On the Indirect Tradition and Circulation of the Ancient Armenian Platonic Translations

Five Platonic or pseudo-Platonic dialogues survive in ancient Armenian translations (Timaeus, Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates, Laws, and Minos). At the present state of knowledge, the versions, written in heavily Hellenising Armenian, are attested in their entirety only in one extant manuscript of uncertain date (17th century?), which is kept in the library of the Mekhitarist monastery of St Lazarus, Venice ([V] 1123) and has provided the basis for the (problematic) 19th-century editions. Ever since their rediscovery in 1835, the date and authorship of these texts have been the object of considerable debate, with proposed dates ranging from the 5th to the 11th century ce. Up until now, the very limited and late textual tradition has not helped in delimiting the original timeframe for the translated dialogues. Tinti describes and analyses the traces of textual circulation and indirect tradition that she has so far been able to identify for one of the dialogues, the Timaeus, including some that were previously unknown and are discussed here for the first time. These new data chiefly prove that the Armenian Timaeus did not exist in a void; on the contrary, it seems to have had a certain amount of textual circulation in different areas of the Armenian-speaking world. Secondly, the minor witnesses provide reassuring indications as to the reliability of the Venetian manuscript, which, despite being quite recent, seems to preserve in many cases a more conservative state of the text. Lastly, Tinti shows that this type of analysis can provide meaningful clues towards solving the complex puzzle of the Platonic versions’ date and attribution.