plato’s other confrere, Archytas].   A third meaning of ‘graphein’ is perhaps most relevant to the tale being developed here — filing legal charges.    Filing such charges, that is, in the way orators and politicians of that day not infrequently did, to advance their political or micropolitical ambitions.   That was then regularly called ‘graphein’.

Yes, admittedly, there was in fact a ‘dramatis persona’ in Plato’s later dialogues — Sophist, Politicus and [prospectively at least in “Philosopher”] named ‘Socrates the Younger’.    Lewis Campbell brought his vivid imagination to bear on the third of this series of dialogues, the part which third part it seems Plato never wrote.    I will be suggesting that portions of Republic IV and V connect rather closely to a draft Plato created for the planned dialogue;   I have it that parts of this material  got embedded within the body, by Plato editing Plato, in this major work, Republic.  

 [Admittedly, this requires me to accept the accusatory categorization (the tone of accusation is clear in John Adam, for example) — of Chorizontics.  My defence, if I do in fact develop it, will begin by the argument that Plato joins me in this class — and even gives us a kind of leadership with  it — the way Dionysius of Halicarnassus has him doing, “combing and curling” his prose.  So if it is an offense to do this kind of cutting or incising of Plato’s corpus, Plato himself will be a leading offender, his own worst chorizontic.  Call him Choridzwn-Presbyteros.]

We may well be able to find traces of Plato’s Politicus-era thinking about and drafting of his intended separate dialogue Philosopher in the dialectical divisions within Republic V.   This is the very place where we find the seemingly personal reference to a man he calls  ChrEstos   [  χρηστός ,  479 a1   ], and blames for his look-alike behavior imitative of the perfect Philosopher:  the names Plato there coins are ‘philo-theamwn’ and ‘philo-doxos’, names likely to provoke a reaction of Anger in their target, he says.     It will turn out to be relevant to this reconstruction that each of Aristotle and Philip wrote separate works entitled ‘Of Anger’.    Neither is extant, but much of Aristotle’s thinking on the emotions  found a place in his early work, the Rhetoric.   Scholars such as David Konstan, William Fortenbaugh and others have recently done careful work on this material.

Naturally, these two authors Philip and Aristotle  writing at the Early Academy on the topic of Anger will have had their eye on angers of many types and on many  variations on the theme.    They had an abundance of types to draw upon.  The familiar epic rage of Achilles against his fellow noblemen [would that warlike passions had never been planted in the human soul, an exclamation from the angriest of the heroes], to Archytas, the restrained intellectual angered at someone from his own household [let us restrain our impulse to lash out at that slave — until the passion of our anger against him has subsided.]

Can this have been the same blood-and-bone man whom our Venetus T ms. names “Socrates Alternate” ?     The same as the man Aristotle names, — following Plato — Socrates Junior, named by Aristotle in Metaphysics Z, 11 for his ‘comparison [ παραβολὴ ] to the animals’ ?   I believe this to be likely.   It would give one of the common formulas for the ‘magis amica veritas’ sayings much better point, one of the forms put to the side by L. Taran.    And a still better point to the formula dismissed by Taran, — the version in which Aristotle says he preferred Lady Truth to both of his two teachers — Plato and Socrates.   This latter man will have been identical to the Early Academy personage whose Opuntian mother knew him as “Philip”, a blood-and-bone man from Boeotia, a northeast region of the Greek peninsula whose dialectal expressions Plato sometimes uses playfully, including in Seventh Letter.

But some of the subject angers will have been nearer to Plato and the Dionysius-dynasty.    This means for example the one Plato reports his having experienced in himself towards his wayward pupil, Dionysius — the one he reported on in his Seventh Letter.   Other nearby angers for this pair of “De Ira” authors to have had in view are also intimately linked to  the Academy.     For example the angry exchange reviewed by John Dillon [Heirs of Plato], the incident in which Aristotle abusively attacks  the 80-year old Plato.   This incident was recently re-described by Phillip Horky [Plato and Pythagoreanism] .    Most scholarly reports about matters like this resemble the report by novelist-scholar Margaret Atwood on Amphinomus’s taking advantage of Penelope sexually:  the scholars tend to refute the content of the story, or bury the story altogether.    This story about Philip, revelatory as it is of some of the intramural incidents within the Early Academy, points to the observation that the old man’s memory was faulty, irritatingly so to a younger man at that time and place.     It requires only the lightest generalisation before this story allows room for “some alternate”  disciple of Plato’s  — say a Philippus or a Speusippus or a Kalippus, or a Helicon of Cyzicus — to give it a quite plausible footing inside that contentious setting — all the while leaving Aristotle out of it altogether.   This latter level of generality seems to be the best one to give good sense (without descending to the level of what H.H. Joachim called ‘”substances” both universal and sheerly singular’ and  : DeGenetCorr. pp. xxxv,f.     Joachim had made a further identification here.  He identifies this ‘this-here-and-now’ sheer singularity with the Academy’s formula  ”  ἄτομον εἶδος  ” [p. xxiii].

In the present argument we have The Academy’s Prime Suitor, and incidentally tarnisher of Penelope’s otherwise Hypermnestra-like fame, Amphinomus.  Decoding some of these terms, we come finally to the sheerly singular teacher of Aristotle, Plato’s younger Socrates-like man, known to his own Boeoteian mother as the ‘this-here-and-now’ issue, the son she called ‘Philip’.   She will have known him even before he earned the ‘valorous and victorious’ analysis of his name ‘philo-‘ ‘hippos’.    The analyst’s name:   Aristotle of Stagira.

We can still keep other anger-objects in our view, whilst not omitting Socrates-Alternate.   And we get good alignment with the cautionary words in Seventh Letter, where Plato exhorts controversialists (likely his own colleagues !) against incivility and excessively personal reactions to their (or our?) forms of “manful” disputation and intellectual combat.    Plato is clearly scolding some people, and explicitly differentiating the present targets from “the many”, when he forms his scornful phrases “andreiws kai eristikws”  [ ἀνδρείως καὶ ἐριστικῶς ]and “the patrician thoroughbred power of shallow verbal quarrelling”. [ἡ γενναῖη δύναμις τῆς ἀντιλογικῆς τεχνῆς]

Now which of us — call us by our collective name, we the Professoriate — familiar with our intramural feuds and quarrels (staseis in Plato’s word),  — which of us will think it unlikely that particular tempers will flare up now and then as these prototypical academic battles raged ?   That all-too- familiar form of nuanced verbal battling we call ‘noisy quarrels inside our quiet grove of Academe’, no part of our professoriate is immune from it, ever.    Not difficult to surmise, then, that it will have been one of Plato’s own colleagues, the original source of the angry outburst now written in the margins of our Venetus T, its text of Timaeus 42 b2.   Here is a link to that scholion to fol. 259r in Venetus T:

(bis9.8) angry outburst against ‘Supremely wise Plato’ schol to 42b2

The scholiast at that moment will have been suffering from the peculiar pathology,  an out-of-control rage of the dispute variety ‘academic’.   I mean the angry outburst against Plato himself, on this manuscript’s fol. 259r  addressed  at the “Fool” [i.e. Plato !] who authored that line of theodicy at Tim. 42 b1, presuming to say it of our Cosmic Creator that he was overly harsh in describing our passion-burdened human nature.   The particularly dark picture of Ch XIV. . .The kind which would block him from implanting in our very natures passions such as fear, jealousy, hatred and their congeners [I learnt the phrase “congener” from Jonathan Barnes, who has helped make English what it is today, almost as vigorously as his younger brother Julian has done this.  He has published, alongside David Wiggins, penetrating analysis of ].    Our scholiast rails sarcastically at such an aristophanes-like Fool, [note how closely he manages to echo Apol. and its venomous words about Aristophanes; and then he addresses Plato himself, as if he were a man still alive, “O Supremely Wise Plato !  [   ὦ σοφώτατε πλάτων  ] “, and draws on the word strikingly prevalent in Timaeus and Critias, “enthen”.       Quite comparable is Plato’s own phrase  ”  ὠ σοφώτατε Θρασύμαχε  ”  in Rep I, 339 E.   It is a biting and seemingly cunning form of wit we see here, such as a Diogenes or his pupil Crates of Thebes might have executed with that famous joke about watching Plato as he offered to “participate in” the eating of some Theban figs (metechein, so say our cynic-like texts !, [ μετεχεῖν ]  this is the way Eleatics pictured individuals being ‘covered’ by a sail, thus securing their perfect associated unity.  Diogenes’s complaint was that Plato swallowed them as an undivided unity, rather than sharing them out).

Has this scholion been published before ?   Yes and no.   Domenico Cufalo’s compendious new critical edition of the scholia to Plato’s texts has not yet arrived at Tetralogy VIII, so the Venetus ms. T and this scholion on its fol. 259r has not yet [early 2019] appeared in his publication.   Within a year or so, however, Prof. Cufalo will likely give it his critical attention and call this scholion to the notice of a wider scholarly public.   Much wider this public — we may hope — than the 50 or so researchers now alive who have inspected Gr. IV, 1 and this folio in situ in the past 50 years.   One acute student of Plato’s corpus, a man who has paid the ms. more than one personal visit, is David J. Murphy of the Bambrough-Nightingale School on Manhattan’s upper East Side. Dr. Murphy is likely to turn his attention to Venetus T (again), and write more, and more insistently, about what the OCT editors ought to do about working through Tetralogy VIII.  It is not a defect Dr. Murphy is likely to find particularly troublesome, that the scribe to whom we owe fol. 259r is not Ephraim Monachus, known to Murphy.   Our later Timaeus scribe may well have found a true gem here in the margins of fol. 259r.      Ephraim has plenty to be proud of in any case, with or without fol. 259.     His “SwkratEs Allos”, — published already by Cufalo, — from the margins of fol 67, at the beginning of Statesman, comes to us direct from the 10th century hand of Ephraim.   The excerpt presented below is from the top of col. A of Venetus T’s fol. 67r :

257 a1 – 257 c9 Politicus begins end of col B only, 25ll. ( 67r)

Two points here are likely to be a matter of some interest to manuscript-scholars.   (a)  Ephraim’s text of Apology 34d manifest a particle-pair declared impossible in good Greek prose by Denniston-Dover (GP 2, p. 480), and  (b) this seemingly impossible particle-pair begins with an uncial character, more characteristic of 9th century mss. such as he Clarkianus, than mss. of Ephraim’s own period, the mid-10th.   Please look closely at Ephraim’s ‘Delta’ in the JDD-proscribed coalesced pair       δοῦν    :

Can this scholiast have been one of those same Early Academicians, wanting to ascend to the heights, the More-Platonistic-than Plato ?   Or can he have been someone not unlike Antisthenes, but more like Krates the Theban, known for his diatribe, satire and parody ?   It would be of interest to track down more of the context of this particular scholiast.   Krates’s date of birth is commonly given as 365BC, so he would nearly 20 years younger than Aristotle, perhaps too young to have authored much before the time of Plato’s death in 347.     But he wrote plenty, and some in the right vein to contribute sarcastic or cynical laughter to add on top of those early academic feuds.   His prose is said to have resembled Plato’s own, — thus perhaps gaining pieces of it some access to the margins of what Plato himself wrote ?

We may pause to reflect a moment on the pair of variant readings  “(a) misein de kai stasiadzein”/”(b) misein te kai stasiadzein”.    Variant (a) is less likely to be Plato’s own phrase, since it suggests a contrast between “hating” and “family feuding”.   The second is vastly more expressive, and suggests that these two things are as close as a hand and a glove; most hatreds (even the ones implied at Timaeus 20 b4, the ideal polity’s “suitable war”).   This is where we want our newly set-up City, [our conversation ‘yesterday’] or a human unit within this,  to quarrel and start a contentious fight just to test its vigor, do a kind of proof of performance.   This will be the primal testing of our micropolitan unit, larger than a mere domicile but smaller than a Republic: the intermediate size, the size echoed in Plautus’s play ‘Menaechmi’ when he refers to an over-refined group of judges trying to pin down a particular odor (the ‘collegium’ he calls them).     Likely the Academy at the time of Aristotle and Menaechmus of Alopeconnesus.     Our standard Socrates (in Timaeus) says he “would like to hear” how his warrior-citizens would comport themselves in a “suitable war”  [ polemon preponta].

One of Timaeus 42 b1‘s choices — the one leading to injustice, Plato says — is a ‘helpless’ submission to passions, where the human soul loses control and submissively undergoes a being-mastered by such passions.     Plutarch has quoted a “Socrates”  in his tract on the Slowness of Divine Anger, a Socrates analysing anger.  Plutarch’s source writes on the out-of-control animal rage humans sometimes experience, and notes that on occasion they are even subject to these sentiments against members of their own household (hoi suggenoi).     Heaven forbid, an out-of-control rage against a fellow Academic, we are free to imagine !     But where does our familiar Socrates say anything similar to this ?   Scholars have been perplexed.    There is a consensus that nothing exists either in Plato’s or  Xenophon’s works, nothing to match Plutarch’s “Socrates”.

We may fairly make the move to the man fitly named Socrates-Alternate, or Socrates Junior, well suited to be Aristotle’s teacher in the 106th and 107th Olympiads.   Nothing particularly difficult for a Cornford or any other latter-day academician to imagine — feuding in the pattern of academic ‘bickering’, and acting as if the entire cosmopolis and its destiny might depend upon which intra-academic faction comes out victorious at this stage of the all-too-Academic embattled factions.    Can it even get bitter, we ask?   A quarrel between homoiousians [similar-substance-theorists] and homoousians [same-substance-theorists]  for example ?   It can, certifiably, though not more than an Iota separates the warring camps.

In any case we may get further light on each of these two men from the Early Academy in the course of restoring fragments of Philip’s 2-book tract De Ira and Aristotle’s lost work on Anger and other emotions.   Some of the disputings there at the Early Academy, before Aristotle completed the Organon, will have been background to Plato’s plea for civility-in-disputing (Seventh Letter), and various of these elements will equally have been background  for one another, neighboring those De Ira writings.

[It is certainly an attractive theory that we have an allusive reference by Aristotle in E.N. I, 9, 1099 a 8-11  to a man we would call Philo-Theamwn, parallel to calling someone  Philo-Ippos.    This reference, — first demoted to the apparatus criticus by Bekker and others, then dropped entirely by Bywater at Oxford — may well mean to allude to a draft by Plato of something he was preparing for insertion into the text of Republic, Book V.     More of this story will be developed below.   In any case, Halliwell and others see plenty of room for depth and complexity (opacity, even ?) in this particular book of Republic.    Plato’s intentions in announcing his dialogue “Philosopher” may have included some polemical points against an intra-Academy adversary.   Not a juvenile Aristotle;  rather a mature man,  a teacher of Aristotle’s, so the narrative goes here.   This would be a proud man, even an arrogant man.   On the One-to-Ten continuum between the extreme of the over-likeable, man, Mr. ARESKHS [ἀρέσκης] and the over-irritable Mr. AUT’ADHS  [αὐθαδής ],   — I have Aristotle’s teacher nicknamed ‘Socrates Alternate’ scoring   9.5, self-willed and sometimes even impulsively uncommunicative.    This same man was variously known in antiquity, — as evidenced in this same Venetus T ms.  [its folium 67v, with the Cufalo-published material from the margin of the text of STATESMAN]  — under the label, or “code-name ” SWKRATHS ALLOS ”  [ ΣΩΚΡΑΤHΣ ΑΛΛΟΣ ]   I have corresponded with various scholars, Domenico Cufalo, Roger Pearse and David Murphy among them,  about this point.   

Now to be sure we have a name of great logical similarity at Plato’s Apol. 19 c3.   It is a generalised, ‘Socrates-Guy’ name:   [Σωκρατῆ τινὰ , Apol. 19 c3] .     I have yet to learn the opinion [ as of March 2015 ] of D. Cufalo and Dorothea Frede on this following point , but hope to learn it in the coming months:  Is the source of this irritable outburst now applied to Tim. 42 b1 likely to be the ill-tempered intimate of Plato’s, the man who assumed the Academic name Socrates Alternate ?    This is the scholion, image printed above, whose gist is “you are the most eminent Fool, O Eminently Wise Plato…”  can then be brought into proximity with exactly the man whose slave-turned-ruler kind is criticised as bringing on ‘turmoil and wandering’  somewhere.  Inside the Academy, as my narrative has it, where Amphinomus disputed (not always amicably) with the likes of Menaechmus, creating that “valorous and eristic” climate  [‘taraxhn kai planhn’     ταραχήν καὶ πλανήν   ] in Plato’s immediate vicinity at the Early Academy  He once indulged in a piece of impulsive anger-display for us in his writing his uncontrollably-angry outburst against Plato’s TIMAEUS 42 b .    This barbed scholion (see above for an image of it in Ven. T) is priceless in its fury, and in its high public profile (this is being echoed, I judge, from an original work of Philip’s, — likely not often offering such raw ‘laboratory specimens’ of the anger which Philip gave the title “De Ira” [ = π. Ὀργῆς).    I have framed this impulsive outburst and have given a link to an image of it above.

 

 

If you don’t yourself perceive the anger in this Scholion, ask a classical colleague of your own choosing, or ask one of the two men of my choosing:    Gregory Nagy of the Center for Hellenic Studies or any any of the descendants of that master of the nuanced Marginal Comment, K. J. Dover, St. Andrews.

[to insert here :   the specific words in this sarcastic formula ( = w sofwtate Platwn) echo a formula used by Plato of the “Boeotian” poet Pindar.   Philip of Opus will have shared Plato’s target zone in another way with Boeotian Pindar, being himself of Boeotian origin.   Aristotle will soon be using predicates of some Socrates, a ‘leukos’ and ‘mousikos’.  The former of these descriptors may point to the Republic V ‘pale’ humans who understood themselves to have consorted with gods in recent times, perhaps being their direct offspring.   The gift of prophesy might come along, as belonged to the man listed as a member of the early Academy [ref. here to Joyal’s edition of Theages].   Further, this ‘leukos’ need not surprise us if he manifests the special ability to name the divinity with a full list of its suitable names (like the author of the ps.-Aristotelian tract ‘De Mundo’, its final chapter).    The De Mundo the author (possibly astronomer-theologian Philip) indulged himself in an unreasonably large ratio of  uses of “ge mEn”, as was pointed out by a scholar to David Furley.   Furley had published a piece about this work’s being a fake — a deliberate forgery, thus not entirely unlike the ps.-Platonic Theages, edited recently by Mark Joyal.   In any case the ‘mantic’ colleague of both the elderly Plato and the juvenile Aristotle  would fit the picture of the Divine-Right king,     The light- and dark-skinned references in Rep. V are followed by some hard-to-construe points about the honey-hued skin as a kind of ‘middle’ in the leukos-to-melanos spectrum of skins.  One of Philip’s treatises was on the technical topic “On Means”.    And Philip’s fellow-mortal Pindar is nothing if not ‘mousikos’.     A touchstone of the muse-inspired poets.   Plato, Aristophanes, The Muses,  The Muses, Philip the pretender — all these have the right nature or temperament for this role.   On his more optimistic days Philip may have thought he belonged to this exalted brotherhood, a pretender to the role Complete Philosopher or Philosopher King as well as to the ‘mathematikoi’ amongst latter-day pythagorean saints.]

 

 

Quite likely Philip was wounded by this moralising passage from his teacher’s Timaeus, Chapter XIV ?    Philip may possibly have taken it as targeting him personally — not at all unlike the equally famous passage in Republic V (475 – 480, targeting Mr. Filoqeamwn [Φιλοθεαμῶν]    From our present viewpoint, this man is much like the man who wrote the DeMundo, and drew upon himself the derisive or dismissive remark (from Plutarch) “he wants to be an Empedocles, a Democritus or a Plato”.    If Plutarch ended his list at a diachronic endpoint, it will be pointedly prior to Aristotle.   And he may have done this.   There are reasons for thinking Philip as actively composing Plato-like writings in the 106th Olympiad, near the time of Epistles II and III.   He will have been helping Plato compose LAWS, including its Book XII, and also ambitiously imagining himself as a ‘Socrates Basileus’ kind of perfect-philosopher worthy to be named a member of the august Nocturnal Council in LAWS XII.   This will have been at the same time-period when Philip was helping Plato compose the final parts of the Platono-Philipic treatise LAWS.   This was  essentially the same time when Philip was composing the almost-Plato dialogue “Epinomis”, and quite possibly the little tract mentioned by Joyal, a tetralogy-mate of the Epinomis and Laws — the Minos.   So Plato-like was Philip’s Epinomis that in antiquity it sometimes went by the name “LAWS, Book XIII”.    SUDA seems to have made Philip “the philosopher” and the author of Epinomis (subtitled “Philosopher” in one manuscript).   Philip seems to have wanted to call himself the Complete (or Perfect) philosopher — which is all the same [so the Epinomis]  as the astronomer perfected.     My hypothesis puts this Academician to be more-platonistic-than-Plato as something of an adversary of Plato.   He will be aiming  to capture for  himself the role “successor of Plato”, more precisely the διάδοχος  of “the teaching of Plato”  .    Thus he will have claimed to be personally ready to be a kind of ‘Socrates newly generated’ as the formula of Epistle II has it.    A curious scholion to Euclid’s Elements suddenly digresses into speculations on “to pan” (The All) and on re-incarnation of the soul; it has some hints and traces of the astronomical lore associated with this same Philip.   More on that in due course.   It links quite naturally to the ‘mathematical pythagorean’ topics now under active scholarly investigation on both sides of the Atlantic.     

24.xi.12; 29.iv.14:    Examples #6 and #7 here illustrate the special grammatical form “kaitoi + participle”, similar to the clause (possibly intruded into Plato’s text by Philip of Opus) at Rep. VI, 511 D 2.

At the Old Academy, Philip’s nickname appears to have been “Amphinomus”.  possibly he had a plurality of speaker-names, a pair of lead examples being :  “Younger Socrates” and [this latter made standard in Venetus T, around folio 67, beginning of Polit.] “Socrates Alternate”.   This second variation on the name of this renewed man there beside the late Plato — it should be followed down carefully & methodically soon, perhaps myself, when a blogsite like youngersocrates.net exists and is hospitable to this.   In any case the bone-&-blood man was well acquainted with mathematics,  was personally known to the elderly Plato and by the juvenile Aristotle.   Aristotle seems likely to have been a student of “Socrates Alternate”.   This is strongly suggested by Aristotle’s giving a critical summary of the “parable about the animals” he derived from this man’s “repeatedly putting it forward”.

This report has all the signs of something Aristotle is matter-of-factly reporting from his memory records, rather than whimsically inventing or imagining.   We need hardly remind ourselves that this matter-of-fact turn of mind is characteristic of Aristotle (whatever else we might think about Plato or Empedocles, men of poetico-imaginative ‘natures’ or ‘temperaments’:   ‘physis’ is a standard term for what we might call ‘temperament’ or ‘personality type’ today, — for example there in Problems 30, 6     So this remark from our customarily understood Aristotle, a man not given to imaginative inventiveness or given to attributing opinions to non-existent men, or behavior by actual men which was itself non-existent.    Someone he matter-of-factly refers to as “Younger Socrates” put forward this parable (not persuasive at all to Aristotle) “repeatedly”.       This is the man described in the text of Metaphys. “Younger Socrates,” there at Met. Z, 11    Anyone from that same Early Academy will have associated Amphinomus with LeiOdEs, in the tradition of Homer being the ‘doublet’ character to Amphinomus.   [so B. Fenik ‘Studies in the Odyssey’ (Mnemosyne 1974), esp. pp. 192-196.].

Philip is credited with a Euclid-like work “Optics” (noticed by Burnyeat in his recent piece reviving Archytas’s “Optics”).   He may also have been the same man under reference in the puzzling “twn sophwn tis” [ τῶν σοφῶν τις  ] in Rep. IX,ix, 583B,ff.   Adam’s App. IV makes a mighty effort to identify this “tis”, spoken of as one of the “sophoi”, perhaps with more than a minor note of irony.    The two leading nominees whom Adam reviews are Antisthenes and Democritus.   Then there is – paradoxically —  Plato Himself – Philebus 44 B,ff, where the attitudes toward Pleasure are distinctly less preacherly.

But one particular man at the Old Academy who, apart from Plato, wrote at some length about Pleasure.   He should be a lively candidate; but he seems overlooked here.   If we trust the SUDA report (you might as well say  [kaitoige] ‘surely you don’t want to give preference to trusting ourselves, critics from 11 centuries later !’).   Philip is credited with a treatise  p. h(donh=s a.  (“p. HEdonEs, 1 book”.)    Our present-day vantagepoint does not allow us to say confidently that no part of that book found its way into what we now call Plato’s Philebus .    Nor can we be sure none of it found its way, alongside material from Eudoxus, into EN Books X and IX. 

It may be worthwhile to insert an excursus here, based upon a series of Scholia to Euclid I, 15 (esp. Scholl. ##59-62).   This will take us down a path JL Heiberg laid down.   He collected and published with Teubner in 1888, the scholia to all of Euclid’s Elements.      The Scholion of greatest interest here is the one leading toward the Philip-like sentiment also expressed in Schol. #18 (skeptical towards ‘poiEsis’, on the grounds of its debatable concessiveness to ‘time-dependence’ inside mathematics).   We might take steps to follow the distinctive verb ‘diamphisbEtein’ written by Aristotle in his piece ‘On Friendship’, — on some good accounts of Aristotle’s early writing this will have found its way into EN, at Bk IX, 2 1155 a 32ff.   Campbell had called attention to the relative novelty of this term of art as of Plato’s time.    In Aristotle himself, however, it occurs several times, once in the suspect book of the Metaphysics, namely  Kappa.     This is the book that repeats much earlier material from the same treatise, and that is further peculiar in suffering from a rash of that special DeMundo phrase, shared with Xenophon:   ‘ge mhn’ [ γε μὴν].     Various of these peculiarities were too much for Aristotle scholars beginning with W. Christ and continuing past W.D. Ross.   They agreed that Book Kappa should be deleted in its entirety.    Herbert Granger has recently shown a disinclination to comply  with this scholarly consensus, wanting to restore it to Aristotle himself.   Harold H. Joachim in his 1922 edition of the De Gen et Corr.  indicates that he is open to either idea about Book Kappa:   its 1061 a28 – b33, which Joachim cites  (see his note 1 to p. xx) may or may not be genuine Aristotle .

A noteworthy piece of statistical information can be brought in here:    in just a little over 2 Bekker pages at the beginning of Book Kappa as Bekker has it, we find a total of 6  cases of  γε μὴν.  This is a rate at least ten-fold greater than Aristotle’s average, but it is in line with the rate of its occurrences within the De Mundo, and also with a paraphrase in Proclus “On Euclid I”, Friedlein edition’s pp. 201, 202, 205, 207.   This material is all applied to Euclid I, 1, — as is the Philip_like Scholion #18.

There is a good sense of ‘halfway’ which permits us to say that “Halfway back to Plato, — if we began from Aristotle, — we have our filo-qeamw=n(“ PhilotheamOn”) adjacent to Aristotle’s toying with the etymology   fil[o]-ippos  “Phil-ippos”.   An allusion, possibly, to this self-same student of Plato’s — Philip of Opus ?   This would put him in a fully plausible position, a pupil of Plato’s and a teacher of Aristotle’s  [see 1099 a 10 in the ‘E’ MS, commended by myself in my letter to J. Barnes,  — of early Feb 2010].

There is already some allusiveness in Aristotle’s playing with  the name of this man between himself and Plato — Philip of Opus.   But we can find much more in the vicinity of this allusion if we include the point that the word   filoqeamw=n [‘philotheamOn’] is more likely what Aristotle wrote at 1099 a 10.    We need not follow I. Bywater, who not only does not read this word, but also declines to mention its having some ms. authority,  even in his apparatus criticus.    Certainly H.H. Joachim’s high admiration for Bywater and his other early ‘Aristotelian Society’ scholars was well founded [his preface to the 1922 edition of De Gen. et Corr.].    All the same we ought to follow the example of Slings (his Clitophon, p. 342,f), follow him in keeping the door open to some ‘ancient tradition’ behind any of various manuscript peculiarities which have survived these dozens of centuries in the textual traditions of Plato and of Aristotle.  In any case the present Oxford edition has the [considerably less plausible] reading filo-qeorw=n  (‘philo-theorwn’).    And, alas, Bywater did not preserve the Bekker note listing the “philo-theamwn” varia lectio.    This shift, however, imports a quite different meaning, a difference of substance.   It is as if we let a ‘theoretician’ be interchangeable with a theater-goer !      A lover-of-abstract-knowledge  (qeorhmata)  is allowed to be exchanged for a lover-of-spectacles qea/mata  (‘theamata’) !      ‘Theama’ is in fact the root word meant to be echoed at  Bekker  1099 a10.     So  qeamw=n  has precisely commensurate authority at   a10.

Roughly that same time (say early Olymp. 106, when Philebus  is being composed, and Plato in his very advanced years – those poignantly called ‘our sunset years’ in Laws VI, xiv  — see Slings on Plato’s using the first-personal plural form, in Clitophon for example, to indicate ‘myself’ at Clit. 406 a10.    Around this date we have Phil. 44B, referring to ‘some wise someone’ who is further described as  ‘deinos peri physin’.    John Adam made penetrating suggestions on the type of man here alluded to by Plato.   ‘Pythagorean preachers’, says Adam (app. x to Rep. Bk IX.   This would put our author at the Academy and make him not unlike the Empedocles referred to by Aristotle here in EN IX,2.

A threesome of men (and their temperaments) is put together in Problems 6, 30.    They have attributed to them the shared temperament or ‘personalilty-type’, something about their black bile.   This triumvirate has oddities of various sorts.  But one striking point is its listing Socrates after Plato:     Empedocles, Plato and Socrates.     The Elder Socrates kept his bile pretty well controlled, we might think:  “Go ahead and condemn me to death, O Athens !    As far as I know this may be a not so severe penalty, especially for a peaceable man who has avoided misbehaving.   Temperamentally a reflective and perhaps even phlegmatic man, all the more free from black bile now that I have reached the age of seventy”.

Can Younger Socrates, — or Socrates Alternate — have had something more bilious, even choleric, about him ?    He would have to have had considerable personal energy and a willingness to thrust himself forward there at the Academy, claiming  a position in that succession of eminent men beginning back at Socrates Himself, moving forward via Plato and pointing ahead to such prominent men as Eudoxus, Dicaearchus, Aristotle and Theophrastus.    Again, as we have reliable evidence to inform us, Philip put himself forward as having opinions worth publishing on topics under vigorous debate, such as pleasure, the passion of anger, and On Writing (p. graphein).    Either of the standard meanings of ‘graphein’ here would make Philip a bold man:  “On proving [as in geometry] or On Writing [as in Plato’s Phaedrus”].

Let us make use of more of this (liberally provided) e-space to develop this theory further.   In today’s roomier surroundings, we need not fret over the cramped space Ephraim the Monk and his limited parchments, [in the XXIst century there will be no such calamity as befell L. Campbell at the beginning of the XXth — his Plato Lexicon being cut from 900 to 600 pages, fretful editors at Clarendon too illiberal with their allocation of printed pages].        Back in Ephraim’s time — a few years away from 954 AD — this monastic scribe was abbreviating his Plato texts and his Aristotle, squeezing in an odd example or two of the “half-H” character such as with his word “hidion”, all in order to save space.     Ephraim also crafted ligatures to keep within his space limits.    He was the dutiful copyist of the now proud primary witness to Plato, Venetus  T, and also the space-conscious mansusript called Marcianus 201, containing Aristotle’s Organon.   These two treasures are today kept in safety and cloistered solitude (so to speak ‘in a silo’) adjacent to Piazza San Marco.  This present theory wants to sketch the third Academician near Plato near in time to Olympiad 106,  (Mr. X of the formula Plato+Aristotle+X).     The formula  is designed to situate an Old Academy man capable of wearing  several epithets simultaneously, even proudly and almost regally.     The author naturally wants to emulate his immortal counterparts, even their deliberately assumed polyonymity.   The figure of  Zeus as  described devotedly by the author of the DeMundo Chapt. 7 expatiates on this very point.      That is where Zeus gets praised as ‘polyonymous’ .    

There are several further signs of the Old Academy’s habit of playing on names.  Simplicius echoes elaborate plays on the name “Eudoxus”.    “Theophrastus” was a nickname, not his birthname.  No shame therefore if our DeMundo Academician with an epi-anthropic scope of vision [do you have an opinion on who originally wrote the Scholion numbered 18 in JL Heiberg’s edition, to Euclid I, 1 ?    His attitudes have a deeply reactionary Platonism about them, like those of Amphinomus.  He is a reactionary devotee, writing prose that is “more Platonistic than Plato”, and alive during the final years of Plato’s own life.   This was when Aristotle was reaching maturity, but perhaps had not finished working on his  Analytics, or Topics.    Pamela Huby demonstrated that the latter work dates to near the year 360 [Olympiad 106].    [there will some day soon be more on this subject in “Lemma 1 on Philip of Opus and the angle-sum within the Triangle”.    The date of this coinage seems likely to be close to Huby’s date forTopics.     In any case this scholiast creates the startling coinage “epi-dhmiourgesthai” in Schol # 18.   He appears also to indulge in word-plays on  “epi” in other passages now following their paradromic-course in our best mss. of Euclid.     Some kernels of gold (as Heiberg put it) in these marginalia.   This scholiast is leading up to his famous remarks on the #1 illustrative “Academic” morsel of geometry’, the famous “internal angle sum of the triangle,  I, 32.   An immediate pupil of Plato’s and immediate teacher of Aristotle’s.   Who better to claim the nickname “Socrates Junior” than a teacher at the Old Academy well versed in geometry and astronomy ?     This might well be Amphinomus, or Aristotle’s teacher “Socrates Allos”.   Notice how a reporter near in time to Eudemus of Rhodes may have opted to avoid a jingling rhyme, thus avoiding the pair of names ‘Phil-ippus and Speus-ippus’, thus arriving in Proclus’s later echo as ‘Amphinomus and Speusippus’, many puzzles being created around  this namesake to the heritage of Odysseus/Plato.

My lightly speculative Early Academy narrative has him naming himself “Amphinomus” as pretender to succeed Odysseus.    “Neocles” or “Neos SokratEs” [ Socrates-the-Younger] will be other suitable nicknames for this polyonymous man.   Call him a hero, a daemon, a demi-god.    After all Amphinomus and his doublet LeiodEs were heroes [B.  Fenik, “Studies in the Odyssey”, 1974, proves these to be two mutually dual figures].     Plato was soon to be called ‘divine’, Aristotle ‘daemonic’,  Theophrastus ‘divine in his phrasings’  [B. Einarson, in his Loeb edition of the De causis plantarum proves that the divinity of his prose style is only a notch below that of the divine Plato.  Einarson’s magisterial work deserves more attention.   He is on a par with Denniston,  Slings and Dover ].       We may speculate a bit further  towards Old Academy nicknames like Hermogenes and Hermokrates [Philip was a devoted follower of Hermes, and possibly an early Theurgist, asking that prayers be acted upon, below and above].    Kal-Ippos (a fellow astronomer,  familiar to young Aristotle, is obliquely complimented in Metaphys. Lambda 8 ( 1073b): “Amicus Calippus, sed…”    I once tried to interest Jonathan Barnes in this ‘Amicus Kalippus, sed…’ formula, but not to any effect.    Perhaps he thinks this topic treated to a finality by L. Taran in his monograph on Epinomis.   At least so I surmise).    If Plato did in truth compose a draft for his announced dialogue The Philosopher, this would have been near Olympiad 106 when all three men, he, Younger Socrates”,  Philip and the young Aristotle were hard at work.   If Plato were so inclined, he could weave material from it into Republic V, that draft might have been much the way Republic-scholar Campbell once imagined this.    [Campbell was crafting a speculative note to his edition of “Politicus” 257]       I would diverge from Campbell’s suggestion– that Plato has as his central speaker  a repeat character :  young Theaetetus again.    We might do better to imagine a repeat of our astronomical expert, Younger Socrates.   Or perhaps a man whose stage-name were ‘Hermokrates’.    It will only be a fuller credit to his play-on-the-word-epi if this same blood and bone man also wrote the (now-lost) pair of dialogues listed in Vatican Palatinus #173, the works there entitled “epi DialektikEs” [ἐπὶ Διαλεκτικῆς ]  and “epi Tyrannou”, deploying his genitives startlingly.   An index to Plato’s writings at the Vatican has these two titles manifested.  [see below, Lemma 2, “Philip’s startling uses of the prefix “epi-“, as Hellenic prose was devolving into Hellenistic prose”]

[22.vii.15]  Do please notice the possibility of a serious connection to Chrysippus’s “On Dialectic”,  from whose Book III we have a fragment.   It forms the basis of what we may call the Brunschwig_Barnes puzzle:  how to find a dialectician “Socrates” —  listed in seemingly non-chronological order, as AFTER ARISTOTLE !  This substantive anomaly (Brunschwig called it ‘scandaleux’) is reduced to a tolerable and even regular phenomenon.   We just need to recall our subscriptives, where n>1  within the formula Socrates(n), and think of the self-styled “dialectician”, Aristotle’s teacher, his sometime friend and colleague Philip of Mende, Opus and Athens.   Philip the mannigfaltig, in Ortsname, in EpiklEsis [here again, Philip’s Epi-X work the Epinomis includes a striking and standout term, ‘epi-klEsis’, perhaps to be sorted with the slightly more general sort_word ‘epi-thet’, where both a hat and a label can be epi-thetised on a man’s head.   Philip’s generalized_uppity character would allow him to interpolate something at Republic 511d, something self-servingly and deliberately put there to help him create a blurring (recall LCampbell’s consciously blurred formula “not absolute noEta”.  We may paraphrase this blurred marker, brightly demarcating the mathematicians’s hypothesis-undercut entities so as to set them off distinctly from true Realia: “these fancy new mathematica will have the (correspondingly fancy) feature that they are not truly or appreciably lowered [see R. Goldblatt on the hyperreal special meaning of ‘appreciable‘]  from the ‘epi’ range of noEta.”   Continuing our effort to paraphrase the conciliatory Victorian interpreter:  “. . . and this inappreciable little lowering need not trouble those of us at the Academy, during the tumult years of our Epi_Stasis ,  — also rightly called the taraxh_kai_planE years, — h.e. the miserable period for us, Olympiad 106”.  

These Olymp. 106 years would be those same ones when we may reasonably look for “originals” for the vivid drawings of Plato and Socrates (in that order) —  caricatures really (h.e. that preserved to this day at the Bodleian library, under the curatorial supervision of Bentley).   In that image Plato is the Unwriting speaker and Socrates the Writing philosopher !   We need a Socrates_Allos.   Fortunately, we have at least one, the almost-dialectician Philip of Opus/Athens.   [Philip’s way of writing our numeral ’13’  may possibly survive into the template from which our monk Ephraim was working in the mid-10th century, as he wrote numerals such as  ‘GI’ and ‘DI’, meaning three_atop_ten and four_atop_ten.   Fol. 109v in Ephraim’s “Phaedrus” suffers anomalising forces just as our count reaches ’11’.   The ‘intrusive’ preposition ‘epi’ pushes aside the conventional ‘kai’, we have the Calendaric days of the Athenian month numeralised thus ‘tris epi deka’ &c.   Thus he must render our ’12’ and ’13’ with his “mu” and “nu”, both lower-case cursives (again, anomalously).   Unhappily D. Cufalo’s critical edition of the Scholia opts to ‘neglect’ some of these anomalies over the numerals.  See Cufalo’s Vol. I, pp. 122-123, his apparatus criticus.  from the time when H.W. Smyth’s chart on p. 722 lists a series of ‘epi’ intrusions.  But now has had enough time, however scant his lamentably short  leisure time, to experience new ideas about these anomalies, and to compare them to numeral anomalies as they occur in Venetus T.   The ‘intrusive’ preposition ‘epi’ pushes aside the conventional ‘kai’ in these anomalous places, so we have the Calendaric days of the Athenian month numeralised thus ‘tris epi deka’ &c.   The ordinal numerals listed by John the Lydian in his Annals (Roger Pearse has called attention to this material) are of interest here.  The backward-looking numeral “hendeka” for our date “11th” is undeclined; but John Lydus’s “dekamias” , “dekatetras” and “dekaheptas” are not so.  Conceivably our Venice ms. has sources in common with those of John Lydus ?  John shows much interest in writing in an “archaising” manner.

KJ Dover takes an example, a speech by Alcibiades, relayed by Thucydides.    He makes it a milestone in the evolution of Hellenic prose.   But we may fairly think ahead some 50 years [counting from the ‘dramatic date’ of Plato’s , and to a time when Attic prose was showing marks of decay (Denniston had put on exhibit some of the Epinomis and some of LAWS as samples and exempla of this decline).     To resume the account of Philip’s super-ambitious manner at the Old Academy and its deservedly admired wise men of astronomy.       We may recall once again those oscillations of the Wheel moved ahead by Fortune.   That Wheel can have also moved backwards, just as kingdoms can do, indeed are not infrequently witnessed to do.   A regime taking sudden control of the representative constitutional democracy in A.D. 2016  created a trepidation followed by a microcosmic turn backwards.   Could the generation of Dionysius II  find its way back  to the times  and  patterns of  Sicilian Dionysius I, or his wife Doris’s father Hermocrates ?    The myth about cosmic time reversing itself, micro-cosmic time with it, could apply to microcosms like Syracuse and Athens, and the intellectual ferments down here.    Still smaller microcosms can have their clocks “turn back” to a Father Parmenides as Plato calls him,  or to a “Great Uncle Pythagoras” as we may fancy Aristotle on so-called pythagoreans in Metaphys. A alluding to Himself.    Campbell speculated on the demon or demi-god there near the beginning of Philebus ?  May this have been Plato himself?   So it might seem to some of his then-Academicians.].    In this un-actualised scenario, we will have Plato’s intended Philosophos aspiring to publish his draft treatise  Epi DialektikEs  (ἐπὶ διαλέκτικῆς ) This is a title actually preserved in the Vatican Palatine #173 ms., seeming to entitle a work by Plato].     

My theory has this same Academician Mr. X someone who will have known Plato intimately when he was composing Republic VII, and will also have known much of the mathematics (especially Astronomy) and much of the ‘dialectical science’ there under discussion.   Of Plato’s mathematical companions the two greatest were no doubt Theaetetus and Eudoxus.   But the third was not Aristotle; it was (or may have appeared briefly to be) this very Mr. X.  It surely fits in nicely with this theory that we have here the same X   who satisfies the formula   Plato+X+Aristotle, where X narrowly precedes Aristotle at the Old Academy.     [see below, Lemma 1]     

This point will be developed more fully below.    Proposition 15 of Elements Book I is a sort of Lemma to prop. 32 of that same book, about the “two right angles” property of the Triangle qua triangle.     The man whom Proclus names as complaining about I, 32 is likely to be (for various reasons which I will offer elsewhere.   Not because space is lacking here (which it is not), but because we are better advised to keep in reserve the voluminous material coming to be known as  TLG5022.txt,, h.e. Scholia in Euclidem, as published in Heiberg’s Volume V and discussed in his Danish monograph of 1888.    Its Scholion #61 makes the scholiast a devotee of Hermes;   but the closely related scholia ## 112-114 (to I, 32) have the same scholiast [this is a to-be-proved lemma] — a personal devotee of Plato, during Plato’s own lifetime.    Proclus has a name for this man.   He calls him   PHILIP .]

To resume.    We may well have had a blood-and-bone man Younger Socrates will have been likely to be nearby when Plato was writing the final lines of his dialogue ‘Statesman’, the lines now appearing in the revised OCT edition of Plato attributed by our Oxford editors to Socrates the Elder.   It is all somewhat confusing, this interweaving of artistically created persons and real ones.    We risk making things less clear if we attempt to decipher the famous remark or remarks to the effect  “my friendship with Plato and Socrates is true, but my greatest friendship is [reserved for] Truth.”     Some recent scholarship (not to be accepted uncritically here) makes some drastic simplifications by denying that Aristotle had any teacher named Socrates, and by also denying that Aristotle said the famous words about two men, rather than about Plato solely.    Prof. Taran prefers to think Aristotle said it, if indeed he said it at all, only in reference to just the one man (Plato).   Socrates ends by being dropped, both in name and in substance.

Here the idea is to suppose that Younger Socrates will have been a  flesh-bone-and-blood individual man, ‘sheerly singular’ in the phrase of H.H. Joachim, — writing in the immediate vicinity of both Plato and Aristotle near Olympiad 107.   We may safely begin with this hypothesis, and see where we may responsibly take its consequences.  There is certainly a coherent theory which makes him the same man alive within that Old Academy, the man referred to as helping craft cities in Epistle XI.   Taking a less agnostic view of our evidence, he will also be the man wrote the Epinomis  and the pre-Aristotle tract  De Ira.    On my theory he will have been an ambitious man, claiming the prerogatives of ‘philosopher’,  ‘dialectician’.     Perhaps he also wrote the little dialogue which shares a Tetralogy IX place with LAWS and EPINOMIS, namely the ps.-platonic  Minos.  Only somewhat less compelling is the hypothesis that this same man wrote both the DeMundo and several of the Scholia that come down to us in Euclid’s margins, one of them explicitly attributed to Philip of Opus by Proclus.    But this more extended set of hypotheses can be left for another time and another site, perhaps calendar 2019 and http://www.youngersocrates.com.     There will then be reasons for preferring the older OCT text, edited by Burnet, to the revised OCT now before readers of Plato, at least in the readings at the very end of the Statesman.   The young and kingly Socrates (as will there be argued) felt ready to succeed Plato, ascend to the role of DIADOCHOS  ( διάδοχος-of-platonic-teaching — so SUDA) at the Early Academy.

Do you think it possible, even likely, that certain other puzzles about historical personages at the Old Academy are linked to this one about ‘Socrates the King’ ?   I for one do think this, and will devote some time and research to gathering supporting evidences.     Certainly one unresolved puzzle was very troubling to the late much-lamented Prof. Jacques Brunschwig of the Sorbonne.   Rather recently, but years before his all-too-early death he had done a Bude edition of Aristotle’s Topics.    This involved his hunting down the source of the “dialectic” attributed to earlier sources by various philosophers  of late antiquity (Stoics and Platonists notably).   The scholarly issue here was over attributing this special amalgam of ‘dialectic’ to someone called ‘Socrates’.     Oddly enough, a knowledgeable Plutarch lists such a Socrates AFTER Plato, not before him, and lists him alongside Plato’s followers, not Plato’s predecessors.   He also attributes to him a concept of dialectic strongly incompatible with that of our familiar Socrates.

So severe is the incompatibility of these variant ‘Socratic’ dialectics that Prof. Brunschwig was provoked to call the amalgam “scandaleux”.     Now a Sorbonne scholar is not easily scandalised (less easily, for example, than the ex-Oxonian  Jonathan Barnes, whose Gallic sensibilities do not always sit peaceably with his Anglican).     But why, asked Brunschwig, why should Chrysippus in Book III of his “On Dialectic” have things so wrong about Socrates and dialectic  ?         After all,  Chrysippus was in a fine position to know his Old Academy intimately, and many of the nuances of its patterns of “Dialectic”.  Perhaps he even knew two or three variants of which we today have almost no remaining trace.   Or traces so faint as just an idiosyncratic title in a Vatican ms. of Plato ?   Certainly many of the writings of some latter-day Socrates (yet a man living before Chrysippus’s time) may have gone lost in then-preceding centuries.   Lost to us, therefore, but nevertheless still available to Chrysippus and Plutarch.     These well-read scholars of late antiquity would naturally assume that their readers would have copies of their own.   So they will be unaware of what becomes so confusing to Brunschwig and others of us, more than 2 millenia later.       Easy enough for them to dis-ambiguate their various ‘Socrates’s.   Not so easy for us, at a time when the name has repeatedly been uniquely reserved for Plato’s teacher.

One quite special item in evidence:  a tract  from near Plato makes a ghostly appearance in the Palatine ms. now called “P”.    As mentioned above, it is a work disappeared work entitled “ Ἐπὶ Διαλεκτικῆς   [Epi DialektikEs]“;  this title is relayed in the margins of a curiously complex  Plato ms. now held by the Vatican.   They call it Vaticanus Palatinus Gr. 173,  from  the Tenth Century.     Alongside various complete dialogues, it also contains excerpts from Plato and paraphrases of his writings.   With help from the Leonard Polonsky Foundation of London, this ms. may achieve a proper digitally-archived format, suitably accessible to scholars from Oxford or London, Paris or Firenze  — or notably from Pisa ! — or conceivably from Hull, Massachusetts.      According to a full feature story on the BBC in early 2012, the coming 4 years ought to see a major outpouring of digitally processed mss., some from the Bodleian, some from the Vatican.      With luck, this will include the Vatican’s Plato ms. Palatinus Gr. #173.   It may possibly furnish insight into some of our ‘seek-whence’ questions, a kind of apostolic succession leading back to Aristotle, Philip and to Plato himself.   The playful neologism ‘seek-whence’ is due to the American mathematician Hofstadter.

In any case, this title ‘epi dialektikEs’ is tantalising both as to its content and as to its syntax.   There is a reason for suspecting that this title was coined in the near-vicinity of Plato:   two passages in Aristotle have similar “epi+genitive”  X syntax, meaning “concerning X”; this is otherwise quite rare in classical Attic Greek, according to LSJ s.v.].      This title, along with the one nearby it in this same Palatine ms., suffering from the same peculiarity of syntax — “Epi Tyrannou” —  calls out for more detailed study.      As to its authority,  sometimes (as at Symp. 207 d2)  it ascends near to the status of a primary witness to Plato himself.   It is in any case in a stemma near  to our Tenth Century ms. in Venice,  Venetus    T  .    P and T are close, and appear to be not distant from a third authoritative family of Plato mss., that of  W.   At Symp. the various texts manifest is a broad consensus (especially of the striking word   AIEI  ) of  B, T, W, P and the Oxy. papyrus.    It is startling that it should include also this pair of titles with the repeated little “sprachliche Anstoesse” delivered by their surprising pair of “epi” locutions.   Again, these may match some wordings now preserved in Euclid’s margins.

Is P  a surviving trace  of a tract from the Old Academy, familiar in some form to Chrysippus and his readers, including Plutarch, — but not otherwise familiar to us  ?     In any case this pair of works twice shares strange grammatical construction “epi+genitive-of X”, meaning “concerning X”.    Vastly more standard was ‘Peri X’ as in the De Anima, De Caelo or De Ira.      The LSJ article on “epi”, III includes the sub-section on “epi+genitive”.   Their two examples of this  rare usage are drawn from the Rhetoric and Nicomachean Ethics — both being works from just the right period of Aristotle’s writing — the earliest.    This agrees nicely with the theory that has Younger Socrates one of Aristotle’s teachers — teaching Plato to the impressionable young man.    The man Aristotle calls “Younger Socrates” (Met. Z, 11)  may have created this special way of using “epi” to mean our “concerning”.    Did this Socrates initiate this, or did Aristotle ?

One of the fragments preserved of Amphinomus (see the Lasserre collection) brings out a similar point about ‘priority’.   Which of the two men (Aristotle or Amhinomus) was FIRST to insist on a point about mathematicians NOT seeking out CAUSES ?     The fuller story theory to be developed at  http://www.youngersocrates.com will draw on a lengthy passage in Proclus on mathematics and will conclude that this poly-onymous man of Epinomis, DeMundo and Book XII-alt. of Elements, this very same man was the mathematician-astronomer-philosopher, Philip of Opus.     No shame to him if he assumed a variety of names.   This ‘polyonymy’ parallels that of Zeus, as outlined and celebrated in DeMundo 7.

To resume our work on the now lost work “epi DialektikEs”.    There will have been plenty of time for this work to have (a) had an influence, say on Chrysippus, but (b) being largely lost to the tradition — except for its ghost of a title, surviving now in Vaticanus  P.    Both Plutarch and Chrysippus before him will have had a broad and deep acquaintance with the Old Academy (Sandbach’s skepticism on the transmission of Aristotle can reasonably be kept to the side here).    Plutarch may have been willing to cite over-free versions of some of his texts, or been willing to paraphrase where we would prefer precise quotation.    But he was fond of the proverbial:   “let us begin from our own hearth”, meaning in Plutarch’s case that same Old Academy, Plato alongside personally.  And Plutarch had a broad range of books to cite from or paraphrase from — books we often sadly lack today.

We may follow down yet another nickname which originated at or near the Old Academy and involves the name “Socrates”.     Epistle #2 riddlingly refers to a man it calls :  “Socrates, born anew [neos gegonotos], but handsome this time”.     The handsome man stage-right in the mosaic picture of Astronomers (the so-called ‘Philosophenmosaik in Neapel’) has many of the right characteristics and attitudes to match this Handsome Younger Socrates, to include notably an arrogance to his strut, back turned toward his colleagues stage-left.    See Figure 2 below, where our ‘Socrates, new series’ brings along his pixelated face.    The physiognomy of Eudoxus can be extracted from the seated figure stage-left, also with a scroll in his hand.     This point will be a focus of the analysis projected to appear in fuller form at a wordpress blog with this following name:

youngersocrates.com

Generally speaking, we have no images of the face of Eudoxus, unhappily.   This pixelated example may be the exception ?

The ps.-Aristotle work Problemata has just the same mis-ordering issue when giving a list of “mad poets”, so to speak driven crazy by their ‘Melancholic’ personalities/temperaments.    The list given has this historical mis-ordering:   Empedocles=>Plato=>Socrates.    A wild poet Socrates ?   Well the author of  DeMundo Ch. 7 , — especially in his poetic and melancholic rant on the ‘polyonymous Zeus’, — fits this personality type neatly.   Call him Socrates Homericus, or S. Musiko-Manikos.      Ask Jonathan Barnes if he could write a tract entitled “Coffee with Socrates-Teacher-of-Aristotle”.    He surely could do, but likely will not do.  In the process, this elder brother of the novelist Julian Barnes might encounter evidence about the authorship of the ps.-Aristotle tract, the DeMundo.      We are entitled to a ‘secundum mentem’ inference here, I think.   My possible-Barnes sometimes answers my questions in these arcane matters.    He answers my question:   “was the DeMundo written near in time to Aristotle’s De Caelo, and less than one human generation after Plato wrote Timaeus ? ”     

Jonathan has attributed to Aristotle a fondness for answering complex questions : ” Yes and No “.      Some three years ago now I wrote to Jonathan and asked that question, namely about the authorship of the DeMundo.   Was its author Philip of Opus ?   As I interpret his answer, it was a friendly “Yes and No”.    This agrees with the answer I got from David Furley of Princeton, to whom I had written three years previously.

In that mixed mass of early-Academy material gathered under the name “Problems” (later getting attributed to Aristotle) we come upon a man named “NeoklEs”  (956 a 13), who had a special relationship with Plato.   He could confront Plato with a question, and demand to get an answer.    Scholars have been unable to identify this man.   A young Pittsburgh scholar with good access to libraries in Italy is now working on some mss. of Aristotle’s ‘Mechanical Problems‘, the diagrams especially.  She is likely to throw valuable new light on that scene in the Old Academy, based on various of  these north-Italy sources of evidence.    One particular question that arises is:   does the author use the diagram-letter “K” to stand for a figure’s “kentron”.   This involves a bit of special attention, when one is parcelling out letters of the alphabet over somewhat complicated figures or diagrams.    One has to think ahead, when naming a pair of quadrilaterals Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta  and  Epsilon, Zeta, Eta, Theta, lest he be called on to parcel out the letter Kappa prematurely, rather than putting it “on reserve” for the central point of a circle or sphere also part of the diagram.  But Meteorologica III, v   does this thinking ahead, as do some diagrams late in Book XII of Euclid [interestingly, this does NOT happen in Book XIII of the same work].     An example easy to find is in XII, 12 .    This book of the Elements was likely written by Aristotle’s teacher,  Eudoxus of Cnidus, somewhere near the 106th Olympiad (354 BC).

Returning to the case of our man  “NeoklEs” who plagued Plato with a question — scholars don’t know who he was.    But it looks as if this bold had required Plato to answer him — “Why is it that obedience is not called for in a general way within our the animal kingdom — but rather manifests uniquely in obedience to a human ?”       Plato is reported to have “replied [apokrinai]” to this man.    We may rightly call him “Mr. Neo-“.    The reply runs  as follows:  because humans are properly cognisant of numbers, and uniquely so among our fellow-animals.    This very topic has been researched in a new way by neuroscientists, biologists and evolutionists in the early XXIth century.   It seems other primates are not obedient or disobedient to one another the same way we humans are.   It has long been recognised by scholars that this reply about numbers matches precisely the point made repeatedly in the ps-Platonic dialogue  Epinomis, or The Philosopher [see P. Shorey, What Plato Said, p. 62].   The teacher of that particular doctrine at the Old Academy was Plato’s immediate disciple Philip of Opus.   But scholars have been shy to take a reasonable next step.   We have the authority of Euthydemus to underpin our detaching the ‘-okles’ segment from this name, as is carefully done there with ‘Heracles’ and other similar names.

This following is a reasonable next step.    We may have this “Mr. Neo-” identical to the man of kingly voice at Politicus 311c, and also identical with the man of regal bearing amongst the Old Academy astronomers of the ‘philosophenmosaik’.   Therefore he will have been,  within that nanocosm of the Academy, a King-of-the-contest, feeling temporarily entitled to require of Plato a kind of “command performance” reply to his questions.    “Answer my question, O Plato” says our emboldened young man [as an author, he will soon presume to entitle his piece appended to Plato’s Laws with a provocative title.   His title was “The Philosopher”   Later editions tend to agree in calling it Epinomis, or “epi” the Nomoi.   A lEmmation or two, when proved, will allow us to identify this ‘New Socrates’ with ‘Amphinomus’, and again identify Amphinoms with Philip of Opus].     I have Philip continuing:  “. . .since I have not become the donkey of the child’s game, the one making an error.    Rather I have been coronated (for now) the King of the victorious Opinion !”

What is a lEmmation, you ask ?     It is a lEmma still in its juniority.     We note a word of like construction (diminutive) occurring in the scholia to Euclid I (also not noticed by LSJ):     “ANTISTROPHION”.      L. Campbell had paid special attention to Plato’s own coinages of diminutives, in his Republic Vol. II.    This classical Greek word could rightly be rendered  “converse-junior”.      Other material of great interest follow this same ‘paradromic’ path on their way to reaching us today.    It looks to have originated in the Academy near Olympiad 106, and arrives in our the digital era of Plato scholarship XXI centuries into the Christian era [Slings, for example, was wary of over-reliance on the TLG — yet saw much value in making use of it].     An example (not to be pursued here) is a report on a ‘pythagorean’ version of the definition of   SXHMA.      Scholars who refuse to credit the early Greek mathematicians, especially those around Plato and Aristotle, with any concept of structure in mathematical proof sequences are  too ready, I judge,  to dismiss these little-people present here and there in Euclid’s scholia, some of them destined to grow up.     LEmmatia can grow up to be lEmmata, antistrophia to be antistrophai, and proof-positions which “want” to be earlier rather than later inside Euclid Bk I can grow up to be mature gratified wishes and wants.

Consider this picture, a kind of graphic-novel,  of the de-crowning of  Socrates-Elder, followed by the next cycle’s renewed-crowning of  “Socrates-the-Reborn” (ho neos gegonotos as the description goes in Letter #2)”:

see how the crown is ready to fall off, as the fateful wheel-turner moves history ‘ever onward’  (AIEI would be the right word for Thucydides here).    In cycles of 50-years, however, one meets up with ever-reborn reminders of cycles past.    Our “Socrates, new series”, seems to have flourished near Olymp. 107.  

Younger Socrates’s ‘coronation’ will have been more of a child’s-game level of culture, thus many steps below the cultural level of a ‘coronation’ of Demosthenes (we recall Tht. 146 A again for our ‘child-king Socrates’).    To be sure, this coronation in turn, will have been many steps below the one depicted at  Phaedo 118.   This picture is from White Sulphur Springs artist  David Dann, varying the themes of “Secular Cycles”, of Elder Socrates by French painter David, and the mosaic in Naples.      Socrates Junior  of   Polit. 311cd  reaches upward to displace the Socrates coronated one cycle earlier  [Phdo. 118] .

facial features for Younger Socrates, taken from the Konrad Gaiser mosaic now in Naples: his “philosophenmosaik” (1980)

But where can a person reasonably begin in this historical inquiry, seeking for a second blood-and-bone Socrates, near the time of Leodamas ?    It is admittedly not an Academy easy to unriddle, after all.   Can we find a definite pointer to such a man at the Old Academy ?      Answer:   Metaphysics Book Zeta, Chapter 11 gives us such a pointer, advancing the interesting concept of “noetic matter”.   Scholars have been shy of identifying any ‘blood and bone’ person in the immediate vicinity of Plato and Aristotle, to whom Aristotle is there pointing his finger.    Yet Plato’s Letter 11 refers to just such a man.  And Merton College scholar David Bostock in his commentary is willing to say of such a real-life person, that he appears to have been a mathematician.    Siem Slings (his Clitophon edition) has two Socrates’s in Plato’s vicinity, but only one is a ‘blood & bone’ individual, and that one is not mathematically inclined.    D.B. Robinson’s OCT text of ‘Politicus’ — one may rightly follow CJ Rowe in calling this recent OCT work ‘interventionist’ —   is so bold as to intervene textually at Politicus 311 c9.   The result is to remove any traces of a truly human individual — Younger Socrates by nickname.     There will have been lots of room for paronymy and ambiguity, the names  (Older/Junior) Socrates.    Robinson inserts some text and causes Older Socrates to make a return here, where Plato had Socrates Junior.   At least if we allow   Venetus  T and all the other primary witnesses count as authoritative, Plato is pointing to  Socrates Junior.

Admittedly, what Aristotle says of him there in Metaphysics Zeta is rather harsh.   Aristotle tells us that his opinion ‘leads away from the truth [ap-agwgE].    This is likely an allusion to the admired elder Socrates, a sharp-edged allusion if we have a re-incarnated “Socrates” alongside Plato amongst young Aristotle’s teachers.    A chief feature of the Elder Socrates (admired by both Plato and Aristotle) was his trademark ‘induction’ [ep-agwgE] or ‘[reasoning ]leading towards [truth]‘.   Yes, it’s truly an irony that Aristotle would turn the standard prefix into its exact opposite,  an apo– instead of an epi– [‘away from’  instead of ‘towards’].     C.J. Rowe and D.B. Robinson have recently done some public agreeing about the meaning of a related term,  ‘par-agein’.   It occurs in a discussion of rhetoric, at Phdr. 262 d2.    It refers to a rhetorical  ‘side-slipping’ past the truth, or side-stepping of it.     Yet this is not so complete a mishandling of Truth as to lead away from it.   This is a  dragging-away from truth, and our text has Aristotle accusing “his” Socrates of doing this.     

Our moment in history is back when we are nearby the proverbial   “hearth to begin from” as Plutarch’s proverb has it — Platonism in its nascent stages.   This is also the place place where  W. Jaeger’s young philosopher was analysing rhetoric, writing on the emotions (anger and other emotions).    That time and place seems to have had Leodamas, Socrates and the very young Aristotle all learning from one another.   And Plato learning too, as his nature required of him to do perennially.

Aristotle adds one further point to the acidity of his remark about ‘Socrates Junior’ in this same passage of Met. Zeta.   He uses a perverse word to focus our attention on  Younger Socrates’s ‘repeatedly/habitually’ making this misleading and wrong comparison.   Aristotle uses the imperfect tense by way of suggesting he had heard this recently inside the Old Academy, and by way of emphasising its misleadingness.   For it was an ‘oft-repeated’ misleading comparison — with animal-parts.     Or perhaps, as in Politicus, parts of the portrait (zw-on) being stagewise assembled by a Zo-ographos ( = a painter).

Be this as it may, the 13th century  treatise held by the Ashmolean in Oxford bears the title PROGNOSTICA.    You might think its contents disreputable popular-style Astrology or Fortune-telling.   The Oxford MS. is illustrated by Matthew Paris.   Jacques Derrida got very excited by it, thought up some elaborate neo-Freudian fancies based upon it.    Derrida adds some valuable points when he brings in the (I believe falsified) Letter #2 of Plato.    The contents and the underlying motivation(s) of this Letter are certainly hard to decipher.   It may be helpful to turn toPaul Friedlaender,  a man who knew his Plato and his Old Academy well.   In his chapter “Plato’s Letters” he reviews the contentious scholarship about Letter #2.      What of those who dismiss it as “silly, childish [and its] falseness requires no proof”.     Or this, relayed from another august authority, Shorey:    “this mystico-theosophical gabble”  [Friedlaender’s Plato, An Introduction, p. 243].     In any case the Ashmolean curator Mr. Benfield is far from proud of this PROGNOSTICA’S contents [his scornful tone as he exhibited the work to me at the Bodleian in 2010 relayed this unambiguously].    But he was and is immensely proud of its standing as one of the Bodleian’s chief “treasures”.     Its composer can have been an over-ambitious hyper-platonist “climber”, scrambling to secure for himself a satisfying role within the governing “Nocturnal Council” outlined at the end of Plato’s Laws (Book XII).    Philip was ambitious enough, anyhow, to append his mystico-astronomical literary piece “The Philosopher” at this very point in Plato’s writings.    The final book of Plato’s final work — by Philip of Opus as it turns out, and subtitled with that title left with nothing underneath itself.   “The Philosopher”, which Campbell speculated might have had Theaetetus as its principal speaker, was put into the crowning position, perhaps by Philip.

[a subtle and subtly allusive point surfaces in the text of  in Book I of Aristotle’s Ethica Nicomachea   (1099 a 10) , possibly written when Aristotle was a young scholar at the Academy — etymologising the name “Philip”.    This runs closely parallel to the etymological work by Plato in Republic Bk V, on ‘philo-X, where X intends to be set equal to ‘sophia’.   Plato had some complex motives there in Rep. V, one being to chide the type of man over-fond of ‘glory’ (doxa). Plato respects his more moderate intellectual compeers, such as Helicon of Cyzicus.    When honor and glory take charge, Plato there writes, you can find a man so pre-occupied with them that (like the glory-driven military commander, content to reduce the measure of his chosen unit, the one he ‘commands’ just so long as he remains the glorious chief {of this reduced unit, call it the Sandbox Unit !}     On the purely cognitive side, this same temperament is often willing to bargain away truth just to win the ‘prevailing opinion’.   Beloved rightminded-opinion, nevermind truth (as a benighted Euthyphro might put it).       This is the passage of Rep. V where Plato coins the word  ‘philo-theamwn’  and sharply contrasts him and his attitudes from the true ‘philo-sophos’.     Here in EN Bk I Aristotle makes bold to use the example of ‘horse-lovers’ (phil-ippoi) under his deliberately generalised heading ‘philo-toioutos’.    And two of our good mss. include a reference to the ‘philo-theamwn’ [these vv. ll., alas, do not survive in apparatus criticus of Bywater’s Oxford edition — though they had survived in Bekker].     The Bywater preferred reading has the more innocuous term ‘philo-theoros’.    The standard Oxford text thus permits Aristotle an ever-so-slight slip to the side, since it is a ‘theama’ which the text wants to be echoing, not a ‘theoria’, and not a ‘theorhma’.   Thus  a ‘spectacle’, not a ‘theoretical truth’ as the Bywater text offers us the point [notably omitting the vv. ll. ad loc].       Noteworthy here is J. Barnes’s point about Aristotle’s prose style [His “Coffee with Aristotle”]:   not just sinewy prose, says Barns approvingly — also allusive prose.      Alas, we already find that the Bekker text de-prefers the ‘philo-theamwn’ readings. And then — double-alas, Bywater-Oxford text carries this one step further. Bywater does not trouble to let us readers know of these vv. ll., serious though they are.   To compare: the 1995 OCT has dropped Burnet’s report at Polit. 311 c4 [it is even Bodleian’s B that is losing critical force here !]. There is further editorial trouble back in Rep. IV, Chapt. xviii, where PAWAG terms like ἀλλοτριοπραγμόσυνη suffer from neglectful editing.

Back to Aristotle and his EN I. I mean his ‘philo-X’ factoring, isolating the varieties of X. φιλο-τοιοῦτος is Aristotle’s precise word for this open-formula, where he will factor in ‘horse’ or ‘spectacle’ or [conceivably anyhow] ‘ideal object ‘ Aristotle’s meaning seems better captured   (a)  a ‘theama’ when loved is a case of ‘philo-theamwn’ ; but this has the further consequence of associating Aristotle’s teacher with a falling-away from Platonic truth.   For  (b)  the lover spectacle/opinion/glory comes up precisely parallel in these variant texts to the character sharing his name with Aristotle’s ‘socratic’ teacher: Phil-ippos {of Opus !} ]

There is due to be more about all of this (except for the Derrida part) at the site now called  youngersocrates.net   If this succeeds in evolving into a WordPress blog [sun te du’ erxomenw], its name will likely evolve  also.   It would then likely include observations about the San Marco Library’s  Plato  MS  Gr. IV, 1, —  the Plato ms. which scholars commonly call    T  .   This  MS got close attention in spring of 1994  from certain British scholars.    But the Clarendon Press editors of today — now at work at re-issuing Volume II of their Plato OCT — lean toward readings from another family they have recently come to groupname    β    .      This can sometimes be a vexation to manuscript scholars.    Wilamowitz, for example, taxed some of his philologue brethren across the English Channel with succumbing to a “dummes Aberglauben” getting them to prefer the ms. in their own Bodleian location.       [S. Slings permitted himself a naughty swipe or two in his 1998 review in Mnemosyne, endorsing the substance, if not the rhetoric, of his colleague Wilamowitz’s opinion]       As with the “idion” added by  T   at Soph. 264 e, so with the special extra meaning of “oikeion” there;  Campbell finds “something of an ethical force” both in Soph. 216 and in “oikeioteta” at Polit. 257d,f.    Here we can supplement Campbell’s remarks with the arguments of Philip Merlan, showing that “oikeion” was a kind of signature term for the Old Academy.   This strengthens Campbell’s intuitive point, and bases it on a more detailed analysis.    It has a bit of parallelism in the proverb quoted by Plutarch, treating the Academy as the true “home base” for the best scholars:    “let us begin from our hearth” is Plutarch’s self-exhortation, meaning by hearth and home exactly this, The Academy.      Whereas some of the brittler part Anglican opinion may want to cleave to the authority of  Beta, there will always be room for the strength of continental learning and memory.     In any case publishers in Leipzig and Amsterdam ought not be demoted to an inferior “league”, as one British scholar (Rowe by name) presumed to write in a recent review article.

On the other hand,  Campbell’s successors — now a whole century later — at Clarendon Press have kept Sophist 264’s  “idion” demoted to their apparatus criticus.     Thus no part of that committee’s OCT text.    They give it only as a v.l. in case one wants to consult the parchment pages of  the Marciana’s Venetus  T .      In due course it may be possible to make all of this about Soph. 263-264 clearer, and more directly available to the scholarly eyes, such as those of the OCT editors of Plato.    Three of these editors have recently done direct inspections of our Venice ms.   T.

My opinion, offered truly in humility (I speak here not of the perhaps artificial and certainly ceremonial ‘humilissime’ in Heiberg’s dedication to Madvig — but rather in a less-than-European humility-on-the-merits;  you will be able to weigh these merits, Dear e-Reader, especially if you have spent time with any of the abundance of mss. edited by Heiberg)  is the following.     We may all need to be patient for another century, awaiting the hitherto unimagined length and breadth [after electronic enlargements] of open spaces for our editorial efforts.   Thus  the XXII. cent.  OCT may find a way to expand itself to give a fuller understanding of that “idion” word at Soph. 264 e3, firmly lodged there ad loc. in our Marciana ms.     Prof. Whitaker of Glasgow University has told the story of the late-19th century plans at Clarendon Press, which imposed a severe page-limit on Prof. Campbell’s proposed lexicon to Plato.   The book would have to be reduced from its proposed size of 900 pages, compressed into a 600 page format.     Yes, it troubled the “Plato Lexicon” around 1903, a book anticipated quite explicitly by Campbell, in  Vol II of his Oxford Republic on p. 270, and less explicitly on p. 323, elliptically at the top of p. 339.

See now Prof. Whitaker of Glasgow’s e-article “Unvollendetes”.    In summer of 2009 I made a hard-copy of portions of this Whitaker essay and snail-mailed it to Jonathan Barnes, the former Balliol professor and admirer of Timaeus Sophistes’s lexicon to Plato who lives in central France, seemingly away from connection to electronic communications.      May we call in a ‘mantic’ Socrates-Basileus here ?   I mean to produce for us a glimpse of lexicography available to scholars one pentacontaeteia forward from today, via a kind of prognostication.    Perhaps the King prognosticator can be imagined equipped to take charge [see his aspiring ‘climbing’ attitude in David Dann’s portrait above] .      At this present time (early in 2015)  only Volume I of the early Twenty-First Century’s anticipated five-volume OCT has yet appeared.

In addition to the 3 midwives  (Phenarete, Socrates and Theaetetus), we may add the man soon to appear — Socrates Alternate.    This additional midwife is brought in by a group of scholiasts to Chapter 4 of Euclid’s most “Theaetetan” book — i.e. Euclid’s present Book X.   It is thematic of this set of scholia that the metaphors of ‘progeny’, ‘mothers’ and ‘ancestors’ will assist in the reader’s understanding of the text’s theorems about Binomials.    That chapter of  Elements, running as it does from Prop.  29  through Prop.  47,  certainly calls for serious extra research, over and above what recent scholarship in Paris has contributed.

 

One needs a ‘lEmmation’ to aid in proving this.    But these may grow up to be firmly established lemmas.    [see above on diminutivised Lemmatia and diminutivised Antistrophia, admittedly rare words in ancient Greek]

Leon Robin had challenged some parts of the then-consensus of scholars (1911 through the 1930s), — including those scholars around J. Burnet, — by finding literally scores of examples of what I am now calling a ‘vectoral’ or ‘ever-onward’ interpretation of Plato’s word for  ‘ever’.    Many manuscripts read   “AIEI” , and Robin reflected this frequently in his critical apparatus.    There is a striking dominance of this reading among Robin’s collection of good mss. of Symp. and Phdr. ,  — they are present in large numbers, for example, in the Marciana’s Gr. IV, 1, also known as Venetus  T.    Further, the passage of Euthydemus, 296 ab singles out exactly the term AIEI for detailed attention, a close focus not unlike the one given to AIEI at Symp. 206.   That is where Diotima chooses her words precisely and carefully, speaking of ‘adding’ EINAI’ to ‘AIEI’ to build up the  summary description of ERWS.   It seems reasonable to look for a meaning  similar to what we find inside the word “AIEI” as deployed by a then-young Theaetetus, composing Ur-Book-X of Elements.         This same word “AIEI” turns up,  — signally in its location — adjacent to that word “idion [oikeian]” in Soph. 264 e1.      [Dramatically, and inside his dialogue, Plato has his ‘Eleatic Visitor’ in conversation with a then-young mathematician named Theaetetus.]

A passage in Theorem 2 of Euclid XII  quotes verbatim from Theaetetus’s signature proposition, i.e. Book X, Prop. 1, and quotes the “AIEI”  (in that spelling) in the course of doing this act of referring.   So we have a pattern of D-C-B-A here.    Plato-in-Sophist (=D) paraphrasing Eudoxus-in-Ur-XII (=C), citing Theaetetus-in-Ur-X (=B).   And this series continues back towards an Archytas-era piece of mathematical theory (=A).    Here we do best not to indulge in the “expansion” of this early Pythagorean ‘Areskon’, such as Proclus, Friedlein p. 142 admits he has done — bringing in mirrors and other digressive topics.       It is better to guide by the purer and more condensed echo, seemingly that self-same Pythagorean ‘Areskon’.  I refer to the one relayed in Scholion 1, to Def. 14 of Bk. I.   The scholion applies to the euclidean definition of “SXHMA”.   This more elegant version of the ‘Areskon’ is less than half the length of Proclus’s expanded version.   There are some internal indications that the simpler formulation is also the purer and older, sourced most likely from the Old Academy itself.    Plato’s Meno helps us date the early (pre-euclid) interest in the definitions being premissed at that time by geometers.   It touched on this very definition, that of ‘schEma’.   At that very early time, perhaps 387 BC, we not only had no treatise by Euclid of Alexandria on the Athenian horizon, we barely had much of the early Academy.   Our witness here is the anonymous scholiast relayed by Heiberg from the margins of Elements, — at his Vol. V, pp. 91 – 93.     Quite conceivably the scholiast is working from a source from the pre-Academy period, nearer in time and place to Archytas in Tarentum, when the Fourth Century BC was itself only beginning.    This is an attractive and not implausible place to locate our initial term “A” in this A-B-C-D , where D stands for Sophist 264 de.

Several scholarly puzzles could be rendered less puzzling if we follow some independent evidences from the history of geometry and astronomy here, and guide also by these outlined clues from the philology of ‘aiei’.    Some arguments can be developed, for example, for attributing  the tract named “epi dialektikEs” in the Plato ms. “P” to this same man near the young Aristotle and the aging Plato — Philip of Opus.     Philip will have been making his syntax “epi-plus-genitive” a case of the LSJ article s.v. III, where all their illustrations are from the early Aristotle [a student of Younger Socrates]. In any case, more is likely to be learned when scholars can have a leisurely look at  that 163-leaf manuscript, and its Plato Lexicon.     It seems likely to be scanned into digitised  format, under the Polonsky Foundation project, due to run until 2016.       Several issues in the early history of logic and the exact sciences, brought into sharper focus by JBrunschwig of Paris and CWilson of Annapolis, will be provoking scholars to carry forward their recent efforts, alas in the cases of these two men now discontinued.     We can imagine this in the pattern of an Archytas ‘ever-onward’ series of stages, greater knowledge being harvested as the series continues.

There is in any case a time-neutral sense of ‘ever-onward’, not so exalted as a thing timeless pure and simple.    Rather, it resembles that middle item between the time-neutral status of a Theorem and the time-connected status of a Problem (when if ever will our solution be completed ?).      De Morgan wrote affectingly in 1855 [his friend Boole died then] about mathematical research he and George Boole were advancing, moving it towards a more perfect result than Hobbes had achieved.   The two of them in 1855, wrote De Morgan, made a point of abstaining from each of three claims:    priority, posteriority and simultaneity — with ongoing work by other mathematical researchers.     All the same De Morgan prognosticated that the name ‘Boole’ would one day be widely known for the fundamental idea [we now call it Boolean Algebra] that Algebra, so far from limiting its scope to a handful of the mind’s operations — might be seen by a very wide public indeed to underlie them all.     Porisms and Episkepseis can rise to such levels of aspiration.    So say some of our ancient scholia to Euclid.    We might rephrase this as: a not-fully-vetted proof can lead researchers to a porismatic-onward, or episkeptic-onward, or peirastic-onward effort of thought.    If this leads in turn to an heroic or ‘Orphic’ aspiration, so much the better.    Plato was forever keeping himself open to such aspiration, certainly.

The philological thread, unbroken from point-D back to point-B at least, has textual warrant to support it.   More so if the forthcoming editions of the OCT texts of Symp. and Phaedrus keep many (or even keep half) of the “AIEI” readings now manifest in the Marciana MS  #542.    A most curious detour, on the way back from C to B.    It occurs right at  Ur-XII, where Heiberg preserves a non-standard edition, one in his main text and the other under the title “Appendix II”.    This is not merely an alternate reading of one or another proposition in Book XII, it is an alternate version of the entire book (together with a few propositions from the end of Book XI).    Heiberg calls it Appendix II to his Vol. III.    No MS reads this way except the one now residing in Bologna [which I have inspected].    Its Heiberg siglum is    b  .    Guiding by the philological thread I am now following, Book XII in its entirety has a variant reading.   It has what one may call a  “deviation into standard later-Attic”.    This will have required Eudemus’s  altering its “AIEI” into the later-Attic variant  “AEI”.

This “regularising”was to become  standard for Plato editors (including, one can now in 2015 venture to prognosticate’, — the OCT editorial team of Duke, Nicoll, Robinson et al.    Which is due to become our XXI. century standard for Plato’s texts)  [ note well, Leonard Brandwood sounds a non-compliant note here, something of a Cassandra note, possibly foretelling a XXII. cent. restoration of  the “AIEI” form, at least for Symp.  Phdr. , Euthydemus and Sophist]   A passage from late in Plato’s SophistEs manifests a pair of peculiar variants in close proximity, in the Venice ms. “T” (1) it adds in a modifier word “idion” [“” {own/private}] where it wants to point to the “exclusive” or “private” location where the dichotomous divisions have enclosed ‘The Sophist Himself’.

This is the ‘peculiarity’  of logical tightness signaled to Aristotle scholars by Harold H. Joachim, paraphrasing Aristotle himself with the phrase “universal but sheerly singular”.   Joachim has Aristotle’s illustrating this by his example: this  moon here.  Joachim does not refer to the text of ms. E for Met. Lambda 8, where the uniqueness of the denotatum of “Socrates” is the issue.  The general consensus of texts has “Socrates is One” and E has in the margin “gr.  Oux Eis”.
Something peculiar also occurs here – in the Venetus “T” , but not only in “T”. A variant spelling of the word “AEI [“AIEI”]) manifests in the same sentence. The form Brandwood puzzled over in his Word Index (1976), following the extensive puzzling of L. Robin in the 1920s and 1930s in his Budé editions of Symp. and Phdr. Here Sophist appears to revert to an older-Attic spelling.  This is the 4-letter variant, which is more common in the epigraphic evidence for Athens prior to 360 B.C. (see LSJ s.v.  aei   and L. Threatte’s recent studies).

This particular orthography has a special way of marking texts from at or near Plato’s time, Thucydides favoring the 4-letter variant by a ratio of  of 128:0.   [TLG reveals this].  In Xenophon the Attic koinE predominates, except for his Cyropaedia, where the 4-letter variant prevails.   In this case, however, the data are more nuanced (nothing nuanced about a 128:0 ratio).    Xenophon’s data may need more nuanced mining than our published concordances have so far given us.     It would be helpful to have a finer level of detail here, since the latest period of Xenophon’s writing coincides with the late-middle period of Plato’s.   writing given that Plato’s composing of late-middle dialogues such as Symposium, Phaedrus and Euthydemus, is datable to the late period of Xenophon’s life.  Did Xenophon have a hand in the editing of the texts of Thucydides ?  More light might be shed on questions of this sort also, with more nuanced data-mining in these 3 dialogues (where the 4-letter variant prevails), and in both Thucydides and Xenophon. – “aiei”.     Scholarship has
It may be that “AIEI” is used by Plato somewhat differently from “AEI”. The ‘forever’ series, a series of ‘ever onward’ dichotomizing cuts.

This is not the place to go into detail about the “poiEsis” question in Books XII.   The key indicator of Philip’s authorship (thus ‘tampering’ with the original version, by Eudoxus) will be this one:   C-alt   executes a near-total removal of the poiEsis language, which characterises Eudoxus’s original version (now the standard text of Bk XII).       There are a number of further reasons, several based on scholia to Euclid, — notably  Schol. #3 to Book V in the Heiberg edition —  for believing the following about this “Bologna ms.” edition of Book XII:  The true author of  C-alt. flourished some 50 years prior to Euclid’s floruit.   He was (as his mother knew him) Philippus.    This is the same man tradition has known under various names, but in any case he functioned as Plato’s personal amaneunsis.    Standardly his name has come to settle on “Philip of Opus”.    Philip will have been willing and able to assume code-names there at the Academy [Campbell wrote about officials in mystery religion being required to assume code-names.  This phenomenon is much broader than Campbell’s focus on religion left him scope to discuss.   Religion, to be sure, was in no way a remote topic to our Younger Euthyphro there at the Academy training young Aristotle in logic, theology and theodicy.  In Cratylus Plato manages to hint about someone nearby breathing the breath inspired by Euthyphro the Elder.    Possibly Eudoxus would take the less pious line that “we may subject the Divine Sun to our klepshydra’s, as I. Kant was to subject The Holy one of the Gospels to the Imperative”.

Anaxagoras and Eudoxus might think risky thoughts here-below, if surrounded by self-righteous and pious Alternate Euthyphro’s, bent on recruiting The Sun some devout worshippers.  Philip (as in Epinomis) was more the evangelist, breathing new life into Elder Euthyphro, all the while joining young Aristotle at the Early Academy.   The two of them, Socrates and Aristotle, will have done what Chrysippus (and Plutarch, citing his tract P. DialektikEs, Bk III) called Socratic dialectic.   Philip (alias Socrates) will have been both teaching and co-studying alongside Aristotle there at the very early Academy.   Among other things, the neo-Euthyphrontic dialectic involved in Definitio per genus et differentiam [I owe this Romanised formula to Dr. George Pepe, a good decoder of the Aristotle of late antiquity, as well as a pious man himself.]

Somewhat speculatively, I have this same man, ne’ Philip, assuming the code-name within the Academy   “Amphinomus”.    Thus Proclus has the pair “Speusippus and Amphinomus” complaining about “poiEsis” language infecting mathematics.    The timeless sense of “ever” in mathematics is threatened by this.   This subject needs fuller discussion elsewhere.   Here at Book XIIa, his spelling preference for this technical word would naturally be   “AEI”, his motivations strongly “eternalist” similar to Phaedo.     This will be entirely like the man (likely also Philip) who wrote Scholion #18 to Euclid I.     He fairly shudders at the thought of a “tote trigwnon”, a ‘then-triangle’ with one side having recently suffered [such an indignity to its essence!] a geometer’s operation of ‘extending’.    Much needs developing here — and that which is susceptible of near-proof needs near-proving.    But there is a real possibility that such proofs may be found, with your help, dear reader !    Scholion #3 to Book V, when rightly interpreted,  is likely to be a major boost to this argument.

In any case we need to continue the retro-progression backward from the post-Platonic viewpoints of a Philip/Amphinomus or of a Eudemus of Rhodes, towards the pre-Platonic viewpoiont of an Archytas or Ocellus.   Just where Archytas urges us to think of ‘stretching forth’ vectors, he manages to put his mathematics into motion, bring it to life..   But this means a series or “AIEI” formulation will point towards futurity, the subjunctive and optative, the contingent.    His coding of this was   “AIDIA”.    Therefore something of the old ‘Areskon’ era is likely getting lost amongst the partisans devoted to timeless Forms.   Or so I opine.    Much remains to be investigated here.   Including very notably   Venetus    T.

Back in his 1920s edition of Phaedo Robin had achieved a measure of consensus-challenging textual work.   But his follow-up editions of Symp. and Phaedrus made major extra contributions.   Had Robin commented on Soph. 264 E, we would have had a wider basis to build upon.    This was not to be.

A truly valuable, but hitherto largely unexploited ancient source is available.   It was already available in 1888, but has become much more so since the TLG entered it into machine-readable form.   This is:   the Objections & Replies and also the commentary —  published in the late 1880s by JL Heiberg of Denmark in his Teubner edition of Euclid’s Elements.      These are  Euclid’s “Scholia”.   Heiberg had collected them carefully from the margins of Euclid.    His monograph on the subject was unfortunately only published in Danish.

Scholiasts to Euclid (no, this need NOT refer simply to what we find in Proclus on Book I) have asked us to recognise Theaetetus’s “AIEI” front-matter to Book X as making up a “Chapter One” of that Old Academy work.    That will be Chapter One of what is now Book X of Euclid.    What authority lies behind my calling the definitions and first 18 propositions of Book X “Chapter One” ?   JL Heiberg published a scholion to X,19 — he found it in two excellent  MSS — calling theorem 19 the first theorem of “Chapter Two“.     Heiberg gave this Scholion the number 133.    Proclus makes no reference to it.

Do we have some common material in the background of all four, Symposium, Phaedrus, Theaetetus, and Ur-Chapter-One of Elements?     If so, this will be material pointing back to the time of the Old Academy when Theaetetus was writing this “Chapter One”.    But there are signs that Theaetetus’s Chapter One was itself an outgrowth of earlier pythagorean work.       It may not be unreasonable to entitle some of this material (following other scholia published by Heiberg) a Pythagorean Areskon.     A significant trace of such a guidepost may be present in a troubled passage of Tht., troubled in a special way inside the Venetus   T .    When the new editions of Symp.  and Phaedr. come out from Clarendon Press in the coming few years, we may see more attention to the frequently occurring spelling variant   “AIEI”  in this Marciana MS called Venetus   T  .

Possibly this MS. at the Marciana can help point the way back to such before-Plato sources.      As of this date (early September 2012) we can reasonably conjecture about our series of texts of Plato, of Theaetetus, and of Philip of Opus.

Scholarly initiatives began in earnest with the Bude editions by L. Robin in the 1920s and 1930s — and from there we have another ‘onward-vector’ impetus from scholarly work by Leonard Brandwood, his his 1976 “Word Index to Plato”.     WordPress.com may one day make new offerings here.

Some of these scholia clearly echo material handed down from antiquity.   Proclus confirms this fully.  So the trick may be (do recall that ‘tricks’ and Hermes go together).      Nothing prevents there having been an outcropping of Theurgical arts in the days before Euclid.     This could even have happened at the  Old Academy.    This seems oddly anachronistic, but yet such early Theurgy is not an impossibility.    Scholion #61 to Euclid Book I makes early Theurgy there look to be a possibility.     Of course, this and related scholia (like 109-114) may have been written generations or even centuries after Euclid’s own time.   But there are real indications here and there of a surprisingly different history behind such scholia to Euclid, even behind this relic of an early reference to “Theurgy”.    The new open-access journal “Entangled Religions” may be a place where investigating this, and expanding on the pioneering work of E.R. Dodds, [Greeks and the Irrational, appendix on ‘Theurgy’] might be in order.    In any case, we may be now looking at sources that go back some decades or even three generations before Euclid (say around the time of the young Aristotle).

There is a title “Enstaseis“, a work seemingly attributed to Aristotle — but in scholia to Euclid there are not only scores of remarks [our modern mathematico-philosopher Descartes would one day collect these and call them ‘objections & replies’]     Those ancient scholia even include a short compendium of definitions.    This material includes definitions of the terms ‘e)/nstasis’, ‘lh=mma’, ‘po/risma’ and so forth.    Aristotle can have composed his lists of Enstaseis , about Olymp. 107, close in time to his composing his Posterior Analytics.      It would be no great surprise if Aristotle’s early colleagues (the mathematicians, such as Menaechmus and Amphinomus) sang out the repeated a pair of refrains in these scholia — the ones that begin “a)porese/ie a)\n tis”   or   “po/qen dh there are likely to have been written comments to various pieces of Ur-Euclid, what Heiberg used to call the elementisings of the ‘antiquiores’.    This is true of many of the scholia, such as Schol #95 to Bk X.     Scholia #3 and #30 to Book V give us another outside-of-Proclus vantage point, likely tracing back to antiquity, to make this mathematical material clearer both in its history and its contributions to mathematics and Early Academic philosophy.

The trick when trying to strengthen our understanding this aspect of Archytas will be  to get clearer on what kind of “vector” he understood mathematical series to imply.    This will be encoded in optative and subjunctive moods, some of them not still alive in the mathematical prose of Euclid’s time.    We need to follow the scholiasts’s lead, wherever the evidence encourages this, with fuller explanations.    This means firming up the voices of our personified and dramatised ‘narratives’ from the Old Academy’s mathematicians.       This will mean leaving behind the softer moods of wished-for’s, might-have-been’s, narratives and counter-narratives  — therefore stretching our “duna/it’ a)\n ei)=nai” optatives onward to the simple and declarative ‘on’.    We may usefully draw on the language which Eudemus (his Phys. Frag. 30) draws in turn from Archytas.    This fragment has found its best and boldest interpreter in  T.L. Heath, his “History”.   Over-cautious philology remains compliant with Diels & Kranz, but loses the force of his word “AIDIA”.    By Eudemus’s time, roughly that of Alexander the Great, the settled later-Attic or koinE form prevaled:  by then the form was simply   “AEI”  the three-letter variant, was the prevalent one.

The idea is to set out results avoiding this kind of ‘compliance’ [to borrow a term from Plutarch].    This way of ‘stretching onward’ via “AIDIA” will have been what the Old Academy’s ideals held up for emulation.

We do in fact have several lines of evidence, some within the history of mathematics, of working mathematicians at the Old Academy, near in time to Aristotle’s first arrival there (around -366).   One may rightly think of them as hyper-enthusiasts, men overcome with a passion for thinking like Plato.    Or even thinking more Platonically than Plato himself.    Such a man was Philip of Opus.    These were men known ironically to Plato as ‘Friends of Forms’.   In Philip’s case we may have a more furtive and evasive man, now siding with the ‘-of Forms’ faction, again siding with the ‘-of Earth’ faction within the perturbed atmosphere of every least topic’s being ‘manfully and eristically’ [ἀνδρείως καὶ ἐριστικῶς] quarreled about [Rep. V, Ch iv (end), — where Thesleff has independently identified Plato’s late ‘onkos’ style of writing].

Such ‘unwitting lapses into eristic’ are further illustrated by Plato when, at Tim. 28b 1-4, he dubs in an anacoluthon to scold the empty verbal quibbling [of fellow academicians ?] over the pair of words ‘caelum’ and ‘mundus’, or ‘Οὔρανος’  and ‘Κόσμος’.   Slings and his Amsterdam colleagues have done much to decode Plato’s playful tricks with the word “Ouranos”.    A welcome subtlety to match that of Plato himself.   And here in Tim. 28b Plato may be asking us to pick up his reference to a pair of  then-recently  circulated tracts — by a pair of his closest students, students also of  Timaeus.    H.H. Joachim had stated in his 1922 Oxford edition of the De Gen. et Corr, (Introduction, p. xxiii, n1)  that the author of that early-Aristotle piece comes ‘perilously near’ to endorsing an extreme of the Forms-Friendly position (the one Aristotle often manifests a sharp unfriendlness towards).

Returning to the terminology of ‘Ouranos’ and ‘Kosmos’.   The ‘p. Ouranou’ of a young Aristotle and the ‘p. Kosmou’ of ps.-Aristotle, perhaps the same blood-&-bone man who was also known as the astronomer-mathematician-dialectician Socrates-Alt.    The man whose  Venetus T name “Socrates Allos” lends itself to word-plays such as giving him the sub-nickname “Kurios Allos” or “Mr. Allos”.    Were this wayward Socrates to suffer a hostile play on his names and nicknames, by a Plato of the word-subtlety who etymologises “epistEmE” so as to allow it an ‘embolised’ half-H mark, so to speak ‘thrown’ from the front end of the word “histEmai” [Crat. 437 a7]  is in the target zone when Plato is ready to write about the internal unhealthiness, the disordered segments of the soul under Plato’s attack, which is exhibiting symptoms of psychic disease.   These would be like pathologies Plato describes as un-natural, drawing on Hippocratic concepts of a natural rank-order:  “allo up’ allou” [this repeated phrase at 444 d10 — echoing 444 d5 — forms the climactic point of all of this itself climactic chapter, being one chapter later than the one our best texts seem to want to call the ‘final’ one in Bk IV].

Archytas’s quadrivial credentials were exemplary [see Lasserre’s scholarship on the early stages of the Quadrivium, his ‘Museum Helveticum’ article of some 20 years ago now].     An ounce of Heath’s Archytas-via-Eudemus is worth a pound or more of conjectures about Philolaus and Ocellus the Lucanian —  anyhow if we take as primary controls for our speculative histories the surviving mathematical material [chiefly Euclid’s Elements and the scholia in their margins, but also similar material from works of ‘elements’ from such as Aristoxenus and Autolycus; we now have the good fortune of Heiberg’s magisterial scholarly work on many of these texts, and have his painstaking work fully encoded into the TLG canon, under TLG numbers such as authors 1799 and 5022].      But much of this is still remaining to be developed, this line of argument about the Academy, so far as it struggled to be neither an echo of Plato nor a partisan of Aristotle’s.   These would be men perhaps in a contentious rivalry, each of them ambitious to be Plato’s “diadochos”, perhaps wanting to lead the Academy in the direction of mathematics and astronomy, or even astrology and numerology.

Will a WordPress site have something to offer here ?     Conceivably, yes.   If wishes were horses, Philip of Opus might have lightened his pythagorean burden.   [For now, we can do little but exclaim in the promissory-indefinite manner of lines 551-566 of Hymn to Hermes.    This would be a subjunctive or optative wish for help from The [Unreliable] God of Discovery or seeming-Discovery.     The god to whom sacrifices are suggested (=Hermes) in scholia to Euclid.   This is the very god against whom [or at least the poet’s standard picture of whom] Plato  unleashes sharply hostile, we may say near-blasphemous rhetoric early in Laws XII.    Do try this experiment:  see if you can find a more Hermes-hostile piece of prose than Plato’s attack on this god — or common image of him put forward by the poets — near the beginning of Laws Book XII.

There are admittedly major risks in a modern-day critic’s launching into para-historical parallels, in the effort to throw some new light on a topic from antiquity.   Our phrase “far fetched” gets its meaning for just such prope-responsible ramblings into topics our subjects cannot have had any awareness of.   Can I give some striking examples of how risky this is ?   Yes I can give two scholars of ancient culture.   Critic-A is likely to be pulling our leg, a twinkle in his eye as he indulges in his prope-historical ramble — E.R. Dodds subdividing the “eighties” within the pre-Christian decade  -390 through -380 so as to encumber his argument (his Introduction to his 1959 Oxford edition of Gorgias)  with the concept “the early eighties” [op. cit., p. 25 n4].   He impishly denies that Plato wrote Republic in “the early eighties”.   From a man of his leprechaun-like humor, this must be taken as facetious usage.  Critic B is Leonardo Taran, who keeps a straight and characteristically solemn face, he executes his pedantic romp through portions of modern scholarship, his topic being “amicus Plato [et Socrates], sed” formula.   Taran draws on the material familiar to himself, post-Renaissance Iberian scholarship on Cervantes and others.    The recently published Mark Twain scholarship from Prof. Trombley is a third, but her target has plenty of universality, and may well recall Plutarch on the near superhuman temperance and sobriety of Alexander the Great.

Modern French uses “mon cher” in parallel to Plato’s usage of “chrEstos” [ χρηστός ] late in Republic Book V. To be sure such terms of endearment are always subject to major ambiguities.    Let us borrow from a sholiast to Euclid’s Def. 9 of Elements Bk V, when he writes “we call this perambiguity” [ διακαταχρηστικότερον ] .     I am here presuming to follow up on a Cicero passage in his “Orator”, where he analyses ‘katachrEsis’ (he uses the Greek word there).  I need only add what Cicero WOULD HAVE done, had he come upon the quite special phrasings of tklhis scholion [=Schol #30 to Euclid Bk V, in the Heiberg edition of 1888] .   “διακαταχρηστικότερον” is the word which our Scholiast says “we call” the ambiguous word “double”.     This is a term much worried over by Plato himself. What are the various meanings, he has Socrates ask, of our familiar term “double” ? As it first stands, it is perambiguous.

In the case of this Campbell-selected word ‘ChrEstos’ [ χρηστός], I point to a range of meanings like ‘my precious’, ‘my sweetie’, ‘our late-lamented indentured servant’ and the rest. LCampbell included this term in his list of Plato’s “facetious words”. A lively case in point: early in Chapt. xxii of Rep. V, where it is livelier in the way it draws upon the also-perambiguous term ‘kallos’. This term is used facetiously [so Campbell, Rep. Vol II, p. 290] by Plato in Rep. VIII (the government by Tyranny is ‘kallistos’, the ‘loveliest’ government). It had already been used that same way by Leontius back in Bk. IV (he blames himself for his pathological desire to look on at that ‘lovely’ spectacle — of a clump of dead bodies ! [440 a]. If I have various of the strands decoded suitably here, Plato has encoded facetious references to the very man who was later to become his personal amanuensis and disciple, namely Philip of Opus.    This will be the very man, the very blood-&-bone individual, Plato whom wants to point to under the unflattering rubric ‘philo-theamwn’. Or so I believe.   It was precisely “theamata” that had enabled the unhealthy work of his wretched eyes, inside the soul of poor Leontius.

I have this individual man identical to the man known to fellow astronomers at the Early Academy as (and this will have been his birthname, thus the name used by his Opuntian mother) ‘Philip’.   His name occurs literally scores of times in the Lasserre critical edition of the fragments of Eudoxus of Cnidos, Plato’s chief astronomer.  The name ‘Philip’ is taken apart etymologically, that is dismembered into its philological components by Aristotle, in EN I, Ch. 11. Aristotle takes steps to give it as a a vivid instance of his open-formula, offered alongside: ‘philo-toioutos’,  [φιλοτοιούτος] — we might fairly decode this term of Aristotle’s ‘a philo-Such-and-So’.   Now Aristotle was an immediate pupil of ‘younger-socrates’. He all but says so in Metaphys. Z, 11.   Again, the point of view now is not that of naming and philology, but of locating a blood-and-bone individual, capable also of being the same man as Amphinomus [whose town of origin is pointedly unknown to scholarship].    There are a few stray indicators which might encourage one’s giving Philip the place-name formula ‘the Onchestian’. These come from the homeric “Hymn to Hermes”.  I once tried to interest Prof. Nicholas J. Richardson, author of the article “Penelope”  (OCD 2003) in linking our early-Academy Amphinomus to the suitor-hero killed by Telemachus in the Odyssey.

I may well offer more on all of these reather arcane (yes, admittedly arcane) pointers in the near future. This would be on a separate WordPress site, recently set up and entitled youngersocrates.com. Very likely the argument will look hard at Polit. 311 c, where the 1995 updated OCT text of Plato’s Politicus has admitted some really quite bold conjectures.   Bolder, I judge, than some of the conjectures one finds here on the page “Plato and other ancient Greeks”. . But boldness verges sometimes on rashness, and the less bold surmises here may in the end win over more Plato-readers ? A whimsical wise saying was published some years since   “A fool who rushes in sometimes gets the job done”.  The latitudinarian attitudes of the editors here at “Arteno=l” give encouragement to thought and experimentation.

Relatedly [I lifted this word from Congressman Christopher P. Gibson’s book “Securing the State”, p. 66] — one of the ambiguities surrounding our man called Socrates — or our men called by that same name — was precisely his apparent gift as “fortune teller”.   The book’s title is “Prognostica”.   Matthew Paris’s 12th century ms. has its author named “Socrates Basileus”, or “King Socrates”.   Its famous sketch or graphic of Plato and Socrates (the one now in the Ashmolean, recently much dissected by J. Derrida in his “Post Card” book) has the Socrates figure behaving uncharacteristically. Yes, in Matthew’s relayed illustration the Socrates figure is doing the writing, whilst Plato looks on, no writing instrument in hand, in manifest alarm.   I at least sense alarm or disturbance in the intent look in Plato’s eyes — one might compare the Euclid scholiast’s word ‘[Plato’s] so-to-speak Character’ [this allusion to what one might call Plato’s “personality” is in the scholion to I, Def. iv, — as this stands in JLH, Vol V, but not as it stands in Proclus’s version.]. In any case, no writer’s paraphernalia are to be seen in reach of the en-humored or alarmed Plato figure in the “Prognostica” text of Matthew of Paris.

Matthew Paris’s ms. appears to have a remark in its text about Amorians. Thus people of the earliest period of Alexander’s world-conquest. I can relay it here, something told me by Barker [“Bruce”] Benfield, then curator of this Matthew Paris ms. Mr. Barker reported to me live-voice at the Bodleian  on 2 September 2010, when the two of us had the treasured ms. open before us there at the 1937 building at the Bodleian, as follows: his Matthew-ms. ‘Socrates basileus’ included in his text that he had “showed this work to the King of the Amorians“. Thus we have a reference to a people resident in Asia Minor, perhaps the conquests of a young Alexander still in the future and calling for Prognostic art and wisdom, such as this Prognostica contains in abundance. In any case the Amorians under reference may well reside or have resided just where the conquest-minded Alexander began his famous Ektaseis. We might compare the way Queen Elizabeth looked for a John Dee, another Euclid-linked individual of historical stature. And our Queen wishing for an empire on which the sun never sets.

Yes, these are Fortune-Tellers all, — none as yet online ! Dee was deeply unaquainted with online work. Similarly the major donor of books to Widener Library at Harvard, Mr. Hollis, after whom the ‘HarvardOnLineLibraryInfoService’ catalog later came to be named (HOLLIS). (Our pre-internet man the Monk Matthew gives us his precious Socrates ms. under the heading ” Prognostica Socratis Basilei.” These future-oriented visionaries will have risked demoting their own work to the status of something disreputable, such as Public Service Commissioner Alfred Kahn said about the art of “economic forecasting”.   “These people are about the task of making astrology and numerology look positively reputable, — by comparison” [I paraphrase].   I once spoke to this man over the phone; he was at his summer home near Ithaca NY at the time, intending to take a swim in his backyard pool.   This same Fred Kahn wrote a book centered on politically influential members of the establishment, whom he wittily called “kleptocrats”.

These days there tends to be less writing of this species, biting satire or invective.   Mike Royko the journalist from Chicago used to write vituperative pieces about Henry Kissinger — back when Kissinger was still alive — which had that kind of venom and bite.  A still more venomous variety of such invective came from humorist Mark Twain [Samuel Clemens], heaping venomous invective on his personal intimate, his own private secretary Isabel Lyon [see picture].

The cause of the author’s anger has much in common with Plato’s cause for anger against his own personal secretary Philip of Opus.   Here are Clemens’s words, the parts left in struck-through words where one cannot transpose them readily from the modern to the ancient author defending his literary legacy.   In personal letters Clemens calls his secretary :

“a liar, a forger, a thief, a hypocrite, , a sneak, a humbug, a traitor, a conspirator, ”  Trombley, Laura Skandera, ‘Mark Twain’s Other Woman’, Random House 2010.

It is now a century and more since the 450-page ms. about Ms. Lyon came from Clemens’s hand. Not surprisingly, it is not yet published.    Not surprisingly, neither are Plato’s invectives against Socrates-Alternate, a devotee of the humbug and conspirator Hermes.  This was Plato’s personal secretary, pretender to the role of literary executor for the entire Academy, perhaps even the platonic teaching’s Diadochos.   This is the role Olympiodorus seems to claim for him.    Hermes the forger and misleader.    See mosaic from Macedonia :

Much further work is needed, to see if there is a good match between the alarm expressed in Matthew’s drawing of the upstaged Plato and this remark from the man who has just written about ‘characters’ and looking down from above, and ‘primurgic’ causes. A scholiast to Euclid I [not well preserved by Proclus] looks to be interested in Plato’s thinking about the Demiurge and ‘pronoia’, also about ‘characters’ in the way those reformist (sc. non-Olympian) thinkers among the “older philosophers” conceived these, and responded to them, ἐν τῷ ἑαυτῶν [sic] κατὰ τρόπον ἤθει.

More is to be worked about that matter of “personality” or “humor” or “temperament” in Plato and his immediate companions, some contemporary with Aristotle. What our scholiast is drawing upon, conceivably even from his personal experience, is sources that may go back to before the time of the early Aristotle. If some are traceable to Plato’s biographer Philip, researched recently by Swiss scholar F. Lasserre. Some features we may learn more about may even go back to the younger Plato.

Of great interest would it be, if the Organon and the De Caelo and the DeMundo were not yet written — but that they were only a few Olympiads off into the future, like the conquests of Alexander were. The author of the DeMundo seems to attribute to Zeus a more comprehensive way of being in charge of the Universe.    As grandson of Chronos [Χρόνος] (this leaves a telling one-generation open space for Kronos between the two), —  Zeus masters somewhat more than just  Aristotle’s “heavens”.   To be included in this expanded “all-Universe”” Heavens, Earth, Winds, events down here even including chance-events so-called, such as Alexander’s conquests, Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon, or the sinking of the Spanish Armada. The polyonymous of the perambiguous name is in charge of them all. Not just the limited range of things in the worlds of Timaeus or DeCaelo. Perhaps the author of DeMundo lived and wrote between Olympiads 103 and 107, thus had not yet seen the final version of DeCaelo, and thought he could improve on Timaeus.

We ourselves would want to retreat to a safe rear-guard position in these theological battles, and will want to incant [cf. Tht. 157 c9, ‘epaidw’ ,  ἐπᾳδῶ]  some kind of counter-wish against a threat of divine retribution.   Especially against the threat of hostility from Hermes’s property-conscious older Brother, Apollo.   The calming climate of Venice will one day soon help moderate one or several of my venturous speculations here.   In any case there is more to this story, or would that there might be.

Proclus makes reference to a man, not otherwise easy to identify, whose name is in our best edition as Friedlein’s text has it “Kratistos” [Friedlein 211,16].   Proclus puts him alongside points about the traditional methods at the time of Plato and Leodamas.   Plato, “Kratistos” and Leodamas (a  parallel had occurred just 9 pages above in Proclus’s commentary, when he discusses two other men contemporary with these Early Academy thinkers:  Amphinomus and Aristotle — Friedlein p. 202).     It seems likely that we are hearing echoes of a point made in Politicus  when Socrates is talking to teachers and learners of mathematics at the Early Academy, young men who sat at the feet of Theodorus of Cyrene.   I refer especially to the wording of a remark by Socrates to the teacher (Theodorus), who taught both Theaetetus and Younger Socrates.    Plato’s text at the beginning of Statesman has this teaching described as “most powerful [kratistos] concerning ratios and geometrical matters”:   περὶ λογισμοὺς καὶ τὰ γεωμετρικὰ κρατίστου , Polit. 257 a8.  ).   Something resembling this supposed interchange between common noun and proper name was noted above with Socrates Alternate  and ‘Mr. Alternate’ [struggling against his own form of akrasia, and trying for self-mastery, allon hyp’ allou , ἀλλὸν ὑπ’ ἀλλοῦ see above, on Rep. Bk IV, 444d5].   A similar witticism is embedded in reported final words of Alexander the Great, passed down from antiquity.   He is said to have answered his questioner “whom do you choose for your Successor, O Alexander ?” and his words were  Ho Kratistos [Cratistus, proper name — or the most powerful one, common attribute]

R.G. Bury raises historical points about a man named “Polycrates” — in relation to the late-middle dialogue Symposium.  With only some light work on the etymology of this name we are enabled to see the ‘poly-‘ prefix as an invitation to trying out several variants, such as were in the nomenclature of the Early Academy.    Borrowing from Aristotle’s substitutible word ‘toioutos’ , we can form ‘toioutokrates’.   Substitution instances, all from the vicinity of Plato and his companions:  ‘Polycrates’, Hermocrates’, ‘Socrates’ and, more in the background, infant son of Dionysius II, whom his father named in honor of Plato, ‘Apollokrates’.

Back to names now, and the idea of prepending a null-string so as to produce variants with a suffixed string -[o]krates.   A fully familiar completed name is SOdzein-kratEs, or SW-KRATHS.  Plato had done word-play on the two halves of Socrates’s name in Republic Book VII.  But consider a series of other strings to prefix, the balance being ‘o-crates’. Hermes and Apollo were two well-known names woven into the Sicilian family line, the one with the strong linkages to the voyaging Plato and his Early Academy:   Dionysius I.    Dionysius’s father-in-law was named ‘Hermo-kratEs’, and then this same man’s grandson (son of Dionysius II) got named ‘Apoll-[o]kratEs’, conceivably a reference to Plato’s influence, Plato himself a reputed ‘son of Apollo’ or Apollonides.      Perhaps not a co-incidence that Plato should  incorporate a character in his late dialogue ‘Critias‘, named ‘Hermocrates’.   This name is mis-echoed in Campbell’s ‘Excursus’ on the style of the late dialogues, his Rep. Vol II, p. 59, — Campbell’s Oxford book in 1894 manifests  ‘Herm-ogenes‘, and the various reprintings of his book since then have left this erroneous name (paradoxically enough ) precisely in its place.  Co-incidentally enough, we can find a sort of parallel error in a Teubner Verlag printing of Xenophon’s Memorabilia I, 2, 48.   Please note it carefully, that Teubner in 1886 , as if to interchange a disciple of the Socrates1 for a disciple of Socrates2,  makes the exact same mis-substitution:  it puts in the -ogenes man a disciple of Socrates1 ( Thebes) for the -ocrates man, mis-subatitution for the associate of Socrates2 (the King, Socrates-Alternate as he is variously known within Ephraim’s text, and also in both W and P).

Crates of Thebes is reported to be a disciple of Diogenes of Sinope, (did he carry Diogenes’s famous figs, to set the comic stage for platonic ‘metechein’ (participating), h.e. Plato’s swallowing the plurality of them whole  ?   The Diogenes image where we see Crates opening his purse displays the Cynic teacher’s open book.  See the artful drawing by Vicki Winchester of Liberty, giving a careful rendition of a 15th cent. ms.  Here is her detail, showing both Diogenes and Crates:

In the 15th century ms. after which Ms. Winchester did her copied image, Diogenes sits in his tub poring over a book seemingly containing the standard cynic’s fare.   This would be an anthology of comic plays, letters and diatribes.   All of this material suitable to evolve into scholia in the margins of (say) a IV cent. B.C. ms. behind  Venetus T.    If so, we would have a plausible source for the marginalium on its folio 259r, with a stinging satire on Plato’s flippant word-plays on the root word “KRATHS/KRATEIN” at Tim. 42 b1.    ‘Such-and-such -o-crates’  or ‘crates-a-so-and-so’ we might encode Plato’s line, allowing ourselves to borrow from Aristotle’s etymological dissecting of the nouns ‘Phil-ippos’ and ‘philo-theamwn’ at EN 1099.   In the Aristotle word-play we see a varying of the whole word’s suffix, whereas our case requires that we vary the prefix.   Bywater’s Oxford text unhappily omits part of this word-play in Aristotle, blocking the reader from seeing the good ms. variant   ‘philo-theamwn’ [ φιλο-θεαμῶν ], a word of great interest to the philologically-minded critic of Republic V.

More from Domenico Cufalo in his critical edition of the Tetralogy VIII scholia, unless he opts not to continue with Volume II.  But possibly the Cufalo project can get help from scholars in Holland, such as young Bram Demulder and or his elder-generation associates in Holland, such as Schenkeveld, who have a special interest in the ps-Aristotelian work De Mundo, a work we surmise to have originated from a point ‘halfway’ between Plato and Aristotle.  The point where Philip of Opus, alias Socrates-Alternate, was located.   A series that puts him into the ratio of sub-double or hypodiplasion to the ratio Plato:Aristotle, that is the historical and conceptual series of Teacher:disciple here.

1.  new Chaucer fragment, found in meta-phrased language of 21st cent. A.D. American urban ghetto language.
2. Archytas  his fragment (a Testimonium only ?) A24, from near Olymp. 100, in Tarentum or Ancona or Athens.
3. Plato’s mysterious phrase in Phaedrus, ” The Sweet Elbow”, describing the shape of the harbor (Ancona, or    ἄγκων ).
4.  the 75 KG astronomy stone, (il globo di Matelica), up from Ancona along Ad Aesim river (so was it transported there by river?  the composition of its marble is Ionian!)
5.  Plato’s friend and ally Dionysius I, and the colony he founded in -387 near Ancona.
6.   getting back to the word “atopon” in fragments of Archytas near Olymp. 100, from meta-phrased  243.24
7.   a play on words, via all the best mss. of Euclid’s Elements III, 16, “no room in between for” any named point   X.
8.   Holger Thesleff, with his gnarly-difficulty (=’sisu’), his Sense of Humor about modern Greek ps.-Archytas and Plato.
9.   Rudy Rucker’s dimension#4, spacial, so not the dimension of Time, provider of “room” for ps.-Archytan   Atopon 
10.  Borealis Press image of the shared Laugh, rendered in 4-D by artists in Manhattan NY and Sullivan County NY

[Dec 2017, May 2019]

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24.xi.12; 29.iv.14;25.i.20:    Examples #6 and #7 here illustrate the special grammatical form “kai/toi + participle”, similar to the clause (possibly intruded into Plato’s text by Philip of Opus) at Rep. VI, 511 D 2.

 

Philip of Opus is credited with a Euclid-like work “Optics” (noticed by Burnyeat in his recent piece reviving Archytas’s “Optics”).   He may also have been the same man under reference in the puzzling “twn sophwn tis” in Rep. IX,ix, 583B,ff.   Adam’s App. IV makes a mighty effort to identify this  τις  “=tis”, spoken of as one of the “sophoi”, likely with a whiff of irony, sages and pseudo-sages being promiscuously stirred together as they often are within Plato’s deeply witty writing.    Now the two leading nominees whom Adam  reviews are Antisthenes and Democritus.   Then there is – paradoxically —  Plato Himself – Philebus 44 B,ff, where the attitudes toward Pleasure are distinctly less preacherly.   But one particular man at the Old Academy who, apart from Plato, wrote at some length about Pleasure, was Philip.   He should be a lively candidate; but he seems overlooked here.   If we trust the SUDA report (I might as well say  [kaitoige] this following: ‘surely you don’t want to give preference to trusting ourselves, critics from 11 centuries later !’).   Philip is credited with a treatise   π. ἡδονῆς   α.  (“p. HEdonEs, 1 book”.)    Our present-day vantagepoint does not allow us to say confidently that no part of that book found its way into what we now call Plato’s Philebus .    Nor can we be sure none of it found its way, alongside material from Eudoxus, into Philip’s student’s book —  EN Books I and X.  

It may be worthwhile to insert an excursus here, based upon a series of Scholia to Euclid I, 15 (esp. Scholl. ##59-62).   This will take us down a path JL Heiberg laid down.   He collected and published with Teubner in 1888, the scholia to all of Euclid’s Elements.      The Scholion of greatest interest here is the one leading toward the Philip-like sentiment also expressed in Schol. #18 (skeptical towards ‘poiEsis’, on the grounds of its debatable concessiveness to ‘time-dependence’ inside mathematics).   We might take steps to follow the distinctive verb ‘diamphisbEtein’ written by Aristotle in his piece ‘On Friendship’, — on some good accounts of Aristotle’s early writing this will have found its way into EN, at Bk IX, 2 1155 a 32ff.   Campbell had called attention to the relative novelty of this term of art as of Plato’s time.    In Aristotle himself, however, it occurs several times, once in the suspect book of the Metaphysics, namely  Kappa.     This is the book that repeats much earlier material from the same treatise, and that is further peculiar in suffering from a rash of DeMundo-style phrasings   ge mh\n .     Various of these peculiarities were too much for Aristotle scholars beginning with W. Christ and continuing past W.D. Ross.   [They agreed that Book Kappa should be deleted in its entirety.    Herbert Granger has admittedly published his disinclination to agree  with this scholarly consensus.]

There is a good sense of ‘halfway’ which permits us to say that “Halfway back to Plato, — if we began from Aristotle, — we have our filo-qeamw=n(“ ”) adjacent to Aristotle’s chancing upon the etymology   fil[o]-ippoj  “Phil-ippos” of Plato’s student, Philip of Opus, Aristotle’s teacher in turn [see 1099 a 10 in the ‘E’ MS, commended by myself in a letter to J. Barnes, mine of early Feb 2010].

Dr. Kirsten Larsen at a recent foregathering of her extended family expressed interest in recalling Rafael’s “School of Athens”, including his rather bold anachronisms, even naughty anachronisms from the era of Italian Renaissance flavor.   These are what we might refer to as History in the modality of counterfactuality [or rather, if I may draw on a colloquialism I reliably trace to Senator Elizabeth Warren, History of the “would’a/could’a/ should’a” modes — fuzzy history to draw on an analogy to logic of fuzzy modes.   The final third here is akin to deontology. . .

Do have a Larsen’s eye look at this piece of Italo-American effort at humor.   My late sister-in-law Maria Tarantino would’a laughed aloud, she would’a   She was born just 25 kilometers or so from Rome.   Yes, that Rome.

There is already some allusiveness in Aristotle’s alluding to the name of the man between himself and Plato, Philip of Opus.   But we can find much more in the vicinity of this allusion if we include the point that the word   filoqeamw=n [‘philotheamOn’] is more likely what Aristotle wrote at 1099 a 10.    We need not follow I. Bywater, who not only does not read this word, but also declines to mention its having some ms. authority,  even in his apparatus criticus.    Certainly H.H. Joachim’s high admiration for Bywater and his other early ‘Aristotelian Society’ scholars was well founded [his preface to the 1922 edition of De Gen. et Corr.].    All the same we ought to follow the example of Slings (his Clitophon, p. 342,f) in keeping the door open to there being some ‘ancient tradition’ behind any of various manuscript peculiarities which have survived these dozens of centuries in the textual traditions of Plato and of Aristotle.  In any case the present Oxford edition has the [considerably less plausible] reading filo-qeorw=n  (‘philo-theorwn’).    And, alas, Bywater did not preserve the Bekker note listing the “philo-theamwn” varia lectio.    This imports a quite different meaning, a difference of substance.   It is as if we let a ‘theoretician’ be put in for a theater-goer.      A lover-of-abstract-knowledge  (theorhmata)  for a lover-of-spectacles thea/mata.      ‘Theama’ is in fact the root word meant to be echoed at  Bekker  1099 a10.     So  theamw=n  has commensurate ms. authority at   a10.

Roughly that same time (say early Olymp. 105, when Philebus  is being composed, and Plato in his very advanced years – those poignantly called ‘our sunset years’ in Laws VI, xiv  — see Slings on Plato’s using the first-personal plural form, in Clitophon , to point to ‘myself’ at 406 a10.    Around this date we have Phil. 44B, referring to ‘some wise someone’ who is further described as  ‘deinos peri physin’.    John Adam made penetrating suggestions on the type of man here alluded to by Plato.   ‘Pythagorean preachers’, says Adam (app. x to Rep. Bk IX.   This would put our author at the Academy and make him not unlike the Empedocles referred to by Aristotle here in EN IX,2.     A threesome of men is put together in Problems 6, 30.    They have attributed to them a shared temperament or ‘personalilty-type’.     Something about their black bile.   This list has oddities of various sorts.  But one striking point is its listing Socrates after Plato:     Empedocles, Plato and Socrates.     The Elder Socrates kept his bile pretty well controlled, we might think:  “Go ahead and condemn me to death, O Athens !    As far as I know this may be a not so severe penalty, especially for a peaceable man, a reflective and perhaps even phlegmatic old man, now aged seventy”.

Can Younger Socrates, or Socrates Alternate have had something more bilious, even choleric, about him ?    He would have to have had considerable personal energy and a willingness to thrust himself forward there at the Academy, claiming  a position in that succession of eminent men beginning back at Socrates Simpliciter, moving forward via Plato and pointing ahead to such prominent men as Eudoxus, Aristotle and Theophrastus.    Again, as we have reliable evidence to inform us, Philip put himself forward as having opinions worth publishing on topics under vigorous debate, such as pleasure, the passion of anger, and On Writing (p. graphein).    Either of the standard meanings of ‘graphein’ here would make Philip a bold man:  “On proving [as in geometry] or On Writing [as in Plato’s Phaedrus”].

 

Returning now to Aristotle’s seemingly polyonymous teacher, call him Amphinomus, call him LeiOdEs, call him Younger Socrates (basileia is among the things Aristotle has under DiamphisbEsis, not so  ?)       In that same DeMundo Chapt 7 spirit of Polyonymising I’d like to add to Philip’s names.    We have it in our best ms. of the Euclid scholion (Heiberg de-prefers this reading, demotes it to his apparatus criticus):   “AristoclEs”.   In Schol. #15, nearby to both #11 and #18 (each of these two latter has peculiarities which may be  signs of Philip’s style) – we have a report about A)risto/lhj kai\ oi( gewme/trai  (‘Aristo/lEs and the geometers’) .   Whoever they were, they came up with their own favorite technical terms for various forms of initial hypotheses or  “anapodeikta”.      Whilst JL Heiberg has printed ‘AristotelEs’ here in Scholion  #15, he is characteristically methodical, and retains in his Critical notes the true reading from our single MS source ( “P”):   ‘Aristo/lhj’(sic)    Call him AristoclEs, say I, not far from either SosiclEs (Plautus), or NeoclEs (Problems, XXX, Ch. 6), an otherwise unfamiliar name at Old Academy.

Amphinomus is like the author of the De Mundo, who is emphatic about how Zeus manages his “polyonymy”.   (some of us moderns experience shock at Zeus’s polygamy; others at his polyonymy.  Philip piously admires both.   Amphitryon is as admirable as Amphinomus at this time of Old Academy rivalries and jealousies.   Zeus seems positively to luxuriate in his variety of names as we see him there in DeMundo #7 — even in its sheer variety.   The author, whoever and whenever he was, passes many names of Zeus in review there in the work’s final chapter (Bekker p. 401).    He and Zeus co-luxuriate in the polymorphic variety of all of this.  It is only better if Zeus should have a son younger than Apollo, the cunning and contriving and thieving youngster.   He will steal cattle early on.   Later he will steal names and inspire others to such stealing.   For example the forger of ps-Plato’s Letter #2, if he can be a ‘Socrates re-born’, can steal the name of Socrates and then (having had Plato confess that all of his written work was not truly his own, but rather belongs to Socrates) steal Plato’s entire oeuvre, including the Epinomis and the Minos !

Returning again to the man known to his mother as Philip:   he and others near him at the Old Academy is a lively nominee to be author of the De Mundo.   (My analysis, which draws on work by  D. Schenkeveld, presses hard on the identity of this author.  I end by finding Philip of Opus, the same author revealed behind mask of Plato, at the the ps.-Platonic “Epinomis”.    My conclusion is that Philip was also known as ‘Amphinomus’, particularly where he and Speusippus try to combat a band of mathematicians in the immediate vicinity of Plato and the young Aristotle.   [so reports Proclus, On Eucl Bk One] and therefore, intimately linked (as a ‘doublet’ to Homer’s Leiw/dhj  (‘LeiOdEs’) figure. — See B. Fenik, “Studies in the Odyssey”, 1974.

Eudoxus, Speusippus and Aristotle, all joined Philip in writing on the Pleasure Question, the date of all of this Early Academy writing (including notably Philebus) : the 106^th Olympiad at the latest.    Rep. IX can easily have been under revision [recall D.H. on Plato’s continually revising his writings until on his death-bed.]    This writing activity – including notably Plato’s own – was likely to be going forward at a rapid pace in Olympiads 104-106, at and after the date of Seventh Letter.

Amphinomus, a somewhat evangelical Friend of Forms’ seems the most plausible candidate for this man behind the mask of tw=n sofw=n tij  (‘twn sophwn tis’).   Our text of 583 B includes a case of ‘kaitoi’, a favorite of Plato’s quasi-friend.    A way of decoding the nickname ‘Amphinomus’ leads via the epithet applied to the suitor Amphinomus in Odyssey XVIII, 152 :     kosmh/twr laou=  (‘kosmEtOr laou’).    It is all the more ironic that it should be Odysseus himself who calls Amphinomus by this mis-placed epithet.   But our Academic ambassador and voyager Plato, at Rep. 422C had raised a storm of ridicule against mythical Agamemnon, “do you say, absurdly, that our great strategist didn’t even know how to count the number of his own feet?”     Plato uses the ‘kaitoi’ phrasing there too, keeping his tone jocular and vernacular.

Our author on Optics, on Pleasure, On Friends and Friendship — the Pythagorean mathematician very close to Plato as he begins his Laws does well here.

Adam is looking for a suitable nominee to be a  “preacher of the Orphic-Pythagorean type”, thus someone at once somewhat admirable and a bit suspect in Plato’s eyes.   But   again,  textual and interpretive difficulties abound near 583B,ff.    They provoke Adam to write explanatory appendices to his text there.  It is clearly a heavy-hearted interpreter Adam who writes this complaint in his Appendix IX to Bk IX, about 585 C,f “the following sentences are among the most perplexing in the whole of the Republic, or indeed in the whole of Plato’s writings” (II, p. 354).   Adam struggles, and then reconciles himself to “the least unsatisfactory solution” to his interpretive troubles.  (ibid.)

This may be another case where the world needs to guard our text against the contaminations from outside manipulators — say Amphinomus or his over-zealous ‘friends of the Forms’.   They will be losing their bearings when fighting pitched battles against “Friends of the Earth”.   This bad habit of later Platonists – the habit of ‘tampering’ with texts, say of Aristotle when combatting Plato or others, — or alternatively those of Plato when combatting Aristotle or others.   These tamperers or hybridisers or contaminators — they may not hesitate to tamper [see J. Dillon and J. Whittaker on the well-documented later tamperings with Academic texts, aimed at scoring polemical points.   Ignoring the rules against ‘Straw Man’ arguing.]      It is a distortive simplification to suppose that all intra-Academy polemics, — even when the Academy had yet to complete its first Pentekontaetea, — were variations on the Plato vs. Aristotle wars there.    When Aristotle was writing his (Brunschwig) Topics, (near the 102d or 103d Olympiad) he was not mature enough to write strategy for such little  armies.  Little and little-minded as are most intra-Academic armies.

We may even venture this:   it should be ‘axiomatic’ for any modernday academic [I mean ‘axiom’ in the senses of Scholl. 11 and 15 to Euclid I, as edited by J.L. Heiberg]  that Academic wars can break out in many directions.  They will be wildly various, as alliances form and sub-sectarian quarrels devolve from earlier and different battles of the larger sectarian units or tribes.   Scholl. 11 and 15 bring out the etymology of ‘axiom’:   “something which  I or one of my colleagues currently think valuable,   ἀξιούμεν  (‘axioumen’)”].       In a letter a couple years ago I asked a colleague formerly from Balliol College – a widely respected Aristotle scholar, in fact —  whether he had come up against such a local and party-quarrel context at or near Balliol, for such an august term as Aristotle’s word.    Ἀξιώμα (Axioma).   From his silence I infer that such a party-quarrel was something he had never witnessed at Balliol, nor heard tell of on his island, — say at Kings College Cambridge.

F.M. Cornford’s little tract, written down in a compressed 2-week period, gives a further perspective on academic in-fighting.  He entitled it “Microcosmographia Academica”, echoing a title from the 17th century.   Some decades later it came out in a second edition, where there will have been more intensity of historical scholarly research at work.   The tract includes a large-scale photograph of a large collection of early 20th century “friends of the University[ sc. Cambridge]”.   Stage-left in the photograph is a diminutive but head-held-high man, “the Orator”, and stage-center is the fully vested figure, that of the national and imperial Monarch himself.   A curious and comedic variant on Plato’s ideal of political power intimately linked with Rhetorical Art.    Dr. Henry Jackson was perhaps not on that photographer’s exact scene, but he will have had a pretty full comprehension of various of its details.  Also, of its iconic value representing Plato’s phrase for party conflicts within philosophy,  a scene of battles carried out   ἀνδρειῶς καὶ ἐριστικῶς  Rep V. 454 b5.   This is where Holger Thesleff found Plato’s prose betraying an “onkos” style, the style of his latest dialogues, when Philip and his entourage were busy executing their intra-Academy “epistasis”, or “uprising”.    Dr. Jackson got personally involved to such a depth in the intra-Cambridge issue over co-education there that he had to be (personally) carried into the Senate chambers to cast his vote (pro-women) there in 1921.

Here is a curious sidelight on the history of this Universal, academic eristic.  It goes back to fall of 1902 and spring of 1903 in Cambridge, England.  Late in 1902 lectures were given by Dr. Henry Jackson in Cambridge on Aristotle’s Metaphisics.  Notes were taken down by then-young-scholar Leonard Hugh Graham (LHG) Greenwood.   He took them from Dr. Jackson’s lectures on Aristotles Metaphysics.  They have Jackson referring to Aristotle’s phrase   κατὰ ξυμβέβεκος  in a peculiarly dismissive way.  Jackson called the phrase “slang”. [these Greenwood notes are unpublished, but are contained in Greenwood’s minute letters, lovely multi-colored ink, in an interleaved copy of his OCT text, later owned by Hamish Wilson.   I last saw this volume in summer of 1984, and relayed it to officers at Kings College Cambridge library in the fall of that year 1984, via G.E.R. Lloyd].    Jackson is there reported to have “dismissed the entire series of chapters, with abuse”.    Alas, these include the chapter Z, 11 where Aristotle mentions a “Younger Socrates”.   Some of this material, net of its colorful inking, can soon be published here on this website.

Whatever the accidentalities of the thing our transatlantic colleagues pronounce as contr-O-versy, and we Americans vocalise as CON-troversy, — Academic quarrels seem an essential part of  our great Herebelow.  They are universal enough to counter the Vienna line-against-all-metaphysics parroted by K.J. Dover, his 1980 edition of Symposium, p. 6.  Consider this from Dover direct:

“[Plato believed that] something more, something that ‘really exists’, unchanging, indepedent of our indefinitely adjustable and pragmatic definitions.   Whether this belief happens to be right, happens to be wrong, or is insufficiently meaningful to be called either [emphasis my own]. . .”   

As surely as the apostle Paul brought us doctrines later promulgated more systematically from St. Peter’s in Rome, so surely does the acolyte Dover here echo doctrines centered in the Vienna of the 1920s and 1930s.   The apostle in the latter case went by the name A.J. Ayer.   The acolyte and the apostle help us overturn the dogmatisms flowing down out of their circle’s center, Vienna.

To resume the story of our men very near to Plato in time and place.  Some of their later followers seem to have felt free to “tamper” (so Dillon, following Whittaker) with texts in what we may call, following Campbell “victorious analysis”.

A lead example here is one Philip had a special interest in.   It is a close parallel to — perhaps nearly identical to — what is at stake back at Schol. #18 to Book I of ‘Elements’.   The Scholiast wants to edify the reader by raising up the level of his gaze.   We must discipline ourselves to make sure we are gazing only upon the pure and purely mathematical.   But this requires us to abstain from (in a manner of speaking) soil our hands with production-or-making.    The famous ‘Divided Line’ calls on us to section off (a recently trendy formula for this is ‘draw a bright line’) — between those ‘lower’ applications of the human mind, where ‘gross matter’ is managed, manoeuvered, manipulated and so forth.   What it is customary to entitle or label (epiklEsis is the word in Epinomis 973b) ‘PoiEsis’.

The very label Q.E.F., or in the ancient form   ὅπερ ἔδει ποιῆσαι , says Philip or the Philip-like commentator there, invites us to depreciate the thing ‘made’ or ‘produced’.   The phrase “hoper edei poiEsai” implies our platonist demotion of its status as ‘mere product’.    Essences are a whole world different.   They are “there”, not “here” to paraphrase a retort to the young Aristotle’s challenge.   An object of ‘Thewrein’ is just there for us to gaze upon.    It makes no sense to say of The Triangle-as-Itself that it was ever “made”.    Here we are encountering a variant of the same issue that created a schism within the Academy, that which had the “eternal cosmos” only in a figurative or ‘pedagocical’ sense a thing “made” or “constructed”.   Thus in the case of Prop. 1 of Euclid, the ‘once triangle’ is only said of a figure ‘just now’ constructed in a metaphorical manner.  We need to keep bringing out for ourselves and reminding ourselves of this fundamental falling short of being and ideality which “poiesis” is a threat to.   Thus we must continue to divide in a bright-line way between then-triangle(s) and the kind Scholion #112 formulates the essential triangle :    τὸ τρίγωνον ᾕ ἑαύτῇ (to\ tri/gwnon h(=| e(auth=|)  , in other words the one resident amongst the Ever-Similar range of things.    To be sure, the classical locus of this complaint from Philip is in Proclus.    It may be natural to suppose that Heiberg’s Schol. #112 to Euclid Book I derives from Proclus.   This would mean it had only a slim chance of being traceable to something written while Plato was still alive, or even anything as early as (say) Plutarch or Chrysippus.     An argument is wanting, in the spirit of “let us philologues be as keen to avoid the rash extreme of uncritical skepticism as we standardly are in avoiding incaution” – the spirit, let us call this, of Walter Burkert.      A philologue’s behavior can rhyme with “Vorsicht”, to be sure.   But rational Vorsicht may call on him to restrain his over-restraint, and test out impartially the likelihood (however slim) that, as Slings has put it recently “something ancient”  may lie behind the peculiarities we now and then in texts we have before us today.

We may express this in at least two ways, where the parallelism will be manifest.  (1) The Triangle ‘hE heautE’ has never known a time when it Was Not, or when it (so to speak) ‘stood in need of being constructed’ and (2) that is by nature a thing of which we may not legitimately ask the question e)/c ou(=( ‘ex hou’ )  question – unless we are prepared to accept a somewhat paradoxical form of answer.   ‘Mathematical’ or ‘geometrical’ matter is an answer with the air of paradox about it;  the puzzling phrase ‘noEtic matter’, coming down to us from the Old Academy when Aristotle and Younger Socrates were there debating mathematical platonism in the way rival ‘diadochoi’ or ‘heirs’ might debate (even quarrel) over rival heritages they were prepared to draw from Plato himself.    There will be another view of this same subject – drawn from a man we may identify with the anonymous ‘someone’ of Proclus’s Friedlein p.

You may ask:   “but where do you find a text carrying that phrase of yours ‘geometrical matter’?”     There is an answer, thanks to careful scholarly work such as that by G. Friedlein (Teubner), his edition of Proclus “In primum Euclidis…”, esp. p. 49, line 5,  and p. 50 lines 7,f.     We’ll be equivocating (cf. speaking perabusively, in the manner of the ‘diakatachrEstikoteros’ of Schol. 30 to Eucl. Bk V, if we act like we have just a single ‘middle’ between pure NoEsis and that extremely movable/variable contact with the multiple “ekgonoi’ [cf. pg. 53,26] amongst material things.   [was it not likely to be Philip who wrote that suite of Scholia, — perhaps in various works done to various ends originally —  drawing out a metaphor of ‘mothers’, ‘ancestors’, ‘offspring’.   I mean Schol. to Chapt IV of Bk X.   Likely so, I  now judge – 04.iv.12]

Geometrical matter is an ‘out of which’ for (a) triangle, (b) circle or (c) [definition of] SchEma ‘out of [dia]noEtic matter’, and (you might as well say) ‘out of geometric matter’ or ‘out of noEtic matter’.     Now  is a wholly unintrusive ‘looking upon’ that the mathematician, at his full dianoEtic  “PoiEton” is replaced by Philip with  “noEton” at Tim. 92 C, as fits well with a ‘pythagorean knowledgeable about Nature’.    It takes a proud and self-assured “preacher” to tamper thus with any text in the Eighth Tetralogy.   The deeply inventive mind of Philip (Younger Socrates) was such a preacher, I believe, and did much of his work near Olympiad 105-106.

24.xi.12:    Examples #6 and #7 of this TLG search report on the Scholia to Euclid.   These are lead examples of the combination particle “kaitoi”.    This is in turn followed immediately by a participle (in the genitive case).    A similar clause seems to have been intruded into Plato’s text, perhaps by Philip of Opus,  at Rep. VI, 511 D 2.

At the Old Academy, Philip’s nickname appears to have been “Amphinomus”.  possibly he had a second speaker-name, h.e.  “Younger Socrates”.   This possibility should be followed down by someone, perhaps myself, when a blogsite like youngersocrates.net exists and is hospitable to this.   Each was well acquainted with mathematics, each was personally known to the elderly Plato and the juvenile Aristotle.   Anyone from that same Early Academy will have associated Amphinomus with LeiOdEs, in the tradition of Homer being the ‘doublet’ character to Amphinomus.   [so B. Fenik ‘Studies in the Odyssey’ (Mnemosyne 1974), esp. pp. 192-196.].

Philip is credited with a Euclid-like work “Optics” (noticed by Burnyeat in his recent piece reviving Archytas’s “Optics”).   He may also have been the same man under reference in the puzzling “twn sophwn tis” in Rep. IX,ix, 583B,ff.   Adam’s App. IV makes a mighty effort to identify this “tij”, spoken of as one of the “sophoi”, perhaps with a hint of irony.    The two leading nominees whom he reviews are Antisthenes and Democritus.   Then there is – paradoxically —  Plato Himself – Philebus 44 B,ff, where the attitudes toward pleasure are distinctly less preacherly.

But one particular man at the Old Academy who, apart from Plato, wrote at some length about Pleasure seems overlooked here.   If we trust the SUDA report (you might as well say  [kaitoige] ‘surely you don’t want to trust ourselves, critics from 11 centuries later !’).   Philip is credited with a treatise  p. h(donh=j a.  (“p. HEdonEs, 1 book”.)    Our present-day vantagepoint does not allow us to say confidently that no part of that book found its way into what we now call Plato’s Philebus.    Nor can we be sure none of it found its way, alongside material from Eudoxus, into EN Books X and IX. 

It may be worthwhile to insert an excursus here, Scholia to Euclid I, 15 (esp. Scholl. ##59-62).   This will take us down a path JL Heiberg laid down.   He collected and published with Teubner in 1888, the scholia to all of Euclid’s Elements.   the one leading toward the Philip-like sentiment expressed in Schol. #18 (skeptical towards ‘poiEsis’, as making concessions to ‘time-dependence’ inside mathematics).   We might take steps to follow the distinctive verb ‘diamphisbEtein’ written by Aristotle in his piece ‘On Friendship’, — on some good accounts of Aristotle’s early writing this will have found its way into EN, at Bk IX, 2 1155 a 32ff.   As far back in time as Plato this rather specialised verb was a striking one, on account of its rarity.   In Aristotle himself, however, it occurs several times, once in the suspect Met. Kappa.   This is the book that repeats much earlier material from the same treatise, and that is further peculiar in suffering from a rash of DeMundo-style phrasings   ge mh\n  (‘ge mEn’     γε μὴν  ).     Various of these peculiarities were too much for Aristotle scholars beginning with W. Christ and continuing past W.D. Ross.   They agreed that Book Kappa should be deleted in its entirety.    Herbert Granger has recently shown a disinclination to comply  with this scholarly consensus.

There is a good sense of ‘halfway’ which permits us to say that “Halfway back to Plato, — if we began from Aristotle, — we have our filo-qeamw=n(“ PhilotheamOn”) adjacent to Aristotle’s chancing upon the etymology   fil[o]-ippoj  “Phil-ippos” of Plato’s student, Philip of Opus, Aristotle’s teacher in turn [see 1099 a 10 in the ‘E’ MS, commended by myself in a letter to J. Barnes, mine of early Feb 2010].

There is already some allusiveness in Aristotle’s alluding to the name of the man between himself and Plato, Philip of Opus.   But there is more to the allusion if we include the point that the word   filoqeamw=n [‘philotheamOn’] is more likely what Aristotle wrote at 1099 a 10.    We need not follow I. Bywater, who not only does not read this word, but also declines to mention its having some ms. authority,  even in his apparatus criticus.    In any case the present Oxford edition has the [somewhat less plausible] reading filo-qewrw=n  (‘philo-theorwn’).    But this imports a quite different meaning, a difference of substance.   It is as if we let a ‘theoretician’ be put in for a theater-goer.      A lover-of-abstract-knowledge  (qeorhmata)  for a lover-of-spectacles qea/mata  (‘theamata’).      ‘Theama’ is in fact the root word meant to be echoed at  Bekker  1099 a10.     So  qeamw=n  has commensurate authority at   a10.

Roughly that same time (say early Olymp. 106, when Philebus  is being composed, and Plato in his very advanced years – those poignantly called ‘our sunset years’ in Laws VI, xiv  — see Slings on Plato’s using the first-personal plural form, in Clitophon for example, to indicate ‘myself’ at 406 a10.    Around this date we have Phil. 44B, referring to ‘some wise someone’ who is further described as  ‘deinos peri physin’.    John Adam made penetrating suggestions on the type of man here alluded to by Plato.   ‘Pythagorean preachers’, says Adam (app. x to Rep. Bk IX.   This would put our author at the Academy and make him not unlike the Empedocles referred to by Aristotle here in EN IX,2.     A threesome of men is put together in Problems xxx, 6.    They have attributed to them a shared temperament or ‘personalilty-type’.     Something about their black bile.   This list has oddities apart from mentioning Socrates after Plato:     Empedocles, Plato and Socrates.     The Elder Socrates kept his bile pretty well controlled, we might think.    Can Younger Socrates have had something more bilious about him ?

Returning now to Aristotle’s seemingly polyonymous teacher, call him Amphinomus, call him LeiOdEs, call him Younger Socrates (basileia is among the things Aristotle has under DiamphisbEsis, not so  ?)       In that same DeMundo Chapt 7 spirit of Polyonymising I’d like to add to Philip’s names.    We have it in our best ms. of the Euclid scholion (Heiberg de-prefers this reading, demotes it to his apparatus criticus):   “AristoclEs”.   In Schol. #15, nearby to both #11 and #18 (each of these two latter has peculiarities which may be  signs of Philip’s style) – we have a report about A)risto/lhj kai\ oi( gewme/trai  (‘Aristo/lEs and the geometers’) .   Whoever they were, they came up with their own favorite technical terms for various forms of initial hypotheses or  “anapodeikta”.      Whilst JL Heiberg has printed ‘AristotelEs’ here in Scholion  #15, he is characteristically methodical, and retains in his Critical notes the true reading from our single MS source ( “P”):   ‘Aristo/lhs’(sic)    Call him AristoclEs, say I, not far from either SosiclEs (Plautus), or NeoclEs (Problems, XXX, Ch. 6), an otherwise wholly mysterious name at the Old Academy.

Amphinomus is like the author of the De Mundo, who is emphatic about how Zeus manages his “polyonymy”.   (some of us moderns experience shock at Zeus’s polygamy; others at his polyonymy.  Philip piously admires both.   Amphitryon is as admirable as Amphinomus at this time of Old Academy rivalries and jealousies.   Zeus seems positively to luxuriate in his variety of names as we see him there in DeMundo #7 — even in its sheer variety.   The author, whoever and whenever he was, passes many names of Zeus in review there in the work’s final chapter (Bekker p. 401).    He and Zeus co-luxuriate in the polymorphic variety of all of this.  It is only better if Zeus should have a son younger than Apollo, the cunning and contriving and thieving youngster.   He will steal cattle early on.   Later he will steal names and inspire others to such stealing.   For example the forger of ps-Plato’s Letter #2, if he can be a ‘Socrates re-born’, can steal the name of Socrates and then (having had Plato confess that all of his written work was not truly his own, but rather belongs to Socrates) steal Plato’s entire oeuvre, including the Epinomis and the Minos !

Returning again to the man known to his mother as Philip:   he and others near him at the Old Academy is a lively nominee to be author of the De Mundo.   (My analysis, which draws on work by  D. Schenkeveld, presses hard on the identity of this author.  I end by finding Philip of Opus, the same author revealed behind mask of Plato, at the the ps.-Platonic “Epinomis”.    My conclusion is that Philip was also known as ‘Amphinomus’, particularly where he and Speusippus try to combat a band of mathematicians in the immediate vicinity of Plato and the young Aristotle.   [so reports Proclus, On Eucl Bk One] and therefore, intimately linked (as a ‘doublet’ to Homer’s Leiw/dhs (‘LeiOdEs’) figure. — See B. Fenik, “Studies in the Odyssey”, 1974.

Eudoxus, Speusippus and Aristotle, all joined Philip in writing on the Pleasure Question, the date of all of this Early Academy writing (including notably Philebus) : the 106^th Olympiad at the latest.    Rep. IX can easily have been under revision [recall D.H. on Plato’s continually revising his writings until on his death-bed.  Note also ]    This writing activity – including notably Plato’s own – was likely to be going forward at a rapid pace in Olympiads 104-106, at and after the date of Seventh Letter.

Amphinomus, a somewhat evangelical Friend of Forms seems the most plausible candidate for this man behind the mask of tw=n sofw=n tij  (‘twn sophwn tis’).   Our text of 583 B includes a case of ‘kaitoi’, a favorite of Plato’s quasi-friend.    A way of decoding the nickname ‘Amphinomus’ leads via the epithet applied to the suitor Amphinomus in Odyssey XVIII, 152 :     kosmh/twr laou=  (‘kosmEtOr laou’).    It is all the more ironic that it should be Odysseus himself who calls Amphinomus by this mis-placed epithet.   But our Academic ambassador and voyager Plato, at Rep. 422C had raised a storm of ridicule against mythical Agamemnon, “do you say, absurdly, that our great strategist didn’t even know how to count the number of his own feet?”     Plato uses the ‘kaitoi’ phrasing there too, keeping his tone jocular and vernacular.

Our author on Optics, on Pleasure, On Friends and Friendship — the Pythagorean mathematician [Philip] very close to Plato as he begins his Laws does well as a candidate here.

Adam is looking for a suitable nominee to be a  “preacher of the Orphic-Pythagorean type”, thus someone at once somewhat admirable and a bit suspect in Plato’s eyes.   But   again,  textual and interpretive difficulties abound near 583B,ff.    They provoke Adam to write explanatory appendices to his text there.  It is clearly a heavy-hearted interpreter Adam who writes this complaint in his Appendix IX to Bk IX, about 585 C,f “the following sentences are among the most perplexing in the whole of the Republic, or indeed in the whole of Plato’s writings” (II, p. 354).   Adam struggles, and then reconciles himself to “the least unsatisfactory solution” to his interpretive troubles.  (ibid.)

This may be another case where the world needs to guard our text against the contaminations from outside manipulators — say Amphinomus or his over-zealous ‘friends of the Forms’.   They will be losing their bearings when fighting pitched battles against “Friends of the Earth”.   This bad habit of later Platonists – the habit of ‘tampering’ with texts, say of Aristotle when combatting Plato or others, say of Plato when combatting Aristotle or others — they may not hesitate to tamper [see J. Dillon and J. Whittaker on the well-documented later tamperings with Academic texts, aimed at scoring polemical points.]      It is a distortive simplification to suppose that all intra-Academy polemics, — even when the Academy had yet to complete its first Pentekontaetea, — were variations on the Plato vs. Aristotle wars there.

We may even say further this:   it should be ‘axiomatic’ [in the senses of Scholl. 11 and 15 to Euclid I] for any modernday academic that Academic wars can break out in many directions, earlier and later, varying wildly as alliances form and sub-sectarian quarrels devolve from earlier and different battles.   Scholl. 11 and 15 bring out the etymology of ‘axiom’:   “something of which  I or one of my colleagues have recently held  a)ciou/men (‘axioumen’)”].       In a letter a couple years ago I asked a colleague formerly from Balliol College – an Aristotle scholar, in fact —  whether he had come up against such a local and party-quarrel context for such an august term as Aristotle’s word  A)ciw/ma .   From his silence I infer that such a party-quarrel was something he had never witnessed at Balliol, nor heard tell of at Kings College Cambridge either.

These men seem to have felt free to “tamper” (so Dillon, following Whittaker).

A lead example of a motivation is one Philip had a special interest in.   It is a close parallel to what is at stake back at Schol. #18 to Book I of ‘Elements’ our intentions are only pure and purely mathematical if we don’t (in a manner of speaking) soil our hands with production-or-making.    The famous ‘Divided Line’ calls on us to section off those ‘lower’ applications of the human mind, where ‘gross matter’ is managed, manoeuvered, manipulated and so forth.   What it is customary to entitle or label (epiklEsis is the word in Epinomis 973b) ‘PoiEsis’.

The very word, says Philip there guides us to deprecate the thing ‘made’ or ‘produced’.   The phrase “hoper edei poiEsai” implies our platonist demotion of its status as ‘mere product’.    Essences are not like that.   An object of ‘Thewrein’ is just there for us to gaze upon, by contrast.    It makes no sense to say of The Triangle-as-Itself (hE heautE).

the ‘once triangle’ is only said of a figure ‘just now’ constructed – in order to bring out this fundamental falling short of being and ideality, and to divide between then-triangle(s) and the kind Scholion #112 formulates the essential triangle : to\ tri/gwnon h(=| e(auth=|  , in other words the one resident amongst the Ever-Similar range of things.    To be sure, the classical locus of this complaint from Philip is in Proclus.    It may be natural to suppose that Heiberg’s Schol. #112 to Euclid Book I derives from Proclus.   This would mean it had only a slim chance of being traceable to something written while Plato was still alive, or even anything as early as (say) Plutarch or Chrysippus.     An argument is wanting, in the spirit of “let us philologues be as keen to avoid the rash extreme of uncritical skepticism as we standardly are in avoiding incaution” – the spirit, let us call this, of Walter Burkert.      A philologue’s behavior can rhyme with “Vorsicht”, to be sure.   But rational Vorsicht may call on him to restrain his over-restraint, and test out impartially the likelihood (however slim) that, as Slings has put it recently “something ancient”  may lie behind the peculiarities we now and then in texts we have before us today.

We may express this in at least two ways, where the parallelism will be manifest.  (1) The Triangle ‘hE heautE’ has never known a time when it Was Not, or when it (so to speak) ‘stood in need of being constructed’ and (2) that is by nature a thing of which we may not legitimately ask the question e)/c ou(=( ‘ex hou’ )  question – unless we are prepared to accept a somewhat paradoxical form of answer.   ‘Mathematical’ or ‘geometrical’ matter is an answer with the air of paradox about it;  the puzzling phrase ‘noEtic matter’, coming down to us from the Old Academy when Aristotle and Younger Socrates were there debating mathematical platonism in the way rival ‘diadochoi’ or ‘heirs’ might debate (even quarrel) over rival heritages they were prepared to draw from Plato himself.    There will be another view of this same subject – drawn from a man we may identify with the anonymous ‘someone’ of Proclus’s Friedlein p.

You may ask:   “but where do you find a text carrying that phrase of yours ‘geometrical matter’?”     There is an answer, thanks to careful scholarly work such as that by G. Friedlein (Teubner), his edition of Proclus “In primum Euclidis…”, esp. p. 49, line 5,  and p. 50 lines 7,f.     We’ll be equivocating (cf. speaking perabusively, in the manner of the ‘diakatachrEstikoteros’ of Schol. 30 to Eucl. Bk V, if we act like we have just a single ‘middle’ between pure NoEsis and that extremely movable/variable contact with the multiple “ekgonoi’ [cf. pg. 53,26] amongst material things.   [was it not likely to be Philip who wrote that suite of Scholia, — perhaps in various works done to various ends originally —  drawing out a metaphor of ‘mothers’, ‘ancestors’, ‘offspring’.   I mean Schol. to Chapt IV of Bk X.   Likely so, I  now judge – 04.iv.12]

Geometrical matter is an ‘out of which’ for (a) triangle, (b) circle or (c) [definition of] SchEma ‘out of [dia]noEtic matter’, and (you might as well say) ‘out of geometric matter’ or ‘out of noEtic matter’.     Now  is a wholly unintrusive ‘looking upon’ that the mathematician, at his full dianoEtic  “PoiEton” is replaced by Philip with  “noEton” at Tim. 92 C, as fits well with a ‘pythagorean knowledgeable about Nature’.    It takes a proud and self-assured “preacher” to tamper thus with any text in the Eighth Tetralogy.   The deeply inventive mind of Philip (Younger Socrates) was such a preacher, I believe, and did much of his work near Olympiad 105-106.