For the study of this period, the terrain was rocky and inaccessible to all but the most hardy and well-equipped explorers. Philosophy was practised primarily through the commentary on the works of Plato and Aristotle, which dominated the school curriculum. In a massive project carried out in 1887–1910, the Berlin Academy published 15,000 pages of Greek text. But none of these writings had ever been translated into a modern language. In 1985 Richard Sorabji, Professor of Ancient Philosophy at King’s College London, inaugurated the series The Ancient Commentators on Aristotle. About seventy volumes have now been published, slender volumes, easily recognisable in their bright, multicoloured dust jackets. Another thirty volumes are planned. When completed, the project will have changed the face of the study of late ancient philosophy forever. There will be no excuse for scholars to skip from Plato and Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas and Descartes. There is a whole history of philosophy in between, and much of it is virgin territory.

Philoponus Against Proclus's 'On the Eternity of the World' 6–8 translated by Michael Share

Duckworth, £55 hb, 208 pp

The majority of late ancient philosophers stood firmly in the Hellenic religious tradition, and this was the reason that the Christian Emperor Justinian closed down their schools in 529. But it would be a mistake to conclude that all of them were pagans. Indeed, one of the very greatest late ancient philosophers was a controversialist who set out to use his Christian convictions as a basis for developing striking new philosophical ideas. We know little about the personal circumstances of Johannes Philoponus (c.490–575). Born in Alexandria, his first name suggests a Christian family background. His second nickname (‘lover of toil’) either indicates he was a hard worker or that he belonged to an evangelical brotherhood. As Sorabji and others have shown, his commentaries and other treatises challenge accepted Platonic and Aristotelian ideas on matter, place and the motion of bodies (his theory of impetus anticipates Islamic and medieval views by many centuries). But his most detailed and forceful arguments are reserved for his attack on the influential fifth-century Athenian philosopher Proclus.

Proclus’s favourite Platonic dialogue was the Timaeus, an ambitious and complex work that explains the origin of the universe by invoking a creator god who brings rational order to a primeval state of chaos. Proclus is convinced that Plato did not mean this act of creation literally. Rather, it was meant to illustrate the components of reality as it stands. He even wrote a work that gave eighteen arguments in favour of the eternity of the cosmos (both past and future). We know about this work because it is attacked by Philoponus in unrelenting detail, including long literal quotations of Proclus’s arguments. Philoponus’s biblically based conviction that creation was a singular event leads him to probe the presuppositions of Proclus’s arguments. At the same time his treatise is one of the most important sources on the history of Platonic interpretation that we possess.

The Tasmanian classicist Michael Share has contributed two volumes to The Ancient Commentators on Aristotle series. (In fact, Philoponus is attacking a Platonist commenting on Plato, but the series is flexible in its coverage.) The first covers Philoponus’s treatment of Proclus’s first five arguments; the second deals with the next three. There are still ten arguments to go: it is a long work. Share’s translation is painstakingly conscientious and accurate. Readers may be certain that he is rendering a complex text as precisely as he can. A bevy of annotations amounting in length to about twenty per cent of the text elucidates its meaning and reveals the translator’s profound grasp of late ancient philosophical Greek. His introductory comments on the difficulty of rendering key Greek terms, especially those of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’, are very much worth reading. Both books contain a detailed English–Greek glossary and a Greek–English index. Not a Greek letter will be found in either of them. Some may regret this decision on the part of the publishers, but it has the advantage of lowering the threshold for Greekless readers.

Space forbids me from going into detail on the arguments on both sides. They turn largely on the role of God as creator, on various kinds of causality, and on the nature of time. A fine example of Philoponus’s insights is his rejection of the Aristotelian view that it is absurd to say that there was a time when time did not exist. He is more sensitive than his opponent to the separation between the realms of language and physics. In terms of modern science, Philoponus’s creationistic view is closer to the singularity of the big-bang theory, but both he and his opponent share an unquestioning acceptance of the notion of intelligent design. These two impressive volumes do not give us science, but they show how philosophers have had their own way of approaching the big question of where our world comes from.