Olympiodorus: Commentary on Plato's Gorgias

audience which is itself new to Plato; he may have had less high-quality prior scholarship to draw on for the Gorgias than for the Alcibiades or the Phaedo.

2. The Significance of Olympiodorus

Olympiodorus is of interest for the historian of philosophy. Given the lack of originality in Hermeias' Phaedrus-commentary, which is simply a faithful report of the views of his teacher Syrianus, Olympiodorus is the only significant witness to the approach to Plato taught at Alexandria in the late Neoplatonic period. Besides his own lectures on the Alcibiades I,This dialogue, not universally agreed to be from Plato's own hand, will normally be described simply as Alcibiades (or Alc.) in the present volume. Gorgias, and Phaedo, it is clear that both the anonymous Prolegomena to Platonic Philosophy and the extensive scholia on the Gorgias are very heavily influenced by Olympiodorus. His lectures on Aristotle's Categories and Meteorologica are also preserved, as are certain lectures on Paulus of Alexandria sometimes attributed to him, and those on Zosimus Kat' Energeianoriginal: "concerning energy/action" which, even if his work, contribute little to our present study.Westerink (1976), pp. 21-23; Warnon (1967) on 'Heliodorus'. Those members of the school who follow him—Elias, David, and Stephanus—besides bringing it into a new Christian phase, reverted more to the study of Aristotle.

We believe that Olympiodorus' Platonic commentaries are the works of his that are of special interest. In the first place, they preserve Neoplatonist commentary on the more elementary Platonic works of the post-Iamblichan Neoplatonist curriculum—the Alcibiades, Gorgias, and Phaedo—those dialogues normally read first, second, and third with pupils. Secondly, they include two of Plato's works (Alcibiades, Gorgias) which were considered 'exploratory' (zetetic), i.e., less dedicated to the expounding of doctrine than many works in the curriculum, and which develop in a manner tailored to the nature of the interlocutor(s) being tackled. No other works in the Neoplatonist curriculum routinely employ the Socratic elenchus (the method of logical cross-examination).Theaetetus is surely different in that Socrates contributes so much theory of his own for scrutiny, and even while Theaetetus is the interlocutor, it is never his inadequacies which are being exposed but those of his 'offspring'. Where Republic is included in the curriculum, one will find elenchus in the first book. All the other works in the Neoplatonist curriculum,