Aristoxenus of Tarentum: Discussion by Carl A. Huffman

Author:Carl A. Huffman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Ancient, Greece, Literary Collections, Ancient & Classical, Literary Criticism, Music, History & Criticism, Philosophy, History & Surveys
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 2012-01-15T00:57:56.384000+00:00

7

Aristoxenus’ Biographical Method*

Stefan Schorn

1. Introduction

The Negative Assessment of Aristoxenus’ Biographies in Modern Scholarship is Highly Influenced by the Verdict Pronounced by Friedrich Leo More than a Hundred Years Ago:1

What we learn about the topics and the contents of these shows in a surprising way the fundamental features of this whole kind of literature in later times: the life of a person is treated who lived hundreds of years ago and about whom there was no documentary tradition; legendary traditions and deductions based on it are accepted; characteristic traits are invented and especially malicious gossip is propagated, exaggerated and invented as a consequence of a hostile attitude (about Socrates and Plato), and here we even find already the tendency to besmirch the relationship between teacher and pupil (fr. 25)2 and to denigrate the social position of the father (fr. 41), which is found regularly in the later tradition. Oral traditions of contemporaries made the account lively especially because they were partial and these individual impressions cast a light on the persons that had caused them (esp. fr. 28). There is one common feature of all these : they are all written in the heat of the moment as a consequence of the attitude of the author against the persons he writes about, as a consequence of hatred against some of them, of love for others and of religious veneration for the one and only Pythagoras.

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