ABSTRACT
As the present collection of papers shows, it was above all by means of the commentary genre that philosophical systems were elaborated and handed on in Late Antiquity. The ‘late platonist’ commentators of Athens and Alexandria preserved much of the Platonist, Peripatetic, and Stoic teaching of an earlier age within a well-defined and institutionalized pedagogical context.1 While the Latin reception and transformation of that tradition, especially in the person of Boethius, is explored elsewhere in the present collection,2 the Syriac-speaking East too was active in adopting and adapting for its own ends this particular stream in which flowed so much of the stored-up ‘wisdom of the Greeks’. This is hardly surprising given the significance of the eastern provinces of the Empire, whose intelligentsia had as much access to the Empire’s sources of learning as anyone else. They made good use of it, for during the course of the sixth century at least three individuals chose to begin writing commentaries on Aristotle’s Organon in Syriac rather than Greek. All three represent the Alexandrian teaching traditions just as much as their Greek equivalents (Philoponus, Olympiodorus et al.) and probably all had spent time in the great city itself. Two members of this triad, Probus and Sergius, should be called ‘Graeco-Syrians’, scholars conversant and literate in both languages, and they expected many at least of their students to be literate in Greek as well as Syriac.3 The third, Paul the Persian, came from a different linguistic sphere but he too was as much a product of the Greek tradition as the others.
