Theophrastus by Aeneas of Gaza (review)
- Theophrastusby Aeneas of Gaza
The canonical date for the end of paganism is 529 CE, when the Emperor Justinian closed down the Athenian Academy. The decades preceding this symbolically momentous event were characterized by lively debates between Christians, many of whom were steeped in classical culture, and philosophers of the Platonic school, not yet aware that the intellectual predominance they had enjoyed for centuries was about to be eclipsed, in some cases by former students of theirs who had seen a higher light than philosophy. The Christian authors of the two dialogues translated in this volume were both from Gaza, and both studied in Alexandria under the leading Platonists of the day. Aeneas—a rhetorician and sharp-witted satirist, well versed in Homer, Herodotus, and Xenophon, as well as in Plato and the Neoplatonists—later returned to his native Gaza. [End Page 123]Zacharias, after training and practicing as a lawyer in Beirut, eventually became bishop of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos. Arguing against the Platonic doctrines of the eternity of the universe and of the preexistence and transmigration of souls, and arguing in favor of the Christian dogmas of the immortality of the soul, resurrection of the body, and divine creation of the world in time, these two Christian writers were notably lacking in the philosophical sophistication of their pagan opponents. Nevertheless, history, if not God, was on their side.
Jill Kraye, professor emerita of the history of Renaissance philosophy at the University of London, is an honorary fellow of the Warburg Institute and the author of Classical Traditions in Renaissance Philosophy. She is an editor of the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, the International Journal of the Classical Tradition, and the “Renaissance and Sixteenth Century” section of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
