Elias

The name under which a sixth-century Alexandrian course on Porphyry’s Isagoge, with twelve introductory lectures on philosophy, has come down; with the parallel commentary of David it shows the form of the logic course that the Syriac and Arabic schools continued.

Life

Nothing is known of Elias’ life. The works under his name were written at Alexandria in the second half of the sixth century and circulated for a time anonymously; the name is a later attribution. Their author may have been a pupil of Olympiodorus, and the Isagoge commentary may record Olympiodorus’ own lectures. L. G. Westerink proposed identifying him with a prefect named Elias mentioned in a law of Justinian dated 12 December 541. The Stanford Encyclopedia notes that good evidence for a Neoplatonic philosopher with the Christian monastic name Elias is scant, that nothing in the works is explicitly Christian, and that the author may have been a pagan teaching Greek philosophy to a Christian audience, as Olympiodorus did.

The works are lecture courses for beginners. An introduction to philosophy in twelve lectures precedes the commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge; a commentary on the Categories, only the beginning of a commentary on the Prior Analytics, and scholia on On Interpretation also survive under his name. The Categories commentary is ascribed by some scholars to Elias and by others to David, another commentator of the same school under whose name similar lectures survive; a further Isagoge commentary is now called ‘Pseudo-Elias’.

No Arabic translation of Elias’ works has been securely identified. The Arabic sources name an otherwise unknown ‘Allīnūs’ as the author of a commentary on the Categories, and Ibn Suwār translated a ‘book by Allīnūs’; Cristina D’Ancona notes that Allīnūs might be Elias, though other identifications have been proposed. The Alexandrian views that his lectures record were nonetheless inherited by the Arabic logicians: the Stanford Encyclopedia quotes Elias’ classification of syllogisms by the truth of their premises (all true: demonstrative; all false: poetic and mythical; mixed) as the ‘typical Neoplatonist soundbite’ behind a statement of al-Fārābī on poetic discourse.

Works

• Introduction to philosophy (twelve lectures) and commentary on the Isagoge — عَلَى فُرْفُورِيُوسGreek text ed. A. Busse, CAG 18.1 (1900); transmitted anonymously but quoted under Elias’ name in Byzantine scholia.شَرْح
• Commentary on the Categories — عَلَى أَرِسْطُوEd. Busse, CAG 18.1 (1900); its attribution to Elias or to David is disputed. An incomplete Armenian version survives.شَرْح
• Commentary on the Prior Analytics — عَلَى أَرِسْطُوOnly the beginning survives (ed. Westerink, 1961).شَرْح

Reception

Like his course, which opens with general questions about philosophy before the five predicables, the Arabic commentary on the Isagoge by Ibn al-Ṭayyib includes introductory material on the status of logic (see the article ‘How the Isagoge travelled’).