PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH large portions of the former Western Empire and united them for a while under the rule of Constantinople His jurists collected and rationalized into a single code all the extant imperial edicts and statutes, and appended a digest of legal commentaries The Code of Civil Law that was handed down in the course of his reign inXuenced most European countries until modern times Justinian’s reign was not, however, as favourable to philosophy as it was to jurisprudence The school of Athens continued the anti-Christian Neoplatonic tradition of Proclus, which brought it into imperial disfavour Simplicius was one of the last group of scholars to adorn the school He devoted great eVort and erudition to the writing of commentaries on Aristotle, whose teachings he was anxious to reconcile with the thought of Plato as interpreted in late antiquity Scholars of later generations are in his debt because in the course of this enterprise he quoted extensively from his predecessors as far back as the Presocratics, and is our source for many of their surviving fragments Simplicius was still working there when, in the year 529, Justinian closed down the school because of its anti-Christian tendency His edict, in the words of Gibbon, ‘imposed a perpetual silence on the schools of Athens and excited the grief and indignation of the few remaining votaries of Grecian science and superstition’ (Decline and Fall, ch 40) Philoponus, too, suVered under Justinian, but for diVerent reasons While Simplicius was a pagan philosopher based in Athens, Philoponus was a Christian philosopher based in Alexandria While Simplicius was the most ardent admirer of Aristotle in antiquity, Philoponus was his severest critic Whereas previous philosophers had either ignored Aristotle (like the Epicureans and Stoics) or interpreted him irenically (like the Neoplatonists), Philoponus knew him very well and attacked him head-on As a Christian, Philoponus rejected the doctrine of the eternity of the world, and demolished the arguments of Aristotle and Proclus to the eVect that the world had no beginning He carried his attack throughout the whole of Aristotle’s physics, rejecting the theories of natural motion and natural place, and denying that the heavenly bodies were governed by physical principles diVerent from those obtaining here below.7 It was Philoponus’ physics is discussed in detail in Ch below 26