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philosophy elsewhere in the empire 853
of the fifth century. If Asclepiodotus of Alexandria arrived in Aphrodisias
in the late 470s, as Charlotte Roueché supposes, he may well have found a
Neoplatonic school already flourishing under the direction of his future
father-in-law. No writings survive by any representative of this school, and
it may not have lasted very long. Asclepiodotus of Alexandria probably left
Aphrodisias in the mid 480s. He and his wife visited the shrine of Isis at
Menouthis in Egypt in an attempt to cure Damiane’s childlessness. A baby
was produced, but the Christians of Alexandria alleged that it had been
bought from a priestess and used the affair as a pretext for attacking and
destroying the shrine. Asclepiodotus apparently did not return to
Aphrodisias. At some point, probably in the sixth century, the shield portraits
were removed, broken up and dumped. It seems plausible that
Justinian’s legislation of 529 affected Aphrodisias as well as Athens. 41
Another pupil of Proclus, Agapios, taught philosophy to John Lydus in
Constantinople. An anonymous dialogue, On Political Science, written by a
Christian in Constantinople some time before 532, bears witness to the wide
diffusion of Neoplatonic teaching among contemporary intellectuals. 42
This diffusion was not confined to the Greek-speaking world.
Neoplatonism spread both westwards, into medieval Europe, and eastwards,
into Syria and Armenia. Neoplatonic thought had already influenced
writers in Latin in the third and fourth century. Macrobius, Marius
Victorinus and Augustine all drew on Plotinus and Porphyry. In the fifth
century one Latin writer, Boethius, stands out as strongly influenced by
contemporary Greek philosophy. Boethius, born around 480 and executed
in prison in 524, drew both on his Latin predecessors and on the Greek
thought of his own time. His Christian theology is strongly influenced by
Augustine but his works on logic, which include commentaries on
Aristotle’s De interpretatione and Categories and on Porphyry’s Isagoge (an
introduction to the Categories), show knowledge of fifth-century Greek
Neoplatonism, particularly the work of Proclus. Like his Greek contemporaries,
and like Iamblichus, he was interested in the works on arithmetic and
music by Nicomachus of Gerasa and used them in his own writings on
these subjects. It remains, however, uncertain just how much of contemporary
Greek thought was known to Boethius and whether he had any
direct personal contact with the Greek Neoplatonists. Pierre Courcelle
argued that much of Boethius’ work was closely parallel to that of
Ammonius and suggested that Boethius had actually studied at Alexandria.
At the other extreme, James Shiel has argued that Boethius worked from a
manuscript of Aristotle’s Organon with marginal glosses and had no other
access to the work of the Greek commentators. Boethius’ knowledge of
41 Roueché, Aphrodisias 85–96. Smith (1990).
42 Lydus, De Magistratibus iii.26. Maas, John Lydus ch. 7. Fotiou (1985).
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