L'épître dédicatoire de la Rhétorique à Alexandre

In contrast with pieces of work included in the corpus of Aristotle's works whose authenticity remains uncertain - such as the De mundo, that still until today generates passionate debates -, the Rhetoric for Alexander is very clearly a pseudo-Aristotelian text. Not only do we have very strong arguments against the philosopher's paternity, but we also have an alternative attribution: most specialists nowadays tend to apply it to the rhetor and historian Anaximenes Lampsacenus. Erasmus himself had already suspected that the treatise was not authentic. Therefore, it is not new to say that the dedicatory letter, that caused the admission of the treatise into the Aristotelian corpus, is a forgery. However, this "evidence" has prevented any proper and detailed analysis of the letter, that is most usually considered as "poor", to be performed. Nevertheless, however awkward he was, the forger believed that he would be able to trick people, and indeed he did since nearly all the available medieval copies consider without any discussion that this piece was written by Aristotle. For this reason, having summarized which reasons oppose the attribution of the Rhetoric for Alexander to Aristotle, we would like to hold an inquiry - based on an analysis of the text itself - on the strategy of the forger, in order to draw hypotheses regarding his motivations, his cultural environment and his epoch. We will end up analyzing the textual consequences of the manœuver. Indeed, the admission of the treatise into the corpus of Aristotle did cause a number of modifications whose aim was to harmonize its doctrine with that of his presumed author. This phenomenon - whether it was contemporaneous of the forgery or occurred later - tended to increase the plausibility of the false attribution, and is likely to have played a role in its success

Humanities · Classical Antiquity Studies · Historical and Literary Studies · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy