Le commentaire littérale de la Rhétorique d’Aristote par Gilles de Rome (1272-73)

While the logical works of Aristotle had tradition of commentary in the universities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Aristotle’s Rhetoric was an almost unknown work when Giles of Rome, a young augustinian monk, was asked to write a commentary on it (1272-73). Later he also commented on Sophistical Refutations and Posterior Analytics; but while in these latter cases Giles could rely on previous models and a number of commentaries on these texts, in the case of Aristotle’s Rhetoric he had almost no tools that could help him in the very difficult task of explaining and discuss- ing this text. The method of his commentary, as in all of his Aristotelian commentaries, conforms to the genre of the literal commentary (sententia): he first proposes a division of the text (diuisio textus), which shows its logical structure; he then proceeds to the literal explanation of the text (expositio litterae); finally, he often adds discussions of specific problems, calling them notabilia (short annotations) or declarationes (shorter or longer digressions or examinations of specific problems). These declarationes are occur mainly in the commentary of the first and second Books of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. In this paper, I show some examples of the kind of work Giles carried out on the text of Aristotle’s Latin translation (made by William de Moerbeke a few years before – about 1269). Giles uses three basic operations for explaining the meaning of the text: terminological elucidation ; clarification of the syntax (through simple trans- position or more often by reorganizing whole phrases); correction of the text (often through a comparison with other translations and sometimes with other copies of William’s translation).