Physiognomonics is an Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...

 treatise on physiognomy

Physiognomy

Physiognomy is the assessment of a person's character or personality from their outer appearance, especially the face...

 casually attributed to Aristotle

Aristotle

Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...

 (and part of the Corpus Aristotelicum

Corpus Aristotelicum

The Corpus Aristotelicum is the collection of Aristotle's works that have survived from antiquity through Medieval manuscript transmission. These texts, as opposed to Aristotle's lost works, are technical philosophical treatises from within Aristotle's school...

) but now believed to be by an author writing approximately 300 BC.

Ancient physiognomy before the Physiognomonics

Although Physiognomonics is the earliest work surviving in Greek devoted to the subject, texts preserved on clay tablets provide evidence of physiognomy manuals from the First Babylonian Dynasty

First Babylonian Dynasty

The chronology of the first dynasty of Babylonia is debated as there is a Babylonian King List A and a Babylonian King List B. In this chronology, the regnal years of List A are used due to their wide usage...

, containing divinatory case studies of the ominous significance of various bodily dispositions. At this point physiognomy is "a specific, already theorized, branch of knowledge" and the heir of a long-developed technical tradition.

While loosely physiognomic ways of thinking are present in Greek literature as early as Homer

Homer

In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...

, physiognomy proper is not known before the classical period

Classical Greece

Classical Greece was a 200 year period in Greek culture lasting from the 5th through 4th centuries BC. This classical period had a powerful influence on the Roman Empire and greatly influenced the foundation of Western civilizations. Much of modern Western politics, artistic thought, such as...

. The term physiognomonia first appears in the fifth-century BC Hippocratic

Hippocratic Corpus

The Hippocratic Corpus , or Hippocratic Collection, is a collection of around 60 early Ancient Greek medical works strongly associated with the physician Hippocrates and his teachings...

 treatise Epidemics (II.5.1). Physiognomy was mentioned in a work by Antisthenes

Antisthenes

Antisthenes was a Greek philosopher and a pupil of Socrates. Antisthenes first learned rhetoric under Gorgias before becoming an ardent disciple of Socrates. He adopted and developed the ethical side of Socrates' teachings, advocating an ascetic life lived in accordance with virtue. Later writers...

 on the Sophists, which provides evidence of its recognition as an art (techne

Techne

Techne, or techné, as distinguished from episteme, is etymologically derived from the Greek word τέχνη which is often translated as craftsmanship, craft, or art. It is the rational method involved in producing an object or accomplishing a goal or objective...

).

In Aristotle's time, physiognomics was acknowledged as an art (techne) with its own skilled practitioners (technitai), as we see from a reference in Generation of Animals

Generation of Animals

The Generation of Animals is a text by Aristotle.-Arabic translation:...

(IV.3):

Then people say that the child has the head of a ram or a bull, and so on with other animals, as that a calf has the head of a child or a sheep that of an ox. All these monsters result from the causes stated above, but they are none of the things they are said to be; there is only some similarity, such as may arise even where there is no defect of growth. Hence often jesters compare someone who is not beautiful to a goat breathing fire, or again to a ram butting, and a certain physiognomist reduced all faces to those of two or three animals, and his arguments often prevailed on people. (trans. Pratt rev. Barnes

Jonathan Barnes

Jonathan Barnes is a British philosopher, translator and historian of ancient philosophy.-Education and career:He was educated at the City of London School and Balliol College, Oxford University....

)

Already in antiquity, physiognomy's pretensions to a "scientific" foundation were questioned and debated. It had connections to medicine, but also to magic

Magic in the Greco-Roman world

The study of magic in the Greco-Roman world is a branch of the disciplines of classics, ancient history and religious studies. In the ancient post-hellenistic world of the Greeks and Romans , the public and private rituals associated with religion are accepted by historians and archaeologists to...

 and divination.

Structure and content

The treatise is divided into sections on theory (805a1-808b10) and method (808b11-814b9). The connections between bodily features and character are treated in detail, cataloguing, for example, twelve kinds of nose, and the distinctive features of the cinaedus.

Connections to Aristotle

The pseudo-Aristotelian

Pseudo-Aristotle

Pseudo-Aristotle is a general cognomen for authors of philosophical or medical treatises who attributed their work to the Greek philosopher Aristotle, or whose work was later attributed to him by others....

 treatise begins with an allusion to Aristotle's Prior Analytics

Prior Analytics

The Prior Analytics is Aristotle's work on deductive reasoning, specifically the syllogism. It is also part of his Organon, which is the instrument or manual of logical and scientific methods....

(II.27, on the body-soul correlation), and many of the physiognomic connections discussed are mentioned specifically in the History of Animals

History of Animals

History of Animals is a zoological natural history text by Aristotle.-Arabic translation:The Arabic translation of Historia Animalium comprises treatises 1-10 of the Kitāb al-Hayawān .-See also:...

.

Influence

The author's systematic scheme of physiognomic relationships was not adopted by later writers on the subject; the proliferation of incompatible teachings had "the cumulative effect of undermining the authority of the profession as a whole."

Further reading

• Sabine Vogt (trans. and comm.), Aristoteles: Physiognomonica, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999, ISBN 3050034874

External links

• Greek texts: Immanuel Bekker's text available via Greco interattivo; Richard Foerster's 1893 Teubner edition via Google Books
• English translation of E.S. Forster and T. Loveday in The Works of Aristotle, Oxford, 1913