Aristotele, Costituzione degli Spartani - Frammenti

Abstract

This work consists in a reconstitution of the corpus of fragments ascribable to the Constitution of the Spartans by Aristotle through the translation and the exegetical, historical and historiographical commentary. Within the corpus of both the fragments preserved by the indirect tradition and the extract of Heraclides Lembo, the Alexandrian scholar of the second century B.C., who created an epitome of the Aristotelean Politeiai, which, in all likelihood, came to us in a further epitomized form by an anonymous excerptor. Since the substantial fidelity of the original extracts from Heracleides to the original version by Aristotle has been proved and accepted. For what concerns the presence of topics and the succession of the information, the Spartan extract is used, when possible, as a support element for the reconstitution work of the corpus in the recognition and numbering of fragments. The points of reference were the previous editions of Aristotle's fragments of indirect tradition made by V. Rose and O. Gigon and the Historicorum Fragmenta Graecorum (FHG) of C. Muller. In this work have been recognized as fragments both texts with explicit quotations from Aristotle or from the discussed work by Aristotle, and texts, in which there is just a strong similarity with others which can be connected with the Aristotelian pamphlet. Some information which emerged from the work led to proceed with a new and different numbering of the fragments compared with the one proposed by Rose and then by Gigon. The translations were made trying to respect as much as possible the Greek text both from the lexical and the syntactical point of view. This was to prevent distortions of the vocabulary and of the structure of the citing source, which could made difficult to detect distortions operated from the translation on the traditionalized text by Aristotle. The comments faced textual problems, where necessary, more frequently historical, historiographical, and, in some cases, philological issues; it was first tried to give an account of the choices regarding the allocation of the fragments, their boundaries within the texte- source and the numbering which has been attributed to them. For some texts it has also been proposed the recognition of doubtful fragments, potentially attributable to the Aristotelian pamphlet. These texts are not recognized by previous editions and graphically identified by the question mark. The parallel texts, i.e. the texts that report a content similar to that of the already recognized texts as Aristotelian, do not show explicit mention either of Aristotle or his work and they are graphically identified with an asterisk. [edited by author]