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]
[755] See Roger Bacon’s allusion to this passage in F. A. Gasquet, “An Unpublished Fragment of a Work by Roger Bacon,” in EHR, XII (1897), p. 502.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.”
[761] See Arundel MS 165, 14th century. On the general subject of the Pseudo-Aristotelian literature the reader may consult V. Rose, Aristoteles Pseudepigraphus, and De ordine et auctoritate librorum Aristotelis; Munk’s article “Aristote” in La France littéraire; Schwab, Bibliographie d’Aristote, Paris, 1896; and R. Shute, History of the Aristotelian Writings, Oxford, 1888. It is, however, a difficult subject and for the middle ages at least has not been satisfactorily investigated. Grabmann (1916) devotes only a page or two of supplement to it; see pp. 248-51. A work on Aristotle in the middle ages, announced in 1904 by G. H. Luquet, seems not to have appeared.
[762] Sloane 2030, fols. 110-13.
[763] Hammer-Jensen, Das sogenannte IV Buch der Meteorologie des Aristoteles, in Hermes, vol. 50 (1915) pp. 113-36, argues that its teachings differ from those of Aristotle and assigns it to Strato, his younger contemporary. Not content with this thesis, which is easier to suggest than to prove, Hammer-Jensen contends that it was a work of Strato’s youth and that it profoundly influenced Aristotle himself in his last works. “The convenient Strato!” as he is called by Loveday and Forster in the preface to their translation of De coloribus (1913) vol. VI of The Works of Aristotle translated into English under the editorship of W. D. Ross.