The Early Peripatetic Interpreters of Aristotle's Categories and the Previous Philosophical Tradition

The renaissance of interest in Plato and Aristotle is one of the major features of first-century BC philosophy. This aspect is connected to the genesis of an exegetical tradition on authoritative texts, which ultimately led to the great commentaries on Plato and Aristotle in Late Antiquity. The return to Plato and Aristotle was certainly also connected to a distinctive attitude to the past: the first century BC can be seen as an age of return to the ancients, as opposed to the anti-Classical attitude proper to the Hellenistic philosophical schools. This holds true for Antiochus of Ascalon's return to Plato and the Old Academy and for Eudorus of Alexandria’s return to Plato and Pythagoras. Here I will try to reconstruct how Andronicus of Rhodes and Boethus of Sidon, the two most prominent Peripatetic commentators on Aristotle’s Categories in the first century BC, fit with this picture. As I aim to show, their approach to Aristotle can best be assessed against the distinctive backdrop of first-century philosophical debates.