After the appearance of commentary volumes to Theophrastus' fragments (published in 1992 in two volumes by F., R.W. Sharples, P. Huby and D. Gutas = FHSG) on physics and biology (Sharples 1994, 1998), on psychology (Huby 1999) and on Metaphysics (Huby 2007), this volume deals with ethics. It is a hefty tome. In this case size matters: ethics (with links to psychology, politics, rhetoric and poetics) was easily the most important subject to philosophers of this era. Unfortunately no complete Theophrastean works on ethics survive (his Character sketches is relevant, but not theoretical), so that we have to rely on the citations and paraphrases, more so than in other areas on which Theophrastus wrote. F. presents a comprehensive commentary which results from over thirty years of engagement with the Eresian. The book comprises texts on virtue and vice, education, happiness, fortune, fate, justice and friendship. Fragments on ‘Religion’ have been given a separate volume (6.2), in preparation by S. Schorn (p. 1).
F.'s Quellen zur Ethik Theophrasts (1984) was one of the first major publications on the subject. He returns to it on a larger scale offering a more extensive commentary and a translation, taking new scholarship into account and making the material more widely available. F. hastens to say that the volume does not replace the 1984 edition (some materials are excluded in the new book), but one expects only specialists will go back to the earlier volume.
As in all commentaries of the series the book is conveniently divided into four main parts (‘Introduction’, ‘The Sources’, ‘Titles of Books’, ‘The Texts’) followed by a very useful summary, bibliography and various indexes. A separate discussion of the sources not only illustrates their enormous variety, but provides a necessary précis of the ‘who, where and when’: thus we start with pseudo-Aristotle (third to first century b.c.e.) but end up in the thirteenth century with several Arabic sources. The fragment edition of 1992 had aimed for comprehensiveness, but the commentary even offers some new additions.
As always with fragmentary survival of ancient works, one should make the most of the titles of works (here discussion takes up 110 pages). A long list of Theophrastus' works survives in Diogenes Laertius (5.42–50, which represent in fact five lists, with duplications and addenda going back to one Hermippus in the third century b.c.) and the range of his activities certainly justifies his important place in the Peripatetic tradition. Works deal with education, child rearing, virtues and marriage to ethical characters, dispositions, habits, the happy life (περὶ εὐτυχίας) and emotions (περὶ παθῶν). The discussion highlights specific problems concerning their form (the significance of the preposition περί and sub-titles), their authenticity and relation to Aristotle.
The ‘Texts’ are subdivided into thematic sections (shown in running headers) and offer a helpful guide (as do the detailed indexes) to those who want to ‘dip in and out’ of the book for specific topics. I found most interesting the discussion on emotions and on virtue and vice, where the texts are well contextualised within the contemporary debates with other schools. From a selective sampling we learn that the study of emotional responses and different kinds of virtues were linked. In other sections we see that the comments on fate in Callisthenes or On grief (fr. 436 no. 15) were very influential on the subsequent debates on how fate rules our lives; Bioi ‘Lives’ (fr. 436 no. 16 FHSG) is probably referring to types of philosophical life, not biography; the title of the so-called ‘doxographical’ work περὶ τῶν ϕυσικῶν δοξῶν (= fr. 137 no. 6b) should be translated ‘On the Physical Tenets’, not ‘On the tenets of the natural philosophers’ (p. 39, after J. Mansfeld in Rutgers Studies in Classical Humanities vol. 5, p. 69 – a gracious retractatio to FHSG); and that F. suggests in a future edition more be printed than in FHSG for 726A (Apollonius' Amazing Stories) so that readers can decide themselves whether certain sections are genuine (p. 297). In several sections F. evaluates the question whether the material is genuinely Theophrastean, which may include speculation about the particular work a fragment may come from: for example ‘if pressed’, F. attributes fr. 557 on eros to the (Dialogue) concerning love (fr. 436 no. 29). The material is treated even-handedly, in weighing up interpretative options, the relation to Aristotle's works and the internal coherence in the Theophrastean corpus.
For a book of this size and complexity there are not too many typos and most of little consequence (e.g. p. 128 line 1 ‘Divsions’; p. 181, fr. 436 no. 18 redundant apostrophe in ‘what Diogenes’ reports'; p. 198 and 200 n. referring to F.-A. Steinmetz who is listed as F. Steinmetz in the bibliography; p. 236 ‘Mendotus’ for ‘Menodotus’; p. 353 line 2 ‘at the same <time>’? Someone at the press nodded off, it seems, around G–H in the bibliography: Gottschalk 1968 and 1969 are the same article, and under H there are several typos, ‘Halm’ twice for ‘Hahm’, ‘römishcen’ for ‘römischen’; and in some very old works titles are not italicised: Joachim, Kroh, Rutherford). The comments include cross-references to other volumes in the series. F. ends with a summary, which is very helpful to draw a number of insights together: here Theophrastus' closeness to Aristotle is confirmed, a result one would expect given his stance in fr. 72A FHSG.
This comprehensive commentary succeeds in setting out complex material in a very clear fashion; it reads well, while making use of the learned literature of the last 150 years and bringing new translations and insights into the ethical thought of the early Peripatos. It should be of interest to historians of philosophy, ethics, education and emotions.
