The Presocratics in the Herculaneum Papyri

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Georg Wöhrle, since 1/2017
• Subject Area: Greek and Latin Philology ; History of Philosophy
• Term: from 2015 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 271380416

The project aims to create a Corpus Praesocraticorum Herculanense (CPH), i.e. the first comprehensive collection of the evidence for Presocratic philosophers contained in the Herculaneum papyri. The CPH will include a critical edition preceded by a philosophical introduction and accompanied by an English translation and a commentary. In the renowned Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (and, even before, in the Doxographi Graeci) Hermann Diels included altogether 60 Herculanean sources spread over a list of 24 Presocratic authors. The passages at issue concerned only two pieces of evidence for Democritus in Epicurus' masterpiece On Nature, three testimonia for Empedocles and one for Democritus in Demetrius Laco's works contained in PHerc. 1012 (Opus incertum) and PHerc. 1014 (On Poems, Book 2) respectively, but above all a very large number of testimonia in several works by Philodemus of Gadara (especially in his treatise On Piety). Nowadays, the Presocratic doxography can be greatly enriched by more reliable editions of Herculanean texts. As a matter of fact, Diels relied on editions of Herculanean texts which were not principally founded on autopsy of the original manuscripts and, even when this was the case, the previous editors did not dispose of any modern technology (viz. microscopes and multispectral images) for doing this successfully. This fault caused him, on the one hand, to exclude from his collection some actual Presocratic evidence and to include in it, on the other, some Herculanean texts having nothing to do with the Presocratics. In fact, if one considers fragments, doxographical information, reminiscences and simple name quotations, the Herculanean testimonia for Presocratic philosophers (ca. 180 pieces of evidence) almost triples the Diels-Kranz selection. This situation makes clear the strong impact that a comprehensive edition of them could have for a new collection of the Presocratics' fragments and for a better understanding of the Epicurean judgment on Presocratic physics, cosmology, ethics and theology. The project has a both papyrological and philosophical purpose. The former consists in enhancing our knowledge of Presocratic thought by substituting and integrating the relevant Herculanean sections of the Diels-Kranz collection, the latter deals for the first time in a systematic way with the complex relationship between Presocratic philosophy and Epicureanism.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Christian Vassallo, until 1/2017