Table Of ContentSIMPLICIUS
On Epictetus Handbook 1-26
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SIMPLICIUS
On Epictetus
Handbook 1-26
Translated by
Charles Brittain & Tad Brennan
LONDON • NEW DELHI • NEW YORK • SYDNEY
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published in 2002 by Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd.
Paperback edition fi rst published 2014
© 2013 Charles Brittain and Tad Brennan
Charles Brittain and Tad Brennan have asserted their right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identifi ed as Authors of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publishers.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or
refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication
can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN HB: 978-0-7156-3068-6
PB: 978-1-4725-5806-0
ePDF: 978-1-4725-0194-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
The present translations have been made possible by generous
and imaginative funding from the following sources: the National
Endowment for the Humanities, Division of Research Programs,
an independent federal agency of the USA; the Leverhulme Trust;
the British Academy; the Jowett Copyright Trustees; the Royal
Society (UK); Centro Internazionale A. Beltrame di Storia dello
Spazio e del Tempo (Padua); Mario Mignucci; Liverpool University;
the Leventis Foundation; the Arts and Humanities Research Board
of the British Academy; the Esmée Fairbairn Charitable Trust;
the Henry Brown Trust; Mr and Mrs N. Egon; the Netherlands
Organisation for Scientifi c Research (NWO/GW). A special grant
for the preparation of this volume was provided by the Council
of Gresham College. The editor wishes to thank Brad Inwood,
Christopher Gill, Doug Hutchinson and Teun Tieleman for their
comments and Han Baltussen for preparing the volume for press.
Typeset by Ray Davies
Printed and bound in Great Britain
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction 1
Textual Emendations 36
Translation 37
Notes 125
Bibliography 140
Concordance of Editions and Overview of Topics 143
English-Greek Glossary 145
Greek-English Index 152
Subject Index 175
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Preface
The writings of Simplicius are now extant. His physical and meta-
physical commentaries on Aristotle have passed away with the
fashion of the times; but his moral interpretation of Epictetus is
preserved in the library of nations, as a classic book, most excel-
lently adapted to direct the will, to purify the heart, and to confirm
the understanding, by a just confidence in the nature both of God
and man (Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
pt. V, ch. 40).
Gibbon’s casual condemnation of the ‘physical and metaphysical com-
mentaries on Aristotle’ – i.e. of most of the volumes in the Ancient
Commentators on Aristotle series that has given our own translation a
home – now seems merely to illustrate the fashion of his times: transla-
tions of ancient commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics or Metaphysics no
longer need to justify their appearance in print. A translation of an
ancient commentary on Epictetus’ Encheiridion, however, perhaps does
require a bit more justification than Gibbon’s pious encomium, particu-
larly when it is appearing in a series on the exegesis of Aristotle.
Although it is not included in the Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca,
we think that there are good reasons for the inclusion of this commen-
tary in the series that will assure it of appropriate readers. For Sim-
plicius was an ancient commentator on Aristotle, and this work tells us
a great deal about him, the other ancient commentators on Aristotle,
and the Platonist milieu in which they worked; and, though nominally
devoted to a Stoic text, it is perhaps the most concise encapsulation of
the Platonist vision of the world that survives. Thus, by including this
volume, the series will eventually contain all of the extant commentar-
ies by Simplicius, and a work that is extraordinarily informative about
the larger intellectual project that underlay the commentaries on Aris-
totle that are its principal constituents.
Our translation is to a great extent the product of our predecessors:
Johannes Schweighäuser, whose commentary on Simplicius’ commen-
tary is a model of philological and philosophical incisiveness; and
Professor I. Hadot, whose dedication to Simplician studies is likely to
remain unmatched, and from whose editions, books, and articles we
have learned a great deal (and continue to learn: her second edition of
viii Preface
the first half of the commentary in the Budé series unfortunately
reached us too late to be of use for this translation). Where our prede-
cessors failed to enlighten us, a wealth of detailed comments were
provided by the readers co-opted by Richard Sorabji, including Christo-
pher Gill, Margaret Graver and Brad Inwood, as well as six others who
remain anonymous. Susanne Bobzien and Tony Long gave us further
necessary comments on Simplicius’ logic and on the style of our trans-
lation, respectively. We have also received valuable editorial and
indexical assistance from Han Baltussen, Eleni Vambouli, Andrew
Chignell, and Kate Woolfitt. Richard Sorabji, the general editor of the
series, assisted us at every stage; his willingness to include this volume
in the series made it possible for us to focus on Simplicius without the
distractions of a pressing press. We are honoured to have played our
small part in his tireless efforts to inform the scholarly community
about the philosophers of late antiquity. We are profoundly indebted to
these scholars and friends. We also gratefully acknowledge a generous
grant for collaborative research from the Society for Humanities at
Cornell University and a grant from the Frederick W. Hilles Publication
Fund of Yale University.
T.R.B. would like in addition to thank colleagues at King’s College,
London, where he began this work, as well as at Yale University, where
he finished it. Richard Sorabji, M.M. McCabe, Sylvia Berryman, Mi-
chael Della Rocca, Shelly Kagan and Bob Adams deserve special
mention. His children, Alexandra and Lincoln, lightened the difficult
years; and, as always, his deepest thanks go to Liz Karns.
C.B. is indebted to Michael Frede for suggesting Simplicius’ work as
a text for a reading group, and to Stephen Menn, George Boys-Stones,
Susanne Bobzien and his colleagues at Cornell, particularly Hayden
Pellicia and Jeffrey Rusten, for their help and encouragement over the
years. He is very grateful to Sophie and Helena, whose births punctu-
ated the translation, and to his delightful copyeditor, Harriet Brittain.
New Haven & Ithaca C.B.
T.R.B.
Introduction
1. The interest of the work
In [Simplicius’ Commentary on Epictetus], you have clearly before
you the whole philosophical scheme from which Christianity took
its outlines, so that this book, written by a ‘pagan’ philosopher,
makes the most Christian impression conceivable (setting aside
the fact that the whole realm of Christian sentiment and pathology
is absent, i.e. ‘love’ in the Pauline sense, ‘fear of God’, and so on).
The betrayal of all reality through morality is here present in its
fullest splendour – pitiful psychology, the philosopher reduced to a
country parson. And Plato is to blame for all of it! He remains
Europe’s greatest misfortune!’ (Nietzsche in a letter to Overbeck,
7 January 1887).
The Commentary on the Handbook of Epictetus is a valuable source for
the history of Platonism. It contains a series of lengthy digressions on
some of the central philosophical issues in Platonist ethics, treating the
metaphysical structure of the world, the nature of evil and free will.
These essays are particularly valuable because they are designed for
novice philosophers – hence Nietzsche’s ‘country parson’ jibe – and thus
accessible in a way that most of our surviving evidence for late Plato-
nism, which often seems obscure and unduly exuberant, is not. The work
also provides useful information about the Platonists’ theory of emotion,
about their interpretive and pedagogical practices, and about Sim-
plicius’ own reaction to an increasingly hostile political order.
The commentary is equally informative on the history of ancient
Stoicism. It is an extended epigraph on a school which had been dead for
several hundred years, revealing that the Platonists were tacitly en-
gaged in harmonising Plato and Zeno no less than Plato and Aristotle,
by introducing their students to ethical virtue using a Stoic handbook.
It thus provides a precise gauge for the degree of knowledge of Stoic
ethics and psychology still current in the philosophical schools of the
sixth century AD.
The commentary is also of some significance for the history of Chris-
tian theology. For despite its defiant enunciation of pagan principles,
there is – as Nietzsche scornfully remarked – something eerily Christian
