Anonymous Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics

The commentary on Nicomachean Ethics 2 opens on Aristotle's sentence that intellectual aretē comes mostly from teaching: you also need physis, and it is bound up with wisdom and phronēsis. Hence it needs empeiria and time. Ethical aretē comes from ethos; the name ēthikē is from ethos. Nothing that is by nature can be habituated otherwise: a stone will never be habituated to go up. So the ethical aretai are neither by nature nor against nature.

The commentator then follows the mean, pleasure and pain as the matter of ethical aretē, Plato on training the young to rejoice and grieve at the right things, and the objection from apatheia. Milo of Croton is the example of a relative mean in diet: what is little for him is much for another. He once carried a bull the length of the stadium; he held up a sagging house for his Pythagorean companions.

The text is a Byzantine commentary on Aristotle's account of aretē; its author is not named.