## 1. Life and Works


### 1.1 Life



Ammonius' father Hermeias, after studying in Athens under
Syrianus (Head of School in Athens 431/2-437), returned to Alexandria,
where he established the teaching of Platonism as an additional
subject in the school of Horapollo (see below), alongside the
principal curriculum in rhetoric. Ammonius' mother Aedesia had
been chosen as a young girl by Syrianus, a relative of hers, to marry
Proclus, who would succeed their teacher Syrianus as head on the
latter's death in 437. When Proclus was kept from marrying her
by 'some god', Aedesia was then married to Proclus'
fellow student Hermeias. From these details, it is clear that
Ammonius, second of three sons of Hermeias and Aedesia (the eldest died in childhood), must have been born
after about 435, presumably not long before 445. He seems to have been
dead when Damascius (ca. 460-after 532) was writing his *Life of
Isidore* or *Philosophical History* in 526, but alive in
517, when his course on Aristotle's *Physics* was first
published by Philoponus.



Damascius, whose *Life of Isidore* is the source of most
details about Ammonius' life, greatly admired Aedesia for her
piety and charity, and while still a young student of rhetoric he gave
her eulogy at Horapollo's school. Although the municipal stipend
which had been paid to Hermeias (presumably as a teacher) continued to
be given her after Hermeias' death, from the time Ammonius and
his younger brother Heliodorus were small until their maturity,
Damascius says that Aedesia's charitable giving left her sons in
debt on her death in old age (ca. 475, since Damascius, still a boy
and a student of rhetoric, was honored to give her eulogy, ornamented
with heroic hexameters). These financial straits may have something to
do with Damascius' opinion that Ammonius was viciously greedy:
with this debt, he would certainly have striven to keep teaching and
collecting salary and fees; however, the preserved excerpts of
Damascius do not make this connection, perhaps in order to portray
Ammonius as simply greedy (see below, on Ammonius' alleged
'deal' with the Christian Bishop of Alexandria). For
Damascius the true offspring of this union of this exceptionally moral
and holy couple was Aedesia and Hermeias' eldest child, blessed
with divine gifts, who died at age seven and receives a rather
hagiographic description. Aedesia accompanied her two surviving sons
to Athens, where, at her suggestion, both studied with Proclus.



Aedesia and her sons must have returned before 475 from their study in
Athens under Proclus to Alexandria, where Ammonius began lecturing on
philosophy at the school of Horapollon. We have reports of lectures on
Plato by Ammonius from the beginning and end of his career. Sometime
between 475 and 485 Damascius, who studied under Ammonius and his
brother Heliodorus, heard Ammonius lecture on Platonic philosophy;
about 515 Olympiodorus heard him lecture on the *Gorgias*
(Olympiodorus, *in Gorg.* 199,8-10). Asclepius mentions
lectures (or seminars: *sunousiai*, *in Met.* 77,4) on
Plato and refers to an 'exegesis' (*in Met.* 70,31)
of the *Theaetetus*. Nonetheless, Damascius reports that
Ammonius was better versed in Aristotle, and it is his lectures on
Aristotle which, for the most part, have been transmitted to us.



In Ammonius' day, Alexandria, unlike Athens, was an important
center of Christian cult and culture, the third See of Christendom.
The school founded by Horapollo, where after Hermeias joined it the
two main courses of study were rhetoric and philosophy, was a hub of
the 'Hellenic' pagan learning, religion and culture.
Apparently, Christian professors taught there as well, however, though
the latter tended to lecture in their homes on Fridays, leaving the
school largely to the pagans on that day (Zacharias, *Life of
Severus* p. 23 Kugener); certainly, there were Christian students
in the classes of both their co-religionists and the Hellenes. The
atmosphere in Ammonius' classroom is (too?) vividly portrayed in
*Ammonius or On the Creation of the World*, written by one such
Christian student, Zacharias of Maiuma (Gaza's port-city), the
later Bishop of Mytilene, who studied with Ammonius in Alexandria
between 485 and 487. Zacharias' book recounts discussions
between 'The Christian', presumably Zacharias himself, and
'Ammonius' in front of the classroom; there is also
(perhaps added later, after Ammonius' death: Watts 2005) a
discussion with the medical philosopher (*iatrosophistes*)
Gesius, said to have been Ammonius' best student at the time.
This recounting of the 'dialogues in the Platonic manner'
(1. 7-8) should not be taken as historical: it is embellished by
Zacharias with various references to Platonic dialogues and their digs
at sophists; the arguments themselves largely depend upon another
contemporary work, the *Theophrastus* by Aeneas of Gaza, which
has no express connection with Ammonius. But Zacharias portrays
Ammonius' classroom as a battle over the souls of a mixture of
committed pagans and Christians, and some students leaning one way or
the other. Zacharias' contempt for Ammonius and for Platonic
philosophy is evident, and their discussion ends with Ammonius'
embarrassed silence. That the school could be a focus of hostile
Christian attention had been made abundantly clear by the lynching of
Hypatia at the hands of an Alexandrian mob in 415. Questions thus
arise about the relation of the school to what Damascius in his
*Life of Isidore* calls 'the dominant doctrine'.
How did the school manage to keep going as a largely pagan institution
in a strongly Christian city? Did the philosophers in the school make
any concessions, doctrinal or otherwise, to the Christian authorities?
Was the school enabled to continue teaching Platonic philosophy with
some pagan professors into the 530's by a concession of
Ammonius' to the Christian authorities?



It has been speculated that Ammonius may actually have converted to
Christianity. A remark in Philoponus' edition of Ammonius'
lectures on *De Anima* (104,21-23) to the effect that the
soul could be forced to profess tyrants' impious dogma, but
could not be forced to assent to it and believe it, might perhaps go
back to Ammonius and has been taken as possible evidence that he was
coerced to pay lip service to Christianity, as has the dialectically
coerced admission (2.1094-1121) of Zacharias' character
'Ammonius' that the Trinity really *is*
"three in hypostasis and being, but one in number"
(Westerink 1962, XI-XII and Cameron 1969,14-15). But there
is no convincing evidence of a conversion (cf. Blumenthal 1986,
322-323), nor of any *change* in the real Ammonius'
teaching. 



Ammonius' tenure at the school saw a large-scale attack on the
pagan community of Alexandria in the wake of the revolt of Illus
(484-488) against the Emperor Zeno, during which harsh measures
were taken against the pagans by the Patriarch Peter III Mongus
(482-489), since Illus had allied himself with the corrupt pagan
Pamprepius and may have promised him that pagan practice would be
tolerated. It was probably during this crisis that Ammonius is
represented by Damascius as making an agreement or deal:
"Ammonius, who was wickedly greedy and saw everything in terms
of any profit he could make, concluded an agreement
(*sunthekas*) with the overseer (*episkopounta*,
i.e., bishop) of the dominant doctrine" (Photius, *Bibl.*
cod. 242.352a 11-14=Damascius 118B Athanassiadi; cf. her Intro.
30-1 and n. 37). Scholarly attention has focused on the nature
of Ammonius' 'deal' with the Bishop (presumed, by
connecting this persecution with the end of Illus' revolt, to
have been Peter Mongus; the appearance of the name of his successor,
Athanasius II [490-497] in a doublet of the same passage from
Damascius [Photius, *Bibl.* cod. 242.347a 20] is apparently an
intrusive, mistaken gloss). The suggestions have been put forward that
he agreed to continue the alleged Alexandrian Neoplatonic practice of
making the gods into one by collapsing the One into the Intellect (a
view congenial to Christianity); or that he agreed to lecture only on
Aristotle, avoiding Plato, or not to mention in his teaching the
Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity and divinity of the world; or
that he betrayed the hiding places of colleagues and pupils. Scholars
have adduced counterevidence against the first three suggestions,
concerning the school's doctrine. That Ammonius betrayed his
fellow Hellenes is a speculation based on his ability--alone
among the major figures of the school--to resume his teaching
unscathed after the turmoil of 489, on Damascius' association of
Ammonius' deal with a profit motive, and also on
Damascius' hints that Ammonius was unprincipled and given to
intrigue, as evidenced by an earlier power-struggle against Erythrius
(a three-time praetorian prefect) in Constantinople (Damascius 78E;
Athanassiadi 1999, 30-2). Indeed, the excerpts from Damascius
seem to indicate that Ammonius was a prime target of the investigation
and persecution led by the imperial envoy Nicomedes, who in an attempt
to get information on "the Ammonius affair" (Damascius
117A) ordered the arrest of Ammonius' friend Harpocras, a
professor of literature; he fled, but the order led to the arrest and
torture of Horapollo and Heraiscus, whom they tried to make
inform on Harpocras and Isidore (Damascius 117B). Thus, Damascius
perhaps implies that Ammonius set the investigators on Harpocras to
draw them away from himself. 



Richard Sorabji (1990b, 12; see also 2005; 2016b, xiii-xiv;
2016c, 46-47) suggested that Ammonius might have agreed not to
allow the school to be a center of pagan and theurgic ritual, which he
would also de-emphasize in his teaching, or simply not to make trouble
with Christians, as the practice of theurgy or any attempt to convert
Christian students to it would do. On Sorabji's thesis, instead
of agreeing with Iamblichus' insistence on theurgy as
indispensable to reaching spiritual union with God, a doctrine largely
taken over by Proclus (on Proclus' theurgy and its three types,
see Sheppard 1982), Ammonius sided
with Porphyry's refusal to accept the efficacy of theurgy in
purifying the intellect and hence leading us to God. This
interpretation puts Ammonius in an altogether better light than does
Damascius', which is approved by Athanassiadi. For Sorabji his
financial gain was the continuation of his municipal salary, so that
he could keep his school open, rather than a craven payment for
services rendered to the Christian authorities; he did not betray his
friends; he did not betray philosophy, since he merely preferred the
noncommittal attitude of Porphyry in the matter of divine names and
theurgy to that of Iamblichus and Proclus; on the contrary, he saved
philosophy in Alexandria.



Sorabji's conjecture has attained something like a consensus
among scholars (e.g., Hadot 2015, 29) and is quite possibly correct.
There is still room for doubt, however. It is not clear that Ammonius
and his school rejected or downplayed theurgy; Olympiodorus (*in
Phd.*, Lect. 8, sec. 2) puts theurgy on the highest level of
virtue: philosophy can make us Intellect, while theurgy can unite us
with the intelligibles, so that we act paradeigmatically (cf. Blank
2010, 659-660). Still, as Sorabji says (2016c, 47), he
apparently addressed his students as if they were all Christians, and
without the volatile mix of pagans, Christians, and those who were
wavering, the danger of Ammonius' day was absent; Ammonius would
have had much more reason to agree to keep theurgy out of his
classroom after the riots of 486 and persecution of 489. If on the
basis of its absence from his commentaries on Aristotle we say that
Ammonius de-emphasized theurgy or kept it to himself, he appears to
have done so consistently throughout his career, so that this cannot
be used as evidence of any forced change in his teaching. Did he,
then, agree to continue doing what he had been doing all along?
Perhaps the mere fact of Ammonius' willingness to approach and
make an agreement with Peter was enough to justify the disdain of
Damascius.



Can we ascertain Ammonius' attitude to theurgy and
'Egyptian' or 'Hellenic' rites? Beyond the
commentaries we have three quasi-historical sources for Ammonius:
Damascius' *Life of Isidore* and Zacharias'
*Life of Severus* and *Ammonius*. In narrating the early
life of Severus (Bishop of Antioch 512-518, though he was a
pagan during his student days at Alexandria in the 480's),
Zacharias recounts the story of Paralius, a student in
Horapollo's school undecided between paganism and Christianity
(see Watts 2005). In 486 after taunting the philosopher Asclepiodotus
for his claim to have got his hitherto infertile wife pregnant by
Egyptian magic, Paralius was set upon and beaten by the Hellenic
students of the school on a Friday, when the Christians were largely
absent. This incident resulted in complaints to Entrechius the Prefect
and to the Bishop, Peter Mongus, leading to the ransacking of the
sanctuary of Isis at Menouthis and the burning of many hieratic cult
objects. The professors of the school accused in this incident were
Horapollon himself, along with the 'philosophers'
Asclepiodotus, Heraiscus, Ammonius, and Isidore. Nothing further
is said about Heraiscus or Ammonius; Zacharias had already
ridiculed Asclepiodotus, who subsequently repaired to Aphrodisias, and
he remarks that Isidore was later revealed as a magician and
troublemaker. Thus, Zacharias associates Ammonius with colleagues whom
he generally labels philosophers and adherents of the Egyptian
mysteries, but gives us no particulars about him. In his *Life of
Severus*, Zacharias focused on the conflicts between Alexandrian
pagans and Christians, showing the winning and salvific force of
Christianity. In the *Ammonius* he portrayed the superiority of
Christian doctrine, especially that the world was created, and the
dialectical victories of a Christian student over the more
philosophically experienced pagans Ammonius and Gesios. Therefore,
that book avoids the cultic conflict altogether and tells us nothing
about Ammonius relating to theurgic belief or ritual. 



Damascius and his hero Isidore, on the other hand, were fervent
adherents of theurgy and practitioners of hieratic ritual, and
Damascius' cast of characters are divided into those who
practiced such ritual (good), those who were especially divinely
gifted (better), and those whose participation was nil or is passed
over in silence (bad guys); Ammonius is among the latter. The same was
not true of his family, however, as Damascius saw them. Hadot (2015,
1-14) argues for the importance of religiosity and theurgy in the
Alexandrian, as well as in the Athenian, school. Plutarch, who
introduced Iamblichean Platonism into Athens, had three famous
students: Hierocles, Syrianus, and Proclus. Of the first two,
Alexandrians by birth, Hierocles, author of a book on the Pythagorean
*Golden Verses*, returned to teach in his native city, while
Syrianus was chosen by Plutarch to succeed him. Proclus was younger
than these. Born in Byzantium and raised in Lycian Xanthos, convinced
that his Alexandrian teachers did not read Plato in the true spirit of
the philosopher and mindful of the divine vision and calling he had
received in Xanthos (Marinus, *Life of Proclus* 10)--not
the last gift he would receive from the gods--he left Alexandria
for Athens. Hermeias studied with Syrianus; his commentary on the
*Phaedrus* cites the *Chaldaean Oracles* and Orphic
*Hymns* frequently. Hermeias' wife Aedesia not only
shared her husband's virtuous character, she was "so pious
toward God and holy and, to tell the whole of it, beloved of the gods
that she was accorded many epiphanies" (Damascius, *Life of
Isidore* 56). Indeed, the first child born to the couple was a boy
of such wondrous qualities and virtue that he departed this life at
age seven, "unable to bear his embodied existence"
(*Life of Isidore* 57A). As for Ammonius himself, we have seen
him listed (Zacharias, *Life of Severus* 16 and 22) as one of
the four philosophy teachers associated with the philologist
(*grammatikos*) Horapollon and mocked for their adherence to
the pagan gods. Of these, Asclepiodotus and Isidore were explicitly
connected by Zacharias with Egyptian religion and magic. Damascius
(*Life of Isidore* 81) describes how Asclepiodotus was saved
from drowning by divine intervention, "such was his divine
power, even while he was still embodied". Heraiscus he
describes as having a divine nature and living in such a way that his
soul dwelt as much as possible among shrines and places of initiation
(*Life of Isidore* 72A, B). Of the four, then, only about
Ammonius does Damascius report nothing regarding theurgy, mysteries,
or holiness. Is this an accurate picture, or is Damascius'
silence as malicious as his words? 



Ammonius' 'deal' with the Bishop is attested only by
Damascius, who despises Ammonius. Although he could have connected
Ammonius' agreement with his debts, Damascius chose instead to
emphasize his greed, blackening his character with a trait
(*aischrokerdes*) which Plato had said (*Republic*
408c3-4) would be incompatible with the demigod Asclepius'
divinity, if shown in his medical practice; it must be equally bad for
Ammonius in his profession. As Photius already reports, Damascius
always mixed praise for some traits with blame for others in each
person he reports on. He also plays characters one against the other
(cf. O'Meara 2006). Damascius prepared his claim about
Ammonius' greed by his idealization of Hermeias, who even told
merchants that their wares were priced too low (Damascius 54), and of
Aedesia, whose continuation of her husband's charitable giving
put the family into debt, and of the couple's saintly eldest son
(Damascius 56). The respect and love which Ammonius' parents
earned from both philosophers and the masses form an implicit contrast
to the conflict surrounding Ammonius and his greed. The rhetorical
structure of Damascius' narrative thus casts doubt on any
'deal' between Ammonius and the Bishop, which may have
been the result of pure speculation on Damascius' part, combined
with his animus toward Ammonius (see Blank 2010, 657-660).
Damascius actually admits (120B) making such an inference in the case
of Horapollon, who he says deserted to 'the others', a
conversion that "he apparently chose on his own, not compelled
by any misfortune, perhaps too from the demands of an insatiable
greed; for it is not easy to propose any other reason to excuse his
conversion". 



Is a deal with the Bishop necessary to explain Ammonius'
continued ability to teach in Alexandria? The other professors of
philosophy appear to have fled or died during Nicomedes'
investigation in 489, while Ammonius, initially a focus of that
investigation, remained in Alexandria. We are not told that it became
impossible for pagans other than Ammonius to teach after 489, and
there were evidently Christian students in Ammonius' school
after that date, just as there were earlier. Since Damascius connects
Ammonius' deal with his avarice, we should like to know more
about his income. In major cities, the role of teacher was associated
with payment by the city, and in Constantinople there were chairs paid
by the Emperor; a law of Justinian in 529, the extension of an order
of his father (Justin I, 518-527), decrees (*Codex Justinianus*
1.5.18.4) that only those of orthodox faith may teach and receive a
public stipend (*sitesis demosia*). Damascius reports
that Hermeias had received a municipal stipend, presumably for
teaching, which his widow managed to have continued until her sons
could do philosophy (*h&omacr;s ephilosoph&emacr;san*, where *h&omacr;s* is used in the sense of *he&omacr;s*).
Scholars mostly think this makes it likely that Ammonius took up his
father's position on his return from Athens, or even that his
father's position in the school was held vacant for him and was
paid in the meanwhile. But there were at least four philosophers
teaching together with Horapollon in the 480s, so it is difficult to
assert that Ammonius held 'the chair' of philosophy;
perhaps there were a number of 'chairs'--difficult,
but not impossible, since Ammonius was undoubtedly the most important
and influential of the four. How long did Aedesia continue to receive
her dead husband's salary for her sons, "until they began
to do philosophy" (*h&omacr;s ephilosoph&emacr;san*): was
it until they could receive it in their own right? Damascius uses the
aorist tense of *philosophe&omacr;* to mean 'studied
philosophy' (54 Hermeias studied philosophy under Syrianus; 57B
Ammonius and Heliodorus studied philosophy under Proclus; 71B Isidore
studied philosophy under the brothers Heraiscus and Asclepiades;
cf. 63B while Hierios was studying [*philosophounta*]
philosophy). On that likely reading, Aedesia will have arranged for
her sons to be supported by the city until she could take them to
Athens to study philosophy, where they would, as members of the
Academy community, have been supported. When they returned to
Alexandria, they will have made their own way, with the support of
their mother and of family friends; whether with financial support
from students, from the city, or both, is unclear. 



Hadot (2015, 23-25) thinks that Zacharias' account proves that
Horapollon's school was a private institution when Ammonius
taught there and that it is highly unlikely that a pagan philosopher
could have received a municipal salary in Alexandria in
Ammonius' day, due to Christian hostility. She argues Ammonius
and his colleagues will have relied on students' fees for their
income and therefore been more vulnerable than their Athenian
colleagues, who lived communally, supported by the wealth of the
Academy, which stemmed from bequests of the pious and learned
(*Life of Isidore* 102). Support for this may come from
Olympiodorus, who says (*in Gorg.* 43.2, 224.20-24; 43.4,
225.19-21; 43.6, 226.24-26) that philosophers will receive the merited
thanks of their students for their help and must therefore not ask
them for fees (*misthous*); but this is a hoary philosophical
cliche (cf. Xenophon, *Mem.* 1.2.6-8). In his
article on the complex of lecture rooms excavated in Alexandria,
Sorabji (2014, 36-37) points to the size of the establishment and its
rebuilding and expansion after the earthquake of 535 as indications of
generous municipal support. It may well be that Christian Alexandria
continued to support the teaching of pagan philosophers because they
had an audience of students. There were still pagan students and those
leaning toward paganism in the city. But Christians too will have been
drawn to the high reputation of pagan Greek literature and philosophy.
Christian students will also have sought the kind of dialectical
skills taught by pagan philosophers and rhetoricians, along with their
advanced logical and metaphysical teachings, the better to argue
against them and the better to understand the philosophical basis of
their own Christian faith (cf. Wildberg 2005, 234-236). After all,
Zacharias stayed in Alexandria a year after Severus left to study law
at Berytus because he needed further study of the rhetoricians and
philosophers, so as to fight the pagans, who were so proud of them,
with their own weapons (*Life of Severus* 46; cf. Champion
2014, 31-32). 


### 1.2 Works



One work of Ammonius clearly survives in the written form he gave it,
his 'commentary' (*hupomn&emacr;ma*) on
Aristotle's *De Interpretatione*. His commentary on
Porphyry's *Introduction* (*in Isag.*), is
described in the manuscripts variously as 'Ammonius the
Philosopher's Exegesis (or Prolegomena or Commentary) of the
Five Sayings' and is perhaps another work given its final form
by Ammonius; but its present Prooemium is, in any case, considered
inauthentic, and other passages are also interpolations (Busse,
*CAG* IV.3 p. vi).



We hear of other works published by Ammonius, but these are mostly
single book-rolls, monographs on particular points:


* On *Phaedo* 69d4-6, in which he defended Plato
against the charge that in the *Phaedo* he was ambivalent about
the immortality of the soul (Olympiodorus, *in Phd.* 8
SS17,6-7).
* On hypothetical syllogisms (fragment at Ammonius, *in An.
Pr.* 67,32-69,28).
* On the fact that Aristotle made God not only the final but also
the efficient cause of the whole world (Simplicius, *in Cael.*
271,13-21, *in Phys.* 1363,8-12).
* On the Astrolabe. That Ammonius wrote on this topic is mentioned
by Philoponus at the start of his own book on the use, construction,
and inscriptions of the astrolabe. A work entitled "Explanation
of the use of the astrolabe", said in the manuscripts to be by
one 'Aegyptius', is thought rather to be the work of
Ammonius, perhaps an epitome of a lost work of his (cf. Hase 1839,
158-171 and Pingree 1973, 33 n. 7). Ammonius taught Damascius
Ptolemy's *Syntaxis* and was known, along with his
brother Heliodorus, for his work on astronomy (cf. the
observations--one said to have been made by the brothers
together, on 22 Feb. 503--recorded by Heliodorus in his copy of
Ptolemy: Heiberg 1907, xxxv-xxxvii).



In addition, the commentary by an Ammonius on Aristotle's
*Topics* mentioned in Syriac and Arabic authors was perhaps
written by our Ammonius (cf. Stump 1978, 212 and Militello 2014, 92).




The other works of Ammonius which survive are all derived, directly or
indirectly, from his lectures, taken down by his students and hence
mostly described as being 'from the voice (*apo t&emacr;s
phones*, or: the lectures [*skholon*]) of
Ammonius'. Two of these are transmitted under the name of
Ammonius himself, but are thought to come from the notes of anonymous
students from Ammonius' lectures:


* *On Aristotle's Categories* (*in Cat.*):
'Prolegomena to the Ten Categories from the Voice of Ammonius
the Philosopher'.
* *On Aristotle's Prior Analytics I* (*in An.
Pr.*): 'Notes (*skholia*) on the first book of the
*Prior Analytics* from the Voice of Ammonius'.



Two courses bear the name of Asclepius (ca. 465- ?):


* *On Aristotle's Metaphysics* *1-7*
(*in Metaph.*); the title of the first book of this commentary
is: 'Notes on the greater first book of the *Metaphysics* of
Aristotle coming from Asclepius from the Voice of
Ammonius'.
* *On Nicomachus' Introduction to Arithmetic* (*in
Nicomachi Intro. Arith.*): 'Asclepius the Philosopher of
Tralles' Notes on the first book of the *Arithmetical
Introduction* of Nicomachus'.



Four courses are transmitted under the name of John Philoponus (ca.
490-ca. 570):


* *On Aristotle's Prior Analytics* (*in An.
Pr.*): 'John the Grammarian of Alexandria's school
annotations (*skholikai aposemeioseis*) on the first
book of the *Prior Analytics* from the seminars of Ammonius son of
Hermeias'.
* *On Aristotle's Posterior Analytics* (*in An.
Post.*): 'John of Alexandria's school annotations from
the seminars of Ammonius son of Hermeias with some of his own
observations (*epistaseis*) on the first book of the *Posterior
Analytics*' (what is transmitted as the commentary on Book II is
perhaps spurious).
* *On Aristotle's On Generation and Corruption* (*in
GC*): 'John the Grammarian of Alexandria's school
annotations from the seminars of Ammonius son of Hermeias with some of
his own observations on the first of the books *On Generation and
Corruption* of Aristotle'.
* *On Aristotle's On the Soul* (*in DA*;
authorship of the commentary on Book III is disputed): 'John of
Alexandria's school annotations from the seminars of Ammonius
son of Hermeias with some of his own observations on Aristotle's
*On the Soul*'.



The titles of three of Philoponus' Aristotle courses do not
mention Ammonius, and these were probably perceived as representing
rather the lectures of Philoponus than those of Ammonius. These are:



* *On Aristotle's Categories* (*in Cat.*); but
this might have been based on the notes published under
Ammonius' own name.
* *On Aristotle's Physics* (*in Phys.*):
'John Philoponus on the first book of Aristotle's Lecture
on Physics'; this mentions the date of 10 May 517, when Ammonius
was still alive, but shows signs of later revision.
* *On Aristotle's Meteorology* (*in
Meteor.*).



However, *On Nicomachus' Introduction to Arithmetic*
(*in Nicomachi Intro. Arith.*) is thought to be lectures by
Philoponus based on Asclepius' publication (see above) of his
own notes on Ammonius' lectures (cf. Taran 1969,
10-13).


## 2. Ammonius as Aristotelian Commentator



Ammonius established the tradition of Aristotelian commentary in
Alexandria. He was followed in this by his students Asclepius,
Philoponus (ca. 490-570), Simplicius (writing after 529 after
moving to the Athenian school and moving with it from Athens to Persia
after the school's closure under Justinian), and Olympiodorus
(495/505-after 565). The tradition continues through the Christian
commentators Elias (probably a pupil of Olympiodorus), David,
Ps.-Elias and Stephanus (fl. ca. 610).



Damascius commented that Ammonius, who explicated works of both Plato
and Aristotle, was more practiced in the latter (*Life of
Isidore* 57C). The Christian character in Zacharias'
dialogue (562-565) accuses Ammonius' star pupil Gesius and his
comrades, presumably including Ammonius, of being accustomed to refute
Plato's doctrines, while claiming to be his pupils and wanting
to be called 'Platonists'; he also uses a literal
interpretation of the cosmogony in Plato's *Timaeus* to
counter the Aristotelian doctrine of the world's co-eternity
with God espoused by the dialogue's 'Ammonius'
character. Still, Ammonius did lecture on Platonic texts. He is cited
by name nine times in his student Olympiodorus' commentary on
the *Gorgias*, three times on the *Phaedo*, and not at
all on *Alcibiades I*; the differences probably reflect the
fact that for the *Gorgias* Olympiodorus could rely less on a
previous tradition of Neoplatonic interpretation. In all cases, he is
cited with the greatest respect. 



The most substantive comment cited by Olympiodorus from
Ammonius' lectures on the *Gorgias* (SS32,2-3)
is a defense of the four democratic politicians Socrates declines to
call statesmen (499b-503c); Ammonius says they are practitioners
of the 'intermediate' rhetoric, rather than of the false
kind. He draws his explanation from the *Republic* (425c-427a),
where he distinguishes three kinds of physician: the false kind that
gives prescriptions aimed at flattery and pleasing the patient, the
true kind that insists the patient do what is best for him, and the
intermediate kind that gives the patient a true prescription but does
not insist that he follow it. In this explanation, Ammonius follows
the lead of his father Hermeias, who cited (*in Phdr.* p.
231,26-232,14 Lucarini-Moreschini) this passage of the
*Gorgias* in his explanation of *Phaedrus* 260d as
referring to true, popular, and intermediate rhetoric and the
different kinds of therapy of the masses they apply. Ammonius'
lectures on Plato seem to have been enlivened by wit and personal
remarks, some apparently cited as apophthegms from the great teacher.
Socrates (*Gorgias* 513a) warns Callicles against assimilating
himself to the current Athenian *d&emacr;mos*, thereby
attaining power but perhaps losing all he holds dear. Such
assimilation, Olympiodorus says, destroys one's soul utterly;
the proper object to which one should assimilate one's soul is
the cosmos, that is, God. Like the Thessalian witches mentioned by
Socrates, nowadays too the Egyptian magicians claim to have the power
to 'draw down the moon' and run such risk of destruction,
if they fail. Olympiodorus notes that we must not believe these
mythical stories, though most people are deceived by them: this is
simply an eclipse; similarly, even now they say that there are
magicians in Egypt who can change men into crocodiles, asses, or any
shape they like--but one must not believe it. Indeed, Ammonius
told them, in his exegesis, "this experience overpowered me too,
and when I was a boy I used to believe these things were true"
(*in Gorg.* SS39,2). Known for astronomical expertise,
Ammonius was chiding his credulous audience. Another remark of
Ammonius' is cited in Olympiodorus' argument that the myth
at the end of the *Gorgias* that emphasizes the judgement of
our souls in the underworld over that of judges in our present life
shows that our actions derive from our own souls' autonomy.
Olympiodorus notes (SS48,5) that it is up to us to choose virtue
or vice and that there is no place for astrology, which would nullify
foresight, law, and justice: "Ammonius the philosopher says
'I know some men who have the astrological horoscope of
adulterers, yet are temperate, since the self-moving nature of the
soul dominates'". Again, Ammonius does not deny the
influence of the stars in our lives, but insists that our individual
choice plays an overriding role. Explaining that aristocracy is the
best government, Olympiodorus (SS42,1-2) likens the city to
the cosmos, ruled best by God, citing the Homeric line so favored by
Aristotle (*Metaphysics* 12.10, 1076a4) and his Neoplatonic
exegetes: "Rule of many is not good: let there be one
chief!". If someone objects that this is rather monarchy than
aristocracy, respond with Ammonius: "Keep silent; let him have
your fist"! 



In his lectures on Aristotle, Ammonius was heavily indebted to his
teacher Proclus, even if he disagreed with him on some important
points. The introduction to his *in Int.* makes Ammonius'
great debt to Proclus clear: "Now, we have recorded the
interpretations of our divine teacher Proclus, successor to the chair
of Plato and a man who attained the limits of human capacity both in
the ability to interpret the opinions of the ancients and in the
scientific judgment of the nature of reality. If, having done that, we
too are able to add anything to the clarification of the book, we owe
great thanks to the god of eloquence" (1,6-11; cf. *in
An. Pr.* 43,30, with a citation of Proclus' *School
Commentary* [*skholikon hupomn&emacr;ma*]). Proclus, in
turn, often used Iamblichus (see, e.g., *in An. Pr.* 40,16). In
addition, Ammonius used other commentators. For example in his *in
Int.*, most of his material comes from Proclus' lectures,
but Ammonius has polished up what he had in his notes of those
lectures, then added material of his own or from other sources. In
this case, Ammonius' main source for supplementing
Proclus' lectures was apparently the now lost voluminous
commentary (see Stephanus *in Int.* 63,9) of Porphyry, which
was also the major source of Boethius' commentary on *De
Int.* and probably also of Ammonius' citations of earlier
authors, such as Alexander of Aphrodisias (active late 2nd
to early 3rd century), Aspasius (first half of
2nd century), Herminus' (2nd C.), and the
Stoics. Both Porphyry and Proclus held *Int.* c. 14 to be
spurious (252,10 ff.). Although Ammonius agreed, unlike them he
decided to include commentary on the chapter, which he repeats
'verbatim' from Syrianus, having nothing of his own to add
(254,22-31; cf. 253,12).



The sources on which Ammonius drew and his mode of using them will
likely have varied according to the nature of the previous
commentaries he could work with for each text. In Asclepius'
published version of Ammonius' lectures, for example, we see a
very different procedure from the one Ammonius followed in writing out
his own commentary on *De Interpretatione* and basing it on
Proclus' lectures. It is difficult to say to what extent
Asclepius' commentary on *Metaphysics* A-Z is
either a reflection or a more thorough reworking of Ammonius'
lectures. Still, this work is reasonably thought to give the best
representation we have of the lectures themselves, copied down by
Ammonius' student 'from the voice' of the master.
Indications of the commentary's origin in the lectures abound
(cf. Luna 2001, 100-103): the explanation of a passage often
begins by referring to "what was said yesterday" (e.g.,
3,13; 433,18-19); we are told that "the teacher of
medicine Asclepius, who studied with us at these lessons" raised
a question, and "our professor of philosophy" answered him
(143,31 ff.). That faithful transcription of lectures was practiced
and thus could have formed the basis of a later reworking for
publication is implied by Damascius' story (45A) about
Theosebius, who compared his own transcripts of lectures on the
*Gorgias* given at two different times by his master Hierocles
and found nothing repeated between the two versions, "each of
which, however improbable it is to hear, hewed as much as possible to
the intention of Plato". 



In Asclepius of Tralles' commentary on *Metaphysics* A-Z
there are two voices: the Peripatetic voice of Aristotle and Alexander
of Aphrodisias and the Neoplatonic voice of Syrianus and Ammonius.
Asclepius begins with a lemma taken from Aristotle, sometimes
paraphrases it, and explains its philosophical significance; then, if
necessary, he explains why Aristotle was wrong, saying that "we,
on the other hand, say" or "against this we say" or
"our teacher of philosophy Ammonius says", or else why
Aristotle appears wrong but really agrees with Plato. Next, he
explains the Aristotelian text itself, usually taking the explanation
from Alexander, either word-for-word or in paraphrase; occasionally,
he appears to have drawn his paraphrase of Alexander from Syrianus.
Asclepius' commentary and, presumably, Ammonius' lectures,
then, combine the inheritance of Alexander and of Syrianus, a move in
keeping with the opinion of Syrianus himself, who introduced his
commentary on *Metaphysics* G saying (54,11-15):
"[Aristotle] will attempt to teach [these things] in this book,
which, since it has been made sufficiently clear by the very
hardworking Alexander, we will not interpret in its entirety. But if
he seems to us to say something that is troublesome [and requiring]
scrutiny, that part we will try to examine, summarizing all the rest
for the sake of the treatise's coherence." The commentary
on *Metaphysics* A, closely studied by Cardullo (2012),
provides numerous clear examples of Asclepius'--i.e.,
Ammonius'--procedures. Thus, in explaining the famous
declaration of all men's desire for knowledge in the opening
sentence of the *Metaphysics*, Ammonius goes through a number
of different types of knowledge, following Aristotle, ending with art,
which is superior to experience, since it knows the
'*why*' and not just the
'*that*': "Hence Plato says of the divine
mind 'I do not call art that which is an irrational
thing'". With this reference to *Gorgias* 465a6,
Asclepius-Ammonius cites (28,3-6 on *Metaph.* 984b1) a
Platonic argument in explanation of an Aristotelian one to show their
close relation. Later, Asclepius attributes Aristotle's argument
that wisdom is chosen for itself, not for the sake of something else,
to Plato (20,15-16; cf. Cardullo 2012, 266 n. 391). In another
instance of this kind of association, Asclepius comments that
"it is good that sensible things exist: even pitch is necessary
for the perfection of the cosmos, and 'it is unjust to leave
such a great matter to chance or luck', but only to God, who has
created everything because of his own goodness". That the
reference is to the Demiurge of the *Timaeus* (29e) is evident
from the emphasis on the creator's goodness, and the producing
cause is here connected with the Unmoved Mover, which is a final cause
due to its goodness (Cardullo 2012, 294 n. 488). 



From Ammonius' version of the list of ten preliminary topics
recommended by Proclus for those beginning to study Aristotle (cf.
Elias, *in Cat.* 107,24-27), we know that the study of
Aristotle in Ammonius' school began with logic, then moved on to
ethics, physics, mathematics, and theology (Ammonius, *in Cat.*
5,31-6,8). Ammonius also introduced as a new set a sequence of
lessons introductory to the study of Aristotle consisting of: an
introduction to philosophy; an introduction to Porphyry's
*Eisag&omacr;g&emacr;* or Introduction to Aristotle's
logic; a commentary on Porphyry's *Introduction*; the
reading of Porphyry's *Introduction* itself; an
introduction to the philosophy of Aristotle; an introduction to the
*Categories* (cf. Sorabji 2016c, 48-50; Hadot, 1988,
44-45). The introduction to philosophy was particularly
congenial and influential, giving a number of definitions of
philosophy and, particularly, two definitions 'from the
goal': Plato's 'assimilation to God as far as
possible' (*Theaetetus* 176b) and 'practice of
death' (*Phaedo* 64a; Ammonius, *in Isag.* 3,7 ff.
and 4,15 ff.). Lectures on the works of Plato and Aristotle presumably
lasted about an hour. In Proclus we see signs of such hour-long
divisions, as well as a division of the lecture on an individual
passage into discussion of its doctrine (*the&omacr;ria*),
sometimes quite wide-ranging, followed by its wording
(*lexis*); signs of this division are still present in
Ammonius' *in Int.* Students evidently took copious
notes, which they might then publish, under their own names or that of
Ammonius himself.



The lectures of Ammonius and his students gave a very detailed
exegesis of their text and an indication of its philosophical
importance, including how it related to other texts of Aristotle and
Plato. These two philosophers were each taken to be substantially
self-consistent and uniform in opinion throughout his own writings,
and in agreement with one another and with the truth (see, e.g.,
Simplicius, *in DA* 1,3-21). According to Elias (*in
Cat.* 107,24-7), Proclus put together a list of ten
questions to be answered preliminary to the study of Aristotle, and it
is Ammonius who gives us the first preserved version of these. One of
the preliminary questions concerns the role of the interpreter. Elias
(*in Cat.* 122,25-123,5) says that the exegete is also a
knower, in the one capacity explaining what is unclear in his text and
in the other judging its truth and falsity. He ought not to insist
that his author is always correct, but he ought rather to value the
truth more than the man; he ought not to become an exclusive partisan
of his philosopher, as Iamblichus was for Plato. Further, he ought to
know all of Aristotle, so that he can show on the basis of
Aristotle's works that he agrees with himself; he ought to know
all of Plato, so that he can show that Plato agrees with himself,
while making the works of Aristotle an introduction to those of Plato.
These requirements are associated with Ammonius by Olympiodorus in his
commentary on the *Gorgias* (cf. Tarrant in Jackson et al.
1998, 11 and notes on 32.1 and 42.2), and one can see the insistence
on knowing and judging the truth over loyalty to Aristotle in
Ammonius' own introductory precepts (*in Cat.* 7,34
ff.).



The later Alexandrian commentators tend to emphasize that it is the
commentator's duty not to interpret apparent disagreements of
Aristotle with Plato literally, but to look to the sense and discover
the fundamental agreement or 'harmony'
(*sumph&omacr;nia*) of the two philosophers (e.g., Simplicius,
*in Cat.* 7,31). Ammonius' own statement of the qualities
of an exegete (*in Cat.* 7,34 ff.) does not say this, but in
practice he does point out the agreement of Plato and Aristotle
(*in Int.* 39,11). Syrianus and Proclus criticized, at times
harshly, Aristotle's disagreement with Plato's views on,
e.g., the existence of Forms and the demiurgic role of God as crafting
and creating the physical world. In contrast, Ammonius points out
(Asclepius, *in Metaph.* 69,17-27; cf. Sorabji 2005, vol.
3 sect. 5(d), and Cardullo 2012, 78-81) that, while Aristotle
'seems' to be attacking Plato on the Forms in
*Metaph.* 990b3, he actually agrees with Plato, since he
praises (*De An.* 429a28) those who say that the soul is the
place of Forms. Ammonius also makes God the efficient cause of all
things, in addition to being the final cause (see below, sect. 3.2).
This appears to be a characteristic difference of approach between
Syrianus-Proclus and Ammonius and his pupils: the latter outdo the
former in their concern to 'harmonize' Aristotle's
and Plato's views and their willingness to interpret Aristotle
as not disagreeing with Plato in any fundamental way. 


## 3. Philosophical Positions



For four reasons it is difficult to pinpoint Ammonius' own
philosophical positions and contributions to philosophy or to the
interpretation of Aristotle: (1) Our evidence is confined to
commentaries on Aristotle, whose interpretation did not leave as much
scope for expounding Neoplatonic ideas as did that of Plato. (2) He
depends in these works on Proclus, whose Aristotle lectures or
commentaries do not survive, so that we cannot be sure what in them is
really his own. (3) Some of Ammonius' works failed to reach us.
(4) We have to depend to a significant degree on his pupils'
writings for our information about him and his contributions, and
their own stance may be difficult to separate from that of Ammonius
himself. The best approach at present attempts to piece together
Ammonius' views from his commentary on *De
Interpretatione*, from statements attributed to him by later
commentators, and from those lectures of Ammonius which were either
published by students under Ammonius' name or which, while
published under students' names, seem to show little sign of
having altered his teachings--namely, Asclepius on the
*Metaphysics* and the early commentaries of Philoponus (or
their early versions, in the case of commentaries, such as that on the
*Physics*, which were revised). The use of Philoponus to
recover Ammonius' positions was much advanced by Verrycken
1990a; his chronology of the commentaries by Philoponus--and
hence, the degree to which they may represent the thought of Ammonius,
before Philoponus departed from it in important ways--has
recently been revisited by Golitsis 2008 and Sorabji 2016d. (see
above, sect. 1.2).


### 3.1 Ammonius' Neoplatonism



It was claimed by K. Praechter (1910) that the Alexandrian Neoplatonic
school of Ammonius and his followers differed substantially from that
of Athens both before and after Ammonius' time, particularly by
downplaying the Iamblichean theurgic or magical and religious elements
and the complex Iamblichean and Proclan hierarchies and triadic
groupings at the different levels of reality recognized in
Neoplatonist metaphysics (on these, see, e.g., Wallis 1972,
100-110, 123-34, 146-54). In contrast to these wild
and woolly Athenian doctrines and practices, Praechter saw the
Alexandrian school, in whose commentaries such doctrines do not figure
prominently, as more restrained, rational, respectable; they were
sober interpreters of Aristotle and had a doctrine much more easily
reconcilable with the strong Christian cult of Alexandria. Scholars
like P. Merlan (1968) went further, making Ammonius the purveyor of a
strongly Christianized philosophy which featured a creative, personal
God.



Recent studies of the Alexandrians (especially Hadot 1978 on Hierocles
and Simplicius, Verrycken 1990a on Ammonius, Tempelis 1999, Luna 2001,
Cardullo 2009 and 2012, Hadot 2015, Sorabji 2016a and c) have largely
resulted in the abandonment of Praechter's claims. Overlapping
personal histories already cast doubt on the hypothesis of a gulf
between the two schools. As noted above, Plutarch's chosen
successor Syrianus came from Alexandria together with Hermeias, who
brought Plutarch's and Syrianus' teachings back from
Athens to his native city Alexandria. Ammonius studied with and was
evidently greatly influenced by Proclus in Athens. Furthermore,
references and allusions to various important pieces of Proclan
doctrine can be adduced from various places in the commentaries of
Ammonius and his students. The relative paucity, however, of such
references and their lack of centrality to the works in which they are
found makes it difficult to assess their significance in this regard.
The interpretation of certain statements which might be interpreted as
telling against Ammonius' espousal of, say, the transcendent
One, is also a complex matter. Ammonius' interpreters now
rightly rely to a great extent on context in understanding his works.
They ask, for example, whenever Ammonius does not mention a particular
Neoplatonic doctrine or mentions it in a simplified form, whether the
doctrine was necessary to an understanding of the passage on which
Ammonius was commenting. As noted above, Ammonius comments mostly on
Aristotle, especially his logical works. This was the first part of
the Neoplatonic curriculum: Marinus (*Life of Proclus* 13) says
that Syrianus taught Proclus all of Aristotle's works in less
than two years and "having led him through these, as it were,
preliminary initiatory rites and little mysteries, brought him to the
mystagogy of Plato". Ammonius apparently held a similar view of
the Aristotelian portion of the Neoplatonic curriculum, and in
commentary on such works may have felt no need to go into many of the
details of a complex Neoplatonic theology and metaphysics;, even if he
held such views. Even the *Metaphysics*, which according to
Ammonius dealt with things 'entirely unmoved', that is,
'theology' (Asclepius, *in Metaph.* 1,3 and
17-18) may not have been thought to require an explanation of
the highest levels of reality. In a second statement, explaining the
first line of the book, Asclepius says Aristotle aimed to speak about
"beings and how they are beings and, to reason about absolutely
all beings, insofar as they are beings" (2,9-11), which
Hadot (2015, 27) takes to exclude "the entire divine hierarchy
beyond being". The second statement, however, probably derives
from Alexander, who thinks that the *Metaphysics* is
theological in the sense that God is one of the causes of reality and
thus a subject of 'first philosophy' (cf. Cardullo 2012,
225 n. 230). Ammonius here elides the reasoning needed to get from the
study of being *qua* being to theology, and there is some
ambiguity as to the extent to which he thinks the role of theology in
Aristotle is the same as in Plato (Hadot 2015, 27 n. 83). In some
contexts a discussion of certain metaphysical doctrines might even
have been inappropriate, especially if the work under discussion was
meant to be studied by less advanced students. Thus, the fact that
Ammonius does not avail himself of certain opportunities to discuss
certain tenets of Neoplatonic metaphysics does not mean that he would
not espouse such tenets in other circumstances. Still, the very fact
that Ammonius was, as emphasized above, especially known for his
commentaries on Aristotle, could reflect a tendency on his part not to
have taught a full-blown Neoplatonic metaphysical system. Hadot 2015
gives a lengthy account of the similarities and differences in the
ways Aristotle and Plato were 'harmonized' by various
Platonists since Porphyry (cf. the account of various issues on which
harmonization was needed, as seen in Themistius and then in Ammonius,
in Sorabji 2016c, 18-20 and 53-55). In agreement with Cardullo
(e.g., 2009, 245) that one finds in Ammonius an "absolute
allegiance to Neoplatonism", Hadot interprets differences
between, say, Syrianus-Proclus and Ammonius as resulting from the
greater determination of the latter to minimize their possible
disagreements and Ammonius' consequently greater willingness to
bend Aristotle in Plato's direction. There may be debate over
whether this involved more 'Aristotelizing Plato' or
'Platonizing Aristotle' (cf. Sorabji 2016a,
xxvii-xxxi for a discussion of Hadot's objections to
Verrycken's [1990] view of Ammonius' simplification of the
metaphysics of the Athenian Neoplatonists). One may also wonder
whether Ammonius would have thought that his philosophy differed in
any important way from that of his Athenian teacher. 



On the most general level, Ammonius says that the purpose and utility
of studying Aristotle's philosophy is "to ascend to the
common principle (*arkh&emacr;*) of all things and to be aware
that this is the one goodness itself, incorporeal, indivisible,
uncircumscribed, unbounded and of infinite potentiality" (*in
Cat.* 6,9-12). Thus, his stance, in this early work, is that
of a Neoplatonist, as has been clearly shown by Verrycken (1990a,
212-15). Thus he says that Aristotle's distinction of
spoken sound, affection of the soul, and thing in the world (*De
Int.* 16a3-8) corresponds to the Neoplatonic hypostases of
Soul, Intellect and God (*in Int.* 24,24-9). He also
places 'not-being' above the Intellect at the highest
plane of reality and occasionally writes in a manner reminiscent of
Proclus' divine henads. So there seems no doubt of his genuine
commitment to a Neoplatonic stance in metaphysics, even if, as
Verrycken would hold, he may not have espoused a system as complex as
that of Proclus.



Perhaps, though, Ammonius set different emphases and cited different
ultimate authorities than the Athenians. Following Iamblichus,
Syrianus and Proclus held that Plato taught the true philosophy that
originated with Pythagoras and various of his followers, including
Parmenides. They also thought the highest expression of this ancient
wisdom was found in the *Orphic Hymns* and in the *Chaldaean Oracles*, and
these two works were the final course Syrianus was willing to teach,
but only to Proclus and Domninus, though disagreement over which one
to study caused the two students to be taught separately, and
Proclus' study of the *Oracles* was interrupted by
Syrianus' death (Marinus, *Life of Proclus* 26). Proclus
later worked intensively on both texts, along with those of Porphyry
and Iamblichus, and taught them. In fact, "he attained the
highest degree of theurgic virtue" (*Life of Proclus*
27-28). Ammonius was certainly concerned, in Asclepius'
commentary on *Metaphysics* A, to point out on numerous
occasions that Aristotle--who criticized the Pythagoreans and,
according to Ammonius, also the line of reasoning that led from them
to Plato--had got them wrong, since he did not understand that
they expressed themselves 'symbolically' (cf. Cardullo
2009, 258-259). Again, some argue that Ammonius and his students
did not see the importance of the 'divine poetry' of
Orpheus and the *Chaldaean Oracles*. Hadot 2015, 13-14 counters
that citation of these poetic works is also infrequent in Aristotelian
commentaries of the Athenian school, while both Olympiodorus and
Damascius cite the *Oracles* in their commentaries on Plato's
*Phaedo*. In any event, it is important to note that we have no
record that Ammonius or his pupils lectured or commented on the four
great 'theological' dialogues in the Neoplatonic
curriculum: *Phaedrus, Symposium, Philebus, Parmenides* (cf.
Tarrant, in Jackson, et al. 1998, 3). 


### 3.2 Aristotle's God as Efficient Cause of the World



Aristotle's intellectual God seems not to be a good fit for the
role of craftsman and creator which God plays in Plato's
*Timaeus*. Proclus (*in Tim.* 1.266.28-268.24)
says as much: while "the Peripatetics say there is something
separate [from the physical world], it is not creative
(*poi&emacr;tik&emacr;*), but final (*telikon*); hence they
both removed the exemplars (*paradeigmata*) and set a
non-plural intelligence over all things." Indeed, Proclus says,
Aristotle's own principles ought to have made him admit that God
was a creator. According to Simplicius, Peripatetic interpreters,
including Alexander of Aphrodisias, accepted that God was a final
cause of the entire world, that God's moving the heavens made
him indirectly the efficient cause of sublunar motion, and that he was
also the efficient cause of the heavens' motion, but not of
their existence as a substance (*in Cael.* 271,13-21;
*in Phys.* 1360,24-1363,24). Simplicius goes on to say
that Ammonius devoted an entire book to arguing that, contrary to
these Peripatetics, God was both final and efficient cause of both the
movement and existence of the whole world, sublunar and supralunar.
This interpretation, according to Simplicius, allowed Ammonius to
harmonize Aristotle with Plato; it should not, therefore, be taken as
a concession to Christian doctrine. Instead of criticizing Aristotle,
as Proclus had done, Ammonius took five Aristotelian passages and
interpreted them as indicating that Aristotle did in fact reason along
the lines Proclus had indicated in his criticism. Thus, for example,
Ammonius argued, according to Simplicius, that in *Physics*
2.3, 194b29-32, that from which comes the origin of motion
(i.e., God, the unmoved mover) is itself a *productive* cause.
Ammonius also argued that "if, according to Aristotle, the power
of any finite body is itself finite, clearly whether it be a power of
moving or a power that produces being, then, just as it gets its
eternal *motion* from the unmoved cause, so it must receive its
eternal *being* as a body from the non-bodily cause"
(trs. of this and other relevant texts in Sorabji 2005, vol. 2, sect.
8(c)1). Ammonius' harmonization of Aristotle with Plato on this
point would prove essential to both Arabic Aristotelians and,
eventually, to Aquinas' ability to enlist Aristotle's God
for Christianity. Verrycken (1990, 218) interprets Ammonius'
conception of the relation of God and the world as based on the
Neoplatonic 'procession' (God's production of the
world) and 'reversion' (its direction toward God as final
cause), with God conceived as the divine Intellect. Verrycken (1990,
222) argues further that Ammonius and his school also conceived of
Aristotle's God as consisting of two Neoplatonic hypostases, the
Good and the Intellect, and that he/it could be viewed as either one,
depending on one's point of view: in metaphysics, as we see in
Asclepius' commentary, Aristotle's God is mostly
understood as the Good, "the first origin and final cause of all
reality"; in natural philosophy, as we see in Simplicius, God is
primarily the demiurgic Intellect, which is itself the final cause of
the world's movement.


### 3.3 Aristotle and anti-determinism



In his commentary on *On Interpretation* chapter 9, Ammonius
added two other determinist arguments to the famous 'there will
be a sea-battle tomorrow' argument, making his commentary into a
small treatise on determinism. The first of these was the
'Reaper' (131,20 ff.), an argument which Ammonius
considered more 'verbal', which perhaps goes back to
Diodorus Cronus and which greatly interested Zeno the Stoic: "if
you will [that is, you are going to] reap, it is not the case that
perhaps (*takha*) you will reap and perhaps you will not reap,
but you will reap, whatever happens (*pant&omacr;s*); and if
you will not reap, in the same way it is not that perhaps you will
reap and perhaps you will not reap, but, whatever happens, you will
not reap. But in fact, of necessity, either you will reap or you will
not reap." In consequence, Ammonius says, "the
'perhaps' is destroyed," and with it the contingent.
Against this, Ammonius argues that if the determinist intends
'you will reap' to be contingent, he has already lost his
point, but if he intends it as necessary, he is taking for granted
what he intends to prove; further, in that case, 'will reap,
whatever happens' will be true, but the determinist cannot say
'but in fact either you will reap or you will not reap',
since if one of these is necessary, the other is impossible. Sorabji
(1998, 4-5) argues that 'perhaps' is ambiguous,
marking either a hesitant statement about the future or a statement
about present possibilities, and that the determinist argument plays
on this ambiguity, something which he thinks Ammonius did not see.



The second determinist argument, said by Ammonius to be 'more
related to the nature of things', is from divine knowledge
(132,8 ff.): "the gods either know in a definite manner the
outcome of contingent things or they have absolutely no notion of them
or they have an indefinite knowledge of them, just as we do."
Ammonius shows that the gods must have definite knowledge of their
creations. Is the future definite, then, and not contingent, since the
gods know future facts in a definite manner? Ammonius' reply to
this question is based on the idea (from Iamblichus, originally) that
the type of knowledge depends on the type of knower, not on the type
of thing known. Therefore (136,1-17), due to their own nature,
the gods, and only they, can have definite
(*h&omacr;rismen&emacr;*) knowledge of future contingent facts,
though those facts are indefinite, in themselves, and not determined.
Indeed, with the gods nothing is past or future (133,20), for they are
outside of time.



Only after discussing these two additional arguments for the abolition
of contingency does Ammonius consider the sea-battle argument from
Aristotle's discussion (*De Int.*18b17-25,
19a30-32): if every affirmation must be true or false and if
there is a sea-battle today, it was always true to say that there
would be a sea-battle on this day and, hence, it was not possible for
this not to happen or not to be going to happen, so that it is
necessary for it to happen. Ultimately, all things which are going to
happen happen necessarily and none by chance. There has been, since
the Stoics, controversy over Aristotle's answers to this
argument. What has been called the 'standard
interpretation' holds that Aristotle thought that, unlike such
sentences about the past or present, sentences asserting future
singular contingent facts are neither true nor false, exempting them
from the principle of bivalence and avoiding the alleged deterministic
consequence that contingency and chance are destroyed. There has
likewise been a substantial debate over whether Ammonius was an
adherent of the 'standard interpretation' of
Aristotle's answer (cf. Sorabji 1998, Kretzmann 1998, Mignucci
1998, Seel 2000ab).



Ammonius, like Boethius, whose answer is somewhat more complicated,
attacks the problem by means of his interpretation of
Aristotle's opening remark in the chapter (18a28 ff.) that,
while the rule that, of every contradictory pair of sentences, one is
true and one false holds among sentences about what is or has
happened, as well as sentences about universals taken universally and
for singulars in the present or past tense, for universals not said
universally it is not necessary, as he has explained in the preceding;
"but in the case of future singulars it is not the same."
Ammonius interprets "it is not the same" as indicating a
doctrine that sentences about future singular contingent events
'divide the true and false' (i.e., obey the principle of
bivalence) but do so in an indefinite, 'not in a definite
manner' (*ouk aph&omacr;rismen&omacr;s*): either there
will be a sea-battle tomorrow or there will not be one, and certainly
there will not both be one and not, but whichever of these two will
turn out to be the case, the sentence correctly predicting that
outcome is true (and the other false) only in an indefinite, not a
definite way. Thus it is not "possible in a definite manner to
say which of them will be true and which will be false, since the
thing has not already occurred but can both occur and not occur"
(130,23 ff.).



The idea of being true 'in a definite' or 'in an
indefinite manner' does not occur in *De Int.* The
interpretation of Aristotle's response to the sea-battle
argument by this distinction probably goes back to Alexander of
Aphrodisias (cf. Alexander, *Quaestiones* 1.4 with Sharples
1992, esp. 32-6). The distinction itself is probably taken over
from the discussion of one of two contrary properties belonging to a
subject 'in a definite manner' in *Cat.* 10,
12b38-40, which may have been suggested to the commentators by
Aristotle's remark at *De Int.* 19a33 that
"sentences are true in the way things are." What precisely
is meant by the distinction between being true in a definite or in an
indefinite manner is obscure, controversial and much debated in the
literature: is it the distinction between necessary or causally
deterministic truth and mere truth, or that between being already true
and going to be, while not yet being, true (cf. Nicostratus'
characterization of 'the Peripatetics' in Simplicius,
*in Cat.* 406,13-407,15)?



At the end of his discussion (154,3 ff., interpreting 19a23 ff.),
Ammonius brings together necessary and definite truth, but not clearly
enough to resolve all questions about the latter. He uses
Aristotle's idea that sentences can be necessarily true in two
ways, either absolutely, no matter whether they are said of
perishable, existing or non-existent things, or for as long as the
predicate holds of the subject. The whole of a disjunction of
contradictory assertions, such as 'either there will be a
sea-battle tomorrow or there will not be a sea-battle tomorrow'
or 'either Socrates is walking or Socrates is not
walking', is necessarily true in the absolute sense. Ammonius
says that this is still the case when, due to the nature of the thing
in question, one of the disjuncts is true in a definite manner, as in
'either fire is hot or fire is not hot' (154,11). It
appears, then, that Ammonius treats only the contradictory
disjunctions as necessarily true in the absolute sense, while their
disjoined parts may be necessarily true in the other sense, that is,
only as long as the predicate holds of the subject. In the case of
certain facts, such as fire being hot, this is always the case, and of
two contradictory disjuncts the one which asserts this fact is always
true in a definite manner. In the case of contingent facts, then, one
disjunct will only be true in a definite manner when the subject
exists and the predicate is true of it. For Ammonius, when Aristotle
restricts the discussion to future *contingent* facts, this
makes it necessary that neither member of a contradiction said about
them be true in a definite manner, 'whatever happens',
since each, being contingent, must be susceptible of both truth and
falsity 'however it chances' or 'for the most
part' or 'for the lesser part'. Thus,
Ammonius' explanation of Aristotle's reply to the
determinist has an affinity with his answers to the
determinist's claims about the 'Reaper' (there, the
determinist is said to have illegitimately assumed that 'you
will reap' is necessary, not contingent; here, to have ignored
Aristotle's assumption that the disjuncts are contingent) and
about divine foreknowledge (there, the gods are said to know things
definitely, because these things are not future for the gods, although
they are both future and indefinite for us; here, the future disjuncts
are each contingent and, thus, not definitely true, it being open for
each to be true or false in the event). Ammonius' approach may
not be very satisfying to us, in that it does not answer the question
of what kind of truth-value Aristotle or Ammonius assigned to future
contingent propositions, but it keeps to the project of *De
Int.*, exploring the application of and the exceptions to the rule
that every contradictory pair of sentences has one member true and one
member false (cf. Whitaker 1996). Boethius (*in De Int.* II
106,30-107,16, 208,1-18) also uses the distinction between
being true in a definite and in an indefinite manner, but there is
debate among scholars as to whether he understands this distinction
and its role in Aristotle's argument in just the same way as
Ammonius (cf. Sorabji 1998, Kretzmann 1998, Mignucci 1998). 


## 4. Influence



Ammonius was chiefly influential as the founder of the school of
Aristotle-interpretation in Alexandria. Nearly all the principal
commentators who came after him were his pupils or his pupils'
pupils. He gave a model for the method of exegesis of Aristotle and
Plato and his lecturing style made an impression on students. His
commentary on *De Interpretatione* was particularly important
and served as a source for Stephanus and other commentators. In its
translation by William of Moerbeke, this work was influential on
Aquinas and thus on medieval and later Aristotelian philosopy and
semantics (cf., e.g., Fortier 2012). Ammonius' new set of
introductions to philosophy and the study of Aristotle, once adopted
and adapted by his Alexandrian students--Olympiodorus, Elias,
David, Pseudo-Elias, and Philoponus, were also transferred to other
languages and cultures. Importantly, a number of his and his
students' works were studied and translated into Persian, Arabic
and Syriac, where Ammonius' influence was carried forward (cf.
the brief overview of the diffusion of Ammonius' new curriculum
and its introductions in Sorabji 2016c, 49-53, also with further
literature on the translations of works from Ammonius' school).
As an example of this diffusion, take the larger commentary on the
*Categories* by Sergius of Reshaina (d. 536), who studied with
Ammonius at Alexandria and later became a physician in his home city
(see Hugonnard-Roche 2004 and Watt 2010, both with further
literature).