{"_index":"sire","_id":"1449","_score":null,"_source":{"id":1449,"authors_free":[{"id":2431,"entry_id":1449,"agent_type":"person","is_normalised":1,"person_id":108,"institution_id":null,"role":{"id":1,"role_name":"author"},"free_name":"Blumenthal, Henry J.","free_first_name":"Henry J.","free_last_name":"Blumenthal","norm_person":{"id":108,"first_name":"Henry J.","last_name":"Blumenthal","full_name":"Blumenthal, Henry J.","short_ident":"","is_classical_name":null,"dnb_url":"http:\/\/d-nb.info\/gnd\/1051543967","viaf_url":"","db_url":"","from_claudius":null}},{"id":2444,"entry_id":1449,"agent_type":"person","is_normalised":1,"person_id":108,"institution_id":null,"role":{"id":2,"role_name":"editor"},"free_name":"Blumenthal, Henry J.","free_first_name":"Henry J.","free_last_name":"Blumenthal","norm_person":{"id":108,"first_name":"Henry J.","last_name":"Blumenthal","full_name":"Blumenthal, Henry J.","short_ident":"","is_classical_name":null,"dnb_url":"http:\/\/d-nb.info\/gnd\/1051543967","viaf_url":"","db_url":"","from_claudius":null}}],"entry_title":"The commentators: their identity and their background","main_title":{"title":"The commentators: their identity and their background"},"abstract":"While in the previous chapter we have been looking at the overall similarity of the commentators\u2019 methods and assumptions, it is now time to try to say something about them as individuals and the work they produced. This is not an easy task. We may have lives of the most important philosophers, Plotinus and Proclus, and even of an apparent nonentity like Isidore, but for those who wrote commentaries on Aristotle, we can often do little more than establish places of activity and approximate dates.\r\n\r\nThe information most consistently available is the most useless\u2014an indication, sometimes no more than a manuscript tradition with all the doubts attaching to that, of the town or area a man came from or was known by: \u201cProclus the Lycian,\u201d \u201cSimplicius the Cilician,\u201d \u201cPriscian the Lydian.\u201d Those who operated in Alexandria are usually labeled \u201cAlexandrian,\u201d too consistently for the label to be anything more than an indication that that was where they worked or spent an important part of their careers. Thus, all we know, in most cases, is where some of the writers we are concerned with began their lives, and then only to the extent of knowing what part of the world it was in.\r\n\r\nNevertheless, some information on the commentators is provided by sources that tell us about them incidentally to their main aim. Damascius\u2019 reconstructed Life of Isidore is one such source: it deals in passing with those who were either personally or historically connected with the subject of the work. Much of the information about the relation between those who worked at Athens and Alexandria in the fifth and sixth centuries is derived from that source. In particular, most of the evidence about who studied with whom and where is to be found there.\r\n\r\nUnfortunately, by far the larger of two collections of excerpts in Photius (codd. 181 and 242), by whom most of the surviving contents have been preserved, comes from a particularly scrappy part of his work, so that we often do not know which snippets should be taken together, a point that affects, among other things, an important question about Ammonius.\r\n\r\nTwo works that do survive and give us some further help are Zacharias\u2019 Life of Severus, from which, though it concentrates on Christians, we can learn something about conditions in the schools of Alexandria as well as about their students and teachers, and the same writer\u2019s dialogue Ammonius, which provides rather less than its title might lead one to hope, being concerned primarily with matters in dispute between pagans and Christians, such as the eternity of the world and the creative activity of God. It tells us very little about Ammonius but does raise a question of some importance about his beliefs, with which we must deal below.\r\n\r\nAt an earlier period, Marinus\u2019 Life of Proclus, a document often distorted by the desire to fit biographical facts to philosophical notions, gives us some information about others who worked at Athens and are part of the story of Aristotelian commentary\u2014namely, Plutarch and Syrianus, who, Marinus tells us, were respectively master and pupil, as well as both being teachers of Proclus. In addition, he mentions persons about whom he gives us little or no other information, such as Plutarch\u2019s grandson Archiadas and Proclus\u2019 contemporary Domninus. Unfortunately, the Life does not proceed in chronological order because its structure depends on a framework of the Neoplatonic scale of virtues and Proclus\u2019 ascent to its summit.\r\n\r\nIn addition to what these sources provide, we have pieces of more or less incidental information from elsewhere, some of it not unimportant. Such are the dates infrequently given en passant in the commentaries and the occasional references to philosophy in both contemporary and later historians. Some of these references are notoriously difficult to interpret or even simply unreliable. In this category are the details of the exile of 529 and the possible return from it. In addition, there are entries in or from the lexica and other compilations so popular in late Classical antiquity and early Byzantine culture; some of these overlap both with each other and with the material found in Photius.\r\n\r\nThere are some figures in the tradition of Aristotelian commentary about whom we know almost nothing. Such are Asclepius, the editor of Ammonius\u2019 Metaphysics course, at least for Books A-Z, Olympiodorus in the next generation, and his presumed pupil Elias. His\u2014probably\u2014contemporary David is well known in the Armenian tradition but not in the Greek. The last three, as it happens, are all later than the last surviving Life of a philosopher.\r\n\r\nOne of the perversities of the distribution of information is that we are often better informed about those whose work has been lost but was clearly important in the tradition, like Plutarch, and even those whose work has been lost and may not have been important in the interpretation of either the Platonic or the Aristotelian writings in any case, like Isidore, than about the authors of considerable parts of our corpus of texts, like Ammonius and Simplicius.\r\n\r\nLet us now go back to the beginning and look at what we do know about those who contributed to the exposition of the De Anima, leaving aside Plotinus, whose contribution was the more general one of integrating Aristotelian psychology into Neoplatonic philosophy and about whose life we are reasonably well, if somewhat sporadically, informed.\r\n\r\nWe can say that Iamblichus, the initiator of the organization of the Neoplatonists\u2019 Aristotle and Plato course, and perhaps their Aristotle course as well, probably did not write a De Anima commentary, a matter we shall return to shortly, but Ps-Simplicius claims to follow the guidance he offered in his own treatise on the soul.\r\n\r\nSince, however, most of that has been lost, and Ps-Simplicius\u2019 De Anima commentary notoriously fails to provide the extensive documentation and specific attributions found in the other Simplicius commentaries, we can assess neither the real extent nor the specific details of Iamblichus\u2019 influence. That situation contrasts with what obtains in the case of their Categories commentaries: while in this case Iamblichus\u2019 commentary is lost, Simplicius refers to it constantly by name.\r\n\r\nIt is worth mentioning that Proclus does the same in his Timaeus commentary, showing that Iamblichus\u2019 lead was followed by at least some\u2014perhaps avoiding at this stage adding \"Athenians\"\u2014at both ends of the combined Aristotle and Plato course. Nevertheless, the combination of Ps-Simplicius\u2019 expression of intent in the De Anima commentary and what actually happens in other commentaries suggests that Iamblichus\u2019 influence on the exposition of the De Anima will not have been negligible.\r\n\r\nIts extent may or may not have been greater because of his place early in the story: though his exact dates cannot be established, they fall in the second half of the third century and the beginning of the fourth, making it possible that he was actually a pupil of Porphyry, as later writers assert\u2014an assertion that must, however, be treated with some care because of the notorious habit of ancient biographers and doxographers of arranging philosophers in chains of master-pupil relations, a habit that affects the whole history of Greek philosophy from Thales to the end.\r\n\r\nAfter Iamblichus, there is a gap in the history of Platonism and also of Aristotelian exposition. The latter is, however, partly filled by the anomalous figure of Themistius, partly because of the very anomaly that consists in his being a Peripatetic and standing outside the mainstream of philosophical development, which was by now almost entirely Platonist.\r\n\r\nThemistius differs from the other commentators in another respect too. Most of them were, as far as we know, the equivalent of professional philosophers today, producing philosophical research while earning their living by teaching, subsidized perhaps, in the case of those Neoplatonists working at Athens, by the Academy\u2019s funds, from whatever source these came.\r\n\r\nThemistius, on the other hand, was a diplomat and politician whose interest in Aristotle might be thought of as loosely analogous to Gladstone\u2019s in Homer. The commentaries were written early in his life, and there is no evidence that he ever returned to actual study of Aristotle, nor that he ever taught philosophy. Nor is there any evidence that will withstand scrutiny that he ever wrote on Plato, great as his admiration for him was. [introduction p. 35-38]","btype":2,"date":"1996","language":"English","online_url":"","online_resources":"https:\/\/uni-koeln.sciebo.de\/s\/GBYzMZ4X3Nt0hsI","doi_url":null,"categories":[],"authors":[{"id":108,"full_name":"Blumenthal, Henry J.","role":{"id":1,"role_name":"author"}},{"id":108,"full_name":"Blumenthal, Henry J.","role":{"id":2,"role_name":"editor"}}],"book":null,"booksection":{"id":1449,"section_of":213,"pages":"35-51","is_catalog":null,"book":{"id":213,"bilderberg_idno":null,"dare_idno":null,"catalog_idno":null,"entry_type":null,"type":1,"language":"en","title":"Aristotle and Neoplatonism in late antiquity: Interpretations of the \"De Anima\"","title_transcript":"","title_translation":"","short_title":"Blumenthal1996a","has_no_author":null,"volume":null,"date":"1996","edition_no":null,"free_date":"1996","abstract":"Steven Strange: Emory University Scholars have traditionally used the Aristotelian commentators as sources for lost philosophical works and occasionally also as aids to understanding Aristotle. In H. J. Blumenthal's view, however, the commentators often assumed that there was a Platonist philosophy to which not only they but Aristotle himself subscribed. Their expository writing usually expressed their versions of Neoplatonist philosophy. Blumenthal here places the commentators in their intellectual and historical contexts, identifies their philosophical views, and demonstrates their tendency to read Aristotle as if he were a member of their philosophical circle.This book focuses on the commentators' exposition of Aristotle's treatise De anima (On the Soul), because it is relatively well documented and because the concept of soul was so important in all Neoplatonic systems. Blumenthal explains how the Neoplatonizing of Aristotle's thought, as well as the widespread use of the commentators' works, influenced the understanding of Aristotle in both the Islamic and Judaeo-Christian traditions.H. J. Blumenthal is the author or coeditor of six previous books and is currently preparing a two-volume translation, with introduction and commentary, of Simplicius' Commentary on \"De anima\" for publication in Cornell's series Ancient Commentators on Aristotle.","republication_of":null,"online_url":"","online_resources":"https:\/\/uni-koeln.sciebo.de\/s\/VOUUZIIp0rHNG0V","translation_of":null,"new_edition_of":null,"is_catalog":0,"in_bibliography":0,"is_inactive":0,"notes":null,"doi_url":null,"book":{"id":213,"pubplace":"London","publisher":"Duckworth","series":"","volume":"","edition_no":"","valid_from":null,"valid_until":null}}},"article":null},"sort":["The commentators: their identity and their background"]}