ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with aspects of the general development of philosophical schools described as 'Platonist', 'Pythagorean' and 'Aristotelian' in the Roman Empire between the first century BCE and the second century CE. In Plato's Academy, the continuity of the school's tradition linked the members of the school back to the school's founder, a continuity that they could perhaps sometimes take for granted. Aristotle's school, the Lyceum, seems, after the time of his immediate successors, to have lost much of its dynamism and to have more or less disappeared, like the other schools in Athens, following the Roman sack of the city in 86 BCE. Subsequently, the situation resembles what happened in the case of Platonism. The development of Aristotelian schools and of the systematic Aristotelian philosophy that they taught reaches its highest point (and also its end) in the work of Alexander of Aphrodisias.
