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A NEW EDITION OF THE POETICS

Paradoxically enough, and perhaps in the same way that attending a tragic play is supposed to be both disturbing and delightful, Aristotle’s Poetics has been a fascinating, yet nightmarish, affair for editors – and editors have been exceptionally numerous (and translators too). It is not as if the material at our disposal were too scanty, with four main witnesses (two Greek MSS, as well as Moerbeke’s Latin translation and an Arabic translation from a Syriac one). But these witnesses offer quite different readings at some (sometimes crucial) points, and there are also (evident or possible) mistakes even in cases when all of them concur on their readings. From the Renaissance on, scholars have gone to great pains to offer an unusually high number of (more or less plausible) emendations – but this has in a way caused even more trouble for editors trying to recreate what Aristotle might have written. When R. Kassel’s OCT edition came out in 1965, it was widely heralded as being the most careful and balanced edition of the text, with the best and most complete apparatus that had ever been produced; and not without a sort of relief among puzzled readers who were at a loss between various, and variously flawed, editions, it was immediately considered the standard. But even a standard edition of such a difficult and disputed text can hardly be trusted in all of its choices, and indeed no subsequent translator has followed Kassel’s text blindly. It is, thus, not a complete surprise to find yet another attempt to try to cope afresh with the text of the Poetics. As the title indicates, this is an editio maior – first of all in length (538 pages), as it comprises not only a long introduction to the history of the text by T. and to the Arabic translation by G. before the edition of the text itself, but also two substantial sets of notes after it, one by T., wherein he justifies his choices for the text he has edited, and one by G. on the Arabic readings. Perhaps the most innovative part of the book is G.’s enterprise, which explains in minute detail (but very clearly, so that non-Arabic readers too can follow) all the issues linked to the Arabic which had remained largely dependent on Tkatsch’s sometimes unsatisfactory edition. But for Greek classicists, their best bet will be T.’s apparatus which, thanks to a new recollectio, reports all the lectiones one can find in our four primary sources, being thus an editio maior in this specialised sense. Especially in the (in fact, relatively few) cases of imprecisions or mistakes due to Kassel (and Tkatsch), T. and G. have accomplished a very useful task, and every future translator or commentator of the Poetics will benefit immensely from it. If this apparatus seems to be more reliable and more comprehensive as to the primary sources, one might wonder about the policy T. adopts as to the modern emendations: they are only mentioned in cases where T. believes they need to be integrated into the text he has chosen to print. This is, in principle, what editors do for brevity’s sake, but it is obviously a policy that needs to be adapted somewhat given the difficulty of the text – and indeed, Kassel and other editors provide at least a sample of emendations for the most contentious passages, even in cases where they accept the MSS text. Admittedly, T. does from time to time report and discuss some such emendations in his notes. But that leaves many cases where he does not. For instance, there is 1456a20 which is not even discussed in the THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 64