Teaching the Phaedrus at the Neoplatonic School of Athens

 Judged by its influence on the history of thought, the Neoplatonic School of Athens was, along with its sister school at Alexandria, one of the most important intellectual institutions in the West. Such was its importance that 529 CE, the year that its doors were forced shut by the emperor Justinian, is often considered to mark the end of Ancient philosophy, and by extension, of Antiquity itself. While the past thirty years have witnessed a flourishing of scholarship on later Neoplatonism, this movement, to which we owe nearly a third of the philosophical texts to have survived the passage from Antiquity, remains the least explored continent of Ancient philosophy. Many questions regarding the School of Athens therefore remain unanswered, amongst them: what were the pedagogical practices, whether in terms of philosophical theory or contemplative practice, of the School? How did the contents of Platonic dialogues such as the Phaedrus affect these practices? What was the influence of a renowned Neoplatonic teacher such as Syrianus on his students? This project argues that the answers to these fundamental questions lie in a largely overlooked text from the School’s golden age, Hermias of Alexandria’s Scholia on Plato’s Phaedrus.