THE ARISTOTELIAN CORPUS AND THE RHODIAN TRADITION: NEW LIGHT FROM POSIDONIUS ON THE TRANSMISSION OF ARISTOTLE'S WORKS*

Abstract

The ancient sources tell a particular story about the destiny of the works of Aristotle and Theophrastus after Theophrastus' death. According to information provided mainly by Strabo and Plutarch, the texts produced by the Peripatetic school were lost and unavailable during a period of more than two hundred years, from the time of Neleus, the heir of Theophrastus' library, until Sulla's victory in Athens, in 86 b.c., at the end of his campaign against Mithridates. That was the point at which the private library of a famous bibliophile was confiscated: Apellicon of Teos, who at some time at the beginning of the first century b.c. had acquired the autograph papyri that contained the only copies of Aristotle's and his disciple's works. Sulla, so these sources maintain, recovered then for later generations the so-called ‘esoteric writings’ of Aristotle, and this prepared the ground for the general diffusion of Aristotelian thought, and for the work of Andronicus of Rhodes, whose name has gone down in history as the author of the editio princeps of the Aristotelian Corpus.