This excellent volume is a most welcome addition to the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle series. As most scholars familiar with late ancient philosophy are certainly aware, the Ancient Commentators series has produced translations of the vast and, until relatively recently, vastly under-appreciated late ancient commentary tradition that showcase the intellectual dexterity and creativity contained within works once thought to be merely derivative. It has also allowed historians, philosophers and scholars of religion to access and appreciate the debates driving late fifth- and early sixth-century Neoplatonic thought in ways that would have been inconceivable even 30 years ago.
This translation moves the series in an exciting new direction. The two authors it treats, Aeneas of Gaza and Zacharias of Mytilene (also known as Zacharias Scholasticus), are not commentators and the works it translates are dialogues, not commentaries. The Theophrastus discusses the human soul, its condition before birth and its fate after death (including questions about the nature of the Christian Resurrection). The Ammonius speaks primarily about the eternity of the world. Their arguments are medleys with neither author focusing on specific philosophical texts or passages. And, though Zacharias does once say that Aeneas had some expertise in Plotinus, it is debatable how seriously Aeneas and Zacharias are to be taken as philosophers. While both men claim to have had some basic philosophical training in Alexandria, Aeneas served as a teacher of rhetoric in Gaza and Zacharias worked as a lawyer in Constantinople. Furthermore, each wrote their works for non-philosophical audiences and framed their arguments in ways that better reflected the interests of a literary salon or a Christian study circle than the rigour of a philosophical classroom. Theirs is a feral Platonism that escaped from the lecture halls of Alexandria while still quite immature and grew up in the intellectual and religious byways of the later Roman world.
In spite of this, the ideas of Aeneas and Zacharias should matter a great deal to anyone with an interest in sixth-century Neoplatonism. Aeneas' Theophrastus and Zacharias' Ammonius anticipate debates about the eternity of the world and the resurrection of bodies that explode to the surface in John Philoponus' polemics against Proclus and Aristotle in the late 520s and early 530s. Aeneas and Zacharias then preserve the intellectual rumblings that foreshadowed Philoponus' eruption. Furthermore, because these two authors are philosophical outsiders, their work provides a deeper cultural context against which one can appreciate Philoponus' mid sixth-century efforts.
R. Sorabji makes this compelling case in his introduction, a revised version of a previously published essay entitled ‘Waiting for Philoponus’. Sorabji here surveys the texts while reviewing, evaluating and contextualising their arguments. This is very well done, but he is particularly successful in establishing the intellectual and historical contexts that give rise to these two dialogues. Sorabji rightly places the Ammonius and the Theophrastus alongside a segment of Procopius of Gaza's Commentary on Genesis that also frames objections to the idea of an eternal cosmos. He then shows how strongly the arguments made in the three texts overlap, a fact that suggests some textual relationships between them. Zacharias, for example, has clearly read Aeneas' Theophrastus and, as Sorabji rightly highlights, he appears on occasion to have tried to clarify some arguments that Aeneas makes. But these authors also drew upon a much older and more developed textual tradition of Christian objections to philosophical claims that bodily resurrection is impossible and the cosmos is eternal. Aeneas, for example, evokes arguments once framed by Origen to get around the problem of how the body can be resurrected after its particles pass through the food chain. Similarly, both Zacharias and Procopius channel Basil of Caesarea's Hexameron to raise an objection to the eternity of the world founded upon the idea that such a world would share the same honorific status as God. Some of these arguments are compelling and, in a few cases, even original, but they differ fundamentally in form from what the better-trained Philoponus ultimately deploys. While Philoponus uses some of the same basic arguments as Aeneas, Zacharias and Procopius, he frames them with the rigour and philosophical raw materials of a Neoplatonist writing for other philosophers. His Gazan predecessors, by contrast, wrote for audiences who were more impressed by a smorgasbord of literary allusions (Aeneas) or references to Christian scripture (Zacharias and Procopius) than they would have been with philosophical rigour. Sorabji then concludes with the interesting suggestion that Zacharias likely did not receive anything more than a basic training in logic from Ammonius. The most sophisticated arguments found in his dialogue then must derive from training that he received elsewhere, possibly in the monastery of the Enaton outside Alexandria or even from some pre-existing catalogue of Christian objections to eternalist philosophical teaching. Sorabji is right to point to the popularity of anti-Chalcedonian polemical florilegia in Alexandria in the 460s and 470s. Although no Alexandrian florilegium of philosophical counter-arguments is known from the later fifth century, a formulaic refutation of Manichaeism supposedly authored by Zacharias makes Sorabji's suggestion quite plausible.
Each of the individual dialogues contains its own introduction that supplements but does not duplicate the broader argument made in Sorabji's preface. These are both brief, but each makes some important and original contributions to our understanding of the projects that Aeneas and Zacharias undertook. Aeneas is rightly portrayed as a skilled rhetorician who made careful and abundant use of many of the most effective tools in a rhetorical kit. While he shows a strong familiarity with Platonic dialogues, the works of Plotinus and (to a lesser degree) those of Proclus and Syrianus, Aeneas seems particularly concerned to embellish his arguments with literary allusions to authors ranging from Homer and Herodotus to Arrian and Philostratus. He also makes careful use of sarcasm, a technique that makes clear when his pagan adversary has been defeated without clearly humiliating him.
The introduction to the Ammonius shows that Zacharias worked very differently. Gone are the Classical allusions. In their place, one finds abundant references to Scripture. Similarly gone is the artful sarcasm of Aeneas. There is no subtlety in Zacharias' attacks on Ammonius and Gessius (his two pagan interlocutors). By the end of each exchange, the dialogue describes them as being so thoroughly bested in argument that they become ‘as speechless as stones’. They are straw men built up simply to be destroyed in a display of verbal pyrotechnics designed to delight Christian students and ascetics.
The texts themselves are ably translated with thorough notes; a Greek–English glossary and a Greek–English index follow each of them. The notes are particularly well done and highlight many of the points in the text that demonstrate the claims made in Sorabji's preface and the individual introductions to the two dialogues.
The translators are to be commended for such a strong, careful and important contribution to the Ancient Commentators series. It will be useful to philosophers working on fifth and sixth century Neoplatonism, but I suspect that it will also catalyse other discussion as well. Recent years have seen a great deal of interest in Gazan rhetoric, theology and asceticism. This volume's successful integration of a strong preface, descriptive introductions, clear translations and thorough notes should catalyse a similar interest in Gazan philosophical production. This is, then, a translation that points towards new scholarly conversations rather than one that responds to existing ones. For this the translators and series editor are to be congratulated.
