The ancient work that is the subject of Lesley Dean-Jones’ new introduction, text, translation, and commentary for the Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries series is difficult and mired in controversy. It has come down to us in the manuscript tradition as Book X of Aristotle’s Historia Animalium (HA). But its nature and authorship have been the subject of scholarly debate for centuries. Some ancient catalogues of Aristotle’s works suggest that the HA had only nine books and that what is now Book X was not part of that work; and they mention a separate Aristotelian work “On Failure to Reproduce,” which appears to be the same as our HA X. But is the work by Aristotle? From the 18th through early 20th centuries, most scholars thought it was not, but the pendulum has begun to swing in the opposite direction in more recent decades, thanks to the work of Tricot, Balme, and van der Eijk, who have argued the work is by Aristotle, but is either an early work (Tricot, Balme) or one in a more technical genre than the rest of the Aristotelian Corpus (van der Eijk).[1] Now Dean-Jones, in the monograph-length introduction to her new edition of this text, presents a novel theory: the first three-quarters of HA X represents Aristotle’s summary (or excerpt) of a medical work entitled “On Failure to Reproduce” (De non generando, abbreviated Non Gen.) and the final quarter is Aristotle’s subjection of this work to his dialectical method of critique. Her theory is brilliant, and may even be correct.
The main problem that Dean-Jones’ theory aims to solve is that many of the ideas in HA X “contradict central ideas to be found elsewhere in the biological works accepted as genuine Aristotle, most notably the claim that a woman contributes seed to conception when sexually aroused in the same way as a man does” (p. 10). Aristotle, she claims, believes that women do not produce generative seed but instead contribute menses to reproduction, a contribution that is not linked to (or synchronous with) sexual desire. Other scholars have also noticed that some of the ideas in HA X differ from those that we encounter in Aristotle’s Generation of Animals (GA), but they offer different solutions to the apparent conflict. Balme, for instance, explains that HA X reflects Aristotle’s earlier attempts to understand human reproduction, which are “refined” in the later GA.[2] Dean-Jones reasonably objects that the GA does not merely “refine” the views expressed in HA X, but rejects many of them categorically.
But Dean-Jones has one more ace up her sleeve: she has noticed that what she sees as non-Aristotelian language and ideas in HA X are concentrated in the first three quarters or so, whereas the latter quarter shows evidence of language and ideas about human reproduction and dialectical method associated with the mature Aristotle (pp. 95, 103, etc.). HA X, she concludes, is a dialectical critique of a non-Aristotelian medical text. The first three quarters (through 637a35) is the endoxon, the opinion under review, in this case Aristotle’s summary (or excerpt) of a written text (possibly in its entirety). The final quarter of HA X is Aristotle’s dialectical critique, which contains three parts. First is the topos (637a35-b6), here an invocation of the axiom that the same causes must lead to the same results. Second is Aristotle’s attempt to use this axiom—here in the voice of the author of “On Failure to Reproduce” (the Answerer)—to justify the author’s view that women contribute fertile sperma to reproduction (637b6-638a5). That argument is that female birds can produce eggs (wind eggs) without any contribution from the male. The same result—eggs, here without involvement of the male—suggests that female birds must make the same contribution to reproduction, fertile sperma. The third and final part of the dialectic is a superior application of the axiom in the voice of Aristotle himself (now as Questioner) to disprove the author’s view (638a5 to end). What human females can produce on their own is only a pseudo-pregnancy (uterine mole), which can sometimes lead to death. Male seed produces life, whereas the female emission by itself can sometimes lead to death. Because the two causes lead to opposite ends, the causes cannot be the same, i.e., male and female emissions cannot both be generative seed.
Dean-Jones’ theory provides an intriguing explanation of HA X as we have it, and of its apparent internal contradictions in particular. But it is open to a few objections. First, there is not a single surviving example in all of Greek literature of endoxon plus dialectic where the endoxon is an extensive written text, quoted or summarized, apart, apparently, from this one. All we have is Aristotle’s description of his general method in works like the Topica, and briefer examples such as the famous passage in Nicomachean Ethics (NE) VII.2 (cited at p. 42), where Aristotle attributes to Socrates the view that incontinence is impossible because no one does wrong willingly, and then subjects it to dialectical critique.
Second, HA X as we have it does not contain any of the textual markers we would expect if this really is an endoxon followed by a dialectic. For instance, in the endoxon, the summary of “On Failure to Reproduce,” the author is never introduced, never the subject of a verb of speaking or of any verb whatsoever. And when the text supposedly shifts from endoxon to dialectic, there is nothing in the text to mark this transition from anonymous author to Aristotle.[3] Dean-Jones argues that the ποιεῖ at 637a36, at the beginning of the dialectic, has as its subject the author of “On Failure.” She translates the first sentence of the dialectic: “Whatever is contributed to this (i.e., the mixture of fluids in the area before the uterus), the author makes [ποιεῖ] the cause of the same experience (in woman as in men, i.e., excitement and lassitude) because <he believes that> the woman too is emitting a generative fluid” (parentheses and angled brackets original; square brackets added).[4] But there is no “author” in the Greek. She defends her reading in the commentary (ad loc.): “[w]hen referring to an opponent in a dialectic exchange Aristotle often simply uses a third person singular verb for which the reader has to supply the subject” (cf. also p. 49 n. 93). There is something amiss in her citation of the source for this proposition,[5] so this claim is difficult to evaluate. But I would imagine that if sometimes Aristotle does use a third person singular verb without an expressed subject, the identity of the subject can be inferred from the context and must have been referred to explicitly earlier in the work. The author of “On Failure” has never been referred to, much less named. We can get a sense of the expectations of the dialectical genre by returning again to the one example of endoxon plus dialectic that most Aristotle scholars agree on, the passage from NE VII.2: the endoxon is clearly linked to Socrates and his view is summarized in a phrase.
Third, if HA X is in fact an example of the otherwise unattested genre of endoxon (written text) plus dialectic, what we have seems a pretty poor specimen. Dean-Jones’ brilliant reconstruction of topos, Answerer, and Questioner belies the obscurity of the actual text. HA X contains nothing like the tight dialectical argumentation that we encounter in NE VII.2, for example. And if this wonky reductio ad absurdum was Aristotle’s aim, why would he need to summarize an entire treatise (whose focus is on different causes of sterility, mostly in women, and not on female seed) if the dialectic proceeds to critique just one minor part of it? Dean-Jones has to invent a new sub-genre of endoxon plus dialectic: author-notes on an original text, “much as a modern scholar or student might take notes on a text” (p. 48).
The text, translation, and commentary of this edition support Dean-Jones’ new theory. The commentary is excellent, perhaps the strongest part of the book, revealing her deep knowledge of Aristotle’s biological works and the works of the Hippocratic Corpus. The text and translation are also very strong. She offers a total of 30 or so emendations (depending on how one counts) for a text that extends to 16 pages in her edition. She is guided by a commitment to make the text intelligible and coherent, a worthy goal, as the text handed down in the manuscripts does not make a lot of sense in a number of places and appears badly corrupted in others. Many of her emendations are persuasive and salutary (e.g., καλῶς at 634b36, προϊέναι at 635a34, ἀσθενῆ at 635b38, deletion of οὐκ at 637a12), but occasionally she goes beyond imposing clarity to shaping the text in such a way that it more fully conforms to her theory of the nature and authorship of HA X.
One good example is at 635b29, where the transmitted text reads, in her translation, “some women produce so much moisture that they are unable to draw up the sperma of the man unalloyed on account of the intermingling of the secretion which comes from the woman.” Τo the end of the phrase “sperma of the man,” Dean-Jones adds καὶ τῆς γυναικὸς (“and the woman”), on the grounds that the author of “On Failure” clearly insists that women as well as men emit sperma. This is true, but there are examples in the text where only the male’s sperma is specifically mentioned (e.g., 636a27) without implying that there is no female sperma. Dean-Jones’ justification of this emendation is questionable: the transmitted text (without “and the woman”) is either “careless phrasing on Aristotle’s part, or he (or a later copyist) failed to realize that the author of Non Gen. believed there were two female fluids involved in intercourse” (p. 196 ad loc.). This is strange. She acknowledges the possibility that Aristotle himself might have made this “mistake” (out of carelessness or failure to understand the argument). But if HA X really is Aristotle’s summary of a work entitled “On Failure” followed by a dialectical critique, shouldn’t our text reflect Aristotle’s own summary, however careless or incorrect?
Is Dean-Jones overall argument ultimately persuasive? Ockham’s principle of parsimony might lead one to favor the simpler view of Balme (which is not without its shortcomings), that Aristotle’s views evolved between the HA and the GA. But Dean-Jones’ argument is nevertheless brilliant, and it is enjoyable to watch her curious mind at work. Her argument might well carry the day, eventually. And this leads to a final thought: it might have been preferable to make this bold argument in an article or even a monograph, and later, if the argument eventually gained some degree of consensus among scholars in the field, or at least a majority, to produce a text, translation, and commentary that codified the new consensus. Dean-Jones’ daring book, as it is, may have more limited value to anyone who does not buy into the structure of HA X that she describes.
Notes
[1] J. Tricot, Aristote: Histoire des Animaux, vol. 1 (Paris 1957) 17; D. Balme, “Aristotle Historia Animalium Book Ten,” in J. Wiesner, ed., Aristoteles, Werk und Wirkung, vol. 1 (Berlin 1985) 191-206; and P. van der Eijk, “On Sterility (‘HA X’), a Medical Work by Aristotle?” CQ 49 (1999) 490-502.
[2] Balme id. 197.
[3] Strangely, Dean-Jones (p. 54) sees this very lack of transition at the beginning of Chapter 6 (“excessively abrupt”) as evidence that there has been a change of author.
[4] Although this sentence is not without its difficulties, the rendering of D. Balme, Aristotle: History of Animals VII-X, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge MA 1991) 521 seems reasonable: “The women’s contribution brings about [ποιεῖ] the same affections to the extent that she too emits a fertile seed” (brackets added).
[5] She cites a certain “Smith 1999, p. xxvii,” but there is no page xxvii either in that article or in the collection of which it is a part.