Eforo e la Scuola di Aristotele sulla tryphe dei Milesi

Ath. XII 26 on the Milesians' tryphe consists of four quotations: Ephor. FGrHist 70 F 183; Arist. fr. 557 Rose (= 565, 1 Gigon); Heraclid. Pont. fr. 50 Wehrli (= 23 Schütrumpf); Clearch. fr. 45 Wehrli. Clearchus is the more likely source of Athenaeus for the whole paragraph: the fragments should therefore be read in relation to the perspective (the perspective of the ethical debate on the best type of life) and purpose (to prove that the life conducted in the tryphe is to be avoided: is cause of the hybric excess followed inevitably by the disaster for divine intervention) with which they were placed in his Peri bion. The original perspective of Ephorus and Aristotle – the examination of the quotation's context and the comparison with other sources underline the precise correspondence between Ephorus' treatment and that of Aristotle in the Milesion Politeia on the matter – was profoundly different: they used the concept of tryphe as 'interpretative' of historical evolution of the Milesian power, from the apogee to the decline, with a socio-economic perspective in a speech of institutional or political-institutional type. Ephorus came to this reading of the tryphe on the basis of his historical analysis of the events in different cities in the long span of his universal history, Aristotle on the basis of his political analysis of the causes of metabole within the city, built on the basis of a collection of material which extends in time and in space no less than the historical investigation of Ephorus.