881 A8Yby2 L I E) RA FLY OF THE U N I VER5 ITY Of ILLINOIS PURCHASED FROM MR. H. A. RATTERMAN OF CINCINNATI IN 1915 BOOKSTACKSi Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2017 with funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Alternates https://archive.org/details/cleophonsinaristOObywa From the Journal of Philology, Vol. XII.] THE CLEOPHONS IN ARISTOTLE. The account usually given us of the Cleophon^ mentioned in Aristotle’s Poetics and Rhetoric takes two things for granted, (1) that he was the tragic poet on whom Suidas has an article, and (2) that he was the author of the ' Mandrobulus ’ ^(or Mandrobolus^) to which reference is made in the Sophistici Elenchi. On the subject of this 'Mandrobulus’ there is a remarkable diversity of opinion ; it has been variously described as a poem, as a drama, as a tragedy, as a comedy, as an epic — and A-s an oration. The idea that it was possibly an oration is the suggestion of Welcker, who in his Griechische Tragodien (p. 1011) endeavours to prove the paradox that the Gleophon of literature was one and the same person with the Gleophon of Athenian history, the famous demagogue. ^ Compare for instance Mr Cope’s note on Ehet. 3. 7 : “KXeo0wj^] ’Ady- vaios rpayiKOS. rwv dpapLarup avrou ’AktuIuv, ’AfKpiapaos, ’AxtXXeus, Bct/cxctt, Ae^a^evos, ’Hpt 70 J' 77 , Oviarys, AevKiiriro^, Hepo-t?, T^Xe^os, Suidas. He is omitted in. Wagner’s collection, Fragin. Trag. Gr. vol. HI. We learn from Poet, ii 5, that his subjects and characters were neither above nor below the level of ordinary, every-day, life and cha- racter. To the same effect it is stated in Poet. XXII 1, that his style was low or humble, TaireLv-rj, and devoid of all poetical ornament. Grafenhan, ad loc. II 5. Id. ad Poet, xxii 1, ‘qui humili dictione imitabatur vulgares mores.’ To Suidas’ list of 10 tragedies Journal of Philology, vol. xii. must be added the Maj^SpojSouXos, de Soph. El. 15, 174 h 27, olov 6 KXeo^cSj' TTotet h T(p Mavdpo^ovXcp, where it is quoted in illustration of a mode of argument.” 2 On the form Mavdpd^oXos see Meineke F. C. G. 5, p. 44. Letronne, 3Iem. de VInstitut, Acad, des Inscrip- tions, 19 p. 49, compares Mavbpb^ovXos with GeojSouXos, and concludes that, as the first half of the word is found in a number of Asiatic Greek names (e.g. M.avdpoKXys, Mavdpoyeprjs, etc.), Mdi'- dpos or M-avdpa must have been the name of some Phrygian or Carian deity. Pick, Personennamen, p. 53, connects the name with p,dvdpa = fold. 9 y 44669 i8 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOLOGY, The data outside Aristotle’s writings show that there were at least two Cleophons, a politician and a tragic poet. The politician is a sufficiently well-known personage : he was a demagogue of the type of Cleon and Hyperbolus (Ruhnken’s Opusc. I p. 318 ; Grote’s Greece 8 p. 166), and as such he came under the lash of the Old Comedy, and was specially attacked by Plato in his comedy, the K\eocj)cov (Meineke F. C. G. 2 p. 634 ; Kock i p. 615). As regards the tragic poet on the other hand, the only direct proof of his existence is that con- tained in the brief notice in an article of Suidas : — KXeo^^v ^ K6r)vaLO<^ TpayiKo^' twv Spafidrcov avrov ^ NicTaiwv^ ’A/x^tapao?, ’A^iXXeii?, Y^aKyuL, iXe^apuevo<^y}ApL<^QVJ], %ved)v Se fLayk.GQ(£> : irapoo-ov, W9 ^ NpKTTorekrj^ (jiTjal, /xerd T^v iv ^Apyivova-ai^ vavpLa')(^lav AaKeBaLfMovlcov fiovXo- pbivcov 6K AeKeXelaf; dirievaL icj) oh e'^ovcn.v eKarepoL /cal elpijvTjv dyeiv iirl rod K.aXXlov, KXeocjxSv eireiae top TrpocrBe- ^aaOat iX6oov eh T'^v eK/cXTjalav fxeOvcov kox 6(6pa/ca ivBeBv/cm, ov (f/da/ccov e'TTLTpe'^^reiv idv piy 'rrdaa'^ a^c5(7t Ta9 7roXet9 ol AaKeBaijxovLOi. Fr. 370 ed. Rose, from the ^A6r)vaL(Dv TroXirela. ^AOrjvaloL 'Ofxi^pw fxdpTVpL expVorciVTO irepl 'ZaXajxivo^ Kal TepeSLOt epay^o<; UepidpSpcp Y^opipOlw 7rpo9 '^tyeieh. /cal KXeocfxjop /card Kpcrlov roh X6Xcopo<; iXeyeloLf; i')(priaaTO Xiycop OTt TrdXac d(T6Xyrj<; ohLa' ov yap dp Tfore eiTOLrjae XoXcop “ elTretp fxoi Kptr/a TrvppoTpL'^^t '7rarpd<; d/coveLP.” Rhet. I. 15, 1375'’ 30. The second of these passages refers to something said by the demagogue Cleophon in a speech against his political opponent THE CLEOrilOXS IN ARISTOTLE 9 Critias, one of the Thirty (Ciiiit(»n F. H. 2 p. xxxv ed. 3) ; there cannot be much doubt on the point, when one sees Aristotle in the very next sentence quoting in precisely the same way from a speech of Themistocles. Turning now to the places in the Poetics and Rhetoric, which have been by writer after writer — by Welch er, Wagner, Nauck, Kayser, Bernhardy and I know not how many more besides — assumed to relate to a tragic poet Cleophon, I hope to be able to show that the assumption is not justified by Aristotle’s language, whose words must be understood to apply (as Ro- tjortello long ago saw clearly enough, and since him Dacier and l^xitter) to a writer of epic poetry and not to a writer of tragedy. The very first statement in regard to Cleophon in the Poetics is inconsistent with the current theory about him : — Kal TO Trepl too 9 X070U9 Se Kal rrjv yjriXofieTpLav (scil. TavTa<; Ta? Biacpopd^i'i), olov ^'OpLr}po<; pilv ^eXrlov^y KXeocfxIov 8 e 6 p,oLov<;, ^HyTjpicov Be 6 Sdcno^ 6 Td<^ 'rrapcpBlm iroLi^ora^; irpcu- T09 Kal LKO)(apr](; 6 rrjv ArjXidBa ')(<£[ pov^. Poet. 2, 1448^ 11. The point insisted upon here is Cleophon’s realism : his picture of men and manners being neither better nor worse than the prosaic realities of our ordinary experience, he stands mid- way between Homer on the. one side and Hegemon and the parodists on the other. That Aristotle had in view an epic poem of some sort is proved (1) by the mention of ylriXopuerpLa as the head under which the work of Cleophon comes ; ^fnXo' puerpla in fact is a term that excludes the possibility of its being a drama or a lyrical poem : (2) by the company in which Cleo- phon is placed in the text ; Homer is an epic poet, and Hegemon (like Hipponax and Matro : see the fragments in Peltzer, De parodica Graecorum poesi) was as a parodist of Homer the writer of a base kind of epic. We have therefore two extremes, the heroic epic of Homer, and the mock-epic of Hegemon, with Cleophon as a middle-term, the epic poet of realism. Had Cleophon been regarded as a dramatist, Aristotle would have had to reserve him for consideration in a later sec- tion where the distinction between tragedy and comedy has to 2 2 20 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOLOGY. be determined. The evidence of our next Aristotelian passage is of a more ambiguous kind : — X6^6ft)9 Sk dperrj (7a(j>^ Kal /jlt] raireLvrjv elvai. cracovTo<; irolqcn^ kcli 7 ) '%6eve\ov. aepivrj Be Kal e^aWarrovaa to IBcoirtKov q rot? ^evoKOL<; Ke^pqpuevrj. Poet. 22, 1458^ 18. Here Cleophon’s style is condemned as mean and wanting in dignity ; and he is compared in this respect with Sthenelus, a certain sorry tragic poet (Nauck T. G. F. p. 735 ; comp. Meinek^^ F. C. G. 2 p. 640, Kock i p. 621). But the juxtaposition of thi ; two names will hardly warrant the inference that Cleophon was like Sthenelus a tragic poet, as Aristotle throughout his chap- ters on poetic language takes his instances quite as often from epic poetry as from tragedy. I should be inclined to go further and say that, as two poets are cited as exemplifying the same defect, the presumption rather is that Aristotle does not regard them as coming under exactly the same category ; so that, if the one is an instance of a bad style in tragedy, the other is pro- bably mentioned as an instance of a bad style in a different but allied department of poetry. The presumption, that Cleo- phon’s was a bad epic style, is borne out by the parallel in the Third Book of the Rhetoric : — TO Be irpeirov e^ei rj edv § iraOqTLKq re Kal qOtKq Kal ro2 '^(OKpdTr}<; iv iirLTa^icp d\r)6e<;. Rhet. 3. 14, 1415^ 30. Aristotle’s way of quoting from dialogues is known to us from his references to the dialogues of Plato (comp. Ueberweg, Unter- suchungen, p. 140). His quotations from Plato are generally speaking of two kinds, (1) those in which a statement in Plato is assumed to represent the Platonic theory on a certain point — in which case liXarcov or something of the same type is the formula used ; and (2) those in which the statement quoted is still viewed as part of the dramatic situation in the dialogue, so that it may or may not represent Plato’s own opinion on the matter under discussion — in which case 6 '^.coKpdrr}'^ cj)7)(j[ or 6 KaWiKXrj^ (f>r](7L is the sort of formula usedb Any one who has 1 See Sir A. Grant’s note on Eth. Nic. vi. 13, 3. 24 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOLOGY. to deal with a work in a dramatic form, a dialogue or a play for instance, finds it necessary from time to time to distinguish between the writer himself and the dramatis personae of his work : we are obliged for the moment to treat the personages as though they were independent of the writer, e.g. when we say : ‘Polonius in Hamlet gives his son some excellent words of advice’ — though we know perfectly well that the words are really not Polonius’ words but Shakespere’s. Now this is precisely what Aristotle does in the case of the Mandrobulus. He says in effect : ‘ In a disputation the opponent should meet a certain move on the part of the respondent in a certain way, as Cleophon does in the Mandrobulus just as we might say : ^ A fool may give excellent advice to another, as Holonius does in Hamlet’. Here it would be absurd to say ^as Shakespere does in Hamlet ’ ; and it is no less absurd to suppose Cleophon in the analogous case to be quoted as being the author of the Mandrobulus. Had Aristotle meant Cleophon to be regarded as the author of the book, he would have expressed himself dif- ferently and given us something like this : ‘As Cleophon makes So-and-so do in the Mandrobulus ’ — olov rbv * ^ jeypa(pe iroLovvra iv tco yiavbpo^ov\(p. We see then (1) that the Mandrobulus of the Sophistic! Elenchi must have been, a dialogue, and (2) that the Cleophor: mentioned was not the author but merely one of the interlo- cutors. This result has been arrived at by analysis of the Aristotelian passage, without taking anything extraneous into account. We may now perhaps look elsewhere and ascertain whether there is anything outside Aristotle that throws any light on the present question. During recent years it has more than once been asserted (e.g. by Dindorf in H. St. s. v., and Susemihl on Poet. 2) that the Mandrobulus was a dialogue, but in these cases the asser- tion appears to rest not on the language of Aristotle but on a piece of external evidence which became known for the first time in 1842, when Spengel published the anonymous Para- phrast on the Sophistic! Elenchi {Incerti autoris paraphrasis Aristotelis Sophisticorum Elenchorum — Monachii 1842) from a Munich MS. As the Paraphrase seems to me more important THE CLEOPIIONS IN ARISTOTLE. 25 than is generally supposed, I give in extenso the portion of it that corresponds with the concluding words of the Aristotelian passage with which we are now dealing : — €TL coaTrep iv rot? KaO* opLCOwp^iav ol airoKpivopbevoL ttolovctl TT oWaKL'^ iXejx^pLevot' Btacpovori yap varepov avvaicrOopievoL Trj<^ aTrar?;? to Scttov, koX (w? eV’ aXkov (TrjpbaLvopbevov SeBco/cao-tv ^ o avv^^ev 6 ipcoTwv, ovtw koX tou 9 ipcoToovra^ irore Tovrm 7rpo9 toz)9 ivLaTapevov<^ roov ipcoTcopuevcov co<; ov/c iXey^^- puevov'^, av coBl pL6v (Tvpb^aivrj coBl Be pb'^, ore ourco? eeXrjcj^e koX 'JTpoereivev 97 avv^yayev, olov 6 KXeocpcBv Troeel iv tm M.avBpo- ^ovXcp TM rrXaTcoveKtp 8 i o-iV d 7 « (p. 81). The Paraphrast must be credited with twp things: (1) he knows that the Mandrobulus was a dialogue — which no one before 1842 seems to have been able to discover for himself: (2) he knows the Cleophon mentioned to be one of the inter- locutors ; this I take to be sufficiently shown by the careful way in which he generally refers to personages in the dialogues of Plato : — 1. d Trapa UXarcovc l^v6u(j)pcov fcal rop7ta9. p. 45. 2. oTrep 6 KaXXiKXy<; iv rw rop7ta ykyparrrai rroiHv rw irX ar (Dv i KM B eaX 6 y m. p. 71 (Aristotle has merely iv tm V opyia yeypairrai Xiycov), 8. 6 np(WTa7dpa9 iv tm opecovvpew BeoXoyM. p. 82. 4. 6 ToO KaXXcKXeov^ (scil. o-vXXoyecrpb6<;) iv tm Topyla. p. 134. When one compares these passages, and more particularly the second of them, with what is here said about Cleophon and the Mandrobulus — olov 6 K.X€o(f)oov Troeel iv tm M.avBpol3ovX(p Tw 'TrXar (o V e K M BeaXoyco — the meaning of the Para- phrast is plain enough : he regards the Mandrobulus as a ‘ Platonic dialogue ’ just as the Gorgias is ; and he regards Cleophon as one of the personages in it just in the same way as Callicles is a personage in the Gorgias, Euthyphro in the Euthyphro, and Protagoras in the Protagoras. And moreover, as he describes both the Gorgias and the Mandrobulus in 26 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOLOGY. exactly the same terms, I do not see how we can avoid the conclusion that he regards the Mandrobulus as actually a dia- logue of Plato. The work itself may have been, as Susemihl thinks, merely a dialogue of the Platonic kind, but that is cer- tainly not what the language of the Paraphrast seems intended to intimate : for the Paraphrast the Mandrobulus is like the Gorgias a dialogue of Plato. I lay this stress on the point for an obvious reason, because his language indicates that in the opinion of the Paraphrast the Cleophon mentioned was not the author of the dialogue. What is one to think of a man who calmly tells us that the Mandrobulus was a dialogue by Plato ? Is the statement the ‘ turpe mendum,’ as Spengel so contemptuously terms it, of a blundering Byzantine, or is it to be seriously considered as hav- ing presumably some basis of truth underlying it ? I incline to the second alternative, partly because a Byzantine Greek, who must have known his Plato fairly and who wrote for people who had access to Plato’s writings in libraries, was hardly likely to invent such a statement ; and partly because the matter of the Paraphrase is at any rate here and there too good for a Byzantine grammarian ; in the passage now before us for in- stance the Paraphrast shows a truer sense of Aristotle’s meaning than a whole series of eminent modern scholars. The state- ment in the Paraphrase therefore must be traditional and not the invention of the Paraphrast himself. This is no doubt the view of those who have recently termed the Mandrobulus a dialogue ; they do so on the strength of the Paraphrast’s statement, but his words are obviously of no authority unless we suppose them to represent a .genuine and trustworthy tradition. The real difficulty, I need not say, is to explain how the Mandrobulus could be described as a dialogue of Plato. Two explanations may be imagined ; — (1) The Mandrobulus may have been one of the early Platonic pseudepigrapha, the work of some disciple which was popularly attributed to Plato himself. The objection to this theory is the fact that the name does not occur in the list of THE CLEOPIIONS IN ARISTOTLE. 27 Platonic psendepigraplia in Diogenes Laertius or elsewhere (see Diog. Laert. 3. 62 with Menage’s notes, and compare Ueberweg, Untersuchiingen, p. 198). (2) We may perhaps assume the tradition to have got somewhat out of shape by the time it reached the Byzantine Paraphrast, and thus surmise that the original form of the tra- dition assigned the book not to Plato but to some one else whose name was very intimately associated with that of Plato ; so that in fact the phenomenon is to be regarded as due to a confusion of names. But however the Paraphrast’s words are to be explained, we may leave him to his fate and return to the main thread of the enquiry. There is still an important piece of ancient evi- dence to be pointed out and considered, which will, if I am not mistaken, suffice to show that the author of the Man- drobulus was no other than — Plato’s nephew Speusippus. A work entitled ' Mandrobulus ’ certainly appears in the list of Speusippus’ writings given in Diogenes Laertius (4. 4). This list is, like so many of the lists in Diogenes, a most unsatis- factory document — it is defective ; it is confused through want of proper classification of the writings enumerated; and there are cases in which it is clear that one and the same work figures twice over in it. These elements of difficulty are con- fessedly not peculiar to the list of Speusippus’ works, but I have thought it as well to mention them before proceeding to discuss details. The text in Diogenes is as follows : — Ka-raXeXotTTe Be (scil. Speusippus) TrafjLirXeLo-Ta virofxvi^iJiaTa KoX B i aX 6 y o V ttX e 1 0 v a iv ol<; koX ^ AplcrrLTTTrov rlv K.vp7]vaLov^’ Trepl 'ttXovtov d' irepl 7]Bovrj<; d' Trepl BtKaiO(TVvrj<; 1 In an ordinary writer one would genes, however, is often as it were his be tempted to bracket the clause ev own interpolator; he (or the authority ofs /cat ’AptVrtTTTrov rov Kyprivaiov as an whom he is copying) seems to have interpolation partly because of its in- known of this ' Apiarnriros 6 Kvp7]vaLos consistency in point of form with not from the irlvaKe^, but from some what follows, and partly because we other source ; and the addition is not have an ’Ap[Xo 9 * Avaca^' opoi kt€. This list of writings is clearly ‘contaminated’ (see Wila- mowitz-Moellendorff Antigonos, p. 330) and compiled from two distinct 'irLvaKe^. The Mandrobulus was part of the literature of the second irlva^. We may recognize it as being a dialogue not merely by its name but also through its proximity to the Lysias, which can hardly be anything else than a dialogue, and which looks suspiciously like the KXetz^oyaa;;^o 9 g Avala^ of the first 'TTiva^. And besides these we cannot doubt that the ^tXocro 0 o 9 , the Ke 0 aXo 9 , the IToXtr'?;? and the ^AplcrTt7r7ro<; were in like manner dialogues, so that Diogenes seems to be quite right in ascribing to Speusippus ‘several dialogues.’ Assuming then that the Mandrobulus of Speusippus was a dialogue, we have still to enquire whether there is any reason to identify it with the Mandrobulus of the Sophistic! Elenchi. Diogenes gives us no help here, but we are fortunately able to supply the missing link from Clemens Alexandrinus, who pre- serves a few words from a writing of Speusippus not mentioned in the list of Diogenes : — 27r6u<7t7r7ro9 jop ev tw 7rpo9 o ^(Zvr a TTpoorw rd opoia T0 TWcltwvl eoLKe Std rovrov ypd