  Useful in what sense? As if piecing together a Byzantine mosaic, Olympiodorus hands his students the shards and tesserae that could amount, in the appropriate number and arrangement, to classical paideia. His commentaries on Plato abound with references to Homer, Demosthenes, the 2nd-century C.E. orator Aelius Aristides, Plutarch, Epictetus and Aristotle as well as works of Plato other than the one being commented on, notably the Republic, even if his students had not read it yet. One gets the impression that Olympiodorus gently but firmly directs his pupils’ attention to an intellectual world waiting for them to discover it — if they want to. We are entering a period in late antiquity in which Plato and Aristotle cease to be gateways to the ‘truth’ and turn into some kind of cultural heritage that was worth keeping alive for other reasons. Olympiodorus has rightly been called “the first classicist” (Tarrant 1997).