## 1. Introduction




Byzantium in the 6th century witnessed at once a last flourishing and
a dramatic decline of the tradition of composing philosophical
commentaries on the works of Plato and Aristotle, a tradition which
began in earnest in the 2nd century CE. David, together with the
almost equally enigmatic Elias, and Stephanus, belong to the final stage
of this tradition that reached its pinnacle in the 6th century's first
half with the great commentaries of Ammonius Hermeiou and his pupils
Simplicius and John Philoponus in the East, and with Boethius in the
West. If we discount a commentary on the *Categories* which the
manuscript tradition uniformly attributes to 'David' but
which, in style and doctrine, is more closely related to works
attributed to 'Elias', there remain two texts we have to
consider as his works, one entitled 'Prolegomena
philosophiae' ('Introduction to Philosophy'), the
other lectures on Porphyry's 'Introduction to Aristotle's
*Categories*'. The author of these texts refers to
Olympiodorus four times; he may have been his pupil. Olympiodorus, who
was a pagan, held the chair of philosophy at Alexandria as a successor
to Ammonius and Eutocius for well over 30 years, from around 530 to
about 565. These are the only pieces of evidence that provide us with
a rough estimate as to the time of composition.


## 2. Extant Writings




Both the 'Introduction to Philosophy' and the commentary
on Porphyry arose out of the author's teaching activity, presumably at
the school of Alexandria. The text is divided throughout into more or
less self-contained 'lectures,' called
'praxeis,' a formal structure that was first used by
Olympiodorus. The 'Introduction to Philosophy' consists of
24 such lectures. In fact, the texts we have state in their title that
they were written down "from the voice" of David; this means that
while the teacher lectured, a student would take copious notes that
were then copied out and circulated, a practice that was not uncommon
in the Alexandrian school.



 Giving introductory lectures to beginners in philosophy was a
standard part of higher education at Alexandria; Ammonius and
Olympiodorus taught such lectures, and as time went on, the ritual
became more and more elaborate: Elias' 'Introduction to
Philosophy' is about twice as long as that of Ammonius, David's
about four times as long. As today, a lecture of this kind offered an
occasion to inspire students with a love for philosophy. Whereas
Ammonius' lectures were pretty dry and to the point, Elias wore the
cloak of an entertaining intellectual, and David comes across as a
serious man passionate about philosophy. Here are the opening lines
of his first lecture:



> 
>  Those who passionately love philosophical arguments and have tasted
> the pleasure that derives from them with their fingertips, having said
> farewell to all of life's concerns, are evidently pulled towards these
> arguments by some kind of madness and in their souls evoke the love for
> them by the knowledge of the things that are. As we shall learn with
> god's help, philosophy is just this knowledge. Now, since wise love
> and great desire have driven us into this struggle, let us tackle the
> divine struggle of philosophy without regarding the task before us as
> difficult; rather in looking towards the end of the divine promise of
> philosophy, we shall regard any effort as inferior and secondary to
> it.
>  



 Somewhat surprising is that these words are generally supposed to
have been uttered by a Christian. Although it is most certainly wrong
to reckon with a clear-cut dichotomy between the intellectual commitments
and sentiments of 'Christians' and 'pagans' in
late antiquity, it is striking that David's text gives us no
indication that the author was indeed a Christian. On the contrary,
there are many features that belong to the old world of pagan
polytheism: the world is eternal, the soul immortal, the celestial
bodies divine, and we hear of irrational avenging spirits and
long-living nymphs. Moreover, 'David' seems to proselytize
among his students, trying to turn their minds and souls towards pagan
Greek philosophy understood as a commitment to a certain way of
life. For example, he makes heavy weather of the Platonic idea that
philosophy is an assimilation to god and claims at one point that "the
complete philosopher is similar to god because he is characterized by
the same things as god, in particular universal knowledge" (p. 17,
1ff). He finishes his lectures with a resounding exhortation that
philosophy "adorns human souls and transfers the soul from the dim
corporeality of this life to what is divine and immaterial", citing a
line from Homer in support (p. 79, 2-5).



 In the sequence of courses, the 'Prolegomena' were
followed by lectures on Porphyry's seminal 'Introduction to
Aristotle's *Categories*'. Porphyry, who started the
neoplatonic tradition of commentaries on Aristotle at the end of the
3rd century, was once approached by a Roman senator, Chrysarius, who
had great difficulty understanding Aristotle's
'*Categories*'; Elias and David tell their students
how Porphyry seized the opportunity to write what should turn out to
be an extremely popular and influential text, the so-called
'Isagoge' ('Introduction'). The text
deals with a detailed explanation of the five logical-ontological key
concepts: genus, species, differentia, essential attribute and
accidental attribute.



 David explains that an understanding of this text is in fact not only
requisite for an understanding of Aristotle's *Categories*, but
serves also as a preparation for philosophy in general -- in addition
to providing a training in dialectical method (87, 2-5). His view is
that the terms Porphyry explicates are the building blocks of any kind
of philosophical discourse.



 In the two texts we still possess, the author also refers to his own
exegesis of the *Categories*, the *De interpretatione*,
and the *Physics*, but these commentaries have not been
discovered. Whether or not David lectured also on Plato we do not
know.


## 3. The Problem of Authorship




We do not know whether the texts transmitted under the name of
'David' were written at a time when Olympiodorus was still
alive and active, or whether they date to the last decades of the 6th,
beginning of the 7th, centuries. The inability precisely to date these
texts compounds the difficulties that surround the attribution to a
philosopher named 'David'. These difficulties are
threefold:



 First, in the Greek tradition, we nowhere find evidence of an
Alexandrian philosopher named David; neither the Suda nor Hesychius
nor Photius nor anyone else seems to know of any such person. Second,
the texts we have were evidently widely distributed and read, and an
abbreviated and simplified version of the 'Prolegomena to
Philosophy' was translated at some point into Armenian (our
earliest manuscripts date from the 14th century). The Armenian version
was given a new title and attributed to 'David, the
Invincible', who, according to the Armenian tradition, however,
was a theologian of the 5th century. It is impossible to believe that
the Armenian theologian and the (Alexandrian) philosopher a century
later were one and the same. There is also no reason to believe that
the latter David was of Armenian origin. Here, the cross-fertilization
of intellectual traditions has given rise to a great deal of confusion
which, in the absence of earlier manuscripts, is quite impossible to
clear up completely.



 The third difficulty concerns the Greek manuscript tradition. All
of our older manuscripts (from the 11th century onwards) are either
anonymous or attribute their contents to (1) Elias, or to (2) the saint David
of Thessaloniki (who died around 530), or (3) to the 10th century
Byzantine scholar Nicetas of Paphlagonia who called himself by the
monastic name 'David'. Only the 16th century manuscripts
and one from the 14th century name 'David' at all as
author, and it seems imprudent to put too much, if any, weight on this
attribution. It is quite possible that the texts we have now under the
name of David first circulated as anonymous lecture notes and were
only later attributed to an author with a good Christian name so as to
enhance its importance and authority among Christian readers.