Simplicius c. 490 AD – c. 560 AD

Simplicius of Cilicia was a Greek Neoplatonist philosopher and the last great commentator on Aristotle in the Athenian tradition. After the closure of the Platonic Academy by Justinian in 529, he traveled with Damascius and other colleagues to the court of the Sasanian king Khosrow I in Persia and, after returning to the Roman Empire under guarantees of toleration, devoted himself to writing detailed commentaries on Aristotle's Categories, On the Heavens, Physics, and On the Soul, and on the Encheiridion of Epictetus. His commentaries preserve an extraordinary amount of earlier philosophical thought, including many fragments of the Pre-Socratics.

Simplicius of Cilicia was born around 490 in south-eastern Asia Minor and went to Alexandria to study under the Christian Aristotelian Ammonius and on to Athens to study under the last great pagan head of the Platonic Academy, Damascius. When the emperor Justinian closed the Athenian school in 529, Simplicius and six other Athenian Platonists made their way to the Sasanian court of Khosrow I and, after a treaty between Persia and Rome had secured their right to live unmolested, returned to a settled life under Sasanian protection.

His massive commentaries on Aristotle's Categories, Physics, On the Heavens, and On the Soul, together with his commentary on the Manual of Epictetus, are among the longest surviving philosophical works of antiquity. They preserve in their long quotations a vast amount of earlier Greek philosophy — fragments of the pre-Socratics, of the lost commentators, of Stoic and Hellenistic philosophy — that would otherwise have been lost.

Simplicius read Aristotle as essentially in harmony with Plato, defended the eternity of the world against the Christian Philoponus, and combined philosophical argument with deep pietas toward the dying tradition of Greek philosophy whose last representative he understood himself to be. He died around 560, by tradition in Asia Minor.