Chapter 10
Listening to Olympiodorus
The commentaries of several philosophers of the late Alexandrian school of philosophy were recorded by students who took notes during lectures apo phones, that is, from the voice of a teacher.1 A huge quantity of philosophical writings survive from the late Roman Empire, when philosophy was embedded in pagan and Christian culture. This work consists mainly of commentaries, especially on Aristotle and Plato. In the Roman Empire and in late antiquity texts from previous times were at the center of philosophical instruction. Even though discussions and dialogues continued to be present in class, teachers paid a lot of attention to reading and interpreting texts. The term “commentary” inevitably suggests a scholarly exercise, but these commentaries were not only about texts per se but were also attempts to search for the “truth” in the ancient philosophers.2 The Neoplatonic commentaries have not received a lot of attention, because they have not been studied in full but only consulted occasionally. Among these I will focus on the Commentary on the First Alcibiades, which the philosopher Olympiodorus delivered to his class.
Olympiodorus was one of the last pagans to teach at the school of Alexandria in the sixth century. His students were mostly (or all) Christians from the elite who wanted to embark on careers in the clergy or at the Byzantine court.3 Members of the elite were steeped in classical culture, and philosophy was an important part of that. His life spanned approximately from 500 to 570, embracing the whole reign of Justinian. In the late 530s he apparently disappeared as a philosopher. This was the final period of pagan philosophy, because the emperor took extreme measures against philosophy as a way of pagan learning; these culminated in Justinian’s closure of the pagan school of philosophy in Athens in 529, an event that strangely did not leave any traces in the commentaries.4 At that time, in Alexandria and elsewhere, philosophy was strong and producing many commentaries.
A short history of the school is necessary. The first significant representative of the school of Alexandria was Hermeias in the fifth century. When he died, before 470, his widow Aedesia took her son Ammonius to Athens to study with the philosopher Proclus. Proclus revived Neoplatonism and composed, among many other works, a Commentary on the First Alcibiades that is centered on the types of love in Platonic literature. It differs significantly from the commentary of Olympiodorus, which was taken down by students and will be considered next. Ammonius was the teacher of at least four of the most prominent philosophers of late antiquity: Philoponus, Simplicius, Asclepius, and Olympiodorus. It was they who edited his lectures, because Ammonius apparently refrained from writing.5
When Ammonius died, before 526, it was not Philoponus, the most brilliant of his students, who succeeded him; instead, Olympiodorus, who revered Ammonius and considered him as the final authority, held the chair of philosophy.6 Philoponus had an official post as grammarian and was always given the title of grammatikos. It has been suggested that he may have occupied a position in the school as editor of Ammonius’s lectures, but others would have collaborated too.7 Olympiodorus in his writings never mentions Philoponus and apparently ignored or pretended to ignore what was happening in Alexandria so close to himself. Some hostility and rivalry can be read in his attitude. Koenraad Verrycken has tried to define the complex career of Philoponus, but some of his claims might be conjectural.8 The philosopher had the Christian name “John” from his birth in Alexandria around 490. Yet even if he was born a Christian, his philosophy was not necessarily Christian for the rest of his life. In fact, Verrycken conjectures two phases, I and II: Philoponus I adhered to Neoplatonism, but Philoponus II later abandoned his philosophical past.
We have seen in part I that in Plato’s Theaetetus (143a), Euclid had to take several steps in order to jot down a sufficiently correct version of a speech he had heard from Socrates. Socrates did not teach in a closed environment resembling a class, and yet this example of note-taking, the first to my knowledge, can be envisioned in an educational setting. The late antique Neoplatonic commentaries that students took down in Alexandria from the lectures of their teachers of philosophy are not very different. The impulse to consolidate one’s memory is not surprising, and texts escaped their authors and circulated on their own.9 In Oration 11.6 Dio Chrysostom comments that “the text must be delivered before other audiences and many will come to know it.” Von Arnim saw in this an explanation for the dissemination of different versions of the same text.10 People in the audience, and probably students as well, took down texts in the form they remembered them, and there was no way to control quality or circulation. In the same oration of Dio, sections 22–24 concerning the language of Homer is followed by a similar version with several modifications.
At times, commentaries did not originate from scholars’ conscious will. A curious incident involving notes emerges from the Life of Proclus by Marinus.11 It seems that the fifth-century philosopher Proclus was initially very reticent to write a commentary, refusing to do so because of certain visions that had forbidden him from it. His disciple Marinus asked him to make a note in appreciation of a book of Orpheus’s that needed a commentary and devised a stratagem: Proclus’s disciples would ask him to make notes in the margins of commentaries, after which they “then made a single collation of them all.” Again, a new book was created. According to this anecdote, which is difficult to take at face value because Proclus actually wrote a lot, Proclus made a sharp distinction between notes and a finalized text, but perhaps it is more likely that, “having a good nature,” he gave in to the requests of his students.
Even though only one version of each of the late antique philosophical commentaries is now known, there may have been more in circulation. The same lectures may have been given again over subsequent years, and in theory multiple students may have attempted to take down a single one. Most of the commentaries only contain the phrase apo phones (from the voice of someone). Certain philosophers made limited claims to their texts and allowed their ideas to circulate freely, with some inevitable alterations and mistakes. We are not well informed about the students who annotated the lectures. In the case of Didymus, I surmise that the notetaker was an advanced young man of the caliber of the student who interrogated Didymus on the story of Job. In late antiquity too, it is likely that the role of notetaker would have been assigned by the instructor, or at least sanctioned by him. A philosophical anecdote relating to Proclus shows the mechanics of dictation and recording within a student-teacher relationship. Marinus reports that the old Plutarch of Athens was so taken by the young Proclus’s determination and enthusiasm for philosophy that he included him in his study circle, which was reading Aristotle and Plato. It was Plutarch himself who exhorted Proclus to take notes recording what was said in the group, saying that they would eventually form a treatise on the Phaedo under Proclus’s name.12 A story reported by Photius shows the student Theosebius taking down a single text several times.13 The same student twice recorded the Alexandrian philosopher Hierocles’s lectures on the Gorgias, with confusing results, since a comparison of the versions shows notable discrepancies. But was Theosebius entirely to blame for the details surrounding the fundamental exegesis and its inconsistencies? Tradition has preferred to blame the student, but it is possible that Hierocles had actually delivered different accounts at different times.
The ancient commentators exhibited a notable indifference to intellectual property in allowing their students to write down and circulate notes from their lectures.14 Their reasons for this attitude were partly due to the state of publication in antiquity. The commentators would have been aware, as we have already seen in other cases, that copies of some lectures might be disseminated without their consent and beyond their control, and they would have had to accept the inevitable and even take some distance from their teaching lectures. Below I investigate one further reason for their acceptance of the status quo. These notes were “class” copies produced by several students in collaboration. We have seen that in the third century the philosopher Plotinus refrained from writing for ten years, with the result that his students, especially Amelius, wrote massive amounts of notes. Ammonius, we are told, did not like writing either and had to rely on others. One wonders whether in both cases Plato’s negative attitude toward writing was so influential that it established a trend.15 Longinus in any case talked about this very topic, saying that in all schools some philosophers preferred to write but others did not for complex reasons.16 In the case of Ammonius and Plotinus an important reason was to keep their teachings private.
Philosophers like Olympiodorus, who wrote several works on Plato and Aristotle, surely distinguished between the formal texts they wrote for publication and those they shaped more informally from the words they spread in class. The former were carefully organized and composed, while the latter were transcripts. In their lectures to students, philosophers were aware of the needs of their audience and supplied information of every kind. Like all good teachers they cared to plant seeds of knowledge in their students. In his Commentary on Gorgias, Olympiodorus considers the merits of teachers, from whom all our knowledge comes.17 The teacher proceeds calmly, telling the pupils that just as an “apprentice potter first shapes something little,” they should not begin by learning to make a wine jar, but should avoid being too ambitious. Rather than considering their commentaries true “intellectual property,” philosophers would have regarded their lectures as schoolwork. In the commentaries, pedagogy was paramount. Critics have objected to the limited attention Olympiodorus devoted to theoretical philosophy, but he seems to have had different aims.
We shall consider the caution with which Olympiodorus presented his message in his commentary on the First Alcibiades, but there is no direct evidence of his comportment in class. A fragment from Philoponus, however, lets us see the philosopher scrutinizing the faces of his students in an attempt to assess the reception of his message. In order to learn, says Philoponus, young people need to be endowed by nature or receive instruction. Otherwise, those who frequently attend lectures might become annoyed and frustrated. Without the changes that nature or instruction bring, the teacher “might not be able to explain the expressions in the face of someone showing that he has understood what we say and the other expressions showing that he has not understood us.”18 We glimpse the philosopher going around the class interrogating his students’ faces in order to fine-tune his message. Every philosopher had to assure himself that his class was following him, particularly in an introductory course. Students would have arrived with a baseline preparation in grammatical notions and generally would have been exposed to rhetoric, as the Discourses of Epictetus show. Olympiodorus had an interest in rhetoric. He possibly taught this discipline, or at least tried to encourage it because it was a good source of revenue, but philosophy was not part of the enkyklios paideia, and only some privileged young men chose to be exposed to it.19 They were mostly novices and needed guidance.
Olympiodorus on the First Alcibiades
The order in which Plato’s dialogues were taught was discussed throughout antiquity with mixed opinions,20 and in late antiquity it became commonly accepted that the First Alcibiades served as an introduction, followed by Gorgias and Phaedo.21 The topic of the First Alcibiades was perfect for the late antique student, who would have known that after some years of rhetoric he would need to meet civic responsibilities, even if these did not any more involve crucial decisions of war and peace. A confused student feeling uncertain about his future would have been able to identify with the young Alcibiades, who was admired for all his qualities, both physical and cultural.22 He had teachers for every subject, such as arithmetic, poetry, grammar, and rhetoric. In his teachers’ classes, Alcibiades sometimes played games, speaking out confidently against cheating classmates.23 He felt self-assured and did not care to apply effort in the proper directions, claiming that all the other men in politics were uneducated anyway. Alcibiades was sometimes reluctant, but Socrates claimed that he was at the ideal age to learn. Sections 129–135 of the dialogue concern knowing oneself in order to manage city affairs and impart virtue to the citizen. Virtue was becoming for a free man, and vice was proper for a slave. At the end of the dialogue, Alcibiades appears convinced and ready to be educated.
The commentary of Olympiodorus is structured differently from those of Didymus. In Didymus’s commentaries, lemmata are elucidated and students’ questions receive answers. The commentaries on Ecclesiastes and especially the Psalms dealt with popular texts that students probably already knew in part. The First Alcibiades may not have been as well known to beginners, and we can expect that the participants in the seminar would have been asked to read it before or that they would have had the text in their hands. In Kom el-Dikka, one of the fifth- or sixth-century Alexandrian classrooms excavated in 2005 shows a high thronos surrounded by four tiers of seats in a horseshoe shape.24 A stone in the middle of the space was probably the base of a lectern that could have been used by a student to read. The teacher may have used it too, to rest his text before expounding while walking around the classroom. Olympiodorus organized the content of his commentary into twenty-eight praxeis, that is, lessons of various length, each one divided into two parts. The theoria provided an exegesis and discussion of some of the text, while a shorter section (lexis) concentrated on elucidating phrases and words. Internal evidence gives the reader a sense of the passage of time during teaching and shows the movement of the commentary toward the end, with Olympiodorus using expressions such as “we must proceed to the subject,” “we said yesterday,” “we observed before,” “as we said at the beginning,” and “as we stated already.”25 Together with the many repetitions, these statements confer authenticity on the text and give the reader a sense of how the class was conducted. Attempting to calculate how much time it would have taken Olympiodorus to deliver the whole seminar, scholars have estimated a duration of about ten weeks.26
The Life of Plato
The commentary starts with a brief reference to Aristotle, suggesting that the previous curriculum would have covered his work in part.27 After some paragraphs in which Olympiodorus promises his students that they will be enchanted by Plato’s fountain and inspirations, he briefly engages in narrating a “Life of Plato.” Why did Proclus not include a similar narrative in his commentary? The most likely answer is that Olympiodorus’s “Life of Plato” was an encomium more related to rhetoric than to philosophy.28 I have already remarked on Olympiodorus’s knowledge of and partiality to rhetoric. To some of his students, this piece must have sounded familiar. Encomia were the most popular of the progymnasmata (preliminary rhetorical exercises), because on leaving a rhetorical school a young man would be expected to write panegyrics of political figures and of his city.29 This “Life of Plato” has all the ingredients of the exercise as described by Menander the Rhetor, Theon, Aphthonius, and Libanius.30 According to the fourth-century rhetor Aphthonius:
This is the division of encomium. You will develop it under the following heads (kephalaia). You will have a prologue referring to the subject. Then you will place birth, which you will divide into nation, homeland, ancestors, and parents. Then education, which you will divide into pursuits, competence, and customs. Then you will adduce the most important head of encomium, achievements, which you will divide into soul, body and fortune (soul: e.g., courage, practical wisdom; body: e.g., beauty, speed, strength; fortune: e.g., power, wealth, friends). After these, the comparison, attaching greater weight to the subject of the encomium through juxtaposition. Then an epilogue, more akin to a prayer.
In this “Life of Plato,” after a prologue, the headings of the encomium follow Plato’s ancestors and parents (genos), his education, teachers, and achievements in various subjects, and most importantly, his deeds: his closeness to powerful people; his trips to Sicily; his journeys to Egypt and Phoenicia, where he learned priestly skills and the lore of the Magi; and, especially, the founding of the Academy. A short comparison with Homer then leads to a prayer. This “Life of Plato” is constructed like a perfect encomium, with the proper kephalaia. Olympiodorus must have delivered it as a transition to the Alcibiades text.
Westerink, who edited this commentary superbly and had to face tough decisions, made specific choices, as we shall see.31 The text was full of every kind of mistake: grammatical, syntactical, oral, and phonetical. In editing, Westerink resolved not to correct any error that he felt was a blunder on the part of the notetaker, but he also had to decide whether some of them could ultimately be attributed to Olympiodorus himself.
Plato’s dialogues are imaginary accounts of conversations in which exchanges involving students and teaching often take place. In the late antique commentaries we hear the voice of the teacher expounding on his exegesis, but not those of students who ask questions. The presence of the student is revealed by his notes, marginalia, and mistakes, and perhaps by the fact that the exegeses of certain passages may reflect students’ requests for explanations. It would be wrong, I think, to envision a class with only one voice. In this case, the questions may be hidden because the notetaker chose not to copy them as part of simplifying his rendition of the text, as happened with Epictetus and Didymus. In published accounts of lectures, some aspects of the oral texts were effaced, such as references to the members of the audience as hetairoi and the use of the address in the second person. I believe that in Olympiodorus’s First Alcibiades these aspects are still visible, but one must actively look for them.
The philosopher was responsible for the theoria in which he expounded on the parts of the text he had chosen, but what exactly was the place of the lexis in the economy of the whole? How did he isolate certain portions that needed clarification? Was Olympiodorus retracing his steps and rereading the dialogue in order to focus on certain ambiguous expressions? Or was he, like Philoponus, in the habit of studying the faces of his students for signs that they were uncertain and unconvinced? This must have been so in some cases, but not in all. I suggest that the various explanations often addressed students’ questions and doubts, which were then made to disappear from the commentary in order that only the philosopher’s voice could be heard.32 Some of the lexeis refer to elementary expressions, such as, in 25.1.9–10, distinctions between words like “one,” “first,” “only,” “multitude,” and “mob,” or the explanation that “in so many years” means “such a long time” in 26.1. In 35.10 the comparison of “you do not know with precision” with “you only surmise” is a response to a simple question. At 37.14–19 Olympiodorus retorts “it is certainly fair to wonder” at an expression used by Socrates—this too is a response to a question. At 50.15 someone must have asked about the meaning of the text “among the Hellenes and not only among them,” which the philosopher explained as a reference to all Europe, to foreigners, and to people across the earth. This is only a small sample of the lexeis that show attention to issues of grammar and basic comprehension of the text. They must have originated from students’ direct participation. Gellius explains that his teacher, the philosopher Taurus, allowed almost everyone to ask questions.33 Classes were full of life. Quintilian mentions rivalry, noise, jumping, and standing up.34 He considers questions integral parts of a class: the teacher “must answer questions readily and himself question those who do not ask any.”
At the end of the “Life of Plato,” the philosopher is compared to Homer, who is broadly present throughout the commentary. In late antique Alexandria, the philosophers relied on knowledge of the traditional curriculum based on classical literature and myths. Olympiodorus was openly pagan, but he worked within a Christian environment, although one that was not particularly hostile. His aim was to keep alive those Greek cultural achievements of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE that were not considered offensive to Christianity. Though he did not accept certain tenets, such as those concerning eternal punishment and suicide, his students were not particularly challenged by his paganism. They could get along easily with Socrates, Plato, and the pantheon of the Olympians.35 Of course the Christian students of Olympiodorus could not accept traditional religion and mythology, but the philosopher usually omitted the names of the Greek gods and did not consider their individual features. He only spoke of a general God. Classical paideia was one of his concerns, so that Homer, Demosthenes, Aelius Aristides, and Plutarch were often mentioned in class. When he said at the beginning of his First Alcibiades that his students had to learn Plato because he could be useful to them, he referred mostly to that classical learning that was still considered some kind of passport in cultural contexts that could open many doors.
Regarding the First Alcibiades commentary, Westerink remarked, “There is a quotation from Homer for almost any occasion, but they are often no better than confused reminiscences pieced together.”36 We must evaluate this criticism and put it in perspective. We have seen that, in the second century, Epictetus’s quotations from Homer often consisted of half lines, popular verses that freely circulated, and short paraphrases. In a few cases he referred to verses that were rarely quoted by others but would appear in much later literature, mostly in grammarians’ works.37 The fact that those lines were cited correctly must have been due to Arrian’s competence in literary matters and his impeccable schooling. In the second century, the Second Sophistic had revived Homer.38 And yet Epictetus, a philosopher, not having an intrinsic literary interest, did not quote him for the beauty of his poetry but to bend him to his own purpose, reinterpreting the poet to show how useful he could be to the budding philosopher and how nefarious some of his lines were when taken literally.39
An interest in Homer survived in the sixth century, but rather than concentrating on accuracy, philosophers now only wanted to evoke situations and concepts. In terms of tastes, Olympiodorus cited the Iliad more than the Odyssey, which was generally the less well known of the two in antiquity.40His reading choices conformed to the Homeric quotations preserved in the papyri, and also matched those of literary individuals in antiquity.41 He quoted from the whole of the Iliad and not just the first half, although as usual Books 1 and 2 attracted most of his attention. Though he quoted less from the Odyssey, it is interesting that he cited Book 11, which concerns the underworld, only twice, preferring other lines instead.42 He often referred to Homer traditionally, as ho poietes, the poet par excellence. Euripides, whom he called ho tragikos, is the only tragic poet to survive in the commentary. Olympiodorus paid attention almost exclusively to his Hippolytus and Orestes and reported short verses or allusions to them.
It is interesting to glance at his use of literature and at the lengths of his citations, keeping in mind that in Plato he had found some justification for quoting short poetic lines. Three times he quotes the same short line 352 of Hippolytus, in which Phaedra replies that the nurse herself had mentioned the name of Hippolytus: “you heard it from yourself, not me.”43 Olympiodorus also cites a passage from Epictetus, Encheiridion 5: “And as Epictetus the Stoic, who became a true Stoic in his mind, says: an uneducated person blames others for his own faults; one whose education has just begun blames himself and not others; but one whose education is complete blames neither another nor himself.” Alcibiades, who here lacks education, has blamed Socrates by saying “as you say.” As his education progresses, he will not blame anyone. Like Phaedra, Socrates says, “You said this, not me.” In First Alcibiades(113 C), Plato alludes briefly to the same verse of the Hippolytus. Olympiodorus comments to his students: “Plato teaches us how one ought to paraphrase poetic passages, namely, that one should not cite the passages themselves because that is tedious and weakens the words but rather should excerpt some phrases.”44 Citing a rather long passage from the philosopher Epictetus was acceptable, but half lines of poetry, short allusions, and paraphrases served the student of philosophy well.
The Mistakes
Errors of various kinds appear in the philosophical and poetic quotations and in the commentary to the First Alcibiades. While some are due to misheard words, phonetic spelling, or even the introduction of faulty verses that a student had never heard before and with which he struggled, we also have to allow for the possibility that in some cases Olympiodorus himself may have been the source of the confusion. Scholarly attention has focused on the student, who is deemed “less competent than usual” and “none too brilliant,” and has considered his ignorance and hearing impediment with consternation.45 Was he really an exceptionally unprepared young man? Dodds even deemed it suspicious that the commentary became shorter as it proceeded, which he attributed to the fact that “the student’s interest flags.”46 In reality, all teachers in antiquity began by covering a text in detail and little by little proceeded much more quickly, with the consequence that the first books of Homer, for example, were much better known.47
The papyri have sensitized us to the fact that Greek was a language in evolution and that over time its speakers lost sensitivity to certain linguistic phenomena.48 They could no longer clearly perceive the distinction of vowel length, they interchanged liquids (lambda/rho) and sibilants (sigma/zeta), and they were not sensitive to aspiration. Together with iotacism, these are only some of the phonetic changes that could significantly alter the appearance of a word. Two occurrences might take place. Scholars agree that all the errors in Olympiodorus’s Commentary are due to faulty hearing, and therefore the student must have had trouble taking down a text in a sort of dictation. This, however, is not the only possible scenario; another variation is also likely. Even if Olympiodorus had pronounced words in a traditional way and the student had heard them correctly, when writing them down he could have committed phonetic errors.49 Of course, this type of mistake does not exhaust the whole gamut of possible blunders that show that the “editor,” as Westerink called the notetaker, had confronted a challenging task. In previous centuries, phonetic errors were commonplace only in documentary texts, but in the sixth century they could affect people in cultured milieus. The “editor” would have brought his own writing habits to school.
Olympiodorus was probably not exempt from mistakes, but scholars have generally tended to forgive him and to refuse to admit the possibility that he himself was responsible for some big blunders in his text.50 Thus two important errors have been usually attributed to the “editor.” The erroneous mention of Thrasymachus as a character of the Gorgias and the misattribution of a famous quotation from the Republic to the Timaeus are errors that have seemed hardly ascribable to a professor of Platonic philosophy.51 And yet, if the student had been guilty of making those names up, it is strange that he would have taken the initiative to change the text while taking notes. Those were factual errors and not phonetic ones. It is possible that the student left blank spaces here that he or someone else filled in later. We should also reflect on the fact that teachers might not be always infallible. We have considered in the introduction the mistakes that appear in the treatises of Aristotle that reproduced his live lectures to students. In that case too, Aristotle’s faulty use of the sources could be attributed to the philosopher himself. Tarrant may be the voice of reason: “One has to force oneself to recall the greater fallibility of the modern academics within the class-room (even when well prepared) than within their private study.”52 Just as the notes of modern students appear quite unruly and may be compared with those of the Commentary, so too a modern professor may sometimes be absent-minded when lecturing to a class.
Another perplexing feature of this text is the presence of two different praxeis commenting on First Alcibiades 126c–127e, an intriguing occurrence that needs explanation.53 It seems bizarre that Olympiodorus would have commented twice in class on the same passage of Plato, and in a quite different way both times. It appears more plausible that one of the two lectures had been given at a different time and in a different venue. The “editor” must have found the second version somewhere, maybe among Olympiodorus’s papers, and decided to include it. After praxis 21 the new text formed praxis 22, and probably the numbers of the lectures were adjusted not while Olympiodorus was lecturing but later, by someone who was reading the whole text. In the margin at 192.10 a student added, “I wrote a double version of this lecture because the explanations were different.” But this raises a doubt. Is the picture of a single student taking down the commentary still realistic, or did the “editor” work together with others?
Notes on Notes: The Manuscript’s Marginalia
The manuscript of Olympiodorus’s lecture taken down by his students, the archetype of all other copies, is Marcianus graecus 196, which dates to the later ninth century and also contains commentaries on the Gorgias and Phaedo.54 The manuscript is in excellent condition and includes all the notes, corrections, and doodles along with a good number of mistakes. This was one of the earliest works of profane literature to be transliterated into minuscule, and it does not show many errors of transmission.55 Its margins are crowded with written observations, summaries of arguments, and lists of items, all of them things that look like school exercises. Westerink rightly included these jottings in his edition of the Commentary because they appeared contemporary, but they were otherwise ignored and left untranslated, on the grounds that a student had been “fully” responsible for them. These marginal notes are not uniformly of the same kind and level of expertise. As we consider them, we should ask ourselves some basic questions. Would a student have been able to do drawings and make lists in the margins at the same time that he was recording Olympiodorus’s words? Were additional students involved in adding these notes at the same time? May these notes sometimes reflect further explanations that the philosopher gave in class, but that did not become part of the main text?
In trying to give a reader an idea of how these marginal notes look, I will divide them into three overlapping types: lists of words, geometric drawings with sporadic words inserted, and longer passages of poetry and prose that refer to single lines in the text. Thus the marginalia at 42.10–43.3 appear rather elementary. Commenting on Socrates mentioning human experiences, a student listed adjectives and nouns referring to pathe in three columns, in what looks like an exercise at the grammatical level. Likewise, at 58.7–11 the student listed four nouns, “God, Socrates, Alcibiades, and the citizens” in a line, and underneath each one placed adjectives such as “better” and “worse” (cheiron and kreitton). The young man who at 73.12–74.7 wrote in two columns nouns such as rhetor, soldier, captain, and citizen paired with their corresponding aims (getting rich from spoils, persuading through speech, triumphing over enemies, and making the citizens good) also seems to be at a lower level than that implied by the reading of Plato.56 In similar exercises the words are sometimes recorded in alphabetical order.
The drawings in the margins are attractive. At times one has the impression that this young man, like others nowadays, enjoyed producing stylized doodles and considered the actual notes secondary.57 At 195.11–196.3 he wrote only a few phrases and single letters about just people (the dikaioi), instead devoting all his attention to a geometrical drawing. Here and in other schematic drawings he used the adjective asystaton (incoherent) to show the lack of correspondence between some terms.58 At 179.10–20 he placed terms that do not correspond in a kind of box formed with horizontal, vertical, and oblique lines. Four spaces are defined and asystaton is repeated. At 156.9–12 he wrote in five lines the genealogy of Zeus, Danae, and their descendants, whose names are separated neatly by various lines, in what must have been a memory exercise.
The last type of marginal notes raises some issues of attribution. Again, I note only a few examples. In one, Olympiodorus quotes a single line from Aristophanes’s Acharnians, 531, but in the margin of 29.13 a student has added additional verses, 530–34. When and from where did he get them? Was he able to remember the lines himself, or did Olympiodorus supply them in response to someone in class asking for the passage? At 216.4, a bare allusion to the moly in the Odyssey leads to a longer explanation about the plant.59 At another point in the commentary, Olympiodorus mentions the term Metragyrtes, a priest of Cybele, without adding any explanation. A long marginal note at 159.16 fills in the details. This historia mentions a man who went to Attica and bewitched the women of the goddess. After the Athenians killed him, a plague came to the city. Apollo made expiation to pacify the dead. The Athenians built an edifice in the man’s honor and dedicated it, along with a statue of him, to the Mother of the Gods. It seems inconceivable that Olympiodorus had solely cited the exotic name of this priest of Cybele without expanding on the background when in the rest of the text he can so often be seen adding elementary explanations. Did his class ask for clarification? At 174.5 the adjective philochremosyne is explained in a marginal note that mentions a proverb and the story of an oracle of Apollo. When the student adds to the story that “Aristotle mentioned this oracle in the Athenaion Politeia,” it appears likely that Olympiodorus must have told the story of the oracle to the class as an aside but then found it superfluous to introduce it in the commentary.
What precedes suggests an intriguing picture of Olympiodorus and his class. First of all, I think that students should not be blamed for every mistake present in the text. The philosopher might have made some slips himself in the heat of the lecture or in the ennui of the delivery. He would have commented more than once on the First Alcibiades, as the presence of two different praxeis at 126c–127e reveals. This dialogue may have been the foundation of a recurring series of lectures. I have also suggested that some extensive marginal notes may be attributed to him, having derived from some further clarifications requested by his class. These were loosely related to the Platonic text and issued from students’ questions. I have said above that questions are not directly visible in this commentary, unlike occasionally in the notebooks of Epictetus and Didymus; but they must have taken place, because they were a mandatory ingredient of classroom life at all times. I have proposed that some of the lexeis may have issued naturally from students’ requests for explanations. Likewise, the longer historiai present in the margins probably represented Olympiodorus’s responses to students’ demands for elucidation.
An issue that demands attention is how many students were involved in writing the commentary and in adding the marginal notes. We have seen that so far scholars have referred to a single person, the “editor” who was responsible for taking down the lectures, but in light of what we have ascertained this scenario seems impossible. There were too many activities to cover. Taking down the main text would have required much care, the provision of a different version at 126c–127e would have had to be done by a different student, and the marginal notes seem to show various levels of expertise. The notetaker did not have sufficient time to both write the text and add the marginal notes, and probably someone else did so.
Praechter commented on the generosity of the ancient philosophical commentators, who allowed students to write down their lectures apo phones and to circulate them among the public.60 This scholar argued that these philosophers exhibited “a remarkable indifference to intellectual property.” I have already commented on some of the reasons philosophers such as Olympiodorus did not mind the status quo and showed this apparently unselfish behavior. And yet, now that we have glanced at the students who may have collaborated to write the whole commentary, Olympiodorus’s lack of resentment is clear and reasonable. The recording of the commentary on the First Alcibiades was not the product of a single student but was instead a class endeavor. Looking at the work of Olympiodorus through the eyes and interventions of his students allows us to glean information on the activities of teachers of philosophy and their students that would be otherwise unreachable. In part III we have witnessed the pedagogical methods of a variety of philosophers who aimed at instilling in young men knowledge and a new way of life. The ancient philosophical classroom has now acquired not only definite instructors and pedagogical methods unknown before but also students who listened to lectures and played an indispensable role in recording their teachers’ voices.
1. This expression appears in the fifth and sixth centuries and is used in the philosophical schools of Athens, Alexandria, and Gaza. It is also used for Byzantine grammarians and iatrosophists. The lectures of the grammarian Georg Choeroboscus were taken down by his students. The text was simple but very prolix. The classic article is Richard 1950.
2. Cf. Wildberg 2005, 317.
3. On the atmosphere in the city with pagan and Christian students, see Watts 2010.
4. General information on Olympiodorus and his times in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Olympiodorus,” https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/olympiodorus/. In this introductory part I follow Wildberg (2005) and the many works of Richard Sorabji.
5. Cf. Richard 1950, 192: “Ammonius did not like to write.” Cf. Cribiore 2017. The Christian Zacharias painted a portrait of the philosopher teaching from his high chair. On Ammonius see Verrycken 2016b.
6. Sorabji 2010.
7. Westerink 2016, 353. At that time Asclepius became the editor, but later on Philoponus filled that place and became the leading figure of the school.
8. Verrycken 2016a.
9. Cribiore 2019.
10. von Arnim 1898, 170–71. The discussion expands to 181–82; see also 281–82; Praechter 1909 (2016), 43.
11. Life of Proclus 27; Edwards 2000, 99.
12. Marinus, Proclus or on Happiness 12. Translation by Edwards 2000. The treatise on the Phaedo is lost.
13. Photius Bibl. 338b35–36b.
14. Praechter 1909 (2016), 44, also reporting the above episodes. See below.
15. Plato, Phdr. 274b–277a.
16. Cf. part I where Longinus explores this issue.
17. Jackson et al. 1998, 257–58, lecture 40.6.
18. Sorabji 2014b, 771.21–772.3, 125.
19. Jackson et al. 1998, 20 and 17–20 and 37–44 on Olympiodorus and rhetoric.
20. Cf. Diogenes Laertius 3.62.
21. Festugière 1969, 281–96. On the curriculum, see Jackson et al. 1998, 11–15.
22. See, e.g., the beginning of Plato’s Protagoras and the Symposium (212e 1–2), where the beauty of Alcibiades is emphasized.
23. First Alcibiades 110B, an attractive vignette.
24. See in Plato Prt. 315c the representation of a class, with Hippias sitting on a high chair and the other philosophers on benches around him. On teachers’ imposing chairs in antiquity (thronoi), see Cribiore 2001b, 28–34. On Kom el-Dikka, see Cribiore 2007b; Libanius Or. 5 and Chria 3 (Foerster vol. 8). Plutarch Mor. Whether an Old Man Should Engage in Public Affairs 796 represents philosophers sitting on high chairs and lecturing. An image that is not well known on a stele at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva represents a teacher of math sitting on a large chair with a small boy in front of him; see Chamay and Schärlig 1998. The figure of the boy is tiny to show his relative unimportance.
25. 3.2; 34.8; 48.14; 54.17; 55.12.
26. Griffin 2015. Griffin 2020, a continuation covering the translation and commentary of 10–28, is equally masterful.
27. All Neoplatonist commentators accepted the harmony of Aristotle and Plato; see Sorabji 2016b, 3–5.
28. On the life of Plato in this text, see the good interpretation of Griffin 2015, 43–46. I think, however, that the consideration of this life as an encomium is indispensable.
29. Cribiore 2007, 144–46, on Libanius.
30. Patillon and Bolognesi 1997, 83–86 and 131–32 with Aphthonius’s text; Patillon 2008; Russell and Wilson 1981, 2–6.
31. Westerink 1956.
32. I will examine only some instances in the first part of the commentary.
33. NA 1.26. Taurus too asked questions after a reading of Plato’s Symposium, NA 17.20; Snyder 2000, 111–12.
34. Quintilian 2.2.
35. See Jackson et al. 1998, 8–11.
36. Westerink 1956, ix.
37. Cf. chapter 6.
38. On Philodemus’s positive attitude toward Homer, see Fish 2022; Kim 2010; Kim 2022; Manolea 2022.
39. One might compare Dio’s Oration 11 where he criticizes Homer from many points of view. On various views of Homer, see Lamberton 1986.
40. Cf. Cribiore 2001b, 195–96.
41. Cribiore 2001b, 197.
42. Book 11 and specifically the underworld were extremely popular because readers could return to characters of the Iliad. Cribiore 2001b, 196.
43. The whole passage I am looking at is 101.1 to 104.6.
44. Commentary 104.4.
45. Tarrant 1999, 24; Westerink 1956, viii.
46. Dodds 1957, 357.
47. Cribiore 2001b, 194–97.
48. Gignac 1976. On linguistic changes, see Evans and Obbink 2010.
49. Cribiore 1996, 92–93.
50. Most recently, Griffin 2015, 47.
51. 61.8 and 45.2; Westerink 1956, ix; Dodds 1957, 357. See, however, Griffin 2015, 199n297. Griffin removes from Olympiodorus some of the blame for the last instance.
52. Tarrant 1999, 24. Tarrant shows examples of transpositions in the text when Olympiodorus’s comments were given at a different time.
53. Commentary 183.15 to 192.9 the first lecture; 192.10 to 197.6, the second one.
54. For observations on the manuscript, see Duke 1990, 19–29; Tarrant 1999, 23–40.
55. Dodds 1957.
56. There are many more exercises at this level.
57. See 81.26–82.4; 118.18–22.
58. 65.10–19; 195.11–196.3.
59. Od. 10.305. The word is cited often in antiquity, for example, by Galen and Gregory of Nazianzus.
60. Praechter 1909 (2016).