Damascius

Life

Much of what is known about Damascius's life comes from his semi-autobiographical work The Philosophical History, or Life of Isidore, and from a work called Vita Severi written by the 6th-century bishop and historian Zacharias Scholasticus. Damascius, as his name suggests, was born in Damascus in c. AD 462, and travelled to Alexandria in the 480s to study rhetoric at the coeducational school of the late 5th-century Alexandrian professor Horapollo, where students of different religions and philosophies studied together. Zacharias reports that there was a close relationship between the Neoplatonic communities of Athens and Alexandria, as Agapius of Athens and Severianus of Damascus, students of Proclus' Neoplatonic school in Athens, also studied in Neoplatonic schools in Alexandria. Damascius may have travelled to Athens shortly before Proclus died in AD 485, to teach rhetoric, and travelled back to Alexandria before 488.

Late 5th-century Alexandria was a tumultuous place: there were conflicting factions of pro-Chalcedonian and Monophysite Christians, and a growing hostile sentiment towards Neoplatonists and people of other non-Christian religions and philosophies that sometimes led to rioting and arrests of leaders of non-Christian schools, resulting in students having to flee and go into hiding. Damascius's account of these times paints a picture of a circle of intellectuals that was under siege, facing arrest and interrogation. They were sometimes courageous, but at other times capitulated. Horapollo, the head of the school at which Damascius had studied and taught rhetoric for nine years, was arrested in AD 489, causing Damascius and the Neoplatonic philosopher Isidore of Alexandria to flee Alexandria and start on a journey to Athens with the aim of studying in the Neoplatonic school there.

That journey took eight months, and during that time Damascius writes that he lost interest in pursuing a profession as a rhetorician. When they finally arrived in Athens, Damascius and Isidore became students of the 5th-century Neoplatonist Marinus of Neapolis, Proclus's successor, at the Neoplatonic school of Athens. By AD 515, Damascius had become head of the Neoplatonic school in Athens, succeeding Marinus's successor Isidore. He continued Isidore's path of steering the school back to the philosophical studies of Aristotle, Plato, Orphic theogony and the Chaldean Oracles, and away from theurgy and rituals, which had previously been favoured, most likely due to the increasing external pressure on the school's philosophical teachings. Damascius was still the head of the school in AD 529, when the Byzantine emperor Justinian I confirmed his Codex Justinianus and administrators, enforcing the new laws, closed it down.

According to the 6th-century historian Agathias, soon after the school closed, Damascius, Isidore and the 6th-century Neoplatonic philosophers Simplicius of Cilicia, Eulamius of Phrygia, Priscianus of Lydia, Hermias and Diogenes of Phoenicia left Athens and travelled to Persia, where they had heard that the intellectual climate might be more suited to them, under the refuge of the Persian King Chosroes. It is not known if Damascius and his retinue of philosophers arrived in Persia, although late 20th- and early 21st-century scholarship by the French historian and philosopher Pierre Hadot, French scholar Michel Tardieu and German historian and philosopher Ilsetraut Hadot advanced the establishment of a Neoplatonic school in Charrae (present-day Harran, Turkey) in the Persian Empire, a view that is disputed by other 21st-century scholarship. The last known trace of Damascius is an epigram carved on a stele in Emesa, which confirms that Damascius returned to Syria in AD 538; this is also the year scholars say he died. Damascius composed a number of works, and a significant number of them survive fragmentarily, the more complete works being the literary work Life of Isidore, or Philosophical History, preserved by Photius, and the philosophical works Problems and Solutions Concerning First Principles, Commentary on the Parmenides, Commentary on the Phaedo, and Lectures on the Philebus.