Note 58 — ERRATUM. p. 78, note 1, l. 19; for “were in orders, for the most part in holy orders;” read “were generally speaking in holy orders;”

There were three ways of access to the Greek texts of Aristotle: by the Arab-latin translations; by translations into Latin direct from the Greek; and by the use of the Greek text itself. These means were modified again by the chances of access to particular authors, and, as in the case of Aristotle for example, to particular treatises. To ascertain the dates of access to these new sources I have made some search; and herein I have found great help in the “Recherches critiques” of Amable Jourdain. We must remember that though the source of Western culture is not Latin, but Greek, yet its meagre channels in medieval Europe were Latin; its best tradition lay in Lucretius, Cicero, Seneca, Virgil. The ill-starred Boetius was the last of the Grecians. Greek was driven East and West: West into Ireland, where in the ninth century a few Greek MSS. survived, and were read in the original by Erigena and his disciples; but this Irish Greek tradition was soon lost, and there were no teachers of Greek. Yet it seems certain that, in Oxford, Robert of Lincoln and Adam Marsh had at any rate learned assistance in the production of some Greco-latin translations of Aristotle, of the Ethics for example. Dr Jackson has pointed out to me a passage in Aquinas’ Commentary on the Ethics, where “the presentation of the right reading misspelt, and of a ludicrous etymology side by side with one which is very nearly right, seem to show that, whilst Aquinas had about him people who knew Greek, he himself had no substantial knowledge of it.” Grosseteste himself may have had some efficient knowledge of Greek; “vir in latino et in greco peritissimus,” says Matthew Paris. Dr Jackson (in a private letter) feels assured that “Roger Bacon was plainly a competent Greek scholar. Of this there is proof in the Opera inedita, edited by Brewer for the Master of the Rolls.” We know also that more than one scholar of the 11-12th centuries travelled in the East, though, as Dr Daremberg says, travellers to the East were more apt to bring back false relics than genuine manuscripts. There was a small Greek community and a Greek monastery at Auriol, near the old colony of Marseilles. Still, for lack of masters and materials, Greek then was a very rare accomplishment; and it is manifest, from much internal evidence, that Albert had no Greek; though he certainly possessed Greco-latin translations of some few Aristotelian treatises by other hands, of the De anima and of the Physics for example, whence he makes quotations without interspersion of Arabic titles, proper names, nouns and terms, such as he rather helplessly reproduces in his rendering of the ninth book of the De cælo and elsewhere. We know from other sources that a few treatises, such as the De anima, and the first two books of the Ethics, existed in Greco-latin rendering before the Arab-latin versions of Michael Scot and others (1220-1225). In later life Albert had the assistance of Aquinas to whom we have attributed some knowledge of Greek; for we find Aquinas, with the countenance of Urban the Fourth, not only searching Europe for Greek manuscripts, sending emissaries to Spain to make versions for him, and supervising the preparation of translations directly into Latin, but also personally comparing the Latin translations with the Greek texts of the Ethics and Politics, and recording variants; variants which Albert copied from his disciple. (It may be worthy of remark that even so late as 1586 there were no Greek types in Oxford, and that in 1599 Casaubon (Life by Pattison) could find no compositors for Greek in Lyons.) The great debt of the West to the Arabs was a new enthusiasm for learning, and for the “Princeps philosophorum”; not their travestied texts and unwieldy commentaries, which Roger Bacon, probably perceiving that his contemporaries swore by the Arab rather than by the Greek, wished he could burn.