 Recent studies of the Alexandrians (especially Hadot 1978 on Hierocles and Simplicius, Verrycken 1990a on Ammonius, Tempelis 1999, Luna 2001, Cardullo 2009 and 2012, Hadot 2015, Sorabji 2016a and c) have largely resulted in the abandonment of Praechter’s claims. Overlapping personal histories already cast doubt on the hypothesis of a gulf between the two schools. As noted above, Plutarch’s chosen successor Syrianus came from Alexandria together with Hermeias, who brought Plutarch’s and Syrianus’ teachings back from Athens to his native city Alexandria. Ammonius studied with and was evidently greatly influenced by Proclus in Athens. Furthermore, references and allusions to various important pieces of Proclan doctrine can be adduced from various places in the commentaries of Ammonius and his students. The relative paucity, however, of such references and their lack of centrality to the works in which they are found makes it difficult to assess their significance in this regard. The interpretation of certain statements which might be interpreted as telling against Ammonius’ espousal of, say, the transcendent One, is also a complex matter. Ammonius’ interpreters now rightly rely to a great extent on context in understanding his works. They ask, for example, whenever Ammonius does not mention a particular Neoplatonic doctrine or mentions it in a simplified form, whether the doctrine was necessary to an understanding of the passage on which Ammonius was commenting. As noted above, Ammonius comments mostly on Aristotle, especially his logical works. This was the first part of the Neoplatonic curriculum: Marinus (Life of Proclus 13) says that Syrianus taught Proclus all of Aristotle’s works in less than two years and “having led him through these, as it were, preliminary initiatory rites and little mysteries, brought him to the mystagogy of Plato”. Ammonius apparently held a similar view of the Aristotelian portion of the Neoplatonic curriculum, and in commentary on such works may have felt no need to go into many of the details of a complex Neoplatonic theology and metaphysics;, even if he held such views. Even the Metaphysics, which according to Ammonius dealt with things ‘entirely unmoved’, that is, ‘theology’ (Asclepius, in Metaph. 1,3 and 17–18) may not have been thought to require an explanation of the highest levels of reality. In a second statement, explaining the first line of the book, Asclepius says Aristotle aimed to speak about “beings and how they are beings and, to reason about absolutely all beings, insofar as they are beings” (2,9–11), which Hadot (2015, 27) takes to exclude “the entire divine hierarchy beyond being”. The second statement, however, probably derives from Alexander, who thinks that the Metaphysics is theological in the sense that God is one of the causes of reality and thus a subject of ‘first philosophy’ (cf. Cardullo 2012, 225 n. 230). Ammonius here elides the reasoning needed to get from the study of being qua being to theology, and there is some ambiguity as to the extent to which he thinks the role of theology in Aristotle is the same as in Plato (Hadot 2015, 27 n. 83). In some contexts a discussion of certain metaphysical doctrines might even have been inappropriate, especially if the work under discussion was meant to be studied by less advanced students. Thus, the fact that Ammonius does not avail himself of certain opportunities to discuss certain tenets of Neoplatonic metaphysics does not mean that he would not espouse such tenets in other circumstances. Still, the very fact that Ammonius was, as emphasized above, especially known for his commentaries on Aristotle, could reflect a tendency on his part not to have taught a full-blown Neoplatonic metaphysical system. Hadot 2015 gives a lengthy account of the similarities and differences in the ways Aristotle and Plato were ‘harmonized’ by various Platonists since Porphyry (cf. the account of various issues on which harmonization was needed, as seen in Themistius and then in Ammonius, in Sorabji 2016c, 18–20 and 53–55). In agreement with Cardullo (e.g., 2009, 245) that one finds in Ammonius an “absolute allegiance to Neoplatonism”, Hadot interprets differences between, say, Syrianus-Proclus and Ammonius as resulting from the greater determination of the latter to minimize their possible disagreements and Ammonius’ consequently greater willingness to bend Aristotle in Plato’s direction. There may be debate over whether this involved more ‘Aristotelizing Plato’ or ‘Platonizing Aristotle’ (cf. Sorabji 2016a, xxvii–xxxi for a discussion of Hadot’s objections to Verrycken’s [1990] view of Ammonius’ simplification of the metaphysics of the Athenian Neoplatonists). One may also wonder whether Ammonius would have thought that his philosophy differed in any important way from that of his Athenian teacher. 