Introduction1

1. General remarks (Georg Wöhrle)

More than is the case for any other era in the history of European philosophy, our information about the Presocratics2 is subject to interpretation, and thus to the changing interests of those who have transmitted the texts. Most if not all of the texts have come down to us indirectly, and – as is the case with the “Thales” testimonies presented in this volume – are initially based on the kind of hearsay which even someone as early as Aristotle had to rely upon. First of all, modern scholarship was, of course, interested in getting as close as possible to the original thoughts of these protagonists of ancient Greek wisdom. The greater amount of a text’s original wording survives, the more successful such an endeavour can be. In some cases, we can even get a rough idea of the contents and meaning of a particular book, poem or collection. However, and as a matter of course, even the transmission of verbatim quotes has to face the same problems that attend any other textual tradition that extends over a period of hundreds or thousands of years, ranging from mechanical errors occurring during the process of transcription and extending to contradictory interpretations due to the contexts in which the texts are reported. In order to advance to the authentic core of the ancient text by separating original passages from others that have been – whether by mistake, through misunderstanding or even as a result of deliberate forgery – added to the text, philology has undertaken the effort to trace the history of the textual tradition and reveal its filiation. Even so, and justified as these attempts at reconstruction may be, they cannot transcend the horizon of their own age. They themselves are products of their own time and of the methodology prevalent during that era. Especially now that the certainty of the ‘author’ has been abandoned in favour of understanding texts as complex and coherent conjunctions of signs whose reference structure is more or less open, it is time to shift the focus from re-reconstruction to the genesis of construction, i.e. to trace the process of reception – in cases where the textual remains allow us to do so. In facing this task, one should at least attempt to identify the immediate contexts in which this reception was framed.

 

The new edition at hand is based on a fundamentally different approach from the ‘old’ Diels/Kranz edition. In his preface to the first edition of 1903, Hermann Diels acknowledged that an arbitrary selection of fragments inevitably results in inhibiting and patronising both teachers and students, which is why he sought to provide as complete a collection of fragments as possible, while at the same time he included relevant biographical and do-xographical material. Nonetheless, the available material was subjected to a process of rigorous selection, since it was Diels’ objective to “trace the development of Greek thought in statu nascendi [Diels’ emphasis] by reference to original documents” (ibid.). Consequently, he says the following with regard to the second edition (1906): “Selecting the material took me more time and effort than if I had sent the entirety of my material to the printer. However, I believe that I have provided a service not only to beginners by limiting the texts to the relevant and original ones [my emphasis]. It was my intention to only carry the wheat into the barn while leaving the chaff outside, even at the risk of leaving some good grain behind here and there.” Let it be understood that it is not my purpose to criticise Diels’ procedure. His merits are not in question, and I assume he was familiar with most of the material in the present volume (except perhaps for the Syro-Arabic materials)  – that were the ‘chaff’ in his metaphor. He was a child of his times, as we are children of our times, as well. By making this reconstructive selection, Diels set the standard against which, ultimately, thinkers like Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes and others were to be measured. Occasionally, a new fragment has been added which may have modified this standard slightly, but whenever someone speaks of or writes about a Presocratic author, they still usually have in mind the image of the author as it was sketched out by Hermann Diels.

 

Thus, the objective of the present work is not – once again – to present a collection which may offer some ‘new’ elements or others, but which ultimately aims at reconstructing authentic thoughts and works. Rather than that, this edition – in accordance with the title of this new series: Traditio Praesocratica – seeks to document the history of (the adaptive) reception as it can be traced from the earliest extant evidence through the late Middle Ages. Perhaps the Milesian philosophers Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes are particularly suitable for this procedure, since there is no verbatim tradition. Therefore, we need not bother to reconstruct works which may never have existed as such. What actually survives amounts to testimonies about a doctrine which in the course of traditio has been viewed from different perspectives. It is all about this perspective,3 since it is not because of what our distant ancestors thought or uttered that we have arrived where we are now, but because of what history has made of these thoughts and utterances. To me, it makes sense – at least in this context – to speak of testimonies, but in the double sense of the word, referring both to the doctrine of the philosopher in question and also to the perspective of the author /text that has delivered this doctrine to posterity. While these texts are certainly in a fragmentary condition (especially in the light of every text’s semantic openness, which I mentioned above), it would be misleading to speak of an ‘incomplete tradition’ in a narrowly philological sense. After all, we are unable to identify what this ‘complete’ body of texts or doctrines would have been, at least for the Milesians, and most of all in the case of Thales.

 

This approach certainly has its factual and methodological perils. If we want to trace the direction in which the reception moved, the material needs to be presented in chronological order. However, quite a few of our testimonies are found in authors whose lifetime – not to mention whose individual works – can be dated only approximately. In a few cases, datings even by experts may vary by several hundred years.

 

A pragmatic approach needs to be taken to these problems, The dates given in this edition are those of Der Neue Pauly (DNP) or the Tusculum-Lexikon griechischer und lateinischer Autoren. However, in a few cases I have preferred to follow an individual editor’s judgment with regard to dating (which I have also done for authors not listed in DNP, especially for anonymous works). Since this edition’s objective is at least to suggest a context of reception, many of the testimonies presented here have been prefaced by short introductions on the author and his work. However, these are only provisional references, and in some cases very brief ones, too. The responsibility for shedding more light on these contexts rests on a commentator.4 Two examples are sufficient to show how Thales was exploited for various purposes. Pagan authors, on the one hand, generally acknowledged the tradition of Thales’ contact with Egyptian knowledge as genuine. Christian apologists, on the other hand, understood the same fact as evidence that Greek-pagan wisdom did not pre-date Jewish-Christian wisdom, and backed their assumptions by chronological constructions such as Moses having lived earlier than Thales. The anecdote about Thales falling into the well, which is first found in Plato (Th19), is subject to various interpretations, as well. At first, it is taken to illustrate the sage’s ‘unwordliness’, but Christian authors, again, take it as evidence for the uselessness of pagan knowledge.

 

Admittedly, the selection of testimonies is more or less arbitrary. However, this need not be regarded as a shortcoming, since even completeness could only aim at including what has come down to us in the first place. What should bother us instead is the fact that only testimonies mentioning the author by name are included. As a matter of course, Thales’ idea that water is the source of all things is to be found in many texts that do not mention the author. Had we included these testimonies, the material would have exceeded all limits. (Mistaken names in the context of gnomologies, i.e. if a maxim usually attributed to a different author is attributed to Thales in a particular context, are still a different problem).5 In order to prevent further confusion (which is bound to occur when rummaging through a heap of “chaff”, to put use Diels’ metaphor), the testimonies are provided with an apparatus of similia enabling the reader to access the material thematically. Keywords which allow a first approach to the content are assigned to each of the similia. Using the keywords makes tracing a doctrinal, biographical or gnomological attribution to Thales in the history of reception much easier. One can, for example, trace the development of the anecdote about Thales falling into a well from Plato down through the Christian Middle Ages. It goes without saying that this is not intended to entail direct dependence on particular earlier sources – although in some cases this is obvious and in others it cannot be ruled out , which is why similarities within a group of similia are occasionally pointed out. The diachronic arrangement shows which ‘motifs’ were passed on and which were not (and which ones were added), and it illustrates which topics have been particularly interesting to specific authors or at specific times. It is a shortcoming of the doxographic arrangement according to Peripatetic categories (e.g., principles, god, cosmos, meteora, psychology, physiology) that the testimonies of the authors are scattered among various lemmata. The user of the edition at hand, however, can tell at first sight which author considered which piece of Thales’ information worthy of being recorded and discussed, and why. It makes quite a difference whether the same story – for example that of Thales’ prediction of a solar eclipse – is told in the context of an historical account, in an excursus within a history of philosophy or in a Christian chronicle. This also applies to the doxographers in the narrower sense of the word, who today are mostly seen as a quarry for collecting fragments (which was hardly their intention). Authors such as pseudo-Plutarch and Stobaeus were interested in collecting important views on crucial problems – not in reconstructing ‘Thales’ or other authors.⁶ I have tried to counteract the ‘fragmentation’ of these collections of texts by adding the chapter headings in which the respective lemmata are found.

 

Therefore, an artificial distinction between the indirect and the direct traditions, testimonies on Thales’ life and doctrine as opposed to fragments in the narrower sense (sections ‘A’ and ‘B’ in Diels’/Kranz’ edition) cannot be upheld. This is prima facie the case with the ‘Milesians’, who, in effect, are known only through the indirect tradition. With other authors such as Empedocles and Parmenides, this kind of approach is a step backwards in terms of method when compared to the insights of Schleiermacher and Diels, who were well aware that understanding testimonies depends upon understanding the authors who included them in their works.7 However, the goal of this collection is not primarily a reconstructive one. Moreover, the context, too, can be of vital importance in understanding a verbatim ‘fragment’.⁸ Furthermore, it is evident that so-called ‘imitations’ and ‘forgeries’ have to be taken into account, as well; for every age creates its own ‘Thales’, an image that may not withstand critical examination. Still, it is this very image and its development over the course of time that is interesting in itself. It is important to make clear from what angle Thales was viewed by readers at different times. Within the limits of an edition, however, this does not necessarily mean we need to judge this perspective (as one would by using the biased categorisation mentioned above), not even in the case of apparent or obvious misunderstandings. To put things somewhat sympathetically, these authors and texts are assigned a dignity of their own, which they lose when being regarded as mere reference points in the process of reconstruction. I would like to end this general introduction by emphasising that the way I have chosen to present the material does not obstruct further reconstructive efforts. It is possible to employ philological methods to reconstruct doxo-graphical continuities. Material for doing this work for Thales is provided here, but it also allows further inferences to be drawn when this material will be considered together with material provided in future volumes of this series. Likewise, it is possible to engage in philosophical reconstruction. At any rate, one should bear in mind that the two disciplines mutually depend on each other: philosophy provides the intellectual framework for philological efforts, but at the same time it should not move beyond what is philologically possible and probable.

2. Preliminary remarks on the Syro-Arabic tradition (Gotthard Strohmaier)

The Presocratics have been valued within Islamic culture to an extent comparable to their esteem among contemporary Christians. The extant testimonies on the Presocratics in Arabic share idiosyncrasies which I am going to illustrate with some examples. At the same time, I would like to critically discuss the approach to the material that has been taken up to now. On the one hand, less textual material was available, but on the other hand, this very fact (along with certain ideological factors) has facilitated a tendentious approach to these texts not found to nearly the same extent in the European tradition. The Arabic testimonies stem from the ancient school of Alexandria, which promoted a Neoplatonic interpretation of Aristotelianism. Together with the medical and philosophical authority of Galen, this had wide influence on Syro-Christian learning and, via this, on Islamic scholarship. Dimitri Gutas describes the situation fittingly: “ ... the fact remains that the philosophical activity in Alexandria during the fifth to the seventh centuries, its tendencies and intellectual orientations, as well as the written material it both possessed and produced, were determinative of the amount and nature of Greek philosophy that was transmitted to the Arabs. From this derives the first rule of thumb in Graeco-Arabic studies, which says that whatever was not available, either as an idea or a cited text, or as a discrete written work, in the philosophy of late antiquity is by the same token not to be expected to appear in Arabic.”9

 

This qualification also applies to speculations on natural philosophy made by early Islamic theologians, which are remotely reminiscent of Greek thought, but to my knowledge do not refer to Greek authors or works. They developed an atomism which, by analogy to matter, posited atomic units of time, as well. There also existed a counter-current which assumed that the qualities of things exist objectively, understanding change of things as the emergence out of a state of concealment, which is reminiscent of Anaxagoras. However, one should also take into consideration that Islamic scholars might have developed their speculations independently. If we wish to assume inspiration from outside, however, we should think of influence from Persia and India, as well. 10

 

Research on the so-called Graeco-Arabica has made considerable progress since the days of Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz, and this helps overcome the methodological difficulties that have led to harsh criticism from Arabic scholars, who have objected strenuously to the selection of Oriental testimonies made by these two scholars.¹¹ Generally, the transition of our testimonies into Arabic has to be judged in the same way that we judge the transition into the Latin tradition. They are only included when they contain material missing in the Greek tradition and in case they contain important textual variants.. Their chronological order appears, as with the Latin ones, according to the dating of the texts where they are quoted. Moreover, only edited sources have been included. Given the number of manuscripts not yet edited, the corpus is bound to grow in the future.

 

Unfortunately, the Arabic script is not suitable for rendering foreign proper names correctly. Even if the translators took care to render the foreign letters with utmost accuracy, so many mistakes later slipped in during the course of the manuscript tradition that it is frequently impossible to identify the person referred to. The more common names like Arisṭū, Buqrāṭ and Ğālīnūs were saved from distortion since they had taken on an Arabic form, which is why even semi-educated copyists were somehow familiar with them. The Presocratics were less protected. It is even more difficult to identify the persons in question if instead of the Arabic wording only a medieval Latin translation of the text survives. One example of many is Nicolaus Damascenus with his work De plantis. Following the sense rather than the actual letters of the text, Hermann Diels took the name “Abrucalis”, which was being mentioned alongside Anaxagoras, to mean “Empedocles”; the orientalist Hellmut Ritter, though, retranslated it back into Arabic quite sensibly as “Proklos”.

 

On editing the Arabic text, however, it became clear that the passage indeed referred to Empedocles.12 Matters were complicated further if the person translating the text into Latin happened to have received a humanist education and was thus unwilling to tolerate barbaric fantasy names. In the chapter on Anaxagoras in the edition by Diels/Kranz, the long fragment B 20 owes its prominent position to the long journey of Galen’s commentary on Hippocrates’ De aere, aquis, locis through the Syriac, Arabic and Hebrew languages to the Latin translation by Moses Alatino (1529–1605 CE). Now that the Arabic phrasing of this very passage has been identified, it is quite clear that the passage in fact (as was already assumed by Hans Diller) consists of only two short quotes from Hesiod’s Works and Days. Neither does the text surrounding them stem from some Hesiodic “Astronomy”, but was written by none other than the commentator himself.¹³

 

The broad Arabic reception of Greek philosophy, natural science and medicine in Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, which had been founded in 762 CE on the banks of the river Tigris, needs to be commented upon, especially since no similar activity is recorded for Damascus, the town of residence of the preceding Umayyad dynasty. In Baghdad the newly-converted Persian intelligentsia made their way into leading positions. Dimitri Gutas suspects the extent of reception to be indicative of some pre-Islamic Iranian governmental policy that aimed to retrieve the treasures of wisdom which had been stolen by the pernicious Alexander the Great.¹⁴ To me, another motive seems more natural: the flourishing activity of private teaching in Baghdad. Classes on Islamic theology, philosophy and medicine were available, and the teachers found themselves competing for the favour of a leisurely youth with well-to-do backgrounds. The overall situation was comparable to that of classical Athens, with the exception that in the fields of philosophy and medicine there was no need to discover new truths if one could absorb them from elsewhere. There are reports about debating societies in which Syrian Aristotelians educated in the tradition of the school of Alexandria occasionally had to defend their views quite forcefully. The polymath al-Bīrūnī describes a scene in which one of the translators ridiculed a Muslim theologian who refused to believe in the earth’s spherical shape.¹⁵

 

The Muslim audience naturally longed to read the texts in question in an Arabic translation. Persons of rank who had become rich by exploiting the provinces and their estates had the financial means to pay for expensive translations. And expensive they were, since the translators worked with an almost modern understanding of philological accuracy. The Arabic Nestorian Ḥunain ibn Isḥāq (809–873 CE), to name but the most important translator,16 collated as many Greek manuscripts as he could get hold of. In order to be able to do so, he did not spare the effort of travelling through the Near East, since sufficiently many Greek majuscule manuscripts were still to be found in this region, although the old Greek-Syrian bilingualism of the territory had been superseded by a Syro-Arabic one under the new regime. In order to find Galen’s major work De demonstratione, Ḥunain travelled via Syria and Palestine as far as to Alexandria. His perfect command of Greek might have been the result of a lengthy stay in Constantinople.¹⁷ Let me give one example to demonstrate how far his expertise extended. Galen mentions in Quod animi mores corporis temperamenta sequantur that the earth of Scythia has produced but one philosopher, without explicitly mentioning Anacharsis’ name. Ḥunain, however, knows who is referred to and adds the name to the translation, since Anacharsis would not be familiar to his readers.¹⁸

 

The secrets of paper production, which had been given away by Chinese prisoners of war, introduced a much cheaper writing material to the market, and thus contributed to a flourishing of the book production business. In Baghdad, the booksellers even had their own market place. An academic proletariat existed, as well. They earned their living by copying the standard reference works in demand, and some of them seemed to be tempted to increase their meagre income by adding to their stock new bibliophilic rarities purportedly by famous authors.19 Only on rare occasions was the fraud actually discovered. Regarding the situation in antiquity, Lucian informs us that some blue-eyed bibliomaniac bought a forged compendium on rhetoric attributed to Tisias for 750 drachmas.²⁰

 

Tisias, the inventor of the art of oratory on Sicily was well-known by name, but his works had vanished very early, which invited forgers to fill this gap. Compared to the situation in antiquity, the production of this kind of literature in the fields of philosophy and the worldly sciences had been on the increase, and sheer profit seems to have been a strong incentive. As mentioned below,²¹ we know of a man who earned a considerable amount of money by writing alchemical works which he then attributed to a Shiite authority. Whatever the motives for writing these texts might have been, they fulfilled certain expectations, as is proved by the fact that they were read, copied over and over again and sometimes quoted. These expectations had obviously been raised by the names of Greek authorities, among them the Presocratics, who were claimed to be the authors of those texts.

 

The extent to which their very names were familiar to a wider public even at later times can be seen from the following example. Cairo manuscript Ṭal’at, ṭibb 550, which was written 1482 CE in the Persian city of Tabriz contains the unique text of Galen’s commentary on Hippocrates, De aere, aquis, locis. Galen here mentions Pelops, the name of his teacher in Smyrna, six times. The dots in the manuscript are generally applied rather negligently, but the name is each time clearly (and incorrectly) dotted as Tālīs, the characters being unimpaired.²²

 

Since the Arabic tradition originates from the Alexandrian school, it includes many items to be found in the Greek tradition as well. This includes almost the entire Corpus Aristotelicum23 with the exception of the Politics²⁴, the Eudemian Ethics, the Magna Moralia, the dialogues and the collection of constitutions. The following works containing information on the Presocratics were available in translations some of which are still extant, although not all of the extant translations have been edited and published.. The works in question are the Posterior Analytics²⁵, the Topics²⁶, the Sophistical Refutations ²⁷, the Rhetoric²⁸, the Poetics²⁹, the Physics³⁰, De caelo³¹, De generatione et corruptione³², the Meteorology³³, De anima³⁴, De sensu³⁵, De generatione animalium³⁶, the Historia animalium³⁷, De partibus animalium³⁸, the Metaphysics ³⁹ and the Nicomachean Ethics⁴⁰.

 

Commentators whose texts were read in Alexandria, from Alexander of Aphrodisias to those of late antiquity, and who drew on works still extant during their times to provide evidence to illustrate Aristotle’s interest in the Presocratics, found their way into Arabic as well. Even in cases where the original texts are lost, information can survive in the works of later philosophers. These passages, however, might not be clearly discernible from the context surrounding them. Olympiodorus and his short commentary on the Meteorology is a good example. It contains summaries of theories on earthquakes by Anaximenes, Anaxagoras and Democritus which are not found in the Greek version of his commentary, but do not seem to provide more information than could be extracted from the Meteorology.⁴¹ The situation is different for the following piece of information on Leophanes, who is sometimes reckoned among the Seven Sages and who is also mentioned by Theophrastus in De causis plantarum (II 4, 12). “Some people claim that if a man’s left testicle is tied up during intercourse, the child will be male, and if the right testicle is tied up, the child will be female. Leophanes has remarked this.”⁴² Empedocles is rejected on the grounds of his opinion on the so-called Pangenesis doctrine: “The pleasure during intercourse does not necessarily cause the semen to be secreted from the whole body, as Empedocles claims on account of the cause of arousal.”⁴³ On milk, too, he has more to say than fragment 31 B 33 reveals: “Empedocles is mistaken when saying that milk is something rotten like pus, due to decomposition and lack of digestion.”⁴⁴

 

Due to the close connection between philosophy and medicine in the Alexandrian curriculum, the treatises (some of them of considerable length) written by the physician Galen of Pergamum (129–216 CE), who was keenly interested in philosophy, were almost without exception translated into Arabic,45 and thus were read with interest even by non-professionals.⁴⁶ Since this process preserved works which are lost in Greek, editing these Arabic translations has produced quite a few testimonies on the Presocratics, some of which were included in Diels’/Kranz’ edition.⁴⁷ Galen’s commentaries on the Hippocratic Epidemics are only partly extant in the original, but survived entirely in the Arabic version. It is in this version that he refers to Anaxagoras in connection with two lexical problems. On the term , which is here rendered with bauraq⁴⁸, the text says the following: “We also find that water, if fire or the sun heats it exceedingly, is in a way inclined to saltiness, but different types of water differ according to their first nature in terms of how readily they take on a salty taste; for you cannot drink water which easily adopts a salty taste when heated, and in which this taste then dominates. Anaxagoras⁴⁹ calls this kind of taste ‘natronic’, derived from the word ‘natron’, since natron is salt, too. And about that taste he⁵⁰ says it is caused by heat, but the heat causing it is not so excessive as the heat that causes bitterness. This, however, proves that calling this taste ‘natronic’ does not quite fit, since the bitterness in natron predominates over the saltiness. Those, however, who gave this taste the most fitting name, are Hippocrates and Plato. Since Hippocrates calls it ‘saltish’ () and Plato ‘salty’ ().”⁵¹ The second term discussed by Galen denotes an illness occurring among the Scythians which called : “Rufus⁵² claims that this word denotes the ache appearing in the muscles due to two kinds of weakening, and that ‘WL.R⁵³ and others of the elders have employed this name. Sabinus⁵⁴ stated that Anaxagoras⁵⁵ had earlier used the term.”⁵⁶

 

A statement about Empedocles’ concept of matter, which is mentioned along with Democritus’, but does not address anything in addition to what is already known, is to be found in De causis contentivis.57 An adherent of peripatetic natural philosophy, Galen devotes the entire thirteenth book of his major philosophical work De demonstratione to a discussion of Atomism. It is probably this very book to which belongs a snippet in the potpourri of quotations by Ibn al-Muṭrān, one of the personal physicians of Sultan Saladin. From this, it follows that Democritus attributed a random movement to the corpuscles, which he believed to be identical with the dust motes visible in sunbeams.58 This sheds light upon a testimony in De elementis ex Hippocratis sententia⁵⁹, which has not yet been consulted. According to this passage, which was unfortunately athetised by the editor, Democritus (unlike Epicurus) assumed that the atoms were also moving upwards. Indirect evidence that Democritus did not employ ‘atoms’ as a set expression for his corpuscles can be gathered from Galen’s commentary on Hippocrates’ De aere, aquis, locis, in which he points out that Epicurus was the first to introduce the term.⁶⁰ Galen’s interest in Democritus is also emphasised in another passage from De experientia medica, in which Galen stresses that Democritus ascribed great importance to experience gathered over the course of time.⁶¹ We may also assume that (at least to a certain extent) Galen still had authentic texts of the Presocratics at his disposal. An Arabic quotation, attested by various authors, from the recently discovered work De indolentia, (Jouanna/Boudon-Millot 2010. This Greek text is incomplete; the portion discovered does not contain the passages quoted in Arabic.) informs us that Galen lost works of Aristotle, Anaxagoras and Andromachus in a fire in Rome, since he had stored parts of his private library in a royal treasury. Andromachus was a personal physician of Nero and developed a recipe for theriac that was much appreciated by Galen.⁶² In the surviving Arabic parts of his Commentaries on Epidemics, we find a peculiar note that provides insight into how highly the early thinkers were esteemed by the representatives of the so-called Second Sophistic, who reveled in antiquarianism. The note states that Galen’s contemporary Lucian (undoubtedly Lucian of Samosata) forged a work of Heraclitus and let it be put into the hands of a connoisseur, who immediately started preparing a commentary on it. But the deceit was discovered, so there is no danger that parts of it have found their way into our collections.⁶³

 

The Alexandrian school – and its successors among the more secularly oriented Syrian intelligentsia – were fixated on Galen and Aristotle (to whom they gave a Neoplatonic interpretation), and the keen interest in these authorities continued to exist in Arabic-Islamic culture. The Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides came from this background as well. Writing from Cairo, he recommended his translator Samuel ibn Tibbon, who lived in Southern France, to read Aristotle and his Greek and Arabic commentators. Maimonides continues by saying that other works such as the books of Empedocles, Pythagoras, Hermes and Porphyry are one and all “old philosophy”, and reading them is a waste of time.64 One must suppose, however, that he largely based his opinion on pseudepigrapha.

 

Other Peripatetics recorded earlier ways of thinking in order for the progress achieved by Aristotle to be properly appreciated, and in order to dismiss aberrant ideas as reactionary. The polymath al-Bīrūnī, who was interested in physics rather than speculative philosophy, engaged in a disputatious correspondence with Avicenna on Aristotle’s De caelo and Physics.⁶⁵ In these letters, al-Bīrūnī considered the possibility that the fire above the atmosphere is not an element of its own. Instead, he contended, air turns into fire because of the rapid movement of the lunar sphere. As a result, Avicenna criticised him for relapsing into the monism of ancient philosophy, without failing to set forth what this monism taught. Thales assumed water to be the only element, whereas Heraclitus thought it was fire, Diogenes –he refers to Diogenes of Apollonia – claimed that it is a substance intermediate between water and air, and Anaximander – as he erroneously calls Anaximenes – took air to be the only element while Anaximander was proposing the theory that air turns into water when it comes into contact with cold, whereas it turns into fire or ether when it comes into contact with the rapidly rotating sphere.66 We do not know whether Avicenna added material to the theory when he followed al-Bīrūnī in considering the lunar sphere for the model, or whether his source for that suggestion is texts that have not come down to us.

 

The Muslims had a vivid sense of history and (in spite of the rigorous rejection of early philosophy by the Peripatetics) displayed a keen interest in the origins of philosophy and the question who was the first philosopher. The constant number of the Seven Sages was time after time filled with various persons, but Thales was usually considered to be at their head.67 Even in the Persian epic on Alexander written by Niẓāmī (1141–1209 CE), the world conqueror – after having successfully disputed with Indians – invites the Greek sages, namely Aristotle, Thales, Apollonius of Tyana, Socrates, Porphyry, Hermes and Plato, to present their doctrines one after another.⁶⁸ More often than not, the Muslim scholars followed some of the Church fathers in supposing the Greek thinkers to depend upon the Egyptians or on figures from the Old Testament. In doing so, they probably also used the old piece of information that Thales had travelled to Egypt. Muslims knew the Koranic figure of the pre-Islamic sage Luqmān (sura 31), to which figure al-‘Amirī, who wrote around 985 CE in Bukhara, establishes the following connection: “The first one to whom wisdom was attributed was Luqmān the Sage, as God says: ‘And verily we gave Luqmān wisdom’ (Qur’an 31:12). He lived at the time of the prophet David; they were both residents of the land of Syria. It is said that Empedocles the Greek used to keep company with Luqmān and learn from his wisdom. But when he returned to the land of Greece, he spoke on his own authority about the nature of the world, saying things which, if understood literally, offend against (the belief in) the Hereafter. The Greeks attributed wisdom to him because of his former association with Luqmān.”⁶⁹

 

More reliable information was to be found in the doxographies which were translated from Greek. The Placita philosophorum, for instance, which dates back to the times of Galen and is usually attributed to Plutarch, was faithfully translated into Arabic by Qusṭā ibn Lūqā in Baghdad. In some cases, this version can help to correct and complete the Greek text.70 In the course of a popular description of the world given by al-Qazwīnī (around 1203–1283 CE), the view held by some Pythagoreans according to which the earth revolves around its own axis obviously stems from this version.⁷¹ It is not quite clear, however, whence the view of Democritus that the earth rests on air (which is also attested here) originates.⁷² Of the other ancient doxographies, the one by Diogenes Laertius did not find its way into the Arabic transmission, whereas we do have traces of a history of philosophy attributed to Porphyry.⁷³ The Refutatio omnium haeresium by the bishop Hippolytus⁷⁴ was accessible via Syro-Christian transmission, as were the doxographic passages in Cyril of Alexandria’s polemics against emperor Julian.⁷⁵

 

Doxography soon became a playground for people in search for alternatives to Aristotelianism. Most of them sought to present their own monotheistic and creationist convictions as being closely related to other doctrines. The more fragmentary the textual transmission available to them, the more room it gave to reconstructionist speculations. Ulrich Rudolph observes a qualitative difference from the situation in antiquity in the sense that a completely new form of doxography emerges: the unidentified author’s own views are presented under the name of some well-known philosopher.⁷⁶ I, however, would consider this to be but another variant of the rampant pseudepigraphical activity mentioned above, the difference being that people not only circulated their own ideas under a false name, but – driven by the expectations of a wealthy readership – presented an entirely fictitious florilegium supposedly compiled from various ancient authorities. In fact, the Muslim target audience was interested in Prearistotelian rather than Presocratic wisdom. An outstanding example is the doxography of Pseudo-Ammonius,⁷⁷ which has been made accessible in a most exemplary manner by Ulrich Rudolph: its content has little to do with historical reality, but many later writers taken it up and used it alongside of more reliable material. Whether the doxography’s source is of Greek or Muslim origin has been much debated.

 

With due caution, Rudolph decided to date it middle of the ninth century CE, i.e. not before the Arabic period.78 Considering the problem, however, one should not neglect the interval between the Greek and the Muslim periods, when Syrian intellectual life arose in its many forms, even if there are but scarce traces of it left on account of the decline of this culture under Islamic rule.⁷⁹ In Arabic bibliographies, we sometimes find notes stating that the work in question has only partly been translated from Syriac into Arabic. In cases where the translation was complete, such a note was unnec-cessary. Some passages reminiscent of phrases found in the writings of Hippolytus ⁸⁰ point in the same direction. The sayings of Syrian philosophers quoted by Diels/Kranz indicate that the writers had no scruples against composing longer pseudepigraphical sections.⁸¹ A typical manifestation of this tendency is the so-called pseudo-Empedocles, a fictitious character with wide-ranging impact, who – according to De Smet’s comprehensive study – made an appearance as early as late antiquity.⁸²

 

Apart from that, however, some historians of science such as Ibn al-Qifṭī were more successful in establishing a more correct assessment: “As far as the materialists (Arabic dahrīyūn) are concerned, they are a group of elders who deny the existence of a creator and ruler of the world, claiming that the world as such has always existed and did not have a creator who made it or any Being that deliberately established it, and that the rotation [of the spheres] did not have a beginning and that man has come from a drop of sperm and the drop of sperm has come from a man, and that plants have come from seeds and seeds from plants. The best-known sage of this group was Thales of Miletus, and he was the oldest one of those to hold this view.”83 In the late heyday of Neoplatonism in 16^th and 17^th century Shiite Persia, Mullā Ṣadrā Šīrāzī (1572–1641 CE) still knows of such views and nevertheless believes that Thales and the others did not advocate the world’s eternity and that the opposite interpretation only emerged in the works of later philosophers who were unable to relate to their earlier predecessors.⁸⁴

 

Apart from tendentious developments, we can also witness change occurring rather accidentally, namely within the complex of the so-called gnomologies. Over the course of the history of Greek transmission, various maxims and anecdotes were attributed to particular persons in utter confusion, and this continued in the Arabic period.85 An overview, which for the first time considers the Greek as well as the Arabic collections, has been provided by Oliver Overwien.86 The extent to which these collections have been influential cannot be assessed. One of doubtlessly many translators to be named with certainty is Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, who compiled a collection of Wisdom Teachings of the Philosophers”).⁸⁷ A coherent though small collection is formed by The Pythagorean Golden Verses, the Arabic version of which that was published by Johan Elichmann in 1640 was the first text of its kind to be published in print in Europe.⁸⁸ The verses as transmitted are accompanied by a the note that Galen read them every morning and every evening and copied them in golden letters.⁸⁹ Smaller collections, with references to the Greek parallels, have been made accessible by Franz Rosenthal ⁹⁰ and Dimitri Gutas.⁹¹

 

Generally speaking, the Arabic collections are as reliable or unreliable as their contemporary Byzantine counterparts. An anecdote about Diogenes that appears several times in the Arabic collections is to be found in a Herculaneum graffito as well. In this case, the eruption of mount Vesuvius provides a reliable terminus ante quem.92

 

In spite of the confusion of names to be found in this tradition, the material deserves attention, not least because it has been taken seriously by some reputable doxographers and thus has had an influence on the image of the sage. Characteristically, in this type of literature anecdotes are used in the manner of Diogenes Laertius, that is, to reconstruct the sage’s biography. A chapter of is dedicated to each philosopher. In many cases, a collection of further anecdotes and maxims is attached to these chapters. The most influential work of this kind is the Ṣiwān al-ḥikma (The Cabinet of Wisdom), which up to now has been attributed to a certain Abū Sulaymān as-Siğistānī al-Manṭiqī, who studied in Baghdad with Christian Aristotelians and died in 987 CE.⁹³ The text survives in just two extensive excerpts, only one of which has been edited to date.⁹⁴ The Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers, a collection compiled by the Egyptian scholar al-Mubaššir ibn Fātik in 1048 and 1049 CE, consists of 20 chapters, twelve of which are provided with a biography of the sages in question. Of the Presocratic philosophers, Zeno of Elea and Pythagoras are included.95 The Kitāb al-milal wa-n-niḥal, the Book of Religious and Philosophical Sects written in 1127 by the Shiite aš-Šahrastānī, not only addresses religious and theological doctrines, but also contains passages on the philosophers dealt with. Via Theodor Haarbrücker’s translation of 1850 and 1851, knowledge of it spread rapidly, even beyond Orientalist circles.⁹⁶ Particularly counterproductive was Franz Altheim’s attempt to prove parts of this late collection to be authentic,⁹⁷ some of which unfortunately found their way into a compilation of material on the Greek atomists (Griechische Atomisten).⁹⁸ An extensive collection containing 122 biographies of ancient and Muslim thinkers was compiled by the philosopher aš-Šahrazūrī (who died before 1305), its title being Nuzhat al-arwāḥ wa-raudat al-afrāḥ fī ta’rīḫi l-ḥukamā’ (The Delight of the Spirits and Garden of Pleasure with regard to the History of the Sages). Since this collection is based on the works mentioned earlier on, we should not expect to discover new testimonies on the Presocratics in it.⁹⁹

 

Names of Presocratics keep surfacing every now and then in Arabic alchemical literature, and sometimes entire treatises are attributed to these persons, which proves that they were known to a wider public. Among them are Anaxagoras, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Democritus, Ecphantus, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Leucippus, Parmenides, Pythagoras and Thales.100 The alchemists, by the way, were an uneducated and scorned group on the fringes of Muslim society.¹⁰¹ Very interesting is the scathing criticism of the alchemists levelled by the philosopher ‘Abd al-Laṭīf al-Baġdādī, which has been made available in a doctoral thesis by Franz Allemann.¹⁰² The alchemists were particularly exposed to forgeries, especially by people who preferred taking advantage of the chaotic situation of the book market to earning their living in the laboratory. Giving mysterious hints in their pseudepigraphical concoctions, they pretended that the elixir’s secret had been discovered by the ancient Greek or more recently by Muslim sages.¹⁰³ In one of these cases, the forger was identified by the above-mentioned Abū as-Siğistānī al-Manṭiqī, one of the most enlightened spirits of 10^th century Baghdad.¹⁰⁴ It is when these works were regarded worthy of a Latin translation that they became important for occidental reception, as well. This is the case for the Turba philosophorum, a fictitious debate among the Seven Sages which is led by Pythagoras. Before the characters talk about the secrets of alchemy, they present their respective cosmologies. Their Latin names are more or less deformed, but they can be identified. Eximedrus corresponds to Anaximander and also to Anaximenes, Pandolfus to Empedocles, Aris-leus to Archelaus, Lucas to Leucippus, Locustor to Ecphantus, Eximenus to Xenophanes, whereas Anaxagoras and Pitagoras (sic) are written correctly. As recently as 1975, Martin Plessner still thought that this first part reveals an intimate knowledge of Presocratic doctrine.¹⁰⁵ Ulrich Rudolph, however, observed that Hippolytus is the only Greek source for this material.¹⁰⁶

 

In a ninth century catalogue of drugs, Democritus is mentioned as the author of a formula for brewing a potion that would provide its user with life-long immunity against all illnesses.107 Franz Altheim tried to prove this piece of information to be authentic, as well.¹⁰⁸ Therefore, we may reckon that by attributing such discoveries to famous ancient thinkers, forgers ensured that there would be an increased demand for these medicinal texts, as well. A certain Badīġūras appears as the author of a list of substitute drugs. With the help of the Iranologist Werner Sundermann, Manfred Ullman was able to prove that this name can be read as “Pythagoras”, reasonably assuming a Persian stage in the course of its textual transmission.109 Contrary to his assumption that the person in question is an otherwise little-known physician, I would consider this more probably to be an instance of deliberate pseudepigraphy.

 

In a notorious book of black magic by the so-called “Picatrix”, which was translated into Latin at Alfonso el Sabio’s request, Empedocles and Pythagoras are credited with laying the quasi-philosophical foundations for magic.¹¹⁰ In a superstition-ridden treatise on plague, the Turkish scholar Ṭāšköprüzāde (deceased in 1560 CE) recommends magic squares as a charm against the deadly illness, referring to Pythagoras and “the wise Thales of Miletus”.111 Moreover, there are quotations in which Democritus is mentioned as the author of a work on agriculture. Fuat Sezgin has traced the roots of this attribution back to antiquity.¹¹²

3. How to use this edition

As explained above, the testimonies are presented in the chronological order of the authors transmitting them,113 without further distinction between Greek, Latin or Syro-Arabic texts. Longer testimonies are subdivided into several sections. In cases where several testimonies are to be found in different works by one and the same author, they have – if possible – been arranged according to doxographic principles. In some isolated cases where texts by Greek authors have been translated into Latin (e.g. Eusebius → Jerome) or Arabic (e.g. Galen → Ḥunain ibn Isḥāq), there is a reference under the name of the original author, whereas the translation (as far as it can be attributed to a particular person) is to be found under the translator’s name, in chronological order. In cases where an author transmitting a testimony is quoted by a later writer (as is the case with Alcaeus, who is referred to by Himerius), the reference is to be found under the original author’s name, the full quotation, however, under the name of the person quoting the text. In order to provide a quick overview to the users of this edition, a short summary of the quote’s basic statement is added to the initial reference.

 

All testimonies are translated into English. Textual differences from the edition consulted are indicated in the annotations, as are occasional factual explanations. Discrepancies between the present English translation and Wöhrle’s German translation are identified. Professor Wöhrle’s original collection is supplemented by the texts supplied in the volume on Anaximander and Anaximenes in this series plus two more texts which he discovered too late for inclusion in that volume as well as four additional papyrus texts that were called to my attention by David Sider.

 

The testimonies come with an apparatus listing the similia. These are usually not so much literally identical phrasings, but rather parallel passages in terms of content, in which similar information on the biography, doctrine, views and dicta of Thales is provided. In order to facilitate the access to this material, a keyword is added to each of the passages. Only on their first occurrence are all of the similia listed. In later passages, their first occurrence is referred to under “q.v.” (“quod vide/which see”).

 

As has already been said, this collection (on the basis of the indices and electronic resources available) aims at utmost possible completeness of those testimonies which mention Thales by name. This principle is only abandoned in cases where later testimonies render the attribution in question trustworthy. The so-called gnomological tradition on Thales, which has its own characteristic problems, and which, in spite of some valuable preparatory efforts,114 is still in need of further synthesis, could be taken only partially into consideration. The volume is provided with a Subject Index, an Index of Names of Persons, Peoples and Places, Greek-English, Latin-English, Arabic-English and Persian-English indexes to the translation and English-Greek/Latin, English-Arabic and English-Persian Glossaries, a Concordance with Diels-Kranz, a Catalogue of the Testimonia, An Index of Authors and a bibliography containing the editions used for the collection as well as secondary literature referred to in the footnotes.