Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

philosophy in alexandria 851
we would call language and literature. He is said to have studied with the
‘grammarian’ Romanus and he wrote two works dealing with accentuation.
It has also been suggested that he taught the poet Dioscorus of Aphrodito. 38
Combining pagan culture with Christianity would be harder for a
Neoplatonist philosopher than for a poet or a historian. A Christian poet
can comfortably use Homeric motifs or even write a learned poem on
Dionysus (if Nonnus was a Christian when he wrote the Dionysiaca); a historian
like Procopius can avoid committing himself on matters of theology;
but a philosopher discussing Aristotle’s Metaphysics or Plato’s Timaeus
has to decide where he stands on the relationship between the creator God,
divine Intellect and the One or on the eternity of the world. But if, in a city
like Alexandria, pagans and Christians mixed freely and shared a common
culture, then we should not be surprised by Ammonius’ agreement with the
patriarch, the editing of Ammonius’ lectures by the Christian Philoponus
and Olympiodorus’ instruction of Christian pupils. It is the Athenian
Neoplatonists, clinging firmly and almost exclusively to pagan tradition,
who are the odd ones out.
Proclus was interested not only in literature but also in astronomy and
mathematics. The Alexandrian philosophers had similar interests.
Ammonius gave lectures on the work of the second-century Pythagorean,
Nicomachus of Gerasa, a mathematician popular among Neoplatonists
from Iamblichus onwards; these lectures are incorporated in the commentaries
on Nicomachus by Asclepius and Philoponus. Ammonius’ immediate
successor in his teaching post was a mathematician, Eutocius.
Olympiodorus gave lectures on astrology. Philoponus shows considerable
knowledge of medicine. Stephanus too had interests in astronomy and
astrology, but it remains uncertain whether the Stephanus who taught in
Alexandria is the same as the Stephanus of Athens who wrote commentaries
on Hippocrates and Galen.
So far, the Alexandrian Neoplatonists have been discussed as teachers,
commentators and scholars with wide intellectual interests. Did they make
any significant contributions to the development of philosophy? They
were the heirs of a long tradition and, like the Athenians, they saw themselves
as perpetuators of that tradition, not as innovators. Philoponus is
something of an exception. He turned against the tradition to criticize the
Aristotelian account of the physical world which was normally accepted by
the Neoplatonists. In so doing, he introduced a number of new ideas,
notably ‘impetus theory’. Aristotle had been puzzled as to what makes a
projectile, such as a javelin, continue to move once it has left the thrower’s
hand. His solution was to say that successive pockets of air behind the
javelin received the power to push it onwards. Philoponus suggested
38 MacCoull (1987).
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