Has εὐβίοτος in Aristotle’s *Historia Animalium* IX Been Mistranslated?

Chelsea C. Harry

The term, εὐβίοτος, “living well” and its cognates appear in Aristotle’s observations of bird life in *Historia Animalium* IX. This research note compares the way Aristotle’s term was rendered in Greek, Latin, and Arabic manuscripts, and in modern and contemporary translations in English, French, and German, to argue that it has been rendered infelicitously, beginning with the 15th-century humanist translators, George of Trebizond and Theodore Gaza. The liberties taken in over-interpreting Aristotle’s term might have obscured what he was trying to communicate about bird capabilities.

The term εὐβίοτος and its cognates appears in Aristotle's *Historia Animalium* IX (Book 8 in transmissions prior to Theodoro Gaza's 15th-century translation).<fnref n="1" /> In this research note, I examine the transmission of the term in two passages from HA IX, comparing the way it was rendered in Greek, Latin, and Arabic manuscripts, and in modern and contemporary translations in English, French, and German. My aim is to argue that the term has been rendered infelicitously beginning with the 15th-century humanist translators, George of Trebizond and Theodore Gaza.

According to the TLG, εὐβίοτος and cognates are only found in Aristotle, strongly suggesting that it is a neologism. In his extant corpus, they appear ten times, exclusively in his observations on birds in the context of his account of animal character: 609b19, 615a16, a18, a28, a32, 616b10, b13, b23, b30, 619b23.

In HA IX 12, Aristotle considers birds that dwell around water: the ocean, rivers, and lakes. He observes that both web-footed and split-footed birds live in these habitats, noting that they dwell in places that naturally suit them as organisms, in accordance with their natural parts. That the birds have parts appropriated to the environment is exampled by the Anthos, which lives “alongside rivers: its coloring is beautiful and it εὐβίοτος” (615a28). Further examples are swans, for they are “among the web-footed, and also spend their lives around lakes and marshes; they εὐβίοτος, and are good natured (eueitheis), and are good parents (euteknoi), and age well (eugeiroi). And if the eagle starts a fight, they defend themselves and win, but they do not start a fight themselves” (615a32-b2). We see Aristotle including the term with three other attributes prefixed by eu. Swans are not only εὐβίοτος, but they have a good

<footnote n="1">¹ I use Gaza’s book numbering for consistency.</footnote>
character, are crafty or resourceful, which David Balme translates as good at parenting, and they age well (Aristotle 1991: 272). Balme likewise notes their temperament; they are neither cowardly, nor rash.

Only Balme's 20th-century translation of the *History of Animals* is based primarily on the Greek manuscript tradition.<fnref n="2" /> According to Balme, while “William [of Moerbeke]’s translation was intended to assist scholars to understand the Greek, and was therefore a word-for-word rendering” (Aristotle 1991: 47), later translators departed from Moerbeke’s style. For example, translations of Aristotle’s *De Animalibus* by George Trebizond and Theodore Gaza were not translated verbatim, but rather in an explanatory style (Aristotle 1991: 48). Additionally, both Trebizond and Gaza seem to have used Pliny’s *Naturalis Historia*, Gaza more than Trebizond<fnref n="3" />, as well as a Greek-Latin word list (Aristotle 1991: 48-49).

Theodore began the translation in 1458, which was first printed in 1476. Subsequently, it was reprinted many times. Because of its relative ubiquity and high reputation, it had widespread influence: “Gaza’s translation…achieved an authoritative status, totally eclipsing all previous translations” (Beullens and Gotthelf 2007: 503). Gaza’s best-known impositions on the text are his renumbering of books 7-9—deciding that book 9 should follow 6, becoming book 7, and therefore changing book 7 to book 8 and book 8 to book 9, his reorganization of Bekker lines 631-633, and his extraction of book 10 from the *HA*, claiming it spurious (Aristotle 1991: 49).<fnref n="4" /> Yet, Gaza altered the text in many other ways, insofar as his translations were less literal than, for example, Moerbeke’s, and involved more of his own interpretation. In some parts, the text is translated with a heavier hand than one might expect, given the near universal acceptance of Gaza’s work. Beullens and Gotthelf 2007: 505 rightly conclude that “the influence Gaza’s vocabulary exercised on the choices made by the biologists of the Renaissance, this field of research remains virtually untouched. Indeed, there is much about Gaza’s influence, and his work, that is yet to be explored.” And, because of Trebizond’s influence on Gaza, there is also much to explore there.

To begin exploring the interpretive influence of Trebizond's and Gaza's translation, let us consider *εὐβίοτος* in *HA* IX 615a32, where Aristotle uses the prefix *eu-* four times to describe the character of swans:

<footnote n="2">² See Gotthelf (Aristotle 1991: ix).</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ On Pliny's influence on Gaza, see Beullens and Gotthelf 2007: 491.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ For more information on the debate about book 10’s authenticity, see Balme in Aristotle, 1991: 30 and note 16, Balme 1985: 191-206, Van der Eijk 1999: 490-502, and Camille 1999: 372.</footnote>
Καὶ οἱ κύκνοι δ' εἰσὶ μὲν τῶν (31) στεγανοπόδων, καὶ βιοτεύουσι περὶ λίμνας καὶ ἕλη, εὐβίοτοι δὲ καὶ εὐήθεις καὶ εὖτεκνοι καὶ εὖγηροι

Here we see Aristotle’s attribution of εὐβίοτος to these birds along with other descriptors similarly prefixed. When one renders this Greek especially felicitously into another language, one expects that this parallel use of a common prefix will remain. In fact, we see exactly this in William of Moerbeke’s translation:

Et cigni autem sunt steganopodorum, et vivunt autem circa stagna, bone vite autem et boni moris et boni ad pullos et bone senectutis.

We see the *eu-* prefix rendered into Medieval Latin as *bon-* and appearing in quadruplicate just as we see in the Greek manuscript. Similarly, in the 14th-century Latin translation from Arabic, the prefix remains consistent and according to the Greek. This can be observed, for instance, in the Arabic manuscript recently prepared by Lourus Filius (2018).

Trebizond, however, slightly alters the translation into Medieval Latin.

Olores etiam palmipedes sunt & in stagnis atque paludibus vivunt. Facile victum acquirunt. Sobole bene nutriunt beneque senescunt. (BDL Plut. 84.9)

Trebizond partially removes the literal translation of the *eu-* prefix, leaving it only to describe “bene nutriunt beneque senescunt”, that the swans are good parents and age well. Not far off from his previous translation of *eubiotis* as victim acquirit, Trezibond renders it here: “Facile victum acquirunt”. Whereas Moerbeke’s translation rendered “bios” literally, as “vite,” Trebizond interprets Aristotle here to mean life vis-à-vis something acquired, possibly meaning sustenance.

Likely influenced by Trebizond’s less literal style, Gaza’s subsequent translation takes additional liberties with Aristotle’s characterizations of the swans. Gaza completely removes the parallel *eu-* prefixes. Additionally, he translates εὐβίοτος as “*probitate victus*,” meaning roughly that the swan appropriately or properly sustains life. Whereas “life” is a broad term pointing to the most fundamental activity of the natural kind, Gaza’s use of “victus” connotes nourishment. So, where the pre-Gaza Latin translations rendered “*bios*” literally, as “vite,” Gaza interprets Aristotle here to mean life vis-à-vis nourishment, or food.<fnref n="5" />

<footnote n="5">⁵ Whereas *vita* comes up as the first definition of “life” in a Latin dictionary, “*victus*” appears 10th. https://www.latin-english.com/english/life/3/.</footnote>
Olores etiam palmipedes sunt, & apud lacus paludesque vivunt nec probitate victus, morum, prolis, senectutis vacant. (Vat. lat. 2094, f. 140v)

Nourishment, of course, applies to both plants and animals, and hence is too general for what “life” means especially for animals and properly for swans.

Translations of the *HA* into English include Thomas Taylor (1809), Richard Cresswell (1862), Sir D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1910), and David Balme (1991). Cresswell explains in his 1897 preface that the translation has been prepared from Schneider's text and that he has consistently referred to Camus's French, Strack's German, and to Taylor's English translations in completing his own (Aristotle 1897: iii). He also keeps Gaza's book numbers, so the chapter on sea birds is found at his book 9 chapter 13:

> The swan also is web-footed, and lives in ponds and marshes. Its manner of life and disposition is good, and so is its mode of rearing their young and of old age. (Aristotle 1897: 244)

Thompson, famously noting in his preface that Aristotle's natural philosophy is the basis for the rest of his works (Aristotle 1910, vii), retains Gaza's book organization and renders the sea bird passages:

> Swans are web-footed, and live near pools and marshes; they find their food with ease, are good-tempered, are fond of their young, and live to a green old age. (Aristotle 1910)

Thus, he retains Gaza's suggestion that εὐβίοτος pertains especially to nutritive life. Thompson's table of contents rightly describes book 8 as concerned with animal psychology, in particular eating habits. And book 9, according to Thompson, continues discussing animal psychology, now concerning habits and intelligence. Yet, while Thompson states the correct organization of theme for books 7 and 8/Gaza's 8 and 9, he still translates εὐβίοτος in book 9 as having to do with nourishment, following Gaza's Latin. This is the case despite that εὐβίοτος does not occur in book 7/8, the book expressly dealing with eating and feeding habits.

Even in the recent publication of a commentary on these books, in band 16 of the preeminent series *Aristoteles Werke* in Deutscher Übersetzung, Stefan Schnieders explains εὐβίοτος as: “weiß sich seinen Lebensunterhalt gut zu verschaffen” (694, referred from 615a28 because the context here is said to be better) “knows how to make a living” or “knows how to secure livelihood”. Here, post Balme’s 20th century translation, we see the misunderstanding of εὐβίοτος as descriptive of the bird’s ability to meet basic needs, “Lebensunterhalt”.

We can see a similar misunderstanding of εὐβίοτος regarding the anthus's (pipit's) life in some translations of ἔχει δὲ τὴν χρόαν καλὴν καὶ ἔστιν εὐβίοτον (615a28).
<table><tr><td>Moerbeke:</td><td>colore e boe vita</td></tr><tr><td>Trebizond:</td><td>Qu(a)e et Colore Pulcra est & victum facile acquirit</td></tr><tr><td>Gaza:</td><td>cui color pulcher, & vita commoda</td></tr><tr><td>Thompson:</td><td>the plumage of this bird is pretty, and it finds its food with ease.</td></tr><tr><td>Cresswell:</td><td>its color is beautiful and its mode of life good.</td></tr><tr><td>Balme:</td><td>its coloring is beautiful and it lives well</td></tr></table>

Whereas Moerbeke translates the Greek literally, Trebizond and Gaza take liberties with translation.¹¹ Trebizond renders εὐβίοτον as “victum facile acquirit,” at best, adding an active verb to “way of life,” so that Aristotle is communicating that swans successfully *acquire* their way of life, or are capable of sustaining their lives—, but at worst, implying that a *good life* for swans means *acquiring sustenance for life, or nourishment*. Following Trebizond, Gaza chooses an alternative way of rendering εὐβίοτον here with “vita commoda.” While Gaza’s choice does describe a “good” life, commoda also intimates perhaps more than what Aristotle intended to convey. It suggests convenience and comfort, which does not necessarily accompany a “good life.” It goes beyond Aristotle’s meaning in using the prefix *eu* in *eubiotos*.

Considering Aristotle’s account of the nature of a natural being in *Physics* II, the bird’s εὐβίοτος can hardly focus just on their ability to eat. What is most characteristic for the life of all animals for Aristotle is sense perception. This more advanced capacity of the sensitive soul for animals goes well beyond the base power of nutrition. Acquiring sufficient food would be a necessary component of a good animal life, but surely not its sufficient condition.

Why might Trebizond, Gaza, and future translators, e.g., scholars like Thompson, have missed this? One possibility is that their translations were based on a preconceived idea about what it would mean for an animal to live well. Such liberty with translation may mirror liberties taken with animal illustrations in illuminated manuscripts of Aristotle's *De Animalibus*. According to Camille, animals depicted in Oxford MS 271: (1) do not match Aristotle's descriptions, (2) there is evidence of moralizing and Christian symbolism in the animal illustrations, and (3) animals described by Aristotle, but not part of the Christian bestiary, e.g., insects and birds, do not appear in the MS. These indicate some presupposition and bias in reading Aristotle's text. Camille 1999: 369-370 comments on such a bias in Medieval illustrators of *De animalibus*: “One aspect of Aristotle’s biology which was disturbing to many Christian commentators was his viewing humans and animals as part of the same continuum, which of course Christianity could not accept, viewing the animal world as inherently inferior but also as a mirror for man.” The Christian stewards of Aristotle’s texts perhaps needed to make sense of Aristotle’s zoology in the context of their own system of belief.
It further might be the case that both Trebizond's and Gaza's rendering of εὐβίοτος as "victum facile acquirit," and "probitate victus"/"vita commoda," respectively, along with their translations' less felicitous adherence to the Greek and Arabic, misled some later scholars. In Thompson's English translation, which was quite influential at least prior to Balme's, we see this to such a degree that what was Aristotle's original intent was lost. Some readers of these early modern and modern translations thus came to understand the bird life as well, *eu*, when the bird is eating enough, effectively dismissing the key ways birds function in their lives, and should be described as εὐβίοτος.

A final consideration is the condition of the manuscript with which translators like Trebizond and Gaza were working. In his preface to his translation of *De Animalibus*, Gaza writes, "Another cause of my labor was that the Greek manuscripts we have of the books called *On Animals* are very seriously flawed, owing either to the scribes or to that accident about which we read in Strabo the geographer" (Beullens and Gotthelf 2007: 472).<fnref n="6" /> In addition to the flaws of the manuscript(s) is the additional issue that, as Berger 2005: 2 states about the history of the text of the *HA*: "The oldest handwritten fragment of the *Historia Animalium* comes from the Arabic translation from the 9th century, which is already separated from the author by more than one thousand years" (my translation).

Whether on account of scholarly bias, especially anthropocentric bias, a translation and commentary tradition begun using a flawed early modern rendering of a text already quite removed from its author, and from the author's original intent, Aristotle's use of εὐβίοτος has been mistranslated. My discussion supports David Balme's assessment that εὐβίοτος does not mean "feeding well," but "living well": "εὐβίοτος is applied to birds several times in *HA* VIII (IX). It is coupled with beauty, song, happiness, pleasing behavior, and seems to denote more than an easy food-supply; it suggests that the bird lives successfully in its surroundings. The opposite is not δυσβίοτος (living in hardship) but κακόβιος (living poorly, 616b31, 619a2)" (Aristotle 1991: 227 note a). Balme's contrast between living *dus* and *kako* is helpful; εὐβίοτος is not the result of plentiful resources, contra *dus*. Rather, it is the fulfilment of what is natural for the kind, doing it well, rather than poorly. The birds are able to exercise their ability in a conducive habitat. This aligns with James Lennox's analysis that an animal's βίος is for Aristotle a unity, not reducible to any single activity (Lennox 2010: 337)—or kind of activity— in which an animal engages. In short, εὐβίοτος would mean that birds are able to live in

<footnote n="6">⁶ See Beullens and Gotthelf 2007: 471-472 for further details about the condition of the Greek manuscripts and Gaza's impositions on Aristotle's texts.</footnote>
accordance with their entire *telos*, or natural purpose, which means more than simply eating
well.<fnref n="7" />

Chelsea C. Harry

*Southern Connecticut State University*

*Bibliography*

Aristotle. 1897. *Aristotle's History of Animals in Ten Books* trans. by Richard Cresswell. London: George Bell and Sons.

Aristotle. 1991. *History of Animals*. Trans. D.M. Balme and A.L. Peck. Loeb Classical Library IX-XI. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Aristotle. *De Animalibus*. Trans. Gazēs, Theodōros, Vat. lat. 2094, f. 140v.

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Balme, D.M. 1985. "Arist. HA Book Ten," in *Aristoteles—Werk und Wirkung* (essays presented to P. Moraux) Berlin I. 191-206.

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Filius, L.S. 2018. *The Arabic Version of Aristotle's Historia Animalium Book I-X of Kitāb al-Hayawān*. Reihe: Aristoteles Semitico-Latinus Band 23. Leiden: Brill.

Lennox, James. 2010. "Bios and Explanatory Unity in Aristotle" in *Definition in Ancient Philosophy* edited by David Charles. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Schnieders, Stefan. 2020. *Aristoteles Historia animalium: Buch VIII und IX, Zoologische Schriften I Aristoteles Werke in Deutscher Uebersetzung*. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Van der Eijk, P. 1999. On Sterility ('HA X'), A Medical Work by Aristotle? *The Classical Quarterly*, 49(2), 490-502.

<footnote n="7">⁷ I am grateful to Pieter Beullens and Ronald Polansky for helpful comments on the manuscript.</footnote>