A History of Magic and Experimental Science, Volume 2 (of 2): During the First Thirteen Centuries of Our EraThorndike, Lynn
History
A History of Magic and Experimental Science, Volume 2 (of 2): During the First Thirteen Centuries of Our Era
Thorndike, Lynn
Magic -- History; Science -- History
In the other story a Magus is represented in a much more favorable
light than magicians generally were; he seems to represent rather one
of the Persian sages. He was traveling on a mule with provisions and
met a Jew traveling on foot. Their talk soon turned to their respective
religions and moral standards. The Magus professed altruism; the Jew
was inclined to get the better of all men except Jews. When these
principles had been stated, the Jew requested the Magus, since he
professed to observe the law of love, to dismount and let him ride
the mule. No sooner had this been done than the Jew, true to his law
of selfishness and hate, made off with both mule and provisions. This
misfortune did not lead the Magus to lose his faith in God, however,
and as he plodded along he by and by came again upon the Jew who had
fallen off the mule and broken his neck. The Magus then mercifully
brought the Jew to the nearest town where he died, while the king of
the country made the Magus one of his trusted ministers of state.[875]
FOOTNOTES:
[755] See Roger Bacon’s allusion to this passage in F. A. Gasquet, “An
Unpublished Fragment of a Work by Roger Bacon,” in EHR, XII (1897), p.
502.
[756] Ch. Gidel, _La Légende d’Aristote au moyen âge_, in _Assoc.
des Études Grecques_, (1874), pp. 285-332, except for the
Pseudo-Callisthenes uses only the French vernacular literature or
popular legends concerning Aristotle. Similar in scope is W. Hertz,
_Aristoteles in den Alexanderdichtungen des Mittelalters_, in _Abhandl.
d. philos-philol. Classe d. k. bayr. Akad. d. Wiss._, XIX (1892) 1-103;
revised in W. Hertz, _Gesammelte Abhandlungen_, 1905, 1-155.
[757] _De naturis rerum_, II, 189.
[758] _Compendium Studii Philosophiae_, ed. Brewer, (1859), p. 473.
[759] It was translated into Arabic about 840 A. D.; an interpolated
Latin paraphrase of it was published at Rome in 1519, by Pietro Niccolo
de’ Castellani,--_Sapientissimi Aristotelis Stagiritae Theologia sive
mistica philosophia, secundum Aegyptios noviter reperta et in latinam
castigatissime redacta_; a French version appeared at Paris in 1572
(Carra de Vaux, _Avicenne_, p. 74). F. Dieterici translated it from
Arabic into German in 1883, after publishing the Arabic text for the
first time in 1882. For divergences between this Arabic text and the
Latin one of 1519, and citation of Baumgartner that the _Theology_ was
known in Latin translation as early as 1200, see Grabmann (1916), pp.
245-7.
[760] Indeed Carra de Vaux, _Avicenne_, p. 73, says, “Tout un livre qui
ne contient en réalité que des extraits des Ennéades IV à VI de Plotin.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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