Andronicus of Rhodes

One of the unsung roles in the history of philosophy is that of the preservers. These are the scholars, scribes, and chance caretakers who kept ideas alive when they might have vanished forever. It’s tempting, as Harold Bloom and others do, to speak of “greatness” as though it guarantees survival, as if will or genius alone ensures a thinker’s immortality.

But history shows otherwise. Even Aristotle, perhaps the single most influential philosopher in the Western tradition after Plato, nearly disappeared. After his death, his manuscripts and lecture notes passed to his student Theophrastus, then to a chain of lesser-known custodians. For nearly two centuries, his works languished in obscurity, hidden in a cellar in Asia Minor, vulnerable to decay and loss.

The details get a little hazy here, so I will probably come back and correct this later.

The texts eventually arrived in Rome. The library of a book collector named Apellicon of Teos was raided during the sack of Athens by Roman general Lucius Cornelius Sulla, who brought the book collection to Rome. These came into the possession of the Peripatetic School.

Here, Andronicus of Rhodes, the 11th head of the Peripatetic School, undertook the monumental task, in the first century BCE, of editing and organizing what remained of Aristotle's corpus. Andronicus effectively saved Aristotle for posterity. Without Andronicus, Aristotle might have been no more than a dim name in doxographies.

Greatness doesn’t guarantee survival. Sometimes, what saves a writer are only the accidents of history.