EXEGETICAL CULTURES 1 | 149main cause of this decline was said to be student laziness, thanks to which
basic medical textbooks by Hippocrates and Galen had to be simplified and
abridged. Curricular contraction is in fact well attested at this period;^101 and
the cure will have hastened the progress of the disease, to judge from the
mechanical aridity of the surviving Arabic Summaries, with their tedious di-
vision and subdivision of definitions.^102 What is more, the Alexandrian
teaching tradition really did come to an end in the second half of the seventh
century, judging by our scant literary evidence^103 and the recent discovery of
a complex of auditoria buried immediately beneath an Umayyad cemetery—
its extensiveness vividly illustrating how an exegetical tradition fed into ev-
eryday student life.^104 But the explicitly anti- Christian bias to the story, at-
tributing the decline of secular studies to the malevolence of Christian rulers,
is likely to have been introduced under the Abbasid Caliph Maʾmūn (813–
33), who notoriously held that the caliphate rather than the East Roman
Empire was the true heir of Greek scholarship and values. Dimitri Gutas
dubbed this attitude “anti- Byzantinism as philhellenism”;^105 and students of
Byzantine philosophy are indeed hard put to find anything of interest going
on in their field during the couple of centuries after Heraclius,^106 even allow-
ing for the philosophically informed—at a fairly elementary level—theolog y
of Maximus the Confessor (d. 662)^107 and John of Damascus (d. 740s), a
Syrian subject of the Umayyads.^108 As I already pointed out, it was Syria that
made the cultural running at this period, in Greek as well as Syriac. The loss
of this region to the Arabs was not just a military and economic blow.
101 M. Roueché, “Did medical students study philosophy in Alexandria?,” Bulletin of the Institute
of Classical Studies 43 (1999) 153–69; E. Watts, “Where to live the philosophical life in the sixth century?
Damascius, Simplicius, and the return from Persia,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine studies 45 (2005) 311–
- On Alexandrians’ ignorance of basic philosophical concepts, see Anastasius of Sinai, Guide [5:54] 1.3,
18–19.
102 P. E. Pormann, “The Alexandrian summary (Jawāmiʿ) of Galen’s On the sects for beginners,” in
Adamson and others (eds), Philosophy, science and exegesis [1:35] 2.27–28 (whose materials scarcely jus-
tify his upbeat conclusion); and compare Roueché, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 43 (1999)
[5:101] 166–69.
103 M. Roueché, “The definitions of philosophy and a new fragment of Stephanus the Philoso-
pher,” Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 40 (1990) 128; Hoyland, Seeing Islam [3:102] 234–35;
Wa l k e r , Legend of Mar Qardagh [5:72] 183 and n. 68.
104 G. Majcherek, “The late Roman auditoria of Alexandria,” and J. S. McKenzie, “The place in late
antique Alexandria ‘where alchemists and scholars sit (.. .) was like stairs,’ ” in T. Derda and others (eds),
Alexandria: Auditoria of Kom el- Dikka and late antique education (Warsaw 2007) 11–50, 53–83.
105 Gutas, Greek thought [5:92] 83–95.
106 Conrad, in Reinink and Klugkist, After Bardaisan [5:77] 88–89.
107 B. Roosen and P. van Deun, “Les collections de définitions philosophico- théologiques ap-
partenant à la tradition de Maxime le Confesseur,” in M. Cacouros and M.- H. Congourdeau (eds), Phi-
losophie et sciences à Byzance de 1204 à 1453 (Leuven 2006) 53–76.
108 V. S. Conticello, “Jean Damascène,” D PA 3.1008–12; M. Frede, “John of Damascus on human
action, the will, and human freedom,” in K. Ierodiakonou (ed.), Byzantine philosophy and its ancient
sources (Oxford 2002) 63–95; id., “Catégories” [5:46], in Bruun and Corti (eds), Catégories [5:5]
166–73.