Evidence of civil unrest within the Early Academy

In a separate place I will be arguing that Plato’s disciple and friend Philip of Opus had an intramural nickname “Amphinomus”. Likely this same student and colleague had a plurality of speaker-names, a pair of lead examples being : “Younger Socrates” and “Socrates Alternate”. For the present, this can be simply taken as a kind of lemma — that Philip’s various qualities led to some in-house nicknaming. Some of this nicknaming may have been affectionate [like calling Eudoxus ‘endoxus’] and some of it considerably less friendly. G.R. Morrow called attention to Plato’s indulging in word-play, even on solemn terms such as nemein/nomos [Plato’s Cretan City, p. 36]. Morrow takes this as an evidence of Plato’s own authorial hand in the (possibly) pseudo-Platonic Minos. It is quintessential Plato at the height of his powers who puns on the name ‘Eudoxos’ in Rep. VII,10, and who there leaves us a little lexical signal (setting the key phrase apart, in an apposition) — that he is doing word-play. J. Adam was likely understating the point when he allows that this surely Platonic piece of writing was only in theory making an allusion to a close colleague. In any case we may rightly leave room for some artfully contrived namings and re-namings, all internal to the Early Academy, as discussions and controveries developed near the elderly Plato.

We may venture a little more boldness here, taking that lemma as supportable on independent evidence. The same persona or ‘mask’ will be found to be linked to both variants of the same name: “Young Socrates” [in Venice’s margin] and “Socrates the Younger” [the official ‘dramatis persona’ list in both Venice and Vienna mss.] We may rightly notice that the “alternate” is a lightly generalised variant “Socrates Alternate [Σώκρατης Ἄλλος] ”, the question of his age having been factored out and dropped. This variation is worth following down in more detail, some of the primary evidence stemming from this same pair of good Plato manuscripts, T and W.

terms, each of them given its definition (likely by mathematicians writing slightly before the time when Aristotle wrote his Analytics, and likely also within the Academy. ) The famous Eudemian catalogue of geometers collaborating with one another and also with Plato will have been the likely source. Their writings were called ‘elementa antiquiores’ by Heiberg, whose history traced them to this same vicinity, that of the Early Academy.

The report by Aristotle about the man he calls “Younger Socrates” has all the signs of a matter-of-fact reporting from his memory records. There is no reason to think him mistaking the man he is reporting about with the literary figure alongside young Theaetetus inside Plato’s writing. We need hardly trouble to remind ourselves that this matter-of-fact turn of mind is characteristic of Aristotle. Whatever else we might think about Plato or Empedocles, or Heraclitus, these latter are all men of lively imaginations, poetic imaginations, at some remove from the matter-of-fact temperament of an Aristotle. It goes with their ‘natures’ or ‘temperaments’. Now ‘physis’ is a standard term for what we might call ‘temperament’ or ‘personality type’ today, — it is used that way in ps.-Aristotle, Problems 30, 6, where Empedocles and Plato have their temperaments or humors or ‘natures’ described. Contrasting with such ‘natures’ is that of Aristotle — so Aristotle’s remark matter-of-fact remark in Metaphys. Z,11 deserves our close attention. What are the historical facts likely behind it, the matters of fact ?

He says the man “Younger Socrates” had put forward this parable forth “repeatedly”. No, the parable is not the least persuasive to Aristotle. But after all we know it was characteristic of the Academy, not least of its young member Aristotle, to make very critical reviews of the opinions of others (some of them colleagues). They all clearly felt free to combat one another’s opinions. We may start from the name — perhaps an intra-mural nickname — “Socrates the Younger” or “Socrates Alternate”. We may be able to narrow down on one or two possibilities for what the content of this parable was, whether about command authority in the animal kingdom, or perhaps a teaching about animal sacrifice in some sense of this. The former has a reasonably strong hypothesis (about Neocles) supportive of it. The latter has the support of a reasonably strong interpretation of two or three of Plato’s dialogues Republic-and-after dialogues.

In the course of presenting evidence from that Early Academy, I will want to put forward an additional way of identifying this same man under these various names. I think him likely to be identical to the man from Plato’s circle nick-named “Amphinomus”. Homer has two characters who together form a “doublet”, Amphinomus and LeiodEs. Yet another of the suitors, named Ctesippus, will have a role to play at the Early Academy , reflected especially in late chapters of Euthydemus. These names all belong to suitors of Penelope, thus all are would-be claimants to Odysseus’s legacy. [this matter is analysed by Homer specialist B. Fenik in his 1974 work ‘Studies in the Odyssey’ (Mnemosyne ), pp. 192-196; the two ‘personae’ Amphinomus and Ctesippus will give some guidance to several of the reconstructions below.

If we today (2016 AD) are able to reconstruct a ‘voice’ for Penelope [the Longfellow Mansion presented such a re-enacted voice, in a versified “So Spoke Penelope”. This event took place in Cambridge, Mass. during summer 2016. Prof. Tino Villanueva, both poet and rhapsode, writes in powerful English verse and also in a northamerican Spanish, and is now in correspondence with Merton College’s Nicholas Richardson, author of the year-2003 edition of the OCD’s article “Penelope”. Richardson is an expert on the particular subject of the Homeric figure “Amphinomus”, along with much else in the old original Penelope’s epic surroundings. [There is some possibility that Plato the Early Academy’s “Amphinomus” and “Ctesippus” figures will be re-enlivened, alongside Plato’s disciple and friend, Younger Socrates, in these pages.]

Philip is credited with a Euclid-like work “Optics” (noticed by Burnyeat in his recent piece reviving Archytas’s “Optics”). He may also have been the same man under reference in the puzzling “twn sophwn tis” in Rep. IX,ix, 583B,ff. Adam’s App. IV makes a mighty effort to identify this τις “=tis”, spoken of as one of the “sophoi”, likely with a hint of irony. The two leading nominees whom Adam reviews are Antisthenes and Democritus. Then there is – paradoxically — Plato Himself – Philebus 44 B,ff, where the attitudes toward Pleasure are distinctly less Old School and preacherly.

But one particular man at the Old Academy who, apart from Plato, wrote at some length about Pleasure, was Philip. He should be a lively candidate; but he seems overlooked here. If we trust the SUDA report (you might as well say [kaitoige] ‘surely you don’t want to give preference to trusting ourselves, critics from 11 centuries later !’). Philip is credited with a treatise π. ἡδονῆς α. (“p. HEdonEs, 1 book”.) Our present-day vantagepoint does not allow us to say confidently that no part of that book found its way into what we now call Plato’s Philebus . Nor can we be sure none of it found its way, alongside material from Eudoxus, into Philip’s student’s book — EN Books I and X.

It may be helpful to insert here a brief discussion , based upon a series of Scholia to Euclid I, 15 (esp. Scholl. ##59-62). This will take us along a path JL Heiberg laid down. He collected and published with Teubner in 1888, the scholia to all of Euclid’s Elements. The Scholion of greatest interest in our present context is the one leading toward the Philip-like sentiment also expressed in Schol. #18 (skeptical towards ‘poiEsis’, on the grounds of its debatable concessiveness to ‘time-dependence’ inside mathematics). It includes a quite special and distinctive verb ‘diamphisbEtesis’ διαμφισβήτεσις also written by Aristotle in his piece ‘On Friendship’. This is material from Aristotle’s early years, some of which will have found its way into EN, at Bk IX, 2 1155 a 32ff.

Now Lewis Campbell the Plato scholar had called attention to the relative novelty of this specialist term at the time of Plato’s late dialogues. In Aristotle himself, however, it occurs several times, once in the suspect book of the Metaphysics, namely Book Kappa. This is the book that repeats much earlier material from the same treatise, and that is further peculiar in suffering from a rash of DeMundo-style phrasings ge mh\n ( γε μὴν ). Book Kappa is so much filled with unAristotelian features that scholars beginning with W. Christ and continuing past W.D. Ross agreed that Book Kappa should be deleted from Aristotle’s text. Herbert Granger has recently shown a disinclination to comply with this scholarly consensus, but in the main these two eminent Aristotle scholars have carried the day. All six of its γε μὴν ‘s and all of its other irregularities have been removed (alongside the removal of the tract also rich in γε μὴν ‘s , the DeMundo, — a tract of astronomical and meteorological purport, with side excursions into foreign-to-Aristotle issues such as how to flatter one or another god, Zeus especially, by pious recitation of His Hallowed name).

There is a good sense of ‘halfway’ which permits us to say that “Halfway back to Plato” we may find evidence of an Early Academic writer of significance for both Plato and Aristotle. We can take our starting point at a text in Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. He is doing some philological surgery, on words prefixed by “philo-“. Not at all unlike the way Plato finds ‘philo-sophos’ in Republic Book V, by factoring out the ‘-of-such-and-so’ from the words ‘lovers-of-such-and-so’ and then adding ‘-of-wisdom’. In Ethics Book I we have filo-qeamw=n ( φιλοθεαμῶν ) put adjacent to the analysis of fil[o]- ἱππος “Phil-ippos” . Can he be conveying a critical attitude toward his own teacher, a writer half-way back to Plato, a he points to as “Philip the Philo-theamwn” (φιλοθεαμῶν)? The possibility cannot be ruled out.

Certainly when writers’ conventions strongly discouraged using the names of living people (say Eudemus or Eudoxus or Theophrastus or Dicaearchus), we are not surprised when we fail to find those names in either Plato or Aristotle. Even a nearby writer like a Speusippus, a Xenophanes or an Isocrates is likely to appear only very rarely. Is Aristotle intending an oblique reference to one of his teachers, a student and friend of Plato’s ? He might just be copying Plato’s example in Lysis. Exhibiting an already noticed noticed bit of etymological adeptness. But if his opuntian birthname was ‘Philip’, is this not a likely allusion to his platonising teacher, call him Socrates Alternate or Socrates the Younger. I will have reason to claim elsewhere that Plato indulged in oblique personal references when he makes an extra gesture (grammatically isolated from its immediate context) at Tim. 28 b1-2. ‘One of you two may prefer a title such as ‘On the World‘ or ‘p. kosmou’, whilst the other may prefer the title ‘p. Ouranou‘ or ‘De Caelo’. For myself, he might continue, ‘Timaeus or p. physews’ are broadly provided for under my ‘…or whatever else we may opt to name this’. (see Tim. 28b2) All this allusiveness from an urbane Athenian Plato in the manner of an optativus urbanitatis.

I would suggest that there is already allusiveness in Aristotle’s dissecting the name of the man we know to have been between himself and Plato, Philip [of Opus]. But we can find much more in the vicinity of this allusion if we include the point that the word filoqeamw=n [‘philotheamOn’] is more likely what Aristotle wrote at 1099 a 10. We need not follow I. Bywater, who goes further than just dropping this word from his Oxford in his text, He also but also declines to mention its having any ms. authority, and is silent about this whole matter in his apparatus criticus. H.H. Joachim’s high admiration for Bywater and the other ‘Aristotelian Society’ scholars of his day was well founded [I refer to Joachim’s preface to the 1922 edition of the O.U.P. De Gen. et Corr.]. I once suggested to Balliol’s Jonathan Barnes by mail, that he might improve upon Bywater in the Ethics passage, but alas, I did not receive a reply from him to that particular point.

All the same we ought to follow the example of Slings (his edition of Clitophon, p. 342,f). But this requires us to keep the door open to the idea of an ‘ancient tradition’ behind any of various manuscript peculiarities which have somehow survived these dozens of centuries in our textual transmissions. In any case the present Oxford edition has the [considerably less plausible] reading filo-qeorw=n (‘philo-theorwn’). And, alas, Bywater did not preserve the Bekker note listing the “philo-theamwn” lection. This imports a quite different meaning, a difference of substance. It is as if we let a ‘theoretician’ be put in for a theater-goer. A lover-of-abstract-knowledge ( θεωρήμα qeorhma) for a lover-of-a-spectacle qea/ma (‘ θεάμα ’). ‘Theama’ is in fact the root word which is clearly intended by Aristotle to be echoed in the text of Bekker 1099 a10, pace O.U.P. and Bywater. So φιλοθεαμῶν (filotheamwn) has commensurate authority at a10.

We need to focus on that same Early Academy period (Olymp. 106, when Philebus is being composed, and Plato is in his very advanced years – those poignantly called ‘our sunset years’ in Laws VI, xiv — see Slings on Plato’s using the first-personal plural form, in Clitophon for example, to indicate ‘myself’ at 406 a10. Around this date we have Phil. 44B, referring to ‘some wise someone’ who is further described as ‘deinos peri physin’. John Adam made penetrating suggestions on the type of man here alluded to by Plato. ‘Pythagorean preachers’, says Adam (app. x to Rep. Bk IX. This would put our author at the Academy and make him not unlike the Empedocles referred to by Aristotle here in EN IX,2. A threesome of men is put together in Problems 6, 30. They have attributed to them a shared temperament or ‘personalilty-type’. Something about their black bile. This list has oddities of various sorts. But one striking point is its listing Socrates after Plato: Empedocles, Plato and Socrates. The Elder Socrates kept his bile pretty well controlled, we might think: “Go ahead and condemn me to death, O Athens ! As far as I know this may be a not so severe penalty, especially for a peaceable man, a reflective and perhaps even phlegmatic old man, now aged seventy”.

Can Younger Socrates, or Socrates Alternate have had something more bilious, even choleric, about him ? He would have to have had considerable personal energy and a willingness to thrust himself forward there at the Academy, to cause himself to stand out. He might be claiming a position in that succession of eminent men beginning back at Socrates Simpliciter, then coming forward via Plato and pointing ahead to such prominent men as Eudoxus, Aristotle and Theophrastus. Again, as we have reliable evidence to inform us, Philip put himself forward as having opinions worth publishing on topics under vigorous debate, such as pleasure, the passion of anger, On the Gods, and On Writing (p. graphein). Either of the standard meanings of ‘graphein’ here would make Philip a bold man: “On proving [as in geometry] or On Writing [as in Plato’s Phaedrus”].

Returning now to Aristotle’s seemingly polyonymous teacher, call him Amphinomus, call him LeiOdEs, call him Younger Socrates (basileia is among the things Aristotle has under DiamphisbEsis, not so ?) In that same DeMundo Chapt 7 spirit of Polyonymising I’d like to add to Philip’s names. We have it in our best ms. of the Euclid scholion (Heiberg de-prefers this reading, demotes it to his apparatus criticus): “AristolEs” [Ἀριστόλης] In Schol. #15, nearby to both #11 and #18 (each of these two latter has peculiarities which may be signs of Philip’s style) – we have a report about A)risto/lhj kai\ oi( gewme/trai (‘Aristo/lEs and the geometers’) . Whoever they were, they came up with their own favorite technical terms for various forms of initial hypotheses or “anapodeikta”. Whilst JL Heiberg has printed ‘AristotelEs’ here in Scholion #15, he is characteristically methodical, and retains in his Critical notes the true reading from our single MS source ( “P”): ‘Aristo/lhj’(sic) Call him AristoclEs, say I, since this stands not far, as a name, from either ‘SosiclEs’ (Plautus), or ‘NeoclEs’ (Problems, XXX, Ch. 6), an otherwise unfamiliar name at Old Academy.

Amphinomus is like the author of the De Mundo, who is emphatic about how Zeus manages his “polyonymy”. (some of us moderns experience shock at Zeus’s polygamy; others at his polyonymy. Philip piously admires both, and seems to promote sun-worship in Epinomis. Amphitryon is as admirable as Amphinomus at this time of Old Academy, with its presumed rivalries and jealousies [academic habits, as FM Cornford recognised, are enduring — see his pamphlet Microcosmographia academica. . Zeus seems positively to luxuriate in his variety of names as we see him there in DeMundo Chapt. 7 — even in its sheer variety. The author, whoever and whenever he was, passes many names of Zeus in review there in the work’s final chapter (Bekker p. 401). He and Zeus co-luxuriate in the polymorphic variety of all of this. It is only better if Zeus should have a son younger than Apollo, the cunning and contriving and thieving youngster. He will steal cattle early on. Later he will steal names and inspire others to such stealing. For example the forger of ps-Plato’s Letter #2, if he can be a ‘Socrates re-born’, can steal the name of Socrates and then (having had Plato confess that all of his written work was not truly his own, but rather belongs to Socrates) steal Plato’s entire oeuvre, including the Epinomis and the Minos !

Returning again to the man known to his mother as Philip: he and others near him at the Old Academy is a lively nominee to be author of the De Mundo. (My analysis, which draws on work by D. Schenkeveld, presses hard on the identity of this author. I end by finding Philip of Opus, the same author revealed behind mask of Plato, at the the ps.-Platonic “Epinomis”. My conclusion is that Philip was also known as ‘Amphinomus’, particularly where he and Speusippus try to combat a band of mathematicians in the immediate vicinity of Plato and the young Aristotle. [so reports Proclus, On Eucl Bk One] and therefore, intimately linked (as a ‘doublet’ to Homer’s Leiw/dhs (‘LeiOdEs’) figure. — See B. Fenik, “Studies in the Odyssey”, 1974.

Eudoxus, Speusippus and Aristotle, all joined Philip in writing on the Pleasure Question, the date of all of this Early Academy writing (including notably Philebus) : the 106th Olympiad at the latest. Rep. IX can easily have been under revision [recall D.H. on Plato’s continually revising his writings until on his death-bed.] This writing activity – including notably Plato’s own – was likely to be going forward at a rapid pace in Olympiads 104-106, at and after the date of Seventh Letter.

Amphinomus, a somewhat evangelical Friend of Forms’ seems the most plausible candidate for this man behind the mask of tw=n sofw=n tij (‘twn sophwn tis’). Our text of 583 B includes a case of ‘kaitoi’, a favorite of Plato’s quasi-friend. A way of decoding the nickname ‘Amphinomus’ leads via the epithet applied to the suitor Amphinomus in Odyssey XVIII, 152 : kosmh/twr laou= (‘kosmEtOr laou’). It is all the more ironic that it should be Odysseus himself who calls Amphinomus by this mis-placed epithet. But our Academic ambassador and voyager Plato, at Rep. 422C had raised a storm of ridicule against mythical Agamemnon, “do you say, absurdly, that our great strategist didn’t even know how to count the number of his own feet?” Plato uses the ‘kaitoi’ phrasing there too, keeping his tone jocular and vernacular.

Our author on Optics, on Pleasure, On Friends and Friendship and On the gods — the Pythagorean mathematician very close to Plato as he begins his Laws does well here.

Adam is looking for a suitable nominee to be a “preacher of the Orphic-Pythagorean type”, thus someone at once somewhat admirable and a bit suspect in Plato’s eyes. But again, textual and interpretive difficulties abound near 583B,ff. They provoke Adam to write explanatory appendices to his text there. It is clearly a heavy-hearted interpreter Adam who writes this complaint in his Appendix IX to Bk IX, about 585 C,f “the following sentences are among the most perplexing in the whole of the Republic, or indeed in the whole of Plato’s writings” (II, p. 354). Adam struggles, and then reconciles himself to “the least unsatisfactory solution” to his interpretive troubles. (ibid.)

Yes, as Cherniss argued influentially in the early 20th century, Aristotle’s polemics may at times have targeted a Straw Plato. But problematic though it is to put full trust in Aristotle’s reporting, my own view follows that of W.K.C. Guthrie, his piece “Aristotle as Historian”, which credits him with much careful reporting about his predecessors. This notably includes those he regarded as misguided or as lisping childishly in their groping to anticipate Aristotle’s own “more mature” or truer analysis. Even when targeting his beloved teacher Plato we do well to trust Aristotle’s reporting. An extreme case is (where his polemics often have a sharp edge, say when in the middle of a sharply worded attack on Plato he deploys the little phrase “hws epos eipein”, a favorite locution of Plato’s own, perhaps even an intimate creation or brainchild of Plato’s. J. Adam and L. Campbell called scholarly notice to over 50 iterations of it in Plato. When Aristotle was writing his (Brunschwig edited) Topics, (Huby convincingly placed this near the 103d Olympiad) he was not ready to give leadership, or misleadership, to little armies. Little and little-minded as are most intra-Academic armies. A recent staging of such smallness, vivid and telling in its imagery, was the movie “The Man who Knew Infinity”. A real war such as was being waged against Germany, but within Cambridge University’s walls the polemics raged about number theory and what credit to give a “foreign” voice. The foreigner was the Indian genius Ramanujan, rescued from his detractors on the faculty by GH Hardy.

D.A. Campbell reviews academic battles amongst literati which raged “with brief interruptions for two real wars” during the 20th century. We may reasonably offer this: it should be ‘axiomatic’ for any modernday academic [I mean ‘axiom’ in the senses of Scholl. 11 and 15 to Euclid I, as edited by J.L. Heiberg] that Academic wars can break out in many directions. They will be wildly various, as alliances form and sub-sectarian quarrels devolve from earlier and different battles of the larger sectarian units or tribes. Scholl. 11 and 15 bring out the etymology of ‘axiom’: “something which I or one of my colleagues currently think valuable, ἀξιούμεν (‘axioumen’)”]. In a letter a couple years ago I asked a colleague formerly from Balliol College – a widely respected Aristotle scholar, in fact — whether he had come up against such a local and party-quarrel context at or near Balliol, for such an august term as Aristotle’s word. Ἀξιώμα (Axioma). From his silence I infer that such a party-quarrel was something he had never witnessed at Balliol, nor heard tell of on his island, — say at Kings College Cambridge.

F.M. Cornford’s little tract, written down in a compressed 2-week period, gives a further perspective on academic in-fighting. He entitled it “Microcosmographia Academica”, echoing a title from the 17th century. Some decades later it came out in a second edition, where there will have been more intensity of historical scholarly research at work. The tract includes a large-scale photograph of a large collection of early 20th century “friends of the University[ sc. Cambridge]”. Stage-left in the photograph is a diminutive but head-held-high man, “the Orator”, and stage-center is the fully vested figure, that of the national and imperial Monarch himself. A curious and comedic variant on Plato’s ideal of political power intimately linked with Rhetorical Art. Dr. Henry Jackson was perhaps not on that photographer’s exact scene, but he will have had a pretty full comprehension of various of its details. Also, of its iconic value representing Plato’s phrase for party conflicts within philosophy, a scene of battles carried out ἀνδρειῶς καὶ ἐριστικῶς Rep V. 454 b5. This is where Holger Thesleff found Plato’s prose betraying an “onkos” style, the style of his latest dialogues, when Philip and his entourage were busy executing their intra-Academy “epistasis”, or “uprising”. Dr. Jackson got personally involved to such a depth in the intra-Cambridge issue over co-education there that he had to be (personally) carried into the Senate chambers to cast his vote (pro-women) there in 1921. Here is a glimpse of the Cornford-Jackson era at Cambridge:

(bis5) Cambridge University and Friends (1894 photo) rev2

Here is a curious sidelight on the history of this Universal, academic eristic. It goes back to fall of 1902 and spring of 1903 in Cambridge, England. Late in 1902 lectures were given by Dr. Henry Jackson in Cambridge on Aristotle. Notes were taken by then-young-scholar Leonard Hugh Graham (LHG) Greenwood. He took them from Dr. Jackson’s lectures on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. They have Jackson referring to Aristotle’s phrase κατὰ ξυμβέβεκος in a peculiarly dismissive way. Jackson called Aristrotle’s phrase “slang”. [these Greenwood notes are unpublished, but are contained in Greenwood’s minute letters, lovely multi-colored red and black inks, in his personal interleaved copy of the OCT text, later owned by Hamish Wilson and for a time owned by myself. I last saw this very volume in summer of 1984, having relayed it, via G.E.R. Lloyd, to Kings College Cambridge library. Jackson is there reported to have dismissed a series of chapters in Aristotle’s Book Zeta “with abuse”. Alas, these abusively treated chapters included chapter Z, 11 where Aristotle has mentioned a “Younger Socrates” and where he described, and criticised, his habitual ‘parable about animals’. Some of this material, net of Greenwood’s colorful red and black inks, will perhaps some day be published here on this website. Some of the special flavour of Edwardian England, and Bloomsbury may then be newly in evidence.

Whatever the accidentalities of the thing known as Academic quarrels, they do seem an essential and unremovable parts of what we may call our professsorial Herebelow. They are universal enough to counter the line-against-all-metaphysics, the Vienna line passively rehearsed and repeated by K.J. Dover in his Introduction, his 1980 edition of Symposium, p. 6. Consider this from Dover’s own hand:

“[Plato believed in] something more, something that ‘really exists’, unchanging, independent of our indefinitely adjustable and pragmatic definitions. Whether this belief happens to be right, happens to be wrong, or is insufficiently meaningful to be called either [emphasis my own]. . .”

As surely as the apostle Paul brought us doctrines later put out more systematically from St. Peter’s in Rome, so surely does the acolyte Dover here echo doctrines sourced from the Vienna of the 1920s and 1930s. The apostle in our case went by the name Alfred J. Ayer. Perhaps contrary to their wishes, the acolyte and the apostle help us overturn the dogmatism flowing down out of their circle’s center, Vienna. Late in calendar year 2019 Vienna seems to have been the destination of a pair of Soviet-born criminals who could boast of close affiliation to the most powerful man then living.

To resume the story of our men very near to Plato in time and place. Some of their later followers seem to have felt free to “tamper” with rival texts (so Dillon, following Whittaker) in what we may call, following Campbell, the art of “victorious analysis”.

A lead example here is one Philip had a special interest in. It is a close parallel to — perhaps it was in fact identical — what is at stake back at Schol. #18 to Book I of ‘Elements’. The Scholiast wants to uplife and edify the reader by raising up his gaze to a level of more purely noetic reality. We must discipline ourselves to make sure we are gazing only upon the pure and purely mathematical. But this requires us to avoid so to speak “soiling our hands” on anything like with production-or-making. The famous ‘Divided Line’ calls on us to section off (a recently trendy formula for this is ‘draw a bright line’) — between those ‘lower’ applications of the human mind, where ‘gross matter’ is managed, manoeuvered, manipulated and so forth. What it is customary to entitle or label (epiklEsis is the word in Epinomis 973b) ‘PoiEsis’. Some ‘corrector’ seems to have made of Plato’s bright line between ‘dianoeta’ and ‘noeta’ full stop far less bright. Thus the blurring of boundary between mathematical objects and truly ideal objects there at Rep. VII, 511d2, now made brighter again by Slings’s valuable removal of the 5-word “kaitoi” clause, in his 2003 OCT edition.

The very label Q.E.F., or in the ancient form ὅπερ ἔδει ποιῆσαι , says Philip or the Philip-like commentator there, invites us to depreciate the thing ‘made’ or ‘produced’. The phrase “hoper edei poiEsai” implies our platonist demotion of its status as ‘mere product’. Essences are a whole world different. They are “there”, not “here” to paraphrase a retort to the young Aristotle’s challenge. An object of ‘Thewrein’ is just there for us to gaze upon. It makes no sense to say of The Triangle-as-Itself that it was ever “made”. Here we are encountering a variant of the same issue that created a schism within the Academy, that which had the “eternal cosmos” only in a figurative or ‘pedagocical’ sense a thing “made” or “constructed”. Thus in the case of Prop. 1 of Euclid, the ‘once triangle’ is only said of a figure ‘just now constructed’. Mathematical constructions, like cosmological ones, can only be metaphorical. If the lectures at Harvard’s Science Center in 2016 speak of the “origin” of gravity or the gauge/gravity duality, they must be taken to be exercising imagination, not pure mathematico-physical intellection. Thus we need to keep bringing out for ourselves, an epi-demiourgic dimension in all this. This means we must remind ourselves that mathematical objects must be kept timeless and changeless. Full-strength Platonic, in short. This matches precisely what Speusippus’s colleague Amphinomus presented in disputing against the “Friends of the Earth” there at the Academy near the time of Sophist. As if ignoring Diotima’s warning about the term about “poiEsis” being multiplex in its meaning, the mathematician should abstain from the time-referring language of “making”.

A statue in alongside Boston’s Tremont St. carries the caption “Industry”, and shows a dodecahedron under construction. Here is a snapshot of this Theaetetus-like man, at work:

Diotima to the elder Socrates ideality which “poiesis” is a threat to. Thus we must continue to divide in a bright-line way between then-triangle(s) and the kind Scholion #112 formulates the essential triangle : τὸ τρίγωνον ᾕ ἑαύτῇ (to\ tri/gwnon h(=| e(auth=|) , in other words the one resident amongst the Ever-Similar range of things. To be sure, the classical locus of this complaint from Philip is in Proclus. It may be natural to suppose that Heiberg’s Schol. #112 to Euclid Book I derives from Proclus. This would mean it had only a slim chance of being traceable to something written while Plato was still alive, or even anything as early as (say) Plutarch or Chrysippus. An argument is wanting, in the spirit of “let us philologues be as keen to avoid the rash extreme of uncritical skepticism as we standardly are in avoiding incaution” – the spirit, let us call this, of Walter Burkert. A philologue’s behavior can rhyme with “Vorsicht”, to be sure. But rational Vorsicht may call on him to restrain his over-restraint, and test out impartially the likelihood (however slim) that, as Slings has put it recently “something ancient” may lie behind the peculiarities we now and then in texts we have before us today.

We may express this in at least two ways, where the parallelism will be manifest. (1) The Triangle ‘hE heautE’ has never known a time when it Was Not, or when it (so to speak) ‘stood in need of being constructed’ and (2) that is by nature a thing of which we may not legitimately ask the question e)/c ou(=( ‘ex hou’ ) question – unless we are prepared to accept a somewhat paradoxical form of answer. ‘Mathematical’ or ‘geometrical’ matter is an answer with the air of paradox about it; the puzzling phrase ‘noEtic matter’, coming down to us from the Old Academy when Aristotle and Younger Socrates were there debating mathematical platonism in the way rival ‘diadochoi’ or ‘heirs’ might debate (even quarrel) over rival heritages they were prepared to draw from Plato himself. There will be another view of this same subject – drawn from a man we may identify with the anonymous ‘someone’ of Proclus’s Friedlein p.

You may ask: “but where do you find a text carrying that phrase of yours ‘geometrical matter’?” There is an answer, thanks to careful scholarly work such as that by G. Friedlein (Teubner), his edition of Proclus “In primum Euclidis…”, esp. p. 49, line 5, and p. 50 lines 7,f. We’ll be equivocating (cf. speaking perabusively, in the manner of the ‘diakatachrEstikoteros’ of Schol. 30 to Eucl. Bk V, if we act like we have just a single ‘middle’ between pure NoEsis and that extremely movable/variable contact with the multiple “ekgonoi’ [cf. pg. 53,26] amongst material things. [was it not likely to be Philip who wrote that suite of Scholia, — perhaps in various works done to various ends originally — drawing out a metaphor of ‘mothers’, ‘ancestors’, ‘offspring’. I mean Schol. to Chapt IV of Bk X. Likely so, I now judge – 04.iv.12]

Geometrical matter is an ‘out of which’ for (a) triangle, (b) circle or (c) [definition of] SchEma ‘out of [dia]noEtic matter’, and (you might as well say) ‘out of geometric matter’ or ‘out of noEtic matter’. Now is a wholly unintrusive ‘looking upon’ that the mathematician, at his full dianoEtic “PoiEton” is replaced by Philip with “noEton” at Tim. 92 C, as fits well with a ‘pythagorean knowledgeable about Nature’. It takes a proud and self-assured “preacher” to tamper thus with any text in the Eighth Tetralogy. The deeply inventive mind of Philip (Younger Socrates) was such a preacher, I believe, and did much of his work near Olympiad 105-106.

24.xi.12:

At the Old Academy, Philip’s nickname appears to have been “Amphinomus”. possibly he had a second speaker-name, h.e. “Younger Socrates”. This possibility should be followed down by someone, perhaps myself, when a website like youngersocrates.net exists and is hospitable to this. Each was well acquainted with mathematics, each was personally known to the elderly Plato and the juvenile Aristotle. Anyone from that same Early Academy will have associated Amphinomus with LeiOdEs, in the tradition of Homer being the ‘doublet’ character to Amphinomus. [so B. Fenik ‘Studies in the Odyssey’ (Mnemosyne 1974), esp. pp. 192-196.].

But one particular man at the Old Academy who, apart from Plato, wrote at some length about Pleasure seems overlooked here. If we trust the SUDA report (you might as well say ‘surely you don’t want to trust ourselves, critics from 11 centuries later !’). Philip is credited with a treatise p. h(donh=j a. (“p. HEdonEs, 1 book”.) Our present-day vantagepoint does not allow us to say confidently that no part of that book found its way into what we now call Plato’s Philebus. Nor can we be sure none of it found its way, alongside material from Eudoxus, into EN Books X and IX.

It may be worthwhile to insert an excursus here, Scholia to Euclid I, 15 (esp. Scholl. ##59-62). This will take us down a path JL Heiberg laid down. He collected and published with Teubner in 1888, the scholia to all of Euclid’s Elements. the one leading toward the Philip-like sentiment expressed in Schol. #18 (skeptical towards ‘poiEsis’, as making concessions to ‘time-dependence’ inside mathematics). We might take steps to follow the distinctive verb ‘diamphisbEtein’ written by Aristotle in his piece ‘On Friendship’, — on some good accounts of Aristotle’s early writing this will have found its way into EN, at Bk IX, 2 1155 a 32ff. As far back in time as Plato this rather specialised verb was a striking one, on account of its rarity. In Aristotle himself, however, it occurs several times, once in the suspect Met. Kappa. This is the book that repeats much earlier material from the same treatise, and that is further peculiar in suffering from a rash of DeMundo-style phrasings ge mh\n (‘ge mEn’). Various of these peculiarities were too much for Aristotle scholars beginning with W. Christ and continuing past W.D. Ross. They agreed that Book Kappa should be deleted in its entirety. Herbert Granger has recently shown a disinclination to comply with this scholarly consensus.

There is a good sense of ‘halfway’ which permits us to say that “Halfway back to Plato, — if we began from Aristotle, — we have our filo-qeamw=n(“ PhilotheamOn”) adjacent to Aristotle’s chancing upon the etymology fil[o]-ippoj “Phil-ippos” of Plato’s student, Philip of Opus, Aristotle’s teacher in turn [see 1099 a 10 in the ‘E’ MS, commended by myself in a letter to J. Barnes, mine of early Feb 2010].

There is already some allusiveness in Aristotle’s alluding to the name of the man between himself and Plato, Philip of Opus. But there is more to the allusion if we include the point that the word filoqeamw=n [‘philotheamOn’] is more likely what Aristotle wrote at 1099 a 10. We need not follow I. Bywater, who not only does not read this word, but also declines to mention its having some ms. authority, even in his apparatus criticus. In any case the present Oxford edition has the [somewhat less plausible] reading filo-qewrw=n (‘philo-theorwn’). But this imports a quite different meaning, a difference of substance. It is as if we let a ‘theoretician’ be put in for a theater-goer. A lover-of-abstract-knowledge (qeorhmata) for a lover-of-spectacles qea/mata (‘theamata’). ‘Theama’ is in fact the root word meant to be echoed at Bekker 1099 a10. So qeamw=n has commensurate authority at a10.

Roughly that same time (say early Olymp. 106, when Philebus is being composed, and Plato in his very advanced years – those poignantly called ‘our sunset years’ in Laws VI, xiv — see Slings on Plato’s using the first-personal plural form, in Clitophon for example, to indicate ‘myself’ at 406 a10. Around this date we have Phil. 44B, referring to ‘some wise someone’ who is further described as ‘deinos peri physin’. John Adam made penetrating suggestions on the type of man here alluded to by Plato. ‘Pythagorean preachers’, says Adam (app. x to Rep. Bk IX. This would put our author at the Academy and make him not unlike the Empedocles referred to by Aristotle here in EN IX,2. A threesome of men is put together in Problems xxx, 6. They have attributed to them a shared temperament or ‘personalilty-type’. Something about their black bile. This list has oddities apart from mentioning Socrates after Plato: Empedocles, Plato and Socrates. The Elder Socrates kept his bile pretty well controlled, we might think. Can Younger Socrates have had something more bilious about him ?

Returning now to Aristotle’s seemingly polyonymous teacher, call him Amphinomus, call him LeiOdEs, call him Younger Socrates (basileia is among the things Aristotle has under DiamphisbEsis, not so ?) In that same DeMundo Chapt 7 spirit of Polyonymising I’d like to add to Philip’s names. We have it in our best ms. of the Euclid scholion (Heiberg de-prefers this reading, demotes it to his apparatus criticus): “AristoclEs”. In Schol. #15, nearby to both #11 and #18 (each of these two latter has peculiarities which may be signs of Philip’s style) – we have a report about A)risto/lhj kai\ oi( gewme/trai (‘Aristo/lEs and the geometers’) . Whoever they were, they came up with their own favorite technical terms for various forms of initial hypotheses or “anapodeikta”. Whilst JL Heiberg has printed ‘AristotelEs’ here in Scholion #15, he is characteristically methodical, and retains in his Critical notes the true reading from our single MS source ( “P”): ‘Aristo/lhj’(sic) Call him AristoclEs, say I, not far from either SosiclEs (Plautus), or NeoclEs (Problems, XXX, Ch. 6), an otherwise unfamiliar name at Old Academy.

Amphinomus is like the author of the De Mundo, who is emphatic about how Zeus manages his “polyonymy”. (some of us moderns experience shock at Zeus’s polygamy; others at his polyonymy. Philip piously admires both. Amphitryon is as admirable as Amphinomus at this time of Old Academy rivalries and jealousies. Zeus seems positively to luxuriate in his variety of names as we see him there in DeMundo #7 — even in its sheer variety. The author, whoever and whenever he was, passes many names of Zeus in review there in the work’s final chapter (Bekker p. 401). He and Zeus co-luxuriate in the polymorphic variety of all of this. It is only better if Zeus should have a son younger than Apollo, the cunning and contriving and thieving youngster. He will steal cattle early on. Later he will steal names and inspire others to such stealing. For example the forger of ps-Plato’s Letter #2, if he can be a ‘Socrates re-born’, can steal the name of Socrates and then (having had Plato confess that all of his written work was not truly his own, but rather belongs to Socrates) steal Plato’s entire oeuvre, including the Epinomis and the Minos !

Returning again to the man known to his mother as Philip: he and others near him at the Old Academy is a lively nominee to be author of the De Mundo. (My analysis, which draws on work by D. Schenkeveld, presses hard on the identity of this author. I end by finding Philip of Opus, the same author revealed behind mask of Plato, at the the ps.-Platonic “Epinomis”. My conclusion is that Philip was also known as ‘Amphinomus’, particularly where he and Speusippus try to combat a band of mathematicians in the immediate vicinity of Plato and the young Aristotle. [so reports Proclus, On Eucl Bk One] and therefore, intimately linked (as a ‘doublet’ to Homer’s Leiw/dhj (‘LeiOdEs’) figure. — See B. Fenik, “Studies in the Odyssey”, 1974.

Our author on Optics, on Pleasure, On Friends and Friendship — the Pythagorean mathematician [Philip] very close to Plato as he begins his Laws does well as a candidate here.

Adam is looking for a suitable nominee to be a “preacher of the Orphic-Pythagorean type”, thus someone at once somewhat admirable and a bit suspect in Plato’s eyes. But again, textual and interpretive difficulties abound near 583B,ff. They provoke Adam to write explanatory appendices to his text there. It is clearly a heavy-hearted interpreter Adam who writes this complaint in his Appendix IX to Bk IX, about 585 C,f “the following sentences are among the most perplexing in the whole of the Republic, or indeed in the whole of Plato’s writings” (II, p. 354). Adam struggles, and then reconciles himself to “the least unsatisfactory solution” to his interpretive troubles. (ibid.)

We may even say further this: it should be ‘axiomatic’ [in the senses of Scholl. 11 and 15 to Euclid I] for any modernday academic that Academic wars can break out in many directions, earlier and later, varying wildly as alliances form and sub-sectarian quarrels devolve from earlier and different battles. Scholl. 11 and 15 bring out the etymology of ‘axiom’: “something of which I or one of my colleagues have recently held a)ciou/men (‘axioumen’)”]. In a letter a couple years ago I asked a colleague formerly from Balliol College – an Aristotle scholar, in fact — whether he had come up against such a local and party-quarrel context for such an august term as Aristotle’s word A)ciw/ma . From his silence I infer that such a party-quarrel was something he had never witnessed at Balliol, nor heard tell of at Kings College Cambridge either.

These men seem to have felt free to “tamper” (so Dillon, following Whittaker).

A lead example of a motivation is one Philip had a special interest in. It is a close parallel to what is at stake back at Schol. #18 to Book I of ‘Elements’ our intentions are only pure and purely mathematical if we don’t (in a manner of speaking) soil our hands with production-or-making. The famous ‘Divided Line’ calls on us to section off those ‘lower’ applications of the human mind, where ‘gross matter’ is managed, manoeuvered, manipulated and so forth. What it is customary to entitle or label (epiklEsis is the word in Epinomis 973b) ‘PoiEsis’.

The very word, says Philip there guides us to deprecate the thing ‘made’ or ‘produced’. The phrase “hoper edei poiEsai” implies our platonist demotion of its status as ‘mere product’. Essences are not like that. An object of ‘Thewrein’ is just there for us to gaze upon, by contrast. It makes no sense to say of The Triangle-as-Itself (hE heautE).

the ‘once triangle’ is only said of a figure ‘just now’ constructed – in order to bring out this fundamental falling short of being and ideality, and to divide between then-triangle(s) and the kind Scholion #112 formulates the essential triangle : to\ tri/gwnon h(=| e(auth=| , in other words the one resident amongst the Ever-Similar range of things. To be sure, the classical locus of this complaint from Philip is in Proclus. It may be natural to suppose that Heiberg’s Schol. #112 to Euclid Book I derives from Proclus. This would mean it had only a slim chance of being traceable to something written while Plato was still alive, or even anything as early as (say) Plutarch or Chrysippus. An argument is wanting, in the spirit of “let us philologues be as keen to avoid the rash extreme of uncritical skepticism as we standardly are in avoiding incaution” – the spirit, let us call this, of Walter Burkert. A philologue’s behavior can rhyme with “Vorsicht”, to be sure. But rational Vorsicht may call on him to restrain his over-restraint, and test out impartially the likelihood (however slim) that, as Slings has put it recently “something ancient” may lie behind the peculiarities we now and then in texts we have before us today.

++++++++++++++++

Who appropriated the name ‘Younger Socrates’ for himself near the time when Plato was writing STATESMAN and LAWS ? I find it likely to be a ‘diadochos’ or ‘successor’ in the sense of LAWS VI, Ch. xiv, — in this case a self-appointed Nomo-phylax. This self-appointed man also composed the pseudo-Plato ‘Epinomis’, possibly also the ps.-Aristotle De Mundo, arrogating to himself the role of lawful Successor, the heir-apparent to Plato Himself at the Academy, a compound of Astronomer-Philosopher-King. This singular man would make it no longer required for Plato to author his promised dialogue The Philosopher.

The key will be to hunt down the King [think of the king at Tht. 146 a 4, βασιλεύσει ἡμῶν ]. A medieval MS in the Ashmolean collection at Bodleian Library Oxford carries the name of its author: ‘Socrates Basileus’. This names ‘Socrates the King’. Possibly we are getting a pointer to a ‘Socrates’, a man skilled in astronomy and present at the Old Academy. I believe this to be Plato’s intention. This would be a man, with quite direct lines of influence on the young Aristotle, bold enough to apply the nickname ‘Younger Socrates’ to himself personally. Several events reported from near Plato can be better explained if we understand the name ‘Younger Socrates’ — Plato’s own stage-name or mask for someone likely personally close to himself and very skilled — as ripe for exactly such an appropriation, especially by a nearby man skilled in astronomy. This stage-name will have certainly been at least theoretically to any of the little set of broadly knowledgeable ‘mathematikoi’. Top ranked amongst these will have been those skilled at astronomy and also ambitious to cross the boundary and promote himself to the rank of dialectician.

That is to say, a man whose specific skills lie precisely at the border between the lower and the higher rank of ‘noEta’ [ νοητὰ ]. It is as if objects of mathematical cognition could suffer their subordinate rank amongst ‘noEta’ to be overruled, even at the cost of Plato’s contradicting himself late in Book VI. Both Adam [Appendix XI to Bk VI] and Campbell [Vol II, p. 16] think Plato himself was in this way falling into contradiction, R. 511 d2. Slings salvages truth and Plato by excluding the entire phrase ‘kaitoi… archEs’ from his OCT text [Slings drops this and his reasons are published in the posthumous notes assembled by Boter et al.] Slings advanced an abundance of reasons for his excision, his explanation running to the greatest length of any of this volume’s notes]. Venetus T includes a suggestive erasure and copyist’s overstrike exactly where Slings calls for the dropping of the crucial 5-word phrase, begun with the ‘kaitoi’.

If several of these bold initiatives from Plato’s subordinates there during Olymp. 104 be taken together, we may bring together a rebellious attitude here surfacing as an interpolation. (late in Chapt xxi of Bk VI ). More detail is naturally needed here, to bring together the concentration of these various overturnings and reversals. If these lightly veiled references to “disturbing and wandering” effects can be responsibly traced to a single cluster of causes, we have major landmarks to guide us in doing some reconstruction of these troubles. In Timaeus, in Euthydemus, in a puzzling string of light irregularities late in Bk. II of Republic, and in various of the ideas of the young Aristotle as he works on early works such as Rhetoric, Analytics, De Gen. et Corr. and De Caelo.

Further, it may be that this presumptuous King Socrates will have pushed his personal self-assertion to the point where he imagines substituting himself for Plato, the underling for the Master, somewhat in the pattern of the Bodleian Library’s medieval ms., a writing Socrates displacing a temporarily non-writing (and clearly perturbed) Plato. Another way of describing this gradually advancing habit of insubordination within the Academy near to Olympiad 106: ‘insurrection’ or ‘insurgency’ or ‘epanastasis [ἐπαναστάσις] ‘ as outlined early in Chapt. xviii of Republic IV.

To resume. Such arrogant behavior would have amounted to something like a “slave-revolt”, or an irritating or satirisable insurrection, its leader being rightly named — a stasiarch (leader of insurgents). This disorderly interlude at the Early Academy after the third Sicilian travels of Plato can rightly also be named by Plato’s specially coined word in LAWS, ‘StasiOteia’ [ Στασιωτεία ]. A.E. Taylor interprets this word with his own fabrication “no-constitution”, an apt interpretation. Top people who head up factions in epoch’s of intense civil unrest are winners in the Race to the Bottom, Leaders and Followers suffering this form of ‘perturbation’. This will mean that this temporarily-coronated King (cartoon image supplied below) risks a satirico-comical treatment. F.M. Cornford’s ‘Microcosmographica Academica’ had its 17th century prototype behind it. This present picture suggests it may also have faintly forewarning indicators in antiquity. The scene will have been set approximately in the 106th Olympiad when Aristotle had yet to produce any of his major work, but was present and active, active and writing. Some of the enigmatic features of that Early Academy may find partial unriddling here.

Plato is likely to have been still at work writing or revising Republic in Olympiad 106 when he was also at work on Statesman and Laws. E.R. Dodds’s edition of Gorgias implies that he was still revising that as late as 354 BC. If so, we would expect our texts of Republic to be subject to repercussions of this micropolitan disturbance and trepidation and wandering. We may gather some unusual phrasings from Books I, IV and VII of Republic and its discussions of ‘the true Astronomer’ [ Book VII: ὁ τῷ ὄντι ἀστρόνομος ] or ‘the True Calculator [Book I: ὁ τῷ ὄντι λογίστης ] to give some of these hypotheses a particular footing in Plato’s texts. Some puzzles about the cosmic layers within the De Generatione et Corruptione will be made less puzzling, on this hypothesis. This blood-and-bone man, — King Socrates as he did not shrink from calling himself — risked creating a fundamental per-disturbance inside that late-Plato period of the Earliest Academy. A significant linguistic signal from that same Olympiad: the poorly attested specialist word diatarassw [ διαταράσσω ] of Laws 693 e, echoed in Plutarch, but very rarely found elsewhere. More on this specialist language and its background in the usage of early mathematics is pursued below.

Two other specialist words descriptive of similar kinds of disturbance should be drawn from a list at the end of Book IV of Republic. These all allude to a pattern of human behavior, likely manifest within this same this man’s disruptive activities at the Academy. One of these two terms is extremely uncommon and the other (on which the first is clearly patterned) is rather common. allotriopragmosunE, [ ἀλλοτριοπραγμόσυνη : ‘behaving like someone foreign to our family group’] and ‘polypragmosunE’ [ πολυπραγμόσυνη : ‘behaving in a meddlesome or interfering way’ ]. The former word is a great rarity, a ‘PAWAG’ we will call it if we follow the suggestion of a recent scholarly coinage, h.e. a PoorlyAttestedWordinAncientGreek). This word not only lacks any recognised examples outside its unique-within-Plato Republic IV passage. Even within Plato’s lexicon it has a further distinction: the relay of this Book IV passage by Stobaeus simply drops out this word from Plato’s text [Slings’s 2003 note repairs the lack of scholarly notes to Plato’s official OCT text; Burnet had remained silent in his OCT of 1901 — also silent Adam’s Cambridge text and the Bude text and Shorey’s Loeb, all major editions from the first part of the XXth century]. The prevailing consensus of the Plato mss. however does carry all three of Plato’s list (1) “polypragmosunE”, (2) “allotriopragmosunE” and (3) “epanastasis”; all of them making reference to insurgencies of one sort or another. The second of these words stands out here for its lexical rarity: it is the only PAWAG. It creates an echo of “polypragmosunE”, the sensitive word from Elder Socrates’s older accusers, who made him out to be guilty of punishable political meddling.

The word ‘taraxh’, which is closely associated with the broader context of this rare word, is itself not at all a rarity. It is commonly translated with terms such as ‘perturbance’ or ‘disturbance’ or ‘turbulence’ or ‘turmoil’. We might think of it as a polar opposite to the related term ‘ataraxy’ — from which a modern-day drug called ‘Atarax’ has borrowed its name. Ataraxy amounts to the suppression of ‘taraxh’ [ταραχὴ ]; so it is the same as the psychic calm which has to do with a person’s self-protection from various troubling passions, anxieties, turmoils or perturbed states of mind.

We may pause to follow down a specialist usage of this ‘perturbance’ word, within mathematics. An early book of Euclid (Book V) has roots in the Early Academy, its original author being Plato’s colleague Eudoxus of Cnidus. Sir T.L. Heath wrote notes on this term, in his 1921 History of Greek Mathematics, echoed in the 1996 edition of LSJ. The usage comes from ratio theory, where it appears in Elements Book V, Def. 18. It is the same same root word ταράσσω from which this definition draws its ‘tetaragmenh analogia’. This definition refers to a disturbed order in ratios within the “ex aequali” operation. In specific, it involves the reversal-of-order of the ‘leader’ and ‘follower’ terms within a suite of ratios. Now Book V is a book whose origins we can trace with confidence to a pre-Euclidean source; a well-informed scholiast writes “this book is by Eudoxus”. LSJ singles Def. 18 out, alongside a somewhat similar usage by Archimedes, as the “math.” usage of the verb ‘tarassw’ [ταράσσω see LSJ s.v. I, 7]

This particular Book authored by Eudoxus puts us in touch in turn with the young Aristotle, who was on intimate terms with Eudoxus. There is a pointed meaning to ‘taraxh’ in Rep. IV’s and the Academy’s particular human context, since on the mathematical side of it we find pairs of ratios which share a ‘middle’ term. The special kind of disturbance involves displacing something from the ‘follower’ position (we now call this the ‘denominator’) in a ratio, re-locating it to the ‘leader’ position (now called ‘numerator’). Thus Plato’s use of ‘taraxh’ in a polital or micro-political context, if we keep in mind the Eudoxan connotations, will give more detailed significance to ‘allotriopragmosunE’.

Now we may usefully pause here to anticipate a serious objection. There are scholars who get much troubled by anyone’s suggesting (via use of terms such as ‘numerator’ or ‘denominator’) that anything so incipiently German as ‘rational numbers’ would be remotely relevant to our ancient Greeks before and at Euclid’s time. Let such troubled scholars, however, undertake to prove that our best texts of Euclid have no Scholion #30, to Bk V, Def. 9, that Eudoxan book’s definition of ‘diplasion’. Let them meantime stay calm and ataractic at our apparent anachronism, and give us all a full explanation of the Scholiast’s examples. I mean the example he uses by taking a 1:3 ratio “meta_itself” and getting something he here puts forward as ‘double’, which is 1:9 . Our scholiast wants us (recall that he is writing good classical Greek and thus writing at a distinctly pre-German era within our indogermanic languages) clearly wants us to compare A meta B [or A meta A] where the ‘meta’ is multiplying a pair of rational numbers to a slightly different operation. For he offers the other result on the 1:3, namely 1:6, asking us to note that 1:6 is not identical to 1:9. He draws the logical moral too: what is here set down as a ‘l e g e t a i’ [perhaps by Eudoxus?] appears to conflict with Truth, ‘a l E th e i a’ (!) All this delicate paradoxing and the man never uses anachronistic words such ‘doch’, ‘nicht’ or ‘estaunlisherweise’.

[Bringing in Book V of Euclid sets up in me a special feeling of personal pride, in that I had a brief exchange of letters in spring of 1972 with Prof. Abraham Robinson, then at Yale, about Book V of Euclid, and its concept of Equality. Not surpisingly, I have carefully held onto the original of Prof. Robinson’s brief letter to me these past 43 years. Sadly for the world of philosophy and of mathematics (and for Plato scholarship) the past 41 years have suffered from the sad fact of Robinson’s very premature death in 1974. Robert Goldblatt in his 2012 book on the ‘hyperreals’ calls Robinson’s 1966 book Non-standard analysis “immortal”. In the personal collection of letters dating back to the 1960, Robinson’s short letter to me mentioning Euclid Book V it is hard for me personally to think of its surviving the man. It gives me the personal feeling of having been in close touch with at least three immortals, Euclid, Eudoxus and Robinson.

Rudy Rucker formulates a list of logicians working on Foundations, at the end of his recent book “The Lifebox, The Seashell and the Soul” (2005). His list (call it the number-theory-sequence) runs from the Russell-Whitehead optimisms about formal systems, via Hilbert’s equally optimistic pronouncement about “no ignorabimus” [“you have to love a guy so scholarly that he can’t avoid lapsing into Latin”] and then on via the explosive work of Goedel, Turing and Rucker himself (formal systems are shown in repeated examples to be incomplete as they apply to the natural world, says Rucker, instances that are impossible either to prove true or to prove false, “thanks to my analysis of computation”, Op. cit., p. 442. Rucker is here not colliding with the advice of Plutarch in his recipes for “Executing self-praise whilst avoiding giving offense”.) Unhappily Rucker omits Robinson from this sequence of number-theorists. But General Quantification Theory and its revisions to Russellian denotation can helpfully look back via the shadows or halos or monads or overlapping_neighbourhoods of Robinson’s work toward hyperreals and the non-standard sign of Identity [≅], helpful in reconstructing denotation and the quantifier Q^(the). Douglas Hofstadter coined the specialist phrase “SeekWhence” to encode the inverse of the relation of “Sequence”. ]

Let us return to that concept of ‘uprising’ or ‘overturning’ or ‘turning upside down’. Plato is likely to be taking up Eudoxan connotations of this usage as he borrows from the mathematician’s language. The Eudoxan usage of ‘tetaragmenE’ occurs, as noted above, in the same famous list of Definitions in which the so-called “Archimedean Axiom” appears as Def. 3. “Perturbed proportion” as defined in Def. 18, carries the precise sense of a suite of ratios in which we encounter the interchanging (within a ratio or ex aequali proportion) of the positions of the Leader-Term (hgoumenon, [ ἡγούμενον ]) and the Follower-Term (‘epomenon’ [ ἑπόμενον ]) in relation to a ‘something else’ [‘allo ti’: ἄλλο τι ]. LSJ cites V, Def. 18 as his mathematics example — the all-but-singular example he finds — of the mathematical use of “tarassw” [ταράσσω]. ‘Leaders’ and ‘followers’ of course can be quite easily exchanged in the context of leaders and followers within the Early Academy. We have the mathematics-admiring Plato working to formulate political disturbance or turmoil or position-exchanges, amongst men he was consorting with, some of them named in Letter #7. Here the concept of ‘following’ is not at all distant from that phrase in the Phaedo, [ ” ‘following’ the rational” ἑπομενή τῷ λογισμῷ , the phrase which gives Barnard College at Columbia University her motto]. It is rationality positioned as the Leader, the individual human (in this case a female) the Follower, [perhaps not unlike one of the nymphs from the Epizephyrian Locrian caves near Rhegium, which fascinate poet and archaeologist Howard Baker of Washington DC.] The Hermes figure in the recently reported mosaic from Amphipolis in IVth century BC Macedonia appears to be leading one individual soul (his vehicle following in turn). A nomo-phylax as in Laws VI will lead a whole Cretan City, or perhaps a whole Atlantis or Athens, after exercising his freedom to edit the versions of the now-deceased lawmaker’s best efforts, in his final version of them. They will have been perfected as best the Lawmaker was able, may his soul be led on to still more perfect versions on the other side of the door [see LAWS VI, xiv.

Much life is present inside this following example: London’s Oliver Sacks, still alive in August 2015, had been deeply disaffected by the ‘bigoted and cruel’ law in Leviticus imposed upon him by his mother back around 1950, so his words say. Sacks was writing in the 16 August 2015 (Sunday) edition of NY Times, about the ‘seventh day’ of one’s life. His metaphor is quite parallel to that of LAWS VI, xiv “en dusmais [etais] tou biou” [ ἐν δυσμαῖς τοῦ βίου ] Sacks was still alive on 16 August, as a million or more of us learned from that newspaper that same ‘seventh day’.

A parallel that may be worth drawing here. It may lend some strength to the present hypothesis of “Socrates-Alternate”, this being one of the aliases for Philip of Opus, yet another alias being “Amphinomus”. Someone associated closely with “Younger Socrates”, namely his fellow student of the geometer and astronomer Theodorus of Cyrene, namely Theaetetus of Sunium, is reported (in the Vita Pythagorica) as having “written laws” for Rhegium. This is a town not much distant from Epizephyrian Locris. This same report about such a man had authority enough to provoke Ivor Bulmer-Thomas in his 1968 article in Dictionary of Scientific Biography entitled “Theaetetus” to come forward with the idea of a kind of Theaetetus_Junior, son of Plato’s mathematician of distinction. An anonymous Scholiast mentions the elder Theaetetus by name in the margin of our very fine ms. of Republic VII, Paris A (#1807, now viewable online at the French National Library). This scholion uses the imperfect tense of when describing him, and also the masculine pronoun ‘hoios’ as if Theaetetus himself were someone (now no longer alive), known to him personally. It is located in the margin of our best Plato ms., Parisinus #1807, adjoining its Rep. VII, 525 e. Greene of Haverford had published it in 1938, likely to be re-published in the much expanded critical edition of the scholia, unless an obstacle reported by him on his LinkedIn page blocks this, before 2017 — by Domenico Cufalo of University of Pisa.

Meantime the Bibliotecque Nationale de France has a good quality digital edition of Parisinus A up on its website for all to inspect directly. Its “iota superscripts” inserted frequently in the word Leon Robin found so fascinating — but uniformly unreported by the OCT edition — is of great philological and historical interest. All 38 specimens read That word occurs 38 times in the Venice ms. of Symposium, in all cases “misspelled” from the OCT’s point of view. Including its superscripted Iota’s, the word is αἰεὶ . Various points will need to be made about this special bit of lexical texture in the Venice ms., not just in Symp. and Phaedrus , where Leonard Brandwood called special attention to it in 1976, but also in Euthydemus, where the OCT commits errors of both omission and commission about it. I will be saying more about this matter below.

Can there have been a man assuming the name Theaetetus_Alt. parallel to Socrates_Alt. ? Plato’s recognised “anger” against the “Socrates” doing upside-down or “Earth-OverFriendly” astronomy in Bk VII, Chapters x-xi are in point here, as is the anger J. Adam finds against “your” Socrates, the one with the polypragmosunE-prone gape-mouthed fascination with looking downward. That ‘other’ Socrates_Alt. or ‘SwkratE tina’ of Apol. 19c, was ready (whether comically floating on the earth or just as comically floating on the sea) bending his attention downward toward the sensible order, as it were from clouds of Aristophanes. The new polypragmosunE, Plato is saying or implying is expresseed in this exotic word ‘allotriopragmosunE’. A mathematical thinker bending his thoughts downward toward Earth, but claiming to be the newly-come-down-from-Heaven dialectician, — from Boeotia, not far from Thebes, where Locrian and Tarentine dialects may well have been well understood, pythagoreans doing the lexical bridgework. Recall the ittw Zeus Theban exclamation of Seventh Letter [ἴττω Ζεύς , 345 a3] likely written some years prior to Plato’s completing his revisions, — on my ‘chorizontic’ view of it at least — of Republic. There is a harmony-of-effects with this present interpretation if the year -354 is that of Letter 7 and if Dodds is right to surmise Plato’s re-editing Gorgias near that date and also making serious revisions to Republic.

We have an irritable young comic named Crates taunting Plato from the Theban side [ ἴττω Ζεύς , 345 a3 would be an echo of this within the the thrice-enraged-Plato passage of Letter VII 345 d – 346 c ]. These cynical provocations may have come via the literary side. This is to say (for example) via the comic stage or via letters and diatribes of the usual uninhibited or cynical rudeness [see our ‘Arteno=l’ drawing of the provocative young Crates and his mentor Diogenes of Sinope, with a book of diatribes and letters opened before him; Socrate et Denys might be thought of under the rubric of ‘Twins’ or ‘Gemini’, perfectly willing to take up images and interpret them, say pictures from Homer’s epic stage or Aristophanes’ more vivid stages, or conceivably a ‘cave’ or ‘well’ such as Plato imagines in the dialogue “Theaetetus”, Thales at the bottom and a Thracian maid_or_nymph looking down mockingly at him. J. Adam glossed a difficult passage about astronomy within Republic VII by surmising that the astronomer might be looking downward into the ritual water-trough there in the ‘pit’ or ‘cave’, conceivably getting more precision into his star_charts with help. from the nearly vertical walls. If we shift attention from the half-mythical Thales figure forward to the fully blood_and_bone man Eudoxus, we may get a good rationalisation of the report on him “at the moment he died, he was logging data inside his observatory”. Did the sun have a “third motion” ? Eudoxus said “yes”, but when asked HOW LARGE was the little trepidation or anomaly, at the solsticial horizon point (say at the observatory at the Academy) he would only say “very little”.

This would be like saying that Aubrey Diller, when he died, was searching out new botanical specimens in the woods in Bloomington, Indiana, near his beloved Indiana University. Prof. Diller, amongst his many other acccomplishments, identified Ephraim of the Souris scriptorium as the copyist of our Marciana Library’s “Venetus T”. Diller found many botanical treasures, and also several medieval manuscript treasures before he died, much praised by his Indiana colleagues — he died in he woods, on a botanical mission, “with his boots on”.

Returning now to the approximate scene of Eubulus’s play “Dionysius”, which included a character named “Philip”. More irritating and insulting yet to the aging Plato would be the pseudo-philosophical pseudo-kings, the tyrants of imperial Syracuse. These men (at the time of Seventh Letter anyway) will be straying young pseudo-platonists, thinking themselves fully equipped to recruit ‘followers’ after having heard Plato’s theories just a single time, and having not really digested the philosophical content, which is to say having not truly reflected upon them or taken counsel in the appropriate way. This might be something like a junior mathematician experimenting with cube-doubling perhaps using a mechanical device or two. Or like a precocious philosopher, deciding on which “enemy combatant” to subject to a targeted character_assassination, presuming to call such tyrannical and impulsive decisions by the name Philosopher_Emperor).

All this could be put under the name “science and knowledge” if one were in such an immmature way ready to interchange night-time alchemical guessing with true quadrivial knowledge, or hypothesis-based science with unhypothetical dialectical ascent to the ideas themselves. We do have fragments of the tract by a pair of authors “Socrates and Dionysius”, fragments of material Plato might have scornfully put under the name “scientific-ish” little_technia [ τέχνια ]. Such are the tracts recently published in France, and analysed under the authors’ names “Socrates and Dionysius [Socrate et Denys]”, by French scholars Halleux and Schamp in their collection “Lapidaires Grecs” (Paris, Les belles lettres, 1985). These tracts have approximately the value that Sir Isaac Newton’s night-time researches into Alchemy have to that same author’s day-light hour theories about the Three-Body problem and the Moon’s motions — and about fluxions of his pre-Robinsonian form.

The poet’s line “let Newton be, and all was Light” does not truly describe today’s situation (according to Curtis Wilson’s recent book, “The Hill-Brown Theory of the Moon’s Motion”, from Springer) — describing with precision and fearlessness the precarious situation of our best present-day knowledge of the moon’s motions. This is Sir Isaac’s Earth and his Moon. Still less do Sir Isaac’s researches into Alchemy tell the entire scientific story about muriatic acid and various stones. A late 2015 striking NASA photograph with the “dark side of the moon” in the foreground, our Earth in the background will have allowed today’s astronomers to pin down that moment’s position of the moon, relatively to a selected latitude_longitude on Earth, and will have helped resolve and regularise what Curtis Wilson refers to as a remaining and intellectually unpalatable irregularity (h.e. a “wobble”) in relation to our very best Einsteino-Newtonian theories, applied to the Jet Propulsion Lab’s data.

We may well have revealing cross-connections amongst these following 3 seemingly unrelated points:(bis5) 511a7 – 511 e5, end of Bk VI, authority of ‘t’ backing Slings’s emendation of 511d2, rev2

(a) a young Aristotle’s De Caelo I, x , a middle-aged Philip’s De Mundo chapt 7, pointed to in Archer-Hind’s note to Tim. Chapt V,

(b) Timaeus Chapt V itself, where we find a manifest of the ‘inciser’ critical instrument in the anakolouthic remark about the terms ‘Heaven’ and ‘World’, and again

(c) that portion of Rep. where Holger Thesleff detected an “onkos” style of the late-Plato: Republic V, Chapt Plato may be pointing to an ‘valorous and eristic’ [ ἀνδρειῶς καὶ ἐριστικως ] phase of growth at his own Olympiad 106-107 Academy of ‘that noble power of empty verbal disputes’ [ἡ γενναίη δύναμις τῆς ἐριστικῆς τεχνῆς ] These phrasings both occur in the same chapter of the same book of Rep.(V,iv) — the same chapter where Thesleff found the surprising “onkos” style of the late Plato asserting itself. This can only help boost the ‘chorizontic’ argument, that some of Books IV and V were written rather late (Thesleff allows a time-range for composing of Rep. to extend into Olympiad 106.

A further point of Plato’s language in Rep. V needs emphasis. The term ‘gennaios’ is listed by L. Campbell (Republic Essays II, p. 290) as among Plato’s “facetious” usages. It may also be facetious when used by the wayward [disaffected?] Platonist — possibly as early as Olympiad 106 — who used the phrase “καθάπερ ὁ γενναῖος Πλάτων φησίν ” at De Mundo 401 b, — where he proceeds to mis-quote the Timaeus. We will be seeing symptoms of the same ‘eristic’ stresses on that Early Academic scene, as Philip gains authority and men such as Menaechmus, Heraclides, Eudoxus and Aristotle are maneuvered into positions of lesser influence (or they opt to move elsewhere) — symptoms of this wayward behavior are properly described in in the exact language of Republic IV, Ch. xviii with its suggestive phrase “ταραχή καὶ πλανή [tarachE kai planE” , ‘Turmoil and straying’].

F.M. Cornford’s ‘microcosmographia’ tract, its recent new edition, carries a snapshot of Royalty on a suitable carpet in front of Cambridge University in 1894, calling the King one of Cambridge University’s “influential friends”. There are naturally many ways of decoding that Cornford pamphlet, some of which lead back to the blood-and-bone man who served as a kind of personal secretary to Plato when he was composing his LAWS. His mother, from Opus, called him “Philip”. As with the character late in the Odyssey, birthname Arnaios, but nicknamed “Iros”, we need to some decoding, some de-Iros’ing as a verse in our epic puts it. Eudoxus’s peer in that early department of Astronomy, who may have bequeathed to Eudoxus some of the disturbing controversies involving both Plato and Philip (see the anticipated Ire of the man whom Plato says he is attacking personally under the scornful term “philodoxos” (479 a), in Republic Book V (likely written very near in time to Statesman and LAWS). Plato will have been Number Zero in the natural sequence of ‘chorizontics’, on this accounting, beginning to separate his own final edition of Republic from its various earlier editions. in the final three chapters of our Adam-Shorey-Slings edition. Sadly, Slings drops the Chapter designations, or we could call them Chapts. xvii-xviii-xix. More on this topic of chapter divisions in Republic below.

This new (or, as our Venetus T ms. calls him, ‘Socrates Alternate’) Socrates will be running the risk of ‘incurring a sinning’ by Athens’, to give it an easily decoded but ironic name. Plato’s name for it, if he had one, was ‘allotriopragmosunE’. Do please check the solitary outcropping of this term, occurring as it does alongside the equally technical term ‘polupragmosunE’. In the text of Stobaeus, this solitary outcropping does not occur, as Slings’s 2003 edition makes clear. The pair of specialist-words (adapted to the law-court) point to something like this decoding. You will find the two of them adjacent, in the same passage within Chapt. XVIII of Adam’s (and Shorey’s) edition, — most especially its lines 444 b1-b8. These deserve a most careful reading, and even some checking of the best 3 families of mss. Venetus T is the chief ms. from Family II. If all goes well, this dark-horse ms. will soon be made much more available via digital images. Projects such as those at the Polonsky Foundation and Roger Pearse’s various websites aim to put all such materials up onto the internet. Conceivably Venetus T might be accessible in its archival quality, some 83 MB per image.

This name ‘Younger Socrates’ will in theory no longer name only a literary character, internal to Plato’s late-dialogue pair Sophist-Statesman. Rather, it will begin to refer to a blood-and-bone human individual there at the Academy when Aristotle had recently arrived, eligible to become one of Aristotle’s early teachers. In the subjects of astronomy and theology especially, but possibly also in geometry and spherics. I have it pictured (but tentatively so) that Philip indulged in digressions. I mean mental gymnastics and word-magic, numerology such as you find in Epinomis, and sorties into his own ‘true opinions about the gods’. This would mean we should find echoes of a Euthyphro Alternate to go along with ‘Socrates Alternate’. It fits with this that there are echoes about the Euthyphro-inspired new understandings of language in Cratylus. The man sometimes called ‘newer Socrates’ and sometimes (in Venetus T) called ‘Socrates Alternate’ is companionable with this alternate Euthyphro.

There is much work needed on Chapt XVIII of Republic IV. What are we to make of the text’s phrase ‘tarachE kai planE’ ? Philip of Opus wrote many treatises, one provocatively entitled ‘p. Graphein’. Can this mean About Writing ? Not likely, at least in the conventional meaning of this, since he was a rather clumsy writer. Denniston wrote things (about the late-Plato clumsiness) that suggest that he agrees. Then can it be about Proving ? This is a perfectly possible meaning, and somewhat more likely for Philip, since he did a treatise on Optics, where he wrote out proofs [some of these may even have chanced to survive, inside the corpus attributed to Euclid, alongside material which Burnyeat attributes to Plato’s other confrere, Archytas]. A third meaning of ‘graphein’ is perhaps most relevant to the tale being developed here — filing legal charges. Filing such charges, that is, in the way orators and politicians of that day not infrequently did, to advance their political or micropolitical ambitions. That was then regularly called ‘graphein’.

Yes, admittedly, there was in fact a ‘dramatis persona’ in Plato’s later dialogues — Sophist, Politicus and [prospectively at least in “Philosopher”] named ‘Socrates the Younger’. Lewis Campbell brought his vivid imagination to bear on the third of this series of dialogues, the part which third part it seems Plato never wrote. I will be suggesting that portions of Republic IV and V connect rather closely to a draft Plato created for the planned dialogue; I have it that parts of this material got embedded within the body, by Plato editing Plato, in this major work, Republic.

[Admittedly, this requires me to accept the accusatory categorization (the tone of accusation is clear in John Adam, for example) — of Chorizontics. My defence, if I do in fact develop it, will begin by the argument that Plato joins me in this class — and even gives us a kind of leadership with it — the way Dionysius of Halicarnassus has him doing, “combing and curling” his prose. So if it is an offense to do this kind of cutting or incising of Plato’s corpus, Plato himself will be a leading offender, his own worst chorizontic. Call him Choridzwn-Presbyteros.]

We may well be able to find traces of Plato’s Politicus-era thinking about and drafting of his intended separate dialogue Philosopher in the dialectical divisions within Republic V. This is the very place where we find the seemingly personal reference to a man he calls ChrEstos [ χρηστός , 479 a1 ], and blames for his look-alike behavior imitative of the perfect Philosopher: the names Plato there coins are ‘philo-theamwn’ and ‘philo-doxos’, names likely to provoke a reaction of Anger in their target, he says. It will turn out to be relevant to this reconstruction that each of Aristotle and Philip wrote separate works entitled ‘Of Anger’. Neither is extant, but much of Aristotle’s thinking on the emotions found a place in his early work, the Rhetoric. Scholars such as David Konstan, William Fortenbaugh and others have recently done careful work on this material.

Naturally, these two authors Philip and Aristotle writing at the Early Academy on the topic of Anger will have had their eye on angers of many types and on many variations on the theme. They had an abundance of types to draw upon. The familiar epic rage of Achilles against his fellow noblemen [would that warlike passions had never been planted in the human soul, an exclamation from the angriest of the heroes], to Archytas, the restrained intellectual angered at someone from his own household [let us restrain our impulse to lash out at that slave — until the passion of our anger against him has subsided.]

Can this have been the same blood-and-bone man whom our Venetus T ms. names “Socrates Alternate” ? The same as the man Aristotle names, — following Plato — Socrates Junior, named by Aristotle in Metaphysics Z, 11 for his ‘comparison [ παραβολὴ ] to the animals’ ? I believe this to be likely. It would give one of the common formulas for the ‘magis amica veritas’ sayings much better point, one of the forms put to the side by L. Taran. And a still better point to the formula dismissed by Taran, — the version in which Aristotle says he preferred Lady Truth to both of his two teachers — Plato and Socrates. This latter man will have been identical to the Early Academy personage whose Opuntian mother knew him as “Philip”, a blood-and-bone man from Boeotia, a northeast region of the Greek peninsula whose dialectal expressions Plato sometimes uses playfully, including in Seventh Letter.

But some of the subject angers will have been nearer to Plato and the Dionysius-dynasty. This means for example the one Plato reports his having experienced in himself towards his wayward pupil, Dionysius — the one he reported on in his Seventh Letter. Other nearby angers for this pair of “De Ira” authors to have had in view are also intimately linked to the Academy. For example the angry exchange reviewed by John Dillon [Heirs of Plato], the incident in which Aristotle abusively attacks the 80-year old Plato. This incident was recently re-described by Phillip Horky [Plato and Pythagoreanism] . Most scholarly reports about matters like this resemble the report by novelist-scholar Margaret Atwood on Amphinomus’s taking advantage of Penelope sexually: the scholars tend to refute the content of the story, or bury the story altogether. This story about Philip, revelatory as it is of some of the intramural incidents within the Early Academy, points to the observation that the old man’s memory was faulty, irritatingly so to a younger man at that time and place. It requires only the lightest generalisation before this story allows room for “some alternate” disciple of Plato’s — say a Philippus or a Speusippus or a Kalippus, or a Helicon of Cyzicus — to give it a quite plausible footing inside that contentious setting — all the while leaving Aristotle out of it altogether. This latter level of generality seems to be the best one to give good sense (without descending to the level of what H.H. Joachim called ‘”substances” both universal and sheerly singular’ and : DeGenetCorr. pp. xxxv,f. Joachim had made a further identification here. He identifies this ‘this-here-and-now’ sheer singularity with the Academy’s formula ” ἄτομον εἶδος ” [p. xxiii].

In the present argument we have The Academy’s Prime Suitor, and incidentally tarnisher of Penelope’s otherwise Hypermnestra-like fame, Amphinomus. Decoding some of these terms, we come finally to the sheerly singular teacher of Aristotle, Plato’s younger Socrates-like man, known to his own Boeoteian mother as the ‘this-here-and-now’ issue, the son she called ‘Philip’. She will have known him even before he earned the ‘valorous and victorious’ analysis of his name ‘philo-‘ ‘hippos’. The analyst’s name: Aristotle of Stagira.

We can still keep other anger-objects in our view, whilst not omitting Socrates-Alternate. And we get good alignment with the cautionary words in Seventh Letter, where Plato exhorts controversialists (likely his own colleagues !) against incivility and excessively personal reactions to their (or our?) forms of “manful” disputation and intellectual combat. Plato is clearly scolding some people, and explicitly differentiating the present targets from “the many”, when he forms his scornful phrases “andreiws kai eristikws” [ ἀνδρείως καὶ ἐριστικῶς ]and “the patrician thoroughbred power of shallow verbal quarrelling”. [ἡ γενναῖη δύναμις τῆς ἀντιλογικῆς τεχνῆς]

Now which of us — call us by our collective name, we the Professoriate — familiar with our intramural feuds and quarrels (staseis in Plato’s word), — which of us will think it unlikely that particular tempers will flare up now and then as these prototypical academic battles raged ? That all-too- familiar form of nuanced verbal battling we call ‘noisy quarrels inside our quiet grove of Academe’, no part of our professoriate is immune from it, ever. Not difficult to surmise, then, that it will have been one of Plato’s own colleagues, the original source of the angry outburst now written in the margins of our Venetus T, its text of Timaeus 42 b1. Here is a link to that scholion to fol. 259r in Venetus T:

schol. to Tim 42 b1, fol. 259r Plato=>Socrates. A wild poet Socrates ? Well the author of DeMundo Ch. 7 , — especially in his poetic and melancholic rant on the ‘polyonymous Zeus’, — fits this personality type neatly. Call him Socrates Homericus, or S. Musiko-Manikos. Ask Jonathan Barnes if he could write a tract entitled “Coffee with Socrates-Teacher-of-Aristotle”. He surely could do, but likely will not do. In the process, this elder brother of the novelist Julian Barnes might encounter evidence about the authorship of the ps.-Aristotle tract, the DeMundo. We are entitled to a ‘secundum mentem’ inference here, I think. My possible-Barnes sometimes answers my questions in these arcane matters. He answers my question: “was the DeMundo written near in time to Aristotle’s De Caelo, and less than one human generation after Plato wrote Timaeus ? ”

Jonathan has attributed to Aristotle a fondness for answering complex questions : ” Yes and No “. Some three years ago now I wrote to Jonathan and asked that question, namely about the authorship of the DeMundo. Was its author Philip of Opus ? As I interpret his answer, it was a friendly “Yes and No”. This agrees with the answer I got from David Furley of Princeton, to whom I had written three years previously.

In that mixed mass of early-Academy material gathered under the name “Problems” (later getting attributed to Aristotle) we come upon a man named “NeoklEs” (956 a 13), who had a special relationship with Plato. He could confront Plato with a question, and demand to get an answer. Scholars have been unable to identify this man. A young Pittsburgh scholar with good access to libraries in Italy is now working on some mss. of Aristotle’s ‘Mechanical Problems’, the diagrams especially. She is likely to throw valuable new light on that scene in the Old Academy, based on various of these north-Italy sources of evidence. One particular question that arises is: does the author use the diagram-letter “K” to stand for a figure’s “kentron”. This involves a bit of special attention, when one is parcelling out letters of the alphabet over somewhat complicated figures or diagrams. One has to think ahead, when naming a pair of quadrilaterals Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon, Zeta, Eta, Theta, lest he be called on to parcel out the letter Kappa prematurely, rather than putting it “on reserve” for the central point of a circle or sphere also part of the diagram. But Meteorologica III, v does this thinking ahead, as do some diagrams late in Book XII of Euclid [interestingly, this does NOT happen in Book XIII of the same work]. An example easy to find is in XII, 12 . This book of the Elements was likely written by Aristotle’s teacher, Eudoxus of Cnidus, somewhere near the 106th Olympiad (354 BC).

Returning to the case of our man “NeoklEs” who plagued Plato with a question — scholars don’t know who he was. But it looks as if this bold had required Plato to answer him — “Why is it that obedience is not called for in a general way within our the animal kingdom — but rather manifests uniquely in obedience to a human ?” Plato is reported to have “replied [apokrinai]” to this man. We may rightly call him “Mr. Neo-“. The reply runs as follows: because humans are properly cognisant of numbers, and uniquely so among our fellow-animals. This very topic has been researched in a new way by neuroscientists, biologists and evolutionists in the early XXIth century. It seems other primates are not obedient or disobedient to one another the same way we humans are. It has long been recognised by scholars that this reply about numbers matches precisely the point made repeatedly in the ps-Platonic dialogue Epinomis, or The Philosopher [see P. Shorey, What Plato Said, p. 62]. The teacher of that particular doctrine at the Old Academy was Plato’s immediate disciple Philip of Opus. But scholars have been shy to take a reasonable next step.

This following is a reasonable next step. We may have this “Mr. Neo-” identical to the man of kingly voice at Politicus 311c, and also identical with the man of regal bearing amongst the Old Academy astronomers of the ‘philosophenmosaik’. Therefore he will have been, within that nanocosm of the Academy, a King-of-the-contest, feeling temporarily entitled to require of Plato a kind of “command performance” reply to his questions. “Answer my question, O Plato” says our emboldened young man [as an author, he will soon presume to entitle his piece appended to Plato’s Laws with a provocative title. His title was “The Philosopher” Later editions tend to agree in calling it Epinomis, or “epi” the Nomoi. A lEmmation or two, when proved, will allow us to identify this ‘New Socrates’ with ‘Amphinomus’, and again identify Amphinoms with Philip of Opus]. I have Philip continuing: “. . .since I have not become the donkey of the child’s game, the one making an error. Rather I have been coronated (for now) the King of the victorious Opinion !”

What is a lEmmation, you ask ? It is a lEmma still in its juniority. We note a word of like construction (diminutive) occurring in the scholia to Euclid I (also not noticed by LSJ): “ANTISTROPHION”. L. Campbell had paid special attention to Plato’s own coinages of diminutives, in his Republic Vol. II. This classical Greek word could rightly be rendered “converse-junior”. Other material of great interest follow this same ‘paradromic’ path on their way to reaching us today. It looks to have originated in the Academy near Olympiad 106, and arrives in our the digital era of Plato scholarship XXI centuries into the Christian era [Slings, for example, was wary of over-reliance on the TLG — yet saw much value in making use of it]. An example (not to be pursued here) is a report on a ‘pythagorean’ version of the definition of SXHMA. Scholars who refuse to credit the early Greek mathematicians, especially those around Plato and Aristotle, with any concept of structure in mathematical proof sequences are too ready, I judge, to dismiss these little-people present here and there in Euclid’s scholia, some of them destined to grow up. LEmmatia can grow up to be lEmmata, antistrophia to be antistrophai, and proof-positions which “want” to be earlier rather than later inside Euclid Bk I can grow up to be mature gratified wishes and wants.

Consider this picture, a kind of graphic-novel, of the de-crowning of Socrates-Elder, followed by the next cycle’s renewed-crowning of “Socrates-the-Reborn” (ho neos gegonotos as the description goes in Letter #2)”:

see how the crown is ready to fall off, as the fateful wheel-turner moves history ‘ever onward’ (AIEI would be the right word for Thucydides here). In cycles of 50-years, however, one meets up with ever-reborn reminders of cycles past. Our “Socrates, new series”, seems to have flourished near Olymp. 107.

Younger Socrates’s ‘coronation’ will have been more of a child’s-game level of culture, thus many steps below the cultural level of a ‘coronation’ of Demosthenes (we recall Tht. 146 A again for our ‘child-king Socrates’). To be sure, this coronation in turn, will have been many steps below the one depicted at Phaedo 118. This picture is from White Sulphur Springs artist David Dann, varying the themes of “Secular Cycles”, of Elder Socrates by French painter David, and the mosaic in Naples. Socrates Junior of Polit. 311cd reaches upward to displace the Socrates coronated one cycle earlier [Phdo. 118] .

facial features for Younger Socrates, taken from the Konrad Gaiser mosaic now in Naples: his “philosophenmosaik” (1980)

But where can a person reasonably begin in this historical inquiry, seeking for a second blood-and-bone Socrates, near the time of Leodamas ? It is admittedly not an Academy easy to unriddle, after all. Can we find a definite pointer to such a man at the Old Academy ? Answer: Metaphysics Book Zeta, Chapter 11 gives us such a pointer, advancing the interesting concept of “noetic matter”. Scholars have been shy of identifying any ‘blood and bone’ person in the immediate vicinity of Plato and Aristotle, to whom Aristotle is there pointing his finger. Yet Plato’s Letter 11 refers to just such a man. And Merton College scholar David Bostock in his commentary is willing to say of such a real-life person, that he appears to have been a mathematician. Siem Slings (his Clitophon edition) has two Socrates’s in Plato’s vicinity, but only one is a ‘blood & bone’ individual, and that one is not mathematically inclined. D.B. Robinson’s OCT text of ‘Politicus’ — one may rightly follow CJ Rowe in calling this recent OCT work ‘interventionist’ — is so bold as to intervene textually at Politicus 311 c9. The result is to remove any traces of a truly human individual — Younger Socrates by nickname. There will have been lots of room for paronymy and ambiguity, the names (Older/Junior) Socrates. Robinson inserts some text and causes Older Socrates to make a return here, where Plato had Socrates Junior. At least if we allow Venetus T and all the other primary witnesses count as authoritative, Plato is pointing to Socrates Junior.

Admittedly, what Aristotle says of him there in Metaphysics Zeta is rather harsh. Aristotle tells us that his opinion ‘leads away from the truth [ap-agwgE]. This is likely an allusion to the admired elder Socrates, a sharp-edged allusion if we have a re-incarnated “Socrates” alongside Plato amongst young Aristotle’s teachers. A chief feature of the Elder Socrates (admired by both Plato and Aristotle) was his trademark ‘induction’ [ep-agwgE] or ‘[reasoning ]leading towards [truth]‘. Yes, it’s truly an irony that Aristotle would turn the standard prefix into its exact opposite, an apo- instead of an epi- [‘away from’ instead of ‘towards’]. C.J. Rowe and D.B. Robinson have recently done some public agreeing about the meaning of a related term, ‘par-agein’. It occurs in a discussion of rhetoric, at Phdr. 262 d2. It refers to a rhetorical ‘side-slipping’ past the truth, or side-stepping of it. Yet this is not so complete a mishandling of Truth as to lead away from it. This is a dragging-away from truth, and our text has Aristotle accusing “his” Socrates of doing this.

Our moment in history is back when we are nearby the proverbial “hearth to begin from” as Plutarch’s proverb has it — Platonism in its nascent stages. This is also the place place where W. Jaeger’s young philosopher was analysing rhetoric, writing on the emotions (anger and other emotions). That time and place seems to have had Leodamas, Socrates and the very young Aristotle all learning from one another. And Plato learning too, as his nature required of him to do perennially.

Aristotle adds one further point to the acidity of his remark about ‘Socrates Junior’ in this same passage of Met. Zeta. He uses a perverse word to focus our attention on Younger Socrates’s ‘repeatedly/habitually’ making this misleading and wrong comparison. Aristotle uses the imperfect tense by way of suggesting he had heard this recently inside the Old Academy, and by way of emphasising its misleadingness. For it was an ‘oft-repeated’ misleading comparison — with animal-parts. Or perhaps, as in Politicus, parts of the portrait (zw-on) being stagewise assembled by a Zo-ographos ( = a painter).

Be this as it may, the 13th century treatise held by the Ashmolean in Oxford bears the title PROGNOSTICA. You might think its contents disreputable popular-style Astrology or Fortune-telling. The Oxford MS. is illustrated by Matthew Paris. Jacques Derrida got very excited by it, thought up some elaborate neo-Freudian fancies based upon it. Derrida adds some valuable points when he brings in the (I believe falsified) Letter #2 of Plato. The contents and the underlying motivation(s) of this Letter are certainly hard to decipher. It may be helpful to turn toPaul Friedlaender, a man who knew his Plato and his Old Academy well. In his chapter “Plato’s Letters” he reviews the contentious scholarship about Letter #2. What of those who dismiss it as “silly, childish [and its] falseness requires no proof”. Or this, relayed from another august authority, Shorey: “this mystico-theosophical gabble” [Friedlaender’s Plato, An Introduction, p. 243]. In any case the Ashmolean curator Mr. Benfield is far from proud of this PROGNOSTICA’S contents [his scornful tone as he exhibited the work to me at the Bodleian in 2010 relayed this unambiguously]. But he was and is immensely proud of its standing as one of the Bodleian’s chief “treasures”. Its composer can have been an over-ambitious hyper-platonist “climber”, scrambling to secure for himself a satisfying role within the governing “Nocturnal Council” outlined at the end of Plato’s Laws (Book XII). Philip was ambitious enough, anyhow, to append his mystico-astronomical literary piece “The Philosopher” at this very point in Plato’s writings. The final book of Plato’s final work — by Philip of Opus as it turns out, and subtitled with that title left with nothing underneath itself. “The Philosopher”, which Campbell speculated might have had Theaetetus as its principal speaker, was put into the crowning position, perhaps by Philip.

[a subtle and subtly allusive point surfaces in the text of in Book I of Aristotle’s Ethica Nicomachea (1099 a 10) , possibly written when Aristotle was a young scholar at the Academy — etymologising the name “Philip”. This runs closely parallel to the etymological work by Plato in Republic Bk V, on ‘philo-X, where X intends to be set equal to ‘sophia’. Plato had some complex motives there in Rep. V, one being to chide the type of man over-fond of ‘glory’ (doxa). Plato respects his more moderate intellectual compeers, such as Helicon of Cyzicus. When honor and glory take charge, Plato there writes, you can find a man so pre-occupied with them that (like the glory-driven military commander, content to reduce the measure of his chosen unit, the one he ‘commands’ just so long as he remains the glorious chief {of this reduced unit, call it the Sandbox Unit !} On the purely cognitive side, this same temperament is often willing to bargain away truth just to win the ‘prevailing opinion’. Beloved rightminded-opinion, nevermind truth (as a benighted Euthyphro might put it). This is the passage of Rep. V where Plato coins the word ‘philo-theamwn’ and sharply contrasts him and his attitudes from the true ‘philo-sophos’. Here in EN Bk I Aristotle makes bold to use the example of ‘horse-lovers’ (phil-ippoi) under his deliberately generalised heading ‘philo-toioutos’. And two of our good mss. include a reference to the ‘philo-theamwn’ [these vv. ll., alas, do not survive in apparatus criticus of Bywater’s Oxford edition — though they had survived in Bekker]. The Bywater preferred reading has the more innocuous term ‘philo-theoros’. The standard Oxford text thus permits Aristotle an ever-so-slight slip to the side, since it is a ‘theama’ which the text wants to be echoing, not a ‘theoria’, and not a ‘theorhma’. Thus a ‘spectacle’, not a ‘theoretical truth’ as the Bywater text offers us the point [notably omitting the vv. ll. ad loc]. Noteworthy here is J. Barnes’s point about Aristotle’s prose style [His “Coffee with Aristotle”]: not just sinewy prose, says Barns approvingly — also allusive prose. Alas, we already find that the Bekker text de-prefers the ‘philo-theamwn’ readings. And then — double-alas, Bywater-Oxford text carries this one step further. Bywater does not trouble to let us readers know of these vv. ll., serious though they are. To compare: the 1995 OCT has dropped Burnet’s report at Polit. 311 c4 [it is even Bodleian’s B that is losing critical force here !]. There is further editorial trouble back in Rep. IV, Chapt. xviii, where PAWAG terms like ἀλλοτριοπραγμόσυνη suffer from neglectful editing.

Back to Aristotle and his EN I. I mean his ‘philo-X’ factoring, isolating the varieties of X. φιλο-τοιοῦτος is Aristotle’s precise word for this open-formula, where he will factor in ‘horse’ or ‘spectacle’ or [conceivably anyhow] ‘ideal object ‘ Aristotle’s meaning seems better captured (a) a ‘theama’ when loved is a case of ‘philo-theamwn’ ; but this has the further consequence of associating Aristotle’s teacher with a falling-away from Platonic truth. For (b) the lover spectacle/opinion/glory comes up precisely parallel in these variant texts to the character sharing his name with Aristotle’s ‘socratic’ teacher: Phil-ippos {of Opus !} ]

There is due to be more about all of this (except for the Derrida part) at the site now called youngersocrates.net If this succeeds in evolving into a WordPress blog [sun te du’ erxomenw], its name will likely evolve also. It would then likely include observations about the San Marco Library’s Plato MS Gr. IV, 1, — the Plato ms. which scholars commonly call T . This MS got close attention in spring of 1994 from certain British scholars. But the Clarendon Press editors of today — now at work at re-issuing Volume II of their Plato OCT — lean toward readings from another family they have recently come to groupname β . This can sometimes be a vexation to manuscript scholars. Wilamowitz, for example, taxed some of his philologue brethren across the English Channel with succumbing to a “dummes Aberglauben” getting them to prefer the ms. in their own Bodleian location. [S. Slings permitted himself a naughty swipe or two in his 1998 review in Mnemosyne, endorsing the substance, if not the rhetoric, of his colleague Wilamowitz’s opinion] As with the “idion” added by T at Soph. 264 e, so with the special extra meaning of “oikeion” there; Campbell finds “something of an ethical force” both in Soph. 216 and in “oikeioteta” at Polit. 257d,f. Here we can supplement Campbell’s remarks with the arguments of Philip Merlan, showing that “oikeion” was a kind of signature term for the Old Academy. This strengthens Campbell’s intuitive point, and bases it on a more detailed analysis. It has a bit of parallelism in the proverb quoted by Plutarch, treating the Academy as the true “home base” for the best scholars: “let us begin from our hearth” is Plutarch’s self-exhortation, meaning by hearth and home exactly this, The Academy. Whereas some of the brittler part Anglican opinion may want to cleave to the authority of Beta, there will always be room for the strength of continental learning and memory. In any case publishers in Leipzig and Amsterdam ought not be demoted to an inferior “league”, as one British scholar (Rowe by name) presumed to write in a recent review article.

On the other hand, Campbell’s successors — now a whole century later — at Clarendon Press have kept Sophist 264’s “idion” demoted to their apparatus criticus. Thus no part of that committee’s OCT text. They give it only as a v.l. in case one wants to consult the parchment pages of the Marciana’s Venetus T . In due course it may be possible to make all of this about Soph. 263-264 clearer, and more directly available to the scholarly eyes, such as those of the OCT editors of Plato. Three of these editors have recently done direct inspections of our Venice ms. T.

My opinion, offered truly in humility (I speak here not of the perhaps artificial and certainly ceremonial ‘humilissime’ in Heiberg’s dedication to Madvig — but rather in a less-than-European humility-on-the-merits; you will be able to weigh these merits, Dear e-Reader, especially if you have spent time with any of the abundance of mss. edited by Heiberg) is the following. We may all need to be patient for another century, awaiting the hitherto unimagined length and breadth [after electronic enlargements] of open spaces for our editorial efforts. Thus the XXII. cent. OCT may find a way to expand itself to give a fuller understanding of that “idion” word at Soph. 264 e3, firmly lodged there ad loc. in our Marciana ms. Prof. Whitaker of Glasgow University has told the story of the late-19th century plans at Clarendon Press, which imposed a severe page-limit on Prof. Campbell’s proposed lexicon to Plato. The book would have to be reduced from its proposed size of 900 pages, compressed into a 600 page format. Yes, it troubled the “Plato Lexicon” around 1903, a book anticipated quite explicitly by Campbell, in Vol II of his Oxford Republic on p. 270, and less explicitly on p. 323, elliptically at the top of p. 339.

See now Prof. Whitaker of Glasgow’s e-article “Unvollendetes”. In summer of 2009 I made a hard-copy of portions of this Whitaker essay and snail-mailed it to Jonathan Barnes, the former Balliol professor and admirer of Timaeus Sophistes’s lexicon to Plato who lives in central France, seemingly away from connection to electronic communications. May we call in a ‘mantic’ Socrates-Basileus here ? I mean to produce for us a glimpse of lexicography available to scholars one pentacontaeteia forward from today, via a kind of prognostication. Perhaps the King prognosticator can be imagined equipped to take charge [see his aspiring ‘climbing’ attitude in David Dann’s portrait above] . At this present time (early in 2015) only Volume I of the early Twenty-First Century’s anticipated five-volume OCT has yet appeared.

In addition to the 3 midwives (Phenarete, Socrates and Theaetetus), we may add the man soon to appear — Socrates Alternate. This additional midwife is brought in by a group of scholiasts to Chapter 4 of Euclid’s most “Theaetetan” book — i.e. Euclid’s present Book X. It is thematic of this set of scholia that the metaphors of ‘progeny’, ‘mothers’ and ‘ancestors’ will assist in the reader’s understanding of the text’s theorems about Binomials. That chapter of Elements, running as it does from Prop. 29 through Prop. 47, certainly calls for serious extra research, over and above what recent scholarship in Paris has contributed.

One needs a ‘lEmmation’ to aid in proving this. But these may grow up to be firmly established lemmas. [see above on diminutivised Lemmatia and diminutivised Antistrophia, admittedly rare words in ancient Greek]

Leon Robin had challenged some parts of the then-consensus of scholars (1911 through the 1930s), — including those scholars around J. Burnet, — by finding literally scores of examples of what I am now calling a ‘vectoral’ or ‘ever-onward’ interpretation of Plato’s word for ‘ever’. Many manuscripts read “AIEI” , and Robin reflected this frequently in his critical apparatus. There is a striking dominance of this reading among Robin’s collection of good mss. of Symp. and Phdr. , — they are present in large numbers, for example, in the Marciana’s Gr. IV, 1, also known as Venetus T. Further, the passage of Euthydemus, 296 ab singles out exactly the term AIEI for detailed attention, a close focus not unlike the one given to AIEI at Symp. 206. That is where Diotima chooses her words precisely and carefully, speaking of ‘adding’ EINAI’ to ‘AIEI’ to build up the summary description of ERWS. It seems reasonable to look for a meaning similar to what we find inside the word “AIEI” as deployed by a then-young Theaetetus, composing Ur-Book-X of Elements. This same word “AIEI” turns up, — signally in its location — adjacent to that word “idion [oikeian]” in Soph. 264 e1. [Dramatically, and inside his dialogue, Plato has his ‘Eleatic Visitor’ in conversation with a then-young mathematician named Theaetetus.]

A passage in Theorem 2 of Euclid XII quotes verbatim from Theaetetus’s signature proposition, i.e. Book X, Prop. 1, and quotes the “AIEI” (in that spelling) in the course of doing this act of referring. So we have a pattern of D-C-B-A here. Plato-in-Sophist (=D) paraphrasing Eudoxus-in-Ur-XII (=C), citing Theaetetus-in-Ur-X (=B). And this series continues back towards an Archytas-era piece of mathematical theory (=A). Here we do best not to indulge in the “expansion” of this early Pythagorean ‘Areskon’, such as Proclus, Friedlein p. 142 admits he has done — bringing in mirrors and other digressive topics. It is better to guide by the purer and more condensed echo, seemingly that self-same Pythagorean ‘Areskon’. I refer to the one relayed in Scholion 1, to Def. 14 of Bk. I. The scholion applies to the euclidean definition of “SXHMA”. This more elegant version of the ‘Areskon’ is less than half the length of Proclus’s expanded version. There are some internal indications that the simpler formulation is also the purer and older, sourced most likely from the Old Academy itself. Plato’s Meno helps us date the early (pre-euclid) interest in the definitions being premissed at that time by geometers. It touched on this very definition, that of ‘schEma’. At that very early time, perhaps 387 BC, we not only had no treatise by Euclid of Alexandria on the Athenian horizon, we barely had much of the early Academy. Our witness here is the anonymous scholiast relayed by Heiberg from the margins of Elements, — at his Vol. V, pp. 91 – 93. Quite conceivably the scholiast is working from a source from the pre-Academy period, nearer in time and place to Archytas in Tarentum, when the Fourth Century BC was itself only beginning. This is an attractive and not implausible place to locate our initial term “A” in this A-B-C-D , where D stands for Sophist 264 de.

Several scholarly puzzles could be rendered less puzzling if we follow some independent evidences from the history of geometry and astronomy here, and guide also by these outlined clues from the philology of ‘aiei’. Some arguments can be developed, for example, for attributing the tract named “epi dialektikEs” in the Plato ms. “P” to this same man near the young Aristotle and the aging Plato — Philip of Opus. Philip will have been making his syntax “epi-plus-genitive” a case of the LSJ article s.v. III, where all their illustrations are from the early Aristotle [a student of Younger Socrates]. In any case, more is likely to be learned when scholars can have a leisurely look at that 163-leaf manuscript, and its Plato Lexicon. It seems likely to be scanned into digitised format, under the Polonsky Foundation project, due to run until 2016. Several issues in the early history of logic and the exact sciences, brought into sharper focus by JBrunschwig of Paris and CWilson of Annapolis, will be provoking scholars to carry forward their recent efforts, alas in the cases of these two men now discontinued. We can imagine this in the pattern of an Archytas ‘ever-onward’ series of stages, greater knowledge being harvested as the series continues.

There is in any case a time-neutral sense of ‘ever-onward’, not so exalted as a thing timeless pure and simple. Rather, it resembles that middle item between the time-neutral status of a Theorem and the time-connected status of a Problem (when if ever will our solution be completed ?). De Morgan wrote affectingly in 1855 [his friend Boole died then] about mathematical research he and George Boole were advancing, moving it towards a more perfect result than Hobbes had achieved. The two of them in 1855, wrote De Morgan, made a point of abstaining from each of three claims: priority, posteriority and simultaneity — with ongoing work by other mathematical researchers. All the same De Morgan prognosticated that the name ‘Boole’ would one day be widely known for the fundamental idea [we now call it Boolean Algebra] that Algebra, so far from limiting its scope to a handful of the mind’s operations — might be seen by a very wide public indeed to underlie them all. Porisms and Episkepseis can rise to such levels of aspiration. So say some of our ancient scholia to Euclid. We might rephrase this as: a not-fully-vetted proof can lead researchers to a porismatic-onward, or episkeptic-onward, or peirastic-onward effort of thought. If this leads in turn to an heroic or ‘Orphic’ aspiration, so much the better. Plato was forever keeping himself open to such aspiration, certainly.

The philological thread, unbroken from point-D back to point-B at least, has textual warrant to support it. More so if the forthcoming editions of the OCT texts of Symp. and Phaedrus keep many (or even keep half) of the “AIEI” readings now manifest in the Marciana MS #542. A most curious detour, on the way back from C to B. It occurs right at Ur-XII, where Heiberg preserves a non-standard edition, one in his main text and the other under the title “Appendix II”. This is not merely an alternate reading of one or another proposition in Book XII, it is an alternate version of the entire book (together with a few propositions from the end of Book XI). Heiberg calls it Appendix II to his Vol. III. No MS reads this way except the one now residing in Bologna [which I have inspected]. Its Heiberg siglum is b . Guiding by the philological thread I am now following, Book XII in its entirety has a variant reading. It has what one may call a “deviation into standard later-Attic”. This will have required Eudemus’s altering its “AIEI” into the later-Attic variant “AEI”.

This “regularising”was to become standard for Plato editors (including, one can now in 2015 venture to prognosticate’, — the OCT editorial team of Duke, Nicoll, Robinson et al. Which is due to become our XXI. century standard for Plato’s texts) [ note well, Leonard Brandwood sounds a non-compliant note here, something of a Cassandra note, possibly foretelling a XXII. cent. restoration of the “AIEI” form, at least for Symp. Phdr. , Euthydemus and Sophist] A passage from late in Plato’s SophistEs manifests a pair of peculiar variants in close proximity, in the Venice ms. “T” (1) it adds in a modifier word “idion” [“” {own/private}] where it wants to point to the “exclusive” or “private” location where the dichotomous divisions have enclosed ‘The Sophist Himself’.

This is the ‘peculiarity’ of logical tightness signaled to Aristotle scholars by Harold H. Joachim, paraphrasing Aristotle himself with the phrase “universal but sheerly singular”. Joachim has Aristotle’s illustrating this by his example: this moon here. Joachim does not refer to the text of ms. E for Met. Lambda 8, where the uniqueness of the denotatum of “Socrates” is the issue. The general consensus of texts has “Socrates is One” and E has in the margin “gr. Oux Eis”.
Something peculiar also occurs here – in the Venetus “T” , but not only in “T”. A variant spelling of the word “AEI [“AIEI”]) manifests in the same sentence. The form Brandwood puzzled over in his Word Index (1976), following the extensive puzzling of L. Robin in the 1920s and 1930s in his Budé editions of Symp. and Phdr. Here Sophist appears to revert to an older-Attic spelling. This is the 4-letter variant, which is more common in the epigraphic evidence for Athens prior to 360 B.C. (see LSJ s.v. aei and L. Threatte’s recent studies).

This particular orthography has a special way of marking texts from at or near Plato’s time, Thucydides favoring the 4-letter variant by a ratio of of 128:0. [TLG reveals this]. In Xenophon the Attic koinE predominates, except for his Cyropaedia, where the 4-letter variant prevails. In this case, however, the data are more nuanced (nothing nuanced about a 128:0 ratio). Xenophon’s data may need more nuanced mining than our published concordances have so far given us. It would be helpful to have a finer level of detail here, since the latest period of Xenophon’s writing coincides with the late-middle period of Plato’s. writing given that Plato’s composing of late-middle dialogues such as Symposium, Phaedrus and Euthydemus, is datable to the late period of Xenophon’s life. Dide Xenophon have a hand in the editing of the texts of Thucydides ? More light might be shed on questions of this sort also, with more nuanced data-mining in these 3 dialogues (where the 4-letter variant prevails), and in both Thucydides and Xenophon. – “aiei”. Scholarship has
It may be that “AIEI” is used by Plato somewhat differently from “AEI”. The ‘forever’ series, a series of ‘ever onward’ dichotomizing cuts.

This is not the place to go into detail about the “poiEsis” question in Books XII. The key indicator of Philip’s authorship (thus ‘tampering’ with the original version, by Eudoxus) will be this one: C-alt executes a near-total removal of the poiEsis language, which characterises Eudoxus’s original version (now the standard text of Bk XII). There are a number of further reasons, several based on scholia to Euclid, — notably Schol. #3 to Book V in the Heiberg edition — for believing the following about this “Bologna ms.” edition of Book XII: The true author of C-alt. flourished some 50 yrs prior to Euclid’s floruit. He was (as his mother knew him) Philippus. This is the same man tradition has known under various names, but in any case he functioned as Plato’s personal amaneunsis. Standardly his name has come to settle on “Philip of Opus”. Philip will have been willing and able to assume code-names there at the Academy [Campbell wrote about officials in mystery religion being required to assume code-names. This phenomenon is much broader than Campbell’s focus on religion left him scope to discuss. Religion, to be sure, was in no way a remote topic to our Younger Euthyphro there at the Academy training young Aristotle in logic, theology and theodicy. In Cratylus Plato manages to hint about someone nearby breathing the breath inspired by Euthyphro the Elder. Possibly Eudoxus would take the less pious line that “we may subject the Divine Sun to our klepshydra’s, as I. Kant was to subject The Holy one of the Gospels to the Imperative”.

Anaxagoras and Eudoxus might think risky thoughts here-below, if surrounded by self-righteous and pious Alternate Euthyphro’s, bent on recruiting The Sun some devout worshippers. Philip (as in Epinomis) was more the evangelist, breathing new life into Elder Euthyphro, all the while joining young Aristotle at the Early Academy. The two of them, Socrates and Aristotle, will have done what Chrysippus (and Plutarch, citing his tract P. DialektikEs, Bk III) called Socratic dialectic. Philip (alias Socrates) will have been both teaching and co-studying alongside Aristotle there at the very early Academy. Among other things, the neo-Euthyphrontic dialectic involved in Definitio per genus et differentiam [I owe this Romanised formula to Dr. George Pepe, a good decoder of the Aristotle of late antiquity, as well as a pious man himself.]

Somewhat speculatively, I have this same man, ne’ Philip, assuming the code-name within the Academy “Amphinomus”. Thus Proclus has the pair “Speusippus and Amphinomus” complaining about “poiEsis” language infecting mathematics. The timeless sense of “ever” in mathematics is threatened by this. This subject needs fuller discussion elsewhere. Here at Book XIIa, his spelling preference for this technical word would naturally be “AEI”, his motivations strongly “eternalist” similar to Phaedo. This will be entirely like the man (likely also Philip) who wrote Scholion #18 to Euclid I. He fairly shudders at the thought of a “tote trigwnon”, a ‘then-triangle’ with one side having recently suffered [such an indignity to its essence!] a geometer’s operation of ‘extending’. Much needs developing here — and that which is susceptible of near-proof needs near-proving. But there is a real possibility that such proofs may be found, with your help, dear reader ! Scholion #3 to Book V, when rightly interpreted, is likely to be a major boost to this argument.

In any case we need to continue the retro-progression backward from the post-Platonic viewpoints of a Philip/Amphinomus or of a Eudemus of Rhodes, towards the pre-Platonic viewpoiont of an Archytas or Ocellus. Just where Archytas urges us to think of ‘stretching forth’ vectors, he manages to put his mathematics into motion, bring it to life.. But this means a series or “AIEI” formulation will point towards futurity, the subjunctive and optative, the contingent. His coding of this was “AIDIA”. Therefore something of the old ‘Areskon’ era is likely getting lost amongst the partisans devoted to timeless Forms. Or so I opine. Much remains to be investigated here. Including very notably Venetus T.

Back in his 1920s edition of Phaedo Robin had achieved a measure of consensus-challenging textual work. But his follow-up editions of Symp. and Phaedrus made major extra contributions. Had Robin commented on Soph. 264 E, we would have had a wider basis to build upon. This was not to be.

A truly valuable, but hitherto largely unexploited ancient source is available. It was already available in 1888, but has become much more so since the TLG entered it into machine-readable form. This is: the Objections & Replies and also the commentary — published in the late 1880s by JL Heiberg of Denmark in his Teubner edition of Euclid’s Elements. These are Euclid’s “Scholia”. Heiberg had collected them carefully from the margins of Euclid. His monograph on the subject was unfortunately only published in Danish.

Scholiasts to Euclid (no, this need NOT refer simply to what we find in Proclus on Book I) have asked us to recognise Theaetetus’s “AIEI” front-matter to Book X as making up a “Chapter One” of that Old Academy work. That will be Chapter One of what is now Book X of Euclid. What authority lies behind my calling the definitions and first 18 propositions of Book X “Chapter One” ? JL Heiberg published a scholion to X,19 — he found it in two excellent MSS — calling theorem 19 the first theorem of “Chapter Two”. Heiberg gave this Scholion the number 133. Proclus makes no reference to it.

Do we have some common material in the background of all four, Symposium, Phaedrus, Theaetetus, and Ur-Chapter-One of Elements? If so, this will be material pointing back to the time of the Old Academy when Theaetetus was writing this “Chapter One”. But there are signs that Theaetetus’s Chapter One was itself an outgrowth of earlier pythagorean work. It may not be unreasonable to entitle some of this material (following other scholia published by Heiberg) a Pythagorean Areskon. A significant trace of such a guidepost may be present in a troubled passage of Tht., troubled in a special way inside the Venetus T . When the new editions of Symp. and Phaedr. come out from Clarendon Press in the coming few years, we may see more attention to the frequently occurring spelling variant “AIEI” in this Marciana MS called Venetus T .

Possibly this MS. at the Marciana can help point the way back to such before-Plato sources. As of this date (early September 2012) we can reasonably conjecture about our series of texts of Plato, of Theaetetus, and of Philip of Opus.

Scholarly initiatives began in earnest with the Bude editions by L. Robin in the 1920s and 1930s — and from there we have another ‘onward-vector’ impetus from scholarly work by Leonard Brandwood, his his 1976 “Word Index to Plato”. WordPress.com may one day make new offerings here.

Some of these scholia clearly echo material handed down from antiquity. Proclus confirms this fully. So the trick may be (do recall that ‘tricks’ and Hermes go together). Nothing prevents there having been an outcropping of Theurgical arts in the days before Euclid. This could even have happened at the Old Academy. This seems oddly anachronistic, but yet such early Theurgy is not an impossibility. Scholion #61 to Euclid Book I makes early Theurgy there look to be a possibility. Of course, this and related scholia (like 109-114) may have been written generations or even centuries after Euclid’s own time. But there are real indications here and there of a surprisingly different history behind such scholia to Euclid, even behind this relic of an early reference to “Theurgy”. The new open-access journal “Entangled Religions” may be a place where investigating this, and expanding on the pioneering work of E.R. Dodds, [Greeks and the Irrational, appendix on ‘Theurgy’] might be in order. In any case, we may be now looking at sources that go back some decades or even three generations before Euclid (say around the time of the young Aristotle).

There is a title “Enstaseis”, a work seemingly attributed to Aristotle — but in scholia to Euclid there are not only scores of remarks [our modern mathematico-philosopher Descartes would one day collect these and call them ‘objections & replies’] Those ancient scholia even include a short compendium of definitions. This material includes definitions of the terms ‘e)/nstasis’, ‘lh=mma’, ‘po/risma’ and so forth. Aristotle can have composed his lists of Enstaseis , about Olymp. 107, close in time to his composing his Posterior Analytics. It would be no great surprise if Aristotle’s early colleagues (the mathematicians, such as Menaechmus and Amphinomus) sang out the repeated a pair of refrains in these scholia — the ones that begin “a)porese/ie a)\n tis” or “po/qen dh there are likely to have been written comments to various pieces of Ur-Euclid, what Heiberg used to call the elementisings of the ‘antiquiores’. This is true of many of the scholia, such as Schol #95 to Bk X. Scholia #3 and #30 to Book V give us another outside-of-Proclus vantage point, likely tracing back to antiquity, to make this mathematical material clearer both in its history and its contributions to mathematics and Early Academic philosophy.

The trick when trying to strengthen our understanding this aspect of Archytas will be to get clearer on what kind of “vector” he understood mathematical series to imply. This will be encoded in optative and subjunctive moods, some of them not still alive in the mathematical prose of Euclid’s time. We need to follow the scholiasts’s lead, wherever the evidence encourages this, with fuller explanations. This means firming up the voices of our personified and dramatised ‘narratives’ from the Old Academy’s mathematicians. This will mean leaving behind the softer moods of wished-for’s, might-have-been’s, narratives and counter-narratives — therefore stretching our “duna/it’ a)\n ei)=nai” optatives onward to the simple and declarative ‘on’. We may usefully draw on the language which Eudemus (his Phys. Frag. 30) draws in turn from Archytas. This fragment has found its best and boldest interpreter in T.L. Heath, his “History”. Over-cautious philology remains compliant with Diels & Kranz, but loses the force of his word “AIDIA”. By Eudemus’s time, roughly that of Alexander the Great, the settled later-Attic or koinE form prevaled: by then the form was simply “AEI” the three-letter variant, was the prevalent one.

The idea is to set out results avoiding this kind of ‘compliance’ [to borrow a term from Plutarch]. This way of ‘stretching onward’ via “AIDIA” will have been what the Old Academy’s ideals held up for emulation.

We do in fact have several lines of evidence, some within the history of mathematics, of working mathematicians at the Old Academy, near in time to Aristotle’s first arrival there (around -366). One may rightly think of them as hyper-enthusiasts, men overcome with a passion for thinking like Plato. Or even thinking more Platonically than Plato himself. Such a man was Philip of Opus. These were men known ironically to Plato as ‘Friends of Forms’. In Philip’s case we may have a more furtive and evasive man, now siding with the ‘-of Forms’ faction, again siding with the ‘-of Earth’ faction within the perturbed atmosphere of every least topic’s being ‘manfully and eristically’ [ἀνδρείως καὶ ἐριστικῶς] quarreled about [Rep. V, Ch iv (end), — where Thesleff has independently identified Plato’s late ‘onkos’ style of writing].

Such ‘unwitting lapses into eristic’ are further illustrated by Plato when, at Tim. 28b 1-4, he dubs in an anacoluthon to scold the empty verbal quibbling [of fellow academicians ?] over the pair of words ‘caelum’ and ‘mundus’, or ‘Οὔρανος’ and ‘Κόσμος’. Slings and his Amsterdam colleagues have done much to decode Plato’s playful tricks with the word “Ouranos”. A welcome subtlety to match that of Plato himself. And here in Tim. 28b Plato may be asking us to pick up his reference to a pair of then-recently circulated tracts — by a pair of his closest students, students also of Timaeus. H.H. Joachim had stated in his 1922 Oxford edition of the De Gen. et Corr, (Introduction, p. xxiii, n1) that the author of that early-Aristotle piece comes ‘perilously near’ to endorsing an extreme of the Forms-Friendly position (the one Aristotle often manifests a sharp unfriendlness towards).

Returning to the terminology of ‘Ouranos’ and ‘Kosmos’. The ‘p. Ouranou’ of a young Aristotle and the ‘p. Kosmou’ of ps.-Aristotle, perhaps the same blood-&-bone man who was also known as the astronomer-mathematician-dialectician Socrates-Alt. The man whose Venetus T name “Socrates Allos” lends itself to word-plays such as giving him the sub-nickname “Kurios Allos” or “Mr. Allos”. Were this wayward Socrates to suffer a hostile play on his names and nicknames, by a Plato of the word-subtlety who etymologises “epistEmE” so as to allow it an ‘embolised’ half-H mark, so to speak ‘thrown’ from the front end of the word “histEmai” [Crat. 437 a7] is in the target zone when Plato is ready to write about the internal unhealthiness, the disordered segments of the soul under Plato’s attack, which is exhibiting symptoms of psychic disease. These would be like pathologies Plato describes as un-natural, drawing on Hippocratic concepts of a natural rank-order: “allo up’ allou” [this repeated phrase at 444 d10 — echoing 444 d5 — forms the climactic point of all of this itself climactic chapter, being one chapter later than the one our best texts seem to want to call the ‘final’ one in Bk IV].

Archytas’s quadrivial credentials were exemplary [see Lasserre’s scholarship on the early stages of the Quadrivium, his ‘Museum Helveticum’ article of some 20 years ago now]. An ounce of Heath’s Archytas-via-Eudemus is worth a pound or more of conjectures about Philolaus and Ocellus the Lucanian — anyhow if we take as primary controls for our speculative histories the surviving mathematical material [chiefly Euclid’s Elements and the scholia in their margins, but also similar material from works of ‘elements’ from such as Aristoxenus and Autolycus; we now have the good fortune of Heiberg’s magisterial scholarly work on many of these texts, and have his painstaking work fully encoded into the TLG canon, under TLG numbers such as authors 1799 and 5022]. But much of this is still remaining to be developed, this line of argument about the Academy, so far as it struggled to be neither an echo of Plato nor a partisan of Aristotle’s. These would be men perhaps in a contentious rivalry, each of them ambitious to be Plato’s “diadochos”, perhaps wanting to lead the Academy in the direction of mathematics and astronomy, or even astrology and numerology.

Will a WordPress site have something to offer here ? Conceivably, yes. If wishes were horses, Philip of Opus might have lightened his pythagorean burden. [For now, we can do little but exclaim in the promissory-indefinite manner of lines 551-566 of Hymn to Hermes. This would be a subjunctive or optative wish for help from The [Unreliable] God of Discovery or seeming-Discovery. The god to whom sacrifices are suggested (=Hermes) in scholia to Euclid. This is the very god against whom [or at least the poet’s standard picture of whom] Plato unleashes sharply hostile, we may say near-blasphemous rhetoric early in Laws XII. Do try this experiment: see if you can find a more Hermes-hostile piece of prose than Plato’s attack on this god — or common image of him put forward by the poets — near the beginning of Laws Book XII.

There are admittedly major risks in a modern-day critic’s launching into para-historical parallels, in the effort to throw some new light on a topic from antiquity. Our phrase “far fetched” gets its meaning for just such prope-responsible ramblings into topics our subjects cannot have had any awareness of. Can I give some striking examples of how risky this is ? Yes I can give two scholars of ancient culture. Critic-A is likely to be pulling our leg, a twinkle in his eye as he indulges in his prope-historical ramble — E.R. Dodds subdividing the “eighties” within the pre-Christian decade -390 through -380 so as to encumber his argument (his Introduction to his 1959 Oxford edition of Gorgias) with the concept “the early eighties” [op. cit., p. 25 n4]. He impishly denies that Plato wrote Republic in “the early eighties”. From a man of his leprechaun-like humor, this must be taken as facetious usage. Critic B is Leonardo Taran, who keeps a straight and characteristically solemn face, he executes his pedantic romp through portions of modern scholarship, his topic being “amicus Plato [et Socrates], sed” formula. Taran draws on the material familiar to himself, post-Renaissance Iberian scholarship on Cervantes and others. The recently published Mark Twain scholarship from Prof. Trombley is a third, but her target has plenty of universality, and may well recall Plutarch on the near superhuman temperance and sobriety of Alexander the Great.

Modern French uses “mon cher” in parallel to Plato’s usage of “chrEstos” [ χρηστός ] late in Republic Book V. To be sure such terms of endearment are always subject to major ambiguities. Let us borrow from a sholiast to Euclid’s Def. 9 of Elements Bk V, when he writes “we call this perambiguity” [ διακαταχρηστικότερον ] . I am here presuming to follow up on a Cicero passage in his “Orator”, where he analyses ‘katachrEsis’ (he uses the Greek word there). I need only add what Cicero WOULD HAVE done, had he come upon the quite special phrasings of tklhis scholion [=Schol #30 to Euclid Bk V, in the Heiberg edition of 1888] . “διακαταχρηστικότερον” is the word which our Scholiast says “we call” the ambiguous word “double”. This is a term much worried over by Plato himself. What are the various meanings, he has Socrates ask, of our familiar term “double” ? As it first stands, it is perambiguous.

In the case of this Campbell-selected word ‘ChrEstos’ [ χρηστός], I point to a range of meanings like ‘my precious’, ‘my sweetie’, ‘our late-lamented indentured servant’ and the rest. LCampbell included this term in his list of Plato’s “facetious words”. A lively case in point: early in Chapt. xxii of Rep. V, where it is livelier in the way it draws upon the also-perambiguous term ‘kallos’. This term is used facetiously [so Campbell, Rep. Vol II, p. 290] by Plato in Rep. VIII (the government by Tyranny is ‘kallistos’, the ‘loveliest’ government). It had already been used that same way by Leontius back in Bk. IV (he blames himself for his pathological desire to look on at that ‘lovely’ spectacle — of a clump of dead bodies ! [440 a]. If I have various of the strands decoded suitably here, Plato has encoded facetious references to the very man who was later to become his personal amanuensis and disciple, namely Philip of Opus. This will be the very man, the very blood-&-bone individual, Plato whom wants to point to under the unflattering rubric ‘philo-theamwn’. Or so I believe. It was precisely “theamata” that had enabled the unhealthy work of his wretched eyes, inside the soul of poor Leontius.

I have this individual man identical to the man known to fellow astronomers at the Early Academy as (and this will have been his birthname, thus the name used by his Opuntian mother) ‘Philip’. His name occurs literally scores of times in the Lasserre critical edition of the fragments of Eudoxus of Cnidos, Plato’s chief astronomer. The name ‘Philip’ is taken apart etymologically, that is dismembered into its philological components by Aristotle, in EN I, Ch. 11. Aristotle takes steps to give it as a a vivid instance of his open-formula, offered alongside: ‘philo-toioutos’, [φιλοτοιούτος] — we might fairly decode this term of Aristotle’s ‘a philo-Such-and-So’. Now Aristotle was an immediate pupil of ‘younger-socrates’. He all but says so in Metaphys. Z, 11. Again, the point of view now is not that of naming and philology, but of locating a blood-and-bone individual, capable also of being the same man as Amphinomus [whose town of origin is pointedly unknown to scholarship]. There are a few stray indicators which might encourage one’s giving Philip the place-name formula ‘the Onchestian’. These come from the homeric “Hymn to Hermes”. I once tried to interest Prof. Nicholas J. Richardson, author of the article “Penelope” (OCD 2003) in linking our early-Academy Amphinomus to the hero killed by Telemachus in the Odyssey.

I may well offer more on all of these reather arcane (yes, admittedly arcane) pointers in the near future. This would be on a separate WordPress site, to be set up and to be entitled youngersocrates.net. Very likely the argument will look hard at Polit. 311 c, where the 1995 updated OCT text of Plato’s Politicus has admitted some really quite bold conjectures. Bolder, I judge, than some of the conjectures one finds here on the page “Plato and other ancient Greeks”. . But boldness verges sometimes on rashness, and the less bold surmises here may in the end win over more Plato-readers ? A whimsical wise saying was published some years since “A fool who rushes in sometimes gets the job done”, and the latitudinarian attitudes of the editors here at “Arteno=l” give encouragement to thought and experimentation.

Relatedly [I lifted this word from Congressman Christopher P. Gibson’s book “Securing the State”, p. 66] — one of the ambiguities surrounding our man called Socrates — or our men called by that same name — was precisely his apparent gift as “fortune teller”. The book’s title is “Prognostica”. Matthew Paris’s 12th century ms. has its author named “Socrates Basileus”, or “King Socrates”. Its famous sketch or graphic of Plato and Socrates (the one now in the Ashmolean, recently much dissected by J. Derrida in his “Post Card” book) has the Socrates figure behaving uncharacteristically. Yes, in Matthew’s relayed illustration the Socrates figure is doing the writing, whilst Plato looks on, no writing instrument in hand, in manifest alarm. I at least sense alarm or disturbance in the intent look in Plato’s eyes — one might compare the Euclid scholiast’s word ‘[Plato’s] so-to-speak Character’ [this allusion to what one might call Plato’s “personality” is in the scholion to I, Def. iv, — as this stands in JLH, Vol V, but not as it stands in Proclus’s version.]. In any case, no writer’s paraphernalia are to be seen in reach of the en-humored or alarmed Plato figure in the “Prognostica” text of Matthew of Paris.

Matthew Paris’s ms. appears to have a remark in its text about Amorians. Thus people of the earliest period of Alexander’s world-conquest. I can relay it here, something told me by Barker [“Bruce”] Benfield, then curator of this Matthew Paris ms. Mr. Barker reported to me live-voice at the Bodleian on 2 September 2010, when the two of us had the treasured ms. open before us there at the 1937 building at the Bodleian, as follows: his Matthew-ms. ‘Socrates basileus’ included in his text that he had “showed this work to the King of the Amorians“. Thus we have a reference to a people resident in Asia Minor, perhaps the conquests of a young Alexander still in the future and calling for Prognostic art and wisdom, such as this Prognostica contains in abundance. In any case the Amorians under reference may well reside or have resided just where the conquest-minded Alexander began his famousEktaseis. We might compare the way Queen Elizabeth looked for a John Dee, another Euclid-linked individual of historical stature. And our Queen wishing for an empire on which the sun never sets.

Yes, these are Fortune-Tellers all, — none as yet online ! Dee was deeply unaquainted with online work. Similarly the major donor of books to Widener Library at Harvard, Mr. Hollis, after whom the ‘HarvardOnLineLibraryInfoService’ catalog later came to be named (HOLLIS). (Our pre-internet man the Monk Matthew gives us his precious Socrates ms. under the heading ” Prognostica Socratis Basilei.” These future-oriented visionaries will have risked demoting their own work to the status of something disreputable, such as Public Service Commissioner Alfred Kahn said about the art of “economic forecasting”. “These people are about the task of making astrology and numerology look positively reputable, — by comparison” [I paraphrase]. I once spoke to this man over the phone; he was at his summer home near Ithaca NY at the time, intending to take a swim in his backyard pool. This same Fred Kahn wrote a book centered on politically influential members of the establishment, whom he wittily called “kleptocrats”.

These days there tends to be less writing of this species, biting satire or invective. Mike Royko the journalist from Chicago used to write vituperative pieces about Henry Kissinger — back when Kissinger was still alive — which had that kind of venom and bite. A still more venomous variety of such invective came from humorist Mark Twain [Samuel Clemens], heaping venomous invective on his personal intimate, his own private secretary Isabel Lyon [see picture].

The cause of the author’s anger has much in common with Plato’s cause for anger against his own personal secretary Philip of Opus. Here are Clemens’s words, the parts left in struck-through words where one cannot transpose them readily from the modern to the ancient author defending his literary legacy. In personal letters Clemens calls his secretary :

“a liar, a forger, a thief, a hypocrite, , a sneak, a humbug, a traitor, a conspirator, ” Trombley, Laura Skandera, ‘Mark Twain’s Other Woman’, Random House 2010.

It is now a century and more since the 450-page ms. about Ms. Lyon came from Clemens’s hand. Not surprisingly, it is not yet published. Not surprisingly, neither are Plato’s invectives against Socrates-Alternate, a devotee of the humbug and conspirator Hermes. This was Plato’s personal secretary, pretender to the role of literary executor for the entire Academy, perhaps even the platonic teaching’s Diadochos. This is the role Olympiodorus seems to claim for him. Hermes the forger and misleader. See mosaic from Macedonia :

Much further work is needed, to see if there is a good match between the alarm expressed in Matthew’s drawing of the upstaged Plato and this remark from the man who has just written about ‘characters’ and looking down from above, and ‘primurgic’ causes. A scholiast to Euclid I [not well preserved by Proclus] looks to be interested in Plato’s thinking about the Demiurge and ‘pronoia’, also about ‘characters’ in the way those reformist (sc. non-Olympian) thinkers among the “older philosophers” conceived these, and responded to them, ἐν τῷ ἑαυτῶν [sic] κατὰ τρόπον ἤθει.

More is to be worked about that matter of “personality” or “humor” or “temperament” in Plato and his immediate companions, some contemporary with Aristotle. What our scholiast is drawing upon, conceivably even from his personal experience, is sources that may go back to before the time of the early Aristotle. If some are traceable to Plato’s biographer Philip, researched recently by Swiss scholar F. Lasserre. Some features we may learn more about may even go back to the younger Plato.

Of great interest would it be, if the Organon and the De Caelo and the DeMundo were not yet written — but that they were only a few Olympiads off into the future, like the conquests of Alexander were. The author of the DeMundo seems to attribute to Zeus a more comprehensive way of being in charge of the Universe. As grandson of Chronos [Χρόνος] (this leaves a telling one-generation open space for Kronos between the two), — Zeus masters somewhat more than just Aristotle’s “heavens”. To be included in this expanded “all-Universe”” Heavens, Earth, Winds, events down here even including chance-events so-called, such as Alexander’s conquests, Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon, or the sinking of the Spanish Armada. The polyonymous of the perambiguous name is in charge of them all. Not just the limited range of things in the worlds of Timaeus or DeCaelo. Perhaps the author of DeMundo lived and wrote between Olympiads 103 and 107, thus had not yet seen the final version of DeCaelo, and thought he could improve on Timaeus.

We ourselves would want to retreat to a safe rear-guard position in these theological battles, and will want to incant [cf. Tht. 157 c9, ‘epaidw’ , ἐπᾳδῶ] some kind of counter-wish against a threat of divine retribution. Especially against the threat of hostility from Hermes’s property-conscious older Brother, Apollo. The calming climate of Venice will one day soon help moderate one or several of my venturous speculations here. In any case there is more to this story, or would that there might be.

Conceivably the singular atmosphere of that peculiar Nietschean aesthetic at Arten ῳ l will overcome inhibitions to this work.]

I once sent a rant-email Christopher Hitchens, may he rest, on the subject of a curious illiteracy often repeated by one of his favourite newspapers, the NY Times: their way of encoding their so-called “Quotation of the Day”. It was also the regular way that Borealis Press says “QuoteUnquote”, namely “”. What is between that open-quote and the close-quote? Well something like nothing. The Null Character, or what goes under the listing of “Special Character” as the no-space break.

What is the string-length of a single iteration of the no-space break ? None, I think. As in the saying (or no-saying) attributed to Socrates: “That One-Thing that I know is precisely this: No-One-Thing, or Nothing”.

Now render this into personal references, and you come back to that world’s oldest joke, the ManyMinded Odysseus confusing his Cyclops captor by telling him “My name is Outis”, or “I’m Mr. Nobody”. Whence, by a good substitution, the One-Eyed king concludes “Nobody is putting out my (one) eye”. And so he cried out. Epically.

Back to the NY Times and its self-nullifying quotations of the day. If you do a string-addition of a single no-space break (say the day’s quotation for Tuesday) + the no-space break for the next day, Wednesday, do you get a quotation whose string-length is 2 ? I’m guessing that a standard function for appraising string-lengths would answer, Yes, Tuesday + Wednesday, point of view summed-up null characters results in a string of length 2. ” “.

KratEs of Thebes is not impossible here, either as a matter of string-summings (‘grammar’ in the old sense of word-formation). Prefixing now the 3-day reference to the front of the string -ocrates, we get ” “[o]crates. This is an agglomerated name with 3-underbars prefixed, then a set of 3 null-string characters and then the 7 easy-to-read suffixed characters, totalling 13 bytes in all. A sophisticate’s variation on the proper name ‘Crates of Thebes’. Someday I’ll have to tax Vicki’s brain with these nothings (real) & somethings (nominal).

Proclus makes reference to a man, not otherwise easy to identify, whose name is in our best edition as “Kratistos” [Friedlein 211,16]. Proclus puts him alongside points about the traditional methods at the time of Plato and Leodamas. Plato, “Kratistos” and Leodamas (a parallel had occurred just 9 pages above in Proclus’s commentary, when he discusses two other men contemporary with these Early Academy thinkers: Amphinomus and Aristotle — Friedlein p. 202). It seems likely that we are here hearing echoes of a point made in Politicus when Socrates is talking to teachers and learners of mathematics at the Early Academy, young men who sat at the feet of Theodorus of Cyrene. I refer especially to the wording of a remark by Socrates to the teacher (Theodorus), who taught both Theaetetus and Younger Socrates. Plato’s text at the beginning of Statesman has this teaching described as “most powerful [kratistos] concerning ratios and geometrical matters”: περὶ λογισμοὺς καὶ τὰ γεωμετρικὰ κρατίστου , Polit. 257 a8. )

R.G. Bury raises historical points about a man named “Polycrates” — in relation to the late-middle dialogue Symposium. Only some light work on the etymology of this name is needed to see the ‘poly-‘ prefix as an invitation to trying out several variants, such as were in the nomenclature of the Early Academy. ‘Hermocrates’, ‘Socrates’ and [more in the background, son of Dionysius II] ‘Apollokrates’…

Back to names now, and the idea of prepending a null-string so as to produce variants with a suffixed <string> -[o]krates. A fully familiar completed name is SOdzein-kratEs, or SW-KRATHS. Plato had done word-play on the two halves of Socrates’s name in Republic Book VII. But consider a series of other strings to prefix, the balance being ‘o-crates’. Hermes and Apollo were two well-known names woven into the Sicilian family line, the one with the strong linkages to the voyaging Plato and his Early Academy: Dionysius I. Dionysius’s father-in-law was named ‘Hermo-kratEs’, and then this same man’s grandson (son of Dionysius II) got the name ‘Apoll-[o]kratEs’, this naming showing deference — so says Plutarch — to Plato. Plato himself had the nickname in antiquity ‘son of Apollo’ or Apollonides. All of this will point to a variety of locally understood cross-referring expressions, thinly veiled within such proper names or nicknames. Plato should incorporate a character in his late dialogue ‘Critias’, named ‘Hermocrates’.

This name ‘Hermocrates’ is mis-echoed, in the Oxford Press edition of Campbell’s Republic, Vol II, its ‘Excursus’ on the style of the late dialogues, [ his Rep. Vol II, p. 59 ]. Campbell’s Oxford volume of 1894 manifests ‘Herm-ogenes’, and the various reprintings of t his book since then have left this erroneous name (paradoxically enough ) precisely place, misprinted. [Co-incidentally enough, we can find a sort of parallel error in a Teubner Verlag printing of Xenophon’s Memorabilia I, 2, 48. Please note it carefully, that Teubner in 1886 , as if to interchange a disciple of the Socrates1 for a disciple of Socrates2, makes the exact same mis-substitution: it puts in the -ogenes man a disciple of Socrates1 ( Thebes) for the -ocrates man, associate of Socrates2 (the King, Socrates-Alternate as he is variously known within Ephraim’s text)].

In the 15th century ms. after which this site intends to produce a manual reproduction (or copy) , Diogenes sits in his tub poring over a book seeming to contain standard cynic’s fare. This would include comic plays, letters, satires and diatribes. Specimens of such writings survive from antiquity. All of this could furnish material suitable to be copied into the margins of (say) a IV cent. B.C. ms. behind Venetus T. Or copied directly into the margins of a mathematics text, such as we now have extant in Euclid. If so, we would have a plausible channel of transmission for the marginalium on folium 259r of Venetus T, with its stinging satire on Plato’s word-play with the root word “KRATHS/KRATEIN”. Such word-plays do in fact occur, at Tim. 42 b1. ‘Such-and-such -o-crates’ or ‘crates-a-so-and-so’ we might encode this line in Timaeus, allowing ourselves to borrow from Aristotle’s etymological dissecting of the nouns ‘Phil-ippos’ and ‘philo-theamwn’ at EN 1099. And, closer to home, we are borrowing from the word-dissections in Chapt 22 of Euthydemus . In the Aristotle word-play we see a varying of the whole word’s suffix, whereas our case requires that we vary the prefix. Bywater’s Oxford text unhappily omits part of this word-play in Aristotle, blocking the reader from seeing the good ms. variant ‘philo-theamwn’ [ φιλο-θεαμῶν ], a word of great interest to the philologically-minded critic of Republic V.

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[this following is a draft piece on Amphinomus, of a very general sort, redrafted several times and likely self-repeating and self-repeating, as of 12-12-2016]

At the Old Academy, Philip of Opus’s nickname appears to have been “Amphinomus”. possibly he had a plurality of speaker-names, a pair of lead examples being : “Younger Socrates” and [this latter is in truth made standard in Venetus T, its folio 67, beginning of Polit., and it is further echoed in the also authoritative Plato ms. W in Vienna] “Socrates Alternate” Σωκράτης Ἄλλος . This second variation on the name of this quasi-renewed man there beside the late Plato, this second name ought be followed down carefully & methodically, when a website like youngersocrates.com comes into existence and is hospitable to this. In olden days an innkeeper was called a ‘pandoxos’, and Plato’s friend and rival Eudoxus may even have said of Dionysius I “you are in some sort a Pandoxos, having played the innkeeper to my esteemed Plato, here in Syracuse”.

In any case it does seem historical that a certain bone-&-blood man was well acquainted with mathematics, was personally known both to the elderly teacher Plato and to the very young pupil, Aristotle of Stagira. Aristotle is reported (scholars judge this to be some kind of error) to have been a student of a “Socrates”. During and others, however, leave room for a Socrates Alternate. And history itself is here, as often, hospitable to many guests. A blood and bone person is strongly suggested by Aristotle’s writing a sharply worded criticism of the “parable about the animals” and then attirbuting this parable to this very man. He calls him “Socrates Junior” or “Socrates the Younger” Σωκράτης νεώτερος This is in Metaphysics Z, 11. The parable in question, which we may rightly get further clarity about from Metaphysics A, 1-2, is one which this man “repeatedly put forward”. We may safely presume Socrates Junior did this at the Academy, likely not far away from Plato.

This report by Aristotle has all the symptoms and signs of a matter-of-factl statement from his memory records, — not something he is inventing or imagining. We need hardly remind ourselves that this matter-of-fact turn of mind is deeply ingrained in Aristotle’s own character, so to speak within his very own blood and bones. We are right to think of a Plato or or a Heraclitus or an Empedocles, or a Parmenides — all men of poetico-imaginative ‘natures’ or ‘temperaments’ — that they pictured or imagined things, including their immediate surroundings, imaginatively and perhaps over-vividly. The term ‘physis’ is a standard term at Plato’s and Aristotle’s time for what we now tend to call ‘temperament’ or ‘personality type’. It is so used in ps.-Aristotle, Problems 30, 6, quite certainly . So this remark from our customarily understood Aristotle, writing in his characteristic matter-of-fact manner according to his own nature, deserves our close attention.

“Younger Socrates” used to put forward this parable “repeatedly” No, it is not at all persuasive to Aristotle, but one bit of Academic behavior just as characteristic of Aristotle as his factual reporting opinions, was his willingness to subject these one and all to vigorous criticism. I will be suggesting that the man he is criticising also went by the nickname (likely an intramural name), “Amphinomus”. Anyone from that same Early Academy will have associated Amphinomus with LeiOdEs, linked as the two figures are in Homer’s stories the tradition of Homer. LeiOdEs is the ‘doublet’ character to Amphinomus. [so B. Fenik ‘Studies in the Odyssey’ (Mnemosyne 1974), esp. pp. 192-196.].

Philip is credited with a Euclid-like work “Optics” (noticed by Burnyeat in his recent piece reviving Archytas’s “Optics”). He may also have been the same man under reference in the puzzling “twn sophwn tis” in Rep. IX,ix, 583B,ff. Adam’s App. IV makes a mighty effort to identify this τις “=tis”, spoken of as one of the “sophoi”, likely with a hint of irony. The two leading nominees whom Adam reviews are Antisthenes and Democritus. Then there is – paradoxically — Plato Himself – Philebus 44 B,ff, where we can identify the attitudes toward Pleasure to be distinctly less preacherly. Prof. D. Frede may possibly agree with our understanding here. If not, her ‘adoxotera’ ‘endoxa’ will find a kindly-minded Innkeeper at this website. Men at or near Plato, Amphinomus and Eudoxus are all kindly Pandoxoi.

But amongst the various men writing on Pleasure at the Old Academy, one further man (so says SUDA), apart from Plato himself, who wrote at some length about Pleasure, was Philip of Opus. He seems rarely to get much notice seems overlooked here. If we trust the SUDA report (you might as well say [kaitoige] ‘surely you don’t want to give preference to trusting ourselves, critics from 11 centuries later !’). Philip is credited with a treatise π. ἡδονῆς α. (“p. HEdonEs, 1 book”.) Our present-day vantagepoint does not allow us to say confidently that no part of that book of Philip’s found its way into what we now call Plato’s Philebus . Nor can we be sure none of it found its way, alongside material from Eudoxus, into the relevant portions of the book by the student of “Younger Socrates” — E.N. Books I and X.

It may be helpful to insert here a brief discussion , based upon a series of Scholia to Euclid I, 15 (esp. Scholl. ##59-62). This will take us along a path JL Heiberg laid down. He collected and published with Teubner in 1888, the scholia to all of Euclid’s Elements. The Scholion of greatest interest in our present context is the one leading toward the Philip-like sentiment also expressed in Schol. #18 (skeptical towards ‘poiEsis’, on the grounds of its debatable concessiveness to ‘time-dependence’ inside mathematics). It includes a quite special and distinctive verb ‘diamphisbEtein’ also written by Aristotle in his piece ‘On Friendship’. This is material from Aristotle’s early years, some of which will have found its way into EN, at Bk IX, 2 1155 a 32ff. Now Lewis Campbell the Plato scholar had called attention to the relative novelty of this specialist term διαμφισβήτειν at the time of Plato’s late dialogues.

In Aristotle himself, however, it occurs several times, once in the suspect book of the Metaphysics, namely Book Kappa. This is the book that repeats earlier material from the same treatise, and that is further peculiar in suffering from a rash of DeMundo-style phrasings ge mh\n ( γε μὴν ). Book Kappa is so much filled with unAristotelian features that scholars beginning with W. Christ and continuing past W.D. Ross agreed that Book Kappa should be deleted from Aristotle’s text. Herbert Granger has recently shown a disinclination to comply with this scholarly consensus, but in the main these two eminent Aristotle scholars have carried the day. All six of its γε μὴν ‘s and all of its other irregularities have been removed (alongside the removal of the tract also rich in γε μὴν ‘s , the DeMundo, — a tract of astronomical and meteorological purport, with side excursions into unAristotelian issues such as celestial names).

There is a good sense of ‘halfway’ which permits us to say that “Halfway back to Plato” we may find evidence of an Early Academic writer of significance for both Plato and Aristotle. We can take our starting point at a text in Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. He is doing some philological surgery, on words prefixed by “philo-“. Not at all unlike the way Plato finds ‘philo-sophos’ in Republic Book V, by factoring out the ‘-of-such-and-so’ from the words ‘lovers-of-such-and-so’ and then adding ‘-of-wisdom’. In Ethics Book I we have filo-qeamw=n( φιλοθεαμῶν ) put adjacent to the analysis of fil[o]- ἱππος “Phil-ippos” . Can he be conveying a critical attitude toward his own teacher, a writer half-way back to Plato, a he points to as “Philip the Philo-theamwn” (φιλοθεαμῶν)? The possibility cannot be ruled out.

Certainly when writers’ conventions strongly discouraged using the names of living people (say Eudemus or Eudoxus or Theophrastus or Dicaearchus), we are unsurprised not to find those names in either Plato or Aristotle. Even a Speusippus or an Isocrates is likely to appear only very rarely. Is Aristotle intending an oblique reference to one of his teachers, a student and friend of Plato’s ?

I would suggest that there is already allusiveness in Aristotle’s dissecting the name of the man between himself and Plato, Philip [of Opus]. But we can find much more in the vicinity of this allusion if we include the point that the word filoqeamw=n [‘philotheamOn’] is more likely what Aristotle wrote at 1099 a 10. We need not follow I. Bywater, who not only does not keep this word in his text, but also declines to mention its having ms. authority, declines to report this in his apparatus criticus. H.H. Joachim’s high admiration for Bywater and the other ‘Aristotelian Society’ scholars of his day was well founded [I refer to Joachim’s preface to the 1922 edition of the O.U.P. De Gen. et Corr.].

All the same we ought to follow the example of Slings (his Clitophon, p. 342,f) in keeping the door open to the idea of an ‘ancient tradition’ behind any of various manuscript peculiarities which have survived these dozens of centuries in our textual transmissions. In any case the present Oxford edition has the [considerably less plausible] reading filo-qeorw=n (‘philo-theorwn’). And, alas, Bywater did not preserve the Bekker note listing the “philo-theamwn” varia lectio. This imports a quite different meaning, a difference of substance. It is as if we let a ‘theoretician’ be put in for a theater-goer. A lover-of-abstract-knowledge ( θεωρήμα qeorhma) for a lover-of-a-spectacle qea/ma (‘ θεάμα ’). ‘Theama’ is in fact the root word which is clearly intended by Aristotle to be echoed in the text of Bekker 1099 a10, pace O.U.P. and Bywater. So φιλοθεαμῶν (filotheamwn) has commensurate authority at a10.

We need to focus on that same Early Academy period (Olymp. 106, when Philebus is being composed, and Plato is in his very advanced years – those poignantly called ‘our sunset years’ in Laws VI, xiv — see Slings on Plato’s using the first-personal plural form, in Clitophon for example, to indicate ‘myself’ at 406 a10. Around this date we have Phil. 44B, referring to ‘some wise someone’ who is further described as ‘deinos peri physin’. John Adam made penetrating suggestions on the type of man here alluded to by Plato. ‘Pythagorean preachers’, says Adam (app. x to Rep. Bk IX. This would put our author at the Academy and make him not unlike the Empedocles referred to by Aristotle here in EN IX,2. A threesome of men is put together in Problems 6, 30. They have attributed to them a shared temperament or ‘personalilty-type’. Something about their black bile. This list has oddities of various sorts. But one striking point is its listing Socrates after Plato: Empedocles, Plato and Socrates. The Elder Socrates kept his bile pretty well controlled, we might think: “Go ahead and condemn me to death, O Athens ! As far as I know this may be a not so severe penalty, especially for a peaceable man, a reflective and perhaps even phlegmatic old man, now aged seventy”.

Can Younger Socrates, or Socrates Alternate have had something more bilious, even choleric, about him ? He would have to have had considerable personal energy and a willingness to thrust himself forward there at the Academy, claiming a position in that succession of eminent men beginning back at Socrates Simpliciter, moving forward via Plato and pointing ahead to such prominent men as Eudoxus, Aristotle and Theophrastus. Again, as we have reliable evidence to inform us, Philip put himself forward as having opinions worth publishing on topics under vigorous debate, such as pleasure, the passion of anger, and On Writing (p. graphein). Either of the standard meanings of ‘graphein’ here would make Philip a bold man: “On proving [as in geometry] or On Writing [as in Plato’s Phaedrus”].

Returning now to Aristotle’s seemingly polyonymous teacher, call him Amphinomus, call him LeiOdEs, call him Younger Socrates (basileia is among the things Aristotle has under DiamphisbEsis, not so ?) In that same DeMundo Chapt 7 spirit of Polyonymising I’d like to add to Philip’s names. We have it in our best ms. of the Euclid scholion (Heiberg de-prefers this reading, demotes it to his apparatus criticus): “AristoclEs”. In Schol. #15, nearby to both #11 and #18 (each of these two latter has peculiarities which may be signs of Philip’s style) – we have a report about A)risto/lhj kai\ oi( gewme/trai (‘Aristo/lEs and the geometers’) . Whoever they were, they came up with their own favorite technical terms for various forms of initial hypotheses or “anapodeikta”. Whilst JL Heiberg has printed ‘AristotelEs’ here in Scholion #15, he is characteristically methodical, and retains in his Critical notes the true reading from our single MS source ( “P”): ‘Aristo/lhj’(sic) Call him AristoclEs, say I, not far from either SosiclEs (Plautus), or NeoclEs (Problems, XXX, Ch. 6), an otherwise unfamiliar name at Old Academy.

Amphinomus is like the author of the De Mundo, who is emphatic about how Zeus manages his “polyonymy”. (some of us moderns experience shock at Zeus’s polygamy; others at his polyonymy. Philip piously admires both. Amphitryon is as admirable as Amphinomus at this time of Old Academy rivalries and jealousies. Zeus seems positively to luxuriate in his variety of names as we see him there in DeMundo #7 — even in its sheer variety. The author, whoever and whenever he was, passes many names of Zeus in review there in the work’s final chapter (Bekker p. 401). He and Zeus co-luxuriate in the polymorphic variety of all of this. It is only better if Zeus should have a son younger than Apollo, the cunning and contriving and thieving youngster. He will steal cattle early on. Later he will steal names and inspire others to such stealing. For example the forger of ps-Plato’s Letter #2, if he can be a ‘Socrates re-born’, can steal the name of Socrates and then (having had Plato confess that all of his written work was not truly his own, but rather belongs to Socrates) steal Plato’s entire oeuvre, including the Epinomis and the Minos !

Returning again to the man known to his mother as Philip: he and others near him at the Old Academy is a lively nominee to be author of the De Mundo. (My analysis, which draws on work by D. Schenkeveld, presses hard on the identity of this author. I end by finding Philip of Opus, the same author revealed behind mask of Plato, at the the ps.-Platonic “Epinomis”. My conclusion is that Philip was also known as ‘Amphinomus’, particularly where he and Speusippus try to combat a band of mathematicians in the immediate vicinity of Plato and the young Aristotle. [so reports Proclus, On Eucl Bk One] and therefore, intimately linked (as a ‘doublet’ to Homer’s Leiw/dhj (‘LeiOdEs’) figure. — See B. Fenik, “Studies in the Odyssey”, 1974.

Eudoxus, Speusippus and Aristotle, all joined Philip in writing on the Pleasure Question, the date of all of this Early Academy writing (including notably Philebus) : the 106^th Olympiad at the latest. Rep. IX can easily have been under revision [recall D.H. on Plato’s continually revising his writings until on his death-bed.] This writing activity – including notably Plato’s own – was likely to be going forward at a rapid pace in Olympiads 104-106, at and after the date of Seventh Letter.

Amphinomus, a somewhat evangelical Friend of Forms’ seems the most plausible candidate for this man behind the mask of tw=n sofw=n tij (‘twn sophwn tis’). Our text of 583 B includes a case of ‘kaitoi’, a favorite of Plato’s quasi-friend. A way of decoding the nickname ‘Amphinomus’ leads via the epithet applied to the suitor Amphinomus in Odyssey XVIII, 152 : kosmh/twr laou= (‘kosmEtOr laou’). It is all the more ironic that it should be Odysseus himself who calls Amphinomus by this mis-placed epithet. But our Academic ambassador and voyager Plato, at Rep. 422C had raised a storm of ridicule against mythical Agamemnon, “do you say, absurdly, that our great strategist didn’t even know how to count the number of his own feet?” Plato uses the ‘kaitoi’ phrasing there too, keeping his tone jocular and vernacular.

Our author on Optics, on Pleasure, On Friends and Friendship — the Pythagorean mathematician very close to Plato as he begins his Laws does well here.

This may be another case where the world needs to guard our text against the contaminations from outside manipulators — say Amphinomus or his over-zealous ‘friends of the Forms’. They will be losing their bearings when fighting pitched battles against “Friends of the Earth”. This bad habit of later Platonists – the habit of ‘tampering’ with texts, say of Aristotle when combatting Plato or others, — or alternatively those of Plato when combatting Aristotle or others. These tamperers or hybridisers or contaminators — they may not hesitate to tamper [see J. Dillon and J. Whittaker on the well-documented later tampering with Academic texts, aimed at scoring polemical points. This form of argumentative misbehavior often goes by the nickname ‘Straw Man’ ] It is a serious over-simplification if we think that all intra-Academy polemics, — even when the Academy had yet to complete its first Pentekontaetea, — were variations on the Plato vs. Aristotle wars there. Yes, as Cherniss argued influentially in the early 20th century, Aristotle’s polemics may at times have targeted a Straw Plato. But problematic though it is to put full trust in Aristotle’s reporting. My own view follows that of W.K.C. Guthrie, his piece “Aristotle as Historian”, which credits him with much careful reporting about his predecessors, including those he regarded as misguided or as lisping childishly in groping to anticipate Aristotle’s own “more mature” or truer analysis. Yes, even when targeting his beloved teacher Plato we do well to trust Aristotle’s reporting. An extreme case is (where his polemics often have a sharp edge, say when in the middle of a sharply worded attack on Plato he deploys the little phrase “hws epos eipein”, a favorite locution of Plato’s own, perhaps even an intimate creation of Plato’s. When Aristotle was writing his (Brunschwig edited) Topics, (Huby convincingly placed this near the 103d Olympiad) he was not ready to give leadership, or misleadership, to little armies. Little and little-minded as are most intra-Academic armies. A recent staging of such smallness, vivid and telling in its imagery, was the movie “The Man who Knew Infinity”. A real war such as was being waged against Germany, but within Cambridge University’s walls the polemics raged about number theory and what credit to give a “foreign” voice.

D.A. Campbell reviews academic battles amongst literati which raged “with brief interruptions for two real wars” during the 20th century. We may reasonably offer this: it should be ‘axiomatic’ for any modernday academic [I mean ‘axiom’ in the senses of Scholl. 11 and 15 to Euclid I, as edited by J.L. Heiberg] that Academic wars can break out in many directions. They will be wildly various, as alliances form and sub-sectarian quarrels devolve from earlier and different battles of the larger sectarian units or tribes. Scholl. 11 and 15 bring out the etymology of ‘axiom’: “something which I or one of my colleagues currently think valuable, ἀξιούμεν (‘axioumen’)”]. In a letter a couple years ago I asked a colleague formerly from Balliol College – a widely respected Aristotle scholar, in fact — whether he had come up against such a local and party-quarrel context at or near Balliol, for such an august term as Aristotle’s word. Ἀξιώμα (Axioma). From his silence I infer that such a party-quarrel was something he had never witnessed at Balliol, nor heard tell of on his island, — say at Kings College Cambridge.

Here is a curious sidelight on the history of this Universal, academic eristic. It goes back to fall of 1902 and spring of 1903 in Cambridge, England. Late in 1902 lectures were given by Dr. Henry Jackson in Cambridge on Aristotle. Notes were taken by then-young-scholar Leonard Hugh Graham (LHG) Greenwood. He took them from Dr. Jackson’s lectures on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. They have Jackson referring to Aristotle’s phrase κατὰ ξυμβέβεκος in a peculiarly dismissive way. Jackson called Aristrotle’s phrase “slang”. [these Greenwood notes are unpublished, but are contained in Greenwood’s minute letters, lovely multi-colored red and black inks, in his personal interleaved copy of the OCT text, later owned by Hamish Wilson and for a time owned by myself. I last saw this volume in summer of 1984, having relayed it, via G.E.R. Lloyd, to Kings College Cambridge library. Jackson is there reported to have dismissed a series of chapters in Aristotle’s Book Zeta “with abuse”. Alas, these included the chapter Z, 11 where Aristotle has mentioned a “Younger Socrates” and where he described, and criticised, his habitual ‘parable’ about animals. Some of this material, net of Greenwood’s colorful red and black inks, will soon be published here on this website.

A lead example here is one Philip had a special interest in. It is a close parallel to — perhaps it was in fact identical — what is at stake back at Schol. #18 to Book I of ‘Elements’. The Scholiast wants to uplife and edify the reader by raising up his gaze to a level of more purely noetic reality. We must discipline ourselves to make sure we are gazing only upon the pure and purely mathematical. But this requires us to avoid so to speak “soiling our hands” on anything like with production-or-making. The famous ‘Divided Line’ calls on us to section off (a recently trendy formula for this is ‘draw a bright line’) — between those ‘lower’ applications of the human mind, where ‘gross matter’ is managed, manoeuvered, manipulated and so forth. What it is customary to entitle or label (epiklEsis is the word in Epinomis 973b) ‘PoiEsis’. Some ‘corrector’ seems to have made of Plato’s bright line between ‘dianoeta’ and ‘noeta’ full stop far less bright. Thus the blurring of boundary between mathematical objects and truly ideal objects there at Rep. VII, 511d2, now made brighter again by Slings’s valuable removal of the 5-word “kaitoi” clause, in his 2003 OCT edition.

The very label Q.E.F., or in the ancient form ὅπερ ἔδει ποιῆσαι , says Philip or the Philip-like commentator there, invites us to depreciate the thing ‘made’ or ‘produced’. The phrase “hoper edei poiEsai” implies our platonist demotion of its status as ‘mere product’. Essences are a whole world different. They are “there”, not “here” to paraphrase a retort to the young Aristotle’s challenge. An object of ‘Thewrein’ is just there for us to gaze upon. It makes no sense to say of The Triangle-as-Itself that it was ever “made”. Here we are encountering a variant of the same issue that created a schism within the Academy, that which had the “eternal cosmos” only in a figurative or ‘pedagocical’ sense a thing “made” or “constructed”. Thus in the case of Prop. 1 of Euclid, the ‘once triangle’ is only said of a figure ‘just now constructed’. Mathematical constructions, like cosmological ones, can only be metaphorical. If the lectures at Harvard’s Science Center in 2016 speak of the “origin” of gravity or the gauge/gravity duality, they must be taken to be exercising imagination, not pure mathematico-physical intellection. Thus we need to keep bringing out for ourselves, an epi-demiourgic dimension in all this. This means we must remind ourselves that mathematical objects must be kept timeless and changeless. Full-strength Platonic, in short. This matches precisely what Speusippus’s colleague Amphinomus presented in disputing against the “Friends of the Earth” there at the Academy near the time of Sophist. As if ignoring Diotima’s warning about the term about “poiEsis” being multiplex in its meaning, the mathematician should abstain from the time-referring language of “making”.

A statue in alongside Boston’s Tremont St. carries the caption “Industry”, and shows a dodecahedron under construction. Here is a snapshot of this Theaetetus-like man, at work:

Diotima to the elder Socrates ideality which “poiesis” is a threat to. Thus we must continue to divide in a bright-line way between then-triangle(s) and the kind Scholion #112 formulates the essential triangle : τὸ τρίγωνον ᾕ ἑαύτῇ (to\ tri/gwnon h(=| e(auth=|) , in other words the one resident amongst the Ever-Similar range of things. To be sure, the classical locus of this complaint from Philip is in Proclus. It may be natural to suppose that Heiberg’s Schol. #112 to Euclid Book I derives from Proclus. This would mean it had only a slim chance of being traceable to something written while Plato was still alive, or even anything as early as (say) Plutarch or Chrysippus. An argument is wanting, in the spirit of “let us philologues be as keen to avoid the rash extreme of uncritical skepticism as we standardly are in avoiding incaution” – the spirit, let us call this, of Walter Burkert. A philologue’s behavior can rhyme with “Vorsicht”, to be sure. But rational Vorsicht may call on him to restrain his over-restraint, and test out impartially the likelihood (however slim) that, as Slings has put it recently “something ancient” may lie behind the peculiarities we now and then in texts we have before us today.

We may express this in at least two ways, where the parallelism will be manifest. (1) The Triangle ‘hE heautE’ has never known a time when it Was Not, or when it (so to speak) ‘stood in need of being constructed’ and (2) that is by nature a thing of which we may not legitimately ask the question e)/c ou(=( ‘ex hou’ ) question – unless we are prepared to accept a somewhat paradoxical form of answer. ‘Mathematical’ or ‘geometrical’ matter is an answer with the air of paradox about it; the puzzling phrase ‘noEtic matter’, coming down to us from the Old Academy when Aristotle and Younger Socrates were there debating mathematical platonism in the way rival ‘diadochoi’ or ‘heirs’ might debate (even quarrel) over rival heritages they were prepared to draw from Plato himself. There will be another view of this same subject – drawn from a man we may identify with the anonymous ‘someone’ of Proclus’s Friedlein p.

24.xi.12: Examples #6 and #7 of this TLG search report on the Scholia to Euclid. These are lead examples of the combination particle “kaitoi”. This is in turn followed immediately by a participle (in the genitive case). A similar clause seems to have been intruded into Plato’s text, perhaps by Philip of Opus, at Rep. VI, 511 D 2.

At the Old Academy, Philip’s nickname appears to have been “Amphinomus”. possibly he had a second speaker-name, h.e. “Younger Socrates”. This possibility should be followed down by someone, perhaps myself, when a blogsite like youngersocrates.net exists and is hospitable to this. Each was well acquainted with mathematics, each was personally known to the elderly Plato and the juvenile Aristotle. Anyone from that same Early Academy will have associated Amphinomus with LeiOdEs, in the tradition of Homer being the ‘doublet’ character to Amphinomus. [so B. Fenik ‘Studies in the Odyssey’ (Mnemosyne 1974), esp. pp. 192-196.].

Philip is credited with a Euclid-like work “Optics” (noticed by Burnyeat in his recent piece reviving Archytas’s “Optics”). He may also have been the same man under reference in the puzzling “twn sophwn tis” in Rep. IX,ix, 583B,ff. Adam’s App. IV makes a mighty effort to identify this “tij”, spoken of as one of the “sophoi”, perhaps with a hint of irony. The two leading nominees whom he reviews are Antisthenes and Democritus. Then there is – paradoxically — Plato Himself – Philebus 44 B,ff, where the attitudes toward pleasure are distinctly less preacherly.

But one particular man at the Old Academy who, apart from Plato, wrote at some length about Pleasure seems overlooked here. If we trust the SUDA report (you might as well say [kaitoige] ‘surely you don’t want to trust ourselves, critics from 11 centuries later !’). Philip is credited with a treatise p. h(donh=j a. (“p. HEdonEs, 1 book”.) Our present-day vantagepoint does not allow us to say confidently that no part of that book found its way into what we now call Plato’s Philebus. Nor can we be sure none of it found its way, alongside material from Eudoxus, into EN Books X and IX.

It may be worthwhile to insert an excursus here, Scholia to Euclid I, 15 (esp. Scholl. ##59-62). This will take us down a path JL Heiberg laid down. He collected and published with Teubner in 1888, the scholia to all of Euclid’s Elements. the one leading toward the Philip-like sentiment expressed in Schol. #18 (skeptical towards ‘poiEsis’, as making concessions to ‘time-dependence’ inside mathematics). We might take steps to follow the distinctive verb ‘diamphisbEtein’ written by Aristotle in his piece ‘On Friendship’, — on some good accounts of Aristotle’s early writing this will have found its way into EN, at Bk IX, 2 1155 a 32ff. As far back in time as Plato this rather specialised verb was a striking one, on account of its rarity. In Aristotle himself, however, it occurs several times, once in the suspect Met. Kappa. This is the book that repeats much earlier material from the same treatise, and that is further peculiar in suffering from a rash of DeMundo-style phrasings ge mh\n (‘ge mEn’). Various of these peculiarities were too much for Aristotle scholars beginning with W. Christ and continuing past W.D. Ross. They agreed that Book Kappa should be deleted in its entirety. Herbert Granger has recently shown a disinclination to comply with this scholarly consensus.

There is a good sense of ‘halfway’ which permits us to say that “Halfway back to Plato, — if we began from Aristotle, — we have our filo-qeamw=n(“ PhilotheamOn”) adjacent to Aristotle’s chancing upon the etymology fil[o]-ippoj “Phil-ippos” of Plato’s student, Philip of Opus, Aristotle’s teacher in turn [see 1099 a 10 in the ‘E’ MS, commended by myself in a letter to J. Barnes, mine of early Feb 2010].

Roughly that same time (say early Olymp. 106, when Philebus is being composed, and Plato in his very advanced years – those poignantly called ‘our sunset years’ in Laws VI, xiv — see Slings on Plato’s using the first-personal plural form, in Clitophon for example, to indicate ‘myself’ at 406 a10. Around this date we have Phil. 44B, referring to ‘some wise someone’ who is further described as ‘deinos peri physin’. John Adam made penetrating suggestions on the type of man here alluded to by Plato. ‘Pythagorean preachers’, says Adam (app. x to Rep. Bk IX. This would put our author at the Academy and make him not unlike the Empedocles referred to by Aristotle here in EN IX,2. A threesome of men is put together in Problems xxx, 6. They have attributed to them a shared temperament or ‘personalilty-type’. Something about their black bile. This list has oddities apart from mentioning Socrates after Plato: Empedocles, Plato and Socrates. The Elder Socrates kept his bile pretty well controlled, we might think. Can Younger Socrates have had something more bilious about him ?

Returning now to Aristotle’s seemingly polyonymous teacher, call him Amphinomus, call him LeiOdEs, call him Younger Socrates (basileia is among the things Aristotle has under DiamphisbEsis, not so ?) In that same DeMundo Chapt 7 spirit of Polyonymising I’d like to add to Philip’s names. We have it in our best ms. of the Euclid scholion (Heiberg de-prefers this reading, demotes it to his apparatus criticus): “AristoclEs”. In Schol. #15, nearby to both #11 and #18 (each of these two latter has peculiarities which may be signs of Philip’s style) – we have a report about A)risto/lhj kai\ oi( gewme/trai (‘Aristo/lEs and the geometers’) . Whoever they were, they came up with their own favorite technical terms for various forms of initial hypotheses or “anapodeikta”. Whilst JL Heiberg has printed ‘AristotelEs’ here in Scholion #15, he is characteristically methodical, and retains in his Critical notes the true reading from our single MS source ( “P”): ‘Aristo/lhj’(sic) Call him AristoclEs, say I, not far from either SosiclEs (Plautus), or NeoclEs (Problems, XXX, Ch. 6), an otherwise unfamiliar name at Old Academy.

Returning again to the man known to his mother as Philip: he and others near him at the Old Academy is a lively nominee to be author of the De Mundo. (My analysis, which draws on work by D. Schenkeveld, presses hard on the identity of this author. I end by finding Philip of Opus, the same author revealed behind mask of Plato, at the the ps.-Platonic “Epinomis”. My conclusion is that Philip was also known as ‘Amphinomus’, particularly where he and Speusippus try to combat a band of mathematicians in the immediate vicinity of Plato and the young Aristotle. [so reports Proclus, On Eucl Bk One] and therefore, intimately linked (as a ‘doublet’ to Homer’s Leiw/dhj (‘LeiOdEs’) figure. — See B. Fenik, “Studies in the Odyssey”, 1974.

Amphinomus, a somewhat evangelical Friend of Forms’ seems the most plausible candidate for this man behind the mask of tw=n sofw=n tij (‘twn sophwn tis’). Our text of 583 B includes a case of ‘kaitoi’, a favorite of Plato’s quasi-friend. A way of decoding the nickname ‘Amphinomus’ leads via the epithet applied to the suitor Amphinomus in Odyssey XVIII, 152 : kosmh/twr laou= (‘kosmEtOr laou’). It is all the more ironic that it should be Odysseus himself who calls Amphinomus by this mis-placed epithet. But our Academic ambassador and voyager Plato, at Rep. 422C had raised a storm of ridicule against mythical Agamemnon, “do you say, absurdly, that our great strategist didn’t even know how to count the number of his own feet?” Plato uses the ‘kaitoi’ phrasing there too, keeping his tone jocular and vernacular.

Our author on Optics, on Pleasure, On Friends and Friendship — the Pythagorean mathematician [Philip] very close to Plato as he begins his Laws does well as a candidate here.

These men seem to have felt free to “tamper” (so Dillon, following Whittaker).

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