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Quote by Dimitri Gutas

“Two great contemporary scholars at the antipodes of the cultural spread of Hellenism, Boethius in Rome (d. 525) and Sergius of Re¯ˇsayna in northern Mesopotamia ¯ (d. 536), conceived of the grand idea of translating all of Aristotle into Latin and Syriac respectively.5 The conception is to their…” quote by Dimitri Gutas
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““Two great contemporary scholars at the antipodes of the cultural spread of Hellenism, Boethius in Rome (d. 525) and Sergius of Re¯ˇsayna in northern Mesopotamia ¯ (d. 536), conceived of the grand idea of translating all of Aristotle into Latin and Syriac respectively.5 The conception is to their credit as individual thinkers for their noble intentions; their failure indicates that the receiving cultures in which they worked had not developed the need for this enterprise. Philosophy in Latin was to develop, even if on some of the foundations laid by Boethius, much later,6 while in Syriac it reached its highest point with BarHebraeus in the thirteenth century only after it had developed in Arabic and was translated from it.””

Dimitri Gutas

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