Hermann Diels Research Articles

Antilogies in Ancient Athens: An Inventory and Appraisal

Antilogies, or pairs of symmetrically opposed speeches or arguments, were generally ignored by Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle, Cicero, and Diogenes Laertius, and, later, by Eduard Norden, Hermann Diels, and most modern scholars of antiquity. As a consequence, until the end of the twentieth century CE, antilogies have been ignored or, at best, treated as a minor literary device to be mentioned only with reference to individual writings. Nevertheless, during the second half of the fifth century, antilogies were a crucially important form of argument and persuasion in ‘sophistic’ thought, philosophy, historiography, comedy and tragedy, and other fields. In order to redress the historical neglect of the art of antilogy, this essay provides an inventory (doubtless incomplete) of some 30 antilogies composed by playwrights such as Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, historians such as Herodotus and Thucydides, and, most importantly, ‘sophists’ such as Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus and Antiphon (in addition to a few other writers of the same period). Building on this inventory, the second part of the essay seeks to establish identifying features of antilogy and assess its cultural significance in the Athenian context (in the second half of the fifth century BCE).

Xenophanes and the Pythagoreans (D.L. IX, 20 = 21 A 1 DK)

According to Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Xenophanes of Colophon, poet and philosopher of the 6th–5th centuries BC, was sold into slavery by the Pythagoreans Parmeniscus and Orestades (D.L. IX, 20 = 21 A 1 DK). This testimony has long been a source of concern to Hellenists, taking into account the high reputation that Pythagoras and his school gained in the history of European culture and philosophy. The paper provides a critical review of all the proposed corrections to the fragment in question. In the first part it considers conjectures and emendations made by the editors and translators Diogenes Laertius’ text since the Renaissance. Particular attention is paid to Ambrogio Traversari (1386–1439), the first translator of the Vitae philosophorum, whose translation already reveals a reluctance to follow the literal meaning of the testimony. The second part of the paper examines the restoration of the text proposed by Hermann Diels, which is still the most influential. The third part discusses the position of some modern scholars who, while refusing to correct the text of Diogenes Laertius, continue to suspect him to be mistaken. As a result, the paper shows that all corrections of Diogenes’ testimony, according to which Xenophanes was sold into slavery by the Pythagoreans, are vulnerable to criticism, and that consequently its literal reading may be correct.

German Classicists and the Hunt for Literary Papyri: Discovering New Materials about a Secret (and Hence Forgotten) Project

AbstractThe essay focuses on the initiatives of German classicists to acquire papyri in the period predating the Great War (1890–1914). In Berlin, it was Hermann Diels (1848–1922) and Ulrich von Wi...

Katastrophe der Wissenschaft?! Gewalteskalation, Kriegsgräuel und Kriegsverbrechen als Instrumente der internationalen (Nicht-)Kooperation in der Rechtswissenschaft 1914–1919

This contribution starts with a dictum from the German classical philologist, Hermann Diels. He referred to a ‘catastrophe of science’ which led most academics and scientists to support national war efforts at the beginning of World War One. This study examines the way in which the escalation of violence during the war and related wartime atrocities influenced international co-operation between jurists, something which Gustave Moynier identified as a prerequisite factor for limiting violence in war within a legal framework. Many jurists, especially those on the side the Entente, linked the escalation of violence and wartime atrocities with the legal concept of ‘crime’ and thereby turned an instrument of international co-operation into one of national mobilisation. A similar development was evident among jurists of the Central Powers. This article also discusses the impact which the curtailment of international co-operation at almost all levels throughout the war years had on the escalation of violence and asks how appropriate Diels’ aforementioned dictum has been.

Beyond Diels-Kranz: The New Loeb Early Greek Philosophy

Beyond Diels-Kranz: The New Loeb Early Greek Philosophy JOHN PALMER The publication of a Loeb Classical Library edition of the evidence for early Greek philosophy is a major event in classical scholarship.* In these nine volumes, running to well over 4,000 pages, André Laks and Glenn Most undertake to present in an accessible format the principal evidence for the Greek philosophers of the 6th and 5th centuries BC. They have been assisted in this massive project by Gérard Journée, Leopoldo Iribarren, and David Lévystone, who receive special credit on the title page; by several scholars who have provided special assistance in the preparation and translation of texts in Arabic, Syriac, Armenian, and Hebrew; and by numerous others who have provided comments on individual chapters or who have been consulted on particular points. The editors and their assistants are to be commended for their exemplary execution of such a vast and difficult task. They have succeeded in producing what is far and away the best available edition of the texts of the early Greek philosophers with accompanying English translation. (With the simultaneous publication of Les débuts de la philosophie: Des premiers penseurs grecs à Socrate [Paris: Éditions Fayard, 2016], they have also produced the best edition with accompanying French translation.) More than that, their edition effectively supersedes Hermann Diels and Walter Kranz’s Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, which has long held sway as the standard edition of the Presocratics, *André Laks and Glenn W. Most (eds. and trans.), Early Greek Philosophy. 9 volumes. Loeb Classical Library 524–32. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2016. arion 25.3 winter 2018 but it only does so because Laks and Most have respectfully taken Diels-Kranz as their model. The collection is not without its flaws, some of which will be addressed here, but these are mostly negligible in comparison with its innumerable merits. Laks and Most have set such a high standard with this work that it is hard to imagine that we will see a better general collection on early Greek philosophy in our lifetimes. Laks and Most generally avoid referring to their subject as “Presocratic” philosophy. The term “Vorsokratiker,” first employed in Johann August Eberhard’s Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie (Halle, 1788), was eventually used by Hermann Diels to demarcate, not a chronological period of philosophy prior to Socrates, but that constellation of early thinkers whose mode of philosophical activity was not influenced by Socrates and the changes he wrought to philosophy’s self-conception. “Presocratic” philosophy for Diels was thus roughly equivalent to the phase of ancient philosophy prior to the rise of the philosophical schools. Nonetheless, the term is awkward and has unwelcome temporal and historiographic connotations, rightly noted by Laks and Most. Not all the figures in these volumes were active before Socrates, nor is it historically accurate to contrast them all with a “Socratic” approach to philosophy, despite Cicero’s famously influential characterization of Socrates as having brought philosophy down from the heavens to earth (Cic. Tusc. V 4.10–11). Laks has very usefully discussed both the ancient antecedents and modern deployment of the notion of “Presocratic” philosophy in his Introduction à la “philosophie présocratique” (Paris 2006), now translated by Glenn Most as The Concept of Presocratic Philosophy (Princeton 2018). Laks’s conclusion there that the common history of the transmission and survival of their writings is one of the least contestable criteria of an otherwise problematic identity serves as background to the editors ’ characterization of the object of the present volumes as the philosophers prior to Plato “who are transmitted in the form of fragments” (vol. i, p. 7). The collection’s entire first volume is devoted to introduc188 beyond diels-kranz tory and reference materials. Included are a preface explaining the organizational and editorial principles governing the presentation; a list of abbreviations; a more general bibliography than the ones provided in the introductions to individual chapters; a two-way concordance between Laks and Most’s set of textual identifiers and those employed in DielsKranz ; a useful index of references in the collection to the early Greek philosophers outside the chapters devoted to them, followed by a more...

FIRE AT NIGHT: A VERSION OF HERAKLEITOS

1 R F I R E A T N I G H T : A V E R S I O N O F H E R A K L E I T O S H . L . H I X Philosophers call it a category mistake when something is treated as if it belonged in a category to which in fact it does not belong. And philosophers consistently make two category mistakes with regard to the influential ancient Greek public intellectual Herakleitos : that he wrote fragments and that he was a pre-Socratic philosopher. First Mistake: Herakleitos Wrote Fragments It is true that nothing of Herakleitos’s work has come down to us in continuous or complete form. We might have only a small handful of Sophocles’ apparently numerous plays, but what plays we do have are complete; what dialogues we have of Plato might be (ironically) copies of copies, but they are complete. Of Herakleitos , though, we have only short citations embedded in various works by later authors. Earlier translations, without exception, preserve (and even emphasize) that fragmentation: of course it would be irresponsible to present what has arrived to us as if it had arrived whole. No self-respecting translator would downplay the 2 H I X Y incompleteness and discontinuity of what we have from Herakleitos . Yet one of the short passages that has reached us warns, ‘‘Let us not thoughtlessly consent to common sense in momentous matters .’’ In this matter at least, the warning is apt: the common sense of things in regard to Herakleitos’s work is mistaken and ought not to be consented to. That the work has reached us in fragments does not mean that Herakleitos wrote fragments. Of the passages we have from Herakleitos, to take their current fragmentation as definitive of their character is to mistake an e√ect of transmission history for a revelation of authorial intention or a disclosure of original textual architecture. G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven in their anthology The Presocratic Philosophers fall into this trap, perfectly exemplifying consent to common sense. ‘‘The surviving fragments,’’ they suggest, ‘‘have very much the appearance of oral pronouncements put into a concise and striking, and therefore easily memorable, form; they do not resemble extracts from a continuous written work.’’ Kirk and Raven admit that the one longish passage that appears to have been the opening of Herakleitos ’s treatise on nature (‘‘Logos is ever . . .’’) is ‘‘a structurally complicated sentence’’ that is continuous enough to stand as a counterexample to their view, but they wave it away by speculating that ‘‘possibly when Heraclitus achieved fame as a sage a collection of his most famous utterances was made, for which a special prologue was composed.’’ With a vicious circularity, Kirk and Raven take this speculation as both supportive of and supported by the view – part of the common sense – that ‘‘the fragments we possess’’ (as if the ‘‘Logos is ever . . .’’ passage were not one of them) are ‘‘obviously framed as oral apothegms rather than as parts of a discursive treatise’’ (emphasis mine). Parity of reasoning would sanction a view that the Roman Colosseum, because it is now in ruins, must have been originally designed and built as a ruin, must in its nature be a ruin, and that the large intact portion, so unlike the rest, was a later addition. Even translators alert to the dubiousness of taking current fragmentation as a fulfillment of original form still replicate that gesture. Charles H. Kahn, for example, in The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, wisely disputes Hermann Diels’s curious decision to F I R E A T N I G H T 3 R list the surviving passages ‘‘in alphabetical order according to the name of the author citing them,’’ and replaces Diels’s alphabetical ordering with a thematic ordering on the premise that ‘‘Heraclitus ’ discourse as a whole was as carefully and artistically composed as are the preserved parts, and that the formal ordering of the whole was as much an element in its total meaning as in the case of any lyric poem from the same period.’’ Yet that imputation of wholeness notwithstanding, Kahn’s book bears...

The text of Simplicius’s Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics and the question of supralinear omicron in Greek manuscripts

The purpose of this paper is to show that, contrary to what is claimed in some elementary introductions to Greek paleography, the symbol here called superscript omicron (e.g. κόσμ°) is not a mere abbreviation for the ending omicron-sigma (-ος), but a symbol of suspension that may stand for any ending. The article originated in the author’s study of the manuscripts of Simplicius’s Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics and in connection with the edition of Hermann Diels. It became evident that while Diels did not himself collate any of the Greek manuscripts on which he based his edition, those who did collate for him failed to send him the full information ; thus, when they saw superscript omicron, they frequently just told him that the word in question ended in omicron-sigma. However, in a few instances they did report that the word had a superscript omicron, and in such cases Diels so reported it ; this shows that he must have known that such an ending in the manuscripts could be meant to represent any grammatical case of which omicron was the first letter. Finally, the article offers examples of papyri which clearly indicate that superscript omicron is to be interpreted as a symbol of suspension.

Testimonies about the earliest Greek philosophy

By all accounts all the works of early Greek philosophers were lost forever. Everything we know about their teachings we owe testimonies which have been preserved in the writings of later thinkers. Today it is not possible to seriously consider the earliest Greek philosophy without consulting studies dealing with testimonies about that philosophy. We will here devote our attention to these testimonies, to their importance, to their classification, history of their researches, as well as state of the research in our time. When it comes to classification of genres of testimonies, we will illustrate the most striking representatives of each of them. Central role in the history of this research played a Hermann Diels. We will highlight the importance and achievements of his research, to say something about his predecessors and successors, as well as today's scrutiny of its grandiose works Doxographi Graeci and Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker.

Začetki zgodovine filozofije pri starih Grkih

Raziskovalci zgodovine antične filozofije pod pojmom doksografija večino časa posvečajo ocenjevanju pristnosti in vrednosti antičnih zapiskov o kulturni dediščini starih Grkov. Zato pogosto spregledajo, da apliciramo na zgodovino filozofije evolutivni aristotelovski vidik, ki prek Hegla prevladuje vse do danes. Ta temelji na razumevanju filozofije kot duhovnem boju s preteklim mišljenjem, ki ga lastna modrost vedno znova preseže. Avtorica razprave pa tudi v helenističnem filozofskem zgodovinopisju odkriva dve temeljni značilnosti historične zavesti pri starih Grkih, ki veljata vse od zgodnje epike dalje in ju lahko razberemo v Platonovih dialogih, – modrost kot ἀρχή, kot izgubljeno izvorno védenje, ki ga je treba znova odkriti, ter duhovno genealogijo, ki mišljenje prikazuje kot široko prepleteno mrežo in sosledje miselnih procesov. Iz tega vidika je treba dejansko na novo prebirati tudi zapiske, ki nam jih je o starogrški filozofiji zapustil Diogen Laertski.

A.6. The Presocratics in the doxographical tradition. Sources, controversies, and current research

In this paper I present a synthetic overview of recent and ongoing research in the field of doxography, that is, the study of the nature, transmission and interrelations of sources for ancient Greek philosophy. The latest revisions of the theory of Hermann Diels (Doxographi Graeci 1879) regarding the historiography ought to be known more widely, as they still influence our understanding of the Presocratics and their reception. The scholarly study on the compilations of Greek philosophical views from Hellenistic and later periods has received a major boost by the first of a projected three-volume study by Mansfeld and Runia (1997). Taking their work as a firm basis I also describe my own work in this area and how it can be related to, and fitted into, this trend by outlining how two important sources for the historiography of Greek philosophy, Theophrastus (4th-3rd c. BCE) and Simplicius (early 6th c. AD) stand in a special relation to each other and form an important strand in the doxographical tradition.

Aëtius, or What's in a Name?

A little over ten years ago Jaap Mansfeld and the author published the first of a number of projected volumes on the doxographer Aetius. In the cited volume the source-critical Aetius-hypothesis was subjected to a thorough examination for the first time since its definitive formulation by Hermann Diels in his Doxographi Graeci published in 1879. Scholars accepted the demonstration that the hypothesis was in need of a thorough revision, but at the same time were agreeably surprised how well it had stood up. This chapter briefly responds to two review articles of their first work, in which some salient points were raised concerning the name and identity of its protagonist. One such review article was by Jan Bremmer who made some interesting observations on the names of Aetius, Arius Didymus, and the possible role that Alexandria may have played in the transmission of doxographical material.Keywords: Aetius; Alexandria; Arius Didymus; doxographer; Hermann Diels; Jaap Mansfeld

Xenophanes on the moon: a doxographicum in Aëtius

The subject of this article, Xenophanes' reported views on the nature or substance of the moon, can hardly be considered of great importance for the history of Greek philosophy. The focal point of this article will be precisely on the area of doxography. We have already cited the text of Hermann Diels' reconstructed edition containing the lemma which in the chapter records the view of Xenocrates. Because of the complexity of the material, and also because the author is using this chapter as a kind of exemplum of the difficulties and pitfalls awaiting users of the doxographical tradition, he shall quote the relevant passages in full. He concludes against Diels, therefore, that from the viewpoint of the systematic structure the majority reading νέφοϛ πeπνϱωμένον must be preferred. The most important finding on the nature of ancient doxography that was reached in the article concerns the structure of the analyzed chapter.Keywords: Aetius; Doxographicum; Hermann Diels; Moon; substance of the moon; Xenocrates; Xenophanes

Timon of Phlius: Pyrrhonist and satirist

The twentieth century has been so begrudging to Timon of Phlius that he could be forgiven for identifying himself with his misanthropic namesake. About a hundred and fifty of his ‘glänzenden Sillen’ (the phrase is Wilamowitz's) survive, but in Albin Lesky'sGeschichte der griechischen LiteraturTimon gets only a third of the space devoted to Anaximander from whom we possess one possible sentence. Serious work on Timon largely came to a stop with Hermann Diels who edited the fragments and testimonia inPoetarum philosophorum fragmenta(Berlin, 1901), a book which is as difficult to come by as the older and much fuller study of Timon by C. Wachsmuth inSillographorum Graecorum reliquiae(Leipzig, 1885). In spite of his skilful parody of Homer and his Aristophanic versatility in language (some sixty neologisms, many of them comic formations, occur in the fragments), Timon has been ignored by those who give such generous attention to Hellenistic poetry. Many fragments raise at least one major textual difficulty. A new edition and literary study of the material is badly needed.

Thales

The Greeks attributed to Thales a great many discoveries and achievements. Few, if any, of these can be said to rest on thoroughly reliable testimony, most of them being the ascriptions of commentators and compilers who lived anything from 700 to 1,000 years after his death—a period of time equivalent to that between William the Conqueror and the present day. Inevitably there ilso accumulated round the name of Thales, as round that of Pythagoras (the two being often confused), a number of anecdotes of varying degrees of plausibility and of no historical worth whatsoever. These and the achievements credited to Thales have, of course, been painstakingly brought together by Hermann Diels inDer Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. Useful and necessary (though not entirely comprehensive) as this work undoubtedly is, it nevertheless has probably contributed as much as any other book to the exaggerated and false Aew of Thales which we meet in so many modern histories of science or philosophy, and which it is the purpose of this article to combat.

The Literary History of a Mesopotamian Fable

TWO years ago there appeared in the Penguin Classics a translation of selections from the Fables of Aesop.' In the introduction to his translation, Mr. Handford makes a most remarkable statement. Speaking of the preAesopic fables to be found in the early seventh-century Greek poets Hesiod and Archilochus, he states: These poems are several centuries earlier than the earliest known fables of any other country!2 Then he continues, There is reason to believe that some Egyptian and Assyrian fables became known to the Greeks in classical times, but no evidence exists to suggest that these influences were either early or important. As far as we can see, therefore, the fable was invented by the Greeks.3 This cavalier treatment of the* subject ignores the researches of many scholars long familiar to Classicists, extending back to the article of Hermann Diels which appeared nearly half a century ago.4 It would be an easy task to refute Handford's naive assertion, provided as we are with such a wealth of ancient Near Eastern fable material in Egyptian and especially in Sumerian and Akkadian, much of it long antedating the Greeks. However, in view of the partial and fragmentary nature of the texts at our disposal, it is not often that we chance upon a fable which can with confidence be regarded as the prototype of one familiar to us from the Aesopic corpus, such as the Akkadian fable of the gnat and the elephant.5 It is the modest purpose of this paper to trace the history of one Mesopotamian fable through Egyptian and Classical literature to the Middle Ages. The fable of the serpent and the eagle first appears in the Akkadian Legend of Etana.6 This work is preserved in three recensions, Old Babylonian, Middle Assyrian, and Neo-Assyrian, and consequently the fable imbedded in it, which may of course be much older than the tale of which it forms a part, must be regarded as going back at least to the Old Babylonian period, that is to say, to about the seventeenth century B.C. The