A Rediscovered Categories Commentary

This article is a preliminary edition — introduction, text, translation, commentary — of a previously unknown commentary on Aristotle’s Categories, recently discovered in the Archimedes Palimpsest. The two lemmas covered (both incompletely) in the fourteen surviving pages are 1a20-b15, concerning the distinction between ‘said of a subject’ and ‘in a subject’, and 1b16-24, where Aristotle maintains that different genera are divided by different differentiae. By extrapolating from this sample, the commentary can be inferred to have been considerably longer than the longest Categories commentary to survive intact, that of Simplicius. On this and other grounds, we argue that it is probably a fragment of Porphyry’s monumental lost commentary, the Ad Gedalium. A prominent feature of the new commentary is its extensive concentration on resolving puzzles raised against the Categories. Some of the material is completely absent from the remainder of the surviving Categories tradition. The earlier commentators and critics cited by name in it are Andronicus, Boethus, Nicostratus and Herminus.