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Bill Thayer

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Aristotle on LacusCurtius


[image ALT: A stone head of a kind-looking man of about 40, with a close-cropped beard and somewhat straggly hair. It is a portrait bust of Aristotle, and serves as the icon for the part of my site transcribing the works of that philosopher.]

This early bust, identified as being of Aristotle, is now in the Museo Archeologico of Palermo. Unlike most other portraits of ancient writers, it is probably a true likeness of the man: several other busts of him are known that closely resemble this one.

Photo © Jona Lendering 2004,
by kind permission.

I don't expect LacusCurtius ever to have much Aristotle, because I'm not so interested in philosophy. Still, the transcription of a few works will prove useful because they are cited elsewhere onsite; and of course if I read enough of him, I may change my mind.

The items currently transcribed here are from a Loeb Classical Library volume, Aristotle: Minor Works (1936). That book is now in the public domain pursuant to the 1978 revision of the U. S. Copyright Code, since the copyright expired in 1964 and was not renewed at the appropriate time, which would have been that year or the year before. (Details here on the copyright law involved.)

Bekker's
Page Numbers

Greek Text

English Translation

Loeb Edition
Page Numbers

791‑799

Περὶ χρωμάτων

De coloribus

On Colors

1

830‑847

Περὶ θαυμασίων ἀκουσμάτων

De mirabilibus auscultationibus

Amazing Things One Hears

235

847‑858

Μηχανικά

Mechanica

Mechanical Problems

327

Technical Details

Proofreading

Usually I retype the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise which I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if success­ful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined.) And so indeed I did with the English translation.

With the Greek text, however, I started on the De mirabilibus, but after having typed about a third of it, discovered several versions online — or more accurately, one version cloned on various sites. Since I proofread anyway, and in the case of Greek texts by reading them out loud to insure constant attention to the breathings and diacriticals, I lifted one of these versions: as luck would have it, it was one of several clones introducing a few errors; the original seems to be from PoesiaLatina and transcribes Bekker's edition (1831), to which the Loeb editor made a very few changes, marking them by notes each time. I used a similar Web version of the De coloribus.

So these transcriptions have been minutely proofread, both for accuracy and for conformity to the Loeb edition. I run a first proofreading pass immediately after entering each section; then a second proofreading, detailed and meant to be final: in the table of contents above, the chapters are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe them to be completely errorfree; any red backgrounds would mean that the page had not received that second final proofreading. The header bar at the top of each page will remind you with the same color scheme.

The Loeb edition — English translation by W[alter] S[tanley] Hett — was almost perfectly proofread; and where I used online transcriptions, those as well: I spotted only one clear typographical error in the former, and a different one in one of the latter. The very minor error in my print edition I fixed of course, marking it with a dotted underscore like this: as elsewhere on my site, glide your cursor over the bullet or the underscored words to read the variant.

I did mark one odd recurring spelling with a <!‑‑ sic  in the sourcecode, just to confirm that it was checked: the editor consistently writes στιλβὸν rather than the usual στίλβον.

Any mistakes, please drop me a line, of course: especially if you have the printed edition in front of you.

Chapters (large numbers) and where applicable, sections (small numbers) mark local links, according to a consistent scheme; you can therefore link directly to any passage. Similarly, for citation purposes, the almost universally used traditional numbering and the Loeb edition pagination — down the left-hand 791a and right-hand  p4  side of the page respectively — are both indicated by local anchors in the sourcecode.

In the Greek texts, each American flag [an American flag] is a link to the corresponding section of the English translation, opening in another window; in the English texts, each Greek flag [a Greek flag] is a link to the corresponding section of the Greek original, opening in another window. Once both windows are open, the links will toggle from one to the other.


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Site updated: 25 Aug 21