Simplicius: On Aristotle's Categories 1-4

curriculum had been established that would last until the end of Antiquity. All philosophy students were to follow this cursus studiorum Latin: "course of studies", which prescribed the reading—after an initial moral purification provided by the study of Epictetus or the Pythagorean Golden Verses—first of Aristotle (beginning with his logic, then his physical and psychological writings, and finally his Metaphysics) and then of a carefully chosen selection of thirteen dialogues of Plato, beginning with the First Alcibiades and culminating with the two dialogues held to be the apex and summary of all knowledge: the Timaeus—authoritative for matters of physics—and the Parmenides, regarded as a summary of theological wisdom. It is thus no surprise that all of Simplicius’ surviving works took the form of exegesis or commentaries.

As is the case with most ancient Greek authors, many of Simplicius’ works have not survived. Those lost works of whose existence we can be fairly sure, based on Greek and Arabic sources, ancient library catalogues, etc., include the following: a commentary on the first book of Euclid’s Elements; another on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, as well as one on his Meteorologica; another on Iamblichus’ work On the Pythagorean Sect; a commentary on one of Plato’s dialogues, probably the Phaedo; an Epitome of the Physics of Theophrastus; and a commentary on the Tekhnê Greek: "Art" or "Skill" of the rhetorician Hermogenes (second-third century AD).

Of the surviving works of Simplicius, we possess his commentary on the Manual (Enkheiridion) of Epictetus, now available in a new critical edition by I. Hadot, and in this series in an English translation by Tad Brennan and Charles Brittain (2 vols, London & Ithaca NY 2000), as well as four Aristotelian commentaries ascribed to him, published by the Berlin Academy in the series Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca (CAG). A substantial proportion of these is also already available in English translation in this series, including the whole of the Categories commentary. They are as follows, listed in the order in which we know them to have been composed:

(1.) Commentary on Aristotle’s De Caelo Original: "On the Heavens", ed. I.L. Heiberg (= CAG vol. 7), Berlin 1894.
(2.) Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, ed. H. Diels (= CAG vols 9-10), Berlin, 1882-1885.
(3.) Commentary on Aristotle’s Categories, ed. C. Kalbfleisch (= CAG vol. 8), Berlin, 1907.
(4.) Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima Original: "On the Soul", ed. M. Hayduck (= CAG vol. 11), Berlin 1882. The authenticity of this last commentary has been doubted; some scholars attribute it to Simplicius’ Neoplatonist colleague Priscianus Lydus.

For most of this century, it was thought that the Late Neoplatonists could be neatly divided into two groups, according to the place