ARISTOTLE TO AUGUSTINE three famous Romans, which in an Elizabethan translation by Sir Thomas North provided the plot and much of the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Roman plays But he also wrote some sixty short treatises on popular philosophical topics, which were collected under the title Moralia He was a Platonist and commented on the Timaeus He wrote a number of polemical treatises against the Stoics and Epicureans which contributed to the decline of those systems: they bear parallel titles such as On the Contradictions of the Epicureans and On the Contradictions of the Stoics or On Free Will in Reply to Epicurus and On Free Will in Reply to the Stoics One of the longest of his surviving essays bears the title That Epicurus Actually Makes a Pleasant Life Impossible, and another is an attack on an otherwise unknown work by Colotes, one of Epicurus’ earliest disciples Though his works are not often read by philosophers for their own sake, they have long been quarried by historians for the information they provide about their targets of attack More important, initially, than the incipient revival of Platonism was the beginning of a tradition of scholarly commentary on the Aristotelian corpus The oldest surviving commentary on a text is the secondcentury work of Aspasius on the Ethics, which inaugurates the custom of treating the Nicomachean Ethics as canonical At the end of the century Alexander of Aphrodisias was appointed to the Peripatetic chair in Athens, and he produced extensive commentaries on the Metaphysics, the de Sensu, and some of the logical works In pamphlets on the soul, and on fate, he presented his own developments of Aristotelian ideas Aristotle had spoken, obscurely, of an active intellect that was responsible for concept formation in human beings Alexander identiWed this active intellect with God, an interpretation that was to have a great inXuence on Aristotle’s later Arab followers, while being rejected by Christians, who regarded the active intellect as a faculty of each individual human being Plotinus and Augustine It was Plato, however, not Aristotle, who was to be the dominant philosophical inXuence during the twilight of classical antiquity Contemporary with the Christian Origen, and a fellow pupil of Ammonius Saccas, was the 112