Abstract
Though no Greek commentaries on the Poetics have come down to us, the work has a long tradition in the Byzantine and the Arabic world. It was translated at the end of the ninth century into Arabic.
While the most important Greek codex of the Poetics, the Parisinus gr. 1741, was written between the end of the ninth and the beginning of the eleventh century, the Arabic version known to us today is the one by Abū Bishr Mattā Ibn Yūnus al-Qunnā’ī (c. 870/940), made from a Syriac version dating from around 700 CE, and perhaps relying on a preceding version by Isḥāq b. Ḥunayn (d. 910). The bio-bibliographers Ibn al-Nadīm (d. 995) and Ibn al-Qifṭī (d. 1248) speak of another translation by Yaḥyā b. ‘Adī (d. 973), now lost, and of a commentary by Themistius (c. 320–390).
Jacopo Mantino’s version in 1481 was made on the basis of the Jewish version by Tôdrôs Tôdrôsî (first half of the fourteenth century).
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Baffioni, C. (2020). Aristotle, Arabic: Poetics. In: Lagerlund, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1151-5_54-2
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