sance Literature, ed. Peter Godman and Oswyn Murray.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990, pp. 57–72.
Pucci, Joseph, “Job and Ovid in the Archpoet’s Confession.”
Classica et mediaevalia 40 (1989): 235–250.
Shurtleff, Steven. “The Archpoet as Poet, Persona, and Self: The
Problem of Individuality in the Confession.” Philological
Quarterly 73 (1994): 373–384.
Jan Ziolkowski
ARISTIPPUS, HENRY (d. 1162)
Henry or Henricus Aristippus, a prominent Latin cleric
and court fi gure in the kingdom of Sicily during the reign
of William I, brought important Greek philosophical
and scientifi c writings into the intellectual orbit of the
medieval Latin west. How he acquired his knowledge
of Greek is unknown. His translation of Plato’s Meno
was fi nished sometime between early 1154 and 10
November 1160. His translation of Plato’s Phaedo
was begun in the spring of 1156 while Aristippus, now
archdeacon of Catania, was in camp during William’s
siege of Benevento. It was completed in Palermo shortly
thereafter and was later revised; two forms are known,
both thought to be auctorial. The Phaedo and the Meno
are the only Platonic dialogues that refer by name to an
Aristippus; this fact may have some bearing either on
Henry Aristippus’s adopted byname or, if he was already
so called (probably after the ancient Greek philosopher
Aristippus, also a Sicilian court fi gure), on his decision
to translate these works. Though they were not the only
sources for a knowledge of Plato, these versions in Latin,
made from the original Greek, are the only complete
translations of any of his dialogues known to have
circulated outside the Arab world during the Middle
Ages. Henry Aristippus’s designedly literal efforts are
now and probably always were preserved in relatively
few manuscripts, but they were sought out and read by
early humanists for whom their content must have been
more appealing than their style.
In 1158 Aristippus returned from a diplomatic mis-
sion to Constantinople with gifts to the kingdom from
the emperor Manuel I Comnenus that included a copy
of the Greek text of Ptolemy’s Almagest and, in all
likelihood, the Greek Prophecy of the Erythrean Sibyl
later translated into Latin by Eugenius of Palermo. The
anonymous early translator of the Almagest (who had
come to Sicily from Salerno in 1158 or 1159) tells us
that he found Aristippus investigating, at some personal
risk, the wonders of Mount Etna, the volcano whose
lava fl ows have often threatened Catania and its vicinity.
Apparently connected with this interest is Aristippus’s
undated and still only partly edited translation, from the
original Greek, of Book 4 of Aristotle’s Meteorology, a
text dealing in part with the liquefying and congealing
of matter. Known to Gerard of Cremona (d. 1187), who
translated Meteorology from the Arabic, this remained
the standard Latin version of Book 4 until it was super-
seded in the thirteenth century by William of Moerbeke’s
new translation of the entire work. Even so, much of it
lived on, as William s version here is largely a revision
of Aristippus’s. Probably Aristippus’s as well, and also
known to Gerard, is a translation of the Greek scholia
(annotations) for this book.
Preserved with the earlier form of Aristippus’s trans-
lation of the Phaedo is a preface praising the king’s
intellectual curiosity and providing valuable information
about secular Greek texts available in Sicily. In the pro-
logue to his translation of the Meno, Aristippus parades
his connections with the powerful while proclaiming
their interest in this sort of cultural acquisition: the ad-
miral Maio (King William’s chief minister) and Hugh,
the archbishop of Palermo, have asked him, he says, to
translate the ancient Greek Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of
the Philosophers; and the king himself has commanded
him to translate some writings of the Greek church fa-
ther Gregory of Nazianzus. It is not absolutely certain
that these announced versions were completed, but if
they were, they may have been the source of quotations
from both authors by Aristippus’s contemporary John of
Salisbury. A lost partial translation of Diogenes Laertius
is usually supposed to have been Aristippus’s: excerpts
from it showing characteristics of his style, which al-
lowed more lexical variation than that of most medieval
western word-for-word translators, occur in the widely
read De vita et moribus philosophorum (Lives of the
Philosophers), formerly attributed to Walter Burley but
now believed to have originated in northern Italy early in
the fourteenth century. According to a recent argument,
this translation was only of Books 1 and 2 of the Laertian
original (plus, perhaps, the Life of Aristotle from Book
5), rather than, as commonly thought, of the entire fi rst
fi ve books. If so, and if Henry Aristippus really was the
translator, then he left it unfi nished: the earlier Aristip-
pus and Plato are both in Book 3.
Henry Aristippus’s scholarly activity is often said
to have ended in November 1160, when, after Maio’s
assassination, William I chose Aristippus to be his
interim chief minister and also head of the royal chan-
cery. Thereafter Aristippus was involved, deeply but
ultimately unsuccessfully, in the tumultuous affairs of
the kingdom. Suspected by William of complicity in a
coup of 1161 that failed but had almost cost the king
his life, Aristippus was imprisoned in the spring of 1162
and died soon afterward.Further Reading
Editions
Fobes, F. H. “Mediaeval Versions of Aristotle’s Meteorology.”
Classical Philology, 10, 1915, pp. 297–314. (See pp. 310–311,
ch. 1 of Henry Aristippus’s translation.)
Kordeuter, Victor, and Cariotta Labowsky, eds. Meno interprete
Henrico Aristippo. Plato Latinus, 1. London: Inaedibus In-
stituti Warburgiani, 1940.ARISTIPPUS, HENRY