Aeneas of Gaza : Theophrastus with Zacharias of Mytilene, Ammonius

216 Pages·2012·2.171 MB·English

by  Dillon, John M., Gertz, Sebastian Ramon Philipp, Russell, Donald Andrew

AENEAS OF GAZA
Theophrastus
with
ZACHARIAS OF MYTILENE
Ammonius
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AENEAS OF GAZA
Theophrastus
Translated by John Dillon and
Donald Russell
with
ZACHARIAS OF
MYTILENE
Ammonius
Translated by Sebastian Gertz
LONDON • NEW DELHI • NEW YORK • SYDNEY
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First published in 2012 by Bristol Classical Press
Paperback edition (cid:2) rst published 2014

Preface © 2012 by Richard Sorabji
Translation © 2012 by Sebastian Gertz,
John Dillon, and Donald Russell
Richard Sorabji, Sebastian Gertz, John Dillon, and Donald Russell have
asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
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The present translations have been made possible by generous and imaginative
funding from the following sources: the National Endowment for the Humanities,
Division of Research Programs, an independent federal agency of the USA; the
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e del Tempo (Padua); Mario Mignucci; Liverpool University; the Leventis
Foundation; the Arts and Humanities Research Council; Gresham College; the
Esmée Fairbairn Charitable Trust; the Henry Brown Trust; Mr and Mrs N. Egon;
the Netherlands Organisation for Scienti(cid:2) c Research (NWO/GW); the Ashdown
Trust; Dr Victoria Solomonides, the Cultural Attaché of the Greek Embassy
in London; Robert Bagnall; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
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responsible for every volume since the (cid:2) rst. Detailed acknowledgements are
provided in ‘Note on the composition of the present volume’.
Typeset by Ray Davies
Printed and bound in Great Britain
Contents
Preface by Richard Sorabji vii
Note on the Composition of the Present Volume xxxi
Conventions xxxii
Note on Citations xxxiii
Aeneas of Gaza: Theophrastus 1
Introduction 3
Translation 11
Variations from Colonna’s Text 54
Notes 55
English-Greek Glossary 69
Greek-English Index 81
Zacharias of Mytilene: Ammonius 93
Introduction 95
Translation 101
Variations from Colonna’s Text 148
Notes 149
English-Greek Glossary 159
Greek-English Index 168
Subject Index 177
Aeneas of Gaza: Theophrastus 177
Zacharias of Mytilene: Ammonius 179
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Preface: Waiting for Philoponus
Richard Sorabji
I. Three Gazan Christians waiting for Philoponus
The fifth-century AD pagan Neoplatonist Proclus wrote eighteen
arguments for the eternity of the cosmos which were to be recorded
and attacked one by one in the following century by the Christian
Philoponus in his Against Proclus On the Eternity of the World.1 By
‘the world’ (kosmos in Greek) was meant the entire universe envis-
aged as an orderly system, and they agreed with each other that the
universe was an orderly system, even when they used an expression,
‘the universe’ (to pan in Greek), that did not actually include that in
its meaning. Their disagreement was on whether it had a beginning
and end, as the Christians said. Proclus died in 485 AD, and Philo-
ponus wrote his reply, the first of a series against the pagan philoso-
phers, in 529. In the period of almost fifty years between 485 and 529,
three Christians from Gaza had already attempted to attack the
dominant pagan philosophy of Platonism. They had some limited
successes, but I shall argue that it was only Philoponus who had the
ability to carry the attack home into the pagan camp.2
Three Christian attacks on Neoplatonism
Aeneas of Gaza was the first of the three Gazans. His dialogue
Theophrastus, written between 485 and 490,3 was named after his
fictitious Platonist interlocutor who represented the case for Plato-
nism and who supposedly lost to the fictitious Christian Euxitheus.
The main subject of the Theophrastus was the human soul and its
fate before birth and after death, including the resurrection. But it
overlapped in one part with the subject of the other two Christian
texts, the Christians’ creation of the world from a beginning, as
opposed to the Neoplatonists’ eternal creation of the world. Moreover,
the overlap turns out to be greater, because the second Christian also
finishes his text by discussing the resurrection.
The second Christian, Zacharias, born in the port of Gaza, Mai-
uma, had gone to study rhetoric and philosophy in Alexandria in the
480s. After moving on to study law in Berytus around 487, he wrote
viii Waiting for Philoponus
in the 490s a dialogue caricaturing the great Neoplatonist philo-
sopher of Alexandria, Ammonius, and named it after him, Ammonius
(or On the Creation of the World). This dialogue represented Am-
monius as being refuted and silenced by the arguments about
creation of a Christian student identified in the preface as Zacharias
himself, even though he warns that when he is in dialogue with the
two pagan professors, he will switch his designation from ‘A’ to ‘CH.’
(short for ‘Christian’), as he does several times.4 It cited Aeneas a
couple of times, and re-used some of his arguments, although it
added many more, often naïve, but occasionally better than those of
Aeneas. Zacharias was to feature as the hero in another of his own
treatises, The Life of Severus, this time as the most important figure
in a riot of about 486 that ransacked the pagan temple of Isis outside
Alexandria, and led to the flight from the city of three pagan teach-
ers, the torture of another, and the death in hiding of a fifth. The
Ammonius inserted the supposed refutation by Zacharias of Gessius,
a younger medical colleague of Ammonius, and it has been suggested
that this ‘refutation’ was added after 525 AD, when Ammonius was
no longer alive himself to provide the straw man.5 The dialogue is
amusingly unreal in its boasts, but also sociologically interesting, as
it reveals much about the practices in the Alexandrian school, which
has recently been excavated,6 and about the feelings of a zealous and
dangerously disruptive sub-group of Christian students. Zacharias
finished up as the Bishop of Mytilene.
As regards a third Christian, Procopius of Gaza (died c. 538), it has
been drawn to my attention7 that there are two pages in Procopius’
Commentary on Genesis8 that argue against the eternity of the world,
and this battery of summarised arguments includes a few that are
more skilful than those that we find in Zacharias. Procopius himself
had a brother called Zacharias, but it is not known whether that
Zacharias was ours.
The anti-Platonist arguments of the last two Gazans very occa-
sionally anticipate those found in Philoponus. But we shall see that
they cannot be compared. One important factor is that Philoponus
does repeatedly what the Gazans do only occasionally. He takes on
his Platonist opponents on their own terms, using their premises to
arrive at his conclusion. Not even Proclus had done that in writing
against the Christians, and Philoponus often complains in his
Against Proclus that Proclus is relying on Platonist dogma which he,
Philoponus, finds unpersuasive and sometimes absurd.
This is only one of the reasons why I have described the Christian
opponents of Neoplatonism as ‘waiting for Philoponus’. But the situ-
ation has been illuminatingly nuanced by Edward Watts. It is not
that the three Gazans were trying to do the same thing as Philoponus
and failing. On the contrary, Watts has argued, in discussing the first
two of the three Gazans, that they had more parochial aims.9 On this
Waiting for Philoponus ix
account, it turns out to be only natural that they did not feel it
necessary to refute the Platonists on their own terms. Aeneas was a
rhetorician, and Watts argues that the readers he wanted to impress
were in the literary salons especially of Alexandria and regarded
themselves as being on equal, and not unfriendly, terms with the
Neoplatonists. Zacharias, by contrast, was writing to impress certain
Christian students in Alexandria and to undercut the personal
authority of their pagan teachers in religious matters. Neither ques-
tioned the value of Neoplatonist cultural knowledge, and Aeneas was
interested in displaying his rhetorical acquaintance with it. Both
might presumably have achieved their objectives, without showing
the Neoplatonists themselves that their philosophical position was
untenable, which is what Philoponus set out to do.
Watts offers a hypothesis about Philoponus’ motivation, which
must inevitably remain conjectural.10 But it would, if true, explain
the fact that Philoponus opposed the Neoplatonists on their own
terms. Up to about 525 AD Philoponus had edited by far the largest
number of commentaries on Aristotle based on Ammonius’ lectures,
with innovative contributions of his own.11 From 529 onwards, while
writing at least one more commentary on Aristotle, he embarked on
a series of attacks on the pagan world-view of Aristotle and Proclus.
Watts’ suggestion is that, on finding he was passed over for the chair
of philosophy upon the death of Ammonius’ immediate successor
around 525 in favour of the very much less experienced Olympio-
dorus, he decided that he could attract Christian students away from
Olympiodorus to his own better exposition of pagan thought, accom-
panied by a critique of it.
I shall now look more closely at the successes and limitations of
the three earlier efforts to combat pagan Neoplatonism.
Aeneas on the food chain objection to resurrection
I shall start with an example from Aeneas’ defence of Christian views
on the soul and the resurrection of the body. This makes the overlap
with Zacharias complete, because Zacharias tacks on this same
problem about the resurrection to his treatise on the creation of the
world. Like Philoponus, Aeneas is aware of an objection to the
resurrection of the body, that our bodies will be eaten after death and
will have passed through a food chain, but he is unaware of the
sharpest formulation of the problem given by Origen (died 253/4 AD),
which motivates the solution offered by Origen and was apparently
followed by Philoponus.12 The crucial point in the sharpest formula-
tion is that the food chain includes other individual humans.
The food chain problem was known at least as early as
Athenagoras in the second century AD. Christians wanted us to be
given back the very same bodies at the resurrection and the usual