Stobaeus, Volume I

Introduction

A library arranged for a reader

Stobaeus offers the reader an encounter with Greek thought through other people’s words. A few lines of tragedy may stand beside a philosophical definition; a hymn beside a report of competing explanations of the world. The connective tissue is often no more than a heading and a name. Reading the collection therefore asks for two kinds of attention at once: to the particular voice of each extract and to the question under which it has been placed.

John Stobaeus, commonly called John of Stobi, is usually placed in the fifth century CE. The most useful starting point for his purpose is the later account of Photius. In his Bibliotheca, Photius describes four books of extracts, sayings, and precepts and reports that Stobaeus prepared them for his son Septimius, whose memory for what he read needed training. The dedication itself is lost; Photius’s report supplies evidence for it.¹

That purpose helps explain the collection’s form. A passage lifted from a long work becomes something a reader can return to, remember, and set beside another passage. The arrangement gives ancient writing a second setting. A poet’s words may now serve as testimony about providence; a statement about arithmetic may become part of an education in philosophy. The new setting is valuable, but it cannot recover everything that surrounded the quotation in its original work.

For that reason, an author’s name above an excerpt is a beginning, not the end, of interpretation. A tragic character need not speak for the playwright. A doctrine reported under a philosopher’s name need not reproduce that philosopher’s exact wording. The notes in this edition identify such distinctions when they bear on how a passage should be read.

The shape of the first volume

This edition follows the first physical volume of Wachsmuth’s 1884 publication. Its central text is Book I, which ranges across the divine, providence, fate, the constitution of the world, celestial and earthly phenomena, living beings, and the soul. Its understanding of nature is much wider than the modern subject called physics.²

The opening preserves traces of an earlier beginning. Wachsmuth explains that introductory material once praised philosophy and discussed philosophical schools, followed by views on geometry, music, and arithmetic. Its surviving conclusion is the section On Arithmetic. Beginning directly with the chapter on God would pass over a significant part of the volume’s surviving Greek.³

Arithmetic here concerns more than practical calculation. Prometheus describes number among the gifts that make human life possible. Other extracts discuss unity, plurality, limit, harmony, knowledge, and the relation between numbers and the things we count. The material ranges from verse to compressed philosophical prose. Some sentences are damaged; their difficulty is part of the evidence the translator must preserve.

Book I then begins with a heading about God as maker and governor of the whole. Its first excerpts offer no continuous demonstration. Theodectes commends beginning with the gods; Euripides points to the encompassing sky; Aratus invokes Zeus through the signs that guide human work. Homeric lines follow in which the gods raise or lower human fortunes. These voices answer to a shared heading while retaining different emphases. The translation lets that variety remain audible.

Translating a collection of voices

The aim of the English is clarity with room for the texture of the original. Long sentences may be divided where the argument permits it. Conditions, qualifications, comparisons, and changes of speaker must remain. A difficult philosophical sentence should not acquire an invented argument merely to make it smoother.

Verse remains visibly verse, without an imposed English meter. Its movement and images matter, as do its precise claims. In prose, the preference is for composed, readable sentences. Changes of register between poetry, technical explanation, and reported doctrine are retained. The collection’s authors should not all sound like the same speaker.

Terms are translated consistently where the context supports consistency. The One and the monad must not be conflated when an excerpt distinguishes them. Conversely, one fixed English word cannot represent every occurrence of a Greek term across authors and centuries. Aretē may mean martial prowess in Homer and excellence more generally in a maxim about a city and its people. A note explains a consequential choice.⁴

The supplied edition is the textual point of reference. When its Greek differs from the wording familiar in another edition of a quoted author, the translation follows the facing page. Supplements and gaps remain visible. An editorially inferred attribution is not converted into a certainty. The reader can see both what the English says and what kind of evidence supports it.

The footnotes serve that comparison. They explain names and references, numerical examples, technical vocabulary, and textual difficulties where useful. They do not reproduce every manuscript variant. The object is a readable bilingual book whose decisions remain open to inspection.