Ptolemy-el-Garib

Ptolemy-el-Garib (Arabic, more correctly "al-gharīb", "Ptolemy the foreigner," explained as meaning "Ptolemy the unknown") was a Hellenistic pinacographer, probably of the Peripatetic school, who wrote a "Life of Aristotle" notable for its catalog of Aristotle's works. This work survives in an unpublished Arabic manuscript in Istanbul. [Gottschalk reported that an edition was in preparation by Marian Plezia and Józef Bielawski.] The excerpts known prior to this discovery were collected in Ingemar Düring's "Aristotle in the Ancient Biographical Tradition" (Göteborg 1957), pp. 184ff.; Marian Plezia has cast doubt on the idea that Ptolemy-el-Garib's "Life" was an important source of later Neoplatonic lives of Aristotle.

Notes

References

*Hans Gottschalk, "The Earliest Aristotelian Commentators," in "Aristotle Transformed" (ed. Richard Sorabji, 1990), pp. 56f. n. 5.

Further reading

*Ingemar Düring, "Ptolemy's "Vita Aristotelis" rediscovered," in "Philomathes: studies and essays in the humanities in memory of Philip Merlan", ed. Robert B. Palmer and Robert Hamerton-Kelly (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1971), pp. 264-269 - includes an English translation of Ptolemy's preface.
*Marian Plezia, "De Ptolemaeo pinacographo," "Eos" 63 (1975), pp. 37-42.
*——, "De Ptolemaei Vita Aristotelis," in "Aristoteles: Werk und Wirkung", vol. 1 ("Aristoteles und seine Schule"), ed. Jürgen Wiesner (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1985), pp. 1-11.