Unpublished Gerasimos Vlachos’s logical works

Abstract

Gerasimos Vlachos was one of the most important Greek scholars of the 17th century, he is also known as the teacher of the brothers Leichoudes, the founders of the Slavic-Latin-Greek Academy in Moscow. The paper focuses on his unpublished student textbook on logic, which was a model for that of Sophronios Leichoudes. It appears that all the texts that make up this collection still remain unidentified. However, the catalogue of the Gerasimos Vlachos’s private library, composed by Vlachos himself in 1683, and preserved in the Hellenic Institute for Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies in Venice, provides us with the list of his logical writings. According to it, the whole collection comprises a com­mon “Introduction in logic”, an “Introduction in questions and answers”, as well as the paraphrases and introductions to Porhyry’s “Isagoge”, Aristotle’s “Categories”, “On Inter­pretation”, “Prior Analytics” and “Posterior Analytics”. The main objective of the present investigation, therefore, is to identify the titles of the logical writings listed in a catalogue of his private library with the logical texts, attributed to Vlachos in the manuscripts. After examining all the known witnesses that are supposed to transmit Vlachos’s texts, we con­cluded that indeed only five of eight codices contain the genuine Vlachos’s works on logic, no single codex contains the whole collection of his logical treatises but it seems that all of them survived. These preliminary investigations allow us to arrange these writings in orig­inal order and identify them with the titles of the catalogue. Finally, the data obtained from this survey authorized us to present the arguments for the selection and priority of the wit­nesses as well as for the possible structure of the future edition.