The Tabula Cebetis (in the Greek manuscripts the title, with minor variations, is Κέβητος πίναξ) is an anonymous prose treatise that expounds lessons of popular moral philosophy, of uncertain dateFootnote ¹ but lasting influence. Its first part stages the encounter of a young man (and his friends)Footnote ² with a votive image that he fails to understand until an elderly exegete explains it to him in great detail as an allegory of initiation into a philosophical commitment to a life of virtue;Footnote ³ in its second part the fiction of a painting and its ekphrasis is largely abandoned in favour of a philosophical dialogue in some ways reminiscent of Plato. The Tabula has moved in critical estimation from being considered a text of considerable educational value, not only for morals but also for grammar and style, to nineteenth-century disdain as being jejune and derivative, to a more recent rehabilitation as a text that expresses imperial fascination with the overlap of aesthetic and ethical modalities, placing it thus at the centre of the cultural milieu of what is generally referred to as the Second Sophistic (it is mentioned twice, for example, by Lucian).Footnote ⁴ Praechter’s 1893 Teubner edition,Footnote ⁵ still the standard one, is based on twelve Greek manuscripts deriving from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries (and on two Latin versions), but in the meantime more than two dozen further Greek manuscripts, full and partial, have come to light;Footnote ⁶ in addition, an Arabic version of this text survives which offers an implicit interpretation as much as a strict translationFootnote ⁷ and transmits the fullest version of the ending of the work, missing in most Greek manuscripts.Footnote ⁸ The identity of the Arabic translator is unknown, but he appears to have been working as part of the celebrated Greco-Arabic Baghdad translation movement of the eighth to tenth centuries; his work was transmitted as part of the collection of wisdom literature called Jāwīdhān khiradh (Eternal Wisdom), composed by the scholar Miskawayh (c.932–1030).Footnote ⁹ Since Salmasius in the seventeenth century, the potential value of the Arabic text has been recognized for establishing the Greek original—Salmasius published the Greek and Arabic texts with a Latin translation—and Praechter too made use of it for his edition.Footnote ¹⁰ This note argues that a significant passage in the Greek text, which in current editions is baffling, may be clarified and emended with the help of the Arabic translation.

At a crucial juncture, the exegete describes the figure of Education (Paideia), who stands at the entrance to an enclosure, in which, it is promised, the initiate will meet the Virtues (Aretai). It is explained that Paideia heals the initiates from Pseudo-Paideia by giving them a powerful purifying drink (ποτίζῃ τὴν καθαρτικὴν δύναμιν, 19.1), which functions as an antidote to the drink of Deception (Apatē) that everyone (6.1) received previously (ποτίζει τῇ ἑαυτῆς δυνάμει, 5.2), as is explained in 14.3 (πίωσι τὰς τούτων καθαρτικὰς δυνάμεις). This striking use of the apparently abstract substantive dunamis to indicate a physical potion possessing a particular dunamis is picked up again later when the exegete explains how it is Paideia’s ‘own power’ which effects the transformation (22.1 and 23.4)—education as a force for change.Footnote ¹¹ The young man, however, does not understand the allegory (οὐ γὰρ συνίημι). The response of the exegete has several textual problems to which this article responds.

This is how the passage is printed by Praechter:

The analogy is based on the familiar Platonic model of the doctor and a sick patient and is straightforward and easy to understand (the young man will go on to say a few lines later [19.3] ταῦτα μὲν συνίημι). But there are serious problems with the sense of the first ten words of the exegete’s reply and some further ones with the tenses of the verbs.

The clearest evidence that something is amiss here is the adverb φιλοτίμως. The word φιλότιμος standardly means ‘ambitious, desiring honours’ and more broadly ‘eager’.Footnote ¹² It is a common adjective in later Greek, not at all necessarily pejorative (except in Plato and the Platonic tradition); it does not recur elsewhere in this text. What could the phrase φιλοτίμως κάμνων mean except ‘ambitiously or eagerly ill’, and what could that possibly mean? The English translation by Fitzgerald and White offers ‘critically’ (‘if someone were to fall critically ill’), and the Latin translations offer grauiter; and these are exactly the kinds of adverb, if any, that we would expect. But φιλοτίμως cannot mean ‘critically’ or ‘grievously’, nor is there an obvious emendation that would change it to a word that would give the sense that the reader expects. The alternative manuscript (M) reading φιλότιμος seems to have been what the Arabic translator read (and probably is the earlier reading in the Greek tradition, for which φιλοτίμως seems to have been introduced mistakenly in order to rescue the syntax, if not the sense), but it does not help very much in providing an understandable meaning: in the resulting phrase, ‘if some ambitious or eager man happened to fall ill’, what would be the point of specifying that the patient was an ambitious or eager man? (Nowhere later in this passage does the text revert to this qualification.)

The Arabic version, however, suggests that the problem lies deeper than a single word (one whose corruption would in any case be hard to explain). The Arabic has the exegete turn on the young man:

Though pleonastic, the Arabic translation follows the Greek quite faithfully:

1. 1. ἀλλὰ συνήσεις (fahimta)

2. 2. ὡς ἄν, εἴ τις φιλότιμος κάμνων ἐτύγχανε πρὸς ἰατρὸν ἂν δήπου γενόμενος (a-lā taʿlamu anna l-marīḍa iḏā qaṣada l-ṭabība), πρότερον (fa-baʿda wuṣūlihi ʿālaǧahu) καθαρτικοῖς ἐξέβαλε τὰ νοσοποιοῦντα (fa-iḏā naqiya naqāʾan ǧayyidan … min maraḍihi llaḏī kāna bihi), εἶτα (ḥīnaʾiḏin) οὕτως ἂν ὁ ἰατρὸς αὐτὸν εἰς ἀνάληψιν καὶ ὑγείαν κατέστησεν (yufāriquhu l-ṭabību … salīman).

3. 3. εἰ δὲ μὴ ἐπείθετο οἷς ἐπέταττεν, εὐλόγως ἂν δήπου ἀπωσθεὶς ἐξώλετο ὑπὸ τῆς νόσου (fa-in lam … ilā l-talaf).Footnote ¹⁵

The lone exception is what precedes fahimta, ‘you will understand’, in the Arabic, namely the conditional clause in ṣarafta ʿanka maḥabbata l-ṣalafi wa-l-takabburi ‘if you give up the love of bragging and arrogance’.Footnote ¹⁶ The exception is valuable, because it is hard, indeed perhaps impossible, to find in any Socratic dialogue—on which the dialogue section of the Tabula Cebetis is obviously modelled—an occasion when Socrates or another authority figure responds to an interlocutor’s failure to understand him with the simple rejoinder that ‘you will understand’. It is a repeated trope that Socrates (or other speakers) suggests an alternative route—through muthos rather than logos, or, as here, through an analogy (Phdr. 246a; Ti. 48d εἰκότων λόγων, 50d προσεικάσα). The model found in Socratic dialogue often involves a cyclical ebb and flow of aporia, and when the interlocutor hits a low point in comprehension, Socrates (or the leading interlocutor) offers ‘another clearer way’ to ‘more understanding’.Footnote ¹⁷ When the exegete in the Tabula Cebetis initially lays out the importance of hearing the allegory explained (3.1)—a passage whose complexity is well explored by Squire and Grethlein—the potential of learning is expressed, as one might expect, in a series of conditionals: ‘If you listen, you will learn …’, ‘if you pay close attention, you will benefit’. As it stands, the blunt declarative statement ἀλλὰ συνήσεις reads very awkwardly, without any parallel either in the Tabula Cebetis or in its most obvious dialogic models.

As an element of a conditional clause, however, the adjective philotimos could well apply to the young man who is very keen to enter the grove of the Virtues: ‘If you are eager to learn’. It is also possible to imagine an adverbial qualification: ‘If you eagerly pay attention’. Either one of these alternatives could easily have led to the Arabic version, which often has its own slant on Greek ethical vocabulary.

Consequently, we suggest that a conditional clause has dropped out after συνήσεις, perhaps through haplography with a repeated εἰ; and that φιλότιμος (and secondarily φιλοτίμως) has remained from the missing conditional cause and has been inserted mistakenly as a repairing gloss, either to replace another adverb with the sense of ‘critically’, ‘seriously’, or, since in fact no adverb is necessary for the sense, by the scribe’s slip of the eye. The original Greek would, we suggest, have meant something like ‘You will understand, if you are eager with regard to education’, he said. ‘Just as when an ill man …’.Footnote ¹⁸ The Arabic translator would have understood the conditional as a starker rebuke than the Greek suggests—which is in line with his exposition of motives elsewhere in the text. Basset, who produced one of the Arabic editions, notes correctly that the Arabic translator has misunderstood the analogy. ‘Le traducteur arabe n’a pas compris le sens de la réponse du vieillard qui parle du traitement préliminaire et non du traitement définitif.’Footnote ¹⁹ Indeed, the doctor’s treatment is only the beginning of the return to a healthy life, as we discuss below. The Greek has been misunderstood thus at two levels by the translator, but the process of misunderstanding may still indicate how the original Greek text has been corrupted.

γενόμενος in the sense of παραγενόμενος (turning up at the doctor’s) is paralleled (Hdt. 3.69; Thuc. 5.26, 7.80) and is made easier by the use of παραγενόμενος in the previous paragraph for the initiates who have arrived to be healed. The imperfect form ἐξέβαλλε, however, is very awkward and there is a strong manuscript tradition for the aorist ἐξέβαλε. The passage rehearses the model of a case history familiar from the Hippocratic corpus and other later medical texts. The patient attends the doctor (γενόμενος); the doctor first (πρότερον) gives him an emetic (καθαρτικοῖς); and second (εἶτα), after the emetic, puts him on the road to recovery (with, it is understood, diet, exercise and the usual pattern of rehabilitation). The continuative sense of the imperfect ἐξέβαλλε sits very awkwardly with the punctual aorist κατέστησεν. For it makes little sense of the case history: it is a sequence of events—attendance, emetic, rehabilitation. ἐξέβαλε should be read.

The difficulties of this passage demonstrate how important it is to read such a Greek text together with its Arabic version, when available, and with a broad sense of the cultural discourse it cues. The process of translation reveals the significance of the language and the assumptions of both texts. At this crucial moment of transition towards true Paideia, marked as significant by the youth’s statement of non-understanding which prompts a new and clearer statement from the exegete, the assumptions of educational process and of medical process become intertwined—and, ironically, misunderstood over time at the very moment understanding is promised. This would be yet another sign of the aesthetics of ἀπάτη at work in the Tabula Cebetis.Footnote ²⁰