Talk:Aesara

WikiProject class rating

This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as stub, and the rating on other projects was brought up to Stub class. BetacommandBot 03:43, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Authorship attribution

we should absolutely discuss the work "on human nature" on this page, as it is frequently attributed to Aesara, but the current state of this page is absolutely too enthusiastic about doing so - almost all pythagorean literature is generally considered pseudynomous, and this work is attributed to Aresas in the editio princeps of Stobaeus, not Aesara, so definitively ascribing it to her is irresponsible.

At some point I wonder if we shouldn't deprecate Waithe as a source - I appreciate what she was trying to do but she is an amateur historian with a background in philosophy, who uses motivated reasoning to come to here preferred conclusions and so will misrepresent scholarly consensus and simply ignore anything that challenges the ascription of any work to a woman. Her conclusions shouldn't be stated in wikivoice, and we should corroborate them and any who directly cite them with the work of other sources with some familiarity in the field. - car chasm (talk) 02:31, 21 May 2023 (UTC)

Existence

It's not obvious if there's evidence beyond Stobaeus of her existence. Eg see this skeptical review of a book by Pomeroy that incudes Aesara. I don't know enough to calculate due weight, but it seems that the page should not take her existence as a given.Ian McDonald (talk) 20:25, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

It's a weird situation: Plant and Pomeroy both say that Aesara is a woman and the argument that she is not is based on an emendation of Stobaeus' text; the BMCR review says that this is not true and that in fact it is reading Aesara as a woman which requires emending the text! Brill's New Pauly doesn't seem to mention Aesara at all; the Oxford Classical Dictionary says that On Human Nature is "possibly" attributed to Aesara. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 22:20, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

I dug into this a bit further than above and it's worse than I first thought, there doesn't seem to be any proof of the existence of Aesara at all. It looks like the critical edition of the text by Wachsmuth, which Wachsmuth says in the apparatus is an emendation! So the apparent claim by Plant and Pomeroy that this is not an emendation would appear to be verifiably false.

As also noted in the review, The "Aesara" who is a daughter of pythagoras that is supposedly mentioned in Photius, which Wachsmuth justifies his own with, is itself an emendation which Wachsmuth credits to Richard Bentley(?), based on line 36 of the Greek which reads "Σαρ́α". So it would seem "Aesara" has been invented out of thin air from two different manuscript emendations, there isn't definitive evidence in either Stobaeus or Photius of her existence. - car chasm (talk) 01:02, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

I've now stubbed the article, quite frankly I don't think Plant, Pomeroy, or Waithe are engaged in scholarship here; the arguments that there's no reason to think that the extract we have wasn't rewritten (which would let it be older than the 4th century) or that the mere attribution itself proves there really was an Aesara of Lucania would both strain credulity even if there was any attestation of her existence whatsoever. I checked some more sources as well - Charles Kahn's "Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans" and Leonid Zhmud's "Pythagoras and the Early Pythagoreans" similarly don't mention her at all. - car chasm (talk) 01:23, 12 July 2023 (UTC)