The ninth Symposium Hellenisticum was held in Haus Rissen at Hamburg, 23–28 July 2001 under the sponsorship of Hamburg University. Nine of the ten papers presented here are revised versions of drafts distributed to the participants in advance and discussed at the meetings; Bobzien's paper could not be presented at the conference and the editors are pleased to be able to include it. The final versions of all the papers bear the mark of much discussion, reflection and revision over the months following the conference.

The participants at the Symposium (and their affiliations at the time) were: Keimpe Algra (University of Utrecht), James Allen (University of Pittsburgh), Julia Annas (University of Arizona), Catherine Atherton (Oxford University), Jonathan Barnes (University of Geneva), Gábor Betegh (Central European University, Budapest), David Blank (University of Reading), Susanne Bobzien (Oxford University), Tad Brennan (Yale University), Charles Brittain (Cornell University), Myles Burnyeat (Oxford University), Walter Cavini (University of Bologna), Sten Ebbesen (University of Copenhagen), Theodor Ebert (Erlangen University), Dorothea Frede (Hamburg University), Nikolai Grintser (Moscow State University), Christoph Horn (Bonn University), Frédérique Ildefonse (University of Paris), Anna Maria Ippolo (University of Rome), Brad Inwood (University of Toronto), André Laks (University of Lille), Anthony Long (University of California), Gretchen Reydam-Schils (Notre Dame University), David Sedley (Cambridge University), Ineke Sluiter (University of Leiden), Gisela Striker (Harvard University), Alexander Verlinsky (University of St Petersburg), Hermann Weidemann (Münster University).

Stoic logicians attended to words rather than to things: so claimed Galen, a dozen times or more; and so claimed Alexander of Aphrodisias. Galen and Alexander meant the claim as an accusation and a criticism: it was because they thought not of things but of words, that the Stoics made fundamental errors in their logic.

Nineteenth-century historians of logic echoed the ancient claim, and they too thought that Stoic logic was ruined by its passion for words. Twentieth-century historians of logic also echoed the ancient claim. But for them it was not a criticism. On the contrary, it was a sign that the Stoic logicians were ‘formalists’ – and it is good thing for a logician to be a formalist.

But whether it is bad or good to attend to words rather than to things can scarcely be decided until we know what it means to attend to words rather than to things. In the following pages I shall discuss one or two aspects of the ancient claim and one or two of the texts pertinent to it. The texts concern complex propositions – conditionals, conjunctions, disjunctions. Such items form the foundations of Stoic logic. According to Galen and Alexander, the Stoics made fundamental errors about these fundamental items: they did so because they attended to words rather than to things, because their misdirected gaze encouraged them to misclassify compound propositions.

The Stoics extensively discussed logical paradoxes and fallacies, both of which they would call sophisms (σοφίσματα). They wrote numerous books on the paradoxes of the Liar and the Sorites, which today – again – are the subject of extensive research; they investigated a number of paradoxes and fallacies that are based on puzzles connected with demonstratives, identity, presuppositions and ambiguities, and there are still many questions unanswered about their treatment of each of these. In this paper I take up the Stoic treatment of sophisms or fallacies which contain ambiguities, more precisely which contain an ambiguous word which is responsible for there being a fallacy. In modern terms, these are lexical, as opposed to grammatical or structural, ambiguities, and this kind of fallacy is often called ‘fallacy of equivocation’, although we cannot assume that the Stoic understanding of such ambiguities fully coincides with any modern ones. The Peripatetics called such fallacies fallacies of homonymy, and the Stoics are likely to have called them fallacies of homonymy in single words. The Stoic discussion of this type of fallacies has been written upon with fruitful results by several scholars, but the precise nature of the Stoic view is still a matter of debate. In this paper, I try to sort out the difficulties for an interpretation of the Stoic treatment of such fallacies based on lexical ambiguities, compare it with Aristotle's treatment of this type of sophisms, and explore what we can learn from it about Stoic theory of logic and language.

[Note: This discussion should be supplemented with the sections on authenticity in the commentary on each of the genuine fragments and testimonia and by the more detailed discussion of specific pseudo-Archytan treatises in the appendix on spurious writings.]

In the case of most ancient authors, if a medieval manuscript or an ancient source ascribes a given text to that author, we assume that the text is genuine until proven otherwise. There are of course works ascribed in the ancient tradition to prominent authors, such as Plato and Aristotle, which modern scholars with good reason regard as spurious. The number of genuine works of Plato and Aristotle, however, far outnumber works judged to be spurious. This situation is almost completely reversed in the Pythagorean tradition. Thesleff's collection of spurious Pythagorean texts (1965) runs to some 245 pages. Out of the forty-four authors listed in Thesleff, in the case of only two, Archytas and Philolaus, are most modern scholars willing to agree that even some authentic fragments also survive, although there are some reliable testimonia about a few others (e.g. Hippasus and Eurytus). In the case of Archytas there are approximately 45 pages and 1,200 lines of almost certainly spurious texts collected in Thesleff, in contrast to the 7 pages and 100 lines of text in DK, which most scholars have accepted as authentic. Thus, in terms of number of lines, the amount of authentic material is less than 10 percent of the amount of spurious material.

The last book devoted to Archytas was published over 160 years ago (Gruppe 1840). Even that work was not really a study of Archytas' thought but rather an unsuccessful attempt to argue that no authentic fragments of Archytas had survived from antiquity. It is not an exaggeration to say, then, that there has never been a book-length study of Archytas of Tarentum. There have not even been many shorter treatments. Erich Frank gave Archytas a fairly prominent role in his reconstruction of early Pythagoreanism (1923), but that reconstruction was eccentric and has been largely rejected by scholars. Essentially the only commentary has been that in Italian by Maria Timpanaro Cardini, as part of a three-volume commentary on all the Pythagoreans (1958–64). In recent years there have been a few important articles and sections of larger works dealing with isolated aspects of Archytas' work, notably his harmonic theory (e.g. Barker 1989, 1994; Bowen 1982; Cambiano 1998 and Lloyd 1990), but to say that Archytas has been neglected would be an understatement. Nonetheless, Archytas is one of the three most important figures in ancient Pythagoreanism (along with Pythagoras himself and Philolaus); we cannot hope to understand ancient Pythagoreanism without understanding Archytas. He was also an important philosopher, mathematician and political leader in his own right. Most scholarship on Greek philosophy during the first half of the fourth century has been devoted to Plato and the Academy.

SOURCES

(The original texts and translations of the testimonia for Archytas' life are found in Part Three, Section One)

Archytas did not live the life of a philosophical recluse. He was the leader of one of the most powerful Greek city-states in the first half of the fourth century bc. Unfortunately he is similar to most important Greek intellectuals of the fifth and fourth centuries bc, in that we have extremely little reliable information about his activities. This dearth of information is all the more frustrating since we know that Aristoxenus wrote a biography of Archytas, not long after his death (A9). Two themes bulk large in the bits of evidence that do survive from that biography and from other evidence for Archytas' life. First, there is Archytas' connection to Plato, which, as we will see, was more controversial in antiquity than in most modern scholarship. The Platonic Seventh Letter, whose authenticity continues to be debated, portrays Archytas as saving Plato from likely death, when Plato was visiting the tyrant Dionysius II at Syracuse in 361 bc. Second, for Aristoxenus, Archytas is the paradigm of a successful leader. Elected general (stratēgos) repeatedly, he was never defeated in battle; as a virtuous, kindly and democratic ruler, he played a significant role in the great prosperity of his native Tarentum, located on the heel of southern Italy.

The standard collection of all the pseudo-Archytan writings is Thesleff (1965). New editions and commentaries on individual treatises have appeared since Thesleff and are cited below. In a few cases, where Thesleff has not provided the text, I provide enough of the text to reveal its nature. All of the following treatises are, in my judgment, surely spurious except On Law and Justice, where the evidence is more complicated. In the case of most treatises, I have given the main arguments for spuriousness. On the pseudo-Archytan treatises in general see Burkert 1972b, Centrone 1990 and 1994b, Moraux 1984: 605–83, and Thesleff 1972 and 1961.