In Inferno IV, when Dante catches sight of him in a mild foyer to the spiralling pit of hell, Averroes is simply described as ‘he who made the great Comment’; but in Convivio IV, the only other place where Dante references him, Averroes is specifically ‘the Commentator on Aristotle's De Anima III’. Dante wrote this in the first decade of the fourteenth century, when Averroes was still, in effect, the commentator on De anima 3. But by the last decades of the fifteenth century, a ‘Simplicius’ commentary on the De anima was being circulated in Italy by émigrés from Constantinople. This commentary rapidly exerted an influence on the likes of Pico della Mirandola and Agostino Nifo. It saw a first Greek edition in Venice in 1527, with a complete Latin translation appearing in 1543, also in Venice. As its first translator pointed out in his prefatory letter, Averroes had a contender in this De anima commentary. The title of a 1553 Latin translation then left no doubt: here was the Commentaria Simplicii Profundissimi & acutissimi philosophi in tres libros De Anima Aristotelis. And by the end of the sixteenth century, this commentary had inspired a vocal coterie in Italy, the so-called sectatores Simplicii.

Despite the fervour of these sectatores Simplicii, there is now a stable consensus that their De anima commentary is pseudo-Simplician. S. has long been convinced that the work should be attributed to Priscian of Lydia; and in this he is preceded by Francesco Piccolomini, a sixteenth-century opponent of the simpliciani who also put Priscian forward as the commentator. I. Hadot has fiercely criticised this re-attribution in a 2002 article in Mnemosyne, ‘Simplicius or Priscianus? On the Author of the Commentary on Aristotle's De Anima’, and S. refers to the dispute in his introduction. He is sanguine: ‘As no other scholar apparently shares Hadot's view, there is no need for further polemics’ (p. 32 n. 6). And regardless of attribution, it is agreed that this De anima commentary originated in Simplicius' circles; that it represents ‘an original and personal engagement with Aristotle's text’ (p. 4); and that the commentator ‘uses various philological strategies to make sense of an obscure text’ (p. 7). On this last point, S. is effusive: ‘Modern commentators could learn with profit from his attempts “to set right” a difficult text … without intervening with conjectures’ (p. 7).

The manuscript basis of S.'s translation is broader than that of M. Hayduck's semi-critical Greek edition (1882), which has been faulted for only collating a single fourteenth-century manuscript (the Laurentianus 85.21) and a single sixteenth-century edition of the commentary (the Aldina). In preparing his translation, S. consulted another fourteenth-century manuscript (which shows emendations and annotations by Cardinal Bessarion) and a mid-fifteenth-century manuscript. Nevertheless, he is generous: ‘Hayduck was basically right: it is indeed possible to constitute a critical text with the Laurentianus and the Aldina’ (p. 149). A concise list of S.'s proposed corrections to the Greek and reconstructions of outstanding lacunae are included at the back of the volume.

S.'s is the final volume of the first ever English translation of this De anima commentary, and gives us ps.-Simplicius on De anima 3.6–13. The translation is nuanced and reliable, though at places the syntax could be smoothed out (‘That also oysters have maturity and decline, all agree …’, p. 101); the volume's apparatus, which is credited to Arnis Ritups, is ample. And while ps.-Simplicius has never had English-speaking sectaries, his De anima commentary is cited once by Bishop Berkeley and repeatedly by Lord Monboddo in the eighteenth century, while Thomas Taylor incorporated excerpts into the notes to his 1808 English translation of the De anima. In short, ps.-Simplicius' Greek commentary has a place in the modern British reception of the De anima. The present translation, similarly, should inform contemporary work on the De anima, and on the Neoplatonists' appropriation and transmission of Aristotle.

Ps.-Simplicius' text is of course too dense to reprise here, but there is much that is of interest in his negotiation of time-statements in the last pages of the De anima, since it is in these pages – not the last paragraphs of Physics 4 – that Aristotle investigates the problematic link of ‘time’ to the ‘soul’. (And when Plotinus takes up the question of time in Enneads 3.7, he – like contemporary philosophers – turns to Physics 4, not De anima 3.) Those who are interested in Neoplatonic conceptions of time – and more generally, in the concept of time in Late Antiquity – would do well to consult this commentary, and the other surviving Greek commentaries on De anima 3.

There is a single, colourful passage that indicates how ps.-Simplicius' commentary on the soul also opens onto the terrain of the body – sexuality, and so on – in Late Antiquity. In De anima 3.9 Aristotle writes that ‘the heart’ is moved when we think of menacing things, whereas ‘if the object is pleasant, some other part’ is moved. It is a pleasure then to see ps.-Simplicius' gloss: ‘The heart, for instance, may be set in movement among fearful things and the generative organs [γεννητικὰ μόρια] upon the thought of sexual pleasure [ἀϕροδισιαστικῶν ἡδονῶν]’ (p. 102). This is doubtless the sense of Aristotle's euphemistic text, and ps.-Simplicius sees the deeper import of sexual excitation with perfect clarity: ‘The intellect is not wholly master [οὐ τὸ ὅλον κύριος] of the movement of the living being’ (p. 102). How far removed are we, here, from Augustine's discussion of post-paradisiacal arousal in his City of God against the Pagans? Or from Proclus' refusal of a disciple who was ‘pursuing philosophy, but at the same time devoting his life to the pleasures below the belly [τὰς ὑπογαστρίους ἡδονάς]’, as Damascius reports?

The early modern sectatores Simplicii likely misattributed their De anima commentary, but in this they were correct: Averroes is not ‘the Commentator on Aristotle's De Anima III’. Ps.-Simplicius' reading of the book is still challenging, at places suddenly illuminating. And it is no small thing for us to have access now – in conscientious English, and in full – to this methodical, lexically sensitive commentary on the soul from the immediate circle of the last representatives of a ‘Platonic succession’ in Athens.