ABSTRACT
In a number of recent articles I have been investigating different aspects of the source criticism of Arabic texts transmitting Greek material and of their immediate predecessors, Greek texts from the late Alexandrian period dealing with the history of philosophy. Specifically, I have been trying to argue that the former are frequently extant in a form that cannot be taken at face value to reflect the Greek original because they underwent alterations that can be detected only by first tracing their transmission back to their point of entry into Arabic and thence into Greek, and that the latter display a schematized conception of the history of philosophy which cannot be taken literally because its purpose, whatever else it might have been, was not to provide objective information on the subject. It is becoming increasingly apparent that these texts exhibit a certain tendentiousness, which source criticism will have to address and correct before they can yield any information that will be useful in areas other than the study of the particular text involved. 1 This tendentiousness is not uniform or homogeneous in all these texts, and the task that lies ahead is to specify and define its various aspects for the different periods and authors. Here I would like to contribute some further evidence toward that goal, by dealing with a text about Theophrastus.
