This extraordinary work, 2,315 pages printed over four separately bound Parts, is the fifth volume of Mansfeld and Runia's Aëtiana, a project published by Brill now a quarter-century old. The four earlier volumes dealt with Hermann Diels's attempt to reconstruct the lost Placita and with the materials on which he relied, on which anyone else would also have to rely (vol. 1 [1997]); the form and structure of the overall doxographical work, with an early edition of Book 2 (vol. 2, in two parts [2009]); various questions of content, in the form of a collection of essays by Mansfeld and Runia (vol. 3 [2009]); and the Papers of the Melbourne Colloquium on Ancient Doxography, by multiple authors, on the evidentiary sources of the Placita and the evidence of earlier philosophy the Placita provides (vol. 4 [2018]). This volume, which in its 100-page introduction reprises many of the issues discussed more expansively in the preceding volumes, is the culmination of this enterprise. It does three things.
(i) Text. The volume establishes the greater part of Aëtius’ original text, that for which there is evidence (86%, according to one of the authors’ collaborators, Edward Jeremiah). Mansfeld and Runia rely, as Diels did, on the primary, incomplete, but often overlapping witnesses of ps.-Plutarch, Placita (Περὶ τῶν ἀρεσκόντων τοῖς φιλοσόφοις φυσικῶν δογμάτων ἐπιτομή); Stobaeus, Eclogae physicae et ethicae (Books 1–2 of ἐκλογῶν, ἀποφθεγμάτων, ὑποθηκῶν, βιβλία τέσσαρα); and Theodoret, Graecarum affectionum curatio (Ἑλληνικῶν ἰατρικὴ παθημάτων) – though they give greater weight to Theodoret's evidence than Diels did. The first two witnesses tend to agree in their orderings, giving good evidence for the original structure of Aëtius’ work; because they abbreviate in different ways, one often provides entries the other does not. There is a copious positive apparatus, with a generally clear account of which direct and indirect witnesses provide which material. (There are some cases where this is imprecise, for example in the long §1 of 1.7, ‘What the god is’, where Theodoret is reported to include just bits [p. 372 at line 58]; but to know precisely which bits, it seems one must still go to the text of Theodoret. Admittedly, it is a niche interest, knowing this with precision, since it does not speak to the accuracy of the Aëtius reconstruction.) Overall, the editors are amazingly thorough in their documenting and justifying inclusions and exclusions in their assembly of the Aëtian source text.
(ii) Context. The volume provides total doxographical context for every chapter, with parallels for nearly every entry. It prints and discusses both secondary or indirect witnesses and parallel texts that do not count as witnesses. Thus – and this is the source of much of the volume's bulk – Aëtiana V is not just an account of the Placita but of all the proximate doxographical currents in the centuries of the book's compilation, use and influence.
(iii) Translation. It translates the resulting text into 90 pages of lucid, idiomatic and reliable English. Appearing in Part 4, it includes no apparatus except indications for each entry of the source, whether ps.-[P]lutarch, [S]tobaeus and/or [T]heodoret and parentheses around words supplied to transform Aëtius’ telegraphisms into grammatical prose.
The volume also includes all the useful tools for navigating its great size: an index of witnesses; an index of name-labels; a concordance of texts; an index of names; a 125-page bibliography; and, in an appendix, the (German) translation of the table of contents found in a manuscript of the Arabic Qusta ibn Luqa from 1161 ce.
For all its length, this volume does not officially include a complete commentary on every doctrine included in Aëtius’ Placita. The authors’ explanation is that doing so would amount practically to a commentary on the history of Greek philosophy, which would be even more unwieldy and would not advance the purpose of this work. And this is true enough. Still, plenty of commentary is to be found, much of it extremely valuable, both in the essays of the previous volumes and in the chapter-by-chapter discussion in this one. For instance, in 1.7 as in all the other chapters (I mention this one because it is ‘the richest chapter of the Placita as to doxai’, with ‘no less than thirty different name-labels in twenty-four paragraphs’, p. 384) the authors discuss the information provided by the primary witnesses; the proximate tradition, which ends up giving detailed assessment of the arguments; chapter headings; overall context; ordering of the lemmata; the overall structure; and many individual points. The whole chapter-complex takes 60 pages! Given that there are 140 chapters, this volume is cumbersomely large and (justifiably) expensive; the editors explain that they are at work on an editio minor.
Mansfeld and Runia date Aëtius’ work to about 50 ce. They favour but do not insist on the author's name being Aëtius (against arguments by A. Lebedev and J. Bremmer). They call the work a piece of ‘functional’ literature (p. 22), a unified vade mecum for the ‘educated person’ expected ‘to be in possession of information regarding the main currents and views of philosophy and philosophers’ (p. 17). It ‘merely provides material for instruction, discussion and reflection, possibly also for making one's choice if that is what one wants to do … neither a suspension of judgment, more sceptico, nor a positive outcome, more aristotelico or stoico, is ever formulated … only very rarely is there a critical note’ (p. 26). They emphasise the dialectical methodology: ‘diaeresis and diaphonia, with compromise views and maverick opinions thrown in as well’ (p. 25).
Hermann Diels hypothesised a tradition from Aristotle to Theophrastus’ Φυσικῶν δόξαι to a Vetusta Placita (via the school of Posidonius) and then to Aëtius. Diels's goal was to reconstruct Presocratic philosophy, and so he wanted reliability, which required an impressive provenance. Mansfeld and Runia are rather less sanguine about specific Quellenforschung, and thereby forego positing any intermediate or foundational sources. They do, however, emphasise the importance of Aristotle, whose relevance they show Diels to have underplayed: they observe, among other facts, that the order of books in Aëtius’ Placita follows Aristotle's programmatic remarks in Meteorology, On Sensation and On the Generation of Animals.
Why is getting Aëtius right important, especially if the reconstructed Placita provides us no content other than what we know already from later authors? There is the extent to which later authors relied on Aëtius’ work, and so we can learn what those later authors wanted to preserve from what was available to them and what they did not care to reproduce. There is the state of knowledge at the beginning of the Common Era, or at least the variety of views well-informed authors of the era judged suitable or useful to provide to their readers. There is the example of a solution to a tremendous information-management problem, the difficulty of giving shape and usability to six centuries of ‘philosophical’ views and their continued re-assessment and repackaging. And there is the determinate presentation of doxographical material that remains important to us today, such that we might cite its earliest known or quasi-extant presentation with greater precision and appreciation for its dialectical purpose in that presentation.
To conclude on a subjective note: in light of the collegial collaboration, monumental vision, rigorous majesty, and documentary and analytic completeness that characterise this volume and the whole of Aëtiana, all aimed at reconstructing and making sense of a single historical document that is not, so to speak, a primary text of philosophical creativity, I found Mansfeld and Runia's work of classical scholarship quite moving. For all its concrete usefulness – and it has already become a regular reference-point for my own projects, whether on Critias and Hippias, or Aristotle and Stobaeus – it provides an astounding model for a life in academic research and humanistic contribution.
