# Nicomachean Ethics

- id: nicomachean-ethics
- original title: Ἠθικὰ Νικομάχεια / Ethika Nikomacheia
- author: Aristotle
- language: Greek
- composed: c. 340 BCE, Athens
- field: philosophy

Aristotle's lectures on the good life, which entered Arabic in the Hunayn workshop's orbit and reached complete Latin through a bishop of Lincoln.

## The chain

- **c. 870–910** Greek -> Arabic, translation [probable]
  Ishaq ibn Hunayn (translator), Ustath (translator), Baghdad
  The Arabic Ethics survives in one Fez manuscript whose credits are composite: Books I-IV are Ishaq ibn Hunayn's, Books V-X belong to the earlier Ustath of al-Kindi's circle. The existence is attested; the seams are what scholarship keeps relitigating.
  Evidence: Anna A. Akasoy and Alexander Fidora (eds.) 2005 (Dunlop's account of the attribution problem)
- **c. 1246–1247** Greek -> Latin, translation [attested]
  Robert Grosseteste (translator), Oxford
  The first complete Latin Ethics to survive and circulate, made from the Greek with a team of helpers and accompanying Greek commentaries: a bishop running a translation workshop between diocesan duties. A Toledo rival saluted him in a preface as 'Robert of the Big Head but the exquisite intellect'.
  Evidence: Bernard G. Dod 1982
- **1926** Greek -> English, translation [attested]
  Harris Rackham (translator), London
  The Loeb English; the text carried in this library.
  Evidence: Harris Rackham 1926; Thothica 2026

## Worth knowing

The Arabic Ethics survives in a single Fez manuscript, its translator credits tangled enough that scholarship still argues over which books are Ishaq ibn Hunayn's and which belong to the older Ustath tradition. The Latin West read fragments (the Ethica vetus and nova) until Robert Grosseteste produced the first complete translation from the Greek around 1246-47. The Loeb English of Harris Rackham is the one this library carries.

## Sources

- Anna A. Akasoy and Alexander Fidora (eds.), with D. M. Dunlop (2005). The Arabic Version of the Nicomachean Ethics. Brill.
- Bernard G. Dod (1982). Aristoteles latinus, in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy. Cambridge University Press.

Confidence grades: attested (named in the medieval record or settled in scholarship), probable (standard view with real uncertainty), disputed (scholars disagree).