The Fragments of Phanias of Eresus: Before and After Wehrli

It is nearly two hundred years since, for the first time, A. Voisin collected and discussed the fragments of the Peripatetic Phanias of Eresus in his Diatribe de Phania Eresio, philosopho Peripatetico, published in Ghent in 1824. ¹ The year after the publication of Voisin’s Diatribe, Johan Friedrich Ebert devoted some pages to Phanias in his Dissertationes Siculae (1825). Some twenty years later (1848), the fragments of Phanias were again collected in the second volume of the Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum of C. Müller. The first modern edition was, however, that of F. Wehrli, who devoted the first part of the ninth volume of the Schule des Aristoteles to Phanias (1957/1969). In the almost one hundred years that separate Müller’s collection from that of Wehrli there was the article “Phainias aus Eresos” by R. Laqueur for the Realencyclopädie of Pauly and Wissowa (1938). ² Wehrli also wrote, some years later (1983), a brief profile of the philosopher for the updating of Ueberweg’s Grundriss der Geschichte der 148Philosophie, revised by G. Wöhrle (2004). ³ In the meantime, Johannes Engels published a new (partial) collection of fragments of Phanias in Jacoby’s Fragmente der griechischen Historiker Continued (1998). ⁴ Finally, the article by Jean-Pierre Schneider for the Dictionnaire des Philosophes Antiques of R. Goulet should be noted. ⁵