Stobaeus, Volume II

Name: Stobaeus, Volume II
Author: John Stobaeus

Greek and English with an introduction and explanatory footnotes.

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Stobaeus, Volume IIBook II Chapter 31 · II.31.36–II.31.37

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Facing Pages · Branch 394 of 516

Book II Chapter 31 · II.31.36–II.31.37

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Ancient Greek

p. 784

Πλάτωνος

II.31.36

Ψυχῆς ἀνθρώπῳ κτῆμα οὐκ ἔστιν εὐφυέστερον εἰς τὸ φυγεῖν μὲν τὸ κακόν, ἰχνεῦσαι δὲ καὶ ἑλεῖν τὰ πάντων ἄριστα καὶ ἑλόντα αὖ κοινῇ ξυνοικεῖν τὸν ἐπίλοιπον βίον.

Τοῦ αὐτοῦ

II.31.37

Πᾶσα ἐπιστήμη χωριζομένη δικαιοσύνης καὶ τῆς ἄλλης ἀρετῆς πανουργία, ἀλλ’ οὐ σοφία φαίνεται.

Stobaeus, Volume II: Book II Chapter 31

p. 785

Plato, from Laws, Book 5

II.31.36

For a human being, no possession is better fitted than the soul¹¹³⁷ for escaping what is bad, tracking down and capturing the best things of all, and, after capturing them, living in their company for the rest of life.¹¹³⁸

Plato, from Menexenus

II.31.37

All knowledge, when separated from justice and the rest of virtue, appears as cunning, not wisdom.¹¹³⁹

1137.Laws 5, 728C–D. Εὐφυέστερον describes what is better suited by nature to the activities named. The verbs for tracking and capturing make the pursuit of good things a kind of hunt; living together then turns what has been captured into enduring company.

1138.Wachsmuth prints τὰ πάντων ἄριστα, the best things of all, in the plural. His apparatus records the separate Platonic reading τὸ πάντων ἄριστον, a singular object. The English follows the anthology’s plural and its image of sharing the rest of life with what one has obtained. No particular list of goods is supplied by the excerpt.

1139.Menexenus 246E–247A. Ἐπιστήμη is knowledge or skilled understanding, rather than a restriction to modern natural science. Πανουργία here is the cunning that can put such competence to unscrupulous use. The separation from justice and the other virtues determines the judgment; the sentence does not condemn knowledge without that qualification. The local ἀλλ’, but, makes the contrast with wisdom explicit.

About This Reading Edition

The complete surviving text of Stobaeus’s second book, through II.46.22, in Ancient Greek and English, with an introduction and 1,541 explanatory notes. All forty-six chapter headings remain, including the notices for chapters whose texts are missing.

Historical Text and Translation

Greek: Curt Wachsmuth, Ioannis Stobaei Anthologii libri duo priores, volumen II (Berlin: Weidmann, 1884), printed p. 1 and pp. 3–264. The supplied edition preserves consequential editorial signs, reconstructed joins, qualified attributions, and missing-text notices. English translation, introduction, and explanatory notes: Diotimos Editions, 2026.

About Diotimos Editions

This historical edition credits Diotimos Editions as its English translator.

Rights

Stobaeus’s ancient Greek work and Wachsmuth’s 1884 edition are in the public domain. The supplied English translation, introduction, and explanatory notes are published with the site owner’s authorization.