 The particular, deliberate nature of this project is not cast into doubt by the fact that Boethius’s logical commentaries, although almost certainly not merely servile translations of marginalia from a Greek manuscript (as James Shiel (1990) has argued), are not at all original in their logical doctrines. For what is important is Boethius’s choice of Porphyry as his main authority in logic. It was Porphyry who, two centuries or so earlier, had been responsible for making Aristotelian logic an important subject within the Neoplatonic curriculum. He held that it did not conflict with Platonic doctrine, as his teacher Plotinus had believed, because its area of application was limited to the sensible world, to which everyday language refers. Later Neoplatonists accepted the importance of Aristotelian logic, and the harmony between Platonic and Aristotelian teaching, but they tended to try and discover Neoplatonic doctrines even in the Aristotelian logical texts. In the case of the Categories, they even imagined that Aristotle had taken his doctrine from a Pythagorean writer, Archytas, and that there was an underlying and wildly metaphysical strand to the text which it was the commentator’s duty to uncover. Boethius, however, although making occasional use of later commentaries, usually followed Porphyry: on the Categories he stayed close to Porphyry’s surviving (and quite simple) question-and-answer commentary, whilst the long, second commentary on On Interpretation is commonly accepted as the best guide to Porphyry’s exegesis, since his own commentary does not survive. Boethius’s commentaries were, therefore, because more Porphyrian, so more Aristotelian than what was being written in Greek in his period.