[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
This volume of studies on the pseudo-Aristotelian Mirabilia follows on the heels of a new edition of the Greek text by Ciro Giacomelli and precedes a forthcoming English translation of the text by Robert Mayhew for the Loeb Classical Library.[1] It contains twelve papers on what the editors plausibly consider the section of the Mirabilia concerned with natural science (1–77); a second volume, containing papers concerned with historiography and mythography in Mirabilia, has been published simultaneously.[2]
The aspiration of the volume is to explore the connection between this neglected (and at times needlessly derided) text and early Peripatetic natural science. In this context, early Peripatetic science primarily amounts to: (i) the writings of Theophrastus (both extant and preserved only in fragments, summaries, and translations); (ii) the fragments of Aristotle’s lost zoological writings; and (iii) book 8(9) of Aristotle’s Historia Animalium.[3]
The bulk of the volume is made up of eight “commentary” papers, each treating a thematic (usually continuous) section of Mirabilia and exploring the connection between that section and Theophrastus, Aristotle, and various indirect traditions of the Peripatos (e.g., Pliny and Aelian); these are preceded by papers on the textual transmission of the Mirabilia (Giacomelli) and the place of Mirabilia in Peripatetic epistemology (Baltussen), and they are followed by two papers on general scientific topics present throughout Mirabilia, namely color change (Ierodiakonou) and disease (Kazantzidis).
A guiding thread of the eight “commentary” papers is the question of whether Mirabilia (i) draws on texts belonging to the preliminary, data-collection phase of Peripatetic scientific research or (ii) draws on the works of Theophrastus, which are themselves usually assumed to belong to the later, causal-explanatory research phase. The papers thus test Allan Gotthelf’s intriguing hypothesis that Mirabilia may preserve material from now lost writings which provided the data for the extant Aristotelian treatises (on which see Hatzimichali, pp. 46-47).
This guiding question is answered differently by authors working on different passages of Mirabilia: Hatzimichali concludes that both Mirabilia 1–15 and its parallels in Historia Animalium 8(9) draw on a now lost data-collection stage text; Oikonomopoulou considers it likely that Mirabilia 16–22 (which exhibits parallels to Theophrastus’s lost On Honey) is also drawn from a collection-phase text; Zucker (Mir. 23–28), Garani (Mir. 33–41), Mayhew (Mir. 71–74), and Verhasselt (Mir. 139–151) identify Theophrastus as the source of their respective sections; Wilson (Mir. 42–50 and 61–62) and Hellmann (Mir. 75–77) suspend judgment concerning whether the source of their sections is Theophrastus or another Peripatetic text. These differing assessments are no cause for criticism, since each scholar is working with a different part of Mirabilia and (more importantly) with parallel texts in different states of preservation.
Among these papers, the contribution of Verhasselt deserves special mention for including indirect traditions in languages other than Greek and Latin, namely Arabic, Syriac, and Armenian (pp. 240–47); with the help of colleagues versed in the relevant languages, Verhasselt successfully reconstructs passages from the lost agricultural manuals of Cassianus Bassus and Vindonius Anatolius of Berytus, which turn out to have been drawn from Mirabilia. Furthermore, Oikonomopoulou’s discovery that one of the mirabilia concerning honey is likely drawn from Xenophon’s Anabasis constitutes an exciting finding, indicating that the contents of the Mirabilia 1–77 are drawn not just from scientific works but also from other, seemingly unrelated genres. Finally, Mayhew provides a valuable discussion of the intriguing possibility that Theophrastus’ De Piscibus (the parallel to Mir. 71–74) may itself have been a text belonging to the data-collection stage of scientific research; this is important and interesting since most contributors to the volume (plausibly) assume that these two options are mutually exclusive.
In addition to providing source-commentary on their respective sections, a number of authors examine the nature of the particular kind of wonder (thauma) with which Mirabilia is concerned. Such discussions may be found in Zucker, who constrasts the scientific interest in wonder present in Mirabilia with the “sensationalism” of paradoxographic literature (pp. 100–1). Furthermore, Baltussen draws an enlightening contrast between paradoxography for the sake of entertainment and Mirabilia, which he plausibly sees as a scientific attempt to “gain control” over marvelous phenomena (p. 42). Finally, Kazantzidis, in addition to examining the topic of disease, also provides a stimulating discussion of the text’s poetics of wonder, which include the author’s strategy of increasing wonder by “occlusion of details” (p. 314); this is accompanied by an exciting comparison between Mirabilia and tragic wonder present in the works of Euripides and Aeschylus (pp. 298–99).
Closely related to this discussion of wonder, as we have just seen, is the question of whether Mirabilia is a work of paradoxography – a question on which (as the editors note, p. 3) no consensus has been reached. While Zucker vehemently argues against the classification of Mirabilia as a work of paradoxography, Ierodiakonou and Kazantzidis treat the text as belonging to this genre; Baltussen articulates a more nuanced position, distinguishing between mirabilia collections motivated by mere curiosity and the more scientific treatment of wonder represented by Mirabilia (p. 42). If carried further, this discussion may be expected to contribute not only to the study of Mirabilia but also to further articulation of paradoxography as a text-type. In particular, further specifying the kind of wonder relevant to paradoxography may prove especially enlightening; while some headway has been made on this by describing paradoxography in terms of “sensationalism” and “entertainment,” these concepts seem more at home in the modern world of mass media and may thus require some adjustment.
The volume thus renders an important and exciting contribution on a number of fronts, reinvigorating the scholarship on a largely neglected text. One point of criticism may concern the division of papers into two thematic volumes, one on the scientific tradition and the other concerning histography and mythography. To be sure, this division is justified on practical grounds, and it is made plausible by the structure of the text, which indeed seems to fall into a broadly scientific (Mir. 1–77, along with 139–151) and a broadly historical-mythographic section (Mir. 78–138); nevertheless, the reader should be aware that material covered in the scientific volume may very well come from historical sources, and also that mirabilia covered in the historical volume may come from scientific texts. This is of course due in part to the broad thematic range of ancient histories, which may include discussions of natural phenomena (especially if those phenomena are somehow strange or puzzling); indeed, some passages in Mirabilia that have been interpreted as coming from scientific sources have also been argued to originate in historical and ethnographic works: examples include 149–150, which is attributed both to Theophrastus’s On Animals that Bite and Sting and to Aristotle’s On Barbarian Customs (see Verhasselt, p. 258), as well as 19 (18 in the traditional numbering), on crazy-making honey, which Oikonomopoulou astutely traces back to Xenophon’s Anabasis (pp. 70–71).
Furthermore, while the division of the contents of Mirabilia into scientific on the one hand and historiogaphic and mythographic on the other is a useful expedient, it may obscure the fact that some material in Mirabilia may originate in writings belonging to other genres, including literary and ethical works: an interesting case in point is Mirabilia 31–32, which have been traced back both to medical sources and to Heraclides of Pontus’s (presumably ethical) treatise On Pleasure (see Kazantzidis, p. 304); less certain, but to my mind plausible and stimulating, is Kazantzidis’s proposal that Mirabilia 178 – which describes the ten-day illness and subsequent recovery of Demaratus of Locri, and which resembles 99 and 101 – may originate in a Platonic text resembling the Myth of Er (pp. 312–13). While such instances of potential “genre contamination” are few, they may shed important light on the intellectual interests and priorities which guided the compiler(s) of Mirabilia. Finally, one should note that the understandable decision to divide the text into thematic blocks of mirabilia has led to some passages not being handled at all, namely 55–56, 60, and 70; this fact is somewhat obscured by the table of contents, which creates the expectation of an exhaustive treatment of 1–77.
The book is well-produced and contains only negligible typographical errors. The indices are excellent, containing not just an index locorum, nominum, and rerum, but also an index of plant and animal names. The typesetting is well done, not only in Latin and Greek, but also in Arabic and Syriac (I am regrettably not able to comment on the quality of the Armenian).
Authors and titles
- The Text of De mirabilibus auscultationibus: Observations on Its Structure and Transmission, Ciro Giacomelli
- Mapping Human Knowledge in Peripatetic Research: Thaumata, Endoxa and the Hierarchy of Beliefs, Han Baltussen
- Encounters with Curious Animals: De mirabilibus auscultationibus 1–15 and Historia animalium 8(9), Myrto Hatzimichali
- De mirabilibus auscultationibus 16–22 and Theophrastus’ Lost On Honey, Katerina Oikonomopoulou
- De mirabilibus auscultationibus 23–28 and Theophrastus’ Lost On Animals That Appear in Swarms, Arnaud Zucker
- Miracula ignium: Theophrastus’ On the Lava Flow in Sicily, De mirabilibus auscultationibus 33–41, and Pliny’s Historia naturalis 236–238, Myrto Garani
- The Lives of Metals in Theophrastus and De mirabilibus auscultationibus, Malcolm Wilson
- De mirabilibus auscultationibus 71–74 and Theophrastus’ De piscibus, Robert Mayhew
- Multiple Use of Data in Aristotle, the Peripatos, and Beyond: De mirabilibus auscultationibus 75–77 and Theophrastus’ Lost On Animals Said to be Grudging, Oliver Hellmann
- De mirabilibus auscultationibus 139–151: Theophrastus’ On Animals That Bite and Sting and Aristotle’s Nomima barbarica, Gertjan Verhasselt
- Color Changes in De mirabilibus auscultationibus, Katerina Ierodiakonou
- Diseases in De mirabilibus auscultationibus, George Kazantzidis
Notes
[1] Ciro Giacomelli, Pseudo-Aristoteles: De mirabilibus auscultationibus. Roma: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 2023.
[2] Stefan Schorn, Robert Mayhew, Historiography and Mythography in the Aristotelian Mirabilia. Rutgers University studies in classical humanities. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2024
[3] This book is considered to be book 8 of Historia Animalium by its latest editor, David Balme, though it was considered to be book 9 in previous editions.