6. The last philosopher of any celebrity in the Neo-Platonic school of Alexandria. He lived
in the first half of the sixth century after Christ, in the reign of the emperor Justinian. He
was a younger contemporary, and possibly a pupil, of Damnascius; the partiality which he
uniformly shows for him, and the preference which he gives him even above Proclus, seem to
indicate this. Our knowledge of Olympiodorus is derived from those works of his which have
come down to us. From a passage in his scholia to the Alcibiades Prior of Plato, Creutzer has
acutely inferred that he taught before the Athenian school was finally suppressed by
Justinian, that is, before
From what we have of the productions of Olympiodorus he appears to have been an acute and
clear thinker, and, if not strikingly original, far from being a mere copyist, though he
follows Damasciuts pretty closely. He was a man of extensive reading, and a great deal of
valuable matter from the lost writings of other philosophers, as Iamblichus, Syriamnus,
Damascius, and others, with historical and mythological notices, have come down to us through
him at second hand. In his sketches of the general plan and object of the dialogues of Plato,
and of their dramatic construction and the characters introduced, he exhibited great ability.
A great deal that is valuable is also to be found in his analyses
His style, as might have been expected, is marked by several of the solecistms of his age,
but exhibits in the main a constant endeavour after purity and accuracy. His scholia, as we
have them, were put into a written form by his pupils, from notes which they took of his
lectures, and are distributed into
Of his compositions there have come down to us a life of Plato; a polemical work against Strato (inl MS. at Munich) ; anid scholia on the Gorgias, Philebus, Phaedo, and Alcibiades I. of Plato. Whether these were all the works of Plato on which he commented, or not, we do not know.
l. c,); and im a more complete
form
Fabric. Bibl. Graec. vol. x. p. 631.