Talk:Aesara

WikiProject class rating

This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as stub, and the rating on other projects was brought up to Stub class. BetacommandBot 03:43, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Authorship attribution

we should absolutely discuss the work "on human nature" on this page, as it is frequently attributed to Aesara, but the current state of this page is absolutely too enthusiastic about doing so - almost all pythagorean literature is generally considered pseudynomous, and this work is attributed to Aresas in the editio princeps of Stobaeus, not Aesara, so definitively ascribing it to her is irresponsible.

At some point I wonder if we shouldn't deprecate Waithe as a source - I appreciate what she was trying to do but she is an amateur historian with a background in philosophy, who uses motivated reasoning to come to here preferred conclusions and so will misrepresent scholarly consensus and simply ignore anything that challenges the ascription of any work to a woman. Her conclusions shouldn't be stated in wikivoice, and we should corroborate them and any who directly cite them with the work of other sources with some familiarity in the field. - car chasm (talk) 02:31, 21 May 2023 (UTC)

Existence

It's not obvious if there's evidence beyond Stobaeus of her existence. Eg see this skeptical review of a book by Pomeroy that incudes Aesara. I don't know enough to calculate due weight, but it seems that the page should not take her existence as a given.Ian McDonald (talk) 20:25, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

It's a weird situation: Plant and Pomeroy both say that Aesara is a woman and the argument that she is not is based on an emendation of Stobaeus' text; the BMCR review says that this is not true and that in fact it is reading Aesara as a woman which requires emending the text! Brill's New Pauly doesn't seem to mention Aesara at all; the Oxford Classical Dictionary says that On Human Nature is "possibly" attributed to Aesara. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 22:20, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

I dug into this a bit further than above and it's worse than I first thought, there doesn't seem to be any proof of the existence of Aesara at all. It looks like the critical edition of the text by Wachsmuth, which Wachsmuth says in the apparatus is an emendation! So the apparent claim by Plant and Pomeroy that this is not an emendation would appear to be verifiably false.

As also noted in the review, The "Aesara" who is a daughter of pythagoras that is supposedly mentioned in Photius, which Wachsmuth justifies his own with, is itself an emendation which Wachsmuth credits to Richard Bentley(?), based on line 36 of the Greek which reads "Σαρ́α". So it would seem "Aesara" has been invented out of thin air from two different manuscript emendations, there isn't definitive evidence in either Stobaeus or Photius of her existence. - car chasm (talk) 01:02, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

I've now stubbed the article, quite frankly I don't think Plant, Pomeroy, or Waithe are engaged in scholarship here; the arguments that there's no reason to think that the extract we have wasn't rewritten (which would let it be older than the 4th century) or that the mere attribution itself proves there really was an Aesara of Lucania would both strain credulity even if there was any attestation of her existence whatsoever. I checked some more sources as well - Charles Kahn's "Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans" and Leonid Zhmud's "Pythagoras and the Early Pythagoreans" similarly don't mention her at all. - car chasm (talk) 01:23, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

Replying to the entire thread.

You're discussing an issue at the heart of Ancient history (understood as the work of historians specializing in the Ancient World, but also classicists and historians of Ancient Philosophy (amongst others)). Establishing the existence and authorship of any figure beyond the household names (but including some of those) is incredibly difficult and often comes down to scholarly disputes concerning manuscript examination well beyond the apparent purview of anyone in this Talk section.

Material evidence for the existence of figures in classical Greece is scant to begin with—practically none of it (at least the texts) is available to us in the form of contemporary artifacts, but come from quotations and reproductions by authors removed by centuries (and authors who did not answer to 20th century standards for good historical scholarship). But this is compounded by difficulties such as manuscript transmission. The problems here are not simply grounded in transcription error (though this is a serious problem), but based on which texts could be preserved across millennia. Women authors were omitted from such transmissions (and there were certainly fewer literate women in the Ancient world to begin with). This makes attribution to women authors a more nuanced task for modern scholars, and one that requires careful consideration of the process of erasure.

I made changes to the article to better reflect the disputed authorship without adding to the compounding problems of erasure (though a dedicated section on the page would be welcome). Below, I offer some clarification on the issue in addition to corrections on some points made in this Talk thread.

A book review is not a scholarly article, but the reviewer brings up reasonable points. Specifically, he notes that the critical apparatus to the Greek text in Thesleff's 1963 source book presents a reasonable challenge to the attribution (and changes the attribution on this evidence).* Thesleff prefers the observations made by two previous scholars (one from the 30's and another from the 16th Century), where they believe a mistake must have been made at some point in the transmission of the manuscript. That is, in all manuscripts being transcribed by Thesleff, the attribution is to Aesara. The argument for a mistake by a scribe in the manuscript transmission (at some point in the previous thousand or so years) is based on the declension of the Greek "Pythagorean" where Stobeaus refers to the "Pythagorean Aesara of Lucania." By itself, one could claim that the scribal error is made in the transmission of Πυθαγορείου and not Αἰσάρας. That said, it is further suggested that there are no other mentions of a person named Aesara (but see above), which is where the discussion of "Σάρα in Photius’ survey of Pythagoras’ life," comes in (which is misunderstood in the Talk above). Aesara is not "made up out of thin air," it is in the manuscripts of Stobeaus. The emendation in Photius is a counterargument to claims that Aesara is mentioned elsewhere.

• You can look at Thesleff's short footnote in An Introduction To The Pythagorean Writings of The Hellenistic Period pp.48-9 of the Greek section.

P0$t(m0dem)15t (talk) 16:45, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

It’s worth noting that the previous edit to this page (where Aesara’s existence and authorship is immediately questioned) was authored by a user who has also worked on the Diotogenes page. On the page, Diotogenes is referred to as a Neopythagorean philosopher on the basis of fragments preserved in Stobaeus. The second paragraph states that the “details of Diotogenes' life are unknown, and even his name is uncertain, as the name 'Diotogenes' is otherwise unattested.

This strikes me as inconsistent. P0$t(m0dem)15t (talk) 17:08, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

Just dropping in briefly to note that a quick search reveals a recent article in the Journal of Hellenic Studies ("Aesara on human nature: the tripartition of the soul revisited") which would probably be useful to anyone looking to really work on this article. The first section of that article is an overview of the Aesara/Aresas debate. The most salient quotes: most scholars now tend to follow the manuscript tradition and ascribe the text to a female author named Aesara and the feminine name Aesara has stronger manuscript support. Moreover, having a lesser-known female author seems to be the lectio difficilior. They also observe that most allegedly Pythagorean texts were not written by the attributed author, and so whether the text was attributed to Aesara in antiquity is a separate question to whether it was written by a woman. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 18:16, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

Thank you! P0$t(m0dem)15t (talk) 20:13, 3 July 2025 (UTC)