From Athens to Western Europe

How did medieval natural philosophers become aware of the theories of a Greek thinker from the fourth century BCE? Did they read the papyrus scrolls, which Aristotle had scribbled down in Greek 600 years earlier? The ideas and views of Greek philosophers, strolling and chatting in the local marketplace or at a gymnasium, traveled a long way before they had their impact at the universities of Oxford, Paris, or elsewhere in Europe.

Roger Bacon (1214/1220-1292) once claimed that proficiency in languages ‘‘offers the first door to wisdom, which certainly applies to the Latins, who only possess philosophical and theological texts written in a foreign language’’ (Roger Bacon, Opus tertium, Cap. XXVIII). Bacon had a point: Latin wisdom had mainly been imported from Greece. If one wonders how western philosophy had become the legacy of Greece to western philosophy, then the answer is clear: through translation. From the end of the twelfth century onward, a basically alien philosophical and scientific culture was reintroduced into the Latin West that meanwhile had become Christian. In the time span before the twelfth century, Latin natural philosophy was based on a very small number of sources (see the entries on Adelard of Bath and Roger Bacon in this volume). Due to political developments within the Roman Empire, the intellectual ties between the Latin West and the Greek East were gradually severed. The days when members of the intellectual elite in Rome were able to speak and write in Greek had definitely passed.

Western scholars read Aristotle in Latin, even long after 1470, when the first Greek editions of Aristotle’s works had appeared in the West. The Latin translations continued to be published for reasons of user convenience. From the Middle Ages until far into the seventeenth century, Latin simply was the language in which scholars conversed and wrote, no matter their geographical origin. Galileo, Descartes, Spinoza, and Newton, for instance, consulted Latin translations of Aristotle. The position of Latin as the universal language for scholars explains why Aristotle and other Greek thinkers were translated into Latin, rather than into Europe’s different vernacular languages.

In certain respects, the transmission of Greek science and philosophy into Latin is comparable to an infectious disease. Both pass from one community to another through contact. Whenever an ‘‘outbreak’’ is diagnosed, we ask ourselves ‘‘Where did it first originate?’’ Can all outbreaks be traced back to one primary source, or have there been several independent starting points? How did the first Latin translations of Aristotle’s works originate? The question might seem obvious, but the answer is rather complex, at least when one wants to delve deeper than the mere enumeration of data, names, places, and titles of works. The translators came from all parts of Europe. Some worked individually, while others were part of a systematic translation movement. The activities of the Latin translators were part of a process that can best be characterized as the appropriation and assimilation of Greek knowledge in the Latin West. The choice of phrasing implies that much more was at stake than the mere continuation and reception of Aristotle’s works. The Greek thinkers had not come to the West as uninvited guests; they were not thrust upon western culture. On the contrary, translators went to seek out Greek erudition. Extraordinary historical circumstances offered western scholars the unique opportunity to revert to the Greek originals, as well as to their Arabic translations.

Texts written in Arabic played an important role in western philosophy and science. They were an Islamic legacy to the West. The authors came from an area stretching from North-East Africa and the South of Spain to eastern Asia, and wrote in Arabic. The Arabic translations of Aristotle’s works were only a small segment of this Islamic legacy. It further consisted of Arabic translations of other Greek authors, such as Hippocrates, Galen, Euclid, and Ptolemy and, obviously, of independent works of Islamic scientists and philosophers (see the entries on Arabic Texts: Natural Philosophy, The Latin Translations of; Aristotle, Arabic Translations; Aristotle, The Arabic Reception of and Translations from Greek into Arabic in this volume).

Which role did Islamic science play as an intermediary in the transmission ofAristotle’s natural philosophy to the West? The picture often given is that the West came to know Aristotle’s works through translations from Arabic. These translations supposedly had given the impulse toward the western revival of philosophy and science: the light came from the East. However, around the same time when the Latin translations from Arabic were made, Aristotle was also translated from Greek into Latin. The manuscript evidence demonstrates that, in the West, Aristotle’s works were mainly read in Latin translations that were made from the Greek original, certainly since the first half of the thirteenth century. An exception is De animalibus, one of Aristotle’s treatises on biology, which was read Throughout the Middle Ages in a Latin translation made from Arabic.

More important Arabic sources, however, from a western point of view, are the Latin translations of paraphrases and commentaries by al-FarabI (d. 950951), Ibn Sina/Avicenna (980-1037), and Ibn Rushd/ Averroes (1126-1198). They belonged to the philosophical movement known by the Arabic loanword falsafa (philosophia in Greek). Their works would come to play an important role in the Latin reflection on the writings of Aristotle (see the entries on Ibn Rushd; Ibn Rushd, Latin Translations of; Ibn Sina; Ibn Sina, Latin Translations of; al-FarabI as well as al-FarabI, Latin Translations of in this volume).

The origins of the translations and the details about scholars who traveled wide distances in search for texts and who spent most of their lives translating them, are told elsewhere in this Encyclopedia. Important translators of Aristotle’s ‘‘natural books’’ from Greek are James of Venice, Burgund of Pisa, and William of Moerbeke. They helped Aristotle to become the companion of any late-medieval (natural) philosopher in the West.