and the Persian Gulf are not yet considered branches of the Indian Ocean, as became
standard after Alexander’s expedition to India (327– 325 BCE).
FGrHist 646 F 1; M. de Nardis, “Aristotelismo e doxographia,” Geographia antiqua 1 (1992) 89–108.
Mauro de Nardis
Aristotelian Corpus, Historia animalium 10 (ca 350 – 270 BCE)
As stated in its first sentence, the main topic of HA 10 (633b12–638b37) is sterility and its
causes in women and men. In fact, female sterility is treated in much greater detail.
§1 discusses the condition and position of the uterus and menstruation, §2 the condition and
position of the mouth of the uterus, §3 the uterus after menstruation, emissions during
sleep, flatulences in the uterus, and wind pregnancy, §4 spasms of the uterus. Male sterility is
briefly discussed in § 5 – testable, according to the author, by intercourse with a different
woman – followed by a theory of simultaneous emission in men and women as well as
further details about the female role in reproduction (female seed); §6 addresses reproduc-
tion in animals, § 7 mola uteri.
HA 10, transmitted in some MSS as the last book of the HA, missing in others, may be
identical with the work On sterility listed in the Catalogues of A’s work by
D L and in the Vita Hesychii. Perhaps A R added it
to the HA. Today some scholars do not believe HA 10 to be a genuine work of Aristotle but
an addition presumably by a later Peripatetic author with medical knowledge or by a
Hippokratic physician. Besides language, style, and its anthropocentric perspective, HA 10
differs from HA and the other biological treatises mainly in the doctrine of female seed
(rejected by Aristotle in GA 1.17–23 [721a30–731b14]), of pneuma drawing the seed into
the uterus, and because it lacks the concept of form (eidos) and matter (hule ̄). In the last
decades, Balme and van der Eijk, in different ways, have defended it as a genuine work.
Ed.: P. Louis, Aristote, Histoire des animaux III (1969); D. Balme and A. Gotthelf, Aristotle, History of
Animals, Books VII–X (1991); Eidem, Aristotle, Historia animalium, v. 1, Books I–X: Text (2002).
G. Rudberg, Zum sogenannten zehnten Buche der Aristotelischen Tiergeschichte (1911); D. Balme, “Aristotle
Historia animalium Book Ten,” in J. Wiesner, ed., Aristoteles, Werk und Wirkung I (1985) 191–206;
S. Föllinger, Differenz und Gleichheit (1996) 143–156; P. van der Eijk, “On Sterility (‘HA X’), A Medical
Work By Aristotle?” CQ 49 (1999) 490–502.
Oliver Hellmann
Aristotelian Corpus On Indivisible Lines (330 – 300 BCE)
Preserved in the Aristotelian corpus in a rough and often unintelligible form, inspiring much
philological work. Sometimes ascribed to T in antiquity, and today generally
agreed not to be by A, but assignable to the Peripatos of the later 4th c. BCE.
Evidence suggests that P and his follower X maintained a doctrine of
indivisible lines, as much metaphysical as mathematical, although the treatise stresses its
mathematical aspect, i.e., its inconsistency with accepted mathematics. Mathematically the
doctrine holds that the primary entity of geometry is minimal, indivisible (atomic) lines,
with every line being a (apparently finite) sum of such lines. The argumentation of the
treatise is fundamentally Aristotelian. It begins (968a2–b21) with five arguments in support
of indivisibles, refutes the arguments (968b21–969b28), and then (969b9–971a5) offers fur-
ther considerations against indivisible lines. Some related claims are then made: a line is not
ARISTOTELIAN CORPUS ON INDIVISIBLE LINES