The transmission of the Greek Classics to Latin Western Europe during the Middle Ages was a key factor in the development of intellectual life in Western Europe. Interest in Greek texts and their availability was scarce in the Latin West during the Early Middle Ages, but as traffic to the East increased, so did Western scholarship.
Classical Greek philosophy consisted of various original works ranging from those from Ancient Greece (e.g. Aristotle) to those Greco-Roman scholars in the classical Roman Empire (e.g. Ptolemy). Though these works were originally written in Greek, for centuries the language of scholarship in the Mediterranean region, a number of them were translated into Syriac, Arabic, and Persian during the Middle Ages and the original Greek versions were often unknown in western Europe. With increasing Western presence in the East due to the Crusades, and the gradual collapse of the Byzantine Empire during the Late Middle Ages, multiple Byzantine Greek scholars fled to Western Europe, bringing with them a number of original Greek manuscripts, and providing impetus for Greek-language education in the West and further translation efforts of Greek scholarship into Latin.Alexander. A. Vasiliev. History of the Byzantine Empire
The line between Greek scholarship and Arab scholarship in Western Europe was blurred during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. Sometimes the concept of the transmission of Greek Classics is often used to refer to the collective knowledge that was obtained from the Arab and Byzantine Empires, regardless of where the knowledge actually originated. However, being once and even twice removed from the original Greek, these Arabic versions were later supplanted by improved, direct translations by Moerbeke and others in the 13th century and after.
Direct reception of Greek texts As knowledge of Greek declined in the West with the fall of the Western Roman Empire, so did knowledge of the Greek texts, some of which had remained without a Latin translation.Lindberg 52 The fragile nature of papyrus as a writing medium meant that older texts not copied onto expensive parchment would eventually crumble and be lost.
After the Fourth Crusade (1202–1204) and the Sack of Constantinople (1204), scholars such as William of Moerbeke gained access to the original Greek texts of scientists and philosophers, including Aristotle, Archimedes, Hero of Alexandria and Proclus, that had been preserved in the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire, and translated them directly into Latin.Grabmann; note that a number of William's works were redactions rather than original translations, as is commonly supposed
The final decline and collapse of the Byzantine empire in the fifteenth century heightened contact between its scholars and those of the west. Translation into Latin of the full range of Greek classics ensued, including the historians, poets, playwrights and non-Aristotelian philosophers. Manuel Chrysoloras (c. 1355–1415) translated portions of Homer and Plato. Guarino da Verona (1370–1460) translated Strabo and Plutarch. Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) translated Xenophon, Diodorus, and Lucian. Francesco Filelfo (1398–1481) translated portions of Plutarch, Xenophon and Lysias. Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457) translated Thucydides and Herodotus. Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) and his Platonic Academy translated Plato. Poliziano (1454–1494) translated Herodian and portions of Epictetus and Plutarch. Regiomontanus and George of Trebizond translated Ptolemy's Almagest.Johann Müller Regiomontanus Important patrons were Basilios Bessarion (1403–1472) and Pope Nicholas V (1397–1455).
Armenia harbored libraries of Greek classical literature. An Armenian codex of Aristotle (†Δ) is one of the main sources in the text-critical apparatus of today's Greek text.L. Minio-Paluello (ed.). Aristoteles Categoriae et liber de interpretatione recognovit brevique adnotatione critica instruxit. Oxford Classical Texts.
Syriac translations Syriac plays an important role in modern textual criticism even today. The Oxford Classical issue of the Greek text of Aristotle's Organon uses the sigla Ρ, Ι, and Γ, which are texts dating from Christian possessions from the 6th to 8th century.
Syriac translations played a major role for the later reception into Arabic. These translators from Syriac were mostly Nestorian and Jacobite Christians, working in the two hundred years following the establishment of the Abbasid caliphate. The most important translator of this group was the Syriac-speaking Christian Hunayn Ibn Ishaq (809-873), known to the Latins as Joannitius.
Western Roman Empire Classical Greek learning was firmly found in every metropolis of the Roman empire, including in Rome itself.
In the 4th century, the Roman grammarian Marius Victorinus translated two of Aristotle's books, about logic, into Latin: the Categories and On Interpretation (De Interpretatione). A little over a century later, most of Aristotle's logical works, except perhaps for the Posterior Analytics, had been translated by Boethius, c. 510–512 (see: Corpus Aristotelicum). However, only Boethius's translations of the Categories and On Interpretation had entered into general circulation before the 12th century. All in all, only a few major works of Aristotle were never translated into Arabic. Of these, the fate of Politics in particular remains uncertain.
The rest of Aristotle's books were eventually translated into Latin, but over 600 years later, from about the middle of the 12th century. First, the rest of the logical works were finished, by using the translations of Boethius as the basis. Routledge encyclopedia of philosophy, Edward Craig, 1998, p.396, webpage: BooksG-GhV. Then came the Physics, followed by the Metaphysics (12th century), and Averroes' Commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics (13th century), so that all works were translated by the mid-13th century.
A text like On the Soul, for instance, was unavailable in Latin in Christian Europe before the middle of the twelfth century.Sander Wopke de Boer, The Science of the Soul: The Commentary Tradition on Aristotle's De Anima, C. 1260–1360, Leuven : Leuven University Press, 2013, p. 15. The first Latin translation is due to James of Venice (12th century), and has always been considered as the translatio vetus (ancient translation).Sander Wopke de Boer, The Science of the Soul: The Commentary Tradition on Aristotle's De Anima, C. 1260–1360, Leuven : Leuven University Press, 2013, p. 16. The second Latin translation (translatio nova, new translation) was made from the Arabic translation of the text around 1230, and it was accompanied by Averroes's commentary; the translator is generally thought to be Michael Scot. James's translatio vetus was then revised by William of Moerbeke in 1266–7, and became known as the "recensio nova" (new recension), which was the most widely read version.Sander Wopke de Boer, The Science of the Soul: The Commentary Tradition on Aristotle's De Anima, C. 1260–1360, Leuven : Leuven University Press, 2013, pp. 15–16. On the Soul ended up becoming a component of the core curriculum of philosophical study in most medieval universities, giving birth to a rich tradition of commentaries, especially c. 1260–1360.Cf. Sander Wopke de Boer, The Science of the Soul: The Commentary Tradition on Aristotle's De Anima, C. 1260–1360, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2013.
Although Plato had been Aristotle's teacher, most of Plato's writings were not translated into Latin until over 200 years after Aristotle. In the Middle Ages, the only book of Plato in general circulation was the first part of the dialogue Timaeus (to 53c), as a translation, with commentary, by Calcidius (or Chalcidius). The Timaeus describes Plato's cosmology, as his account of the origin of the universe. In the 12th century, Henry Aristippus of Catania made translations of the Meno and the Phaedo, but those books were in limited circulation. Some other translations of Plato's books disappeared during the Middle Ages. Finally, about 200 years after the rediscovery of Aristotle, in the wider Renaissance, Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) translated and commented on Plato's complete works.
Boethius
In Rome, Boethius propagated works of Greek classical learning. Boethius intended to pass on the great Greco-Roman culture to future generations by writing manuals on music and astronomy, geometry, and arithmetic.General Audience of Pope Benedict XVI, Boethius and Cassiodorus; accessed November 4, 2009.
Several of Boethius' writings, which were largely influential during the Middle Ages, drew from the thinking of Porphyry and Iamblichus.Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Anicius Manlius SeverinusBoethius. Internet. Availablefrom http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/boethius/; accessed November 7, 2009. Boethius wrote a commentary on the Isagoge by Porphyry, which highlighted the existence of the problem of universals: whether these concepts are subsistent entities which would exist whether anyone thought of them, or whether they only exist as ideas. This topic concerning the ontological nature of universal ideas was one of the most vocal controversies in medieval philosophy.
Besides these advanced philosophical works, Boethius is also reported to have translated important Greek texts for the topics of the quadrivium. His loose translation of Nicomachus's treatise on arithmetic (De institutione arithmetica libri duo) and his textbook on music (De institutione musica Libri quinque, unfinished) contributed to medieval education. De arithmetica, begins with modular arithmetic, such as even and odd, evenly even, evenly odd, and oddly even. He then turns to unpredicted complexity by categorizing numbers and parts of numbers.Schrader, Dorothy V. ´De Arithmetica, Book I, of Boethius.¡ Mathematics Teacher 61 (1968):615-28.
His translations of Euclid on geometry and Ptolemy on astronomy,Masi, Michael. "The Liberal Arts and Gerardus Ruffus¢ Commentary on the Boethian De Arithmetica". The Sixteenth Century Journal 10 (Summer 1979): 24. if they were completed, no longer survive. Boethius made Latin translations of Aristotle's De interpretation and Categories with commentaries. These were widely used during the Middle Ages.
Early Middle Ages in the Western Provinces In the Western Provinces (what today is considered Western Europe's heartland), the collapsing Roman empire lost a number of Greek manuscripts which were not preserved by monasteries. However, due to the expense and dearth of writing materials, monastic scribes could recycle old parchments. The parchments could be reused after scraping off the ink of the old texts, and writing new books on the previously used parchment, creating what is called a palimpsest.Reynolds & Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, (1991) p. 85-86 - But note that recycling of parchment did not necessarily prejudice against the genre, as Tischendorf's discovery of the Codex Sinaiticus shows. Fortunately for modern scholars, the old writing can still be retrieved, and some valuable works, which would have otherwise been lost, have been recovered in this way. As the language of Roman aristocrats and scholars, Greek died off along with the Roman Empire in the West, and by 500 CE, almost no one in Western Europe was able to read (or translate) Greek texts, and with the rise of the Islamic Empire, the west was further cut off from the language. After a while, only a few monasteries in the west had Greek works, and even fewer of them copied these works (mainly the Irish).Laughlin 139 Some Irish monks had been taught by Greek and Latin missionaries who probably had brought Greek texts with them.Laughlin 140
Late Middle Ages: William of Moerbeke