ABSTRACT
The Author As often, the title o f this paper needs a word of explanation, since some readers, though not our dedicatee, might wonder who the author I call Ps-Simplicius might be. Those whose interests lie in Aristotle rather than his Neoplatonic commentators may not all be aware that there is a serious problem about the authorship o f the de Anim a commentary which they know as the work of Simplicius. This is not the place to discuss this problem, which I and others have discussed elsewhere,1 but the fact, as I think one must now take it to
^ h e first was F. Piccolomini, Com mentarii in Libros Aristotelis De Coeluy ortu et interitu; adiuncta lucidissima expositione, in tres libros eiusdem de anima (Mainz 1608) 1001-1002, whose work was to be ignored for more than two and a half centuries (the de A nim a was published at Venice in 1602: I have not seen that edition). The question was re opened and, as they thought, solved by F. Bossier and C. Steel, Triscianus Lydus en de “in de Anima” van pseudo(?)-Simplicius>, Tidschrift voor Filosofie 34 (1972) 761-822. An updated version of this article, in English, will appear in Priscian, On Theophrastus on Sense Perception , translated by Pamela Huby and ‘Simplicius', On Aristotle on the S ou l 2.6-12, translated by Carlos Steel. Notes by Peter Lautner (London/Ithaca 1997). A critique of their work by I. Hadot is printed as an appendix to Le problem e du Neoplatonism e alexandrin: Hierocles et S im plicius (Paris 1978) 193-202: Hadot argues that while the language of the de A nim a commentary is indicative of an author other than the real Simplicius the doctrines are not different from his, and concludes by stressing this fact while agreeing that the attribution to Priscian is probably correct. For a more agnostic view of the identity of the author cf. my Aristotle and N eoplatonism in late antiquity. Interpretations o f the de Anima (London/Ithaca 1996) 65-71, reprinted with some modifications
be, that our author is not the real Simplicius, has an important implication for any study on the text of this work. That is that the substantial corpus of work by Simplicius himself cannot be used to corroborate-or undermine-readings in our work, and one cannot appeal to it for support for a conjecture. This is the more so since one of the stronger arguments for denying authorship to the real Simplicius is that the language of the de Anima commentary is so different from his as to put it beyond the bounds of possibility that we are dealing with two different kinds of writing from one and the same hand .* 2 If, as some think, the author was Priscian of Lydia, author of the Metaphrasis in Theoprastum, we could occasionally appeal to that work, though it is short-a mere thirty-seven pages of Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca.3 But I think there are difficulties about that identification which are sufficient to require at least a degree of enoxn, and that all that one can safely say is that this commentary comes from the same intellectual area as the works of Simplicius, Priscian and Damascius, all Neoplatonists who worked in Athens at the end o f the fifth century and the beginning o f the sixth. Hence the label Ps-Simplicius, a counsel of prudence if not quite despair: not quite because a solution is possible in principle, though I suspect that we may never arrive at it.
