In 2017, when presenting his text-in-progress of book 2 of the Eudemian Ethics to the Symposium Aristotelicum in Athens, the late Christopher Rowe said, only half in jest, that he hoped to live long enough to finish his new critical text of the EE, as previous editors, notably Richard Walzer, had not been able to do. Rowe got his wish, and his splendid Oxford Classical Text of this problematic Aristotelian work appeared in 2023, two years before his death at the age of 81. Rowe’s earliest work was on Aristotle’s ethical writings, The Eudemian and Nicomachean Ethics: A Study in the Development of Aristotle’s Thought (1971). The Eudemian Ethics (EE), with all of its problems about authenticity, the proper location of the three common books of Aristotle’s ethics, and its relationship to the vastly more influential Nicomachean Ethics (NE), remained a preoccupation over his entire career – and this despite Rowe’s enormous contribution to Platonic scholarship and other aspects of ancient philosophy. He was early to engage with Anthony Kenny’s The Aristotelian Ethics (1978, rev. ed. 2016), which argued persuasively that the three common books (NE 5-7) were originally part of the Eudemian Ethics.
The new OCT of the EE is now the essential resource for study of the work. It is based on a complete re-examination of all the manuscript evidence and a revised stemma codicum which clarifies the relationships among those manuscripts. The new text includes only the exclusively Eudemian books, on the sensible grounds that establishing a properly critical text of the common books, which come to us in the much larger and more difficult textual tradition of the NE, is a different and more complex job (one that remains to be done). The new OCT was accompanied by a separate volume containing detailed discussion of the textual problems in the work, Aristotelica: Studies on the Text of Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics (Oxford 2023). This supplement is vital for the proper understanding of the text and the often difficult choices any editor of the EE must make; students of the text are spared the frustrating task of trying to read the editor’s mind based solely on the apparatus criticus. Such editorial supplementary volumes are gradually becoming common; in an ideal world they would be standard when any new critical text is published.
The present volume is an essential part of Rowe’s project and represents the culmination of work that spanned his entire career, appearing 54 years after his first book on Aristotle’s ethics. The core of the book is obviously the translation itself, which follows on Rowe’s translation of the NE in his collaboration with Sarah Broadie (Nicomachean Ethics edd. S. Broadie and C. Rowe, Oxford University Press 2002). In his preface (ix) Rowe notes that this translation is intended to complement the earlier one and that “for the most part it uses the same translations for key words” so that readers who wish to have a complete translation of the Eudemian Ethics that includes the common books need only consult his 2002 translation. This is less convenient for those readers than Anthony Kenny’s full translation, including the common books, in the series Oxford World’s Classics (2011), that by the present reviewer and Raphael Woolf in the series Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (2013), or the new Hackett translation by David Reeve (2021). But Rowe’s translation of the Eudemian-only books has the considerable advantage of being based on the best available text. (Kenny, Inwood-Woolf and Reeve rely essentially on Bywater’s OCT of the NE and Walzer-Mingay’s now superseded 1991 OCT of the EE, though all three translations use considerable independent judgement about the text at the many cruces evident in the old OCT. No press has yet issued a complete translation revised in light of Rowe’s new textual work.)
Though continuous in crucial ways with his earlier translation of the NE, the present translation is fresh work, the “bulk of the translation” having been done “after an adverse medical diagnosis in early autumn 2024” (xi). The picture of this great Aristotelian scholar devoting the final year of his life to completing his Eudemian project is deeply moving; such dedication to his craft and to the service of his fellow Aristotelians is rare and inspiring.
In addition to the translation itself, the volume contains a long and persuasively argued introduction and two appendices, both of them research papers from earlier in Rowe’s career. The first, ‘Phronēsis and sophia in the Eudemian and Nicomachean Ethics’ (129-144) deals with one of the thorny issues that has divided scholars dealing with the problem of the original home of the common books. Previously unpublished, this paper argues in support of the view articulated in the introduction that neither of the two Ethics was a wholly unified and finished work and that the ethical books that we know as the EE and NE were constructed by editors from sets of smaller treatises; they are “assemblages like the Politics, Physics, and – the extreme case – the Metaphysics” (144). The second appendix, ‘On EE and the Peri Ideōn’ (145-155) is a reprinting of an article published in Phronesis in 1979 (‘The proof from relatives in the Peri Ideōn’) and so is of lesser value to the specialist reader (and who but a specialist will be reading on this topic anyway?). The volume also contains a thorough bibliography, an Index of Names and an Index of Terms (which, along with the Glossary, pp. 18-20, also helps the reader corelate the translation with the original Greek). The Greekless or semi-Greeked reader will find this an approachable book; given the growing importance of the EE for the study of Aristotle’s ethics by philosophers, this approachability is a significant benefit.
It should be obvious that anyone working on the EE or, indeed, on Aristotle’s ethics in general should have this book at hand. Not only is the translation reliable and accessible (or, as accessible as any book by Brill can be: US$162 on Amazon), but the introduction provides a wonderfully thorough and judicious introduction to the problems one faces in handling the EE.
I conclude by providing a quick sketch of that introduction. It begins with a history of the text of this “poor relation” (1) of the NE, which barely survived from antiquity to be for a short time a focus of interest in Byzantine Sicily and Renaissance Italy, owing to which the relatively few surviving manuscripts of the exclusively Eudemian books were made. In a couple of dense but clear pages Rowe outlines the fortuna of the five exclusively Eudemian books, the seven exclusively Nicomachean books, and the three so-called common books (NE 5-7). He argues that Aristotle’s Nachlass included “the elements of two general treatments of ethics” neither of which was comprehensive and that we cannot be sure that either of these treatments was ever “fully conceived, let alone realized, by Aristotle himself” (2). What became known as our EE and NE were probably assembled by editors after Aristotle’s death (Eudemus and Nicomachus, Rowe thinks) and it is difficult to know which, if either, was the dominant text in the ancient world. There are considerations in favour of both, but rather more in favour of the EE’s dominance.
In two or three efficient pages, Rowe sketches the stemma of the Greek manuscripts and the medieval Latin translations that are valuable evidence for a lost early Greek text. Largely following Harlfinger, Rowe shows that there are four primary manuscripts to take into account, all of which Rowe has freshly collated (1). After a brief survey of modern editions, none of which had the resources for the text that Rowe had (7-9), he outlines (9-13) the principles of his new edition, which combines a proper faithfulness to the manuscript tradition with an equally proper interest in and appreciation for Aristotle’s actual argument as a guide to textual choices. A further, vitally important principle of his new edition is “that it never relies on parallels with the NE” (11). This follows from the conviction that Aristotle had at least two distinct projects in ethics, the surviving bits of which have come to us as the EE and the NE. We should expect that Aristotle has different views in different places and so we should not use either to influence our textual choices for the other. The introduction culminates with a five-page analytical discussion (13-17) of the problem of where the common books ‘belong’. This is the most judicious and sensible account that I have seen, and its fulcrum is the realization (I use the term advisedly, for I am persuaded that Rowe is right) that both the EE and the NE were put together after Aristotle’s death. After a dense but admirably clear summary of the history of the various books in the medieval and Renaissance traditions, Rowe’s own solution to this vexed problem is laid out: both editors incorporated “the three middle books” into their constructions, “as they had to if both were to construct (more or less) complete works on ethics” (17). This renders the question of where the common books ‘belong’ moot, strictly speaking. Nevertheless, it is clear that if pressed as to whether the common books are more Eudemian or more Nicomachean, Rowe clearly leans to the Eudemian side (as he says in Appendix 1, pp. 143-144), though he recognizes that there are “undeniable” indications that on some doctrinal points (such as the sense of the term sophia) the second common book (=NE 6) “meshes more closely with the undisputed Nicomachean books than with the undisputed Eudemian ones” (143). Acknowledging that any solution must be speculative, Rowe sums up: “My own provisional hypothesis, for what it is worth, is that Aristotle put together an EE, and then went on to revise various bits of it, which someone else built into an NE (ours) on the analogy of the original EE. But who knows?” This speculation is both more specific and more guarded than Rowe’s own way of putting it on p. 2, but such scepticism about his own preferred hypothesis reflects deep and careful scholarship combined with a healthy intellectual humility.
There is a handful of typographical errors throughout the book, none serious. It is possible that the final preparation of copy for publication was in the hands of the staff at Brill or the series editors, Frans de Haas and Irmgard Männlein, who preface the entire volume with a brief but fitting tribute to the scholarly career of Christopher Rowe, who will, as they say, “be deeply missed by colleagues, students, and friends worldwide.”