While it is common to compare Boethius’ philosophy with that of his intellectual predecessors and heirs, as far as I know there are no studies comparing Boethius and his most well-known Greek contemporary, Dionysius the Areopagite. Yet both were Christians who were inspired by Plato and deeply influenced by Proclean Neoplatonism. This chapter begins to fill this lacuna in the literature by comparing the way that Boethius in the Consolation of Philosophy and Dionysius in On Divine Names employ key Neoplatonic ideas and metaphors in speaking and thinking about God’s nature and providence. The chapter compares how Boethius and Dionysius employ Neoplatonic sphere and circle metaphors (1) to illustrate how God is both completely simple and yet also has, or rather is, a multiplicity of “attributes” or activities, and (2) to articulate the relationship between God and creatures in terms of remaining, proceeding, and reverting.

Chapter 3 takes up the Elenctic section of the dialogue, in which Socrates begins to chisel away at Alcibiades’ hubris in an effort to expose his double ignorance, that is, his ignorance of his ignorance. The young man hastens to the Athenian bema, eager to give a speech about justice, but estranged from justice beyond the level of ethical virtue. Without self-knowledge, he desires nothing other than the accolades of the many and asks not even the simplest question about justice, to say nothing of ascending to contemplate it as intelligible reality. Socrates refutes him in order to remove his arrogant pretension, not only that he knows justice, but that he knows himself. Generally, the Elenctic section removes the obstacles that stand in the way of Alcibiades’ conversion, and the Neoplatonic student learns that he must undergo a similar cleansing to that of Socrates’ interlocutor – Alcibiades’ purification is that of any philosophical initiate.

The first chapter begins the project of weaving together the commentaries of Proclus and Olympiodorus, and argues that both commentators attempt nothing less than a transfiguration of the human soul and its reorientation toward the desiderative longing characteristic of the contemplative life, the consequence of which is their student’s ascent through the hierarchy of virtues that Neoplatonic pedagogy coordinates with the reading of particular Platonic dialogues. The Alcibiades I, with the commentator’s direction, is the doorway through which an initiate must pass, enduring a cleansing that shepherds him toward the sanctum of the real. The Neoplatonic analysis of the dialogue’s thematic structure is also adumbrated: Socrates proposes that Alcibiades change how he lives only to undermine what he wants and finally concludes that Alcibiades is misguided about both because he assumes a mistaken conception of who he is. This progression is itself framed on both sides by eros.

This introduction frames the entire project, the purpose of which is to excavate a sense of erotic striving from the Neoplatonic commentaries on the Platonic Alcibiades I and to argue that its arousal is the beginning of the philosophical life. Proclus and Olympiodorus, inheritors of the commentary tradition that begins with Iamblichus and traces its roots even further back to Plotinus, insisted that their students read the Alcibiades I first of all of Plato’s dialogues because of its emphasis on self-knowledge. They themselves, modelling what they witnessed in Plato, awakened their own students to what it is to be human and directed them accordingly. Self-knowledge, which by the end of the dialogue becomes identification of self with soul, is, in the hands of the commentators, the beginning of psychoerotic metamorphosis, a conversion of initiation that, when properly channelled, seeks wisdom as its sole desideratum.

Chapter 5 concludes the book with an analysis of the Maieutic section of the dialogue. It heralds a new beginning in the conversation, in which Socrates, having received at last Alcibiades’ full allegiance in question and answer, finally reveals to him his own being so as to secure commitment to a love that strives to grasp the totality of all that is, the highest expression of which is none other than the contemplative life. Self-knowing emerges as the zealous pursuit of the ultimate desideratum in the philosophical life, a striving that is akin to self-cultivation. Reason heals the soul, collecting it out of its opinionative and passionate dispersion, only to recognize, in the end, its synthetic activity is done in light of a higher grade of reality that transcends it, a reality in which it finally longs to participate; it yearns to become intellect.

In the second chapter, the role of the dialogue’s Proem is treated in detail. Socrates’ first words are not those of concepts but of courtship, and Alcibiades’ pending metamorphosis is begun by means of love. The Neoplatonic reading of the dialogue’s opening section is not just a reflection on Socrates’ pederastic obsession with a beautiful young man and his attempt to seduce him away from his other lovers; it is a prolonged meditation on the nature of love and its ultimate expression in the philosophical life. Far from being a playful preface without philosophical substance, the Proem is an introduction to this introductory dialogue, an isagogic first step in a lengthy rite of philosophical transformation that begins with erotic initiation. The Neoplatonic student finds that Socrates nurtures the seeds of erotic contemplativity in Alcibiades prior to his formal questions and arguments.

The purpose of the Protreptic section – the subject of this chapter – is to ensure that Alcibiades will not abandon his newly manifest sense of self and its correlative longing sparked in the previous section; it is to continue his transformation so that he might actively seek the desiderata to which he has been awakened. Revealed to himself imbued with a yearning for desiderata he is unable to comprehend much less pursue, the young man remains hesitant. Socrates challenges Alcibiades with the story about the King of Persia and the kings of Sparta in order to argue it is peculiar to Athenians to pursue wisdom. The Neoplatonic student’s interpretation for the entirety of this middle section of the dialogue is framed accordingly: attempting to intensify the young man’s newly awakened eros, Socrates replaces honour with wisdom as the ultimate goal for which philosophical initiates must strive.

This chapter explores the striking coincidences between bureaucratic literature such as John Lydus’ On the Magistracies of Rome or the Notitia Dignitatum and the bureaucratic delineations that characterise texts of Proclus such as the Elements of Theology or the Platonic Theology. We meet in Proclus a taxonomic approach to epistemology itself, one in which the ordering power of the mind is projected on a cosmic level, in terms that must at least remind us of the delegation of power that we see in the governmental deployment of imperium, the right of command. In order to pursue this line of comparison, I compare a prominent form of knowledge-making in the fourth through sixth centuries CE, appearing in texts that enumerate lists, ranks, offices, and power dynamics, with the metaphysical schemata of Proclus. Rather than asking about the direction of influence, this chapter will instead seek to understand the epistemological implications of Proclus’ metaphysical taxonomy.

Festal sermons exhibit a distinct mode of creating and communicating knowledge and, hence, constitute one specific element of the late-antique Christian intellectual world. Through their dynamic character and the flexibility of the genre, sermons offered the preacher endless possibilities to spread the word of God and to inspire his audience by drawing them into the liturgical and spiritual world that he created for them. Three elements contributed to this: rhetoric and style; the use of the scriptures; and a theological and liturgical epistemology, in which the sermon transcends the concrete here and now to encompass the past, present, and future of God’s plan of salvation for humanity. The final section shows that the preacher’s liberty was substantial but not unlimited: in the end he remained a servant of the Word and of his congregation.

This chapter surveys reactions to Plato’s famous proposal in the Republic to allow women to engage in military action and political rule in his ideal city. After a methodological discussion relating this topic to the issues looked at in the volume as a whole, the chapter goes on to set out some of the interpretive debates concerning women in the Republic in modern-day secondary literature. It is then shown that interpreters from late antiquity to the Renaissance responded to some of the same concerns. For example, Proclus was at pains to reconcile the apparently contrary views on women found in the Republic and Timaeus. On the other hand, we find that in Proclus, Ibn Rushd (Averroes), and Lucrezia Marinella, wider concerns shaped reactions to Plato: for instance Ibn Rushd tries to fit the idea of potential virtue in women into an Aristotelian framework while Marinella offers a reading of Plato on women that brings him into conversation with the Renaissance ’querelle des femmes’.

Taking its start from Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, this essay explores various possible antecedents in the philosophical tradition, Platonist and Stoic. It argues for a process of formalization, in the Hellenistic era and later, of the criteria for ‘noble’, or philosophical, erotic relationships, to be derived from such dialogues as Lysis, Symposium, Phaedrus, and, not least, Alcibiades I, based on Socrates’ claim, at the end of the Phaedrus, that he possessed an erōtikē tekhnē. Such a tekhnē would have theōrēmata, and these were listed as (1) selecting a suitable love-object, or axierastos; (2) commending oneself to him; and (3) guiding him to moral and intellectual self-improvement. I suggest that Polemon, in the Old Academy, may have been instrumental in developing such a theory, but we find it formalized only much later, in the Didaskalikos of Alcinous, while further information is forthcoming from the Platonic commentaries of Hermeias (on the Phaedrus) and Proclus (on the Alcibiades). I argue that the Alcibiades seems to assume a more central role than the other dialogues in later Platonist theory, and acknowledge the important role of the Stoics in its formalization.

Ancient Greek philosophy has often been dismissed as irrelevant to contemporary environmental thought or part of the problem in environmental terms because of its apparent dualism and anthropocentrism; Plato is often seen as emblematic of this philosophical stance. Following the research of Timothy Mahoney, this chapter calls into question this characterisation of Plato’s philosophy. Additionally, it examines the environmental perspectives of several philosophers within the later Platonic tradition, whose philosophy was closely connected with ancient Mediterranean religions and has been largely marginalised and excluded from the canon of western philosophy. This chapter argues that there is an important strand in ancient philosophy which is participatory, relational and ecocentric, depicting the philosopher as rooted in place and landscape, and necessitating the philosopher’s recognition of the interconnectedness and sacredness of the natural world and the kinship and ensouled nature of all beings and natural entities. As such, this chapter suggests that ecocentric environmental perspectives can be discerned within Platonism (especially within late antique theurgy) and that, consequently, this strand of ancient philosophy has a great deal to offer to environmental ethics and contemporary environmental thinking on nature and the natural world.

Greek philosophical commentaries in general and Proclus’ commentary on the first book of Euclid’s Elements in particular raise the question how these exegetical and pedagogical works can serve also as a means for developing philosophical ideas. In this chapter I address this question, arguing that the assumption that commenting on texts and developing philosophical views are mutually exclusive activities does not hold for Greek philosophical commentaries because their pedagogical aims are not distinct from their philosophical aims, and because their authors did not regard the canonical texts on which they commented as being necessarily authoritative. In view of these observations, I examine Proclus’ commentary on Euclid’s Elements, showing that it does not differ from other philosophical commentaries in its pedagogical approach and treatment of its base text. Specifically, I show that this commentary’s didactic aim is to teach the demonstrative method and that this is not distinct from its philosophical aim, which is to secure Aristotelian explanatory demonstrations in geometry. This examination highlights Proclus’ complex engagement with Euclid’s Elements. On the one hand, he used this work as a model for teaching rigorous reasoning and adapted the philosophical views of his predecessors, most notably Aristotle’s account of scientific method, to the mode of reasoning found therein. On the other hand, he used it as a basis for further philosophical inquiry into the question of mathematical explanation. This complex engagement makes Proclus’ commentary on the Elements both a secondary text and a philosophical work in its own right.

The historiography of mathematics in the Renaissance involves two kinds of anachronism. First, the tendency to anachronism in the authors themselves, whose understanding of broad historical structures and of the development of mathematics may be colored by concerns of their own time. And second, our anachronism in reading these histories of mathematics as if they were attempting precisely the same thing as modern historians of mathematics. This article focuses on the author of the first modern work dedicated to the history of mathematics, Petrus Ramus (1515–1572), singling out three occasions in which his historical account seems to diverge widely from that of modern historians, and examining them in the light of both types of anachronism. First, in his account of the development of mathematics in the early Platonic Academy; second, his assessment of Eudoxus of Cnidus; and finally in his dating of the Neoplatonic philosopher and commentator on Euclid, Proclus.

This essay explores the views of Neoplatonic commentators (e.g. Proclus and the anonymous Prolegomena to Platonic Philosophy) on the relation between Plato’s ethical philosophy and the literary format of the Platonic dialogue. It focuses in particular on the role of visualisation in the process of moral education. The Neoplatonists praise Plato’s dialogues for their 'vividness' (enargeia). They hold that the vivid depiction of good characters (e.g. Socrates) promotes imitation of similar manners, whereas the equally vivid depiction of bad characters (e.g. the ambitious Alcibiades) invites critical self-examination. The Neoplatonists develop their view in part in response to the Stoics, who had argued that moral education should be restricted to the teaching of bare moral rules. The difference between the Stoic and Platonic view on the importance of literature in moral education can be explained from their differing views on the constitution of the human soul. Whereas (most) Stoics hold that the entire soul is rational, the Platonic tradition acknowledges the non-rational aspect of the human soul and holds that moral education should address both the rational and non-rational. Modern psychological research corroborates the Platonic position on the human soul and the need for (literary) examples in moral education.