Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics

The Medieval Latin Phase (12th – 13th Century)

Before the mid-13th century, the West possessed only fragments of the Ethics. These early, anonymous translations from the Greek are categorized by scholars as:

Ethica Vetus (“Old Ethics”): A 12th-century translation covering only Books II and III.

Ethica Nova (“New Ethics”): A early 13th-century translation consisting primarily of Book I.

The Grosseteste Translation (c. 1246–1248): The first complete translation of all ten books from Greek into Latin was produced by Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln. Grosseteste’s version was a literal, “word-for-word” (de verbo ad verbum) translation. He also translated the accompanying Greek scholia (commentaries), providing the first comprehensive apparatus for Western scholars like Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas.

 The Renaissance Humanist Revisions (15th Century)

Humanists criticized the “barbarous” and overly literal Latin of the medieval period, seeking a style that reflected Aristotle’s original elegance.

Leonardo Bruni (1416/17): Bruni produced a new Latin translation aimed at “Ciceronian” clarity. He famously argued in De interpretatione recta that a translator must understand the aesthetic and rhetorical power of the source language, not just the literal meaning.

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Leonardo Bruni. Edited by Hans Baron. In Leonardo Bruni Aretino: Humanistisch-philosophische Schriften, 75–81. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1928.

Museum & Archive Links

Repository: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Vatican Library)

Digital Manuscript (Example of Bruni’s Latin Translation): Vat. lat. 2167

Institutional Link: The Warburg Institute – Aristotelian Corpus

Provenance

Origin: Florence, Italy (c. 1416–1417).

Commission: Dedicated to Pope Martin V.

Dissemination: Bruni’s translation became the most widely circulated Latin version of the Ethics in the 15th century, replacing the medieval “word-for-word” style with a “sense-for-sense” Ciceronian Latin. Over 300 manuscript copies exist in major European libraries.

Joannes Argyropoulos (c. 1450s): A Byzantine scholar whose translation further refined the technical vocabulary while maintaining a more fluid Latin style than the medieval versions.

Aristotle. Ethica ad Nicomachum. Translated by Joannes Argyropoulos. Edited by Charles B. Schmitt. In The Aristotelian Tradition and Renaissance Universities, 25–42. London: Variorum, 1984.

Museum & Archive Links

Repository: Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence

Digital Manuscript (Example of Argyropoulos’s Autograph): Plut. 84.1

Institutional Link: The British Library – Greek MSS (Joannes Argyropoulos)

Metadata Database: Iter Italicum (The Renaissance Society of America)

Provenance

Origin: Florence and Rome, Italy (c. 1456–1470).

Commission: Often associated with the patronage of the Medici family (Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici), where Argyropoulos served as a primary Greek tutor.

Transmission: Unlike Bruni’s purely rhetorical translation, Argyropoulos’s version was designed for the classroom. It integrated Greek philosophical nuances with a more technical Latin vocabulary, eventually becoming a standard textbook in Renaissance universities across Paris and Padua.

Notable Modern English Translations

The 19th and 20th centuries saw a move toward standardized technical terminology and, more recently, a return to idiomatic or “raw” Greek meanings.

The Oxford Translation (1925): Translated by Sir David Ross. This remains the “standard” scholarly reference for many, known for its precision and formal tone.

Important Links & Scholarly Resources

Manuscript Repository: The Grosseteste Database – University of Oxford

Digital Archive: Aristoteles Latinus Database (Brepols)

Provenance/Transmission Study: The Textual Transmission of the Aristotelian Corpus (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

The Loeb Classical Library (1926): Translated by H. Rackham. Notable for providing the Greek text en face, making it a staple for bilingual study.

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by H. Rackham. Loeb Classical Library 73. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926.

Museum & Archive Links

Repository: Harvard University Press – Loeb Classical Library

Digital Collection: HathiTrust Digital Library – Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Rackham)

Institutional Link: The American Philological Association (Society for Classical Studies)

Terence Irwin (1985/1999): Known for its extensive philosophical notes and attempts to remain consistent with Aristotle’s technical definitions.

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1999.

Museum & Archive Links

Repository: Hackett Publishing Company Archive

Digital Collection: Internet Archive – Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Irwin)

Institutional Link: The Cornell University Department of Philosophy (Terence Irwin Faculty Page)

Joe Sachs (2002): A “non-technical” translation that avoids traditional Latinate terms (like “virtue” or “essence”) in favor of Anglo-Saxon roots (like “excellence” or “being-at-work”) to capture the active nature of Aristotle’s thought.

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Joe Sachs. Focus Philosophical Library. Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing/R. Pullins Co., 2002.

Museum & Archive Links

Repository: Hackett Publishing Company (Acquired Focus Publishing)

Digital Collection: Internet Archive – Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Sachs)

Institutional Link: St. John’s College Digital Archives

This is a key text for the discipline of ethics because it is asking the broader question of how to be virtuous what is virtue.  

The reader will start to notice that how Aristotle goes about his philosophical practice differs in methodology from that of Plato.  It is a display of teleological thinking. 

Interesting to see that when the student looks to the master, in this case, Plato, and asks how can my work be more scientific. 

This happens over and over again in the history of philosophy.  If Philosophy is the Queen of the Sciences; why do philosophers display a constant anxiety that its not scientific enough? These are really questions of method, and the relation between philosophy and science is not a question that goes away. 

Aristotle approaches important questions of political science, happiness, and virtue.

It returns to the question of the compatibility or not of the philosophical and political ways of life.  

This book is a must to understand because every later philosopher on ethics is somehow responding to it.

Its a touchstone when we get into the distinction between virtue and virtuosity which comes up in the Renaissance and stays. 

Reading the Nicomachean Ethics helps to understand what Alasdair MacIntyre is saying in After Virtue.