Note 22 — Chapter II · ARISTOTELIAN CANON.

Strabo, xiii. 608, 609; Athenæus, v. 214. The narrative of Strabo has been often misunderstood and impugned, as if he had asserted that none of the main works of Aristotle had ever been published until they were thus exhumed by Apellikon. This is the supposed allegation which Stahr, Zeller, and others have taken so much pains to refute. But in reality Strabo says no such thing. His words affirm or imply the direct contrary, viz., that many works of Aristotle, not merely the exoteric works but others besides, had been published earlier than the purchase made by Apellikon. What Strabo says is, that few of these works were in possession of the Peripatetic Scholarchs at Athens before the time of that purchase; and he explains thus how it was that these Scholarchs, during the century intervening, had paid little attention to the profound and abstruse speculations of Aristotle; how it was that they had confined themselves to dialectic and rhetorical debate on special problems. I see no ground for calling in question the fact affirmed by Strabo — the poverty of the Peripatetic school-library at Athens; though he may perhaps have assigned a greater importance to that fact than it deserves, as a means of explaining the intellectual working of the Peripatetic Scholarchs from Lykon to Kritolaus. The philosophical impulse of that intervening century seems to have turned chiefly towards ethics and the Summum Bonum, with the conflicting theories of Platonists, Peripatetics, Stoics, and Epikureans thereupon.