Survival was never guaranteed
The works of Greek philosophers did not reach us automatically. For most of history, a text survived only if somebody paid to have it copied by hand, and copies were scattered, damaged or abandoned as languages and fashions changed. The result is uneven. Plato’s dialogues survive in large numbers, while many works of Aristotle’s, including the polished dialogues praised in antiquity, are lost, and the writings of Epicurus and the early Stoics survive mainly in fragments. What we have is partly a story of choice.
Rome: reading and translating
Educated Romans in the later Republic and Empire studied Greek, and Athens remained a destination for students of philosophy. Cicero, in the first century BCE, wrote philosophical dialogues in Latin, drawing on Greek schools, and invented or adapted a Latin vocabulary for ideas such as quality and morality. Some of the most complete accounts of Epicurean and Stoic thought come from Latin authors like Lucretius and Seneca, rather than the Greek founders. Philosophy was woven into elite education, and, as seen in the Roman Senate, leading politicians were often trained in rhetoric and philosophy.
In the third century CE, Plotinus, working in Rome, developed a form of Platonism usually called Neoplatonism, taught later by Porphyry and Proclus. Neoplatonism became the dominant philosophical outlook of late antiquity and shaped how Plato was read for centuries. Meanwhile, the fall of Rome in the West in the fifth century CE reduced the number of readers of Greek in Latin Europe, and knowledge of the language faded.
Boethius and the thin Latin thread
Boethius, a Roman official who died in 524 CE, intended to translate and comment on all of Plato and Aristotle. He did not finish, but his Latin versions of some of Aristotle’s logical writings, with commentary, remained in use. For several centuries these were among the few Aristotelian texts accessible in the Latin West. His Consolation of Philosophy, written in prison, remained widely read in the Middle Ages.
Not long after, the emperor Justinian ordered restrictions on teaching in Athens in 529 CE; traditional accounts describe this as the end of the Platonic school there, although historians debate how sudden or complete its effect was. Some philosophers are reported to have sought refuge in Persia, and others continued work elsewhere in the empire.
Byzantium: copying and commentary
In the eastern Roman, or Byzantine, world, Greek stayed a living language, so philosophy could be read in the original. Alexandria produced an influential tradition of commentary on Aristotle, which continued into the sixth century and was passed on to later writers. In the ninth century, scholars in Constantinople copied many ancient texts in a new, compact minuscule script, and a high proportion of surviving Greek manuscripts descend from copies made in this period or later. Byzantine scholars were not only copyists; they wrote commentaries and compiled encyclopaedias. Their stock of manuscripts was later key to the revival of Greek studies in Italy.
An earlier step in that chain came from the physical format. Books moved from papyrus rolls, the format of the celebrated papyrus scroll collection at Alexandria, to the codex, a bound book usually of parchment, which was sturdier and easier to consult and copy. Works not transferred in this change were mostly lost.
Syriac and Arabic: the translation movement
Christian scholars writing in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, translated Greek logic and medicine from the fifth century CE, and Sergius of Reshaina, who died in 536, is among the best-known translators. After the rise of the Islamic caliphates, Greek works were translated into Arabic on a large scale, especially in the eighth to tenth centuries. Under the early Abbasid caliphs, Abbasid Baghdad became a centre of this effort, supported by rulers, officials and wealthy patrons who paid for manuscripts and translators. The “House of Wisdom” is often named in popular accounts, though historians debate what exactly it was, and the translation movement was broader than any one institution.
Translators such as Hunayn ibn Ishaq, a Christian physician, rendered works by Aristotle, Plato and Galen. Galen anatomy and other Greek medical writing became part of Islamic learning. Philosophers writing in Arabic then built original systems. Al-Kindi, al-Farabi and Ibn Sina (Avicenna) combined Aristotelian and Neoplatonic ideas with their own questions, and Ibn Rushd (Averroes), in twelfth-century Cordoba, wrote detailed commentaries on Aristotle.
Back to Latin Europe
The next stage began in the twelfth century. At centres in Spain and Sicily, including Toledo, scholars translated Arabic versions of Greek works into Latin, among them Gerard of Cremona, who is credited with a very large number of translations. Some works were also translated directly from Greek, and in the thirteenth century William of Moerbeke produced careful Latin versions of Aristotle based on Greek manuscripts.
These texts arrived just as the first universities were forming in Paris, Bologna and Oxford. Aristotle’s natural philosophy and logic were incorporated into the curriculum, though not without controversy and occasional church condemnations. Thomas Aquinas (died 1274) tried to reconcile Aristotle with Christian theology, creating a synthesis that shaped later European thought. This is the phase usually described as scholasticism.
Another sequence of events came with the Renaissance. Greek scholars and manuscripts reached Italy, especially in the fifteenth century and again after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and humanists such as Marsilio Ficino translated Plato’s complete works into Latin. Printing then made editions available in much larger numbers than hand copying ever could.
What the long chain shows
This inheritance was not a single clean line. Greek ideas were preserved, translated, criticised, merged with other traditions and sometimes mistaken. Plato and Aristotle were often read through Neoplatonic spectacles, and some works attributed to them were in fact written by later authors. Yet the chain also shows how many communities (Roman, Byzantine, Syriac-speaking, Arabic-speaking and Latin) took part in keeping the philosophical inheritance alive, which is perhaps the strongest argument against treating Greek thought as the property of a single culture.