  The best way to understand the circumstances of his life is to get a sense of the final period of pagan philosophy in the age of Justinian (for a more detailed account, see Wildberg 2005, with further references). For our purposes, the most important factor is that in the age of Justinian, philosophy, as a discipline taught in schools of higher education, had acquired a highly ambiguous status. On the one hand, almost anyone in the empire was perfectly aware of the fact that Justinian had, right from the beginning of his reign, taken severe measures to eradicate philosophy as a way of pagan life and learning, both private and public. The closing of the Athenian School around 529 (with an apparent expropriation of its assets) is only the most notorious example. On the other hand, members of the elite were evidently also acutely aware that it was impossible to sustain the culture of the empire, both secular and clerical, without a classical education, part of which was and always had been, philosophy. A training in philosophy was all the more necessary since only a firm grounding in logic and ontology could prepare one in a meaningful way for participation in the subtle theological debates that dominated the best minds at the time, notably the intractable problem of the nature of Christ: Does Christ have two natures, one human, one divine, or one compound nature? How can one possibly understand the side-by-side of divinity and humanity in a single substance? One could not hope to become an expert in theology (then regarded as the highest form of philosophy) without having exposed oneself in a serious way to the works of Aristotle and Plato. And so, under the emperor who did perhaps more than anyone to cripple philosophy, philosophy flourished — in Alexandria especially, but also elsewhere — in a manner unparalleled in late antiquity.