Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

The Latin Tradition of Logic to 1100 21
Analytics itself was known, and the treatise on hypothetical syllogisms too was
forgotten [see Martin, 2007].
2.3 The Encyclopaedists
Between Boethius’s death and the late eighth century, no Latin writer worked on
logic in a serious and sustained way. But two accounts of logic written within
longer encyclopaedic works would be important in the centuries following.
Cassiodorus
Cassiodorus (484/90–590) succeeded Boethius in his post at Theoderic’s court,
and he probably had a hand in ensuring the preservation and transmission of
Boethius’s work. In 554, he retired to a monastery at Vivarium in southern Italy
and wrote a handbook called the Institutions (Institutiones) [Cassiodorus, 1937;
transl. Cassiodorus, 1946], which was widely read in the early Middle Ages. In
Book II he gives short accounts of the seven liberal arts among which is logic (II.3.1-
18). There are very summary accounts of the matter of the Isagoge, theCategories
and On Interpretation (which is singled out for its difficulty). For all these, he
uses Boethius’s translations [Courcelle, 1941, 80-3]. He then presents categorical
syllogisms, following Apuleius [Sullivan, 1967, 173-7], definition, basing himself on
Marius Victorinus, and topical argument, in which it seems he is following Marius
Victorinus’s now lost work [Hadot, 1971, 115-41]. There is a list (II,13) of what
he calls ‘the modes of hypothetical syllogisms’: the phrase is Boethius’s, but the
list is closer (though not identical) to that given by Martianus Capella and so,
probably, by Marius Victorinus.
At the end of the section on logic (II,18), Cassiodorus includes a list of those ‘by
whose efforts these things have come into the Latin tongue’. In the standard text
of the Institutions, Marius Victorinus is credited with the major role — as translator
of the Isagoge, Categories and On Interpretation, the writer of monographs
on hypothetical syllogisms and definition and the commentator on Aristotle’s Categories
and Cicero’s Topics. Apuleius is mentioned for his categorical syllogistic,
and Cicero, of course, for his Topics. Boethius’s role is reduced to that of commentator
on the Isagoge and On Interpretation — despite the fact that it was his
translations of Aristotle and Porphyry which Cassiodorus had in fact used (and
it is uncertain whether Victorinus did in fact translate the Categories and On
Interpretation, or comment on the Categories). In one textual tradition, however,
the list is changed, and all the writings attributed to Victorinus are attributed
to Boethius, even the commentary on Cicero’s Topics, where Victorinus and not
Boethius seems to have been the source. A complex explanation involving an original
draft and additions at various stages has been proposed to explain this strange
difference in the lists [Courcelle, 1941; Hadot, 1971, 105-9], but perhaps political
factors could provide a better explanation. Another feature of the pro-Boethian
textual tradition is that these manuscripts contain a series of additions of logical