Ancient Greek philosophers - the term conjures up the names of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, with the stories of hemlock, the Academy and teaching Alexander the Great not far behind. But how often would the name Heraclides Ponticus (c.390-310BC) bubble to the surface? Not very often, if ever.
And yet he seems to have been a prominent philosopher at the time of Plato and Aristotle, having moved to Athens from his birthplace of Heraclea Pontica (modern day Karadeniz Ereğli in Turkey) to study under Plato at the Academy.
Really, he was enough of a star pupil to be left in charge of the Academy when Plato travelled to Sicily in 361-360 and only narrowly missed out on being elected head in 339/338BC (Suda Η461; Guthrie (1986), 470).
Suda H461 also records that Heraclides "wrote a lot," and a list of subjects seemingly addressed by him seems to bear that out - philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, music, grammar, physics, history and rhetoric.
Despite this high profile and extended bibliography, perhaps the thing Heraclides is most famous for is his Pythagorean proposal that the daily motion of the stars was due to the rotation of the Earth, contradicting the fixed Earth approach of Aristotle. A fifth century CE pagan philosopher, Simplicius of Cilicia, records that Heraclides proposed that the irregular movements of the planets can be explained if the Earth moves around a stationary Sun. This has helped see Heraclides portrayed as a proponent and even originator of heliocentrism (Simplicius, On Aristotle, Physics 2; Heath (1921) 312, 316-317). However, a detailed investigation of the sources has shown that "nowhere in the ancient literature mentioning Heraclides of Pontus is there a clear reference for his support for any kind of heliocentrical planetary position" (Eastwood (1992), 256).
Even if these attributions of heliocentrism are somewhat incorrect, Heraclides would seem to be worthy of the position accorded to him at the Academy and perhaps of a more prominent position in the general appreciation of Ancient Greek philosophers.
Instead though, we see him being dubbed Heraclides "Pompicus" from the Greek πομπεια meaning "buffoon". Could this be due to the contrariness of his astronomical assertions in an Aristotelian world? Was it his own vanity and pomposity which made him the target of such punning ridicule? (Davidson (2007), 45)
However, there may have been another reason for the level of ridicule he received: it seems that Heraclides Ponticus was a prolific forger and plagiariser.
In his entry on 'Pompicus' in his Lives of the Philosophers, Diogenes Laertius records that "Aristoxenus the musician asserts that Heraclides also composed tragedies, inscribing upon them the name of Thespis [while] Chamaeleon complains that Heraclides' treatise on the works of Homer and Hesiod was plagiarized from his own" (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers V.92).
It is with this reputation for forgery and plagiarism that we turn to another lesser known Greek philosopher of the fourth century BCE - Dionysius of Heraclea (c.330-250BCE), known to history as Dionysius the Renegade.
In this context 'renegade' - μεταθέμενος - is used in its original meaning, similar to 'deserter' i.e. someone who reneges. This nickname stemmed from his abandoning of the austere Stoic philosophy of Zeno of Citium for the hedonism of the Cyrenaics after being struck with an eye complaint.
Having said that, such a nickname may not have arisen from a single instance of 'desertion.' Dionysius may have had a reputation for turning away from ideas, beliefs, philosophies and people. Indeed, he would seem to have turned away from another teacher early in his life: his fellow inhabitant of Heraclea Pontica - Heraclides.
Dionysius was himself a prolific writer, producing philosophical works on apathy, training, pleasure, riches, use of men, good fortune, kings, praise and barbarians (Diogenes Laertes, Lives of the Philosophers VII.167), but it is a work that he passed off as not being his own that became part of the dispute between he and Heraclides.
Intent on catching out Heraclides in his pomposity and outdoing him at his own game of forgery, Dionysius composed a play called Parthenopaeus and claimed that it was a lost work of the great fifth century BC tragedian Sophocles.
The forgery elicited praise from Heraclides as an authentic piece, who cited it in one of his own works as "Sophoclean evidence" (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers V.92)
Having caught his former teacher in the trap, Dionysius revealed to 'Pompicus' that he had forged the attribution to Sophocles, ridiculing him for his inability to recognise an obvious fraud. Unwilling to accept that he had been duped by his former disciple, Heraclides insisted that the play was authentic.
It was then that Dionysius provided various proofs of his authorship of Parthenopaeus. He pointed to an acrostic - using the first letters of successive lines to spell out a word or message - present in the play which spelled out the name of ΠΑΝΚΑΛΑΣ (Pankalos), who just so happened to be the lover of Dionysius.
Still unwilling to believe that he had been made a fool of, Heraclides continued to dig a hole for himself - "Such a thing, he said, might very well happen by chance" (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers V.93).
Unfortunately for Heraclides, the name of his lover was not the only hidden message Dionysius had placed in Parthenopaeus. Indeed, the Renegade seems to have known his target well for the messages he laced suggest that he did not expect Heraclides to accept his word or the initial reveal of the ΠΑΝΚΑΛΑΣ acrostic as proof of his authorship of this 'Sophoclean' play. The second message read "An old monkey is not caught by a trap," rhetorically setting up Heraclides for the next hidden line, which read "Oh yes, he's caught at last, but it takes time."
If it was not obvious enough by then that Heraclides had been thoroughly duped, the last message shrugged off any pretence and resorted to flat out mockery, pronouncing that "Heraclides is ignorant of letters and not ashamed of his ignorance" (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers V.93)
There is not enough surviving information in the source record of Diogenes and the Suda to provide much more information in this confrontation, so it is difficult to gauge what impact it had on the relationship between Dionysius and Heraclides.
Was it more in jest than a cynical attempt to humiliate a forger? Could the denigration of Heraclides' reputation through the revealing of such forgeries and plagiarism have affected his standing enough to undermine his chances at election as head of the Platonic Academy?
This incident of ridicule by Dionysius cannot have impacted Heraclides' defeat by Xenocrates in 339/338BC, as Dionysius himself does not seem to have been born until c.330, but it may be a consequence of Heraclides' diminishing stature in his later years.
Perhaps we have a barely out of his teens μεταθέμενος trying to make a name for himself by setting up a septuagenarian πομπεια or the latest round in a rivalry between two men from Heraclea Pontic being played out in the great cultural centre of Athens.
Bibliography
Diogenes Laërtius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (Hicks, R.D. translation, Loeb Classical Library, 1925)
Suda, Lexicon (Adler, A. translation, 1928-1938)
Davidson, M.P. The Stars And The Mind. (2007)
Eastwood, B. 'Heraclides and Heliocentrism: Texts, Diagrams, and Interpretations,' Journal for the History of Astronomy 23 (1992) 233-260
Ehrman, B.D. Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew. Oxford (2003)
Grafton, A. Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship. Princeton (1990)
Guthrie, W.K.C. A History of Greek Philosophy: Volume 5 The Later Plato and the Academy (Later Plato & the Academy). Cambridge (1986)
Heath, T. L. A History of Greek Mathematics: From Thales to Euclid. Oxford (1921)
This piece was originally posted on the CANI website and is reposted here with permission
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