29 A less positive view of late antique literary culture is expressed by J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz,
The Decline and Fall of the Roman City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
30 Among recent work that of Richard Sorabji is especially important: see his Time, Creation
and the Continuum: Theories in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (London: Variorum, 1983),
and the papers edited by him in Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science (London:
Duckworth, 1987) and Aristotle Transformed. The Ancient Commentators and their Infl uence, (Lon-
don: Duckworth, 1990).
31 At Apamea, elaborate fourth-century mosaics of Socrates with six sages, Odysseus’ return,
Kallos (the personifi cation of Beauty) and Cassiopeia were subsequently built over when
the cathedral was constructed. For these and the mosaics from New Paphos in Cyprus, also
depicting Cassiopeia, and the birth of Dionysos, see Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity,
chap. 4 and id., Mosaics as History.
32 Trans. Mark Edwards, Neoplatonic Saints. The Lives of Plotinus and Proclus by their Students,
Translated Texts for Historians 35 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000); see G.
Fowden, ‘The pagan holy man in late antique society’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 102 (1982),
33–59; and for possible archaeological evidence for philosophical teaching at Athens, see
Alison Frantz, The Athenian Agora XXIV. Late Antiquity A.D. 267–700 (Princeton, NJ: Prin-
ceton University Press, 1988), especially 56–8, 82–92.
33 For this, see the essays in H.J. Blumenthal and R.A. Markus, eds, Neoplatonism and
Early Christian Thought (London: Variorum, 1981). The thought of Boethius, expressed in
his Consolation of Philosophy, was also deeply imbued with Neoplatonic ideas (see Chapter
2).
34 Malalas, Chronicle, trans. Jeffreys, 264; Damascius: see P. Athanassiadi, Damascius, The Philo-
sophical History (Athens: Apamea Cultural Association, 1999).
35 Hist. II.30–1.
36 Edward Watts, ‘Justinian, Malalas and the end of Athenian philosophical teaching in AD
529’, Journal of Roman Studies 94 (2004), 168–82; id., City and School in Late Antique Athens
and Alexandria; Dominic J. O’Meara, Platonopolis. Platonic Political Philosophy in Late Antiquity
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Simplicius at Harran: I. Hadot, ‘The life and work
of Simplicius in Greek and Arabic sources’, in Sorabji, ed., Aristotle Transformed, 275–303,
following M. Tardieu, ‘Sabiens coraniques et “Sabiens” de Harran’, Journal asiatique 274
(1986), 1–44.
37 See B. Dignas and E. Winter, Rome and Persia in Late Antiquity. Neighbours and Rivals (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 264.
38 For Neoplatonism in Palestinian monastic circles in the sixth century, see I. Perczel,
‘Pseudo-Dionysius and Palestinian Origenism’, in J. Patrich, ed., The Sabaite Heritage in the
Orthodox Church from the Fifth Century to the Present (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), 261–82.
39 Henry Chadwick, ‘Philoponus, the Christian theologian’, in Sorabji, ed., Philoponus, 41–56;
see also Sorabji, ‘John Philoponus’, ibid., 1–40.
40 See Robert Browning, Medieval and Modern Greek, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1983).
41 See Averil Cameron, ‘Education and literary culture, AD 337–425’, Cambridge Ancient His-
tory XIII, 665–707, at 698–707; Frances Young, Lewis Ayres and Andrew Louth, eds., Cam-
bridge History of Early Christian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
42 Many examples also show literary affi nities with contemporary lives of pagan holy men: see
Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, esp. chap. 3; Tomas Hägg and Philip
Rousseau, eds., with the assistance of Christian Høgel, Greek Biography and Panegyric in Late
Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
43 See on this Elizabeth Jeffreys, ‘Malalas’ world-view’, and Roger Scott, ‘Malalas and his
contemporaries’, in E. Jeffreys, B. Croke and R. Scott, eds., Studies in John Malalas (Sydney:
Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, 1990), 55–86.
44 See D. Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert. Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early
Christian Monasticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); R.M. Price, A History of
the Monks of Syria (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1985); Georgia Frank, The
NOTES TO CHAPTER 6