Greek Problems in Latin Shape: The Latin Version of Ps.-Aristotle’s Problemata by Theodore Gaza

Among the protagonists in the season of translations from Greek into Latin promoted in Rome by Pope Nicholas V, Theodore Gaza undoubtedly stands out. Gaza's academic interests ranged from poetry to medicine and even included Aristotelian botany and zoology. A “secondary” product, somewhat derivative, of Peripatetic philosophy are the physical-natural questions known as Problemata. In the mid-15th century, there were two translations of this text: the first, by George of Trebizond, had led to results that were considered so unsatisfactory that Gaza was commissioned to prepare a new one. The dispute that arose after the completion of Gaza's version was one of the moments of confrontation between George of Trebizond and the scholarly milieu associated with Cardinal Bessarion and Pope Nicholas V. The identification of the Greek model used by Gaza for the translation and the comparison of the lexical and syntactic choices characteristic of other contemporary works—beginning with George's previous translation —shed light on the intrinsic features of Gaza's translation technique and provide an answer to the question: Is the success of his translation and its “triumph” over George’s in the decades to come justified on the objective grounds of superior quality, or can it be explained solely by the political dynamics of the time?