Magna Moralia and Nicomachean Ethics

Abstract

In what relation the Magna Moralia stands to the genuine works of Aristotle, and to what phase of Peripatetic doctrine it belongs, are questions which have been discussed with a fair measure of agreement by living scholars. Jaeger described the revolution within the Peripatos which, within two generations, led Dicaearchus to reject the ideal of the contemplative life, making human happiness depend on moral virtue and the life of action. Walzer showed beyond reasonable doubt that the M.M. was influenced by Theophrastus's terminology and statement of problems, and was led to infer that the writer, in his treatment of phronesis and sophia, had formed an uneasy compromise between the views of Theophrastus and Dicaearchus (p. 191). Brink proved from the terminology and style of the treatise, and in amore general way from the structure of its argument, that the author was expounding, probably at an interval of several generations, a received doctrine which he failed to think out properly for himself. Building upon their results, Dirlmeier boldly tried to fix the absolute date of the work within half a century. He argued that it must have been in existence before the first century B.C., since it was used as an authoritative text by the Peripatetic writer from whom Arius Didymus took his compendium of Peripatetic ethical doctrine. On the other hand, a terminus post quem can be obtained from 1204a23, where we read that ‘some persons either equate happiness and pleasure, or regard pleasure as essential to happiness; others, unwilling to reckon pleasure as a good, nevertheless add absence of pain (sc. to ἀρετή in their definition of happiness). Who then were these others? Cicero provides the answer: Diodorus, eius [Critolai] auditor, adiungit ad honestatem vacuitatem doloris (de Finibus V 5, 14, cf. Tusc. Disp. V 30, 85). Now this Diodorus lived in the second half of the second century B.C., and the M.M. mustbe nearly contemporary with him. In confirmation of this, Dirlmeier showed that the writer uses without comment terms which are unquestionably of Stoic origin, such as προθετικός, ἐπιτευκτικός, κατόρθωμα, ἀποκατάστασις, which are coinages not of the earliest Stoicism but of Chrysippus or his followers. Both Walzer and Dirlmeier have called attention to the fact that the writer shows himself to be wholly without understanding of Aristotle's theology, and actually becomes polemical, refusing to contemplate a God who contemplates himself (1212b37–13a10).