In the opening chapter, which may be read as the editorial preface to this interesting volume, Ken Parry presents a ‘conspectus’ of Byzantine dealings with Greek philosophy, which demonstrates that even outside such centres as Edessa and Constantinople, Platonic and Aristotelian terminology was widely employed, that their works were translated not only into Greek but into Arabic, Armenian and Syrian, that even the detractors of philosophy were far from ignorant of it, and in short that with the closure of the pagan schools a new door opened in Eastern Christendom. Johannes Zachhuber's ‘Theology and philosophy in late antiquity’ seems designed to corroborate Parry's thesis, arguing that, notwithstanding disclaimers in Origen and other Christian writers, the Church of late antiquity had begun to shape a philosophy which could not be reduced to that of any pagan school and which outlived all the schools because it came to exceed the ancient definition of philosophy. Subsequent contributions, though often good, are more desultory in subject matter. In ‘Drunk on new wine’, Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides plausibly surmises that the discussion of divine inebriation in Dionysius the Areopagite owes something to Neoplatonic imagery of the effervescence of nous; I am less persuaded that any link need be drawn between Christian precepts to abstain from liquor and Plato's commendation of the sobriety of Socrates even after he had emptied more cups than any of his companions. In the next article, ‘Imperial politics and Alexandrian philosophy’, Michael Crawford argues that, in spite of his claim that disciples of Moses and Jesus need no other teachers, Cyril exhibits unusual learning in citing Greek philosophers against Julian the Apostate, and betrays an occasional sympathy for their aims that would justify the word ‘interact’ (p. 125).

Michael Champion (‘Philosophy as transformation’) demonstrates that Dorotheus of Gaza imitates Neoplatonic methods of exegesis, not only in making the skopos of a text fundamental to its interpretation, but in illustrating through his own practice the meditative exercise which he wishes the digestion of the text to induce in the reader. We may wonder how much Dorotheus might have learned from Origen, who antedates Plotinus by some decades; more originality is permitted to Christian thought in Dirk Baltzly's ‘Theology and philosophy in late patristic discourse’, where the Christological controversies which followed Chalcedon are said to have precipitated a concept of mere existence, rather than of existing-as, which was unprecedented in classical metaphysics. According to John Dillon, this is a laurel that Damascene ought to cede to Dexippus; I am also unsure what is being claimed on Damascene's behalf when Vassilis Adrahtas (‘Translating crisis into logic’) contrasts his iconic understanding of history with the symbolic approach of Proclus. The interesting conjecture that his concept of hypostasis is shaped by the use of huparxis in Proclus to mean individuation rather than the individual requires more proof, as Adrahtas recognises (p. 192). Dirk Baltzly is on surer ground in ‘Civic virtues and the goal of likeness to god’, as he traces the origin of the notion of civic virtue, the supersession of psychic harmony by likeness to god as the Platonic ideal, and correlation in Proclus, not only of psychic with cosmic virtue, but of the three parts of the soul with the elements of the intelligible triad. In ‘Summarising Platonic education’, Graeme Miles examines this author's attempt to produce an integrated and edifying summary of Plato's thought in his exposition of the divided line in the Republic: Proclus shows himself a man of his time when he associates eikasia, the most primitive state of knowledge, with the belief that by seizing the shadow one may gain power over a living organism.

In ‘Eunapius’ lives of philosophers and sophists’, Han Baltussen argues that, by dwelling on acts and traits in his protagonists that suggest closeness to the divine, this defiant pagan is setting up a gallery of holy men in competition with the Christian saints. This is neither a new nor a doubtful thesis, but Baltussen offers only generic observations, taking the Life of Plotinus as a comparandum but making no use of the detailed criticism that has been applied to this text in the last thirty years. In the next article, ‘A pagan philosopher at the imperial court’, Megan McEvoy reconstructs the tergiversations of Pamprepius, who, notwithstanding his paganism, was able to add a brief career as lawgiver and statesman to his original profession as a teacher. His success illustrates the tendency of statesmen to set more value on natural talent than on religious orthodoxy; Bronwen Neil's study of ‘Pagan and Christian dream theory’ finds that Maximus the Confessor is equally conscious of the presence in Christian souls of natural impulses, which will be turned to good or evil in accordance with one's personal disposition. Willing is natural, but only when it conforms to the image of God within us is it free. Here, as so often when we read Maximus, we might be reading Augustine: there seems to be no one of comparable stature among the Syriac authors who furnish Nestor Kavvadas with instances of ‘The Greek jargon of logic’. Their recitation, in season and out of season, of logical commonplace merely adds pedantry and prolixity to disputes that were already arcane to those who were not engaged in them, and there is little to be said for a rhetorical culture that aims at no more than ‘identity formation’ (p. 307). By contrast, the sceptical case against the utility of definition, the Arabic reception which is recounted by Elvira Wakelnig in ‘Pyrrho and Sextus refuting philosophy’, has recovered all its force in the modern era: following its transmission through the Greek and Armenian versions of David's Prolegomena to Aristotelian philosophy, she concludes that it was the Arabs who conflated it with another Sceptical argument against the possibility of knowledge. It may be paradoxical that this is the piece which has most enlarged my own knowledge, but after reading the whole collection I have still to learn whether there is such a thing as Byzantine philosophy.