The authorship of
Epinomis has been in dispute since ancient times. The grammarian
Thrasyllus (1st century CE), as reported by
Diogenes Laërtius (3rd century CE) in his biographical sketch of Plato, included it in the last of his nine Platonic
tetralogies, along with
Minos,
Laws, and the
Epistles. Diogenes, however, also reported that:Some say that
Philip the Opuntian transcribed his work,
Laws, which was written in wax. They also say that
Epinomis is his.This attribution was repeated by the author of the 10th century CE
Souda:[Unnamed] Philosopher who divided the Laws of Plato into 12 books; for he himself is said to have added the 13th. And he was a pupil of Socrates and of Plato himself, occupied with the study of the heavens. Living in the time of Philip of Macedon, he wrote the following: On the distance of the sun and moon; On gods (2); On time (1); On myths (1); On freedom (1); On anger (1); On reciprocation (1);
On the Opuntian Lokrians; On pleasure (1); On passion (1); On friends and friendship (1); On writing;
On Plato; On eclipse[s] of the moon; On the size of the sun and moon and earth (1); On lightning; On the planets; Arithmetic; On prolific numbers; Optics (2); Enoptics (2); Kykliaka; Means; etc.The identity of the
Souda’s unnamed Philosopher was discovered by
Ludolph Küster, who published an edition and translation of the work in 1705, clearly establishing that it was Philip. He explained his reasoning in this note:I have long inquired who this anonymous philosopher is, of whom
Souda speaks here. At last I found that he was Philip Opuntius, a disciple of Plato; and this information comes from Laërtius in the life of Plato, number 37. For there you read, that Philip Opuntius was the author of the
Epinomis, which is book xiii. Moreover, reviewing the writings of our anonymous philosopher, we see, among other things, that he wrote about Locris Opuntius, it is testified that no one laughs at how well Philippus Opuntius fits.Modern scholars are divided on the question of whether the author of
Epinomis was Plato or Philip.
A. E. Taylor and the German H. Raeder opted for Platonic authorship, in the words of
Werner Jaeger, “because they wanted to credit him with the mathematical knowledge it contains”.
Stylometric analysis linking
Epinomis with
Laws, such as that performed by Gerhard Ledger, would seem to support Platonic authorship, but as
Debra Nails and Holger Thesleff point out, such analysis can lead to the opposite conclusion: that
Laws itself was not written by Plato – that both works represent:an accretion of material onto a Platonic stem, given its final appearance by someone whose heavily mannered style partly corresponds to a practice adopted in the so-called late dialogues, but who lacked a coherent view of the themes treated.Most others accepted the ancient testimony crediting Philip of Opus with authorship. If one accepts this, the question then becomes whether Philip’s effort had official sanction from the leaders of the Academy, or he was writing “out of school”? Beyond that, was he reflecting Plato’s ideas as they had developed in his later years, or was he going beyond Plato and imbuing
Epinomis with his own beliefs (as Nails and Thesleff allege)? These questions have also been extensively debated. Werner Jaeger, writing in the 1940s, saw Philip as working with the Academy’s blessing:After Plato died, Philip of Opus, who was his secretary and his Boswell, edited
The Laws from his incomplete draft on wax tablets, and divided it into twelve books. He noticed the gap created by the absence of any system for educating the ruler, and tried to compensate it by defining in greater detail the special wisdom which the ruler ought to possess. These supplementary ideas he recorded in the treatise which still exists as the
Epinomis or
Appendix to the Laws at the end of the book itself. The Academy must have entrusted him with this task because he knew the manuscripts Plato had left and the plans he had had in mind, so that we cannot call the
Epinomis a forgery. It is rather a supplement to
The Laws, which Plato’s own school therefore considered to be incomplete.Leonardo Tarán, writing in the early 1970s, was less certain about Philip’s authorship, but accepted that the balance of evidence was in his favor. He was not, however, convinced that Philip had a firm grasp on the state of Plato’s thought at the time, maintaining (in the words of one reviewer) that it represented a:misunderstanding or contradiction of Platonic doctrines, such as the placing of astronomy above dialectic as the supreme object of study, the rejection of the Ideas. the introduction of a fifth element, aether, between fire and air, and the elaborate theory of daemons inhabiting the three middle elements.The question will no doubt continue to be debated. Any resolution will depend on knowing how Plato’s thought may have evolved in his later years. The
Laws itself already represented a massive change from
Republic, Plato’s earlier effort to define the best state. Instead of the “ideal” society of
Republic, in
Laws he was content to work out the details of the “best possible” state. The
ideal forms were not mentioned in that work, and it would seem disingenuous to criticize
Epinomis for not including them. As for adding “aether” to the standard list of four elements,
Aristotle had already written about this in
On Philosophy before he left the Academy, though the author of
Epinomis put the five in a different order. Finally, the concept of “
daemon” had been an integral part of the
Socratic dialogs written decades earlier, so the most that can be said of it here is that our author did not invent the entity, merely gave it a specific place in his cosmology. It seems sure that the ideas reflected in
Epinomis were at least in general discussion among Academy members at the time it was written. Whether Plato had incorporated these ideas into his own thinking is anyone’s guess. ==References==