Simplicius of Cilicia Simulacrum

The Life

Simplicius was born in Cilicia around 490 CE. He studied philosophy in Alexandria under Ammonius (son of Hermeias) and in Athens under Damascius. He was among the small group who travelled with Damascius to the court of Khosrow I after the Athenian Academy's closure in 529, and who returned under the 532 peace treaty. He lived and wrote for at least another thirty years, producing the most substantial body of philosophical commentary to survive from late antiquity. He died around 560 CE.

The Thought

Simplicius's surviving work consists almost entirely of long, erudite commentaries on Aristotle — on the *Categories*, the *Physics*, *On the Heavens*, and *On the Soul* (the last of which is now disputed in attribution). A separate commentary on the *Enchiridion* of Epictetus also survives. These are not compact works; the *Physics* commentary alone runs to more than a thousand pages in the standard Greek edition. They are scrupulous, philosophically alert, and polemical by turns, engaging with the Christian philosopher John Philoponus and defending an eternalist Aristotelian–Platonic cosmology against the new creationist arguments.

Their unique value is secondary. Simplicius was the last major scholar who had access to the full library of earlier Greek philosophy, and he cited extensively from works that were already becoming rare — Presocratic fragments, lost Stoic treatises, earlier Neoplatonic commentaries. A large proportion of what we know of Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the Stoics is preserved in quotations within Simplicius's margins. To read Simplicius is to read the last great librarian of the ancient world.

The Legacy

The commentaries were translated into Latin in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and became standard tools of Aristotle-study throughout the medieval scholastic tradition. More recently, the renewed attention paid to the Presocratics in modern classical scholarship has made Simplicius's citations foundational; editions of Parmenides or Empedocles that do not rest on Simplicius do not exist. His commentary on the *Enchiridion* was a small but influential model of how Platonism and Stoicism might be reconciled within a philosophical life.