The Translations

The texts from ancient Greece known in the western Middle Ages were very few: the Categories and the De interpretatione of Aristotle, and the Timeus of Plato, which lacked the final part but was accompanied by the commentary of Chalcidius (4th c.). These late-antique philosophical school texts, with the exception of the Isagoge of Porphyry, were preserved almost exclusively in fragments, quoted with a polemical or apologetic spirit in the works of the Christian Fathers, or gathered in anthologies, florilegia, and cathenae. Many works were, however, preserved thanks to Syrian translations completed by Nestorian Christians who fled from the Easter Roman Empire into Syria for religious reasons in the 4th-5th c., and which were then in great part translated into Arabic. In the 12th c., due to the intensification of cultural exchanges in the Mediterranean and bordering countries (Spain, Sicily, and the southern part of Italy), intellectuals (among whom stand out Hugh of Santalla, Herman of Carinthia, Adelard of Bath, Robert of Chester—the translator of the Koran—, and Bartholomew of Messina) gave new impetus to the work of translating scientific and philosophic texts, which immediately became an object of study, enriching western culture and facilitating its development. In particular they communicated Aristotelian ideas to the West before the translations of the Aristotelian texts themselves were available, and they introduced the Hermetic notion that mankind could modify nature. Since it was difficult to find translators that were highly competent in both Arabic and Latin, often the act of textual interpretation was performed by an oral ‘mediator’ (usually Jewish), who read the test in the vulgar to the ‘translator’, who then translated it from the vulgar into Latin, while writing it down. In other cases, especially in southern Italy where in various places the Greek language was still in use, the Greek texts were translated directly.