Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 313 - Queen of the Sciences - Anna Komnene and her Circle.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich – online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode – Queen of the Sciences – Anna Kumnena and Her Circle. When I imagine the ideal workplace, I picture a group of industrious, committed collaborators engaged in an enterprise they deeply value, so much so that they would have been willing to do the same work for free. They willingly put in long hours, paying close attention to the smallest details, and the boss is a woman. This utopian scenario remains a rarity, yet it was realized almost a millennium ago in Byzantium. The happy workers were philosophers who devoted themselves to studying and completing the late ancient tradition of commentary on Aristotle. Their patron was Anna Kumnena, a princess who had withdrawn from political life. After the death of her beloved father Alexios, and the accession to the throne of her brother John, Anna dedicated herself to a life of scholarship. As we already know, she herself composed the Alexiad, an epic portrayal of Alexios' political and military exploits. She also gathered together several scholars to produce those commentaries on Aristotle, especially texts that had not yet received commentaries earlier in the Greek tradition. They included Eustratus of Nicaea, who is praised in Anna's Alexiad as learned in both scripture and pagan philosophy and rhetoric, and also Michael of Ephesus, the most accomplished Byzantine commentator on Aristotle. He did indeed work long hours to the point that he ruined his eyesight reading by candlelight. We owe that last detail to a funeral oration dedicated to Anna Kumnena by another member of her circle, named George Tourniquets. Speaking in praise of her devotion to learning, he tells us that Anna followed the example of her father with her support of scholarship, and that a goal of her circle was the production of exegetical works on so far uncommented treatises of Aristotle. Confirmation of this is provided by one of those commentaries. In the prologue to his commentary on the sixth book of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, the aforementioned Eustratus alludes to a patron who is evidently Anna. Furthermore, Anna herself tells us of her acquaintance with pagan philosophy. When she announces herself as author of the Alexiad, she says modestly that she is not without some acquaintance with literature, having devoted the most earnest study to the Greek language and being not unpracticed in rhetoric, and having read thoroughly the treatises of Aristotle and the dialogues of Plato. The Alexiad occasionally refers to Aristotle by name and also quotes him without naming him. I mentioned one example in the last episode when Anna says that as a historian, truth is even dearer to her than devotion to her father, so that she is willing to criticise him where appropriate. This is an evocation of Aristotle, who justified his refutation of Plato's theory about the form of the good on the grounds that truth takes precedence over friendship. Of course the Alexiad is a work of history, not philosophy, and it has been argued that Anna Komnena's grasp of Aristotle was in fact rather superficial. Unfortunately, we have no work from her on a specifically philosophical topic, which would have helped us to test this proposition. In his oration in her honour, Tourniquet's actually praises Anna for writing nothing apart from the Alexiad, since this shows her lack of unseemly ambition. But he also assures us that she was enthralled by pagan learning from an early age. Her parents did not approve of the study of such material, especially for girls who are more easily corrupted than boys, but like someone arming themselves against a possible ambush, Anna fortified her soul against the potentially insidious aspects of pagan thought. Tourniquet's describes her young infatuation with learning by switching from this masculinizing military metaphor to an explicitly feminine one. Like a maiden who takes a furtive glance at her bridegroom through some chink, she had furtive meetings with her beloved grammar. Her wide reading, combined with critical distance, is also clear from a passage in the Alexiad itself, which touches on the topic of astrology. In what may be an implicit critique of her nephew Manuel, an emperor who was enthusiastic about astrology, Anna mentions that she acquired some knowledge of this art herself, but only in order to refute its pretensions. Of course, we might be reluctant to take the word of Anna herself and her propagandist Tourniquets as scholarly credentials. But the historian Zona Ras, who was no great admirer of the Comnenoi, said that Anna was engrossed by books and learned men and spoke with them not superficially. Besides, the Alexiad itself is ample evidence for Anna's intellectual attainments. It suggests a cultural and also political motive for her support of such scholarship as commentating on Aristotle. She championed Hellenic culture as a marker of Byzantium's superiority over the rival populations that surrounded them, whether Muslim or Western Christian. For Anna, these were all barbarians who lacked the sort of refinement displayed in fine Greek rhetoric or a mastery of Aristotelian logic. If Hellenic literature was a jewel in the crown of Byzantine supremacy, then it shone most rightly on the crowns of Anna's own family. As we've seen, she was at pains to stress her father's support for scholarship and she praised her late husband, Nikephoros Bryennios, as both a great warrior and a fine scholar. Another member of Anna's circle, Theodor Prodromos, likewise spoke of Nikephoros's expertise in both philosophy and poetry. This brings us to a fundamental question concerning the Alexiad. Did Anna Komnina really write it? Actually, no one doubts that she authored the text as we now have it, but it has been alleged that the work was mostly composed by Nikephoros before he died, with Anna just editing her husband's manuscript and adding a few personal touches. A central reason for this suspicion is that the Alexiad is much concerned with military matters. Nikephoros was indeed an army man who could have drawn on his personal experiences in describing the battles fought under Alexios, whereas Anna as a woman would have been both physically and culturally removed from the scenes of battle. Furthermore, Anna herself tells us that she used a work by her husband in writing the Alexiad, but she also remarks that it was half-finished and hastily put together when he died. Furthermore, as mentioned last time, she explains how she was able to assemble such a compelling account of Alexios' military exploits. She could draw on her own memories of discussions at court and got further material by interviewing men who were present at various battles. Nor need we see the Alexiad's focus on military affairs as a sign of male authorship. In fact, it fits squarely with Anna's classicising interests, since the Alexiad is, as its title suggests, a kind of rewriting of Homer's war epic The Iliad with her father in the lead role. Anna herself would probably not be surprised that later interpreters doubted her authorship in this way. As has been argued in a study of the Alexiad by Leonora Neville, Anna was well aware that readers might be disconcerted by a woman, even one born in the purple, daring to compose such an ambitious historical treatise. She carefully manipulates her own authorial persona, both disarming her potentially hostile audience and, more boldly, making various claims to authority. She tries to win them over by adopting what Neville calls an exaggeratedly feminine persona of extreme emotionalism, especially in passages where she laments such events as the death of Alexios. Her claim to be merely completing her husband's work might actually be another way of forestalling objections to her authorship. Yet she also boldly asserts her reliability as an author, for instance by underscoring her ability to suppress those same emotions of grief in order to carry on writing. A similar function is played by her claim to have conducted interviews and used court documents in writing the Alexiad and by her assertion of scholarly prowess in fields as varied as philosophy, rhetoric, medicine, and astrology. Anna was a woman undertaking a project that would have been expected from a man, and she wrote her book accordingly. Neville explains her strategies in the following terms. Anna's repeated practice of breaking out of the proper boundaries of history, breaking out of a masculinized historian's voice, to speak and participate in the discourses her culture marked as feminized, only to point out and apologize for her transgression, focuses attention both on her essentially female nature and her ability to transcend that nature. A strange feature of Byzantine misogyny, though one familiar from ancient Roman misogyny, is that men deemed women too weak and feeble-minded to do things like, say, writing epic historical works, while also fearing that power-hungry, scheming women could triumph over men in political affairs. It can feel like every highly placed woman of Rome was accused of poisoning a near relative. Similarly, Anna has gone down in history as a sinister conspirator who sought to put herself and her husband on the throne at the expense of her brother John. It was only when she failed to become a real queen that she settled for being Queen of the Sciences. As evidence for this, modern scholars have pointed to the fact that John doesn't get great press in the Alexiad. Notably, he is absent from her description of the family gathered around the dying Alexios because John has run off to the palace to take power. But we certainly find no outright character assassination directed towards John in the Alexiad. In fact, we have to wait for Nikitus Coniades, writing several decades after her death, for any hint in Byzantine sources that she schemed to seize power. A revisionist reading offered by admirers of Anna has sought to absolve her of any such underhandedness. But an alternative feminist reading of Anna's story could emphasize her supposed political ambition rather than denying it, seeing her attempted power grab as continuous with her confident self-presentation in the Alexiad. It's ironic that Anna Comnina's ethical character should be a matter of such debate, because she was responsible for a revival of interest in that greatest of works on this very topic, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Surprisingly, it received no full commentary in antiquity, so it must have been high on the list of treatises to be dealt with in the completest project of her circle. The resulting commentary is perhaps the best illustration of their group enterprise, with different books of the Ethics assigned to different scholars. Michael of Ephesus and Eustratus both commented on some parts, while other books were handled by Scolia and commentary by authors who remain anonymous. A partial commentary by the antique author Aspasius was also included in the manuscript tradition that has come down to us. This illustrates the fact that the circle drew on earlier exegetical material when they could. Michael of Ephesus's commentaries on the Ethics and on other Aristotelian treatises often integrated previous Scolia, while also adding new material by Michael himself. As this suggests, Anna's circle was not merely completing the work of late antique philosophers but also carrying on their intellectual agenda. This has been shown in studies on Eustratus's ethics commentary, which have drawn attention to his use of Neoplatonic materials. Eustratus is quite honest about this, at one point begging the reader's indulgence for introducing so many apparent digressions into his commentary as he draws on authors who lived long after Aristotle. He has a particular taste for Proclus, who influences his idea that ultimate wisdom is the grasp of the highest principles and that when we grasp these principles, our limited human intellect is participating in an eternal, perfectly good intellect that permanently grafts all intelligible forms. This doesn't sound very Aristotelian, and Eustratus knew it. One particularly interesting section of his commentary deals with a chapter where Aristotle refutes Plato's idea that there is a single form of the good, which makes other things good when they participate in it. This is in fact the very chapter that occasioned Aristotle's comment that truth is to be honored even more than friendship. Eustratus's first move in defending Plato is to turn him into a Neoplatonist. This version of Plato thinks that the good is a first principle that produces all other things necessarily, by its very nature, not by will, and that the other forms are ideas in the mind of the divine craftsman. Faced with Aristotle's argument that things are good in many different ways, which cannot all be brought under one single idea, Eustratus replies that to the contrary, the arrangement of better and worse goods requires some greatest good that provides a measure for them all. Other things receive goodness from it to a greater or lesser extent simply because of their varying capacities to acquire perfection. In this and other passages, Eustratus develops the idea of paradigmatic forms that serve as causes for the things that participate in them. He agrees with what he takes to be Aristotle's position that universals have no genuine reality if we understand by universal a general concept that we abstract from the things we encounter. Thus, elsewhere in the theological context of discussing the natures of Christ, he notes that we do not worship Jesus's humanity because humanity as a general universal notion is nothing at all. Nonetheless, Eustratus departs from Aristotle by positing Platonic forms, which can also be called universal but in a different sense, meaning simply that they are each a single whole that stands over the many corresponding participants. The character of the form, humanity for instance, also exists imminently in various individuals, in this case the many humans. Using Neoplatonic terminology, Eustratus calls the immanent form a whole in the parts, whereas the paradigm in the divine mind is a whole before the parts. Eustratus concludes this defense of Plato with the caveat that he is not necessarily endorsing the theory of forms himself, since opponents of that theory would no doubt find other ways to argue against it. But it is hard to avoid the suspicion that Eustratus approaches the task of commenting on Aristotle as a committed Platonist. This is not terribly surprising, since he was a second-generation disciple of Michael Psalos, having studied under John Italoos. Eustratus had disowned Italoos by signing a letter rejecting his master's doctrines, which helps to explain how Anna Komnena, who was no admirer of Italoos, could have accepted Eustratus into her circle of intimates. Eustratus was well-placed during the reign of Alexios, but ran into trouble during a theological controversy and was ultimately, like Italoos before him, put on trial for supposedly heretical views. One of the accusations against him has Eustratus claiming that in the Gospels, Christ gave arguments in an Aristotelian fashion. While one scholar has commented that this is more entertaining than philosophically significant, it is clear that Eustratus did put his philosophical skills to work in theological contexts. For instance, he wrote a treatise defending the doctrine of Christ's two natures on the basis of, as he put it, logical, physical, and theological arguments. Eustratus's fellow commentator Michael of Ephesus offers something of a contrast. For one thing, we know much less about his life. Even the fact that he was from Ephesus is clear only from his reference to Heraclitus of Ephesus as a compatriot. More significantly, he was less Platonist and more Aristotelian. This is clear from his contribution to the group commentary on the ethics. He displays familiarity with Neoplatonism, but tends to take distance from Platonic views on such matters as the highest good and the paradigmatic forms. Then too, Michael commented on a greater range of Aristotelian texts than any contemporary author. Aside from his work on the ethics, he dealt with part of the metaphysics, a collection of Aristotle's short psychological treatises, the Sophistical refutations, and perhaps most remarkably Aristotle's works on animals. Like Albert the Great in the Latin sphere, but about a century earlier, Michael thus revived the study of Aristotle's zoology after this aspect of his scientific achievement had been almost completely ignored since Aristotle's own day. The zoological commentaries provide us with a concrete example of Michael's willingness to favour Aristotelianism over Platonism. He apparently accepts Aristotle's theory that the father's seed is the sole source of form for the offspring. To this, he contrasts what he thinks is Plato's view on generation, which will sound rather strange to readers who know the dialogues better than Michael seems to. He thinks that Plato is a two-seed theorist, in other words that both father and mother are involved in shaping the embryo, and that the seed derives from the various organs of both parents. Thus the parents' heads provide little models for the head of the child, the parental feet indirectly generate the child's feet, and so on. Aristotle does describe a theory like this, but does not identify its author, and apparently Michael assumed Aristotle was talking about Plato. Michael rejects the Platonic theory, assuming instead that there are formative principles or logoi in the paternal seed that actively cause the form of the gestating child. And in another sign of his fidelity to Aristotle, he holds that the heart and not the brain is the central organ of governance for the animal, a notion that had been abandoned by most philosophers after Galen's proof of the importance of the brain in the 2nd century AD. This, despite Michael's evident knowledge of medical theory, which emerges at various points in his writing. The commentaries discussed in this episode are not the only ones to derive from Anna Comdena's circle. You may remember the two devoted to Aristotle's rhetoric mentioned in episode 311. And they were of course not the only ones written in Byzantium. We have alluded to commentaries on Aristotle by Michael Psellos and John Italoos, and there will be later commentators too. There was Leo Magentios, who some generations after Anna's circle dealt with the full range of Aristotle's logical works, and later still, George Pachimeris, who commented on several treatises, including the Ethics. We should also not forget the importance of Epitomes and Scolia devoted to the Aristotelian treatises which were produced pretty well throughout Byzantine history. As we'll see later, some of this material will help readers of Latin to make their way through Aristotle. Eustratus is a good example, since his commentary on the Ethics was received among the Western Scholastics. So there's a lot of material here, and modern day scholars have not yet explored it fully. It used to be thought that late ancient commentaries were dull, arid monuments of pedantry, but now a thriving branch of research is devoted to them. Perhaps a similar reappraisal is in store for Anna's collaborators and other scholars who carried on the labours of ancient exegetes like Alexander of Aphrodisias, Philoponus, and Simplicius. Having said that, it's not as if no one has been looking at these later commentaries at all. Next time, I'll be joined by an interview guest who has done just that, making the works of men like Michael of Ephesus and Eustratus an abiding concern of her inquiries into Byzantine thought. Join me for a conversation with Catarina Iero Diacono. And after you've done so, why not leave a comment on the website for The History of Philosophy without any gaps. 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