Page:Aristotle (Grant).djvu/43

 other. Hardly any of the treatises are finished, still less is there any trace of careful revision and “the last hand.” It is certain that many of these works were never published during Aristotle’s lifetime, and it is even a question whether any of them were so published.

When Aristotle died, all the MSS of his later compositions, together with the considerable library of other men’s writings which he had got together, were under charge of his chief disciple Theophrastus at the school in the Lyceum. After his decease, the Peripatetics appear to have worked to some extent at editing the uncompleted treatises, and at patching together those which existed as yet only in disjointed fragments. But there does not seem to have been any multiplication of copies, or what we should call “publication.” On the death of Theophrastus (which took place thirty-five years later than that of Aristotle), the whole Peripatetic school-library went by his bequest to a favourite pupil named Neleus, who took all the rolls away with him to his home at a place called Scepsis, in the Troad. Included among them were the MSS, many of them unique, of Aristotle’s most important works, which were thus removed from Europe. Not only was this the case, but a few years later the kings of Pergamus began seizing the books of private individuals in order to fill their own royal library, and the family of Neleus, afraid of losing the treasures they possessed,—which, however, they could little appreciate,—hid away the Peripatetic rolls and the precious MSS of Aristotle in a subterranean vault,