To this day, the way the texts of the moral philosopher Democritus of Abdera (4th/5th century BC) have come down to us constitutes a mystery: While all traces of his original writings on ethics disappear as early as the beginning of the Time of the Emperors, an indirect tradition reappears, as it were abruptly, in Late Antiquity. The approximately 300 text fragments preserved in the form of text collections from Late Antiquity (Ps.-Democrates, Stobaios) and attributed to Democritus predominantly take the form of a sententious single sentence (Greek: gnome), and they form the core of the fragments from Democritus which constitute the authoritative canon established by Diels (Fragments of Presocratic Philosophers, ch. 68).The author of the study entitled Gnomica Democritea first sets out to put the general authenticity of the gnomica as postulated by Diels and many others on a new footing by demonstrating connections, as far as content and linguistic form are concerned, between the sparse literary fragments from original writings and the heteronomous gnomological tradition, and, in the course of this, defines more precisely the term “authenticity”: While the gnomic sentences may indirectly be based on a genuine text tradition, the form of the text was subject to manifold changes in the course of the long history of their reception. During this process, the meaning was frequently banalised or reinterpreted in the vein of popular philosophic ideas. In some cases it is possible to retrace such phenomena of reception amid the ruins of the gnomological tradition; once in a while there is even the chance to re-establish the original context, discover text variants and new fragments. Insight into the processes and the motivations of the gnomological transformation does not only lead to modifications, in some places, of Diels’ canon but, in addition, facilitates a more differentiated assessment of the “fragments” transmitted within the gnomic tradition.Since it has been proven that not only the sources from Late Antiquity, but also the great Byzantine florilegia are based on older and sometimes lost models and thus are part of a continual tradition reaching back to Antiquity, the author, in the main body of his study, assesses the importance for Democritus of the later tradition (starting from the 6th century) which so far has been ignored; a florilegium called Corpus Parisinum (9th century), which is of outstanding importance for the history of this text tradition, constitutes the centre-piece of the study. On the basis of a meticulous analysis of the tradition, origin and compilatory structure of this collection, its sources and descendants, the erratic ways of tradition of the Democritea from Late Antiquity up to the height of the Middle Ages as well as the successive manipulations and mistakes are traced with unprecedented precision.Since an approach concentrating purely on authorship cannot suffice to understand the complex tradition of the gnomological sources and their relations, the relevant compilations in their entirety had to be studied as compositional entities. Owing to the wide investigative scope of this approach, which combines traditional philological methods with an innovative analysis of structure und composition, it was possible to go beyond the “index fossil” of Democritus and arrive at entirely new and fundamental insight about the Corpus Parisinum and the environment of its tradition as well as the underlying methods and concepts of the compilers. weiterlesen