A portable presocratics_primer

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A Portable Presocratics Primer?
Catherine Rowett
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University of East Anglia
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To cite this article: Catherine Rowett (2013) A Portable Presocratics Primer?, British
Journal for the History of Philosophy, 21:4, 791-797
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REVIEW ARTICLE
A PORTABLE PRESOCRATICS PRIMER?
Catherine Rowett
Daniel W. Graham (ed.): The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy: The
Complete Fragments and Selected Testimonies of the Major Presocratics.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 2 vols. pp. 1168. £65.00
(pb). ISBN 978-0-521-60842-8.
Daniel Graham notes, in his preface to this work, that ‘Everyone who has
done serious work in the Presocratics knows that the field has suffered for
lack of a decent sourcebook.’ The problem is partly (as he observes) that
Diels Kranz (DK) leaves much to be desired and is far from user-friendly
for English-speaking students. On the other hand, there has been a fair
array of more user-friendly student-level resources, with the text in
English only. So the gap that needs to be filled is not for teaching the
work in translation, but for students and scholars who need the Greek, in
order to do serious work on their own interpretation of the original texts.
In the end, what Graham has chosen to aim for is
not so much an exhaustive collection as a bridge between the introductory text
book and the exhaustive collection, a kind of portable and up to date assem-
blage of the texts that everyone should have access to for the figures everyone
studies.
(xiii)
‘Portable’ is a nice idea. It is interesting that when Graham himself reviewed
Franz Josef Weber’s Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1988) for The Classical
Review 39 (1989) 250–52, he used exactly those terms to describe it (‘This
small volume is designed as a portable text and commentary of the
Presocratic fragments’). It seems that in preparing this collection, Graham
was trying to provide something very like what Weber provided for the
German speakers twenty-five years ago. However, Weber’s was small, just
304 pages long. Graham’s is two fairly large volumes, and 1020 pages
long. It is debatable whether that is ‘portable’. But apart from the size, we
might well agree that what Graham has tried to achieve is something we
would indeed have welcomed twenty-five years ago: had this book been
around in 1983, I guess we would have thrown out the thirty-year-old
British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2013
Vol. 21, No. 4, 791–797, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2013.792773
© 2013, BSHP

Kirk and Raven, rather than revised it. In more ways than one Graham’s
book is thirty years too late.
‘Up to date’ is also a good idea. The collection includes a number of texts
that have added to our knowledge over the last thirty years (notably material
from papyri from Oxyrhynchus, Herculaneum, Derveni, Hibeh and the
Strasbourg Empedocles papyrus). There are also bibliographies for each
chapter and a general one at the end. In some, though not all cases, these
contain a good selection of recent work, as well as some from the first
half of the twentieth century (mainly too old to be useful, in my view, but
perhaps the idea is to reference the key influential milestones). But it is
not obvious that the recent work has fully informed the text and commentary
provided here. And there are some puzzles about missing bibliography. Why
is Kirk, Raven, and Schofield not listed among the ‘General studies,
textbooks, translations, collections of essays’? Likewise a certain very
short introduction which I will refrain from mentioning.
And what exactly is this book for? Is it a sourcebook for research or an
attempt to present, and set in stone, the results of research? Graham has
divided the work into chapters on different thinkers, ordered the chapters
according to a conventional view of who comes after whom (with one
weird exception which we shall come to), and put the texts into an order
of his own choosing within each chapter. What is the principle upon
which Graham has chosen to order the texts within a chapter? It is, he
says ‘a tentative reconstruction’ (13), an interpretative hypothesis (as, he
thinks, all orderings are). Basically, he has followed the classic practice of
presenting his own hypothesis regarding what the original writer was
trying to say, placing texts either on the basis of evidence (if any) for
where in the original work they occurred (the beginning, the end, Book 2,
and so on) or on the basis of what they are about, assuming we know
what the thinker was trying to say and how he argued for it, or else dividing
the material according to certain conventional categories of topic (typically
the categories inherited from the doxography). In one way, this is a very con-
servative practice, approaching the task in just the way someone trained in
the 1950s would have attempted to present a text book in the 1980s. Take
Weber, for instance, or the editions of individual thinkers produced at that
time in the Phoenix series. But is this what we need as a study tool for scho-
lars working on the Presocratics at doctoral or postdoctoral level? We have
become too used to this approach to realize how controversial and potentially
damaging it is: for what it does is present a thesis about the meaning and sig-
nificance of each thinker, without supplying the argument that could justify
it, because the commentary is focused on what the texts mean, not on why
they are arranged thus and so. For some thinkers in particular, where the
ordering of the text is hugely controversial (e.g. Heraclitus and Empedocles),
presenting such a body of doctrine concealed in an apparently authoritative
research tool is highly problematic. For others, it just perpetuates old cat-
egories from the Aristotelian picture of the history of philosophy.
792 CATHERINE ROWETT

At first sight, Graham’s collection seems to be a mildly revised and
updated DK. One major difference from DK is that the chapters are not
divided into two sections, one for testimonia and one for ‘fragments’.
Genuine Fragments are still identified (and given a special set of
F-numbers), but they are dispersed among the testimonia, so that testimonia
and fragments relating to the same topic can be juxtaposed. Good progress,
we might say. This avoids the specious distinction between secondary and
primary material that was an organizing principle in DK and led too easily
to the idea that one could dismiss testimonia (regardless of their quality)
and rely completely on B fragments (regardless of their provenance). It is
more helpful to think of our task as one of combining a range of evidence,
some good and some less good, with a critical eye on how good it is, and
how much it has been affected by the bias and interests of the source who
preserves it. For this purpose, it is better to assemble both kinds of evidence
together, and piece together what is authentic and quibble over what seems
dubious.
But can we do that with this edition? Two things make this almost imposs-
ible for the reader – even for an advanced scholar or graduate student coming
to the material with a traditional classical training. First, most of the passages
classified as fragments (F-texts) are presented bald without context, as
though their own quoting authors were not among the relevant testimonia
on the topic, and as though we did not need to assess the quality of the
quoting authority and his slant, or ulterior motives for choosing or presenting
bits he has quoted or excerpted in discussing his own concerns or assembling
his favourite texts. In some cases, the F-texts are stripped even more bare
than in DK. So although this edition improves on DK by translating the
contexts and testimonia, and not just the ipsissima verba, it falls short in
providing inadequate surrounding text for the vast majority of its fragments.
Secondly, the juxtaposing of texts from all types of sources, regardless of
their date or relative value as testimony, is hugely confusing. To take an
instance at random (from Xenophanes), on page 106, we have the following
texts consecutively: two from Athenaeus (fragments without context), two
from Diogenes Laertius (first from book 8, a fragment without context,
and second from book 1, a testimonium about how long Xenophanes
lived); then one from the Etymologium Genuinum s.v. geras, a fragment
without context; then one from a Scholium on Aristophanes Peace 697
(a testimonium with one ipsissimum verbum); then one from Herodian On
Unusual Words (a fragment without context). Then, over the page, we
have a Scholium on Homer from Oxyrhynchus Papyri 1087, a bit of
Pollux Vocabulary, another bit of the Etymologium Genuinum, something
from Herodian On Doubtful Syllables, two lines in Latin from Aulus
Gellius’ Attic Nights, a fragment (no context) from Sextus Empiricus M
IX, followed by one (with one line of unavoidable context) from Sextus
Empiricus M I, and two bald fragments taken out of context from Clement
of Alexandria. My hunch is that most classically trained graduate students
A PORTABLE PRESOCRATES PRIMER? 793

would not immediately know what kind of source these texts were taken
from, their date, or likely access to good texts or earlier traditions. To
make sound judgements about the value of some testimony, the reader
needs to know who the quoting author is and when they lived and why
they wrote.
Can the student ﬁnd out about the texts that they are handling, from advice
included in this volume? Not as far as I can see. No clue is provided in any of
the texts listed as to how far the quoting author is removed in time or culture
or textual basis from the author they are purporting to quote or explain. This
information is not given in the index of sources (at the back) nor in the two
pages on ‘Sources for the Presocratics’ in the Introduction (at the front); nor
anywhere else. In ‘Sources for the Presocratics’, Graham gives no dates,
aside from assigning Sotion and Diogenes Laertius to the second and third
century AD, respectively (9), and (in ‘Other Sources’) Simplicius to the
sixth – other sources, that is, besides ‘Philosophers’ (which means Plato,
Aristotle, and Theophrastus), ‘Doxographers’ (which means the Placita tra-
dition) and ‘Biographers’. So not only is Graham apparently unaware that
later writers, such as Simplicius, Philoponus, Plutarch, and so on, were phi-
losophers, and had some philosophical agenda in what they were writing
about, he also seems blissfully unaware of some of the other agendas that
lie behind the later sources. He ignores (forgets?) a whole category of evi-
dence from the polemical writers (Christian, anti-Christian, Neoplatonist,
etc.) who deliver some of our richest seams of quotations and exegesis in
the course of illustrating their arguments. You would never guess from
this Introduction that anyone called Philoponus or Clement or Hippolytus
had anything to say about the Presocratics. Nor could you discover that
Herodotus lived at a different time from Plutarch or Stobaeus. As for scho-
liasts, papyri, dictionaries, etymologies, bibliographers, and epitomizers:
you would look in vain to discover one iota of information on how to
handle these sources or their likely access to good texts. For the examples
just given from Xenophanes, the commentary gives no assistance on any
of these matters.
On pages 366–368, some Byzantine scholia that have lately become
popular are listed almost as if they were better evidence for Empedocles
than the texts in Aristotle on which they are late annotations. Instead of
giving in extenso the Aristotle texts to which these annotations were
attached, Aristotle’s text is excerpted in snippets as though it was an unreli-
able or even irrelevant prop to the scholia, signiﬁcant only because it con-
tains the words that are the focus of the scholiast’s interest. Yet,
Aristotle’s texts are perhaps ten centuries older than the scholiast and
written by someone who had read Empedocles in his entirety and written
extensively on him. Similarly, a snippet from Aristotle (340), where
Aristotle decides that Empedocles is not like Homer in a certain respect, is
absurdly excerpted out of context, so as to give the impression that Aristotle
is denigrating Empedocles’ poetry. Graham gives no clue that the point is

supposed to be about dramatic content: in fact, he seems even to have fallen
for the mistake himself (perhaps due to reading excerpts like this out of
context). In his commentary (423), he remarks ‘Empedocles was admired
in antiquity for his prosody – even if Aristotle looked on it with a jaundiced
eye.’ But so far from casting a jaundiced eye, Aristotle was an admirer, and
not just of the prosody, but of all the literary aspects of the poetry. The note
references Most 1999 and Graham 1988 (but see rather Osborne 1997 and
forthcoming).
If you were seriously trying to reconstruct something like the original text,
you would expect, I think, to keep the pieces of the Strasbourg papyrus
together if at all possible. Most recent work on that papyrus has been target-
ing the ideal of showing how all the pieces belong closely together in succes-
sive columns of a single roll of text, and I feel sure that future scholarship
will continue to regard that as a prime desideratum (Primavesi’s 2008b
edition is referenced, but not Janko 2004). But Graham puts some of it as
F20 and F21 in the Empedocles chapter and some at F89 and F145a. He
still wants to relegate Empedocles’ stuff about religion and vegetarianism
to a coda or to a separate poem (see further below). Despite placing the
famous exiled daimon fragment, B115, near the beginning of the list of frag-
ments, nothing has shifted in his understanding of who Empedocles was and
what he said where. The commentary momentarily acknowledges that the
Strasbourg Papyrus eliminates the temptation to divide science from religion
or think of them as separate poems – though I would say that we had already
seen plenty of arguments for eliminating that temptation, well before the said
Papyrus – but then Graham goes on to divide the rest of the fragments into a
series of sections by subject matter in just the traditional way, relegating the
moral and religious material to a section at the very end called ‘magic and
medicine’. The commentary is written as if we were dealing with two
poems, with the cosmic cycle in one and religious stuff in the other. Apart
from recognizing that the cosmic cycle is not straightforwardly a pluralist
objection to Parmenides, since it accommodates unity too, this is very
much the old story about Empedocles as a cosmologist with four elements
and two efﬁcient causes, responding to Parmenides. From the introduction
and bibliography to this chapter, you might easily infer that mid-twentieth
century works on Empedocles were still relevant, and you would never
guess that in the works by Kingsley, Osborne, Gemelli Marciano, Trepanier,
and Inwood that are listed, and in other more recent works by these and other
authors that are not listed at all, you would ﬁnd a quite different picture of
what Empedocles is about, in which reincarnation, mystery, theology, and
moral issues are more prominent or even paramount. John Palmer’s impor-
tant work Parmenides and Greek Philosophy, for instance, is not mentioned
either here or in the bibliography for Parmenides.
So, this is not a source book for research, but a defence of an entrenched
position. As a text book, it might be useful in supporting delivery of a course
that defended the interpretation that Graham favours. But how many places

in the world want to teach the Presocratics in just that way? Try as I might,
I cannot think of a single purpose for which one would want to start the
enquiry into each thinker with what Diogenes Laertius was pleased to con-
sider the truth about that person’s life. Putting that as the first thing you read
in every chapter seems to me a pretty good way of distracting us from either
appreciating the thinkers as proto-philosophers, or reconstructing the history
of ideas in a clean way, with attention to the historical value of the sources.
Because of its new numbering for the texts, this edition has to be linked to
DK by a concordance, allowing you to find a text here if you know its DK
number. This, sadly, is found at the back of Volume 2. Sadly, because it
would be more portable if the back matter were included in each
volume. I would recommend that a future edition should at least have the
DK concordance in both.
Also in Volume 2 is a 28 page appendix containing the material on
Pythagoras and early Pythagoreanism (not including Philolaus who figures
properly in Volume 1). I may be stupid, but I have not so far been able to
find anywhere any explanation for this decision to exclude Pythagoras,
either in the preface or introduction or in the introduction to the appendix.
It strikes me that relegating the most famous philosopher of the period to
an afterthought, at the end of the volume containing the Sophists, is a kind
of ideological statement. It tells us something about the thinking behind
this volume and the nature of its project. It fits with the failure to mention
the Christian sources in the section on sources and with the relegation of
Empedocles’ ‘religious’ material to the end of that chapter. Walter Burkert’s
influential work on Pythagoras is probably part of the background. The
1980s outlook of Graham’s collection makes no space for the recent influen-
tial rebalancing of expectations as to whether religious thought is an impor-
tant part of philosophy or whether dividing it severely between science and
religion is acceptable. Although, in the introduction to his Appendix on
Pythagoras, Graham pays lip service to a range of recent work by Zhmud,
Kahn, and Riedweg suggesting that Pythagoras was indeed a scientific
thinker of some interest and not merely a guru and shaman (905–6), it
seems that he has taken none of it on board. So, he is not only
excluding the religious and moral thought, but also discouraging us from
seeking whatever scientific thought there might be in the texts either.
Graham’s constitutional discomfort in this area of Presocratic philosophy
seems evident.
The Greek and Latin texts seem well presented (it does not aim to be a
novel or revisionary edition). There are textual notes at the foot of the
page, but not a full apparatus. The reader needs to move on to critical
editions for major textual work and for discussions of the papyri, etc. The
English translation is conventional and cautious. It avoids prejudging
the meaning of esti in Parmenides (which is wise: Graham informs us in
the chapter introduction that the dominant interpretation is that Parmenides
means ‘exists’. This surprised me, but may be it is a US thing). However, in

both the translation and the introduction, he adds ‘what-is’ as the subject of
esti, without discussion or apology.
My view is that we do need a complete textual resource for research on the
Presocratics. Given the nature of the sources and the controversies around
the reconstruction of the texts, it would make a lot of sense to use non-
traditional publishing methods, such as an online resource that included
both whole texts and fragments taken from context, so that it could be
ordered according to the reader’s research needs and viewed with varying
quantities of accompanying information on the nature of the source and its
date. If a traditional book format is also needed (as I think it is: a portable
one, indeed), then presenting the sources in chronological order would
allow the reader to acquire a sense of how we ﬁnd out about lost works
from the past. The reader would know that citations towards the end of
the chapter were from much later centuries, and dates could be shown in
the margin to assist. Such a source book would not, like this one, impose
the interpretation of the editor surreptitiously into the resource from which
others tried to reach their own opinion.
But what we have here is not that, but rather a sort of updated DK. It seems
from the preface that Cambridge University Press commissioned the volume,
thinking presumably that it would meet the need that Graham had identiﬁed,
for a good source book in Presocratic thought. I wonder that the Press did not
listen to the many distinguished readers who, as he freely acknowledges in
his Preface, told Graham that they did not want this one. Should the Press
not have heard those readers say ‘we need one, but not this one’? In the
event, what we now have seems likely to rewind the clock, setting us back
where we were in the last century, sidelining much that has been positive
and exciting in the last thirty years, and making it harder for progress to con-
tinue, at least in those places that choose to use this as a text book, and
among scholars who turn to this as a resource.
University of East Anglia

A portable presocratics_primer

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