Plato's ‘testament to Aristotle’

Extract

Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī concluded his celebrated Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī with a string of aphorisms purporting to be ‘a chapter from the utterances of Plato of profit to the generality of men: namely, the testament that he gave to his pupil Aristotle’. In his recent admirable translation, Professor G. M. Wickens comments that ‘the aphorisms in this Section are of course not necessarily regarded as coming from one Platonic corpus: even Ṭūsī uses the term mansūb, with its suggestion of doubt. They will be recognized to have many parallels and resemblances over a wide area of time and space, but their Muslim clothing is worn with an air of comfortable familiarity’. In point of fact, as will be demonstrated in this paper, the entire section is a reasonably close translation of a section occurring in the so-called al-Ḥihmat al-khālida of Ibn Miskawaih.