Themistius' school most likely offered training in both philosophy and rhetoric. Five authentic Aristotelian paraphrases by Themistius have been preserved, three, On the Soul, Posterior Analytics and Physics, in the original Greek and two, On the Heavens and Metaphysics Lambda, in both Hebrew and Latin versions. Themistius revived and to a large extent reinvented the genre of Aristotelian paraphrase as an exegetical tool. Logic clearly occupies a central place both in the curriculum of Themistius' school and in his own interest in philosophy. Themistius' Physics paraphrase contains few original discussions, being designed as an advanced introductory text to the problems of Aristotle's Physics, but some of the occurring digressions shed additional light on Themistius' overall philosophical position. The paraphrase of De anima is by far the longest and philosophically the most interesting work by Themistius. The philosophical position found in Themistius' extant works could be described as an original synthesis within the broad tradition of concordance between Plato and Aristotle.

Iamblichus' philosophical position is essentially an elaboration of the Platonic system propounded by Plotinus, though strongly influenced by such sources as the Pythagorean pseudepigrapha and the Chaldaean Oracles. At any rate, it is plain that for the Athenian School the most significant figure among their immediate predecessors was Iamblichus, both for his adoption of theurgy and for the greatly increased elaboration of his metaphysical scheme, which seemed to them to do justice to the true complexity of the intelligible world. The role of theurgical theory and practice in the thought of Iamblichus has been rather played down, as having, been in the past given too prominent a role in his philosophy, but it cannot at the same time be denied that Iamblichus himself accorded quite a prominent role to the practice of rituals in ensuring the efficacy of philosophical speculation; and this after all reminds us that, for later Platonists, Platonism was a religion as well as a philosophical system.