This study examines a number of what might broadly be classified as biographies of philosophers, Christian theologians and those of two emperors, written between the third and fifth centuries a.d., in order to elucidate the relationship of Christian and non-Christian attitudes to Greek educational practices. The often fraught relationship of educated Christians to traditional Greek paideia is illuminated in terms of their concern to appropriate to their own use in particular the prestige and utility of philosophical learning.

U. looks in a fresh way at these biographies by analysing them as linked phenomena within their own historical context. For example, the scope and purpose of Porphyry's Vita Plotini is compared with Eusebius' description of the life and work of Origen (in Book 6 of the Ecclesiastical History), both of which appeared about the same time (about 300 to 303) just before the Diocletian persecution. Interestingly he sees both of these authors as attempting to write up and, to some extent, reconstitute a tradition of learning which had become fragmented and had lost its continuity, each of them finding a focal point in an outstanding intellectual, Plotinus and Origen respectively. For Porphyry the task was to rescue the Platonic tradition from what Numenius had already stigmatised as the heresies of the new Academy and to establish Plotinus and his treatises as the authentic interpretation of Pythagoras and Plato. Eusebius wanted to graft the same tradition onto the older and, of course for him, more authentic Hebraic tradition of wisdom from Moses and thence to Christ, thus ensuring the integration of Christian education and learning into Greek paideia and the possibility of employing suitably purified philosophical tools to enhance the exposition of Christianity. Both found the nodal point in Alexandria and in the figure of Ammonius, the inspired teacher of Plotinus and Origen. And both saw themselves as important players in the continuance of the renewed tradition established by their respective heroes. There is no need to speculate whether these efforts were in direct and conscious competition, nor does U. insist on this, but the detailed and convincing parallels established by him help us to understand more clearly the intellectual challenges and ideals of this most important period of transition.

Another kind of philosophical life is that of the philosophical ruler, represented by Eusebius (H.E. 10 and the Vita Constantini) as Constantine, and by Libanius as Julian. U. makes a convincing argument for a change in the focus of cultural competition between educated Christian and non-Christian thinkers from intellectual to political figures in this period of profound institutional realignment in which Christian educators were increasingly supported by the authorities at the expense of their pagan rivals. The ‘lives’ of these two emperors, which link their achievements with the Platonic figure of the philosopher ruler, demonstrate the conflicting claims of both parties.

U.'s study then reveals a surprising reversal in the succeeding generation. Athanasius' Life of Anthony locates the true philosopher in the hermit's life in the desert, far away from the political and educational life of the city, a trend that is continued in the fifth century with Theodoretus' lives of Syrian monks. Their non-Christian equivalents, however, continue to stress the traditional civic environment of the philosophical schools. In the case of both Eunapius and Marinus, the latter placing Proclus at a pivotal point in a renewed Platonism, their concern is to stress the maintenance of tradition and the construction of a genealogy of authority. Similarly Athanasius and Theodoretus also concern themselves with establishing intellectual genealogies. Throughout the book U. provides useful diagrams to illustrate the linkages of personalities. Another similarity noted by U., and which I found particularly revealing in the context which he has created for it, is the increasing role of religious practice as an important dimension in the lives of these later Platonists, and especially so of Proclus whose daily routine mirrors an almost monastic pattern of ritual, prayer, study and ascetic living combined with teaching. In a curious way the lives of monks and Neoplatonists, although on the surface so very different, reveal some telling similarities.

U.'s broad analysis has revealed some interesting and important trends in the way in which the philosophical inheritance of pagan antiquity both was defended by what eventually became an isolated elite and was also successfully claimed and eventually disengaged from its purely Greek pagan roots by Christian intellectuals. What is different and new in U.'s account is that this story is not told in terms of philosophical concepts and doctrinal adaptations but through the differing ways in which the ‘philosophical life’ was conceived and conveyed.