The scope of this study

This study makes no pretensions to being a comprehensive survey of medieval commentaries on the Politics; it is confined to a few of the known commentaries on Moerbeke's translation, all dated to the late thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries. Within this narrow range, it aims to discuss, firstly, how close the earliest commentaries, those of Albert the Great and of Thomas Aquinas with the Continuation by Peter of Auvergne, came to explaining Aristotle's meaning accurately and, secondly, what motives later commentators had in writing, what arguments they considered valid, and how far, if at all, their own views can be inferred from what they wrote. To make some useful comparison between the texts, I shall, after a few introductory remarks on each commentary, concentrate on what each scholar made of Aristotle's arguments for the proposition that the multitude of freemen in a state should participate in its political life (Politics III, 1281b and 1282a). Because they recognised its importance, all the commentators expanded, illustrated, or interpreted this passage in a way which brings out their individual characters and sometimes their political ideas.

William of Moerbeke's translation

The exact date at which Moerbeke finished his translation of the Politics is still uncertain, but it was probably around 1260. Moerbeke tried to render Aristotle's meaning without the slightest interpretation of his own – an aim which he believed could be best fulfilled by translating word for word, preserving the Greek word order, some Greek double negatives, and even an occasional Greek term – e.g., ‘epikeiea’ – for which there was no exact Latin equivalent.