New for 2016

We are pleased to announce four volumes due out in 2016. These are the second edition of Aristotle Transformed and its sequel Aristotle Re-Interpreted, the second half of Michael Griffin's translation of Olympiodorus, On Plato Alcibiades, and, previously unannounced here, Priscian's Answers to King Khosroes of Persia. This last volume has involved retro-translation of the, in places incomprehensible, Latin text into ancient Greek in order to produce a meaningful English translation.

Priscian of Lydia was one of the Athenian philosophers who took refuge in 531 AD with King Khosroes I of Persia, after the Christian Emperor Justinian stopped the teaching of the pagan Neoplatonist school in Athens. This was one of the earliest examples of the sixth-century diffusion of the philosophy of the commentators to other cultures.

Tantalisingly, Priscian fully recorded in Greek the answers provided by the Athenian philosophers to the king's questions on philosophy and science. But these answers survive only in a later Latin translation which understood both the Greek and the subject matter very poorly. Our translators have often had to reconstruct from the Latin what the Greek would have been, in order to recover the original sense.

The answers start with subjects close to the Athenians' hearts: the human soul, on which Priscian was an expert, and sleep and visions. But their interest may have diminished when the king sought their expertise on matters of physical science: the seasons, celestial zones, medical effects of heat and cold, the tides, displacement of the four elements, the effect of regions on living things, why only reptiles are poisonous, and winds. At any rate, in 532 AD, they moved on from the palace, but still under Khosroes' protection. This is the first translation of the record they left into English or any modern language.