  The genre of Aristotelian paraphrase, that is, adaptations in which Aristotle’s text is rephrased, reorganized, and amplified or pruned, as need be, in order to make it more easily understood, was allegedly invented by Themistius in the mid-4th century, revived by Michael Psellos in the mid-11th century, and further developed by Sophonias and others in the late 13th to early 14th centuries. It is a curious fact that the only periods from which we have dated paraphrases of Aristotelian works are precisely these three. In addition, there is an Arabic paraphrase that may have been based on a lost Greek paraphrase, which must in that case have been composed in the late 6th or 7th century (D’Ancona 2001). Works of uncertain date include the paraphrase of the Nicomachean Ethics printed in CAG 19 as the work of Heliodorus of Prusa (perhaps mid-14th cent.: see section 1.3). Sophonias consciously tried to blend elements of ‘exegetical commentary’ with his paraphrase of the De anima, in order to be able to preserve more of Aristotle’s original wording. George Pachymeres effected another kind of hybrid paraphrase by organizing his Philosophia like a compendium, which deals with a given subject, rather than a commentary or a paraphrase, which deals with a given text.