The starting-point of Diels's inquiry is a hypothesis provided to him by his Bonn teacher and Doktorvater Hermann Usener (who himself had predecessors), concerning the identical or closely similar language used in reports of pre-Socratic and other philosophical doctrines contained in two late compendia, the Placita surviving among our manuscripts of Plutarch, and the Eclogae of the anthologizer Stobaeus.
This hypothesis Diels modifies in certain respects, and also made much more complicated, as he attempted to trace back from Pseudo-Plutarch and Stobaeus a long line of predecessors, each successively relied upon by later authors in compiling philosophers’s doctrines, all the way down to pseudo-Plutarch and Stobaeus themselves.
In a truly magisterial way, Diels gives it the aura of absolute certainty and unassailability which did much to ensure its dominating position in the study of Ancient Philosophy until today.
The hypothesis may be briefly set out as follows.
The tradition of philosophers in the doxography of physics begins with Aristotle’s pupil and successor Theophrastus.
In the catalogue of his oeuvre preserved in his Life in Diogenes Laertius a treatise is listed of ‘Physikôn Doxôn, sixteen books’.
For the Greek title, in the nominative, one has a choice between
-- Physikôn Doxai (‘Tenets of the Natural Philosophers’) and
-- Physikai Doxai (‘Tenets in Natural Philosophy’).
Usener and Diels opted for the first alternative, but in the opinion of many scholars today the second option is much more plausible.
To this treatise they attributed a number of fragments dealing with the principles ("archai" -- Thales’ water, Heraclitus’ fire, etc.) transmitted for the most part by Simplicius, a Neo-platonic commentator on Aristotle.
That Simplicius and others explicitly quote from Theophrastus’s Physics, a different treatise, did not bother them.
They further posited that a short monograph of Theophrastus, the "De Sensibus," dealing with theories concerning the senses and their objects from Parmenides to Democritus and Plato, is a fragment of this treatise as well.
The simple fact, however, that Plato, not first and foremost a philosopher of nature, is treated here on the same level as Democritus and the other natural philosophers (as is also the case in the fragments dealing with the principles) should have made them more hesitant, even within the scope of their own hypothesis, as to the interpretation of the title of the foundational treatise in sixteen books.
The Metarsiology attributed to Theophrastus, extant in Syrian and Arabic translation, was discovered and published too late to be taken into account by Diels.
Doubts about the attribution are formulated by Bakker 2016.
For the text see Daiber 1992, and for the relation to the Placita Mansfeld & Runia 2020, 4.3.1135–37.
According to Diels’s revision of the hypothesis a number of extant writings (as well as sections of writings) concerned with doctrines in the fields of natural philosophy ultimately derive from from the "Physikôn Doxai," as he called the work, via several intermediary stages.
These stages are:
The "Placita" of an otherwise unknown Aëtius, who is mentioned several times by Theodoret.
Theodoret as source was for the first time adduced by Diels.
This Aëtian work, he thought, may be reconstructed (a) from the Placita of pseudo-Plutarch, (b) from quotations in the Anthology of Stobaeus, and (c) from echoes in the Therapy of Greek Diseases of Theodoret[3].
Pseudo-Plutarch is an epitome of Aëtius.
Stobaeus as a rule quotes verbatim, but has a different systematic lay-out.
The Anthology, moreover, was much abridged and damaged in the course of transmission, so in a number of cases Stobaean parallels for pseudo-Plutarch are no longer extant.
Aëtius will also have been used by other authors, whereas pseudo-Plutarch would have been used by other authors again.
Diels indeed proves that the second part of pseudo-Galen's "Philosophical History" is an epitome of a version of pseudo-Plutarch.
In his turn, Aëtius would for the most part derive from a postulated treatise to which Diels gave the name "Vetusta Placita," which would have been used by Cicero, Varro and others.
The Aëtius hypothesis is new; it has proved to be tenable, though it has been shown to be in need of revision.
Before Diels, philosophers believed in the existence of a single early source, parts of which would have been taken over and adapted by Cicero as well as much later by, for instance, pseudo-Galen.
The "Vetusta Placita" hypothesis, on the other hand, is dubious, and the way back to Theophrastus is much more complicated and uncertain, if only because hard evidence is so scarce, than Diels, who just stuck to Usener’s point of view about Theophrastus, wished to consider.
Diels next posits that Theophrastus’ treatise, the "Vetusta Placita," and Aëtius had the same kind of systematic lay-out as the extant "Placita" of pseudo-Plutarch, viz. according to subject.
The individual books and sections of books of this tract are indeed concerned with specific themes, such as for instance book two, which deals with the cosmos and the heavenly bodies.
Within the framework of a section devoted to a particular subject, e.g., the sun, or the moon, the individual chapters may be concerned with various specific issues pertaining to the sun, or the moon, and so on.
Diels further argues that other reports, in other authors, should also be connected with Theophrastus’s foundational treatise.
The passages dealing with the tenets of Presocratic philosophers in the history of philosophy by Diogenes Laërtius, which is arranged according to schools and individuals, not subjects, as well as similar sections of the first book of Hippolytus’s Refutation of All Heresies and of the Stromateis (‘Patchworks’) of another ps-Plutarch, in Diels’ view also went back, ultimately, to the Tenets of the Natural Philosophers.
He failed to take the difference between treatment according to subject and that according to person, or school, sufficiently into account.
His argumentation is also dubious in other respects.
From the undeniable fact that there are striking resemblances between Theophrastus’s fragments concerned with the principles on the one hand, and what is found on that score in Aëtius, Diogenes Laërtius, and Hippolytus on the other, it does not follow that corresponding passages in these later authors for which we have no Theophrastean parallels derive from Theophrastus too.
This is source criticism, or "Quellenforschung," at its most vulnerable.
Diels moreover preferred to overlook the equally undeniable fact that Aristotle’s treatment of the principles in the first book of the "Metaphysics" exhibits equally striking correspondences with Theophrastus’ fragments (Zeller 1877), and so with the later tradition as well, which could therefore go back ultimately to Aristotle, and not to Theophrastus.
Diels sees the development from Theophrastus to these later and (in his view) dependent authors as a decline, and a progressive obfuscation and deterioration.
His cladistic reconstruction of the doxographical tradition is clearly related to the famous so-called ‘Lachmannian’ stemma of a group of manuscripts, from later copies to the lost common ancestor, or archetype, the text of which (as scholars believed at the time) may be reconstructed in a virtually mechanical way.
Diels was very much aware of this analogy, which surely was an important factor in convincing him and others that the splendid results of his investigations were irrefutable.
In the 19th century the method attributed to Lachmann was assumed to be beyond criticism.
By thus (so to speak automatically) tracing back these mutually corresponding passages in later authors to the, as he assumed, faithful reporter Theophrastus, Diels believes he gained access to reliable information about Presocratic philosophy.
Thanks to the stemmatic method back to the archetype it became possible to bestow upon a passage (a brief lemma in, for instance, Aëtius) dealing with a tenet of a Presocratic philosopher, the conditional status of being an attestation which, though still at second hand, should be early and therefore the more to be trusted.
It is with the importance meted out to such so-called ‘fragments’ that these lemmata, removed by Diels’s scissors from Aëtian chapters dealing with subjects, figure in the chronological series of chapters devoted to persons in two fundamental works he published.
These are the "Poetarum Philosophorum Fragmenta" of 1901, reprinted 2000, and the famous, several times revised (in later editions by Diels’ collaborator Kranz), and often reprinted Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (‘Fragments of the Presocratics’, abbreviated D.-K.).
Scholars indeed still tend to view these Aëtian lemmata as a sort of Theophrastean fragments, and Theophrastus is believed to be a bona fide source.
This also holds for those passages in Hippolytus, Diogenes Laërtius and other authors in D.-K. which had been traced back to Theophrastus hypothetically.
However, when one compares Aëtian lemmata concerned with tenets of extant authors, like Plato or Aristotle, with the doctrines found in the original texts, it becomes clear to what extent these doxai have been adapted and distorted, or ‘modernized’, in some sense of the word.
This consequently should also hold for lemmata dealing with lost authors, as Xylander already pointed out in his 16th century edition of Plutarch, which included the Epitome of pseudo-Plutarch.
For further reading on this topic, see Mansfeld & Runia 1997, and Runia 1999, 2004.)
The role of Theodoret as a source for Aëtius has been questioned and doubted by Lebedev 1983, Frede 1999, Gourinat 2011, and Bottler (2015).
However, no one doubts that there must be a source PS shared by pseudo-Plutarch and Stobaeus.
One can also prove that there must be such a source (TS) shared by Theodoret and Stobaeus.
As a final step one can prove that the PS source and the TS source cannot be distinguished from each other so are identical.
Thus Diels’ s original intuition is vindicated. For details see Mansfeld 2018 and section 8 below.
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