Ptolemy-el-Garib

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Ptolemy-el-Garib (Arabic, more correctly al-gharīb, "Ptolemy the foreigner," explained as meaning "Ptolemy the unknown") was a Hellenistic pinacographer, probably of the Peripatetic school, who wrote a Life of Aristotle notable for its catalog of Aristotle's works. This work survives in an unpublished Arabic manuscript in Istanbul.^[1] The excerpts known prior to this discovery were collected in Ingemar Düring's Aristotle in the Ancient Biographical Tradition (Göteborg 1957), pp. 184ff.; Marian Plezia has cast doubt on the idea that Ptolemy-el-Garib's Life was an important source of later Neoplatonic lives of Aristotle.

[edit] Notes

1. ^ Gottschalk reported that an edition was in preparation by Marian Plezia and Józef Bielawski.

[edit] References

• Hans Gottschalk, "The Earliest Aristotelian Commentators," in Aristotle Transformed (ed. Richard Sorabji, 1990), pp. 56f. n. 5.

[edit] Further reading

• Ingemar Düring, "Ptolemy's Vita Aristotelis rediscovered," in Philomathes: studies and essays in the humanities in memory of Philip Merlan, ed. Robert B. Palmer and Robert Hamerton-Kelly (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1971), pp. 264-269 - includes an English translation of Ptolemy's preface.
• Marian Plezia, "De Ptolemaeo pinacographo," Eos 63 (1975), pp. 37-42.
• ——, "De Ptolemaei Vita Aristotelis," in Aristoteles: Werk und Wirkung, vol. 1 (Aristoteles und seine Schule), ed. Jürgen Wiesner (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1985), pp. 1-11.