128 | CHAPTER 5
society creative or destructive. Our First Millennium begins with Augustus
as well as Christ, and any account of this period will of necessity be a story,
like Tabarī’s, of kings as well as prophets. Nevertheless, the conceptual di-
mension comes first, given that it has to do—I already quoted Björn Wit-
trock to this effect at the end of chapter 2—with
the location of human beings in time, historicity, and... the capacity
of human beings to bring about changes in the world, agency. [New
conceptualizations] made new forms of institutions and practices...
meaningful and possible, and indeed conceivable.And if we ask who above all others gave Eurasians (in the sense defined in
chapter 1) conceptual tools for ordering their impressions and their knowl-
edge, and so made them more effective social and historical agents, the an-
swer is: Aristotle. Before Aristotle there had been no shortage of effective
agents, or of historians to analyze them. After Aristotle, humans were in pos-
session of an exhaustive map showing what was known, and well-sharpened
logical tools for improving and extending that map.^2
This alone makes Aristotle a central figure on the prophetic side—no less
than his pupil Alexander on the kingly side—in the history of the Greek
world and all it impinged on. (Aristotle himself was skeptical about the pos-
sibility of prophecy,^3 but some of his Arabic admirers thought him “more
deserving to be called an angel than a man”^4 ). Eventually the rise of a new
account of mankind’s origin and destiny—the Christian revelation sprung
from a Semitic, Jewish background—posed severe problems concerning its
compatibility with the Greco- Roman thought worlds, problems that had to
be solved in a variety of languages, not only Greek. Hence, parallel to the ac-
celerated spread of Christianity after Constantine, Latin versions of Aristotle
began to be made for the first time. The earliest Armenian translation ap-
pears to date from the later fifth century, and the first Syriac versions soon
after (on all these, see below). These summaries and translations opened up
new horizons for the dissemination of Hellenism, ultimately into Arabic as
well. But the task more immediately at hand was to give the new Christian
doctrine some basic expression in terms of the prevailing—and plainly irre-
placeable—logical and philosophical language of Aristotle. Otherwise, it
could hardly be expected to catch on among thinking people, in Greek or
any other language. Arguing—which was what Christians of different stripes,
2 Encyclopedic knowledge allied to argumentation as the characteristic of Peripateticism: Agath-
ias, History [ed. R. Keydell (Berlin 1967); tr. J. D. Frendo (Berlin 1976)] 2.28.5–29.1.
3 W. C. Streetman, ““If it were God who sent them... ”: Aristotle and al- Fārābī on prophetic vi-
sion,” ASAP 18 (2008) 211–20.
4 According to the tenth- century Secret of secrets: G. Fowden, “Pseudo- Aristotelian politics and
theolog y in universal Islam,” in P. F. Bang and D. Kołodziejczyk (eds), Universal empire (Cambridge
2012) 139–40.