Stobaeus, Volume II

Introduction

The second book and its readers

The second volume resumes the education in reading that shaped the first. Stobaeus places brief sayings beside extended arguments and excerpts from poetry beside philosophical prose. Their proximity invites comparison. It does not make their speakers agree. The reader must attend both to a passage’s particular claim and to the question under which the compiler has placed it.

“Book Two” and “Volume Two” happen to coincide here, but they name different things. The book is an ancient division of the Anthology. The volume is a physical part of the nineteenth-century edition. Its title page explicitly identifies it as containing the second book, edited by Curt Wachsmuth. The ancient contents list reproduced in Volume One describes forty-six chapters; the surviving text has losses, and Wachsmuth preserves a number of headings without the passages that once followed them.¹

The book moves from divine knowledge, dialectic, rhetoric, speech, letters and poetry to ethical philosophy. Extended accounts of virtue and the good sit beside arguments about choice, responsibility, appearance and character. Later sections turn to education, friendship, concord, kindness and gratitude. These topics belong to a broad inquiry into how a person should learn, judge, speak and live.

The opening makes this variety immediately visible. A tragic fragment doubts that wise speakers know more than others. A maxim counsels reverence without investigation. Plutarch allows thought a dim, dreamlike contact with the divine. Plato asks for explanatory examples and for a likely account proportioned to human capacities. Such differences are part of what the collection gives us to read.

Knowledge and the ethical life

The opening chapter tests claims to knowledge of the divine. In the Timaeus excerpt, finding the maker and father of the universe is difficult, and speaking of him to everyone is impossible. In the Hermetic address to Tat, the distinction falls between conceiving and expressing: the incorporeal cannot be apprehended by bodily senses. These qualifications matter. The excerpts do not make interchangeable claims about what human beings can know or say.²

Chapter 7 preserves extended accounts of ethical teaching. Its Stoic account distinguishes goods from things preferred for their value without counting those preferred things as goods. The Peripatetic account gives bodily and external advantages a different place in the good life. The translation keeps these categories distinct, even where ordinary English might use one word for several of them.

The chapters on choice and responsibility bring together arguments about what depends on us, the influence of circumstances, and the relation between judgment and conduct. The heading “That no one is bad willingly” frames a collection of particular accounts; it does not erase their differences. A claim about a natural capacity for virtue, for example, is not a claim that everyone has already become virtuous.

Education supplies another test of the relation between knowing and living. The excerpts ask how natural gifts, instruction, habit and practice contribute to character. They also question whether verbal skill or extensive learning is enough. The short sequences on friendship and gratitude bring the inquiry into relations with others: likeness can unite friends, while kindness calls for a response whose meaning depends on the speaker and context.

The text and the translation

The base text is the Greek printed by Wachsmuth. The English is newly worded from that text. Where an excerpt differs from a familiar passage in an edition of its original author, the facing Greek governs the translation. A source name or a dialogue reference helps to locate an excerpt; it does not license replacing the anthology’s wording with a different text.

Verse remains visibly distinct from prose, without an imposed English meter. Long lines may wrap differently from the nineteenth-century setting. In mixed passages the narrative frame and the quoted verse are distinguished. An attribution to a playwright does not turn a character’s speech into the playwright’s own philosophical profession.

The notes explain consequential vocabulary, textual decisions, and the limits of an attribution. One example is the supplied negative in the Hermetic passage: without it, the comparison between mortal and divine would read differently. Another is the rejected phrase in the Bion anecdote. The Greek retains its brackets, while the English follows the editor’s deletion and the note tells the reader what has been omitted.³

Textual recovery also affects the sequence itself. At the words “philosophy is a hunt for truth and a desire for it,” Wachsmuth explains a join between portions transmitted in different parts of the collection. The vertical stroke is retained and explained. Reconstructed placement is therefore visible as an editorial decision; it is not passed off as an uninterrupted manuscript text.

The text and notes have received a full-volume editorial reread for meaning, terminology, attributions, references and qualifications. The Greek was checked against the source images during preparation; this review retains those checks and revisits specific readings where needed. All forty-six headings are represented, and missing texts are marked.