ABSTRACT
This chapter contains two zoological works of Aristotle, De partibus animalium and De generatione animalium, in the translations of Theodore Gaza, who dedicated the ensemble De animalibus to Pope Sixtus IV. The only surviving classical reference to Aristotle as the scribe of nature is found in the fragments of the attack on the philosopher by the second-century Platonist Atticus, preserved in the Praeparatio Evangelica of the fourth-century Church Father Eusebius of Caesarea. In the Middle Ages, Western scholars could read in Latin translation the twelfth-century Arab commentator Averroes, who apotheosised Aristotle as ‘the rule in nature’. Gaza’s dedication of De animalibus to Sixtus spawned several urban legends. In the mid-sixteenth century Pierio Valeriano and Paolo Giovio each had stories to tell.
