Jean de Stobée

Jean de Stobée , Latinized in Joannes Stobæus , native of Stobi (Macedonia), is a doxographe and Byzantine compiler of the Ve century of our era. Its anthology bequeathed us exclusive fragments of certain Greek authors, like Euripide.

Biography

In the absence of precise testimony, the list of the authors quoted by Stobée leads the editors to locate the life of this compiler at the Ve century of our era. The absence of allusion to Christianity in the writings of Stobée also supported the assumption according to which it would have been pagan or atheistic.

Works

In a letter of Stobée to his Septimius son, lost today but whose conclusion was reproduced by Photius in its Bibliotheca , the author teaches us that it composed a work in two volumes and four books. This letter praised the merits of philosophy and the philosophical schools.

In the manuscripts which reached us, we do not have any more but three books:

Eclogæ physicæ and ethicæ . This collection of extracts frequently betrays the thought of the schools of origin, mixing the doctrines of the Ionian thinkers and comparing rather largely the Platonisme to the Pythagorisme.
Florilegium or Sermones , seems to compose an amalgam of what formed the last two books of the treaty of Stobée.

The poor quality of the contents and the nonconformity of our manuscripts in the plan of origin led criticisms to conclude that the text of the manuscripts is only one summary of the treaty of Stobée, composed by a Byzantine compiler very posterior with Stobée itself.

The matter of Stobée is however quite apparent beginning with the end. In original work,

the first book, Eclogæ physicæ or Mixtures of physics , was devoted to this branch of the philosophy which the old authors devoted to the explanation of the natural phenomena, i.e. nonhuman. For a good part of this book and following, Stobée drew from works of the philosopher peripatetician Aetius and of Didymus Chalcenterus.
the third and fourth books, as well as a good part of the second, were devoted to ethics. We do not have any more that one passage of the second book; the third treated virtues and defects, opposite two by two; the fourth, of more general ethical questions and policies, with frequent quotations of authors to show for and against per pairs of consecutive chapters.

On the whole, Stobée quotes more than 500 authors, while generally starting with the poets, continuing by the historians, the speakers, the philosophers and the doctors. We thus owe him the only known fragments of certain playwrights, in particular Euripide. It also wrote several famous passages on the Stoïcisme.

References

Stobée in L ''' Appendix '' of the “'' Histoire of the Greek literature ''” of Alexis_Pierron (1875).
Hermes Trismégiste, Corpus hermeticum . Volume 3, Fragments extracted from Stobée I-XXII; ED. and tr. Andre-Jean Festugière. Paris: beautiful Letters, 1954. (Collection of the Universities of France). ISBN 2-251-00137-9.
Hermes Trismégiste, Corpus hermeticum . Volume 4, Fragments extracted from Stobée XXIII-XXIX. Various fragments; ED. and tr. Andre-Jean Festugière. Paris: beautiful Letters, 1954. (Collection of the Universities of France). ISBN 2-251-00138-7.

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