Philodemus of Gadara references Aristippus of Cyrene

The Epicurean philosopher Philodemus of Gadara offers a rare explicit reference to Aristippus of Cyrene in a fragmentary segment from his work Against the Sophists. Unfortunately the papyrus scroll is damaged and the text is corrupt, but we can glean the general direction of the statement, which follows: 

μετὰ ταῦτα˙ περὶ ὧν εἶπον ὑμῖν πολλ' ἐστὶν ἐπείσακτα καὶ ὑποψία τις ὕπεστιν, ἀλλὰ . . . . . . οἴδαμενεἶναι πιστὸν Κράτητος καὶ Ἀριστίππου τὰς περί τινων τοῦ Πλάτωνος διατριβάς, καὶ Ἀριστοτέλους τ'ἀναλυτικὰ καὶ τὰ περὶ φύσεως, ὅσαπερ ἐκλέγομεν.

I’m no translator of Ancient Greek, unfortunately, so the best I’ve been able to do in terms of deriving a workable English version of this text myself has been to run it through various translating software and comparing them. Luckily, this seems to be a fairly straightforward fragment, and the sense seems to loosely intend something like this: 

“After these things: Concerning what I have told you, much is introduced, and there is some suspicion present, but… we know that the discussions of Crates and Aristippus concerning certain things of Plato are trustworthy, as well as the Analytics and the works on nature of Aristotle, which we select.”

This fragment seems to imply, at the very least, that some testimony of Aristippus regarding Plato, whether written by himself or recorded from an oral statement by another, survived to Philodemus’ day and he considered it a trustworthy account. Anything further than that would be speculative. In the future I may find a better translation of this selection and perhaps an expert analysis as to its meaning, but this is an interesting artefact nonetheless. 

The Greek script is preserved in the Socratis et socraticorum reliquiae by Gabriel Giannantoni, and the exact reference is in Book IV, A 147 PHILODEM.  adv. <Sophist.> fr. 13 Sbordone. I will provide a link below to an online resource that contains all the Socratic fragments, and this one in particular:

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Philodemus of Gadara references Aristippus of Cyrene

The Epicurean philosopher Philodemus of Gadara offers a rare explicit reference to Aristippus of Cyrene in a fragmentary segment from his wo...