Chapter 6 Theodoret as a Source for the Aëtian Placita
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Abstract
The role of Theodoret as a source for Aëtius has been questioned, or even denied, by Lebedev, Frede, Gourinat and Bottler. No one of course doubts that there must be a source P/S shared by ps.Plutarch and Stobaeus. But one can also prove in two steps that there must be a source T/S shared by Theodoret and Stobaeus. There are in fact 20 lemmata which Theodoret shares with Stobaeus, but are absent in ps.Plutarch, out of a total of about 100 lemmata which he records, i.e. about 20 % of the whole. As a next step one can prove that the P/S source and the T/S source cannot be distinguished from each other so must be identical. This has not been done before. Diels’ critics are refuted, and his original intuition that all three witnesses should be used to reconstruct a text of the Placita in a single column is vindicated. The fact that no one but Theodoret mentions Aëtius is due to the popularity of ps.Plutarch’s epitome. It is perhaps a pity that the work was not attached to a famous name as in the case of the other work and the epitome by ps.Galen. It might then even have survived unscathed. Giving the author another name is rather futile and there are good grounds for adhering to the scholarly tradition initiated by Diels. A brief appendix discusses recent papers by Lebedev and Schubert.