How We Know Ancient Philosophy: Fragments, Reports and Lost Libraries

Before you read

The Greek world, about 600 BCE – 600 CE

For some ancient philosophers, we have complete works: all of Plato’s dialogues survive, and a large part of Aristotle’s teaching. For most of the others, we have only fragments: their own words, quoted by later writers who still had their books. Heraclitus wrote one book; about a hundred and thirty short sentences of it survive, all in other people’s writings.

For many philosophers we do not even have fragments, only reports: other people’s summaries of what they thought, and stories about their lives. Aristotle began his books with surveys of earlier thinkers; his pupil Theophrastus collected their opinions; much later, Diogenes Laertius wrote ten books of lives of the philosophers, full of anecdotes. Some reports are careful; some are gossip; all were written by people with their own views.

A few ancient philosophical books have been found in the ground: a burnt scroll at Derveni in northern Greece, and a whole library of scrolls carbonised by the eruption of Vesuvius at Herculaneum. Modern scholars collect all the fragments and reports in numbered lists, so that everyone can check the evidence for themselves.

We read most ancient philosophers through other people’s eyes.

The story

Retold for this lesson; the events after Philo’s time are told by Sophia as things to come.

According to Diogenes Laertius, the philosopher Thales once fell into a well while he was looking at the stars, and a servant girl laughed at him. Plato tells the same story. Is it true? Perhaps; or perhaps it is just the kind of story people like to tell about philosophers. Diogenes is said to have collected everything he could find, true or false, and he often gives two or three different versions of the same event.

Things to come: some of the best fragments of Heraclitus will survive because a Christian bishop, Hippolytus, quoted them in a book attacking heretics. He wanted to prove that his opponents had stolen their ideas from a pagan philosopher. In the same way, much of what we know about Epicurus will come from writers who disliked him. Sometimes we know a philosopher’s words only because his enemies wanted to show how wrong he was.

Things to come: in the sixth century, a scholar called Simplicius, writing commentaries on Aristotle, will copy out long passages of Parmenides’s poem. He says he is doing it because the book has become rare. He was right: his copy is the only reason we can still read much of it today.

And some books will come back from the dead. At Derveni, a scroll half-burnt on a funeral pyre will be found in 1962: a commentary on a religious poem, the oldest surviving book in Europe. At Herculaneum, hundreds of scrolls turned to charcoal by Vesuvius will be found in a villa. For centuries nobody can open them without destroying them; then, with X-rays and computers, scholars will begin to read them without unrolling them at all.

Talk and write

Discussion and writing

Fragment detectives. Your teacher reads a short text; each student writes down one sentence from memory. Compare your “fragments”. How much has changed?

Discuss. 1. Can we trust what enemies say about a thinker? 2. Is a funny anecdote evidence? 3. Which of today’s books do you think will survive two thousand years?

Write (100–130 words). How we know. Explain the difference between complete works, fragments and reports, using according to, says that and is said to (have).