also edited and re-edited, transposed occasionally, interpolated, and eked out, by the earlier Peripatetics, by Andronicus, and perhaps by subsequent hands. Yet still the individuality of the Stagirite shines out through the greater part of these remains, and in studying them we feel that we are brought into contact with his mind.
If the supposition be correct that what we now possess is substantially the edition of Andronicus, it is clear in the first place that he did not mean this to be what we should call a “complete edition of the collective works of Aristotle,” else he would have included in it the dialogues that Cicero quotes, the hymn in honour of Hermeias, and we know not what beside. His object appears to have been to give to the world the philosophy of Aristotle, hitherto virtually unknown, as he found it in the documents contained in the library of Apellicon. He dealt, it must be remembered, not only with that collection of rolls which had been buried in the Troad, but also with all the books which had been got together by a wealthy bibliophilist. The edition of Andronicus, if it corresponds with ours, contained a body of Aristotelian science and all Aristotle’s greatest works; but on the one hand it excluded his less important writings, and on the other hand it admitted works which Aristotle certainly never wrote, though they are full of his ideas. Andronicus may have doubted as to the authorship of these treatises, which modern criticism pronounces to be by later Peripatetic hands;[1] or he may have thought that they
- ↑ One of the doubtful treatises—the ‘Rhetoric dedicated to Alexander’—is supposed to be the work of Anaximenes, a writer contemporary with Aristotle.
