When Eudoxus of Cnidus was living in Egypt, it is said that on one occasion the sacred bull Apis licked his clothing. Although the bull could not speak, to all the priests present the prophecy was clear: Eudoxus would gain great glory, but not live long.
Eudoxus had an extraordinary life. Born to a poor family around 390 BC in the city of Cnidus, in Anatolia, in his twenty-third year he visited Athens for a few months and listened to the lectures of intellectuals, thanks to financial help from a friend. He then returned to Cnidus. Having over time acquired a good reputation for his mathematical work, he obtained from King Agesilaus of Sparta a recommendation letter addressed to Pharaoh Nectanebo I, asking for permission to come to Egypt. So to Egypt he went, perhaps for just a year and four months (some sources say three or even thirteen years). There he spent much of his time in Heliopolis, where he studied under an Egyptian priest named Chonouphis. Aside from observing and writing about the stars and learning about Egypt, he might even have found time to become competent in the Egyptian language, if it is true that his Dialogue of Dogs was a translation of an Egyptian work which he wanted to make available for Greek-speakers to read. After his Egyptian sojourn, Eudoxus toured to various parts of Hellas and gained great popularity, before returning to Athens, where he had a rivalry with Plato. He died at the age of fifty-three.
The book under review is a full-scale edition of the testimonies and fragments related to Eudoxus of Cnidus. The format is bilingual, with the various ancient languages on the right side of the page and the French translations on the left side of the page. The arrangement is standard for editions of this type: a long introduction is followed by the texts and translations, and the notes are then placed at the back.
A scholar who edits Eudoxus faces a daunting task. Eudoxus was a polymath. Diogenes Laertius calls him an ‘astronomer, geometer, doctor, and legislator’ (8.86). In addition to this, material relating to Eudoxus is dispersed over a wide range of ancient sources, from artwork and inscriptions to papyri and scholia, and in a variety of different languages, not just Greek and Latin but also Hebrew and Arabic and Armenian. Unravelling the details of Eudoxus’ life and thought from a tangled mass of sources is difficult. To be able to edit his fragments, one must become expert in these fields and master of these sources. Victor Gysembergh has certainly achieved this.
The introduction gives an overview of Eudoxus’ life and then goes into detail about his main ideas and writings, ending with an important statement about the ‘principes de l’édition’ (p. ccvi–ccvii). The parts of the introduction dealing with the transmission of the various sources are very helpful, and it is clear that Gysembergh has done a great deal of work on the textual traditions of the various authors who refer to Eudoxus, including the inspection and collation of various manuscripts (Gysembergh thanks plenty of people individually in the notes, especially when talking about examining manuscripts or gathering information about manuscripts).
The first part of the body of the edition is devoted to the testimonia. The biographical testimonia are arranged firstly according to general statements and secondly according to the various phases of Eudoxus’ life. The main source, Diogenes Laertius (8.86–91), comes first. Apart from Diogenes’ fascinating biography and the prophetic and bizarre poem about the Apis bull with which it ends, most of the other biographical testimonia have little to say other than that ‘Eudoxus became famous’.[1] The rest of the biographical testimonia then have places or topics as their themes. It is interesting that Eudoxus seems to have had astronomical observatories both at Heliopolis (T14a) and at Cnidus (T23) and that, according to Strabo (T23), the observatory at Cnidus was built only a little higher than the city houses.
Next come the fragments themselves. Gysembergh’s decision to arrange the fragments according to themes, beginning with other ancient authors’ expositions or mentions of Eudoxus’ various theories, rather than with quotation-fragments, is worth noting, since many modern editors of ancient authors seem to pursue the opposite approach, beginning with quotation-fragments of the author and then giving other authors’ summaries or expositions of his thought later. It is hard to say which approach is better as it depends on the nature of the author, but the fact is that, if you want to read Eudoxus’ actual words (or at least what other ancient authors say were his actual words), they are not so clearly marked here. Some editors are inclined to put quotations from the author in bold type to distinguish them from the surrounding text. The quotation-fragments of Eudoxus that we do have, especially the many quotations provided by Hipparchus of Bithynia, suggest that his style was simple and informative.[2]
Overall, Gysembergh’s book is a fantastic achievement, and there is something fascinating and stimulating to read on almost every page. I found especially interesting Agostino Nifo’s apparent references to Eudoxus’ views on love, namely the idea that love is an agitation of blood under the influence of sexual desire which seizes the body not all at once but grows progressively in intensity (F113a and b). The medieval portrait of Eudoxus in ms. Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria 3632 f. 314r (T31), where he is shown teaching astronomy to students, also caught my attention because of its description of him as ‘the Egyptian’ (ὁ Αἰγύπτιος).
I only have one very small general query about method, and I wonder whether it could be addressed in a second edition or in a separate article. An undoubtedly thorny issue is the question of the reliability the sources upon which our knowledge of Eudoxus rests. In the ‘principes de l’édition’ (p. ccvi-ccvii) Gysembergh states that in this edition ‘la catégorie de fragment n’implique pas que le passage cité constitue une citation littérale ni qu’il reproduise fidèlement les doctrines d’Eudoxe’ (p. ccvii). Although the caution is duly appreciated, and Gysembergh does deal occasionally with these points on a case-by-case basis in the introduction and notes, I think it could have been helpful if he gave more of an overview here in the ‘principes de l’édition’ about how it might be possible to separate reliable and unreliable citations or if he thinks there are any elements of the indirect tradition that are more reliable than others. For example, when, say, Stephanus of Byzantium gives direct quotations from Eudoxus’ Circuit of the Earth, can we depend on these, or should our default view always be doubt? For every authority cited one would probably like to know to what extent we can say they are reliable or unreliable (a) as a source of quotations in general and (b) as a source of material related to Eudoxus in particular. A few pages directly tackling this issue would be very helpful.
There has been no edition of the fragments of Eudoxus of Cnidus since 1966, when François Lasserre’s Die Fragmente des Eudoxos von Knidos appeared. Gysembergh’s edition well surpasses that of Lasserre. It is a wonderful piece of scholarship.
Notes
[1] I wonder why the Armenian source of T4c has been supplied in German translation even though Gysembergh writes out Armenian script elsewhere (p. ccix).
[2] In the section with philosophical fragments (p. 159 onwards) something has gone awry with the Greek font on several of the pages, at least in my copy.