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Apuleius'
De Mundo ('On the Cosmos') has never been published in English translation. One reason for this may be that it has itself been viewed as a mere translation of a work that survives in the Aristotelian corpus, the
Peri Kosmou (traditionally, but confusingly in this context, referred to as the
De Mundo). But greater sensitivity both to the ideological implications of 'translation' (no translation is ever a 'mere' translation) and to the nuanced philosophical debates of the second century CE ought already to suggest that the work will have a lot to teach us-and all the more just because we have the Greek text it is working with.
This volume offers the first English translation of the
De Mundo, which it presents in parallel with a new English translation of the Aristotelian
Peri Kosmou by the same team, so that even readers without Latin or Greek can get a keen sense of how the two works relate-and how substantially they diverge. It is accompanied by a series of ten new scholarly studies introducing the work and setting out a broad range of approaches to its study. Together they make a powerful case that the
De Mundo is deeply informed by Apuleius' Platonism, especially a view of providence which differs substantially from that of the
Peri Kosmou, and that it is an important text for understanding philosophical debate in the second century CE.
List of contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of contributors
- Note to the reader
- I: Introduction
- 1: George Boys-Stones: Apuleius on the Cosmos
- 2: Matteo Stefani: The Textual Transmission of Apuleius' De Mundo: A Survey of the Manuscript Tradition
- II: Translations
- 3: The Aristotelian Peri Kosmou
- 4: Apuleius, De Mundo
- III: Studies
- 5: Leonardo Costantini: The Stylistic Ambition of Apuleius' De Mundo: A Reappraisal
- 6: Matthew Watton: Reading De Mundo: Didactic, Polemic, Appropriation
- 7: Gretchen Reydams-Schils: Stoicism in Apuleius' Rendering of Ps.-Aristotle, Peri Kosmou
- 8: George Karamanolis: Causal Efficacy Through Intermediary Power in Apuleius' De Mundo
- 9: George Boys-Stones: A Second-Century Debate on the Metaphysics of Species
- 10: Dylan Burns: Basilides of Alexandria on the Cosmos and Providence: Reassessing the Aristotelianizing Portrait of the Refutation of All Heresies
- 11: Thomas Slabon: Translation as Philosophical Exercise: Apuleius' Latin Additions to Greek Theology
- 12: Liba Taub: Integrating Meteorology and Theology in De Mundo: Meteorology, Concordia, and Cosmic Order
- 13: Michael Griffin: The 'View from Above' in Apuleius' De Mundo: Contemplative Exercise and Pedagogy
- IV: Back matter
- References
- Index locorum
- Index rerum
About the author
George Boys-Stones read Classics at Christ's College Cambridge, and wrote his doctoral dissertation (on Plutarch and the Stoics) under the supervision of Michael Frede at St John's College, Oxford. From 1995 to 1998 as a Junior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford he started working on philosophy in the Roman Mediterranean during the period 100 BCE to 200 CE. He taught in the Classics Department at Durham University for 20 years from 1999 (serving as Head of Department in 2009-2012). In 2019 he moved to the University of Toronto, where he is currently Chair of the Classics Department.
