Olympiodorus: Commentary on Plato's Gorgias

We shall be concerned here primarily with Olympiodorus’ interpretation of Plato. Fortunately, Elias (In Cat. 122-3) records some rules for the interpreter of ancient texts, which seem to reflect established practice within the school. The two chief principles are that one should not be so dedicated to the views of the single author before him that the truth is overlooked, a view linked with Ammonius in the present commentary (41.9); and that one should base one’s interpretation upon a corpus, not upon a single dialogue. This is a tactic clearly followed here insofar as the Gorgias is interpreted always in conjunction with the Phaedrus (on rhetoric) and with the Republic (on the soul and its virtues), as well as a variety of other Platonic dialogues. Again, one can see that Olympiodorus has acquired this practice from Ammonius (32.2).

One may hesitate to use the term ‘philosopher’ for one whose activities were strictly linked with the exegesis of texts already ancient.Cf. Westerink (1973), p. 23: ‘a pliability so extreme indeed that it might be more correct to speak of a teaching routine than of a philosophy’. But we see Olympiodorus as not only a commentator but also a teacher, a role which frequently comes to the fore.See 41.6, 42.3, 43.2; compare In Alc. 87-88, 133-34. Moral messages which he extracts sometimes from the wider Platonic context,12.3, 17.6, 19.1, 31.4. sometimes from brief phrases in their dramatic context,2.8, 3.4 x 3, 8.12, 15.9. are frequent in the earlier lectures of this commentary; they are less so in that on Alcibiades. This perhaps reflects a tendency to play down his role as a moral teacher after Justinian’s measures to suppress pagan teaching.Westerink (1973) p. 21; (1962) xv; Cameron (1969), p. 12.

4. Keeping ancient Greece alive in a Christian World

An important mission of Olympiodorus was to keep alive the memory of Greek history and cultural achievement, above all that of the fifth and fourth centuries BC.This is an abbreviated account of that given by Tarrant (1997b), 180-182. Even the most elementary knowledge of fifth-century politics, for instance, was rare: Olympiodorus has to point out that Themistocles comes before Socrates, while Pericles was his contemporary (7.3). And Olympiodorus’ fellow Alexandrian Philoponus, in his version of Ammonius’