“Pier Vettori and Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics”
Abstract
The Florentine Pier Vettori (1499-1585) produced editions of Aeschylus, Euripides, Plato, Varro and others. He also published editions of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Poetics, and Nicomachean Ethics – no one, a contemporary said, left Aristotle’s text in better state (“more cleaned up”). My own concern is with his work on Aristotle’s other Ethics, the Eudemian. He did not publish an edition of the work, but we have his copies of the Aldine, one of them with copious marginal annotations. These record readings he found in “ancient books,” which I identify with the three Aristotelian codices containing the Eudemian Ethics that are in the Laurentian library (whose contents an eighteenth century writer claims that Vettori catalogued); they also include a significant number of emendations of his own, a majority of which are both correct and original to him. My own new critical edition of the Eudemian Ethics (OUP, September 2023) refers to him more often than to anyone else before the early modern period. In other cases (e.g. with Aeschylus, or with Plato’s Lysis), he evidently printed few of his own emendations. But the text of the Eudemian Ethics is in poor condition (as Vettori himself noted) and called for greater intervention. In this case he outplays his immediate predecessors, who include K. Laskaris, Chalkondyles, and Bessarion (although the last, in particular, in his copious excerpta from Aristotle, himself makes a number of important restorations), showing himself a true forerunner of his nineteenth-century German and British successors.
