Isagogical Conceptions in the Peripatetic Exegesis of the Post-Hellenistic Age: Aspasius and the Others

In this chapter I set out to address the problem of post-Hellenistic isagogical views of Aristotle’s writings from an ‘indirect’ point of view, namely by focusing on extant witnesses of pre-Alexandrian commentaries. More specifically, by relying on the scarce extant sources, and above all on Aspasius, I shall identify some structural features characterising Peripatetic commentaries in order to detect what conception of Aristotle’s texts they imply. In this way, we will be in a position to address the following questions, which would usually find answers in isagogical writings: how should one read Aristotle’s texts? What, if any, is their specific nature? Why are Aristotle’s writings shaped the way they are? Are they clear or obscure, and why so? To be clear, the point is not that in Peripatetics before Alexander one can already discover later isagogical schemata: this had been suggested by Moraux with reference to Andronicus, but I take Mansfeld to be right in saying that exploring isagogical issues does not imply adopting isagogical schemata. My point is that we should focus neither on the presence of isagogical schemata (since, quite simply, they are not attested), nor on partial ways of addressing them (since this would imply taking later structures as absolute parameters). Rather, we should focus on the possibility of outlining an overall conception of Aristotle’s texts even without isagogical writings, whose goal is – theoretically – to display such a conception and to determine the best approach to the texts within its framework. The limited number of extant sources and their narrow focus might of course discourage us from applying my conclusions to Aristotle's corpus as a whole. However, by making these sources interact and by discovering their methodological consistency, we can at least consider the conclusions drawn from them to represent specific instances (the only known ones) of a wider scenario that is lost to us.