This annotated translation is based on my 2023 Oxford Classical Text Edition of the Eudemian Ethics (EE). It is the companion, in effect, of my translation of the Nicomachean Ethics (NE) written to accompany Sarah Broadie’s commentary (= Broadie-Rowe 2002), and for the most part it uses the same translations for key words. It also looks back to the Broadie-Rowe NE in another way. Three of Aristotle’s books (originally papyrus rolls) on ethics are handed down in the manuscript tradition only as part of the NE, with indications in some manuscripts of the Eudemian text that they belong there too, so that NE IV–VII also becomes EE V–VIII. Whether or not Aristotle really wrote these three books to be part of two separate treatises is a highly controversial matter, but it is more and more the norm to behave as if they were and print an EE with eight books. The present volume does not do so, and this requires an explanation. My chief reason for leaving out the so-called ‘common books’ (hereafter ‘CB1–3’) is that the fit between them and the undoubtedly Eudemian books is considerably less than perfect, as I argue, in relation to the treatment of wisdom (phronêsis) and ‘intellectual mastership’ (as Broadie-Rowe renders sophia) in Appendix 1 below. This is not in itself a decisive argument, since NE itself has its own anomalies if the ‘CB’ are included, most obviously that it will have two ample discussions of pleasure, one in ‘CB3’ and another in NE, the latter apparently written as if the former was not there. It is, I think, a matter of the balance of the argument, and in my view that balance is against taking the equation NE V–VII = EE V–VIII as fixed. So I leave out the ‘CB.’ But my version of the three books is there in Broadie-Rowe 2002 for anyone who wishes to include them after all. My position on the ‘CB’ is summed up in my numbering of the fifth book of EE in the present volume exclusively as V. Appendix 1 will give readers a taste of some of the kinds of issues involved and perhaps give them an opportunity to make up their own mind on a topic (‘the problem of the common books’) that continues to cause the spilling of much ink, and will almost certainly never be resolved.
Appendix 2, for its part, is ultimately concerned with a tool in Aristotle’s analytical toolbox (‘focal meaning’) that helps allow Aristotle to come to terms with his most significant predecessor in ethics, Plato. The EE engages with Plato to a much greater degree than the NE, particularly by way of repeated references, whether implicit and explicit, from the first book through to the last, to Socrates, where ‘Socrates’ is usually, if not exclusively, the Socrates of the Platonic dialogues. But I propose that the EE uses focal meaning as a way of reaching a kind of compromise with Platonic metaphysics, a central topic in EE Book I on which the NE shows him dismissing Plato’s views, by name, as ‘empty’. The use EE makes of focal meaning is integrated into its argument, as I argue in my notes on the relevant passages, and meanwhile there appears to be more than one reference to the Peri Ideôn, ‘On Ideas’, an evidently specialised, ‘esoteric’ work that may well have been one of Aristotle’s earliest works, and in which he may well have first developed the groundwork for, if not the actual idea of, ‘focal meaning’. Appendix 2 introduces the relevant parts of the evidence we have of this lost early work, partly with the aim of injecting a live sense of the possibility that Aristotle is not merely referring back to another work but actively continuing a discussion begun in it; that this should happen, if it does, in the EE, as it does not in the NE, may give us additional reason for supporting a view that I tend to hold on other grounds, namely that the EE is a relatively early treatise of Aristotle’s, written before the NE. (The sharper tone against Plato in the NE is at least consistent with a greater lapse of time since what will surely have been a cooling of Aristotle’s personal connection with his teacher after the establishment of his own school in the Lyceum and the gathering of his own students around him). If this were to be the case, it would raise significant further questions about the common, understandable, but ultimately unhelpful practice of trying to interpret the EE from the NE (why would Aristotle bother to write out again the same things that he had already said?).
The aim of the translation itself, with its notes, is to bring out the full significance of the novelties revealed by the new text. Others will of course continue to dispute the decisions and choices underlying the new text where they see fit, but I shall proceed on the basis that the fundamental work is done, following complete collations of all the primary MSS, to whose number I have added a fourth.
Durham University/Hebden Bridge
February 6th, 2025