What Was Aristotle Really Saying? The Mystery of the Lost Commentaries

Imagine you find an old, hand-written letter from your great-great-grandmother. The ink is faded. Some words are missing. The language is old-fashioned and hard to follow. You have a hunch she’s trying to tell you something important — maybe about your family, or about something that happened a long time ago — but you can’t quite figure it out.

Now imagine that instead of one letter, you have dozens of them. And instead of one reader, there are hundreds of people over two thousand years, each trying to make sense of what she wrote. They write their own notes in the margins, trying to explain what the tricky passages mean. Some of them argue with each other. Some of them think they understand her perfectly. Some of them think they understand her better than she understood herself.

That’s pretty much what happened with Aristotle.

Aristotle was a Greek philosopher who lived around 350 BCE. He wrote about everything: logic, physics, biology, politics, poetry, ethics, the soul, God. His writings were studied for centuries after his death. But here’s the strange part: for a long time, almost nobody read them. Aristotle’s works disappeared for a couple hundred years. When they came back, people were puzzled. The texts were hard. The meaning was unclear. And so began a tradition that would last for almost a thousand years: people writing commentaries on Aristotle.

This article isn’t about Aristotle himself. It’s about the people who spent their lives trying to figure out what he meant. And about a weird fact that emerges from their efforts: the more they tried to get closer to Aristotle’s original meaning, the more they ended up creating something new.

The Puzzle: What Even Is a Commentary?

The word “commentary” might make you think of a sports announcer explaining a play, or a director’s commentary on a DVD. But for ancient philosophers, a commentary was something more specific. You take a text — say, Aristotle’s Categories, a short book about how we classify things — and you go through it line by line, sometimes word by word. You quote a bit of the text (that’s called a lemma), and then you explain what it means.

This sounds straightforward. But it turns out there’s a big question lurking underneath: what is a commentary supposed to do?

Is it supposed to tell you what the author really thought? Is it supposed to help you understand the text better? Is it supposed to correct the author’s mistakes? Is it supposed to use the author’s ideas to solve new problems? Different commentators answered these questions differently. And that’s where things get interesting.

The earliest known commentators on Aristotle were active in the 1st century BCE — about 250 years after Aristotle died. One of them was named Andronicus of Rhodes. He seems to have done something really important: he put together the first reliable edition of Aristotle’s works. Before Andronicus, Aristotle’s writings were scattered, disorganized, and possibly mixed up with fakes. Andronicus sorted them out, gave them titles, and decided what order they should be read in.

But here’s the thing: Andronicus didn’t just copy Aristotle. He interpreted him. When he decided that the Categories should be the first thing students read, he was making a claim about what philosophy is and how to learn it. He was shaping the tradition.

Another early commentator was Boethus of Sidon. Boethus did something different: he wrote a word-by-word commentary on the Categories. He looked at every single phrase and tried to explain it. He also defended Aristotle against critics — especially a group of philosophers called the Stoics, who thought Aristotle’s system was incomplete. Boethus was trying to preserve Aristotle and protect him.

And then there were people like Eudorus of Alexandria. Eudorus wasn’t even a follower of Aristotle — he was a Platonist (a follower of Aristotle’s teacher, Plato). But he still wrote about the Categories, arguing with Aristotle and offering his own interpretations. This tells us something important: the return to Aristotle wasn’t just something that happened inside one school of philosophy. It was a wider intellectual movement. People with very different backgrounds were all trying to figure out what this difficult thinker had to say.

The Great Transformation: From Defender to Harmonizer

For the first few centuries, most commentators on Aristotle were what you might call “Aristotelians.” They thought Aristotle was basically right, and their job was to explain and defend his views. The greatest of these early commentators was Alexander of Aphrodisias, who lived around 200 CE. Alexander was so respected that later commentators called him “the most authentic interpreter of Aristotle.” He wrote commentaries on most of Aristotle’s works, and he tried to present Aristotle’s philosophy as a complete, consistent system.

But then something shifted.

Starting in the 3rd century CE, a new kind of commentator appeared. These commentators called themselves Platonists. They believed that Plato — not Aristotle — had the deepest understanding of reality. But they didn’t reject Aristotle. Instead, they tried to show that Aristotle and Plato were in agreement on the most important points.

Think about how strange this is. Plato and Aristotle had real disagreements. Aristotle criticized Plato’s theory of Forms (the idea that there’s a perfect, invisible world beyond our ordinary one). Plato’s followers thought this criticism was wrong. But rather than simply dismissing Aristotle, the later Platonist commentators decided that Aristotle’s criticisms must have been aimed at a misunderstanding of Plato, not at Plato himself. If you read Aristotle carefully enough, they argued, you’d see that he and Plato were really saying the same thing.

This is a very different project from Alexander’s. Alexander wanted to get Aristotle right for his own sake. The later Platonists wanted to get Aristotle right so they could show he agreed with Plato. The point of studying Aristotle was to prepare yourself for the deeper truths you’d find in Plato.

The most famous of these later commentators was a philosopher named Porphyry, who wrote a massive commentary on the Categories that tried to resolve all the difficulties earlier readers had found in it. Then came people like Iamblichus, who added mystical elements to the interpretation, and Simplicius, who wrote the most comprehensive commentary of all — a kind of encyclopedia of everything earlier commentators had said.

Simplicius is a fascinating figure. He wrote his commentary after the year 529 CE, which is the same year the Roman emperor Justinian closed the last pagan philosophical schools in Athens. Simplicius knew he was at the end of a long tradition. He tried to preserve everything that had come before him — all the different interpretations, all the arguments, all the solutions to problems. But he wasn’t just a collector. He had his own agenda: to prove that Plato and Aristotle were in harmony.

The Active Intellect: A Case Study in Interpretation

To see what’s really at stake here, let’s look at one specific puzzle that commentators wrestled with.

In his book On the Soul (De Anima), Aristotle talks about something he calls the “active intellect” (nous poiêtikos in Greek). He describes it as “separate, unaffected, and unmixed.” But he’s very brief and vague about what it actually is. Is it part of the human soul? Is it something divine? Is it inside us or outside us? Aristotle doesn’t really say.

This became one of the most debated questions in the commentary tradition. Alexander of Aphrodisias argued that the active intellect is not human at all. It’s God — the first cause of everything. It comes into us “from without” and makes our thinking possible. It’s immortal, but we’re not. When we die, the active intellect goes back to being just God.

Themistius, writing about 150 years later, disagreed strongly. He argued that the active intellect is part of the human soul — in fact, it’s the most important part. It’s what makes us who we are. But here’s the twist: Themistius also said there’s only one active intellect for all humans. So it’s not personal — it’s not your intellect or my intellect. It’s a single, shared power that makes thinking possible for everyone.

Do you see what happened? Alexander and Themistius both claimed to be explaining what Aristotle really meant. But they ended up with completely different philosophies. Alexander’s Aristotle says humans are mortal and God does the thinking for us. Themistius’s Aristotle says there’s something divine in all of us — the same thing in everyone. You can’t get both of these from Aristotle’s text. The text is just too short and unclear. The commentators were creating theories, not just finding them.

The Big Picture: What Were They Actually Doing?

So what was the commentary tradition really about?

Part of it was education. Commentaries were teaching tools. They were written for students with different levels of knowledge. Some were simple introductions. Others were advanced investigations. Some were written by the teacher himself. Others were written down by students who attended the teacher’s lectures. The whole system was designed to pass on a tradition of philosophical thinking.

But part of it was something deeper. The commentators weren’t just transmitting information. They were making meaning. They were taking a difficult, ambiguous body of texts and trying to turn them into something coherent and useful. They had different goals — some wanted to defend Aristotle, others wanted to harmonize him with Plato, others wanted to use him to solve new problems. But they all shared the assumption that Aristotle was worth taking seriously. They believed his writings contained deep truths, even if those truths were hard to find.

This is a different attitude from the one most of us have today. When we read an old text — say, a speech by Abraham Lincoln or a novel by Jane Austen — we don’t necessarily assume it’s true. We think of it as a product of its time, interesting for historical reasons but not necessarily authoritative. The ancient commentators thought differently. They treated Aristotle as an authority — someone whose views deserved careful study because they were likely to be right.

But here’s the irony: the more they tried to honor Aristotle’s authority, the more they changed his philosophy. Alexander’s Aristotle is not the same as Themistius’s Aristotle, which is not the same as Simplicius’s Aristotle. Each commentator found something different in the texts, and each one made the texts say things Aristotle himself might not have recognized.

This is still true today. When philosophers read Aristotle, they find different things depending on what they’re looking for. And the old commentaries — by Alexander, Simplicius, and others — are still read, not just as historical documents but as works of philosophy in their own right. They don’t just tell us what Aristotle said. They tell us what generations of smart, dedicated people thought he said. And sometimes that’s even more interesting.

An Unfinished Story

The commentary tradition didn’t end with Simplicius. It continued in the Latin-speaking world, where a philosopher named Boethius translated Aristotle’s logical works into Latin and wrote his own commentaries. It continued in the Islamic world, where thinkers like Avicenna and Averroes engaged deeply with Aristotle. It continued in medieval Europe, where scholars built entire systems of thought around Aristotelian ideas. It continues today, in philosophy departments around the world.

So what can we learn from all this? Maybe this: understanding a difficult text is never a simple act of reading. It’s always an act of interpretation. We bring our own questions, our own assumptions, our own goals to the text, and we find what we’re looking for — or sometimes, we find things we didn’t expect.

The commentators on Aristotle knew this. They knew that the text they were reading was old, fragmentary, and puzzling. They knew they might be getting it wrong. But they thought it was worth trying anyway. And in the process of trying, they created works of philosophy that have their own value — not because they got Aristotle “right,” but because they thought deeply about questions that still matter.

What does it mean to understand someone else’s ideas? Can we ever really know what a dead author meant? And if we can’t, does that make the effort pointless, or does it open up new possibilities?

These are questions the commentators didn’t fully answer. Philosophers still argue about them today. But the commentators gave us a way of approaching them: read carefully, argue honestly, build on what came before, and don’t pretend you’ve got the final word.

That’s not a bad way to think about anything.

Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
Commentary	A line-by-line explanation of a difficult text, written by someone trying to make it understandable
Lemma	A bit of text quoted from the original work before the commentator explains it
Active intellect	A mysterious part of the mind that Aristotle mentions briefly; commentators argued for centuries about what it actually is
Exegesis	The process of interpreting a text — not just reading it, but drawing out its meaning
Platonist	A follower of Plato who (in this period) tried to show that Aristotle agreed with Plato on the big questions

Key People

Aristotle (384–322 BCE): The original philosopher whose works became the basis for centuries of commentary; wrote on nearly everything, but often very briefly and ambiguously.
Andronicus of Rhodes (1st century BCE): The person who organized Aristotle’s scattered writings into a proper edition and decided which order they should be read in.
Alexander of Aphrodisias (c. 200 CE): The most famous defender of Aristotle; he wrote commentaries that treated Aristotle as basically correct and tried to explain his views clearly.
Porphyry (c. 234–305 CE): A Platonist who wrote a huge, influential commentary on the Categories and also wrote an introduction to Aristotle’s logic that was used by beginners for centuries.
Simplicius (c. 490–560 CE): The last great ancient commentator; he tried to collect and summarize everything earlier commentators had said while arguing that Plato and Aristotle agreed.
Boethius (c. 475–526 CE): A Roman philosopher who translated Aristotle’s logical works into Latin and wrote his own commentaries, preserving Aristotelian thought for the medieval world.

Things to Think About

If Aristotle’s texts are so unclear that people have been arguing about them for 2,000 years, does that mean he was a bad writer? Or does it mean something else about what it means to write philosophy?
Is it possible to understand a text “on its own terms,” without bringing your own ideas and assumptions to it? Or is some amount of interpretation unavoidable?
Alexander of Aphrodisias thought the active intellect was God, while Themistius thought it was a shared human power. Both claimed to be faithfully following Aristotle. Could they both be right? Could neither be?
The later Platonist commentators believed that reading Aristotle was a preparation for reading Plato. What would it mean to think of one philosopher’s work as a “stepping stone” to another’s? Is that a respectful way to treat a thinker?

Where This Shows Up

In school: Every time a teacher asks you to “explain what this poem means,” you’re doing something like what the commentators did — trying to figure out what a difficult text is really saying.
In law: Judges and lawyers argue about what the “original meaning” of the Constitution or a law is. This is basically the same problem the commentators faced: how do you interpret an old text faithfully?
In religion: Religious commentators (like the Talmudic rabbis or Christian theologians) have spent centuries interpreting sacred texts. The same questions — “Can we know what the author meant?” and “Should we update the meaning?” — come up again and again.
In fandom: When fans debate what a character “really” meant in a movie or book, or argue about whether J.K. Rowling’s later statements count as “canon,” they’re grappling with the same issues about authorship, authority, and interpretation.