DAMASCIUS, the last of the Neoplatonists, was born in Damascus about A.D. 480. In his early youth he went to Alex andria, where he studied rhetoric, philosophy and science and was a professor of rhetoric. Later on in life he migrated to Athens. He became a close friend of Isidore the dialectician, succeeded him as head of the school in Athens, and wrote his biography, part of which .is preserved in the Bibliotheca of Photius (see appendix to the Didot edition of Diogenes Laertius and a German trans lation by R. Asmun of the fragments preserved in vol. cxxv. of Phil. Bibliothek, Leipzig, 1911). In 529 Justinian closed the school, and Damascius, with six of his colleagues, went to the court of Chosroes I., king of Persia. In 533, in a treaty between Justinian and Chosroes, it was provided that they should be allowed to return. The date of his death is not known.
His chief treatise is entitled Difficulties and Solutions of First Principles ('A7roplae Kai XbO CCs 7repi rc2w 7rpdTCOP apxC&v ). It examines into the nature and attributes of God and the human soul. This examination is, in two respects, in striking contrast to that of certain other Neoplatonist writers. It is conspicuously free from Oriental mysticism, and it contains no polemic against Christianity, to the doctrines of which, in fact, there is no allusion. His main result is that God is infinite, and as such incompre hensible ; that his attributes of goodness, knowledge and power are credited to him only by inference from their effects ; that this inference is logically valid and sufficient for human thought.
Interesting as Damascius is in himself, he is still more inter esting as the last in the long succession of Greek philosophers. (See NEOPLATONISM.) His work Difficulties was edited in part by J. Kopp (1826), and in full by C. E. Ruelle (1889) . French trans. by Chaignet (1898) . See E. Zeller, History of Greek Philosophy; C. E. Ruelle, Le Philosophe Damascius (1861) ; Ch. Leveque, "Damascius" (Journal des savants, Feb. 1891) ; T. Whittaker, The Neoplatonists (i9oi). See also works quoted under NEOPLATONISM and ALEXANDRIAN SCHOOL.