The Politics of Aristotle Read online

  BOLLINGEN SERIES LXXI • 2

  THE

  COMPLETE WORKS OF

  ARISTOTLE

  THE REVISED OXFORD TRANSLATION

  Edited by

  JONATHAN BARNES

  VOLUME ONE AND TWO

  Copyright © 1984 by The Jowett Copyright Trustees

  Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William St.,

  Princeton, New Jersey

  In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

  Chichester, West Sussex

  All Rights Reserved

  THIS IS PART TWO OF THE SEVENTY-FIRST

  IN A SERIES OF WORKS SPONSORED

  BY BOLLINGEN FOUNDATION

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  ARISTOTLE.

  The complete works of Aristotle.

  (Bollingen series ; 71:2)

  Includes index.

  1. Philosophy—Collected works, I. Barnes, Jonathan. II. Title. III. Series.

  B407.S6 1984 185 82-5317

  ISBN-13: 978-0-691-01650-4

  Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources

  Printed in the United States of America

  Second Printing, 1985

  Fourth Printing, 1991

  Sixth Printing, with Corrections, 1995

  20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13

  ISBN-13: 978-0-691-01650-4

  ISBN-10: 0-691-01650-X

  CONTENTS

  Volume One

  PREFACE

  ix

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  xiii

  NOTE TO THE READER

  xiii

  CATEGORIES

  3

  DE INTERPRETATIONE

  25

  PRIOR ANALYTICS

  39

  POSTERIOR ANALYTICS

  114

  TOPICS

  167

  SOPHISTICAL REFUTATIONS

  278

  PHYSICS

  315

  ON THE HEAVENS

  447

  ON GENERATION AND CORRUPTION

  512

  METEOROLOGY

  555

  ON THE UNIVERSE**

  626

  ON THE SOUL

  641

  SENSE AND SENSIBILIA

  693

  ON MEMORY

  714

  ON SLEEP

  721

  ON DREAMS

  729

  ON DIVINATION IN SLEEP

  736

  ON LENGTH AND SHORTNESS OF LIFE

  740

  ON YOUTH, OLD AGE, LIFE AND DEATH, AND RESPIRATION

  745

  ON BREATH**

  764

  HISTORY OF ANIMALS

  774

  PARTS OF ANIMALS

  994

  MOVEMENT OF ANIMALS

  1087

  PROGRESSION OF ANIMALS

  1097

  GENERATION OF ANIMALS

  1111

  ON COLOURS**

  1219

  ON THINGS HEARD**

  1229

  PHYSIOGNOMONICS**

  1237

  Volume Two

  ON PLANTS**

  1251

  ON MARVELLOUS THINGS HEARD**

  1272

  MECHANICS**

  1299

  PROBLEMS*

  1319

  ON INDIVISIBLE LINES**

  1528

  THE SITUATIONS AND NAMES OF WINDS**

  1537

  ON MELISSUS, XENOPHANES, AND GORGIAS**

  1539

  METAPHYSICS

  1552

  NICOMACHEAN ETHICS

  1729

  MAGNA MORALIA*

  1868

  EUDEMIAN ETHICS

  1922

  ON VIRTUES AND VICES**

  1982

  POLITICS

  1986

  ECONOMICS*

  2130

  RHETORIC

  2152

  RHETORIC TO ALEXANDER**

  2270

  POETICS

  2316

  CONSTITUTION OF ATHENS

  2341

  FRAGMENTS

  2384

  INDEX OF NAMES

  2467

  GENERAL INDEX

  2470

  * and **: See the Note to the Reader

  PREFACE

  BENJAMIN JOWETT published his translation of Aristotle’s Politics in 1885, and he nursed the desire to see the whole of Aristotle done into English. In his will he left the perpetual copyright on his writings to Balliol College, desiring that any royalties should be invested and that the income from the investment should be applied “in the first place to the improvement or correction” of his own books, and “secondly to the making of New Translations or Editions of Greek Authors.” In a codicil to the will, appended less than a month before his death, he expressed the hope that “the translation of Aristotle may be finished as soon as possible.”

  The Governing Body of Balliol duly acted on Jowett’s wish: J. A. Smith, then a Fellow of Balliol and later Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, and W. D. Ross, a Fellow of Oriel College, were appointed as general editors to supervise the project of translating all of Aristotle’s writings into English; and the College came to an agreement with the Delegates of the Clarendon Press for the publication of the work. The first volume of what came to be known as The Oxford Translation of Aristotle appeared in 1908. The work continued under the joint guidance of Smith and Ross, and later under Ross’s sole editorship. By 1930, with the publication of the eleventh volume, the whole of the standard corpus aristotelicum had been put into English. In 1954 Ross added a twelfth volume, of selected fragments, and thus completed the task begun almost half a century earlier.

  The translators whom Smith and Ross collected together included the most eminent English Aristotelians of the age; and the translations reached a remarkable standard of scholarship and fidelity to the text. But no translation is perfect, and all translations date: in 1976, the Jowett Trustees, in whom the copyright of the Translation lies, determined to commission a revision of the entire text. The Oxford Translation was to remain in substance its original self; but alterations were to be made, where advisable, in the light of recent scholarship and with the requirements of modern readers in mind.

  The present volumes thus contain a revised Oxford Translation: in all but three treatises, the original versions have been conserved with only mild emendations. (The three exceptions are the Categories and de Interpretatione, where the translations of J. L. Ackrill have been substituted for those of E. M. Edgehill, and the Posterior Analytics, where G. R. G. Mure’s version has been replaced by that of J. Barnes. The new translations have all been previously published in the Clarendon Aristotle series.) In addition, the new Translation contains the tenth book of the History of Animals, and the third book of the Economics, which were not done for the original Translation; and the present selection from the fragments of Aristotle’s lost works includes a large number of passages which Ross did not translate.

  In the original Translation, the amount and scope of annotation differed greatly from one volume to the next: some treatises carried virtually no footnotes, others (notably the biological writings) contained almost as much scholarly commentary as text—the work of Ogle on the Parts of Animals or of d’Arcy Thompson on the History of Animals, Beare’s notes to On Memory or Joachim’s to On Indivisible Lines, were major contributions to Aristotelian scholarship. Economy has demanded that in the revised Translation annotation be kept to a minimum; and all the
learned notes of the original version have been omitted. While that omission represents a considerable impoverishment, it has reduced the work to a more manageable bulk, and at the same time it has given the constituent translations a greater uniformity of character. It might be added that the revision is thus closer to Jowett’s own intentions than was the original Translation.

  The revisions have been slight, more abundant in some treatises than in others but amounting, on the average, to some fifty alterations for each Bekker page of Greek. Those alterations can be roughly classified under four heads.

  (i) A quantity of work has been done on the Greek text of Aristotle during the past half century: in many cases new and better texts are now available, and the reviser has from time to time emended the original Translation in the light of this research. (But he cannot claim to have made himself intimate with all the textual studies that recent scholarship has thrown up.) A standard text has been taken for each treatise, and the few departures from it, where they affect the sense, have been indicated in footnotes. On the whole, the reviser has been conservative, sometimes against his inclination.

  (ii) There are occasional errors or infelicities of translation in the original version: these have been corrected insofar as they have been observed.

  (iii) The English of the original Translation now seems in some respects archaic in its vocabulary and in its syntax: no attempt has been made to impose a consistently modern style upon the translations, but where archaic English might mislead the modern reader, it has been replaced by more current idiom.

  (iv) The fourth class of alterations accounts for the majority of changes made by the reviser. The original Translation is often paraphrastic: some of the translators used paraphrase freely and deliberately, attempting not so much to English Aristotle’s Greek as to explain in their own words what he was intending, to convey—thus translation turns by slow degrees into exegesis. Others construed their task more narrowly, but even in their more modest versions expansive paraphrase from time to time intrudes. The revision does not pretend to eliminate paraphrase altogether (sometimes paraphrase is venial; nor is there any precise boundary between translation and paraphrase); but it does endeavor, especially in the logical and philosophical parts of the corpus, to replace the more blatantly exegetical passages of the original by something a little closer to Aristotle’s text.

  The general editors of the original Translation did not require from their translators any uniformity in the rendering of technical and semitechnical terms. Indeed, the translators themselves did not always strive for uniformity within a single treatise or a single book. Such uniformity is surely desirable; but to introduce it would have been a massive task, beyond the scope of this revision. Some effort has, however, been made to remove certain of the more capricious variations of translation (especially in the more philosophical of Aristotle’s treatises).

  Nor did the original translators try to mirror in their English style the style of Aristotle’s Greek. For the most part, Aristotle is terse, compact, abrupt, his arguments condensed, his thought dense. For the most part, the Translation is flowing and expansive, set out in well-rounded periods and expressed in a language which is usually literary and sometimes orotund. To that extent the Translation produces a false impression of what it is like to read Aristotle in the original; and indeed it is very likely to give a misleading idea of the nature of Aristotle’s philosophizing, making it seem more polished and finished than it actually is. In the reviser’s opinion, Aristotle’s sinewy Greek is best translated into correspondingly tough English; but to achieve that would demand a new translation, not a revision. No serious attempt has been made to alter the style of the original—a style which, it should be said, is in itself elegant enough and pleasing to read.

  The reviser has been aided by several friends; and he would like to acknowledge in particular the help of Mr. Gavin Lawrence and Mr. Donald Russell. He remains acutely conscious of the numerous imperfections that are left. Yet—as Aristotle himself would have put it—the work was laborious, and the reader must forgive the reviser for his errors and give him thanks for any improvements which he may chance to have effected.

  March 1981

  J. B.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THE TRANSLATIONS of the Categories and the de Interpretatione are reprinted here by permission of Professor J. L. Ackrill and Oxford University Press (© Oxford University Press, 1963); the translation of the Posterior Analytics is reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press (© Oxford University Press, 1975); the translation of the third book of the Economics is reprinted by permission of The Loeb Classical Library (William Heinemann and Harvard University Press); the translation of the fragments of the Protrepticus is based, with the author’s generous permission, on the version by Professor Ingemar During.

  NOTE TO THE READER

  THE TRADITIONAL corpus aristotelicum contains several works which were certainly or probably not written by Aristotle. A single asterisk against the title of a work indicates that its authenticity has been seriously doubted; a pair of asterisks indicates that its spuriousness has never been seriously contested. These asterisks appear both in the Table of Contents and on the title pages of the individual works concerned.

  The title page of each work contains a reference to the edition of the Greek text against which the translation has been checked. References are by editor’s name, series or publisher (OCT stands for Oxford Classical Texts), and place and date of publication. In those places where the translation deviates from the chosen text and prefers a different reading in the Greek, a footnote marks the fact and indicates which reading is preferred; such places are rare.

  The numerals in brackets throughout the text key the translation to Immanuel Bekker’s standard edition of the Greek text of Aristotle of 1831. References consist of a page number, a column letter, and a line number. Thus “1343a” marks column one of page 1343 of Bekker’s edition; and the following “5,” “10,” “15,” etc. stand against lines 5, 10, 15, etc. of that column of text. Bekker references of this type are found in most editions of Aristotle’s works, and they are used by all scholars who write about Aristotle.

  NOTE (1994): This is an unrevised reprint of the first edition; but a small number of typographical errors have been corrected. Many of these errors were generously communicated to the editor by Mr. M. W. Dunn, who recorded the translation for the blind.

  THE COMPLETE WORKS OF ARISTOTLE

  CATEGORIES**

  J. L. Ackrill

  1 · When things have only a name in common and the definition of being [1a1] which corresponds to the name is different, they are called homonymous. Thus, for example, both a man and a picture are animals. These have only a name in common and the definition of being which corresponds to the name is different; for if one is to say what being an animal is for each of them, one will give two distinct definitions. [5]

  When things have the name in common and the definition of being which corresponds to the name is the same, they are called synonymous. Thus, for example, both a man and an ox are animals. Each of these is called, by a common name, an animal, and the definition of being is also the same; for if one is to give the [10] definition of each—what being an animal is for each of them—one will give the same definition.

  When things get their name from something, with a difference of ending, they are called paronymous. Thus, for example, the grammarian gets his name from grammar, the brave get theirs from bravery. [15]

  2 · Of things that are said, some involve combination while others are said without combination. Examples of those involving combination are: man runs, man wins; and of those without combination: man, ox, runs, wins.

  Of things there are: (a) some are said of a subject but are not in any subject. [20] For example, man is said of a subject, the individual man, but is not in any subject. (b) Some are in a subject but are not said of any subject. (By ‘in a subject’ I mean what is in something, not as a part, and cann
ot exist separately from what it is in.) [25] For example, the individual knowledge-of-grammar is in a subject, the soul, but is not said of any subject; and the individual white is in a subject, the body (for all colour is in a body), but is not said of any subject. (c) Some are both said of a subject and in a subject. For example, knowledge is in a subject, the soul, and is also [1b1] said of a subject, knowledge-of-grammar. (d) Some are neither in a subject nor said of a subject, for example, the individual man or the individual horse—for nothing of [5] this sort is either in a subject or said of a subject. Things that are individual and numerically one are, without exception, not said of any subject, but there is nothing to prevent some of them from being in a subject—the individual knowledge-of-grammar is one of the things in a subject.

  [10] 3 · Whenever one thing is predicated of another as of a subject, all things said of what is predicated will be said of the subject also. For example, man is predicated of the individual man, and animal of man; so animal will be predicated [15] of the individual man also—for the individual man is both a man and an animal.

  The differentiae of genera which are different1 and not subordinate one to the other are themselves different in kind. For example, animal and knowledge: footed, winged, aquatic, two-footed, are differentiae of animal, but none of these is a [20] differentia of knowledge; one sort of knowledge does not differ from another by being two-footed. However, there is nothing to prevent genera subordinate one to the other from having the same differentiae. For the higher are predicated of the genera below them, so that all differentiae of the predicated genus will be differentiae of the subject also.