C. Homer as Theologos

That Homer, at least in Hellenistic usage, had virtually exclusive rights to the designation "the Poet"

is well known,^[57] but when Porphyry casually refers to Homer as

—a term commonly used to refer to Orpheus—we seem to be in touch with claims on Homer's behalf to excellence of quite a different sort. In fact, however, Porphyry is relying upon the context of his remark to make us understand which

is meant, and the suggestion that Homer is the

(i.e., "the Theologian") is but a gentle hint at most. Furthermore, the use of the word has good classical precedents that must be reviewed as background for the usage of the Neoplatonists.^[58]

The earliest passage that prepares us for the application of the term

to Homer is in Herodotus, who, though he does not in fact use the term,^[59] nevertheless provides an enlightened fifth-century testimony to the relationship between Homer's poetry and information about the divine. He is making the point that Greek culture had only relatively recently absorbed the basic elements of religion:

The Greeks later got this from the Pelasgians, and they were ignorant, so to speak, right up until yesterday or the day before about the origins of the individual gods and whether they were all eternal and what sort of shapes they had, for it is my belief that Homer and Hesiod were four hundred years older than myself and no more. These were the ones who provided the Greeks with an account of the origins of the gods and gave the gods their names and defined their honors and skills and indicated shapes for them. The poets who are

[56] For a summary of ancient passages attributing magic powers to Homer, see Cumont, Recherches , pp. 4-8.

^[57][58][59]

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said to have lived before these men in fact, in my opinion, lived after them.^[60]

This peculiar conception of Homer as a source, a creator, at least in terms of the Greek tradition, rather than a transmitter of information, is rather unsatisfactory from our perspective. Herodotus seems to be recreating Homer in his own image—as many ancient critics were in fact to do—as a sort of ethnographic curiosity seeker who sought out foreign and august sources of wisdom, which he then brought home and presented to a Greek audience in a unique new Greek form. The extravagant author of the essay on Homer attributed to Plutarch would only have to forget the Pelasgians and the Egyptians in order to move from this conception of Homer's creative role to a vision of Homer as an absolute source, a purely creative imagination.

Plato, likewise, is innocent of the term

, though in an important passage in the Republic , discussed above, he refers to

.^[61] The point Socrates wants to make here is that the basic patterns the poets are to follow in their mythmaking are the concern of the city founders.^[62] These are grouped under "the basic patterns of theology"

.
He clearly conceives, then, that the earlier tradition allowed its poets to be creatively mythopoeic. Either they were not bound by any basic rules or patterns, or those they followed were mistaken. His desire to impose correct patterns and norms in order to ensure the educational value of the poetry produced is consistent with his general mistrust of poetic inspiration.^[63]

Aristotle lists "theological philosophy"

among the types of "contemplative philosophy" (

, Metaph . E 1026a19), and his reference to "those very ancient people who lived long before the pres-

^[60][61][62]

[63] Cf. Weinstock, "Platonische Homerkritik," pp. 124-25, and Tate, "Plato and Allegorical Interpretation," pp. 147-51.

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ent age and were the first to theologize"^[64] probably does, as L. Ziehen asserts,^[65] take us back to Homer and to the other early poets. The possibility should also be taken into account, however, that Aristotle may, in fact, be referring to the early interpreters of the poets rather than to the poets themselves, for

was probably already ambiguous.^[66] In general, Aristotle uses the term to speak of the early cosmologists as a class,^[67] but by the time of Cicero, it was used comfortably for such interpretive writers on divine matters as the Euhemerists and even the grammarians. Clearly, these are authors who worked from the primary

and clarified the information on the divine transmitted through them. A passage from Strabo, quoted on page 26 below, indicates the necessary connection between theology as a field of philosophical inquiry and the myths and poems of the early tradition, which constituted the primary source material.

The distinction between "theologizing" by writing poetry in which information about the gods was presented in a more-or-less veiled form and "theologizing" by interpreting the poetry of the ancients in such a way as to bring out these meanings is, in fact, one that seems often to have been blurred in antiquity. From our perspective there is a world of difference between deliberate poetic allegory and the interpretation as allegory of existing poetry. By the fourth century, however, the verb

and its complex of related words could refer to either activity.^[68] Precisely the same divided usage is found in Porphyry over six centuries later. ^[69]

^[64][65][66]

[67] See Ross's comments on Metaph . A 983b29.

^[68]

[69] See below, p. 29.

― 25 ―

Both Herodotus and Plato clearly view the mythopoeic "theologizing" of the poets as creative. Plato would go further and describe it as subjective and arbitrary. Neither suggests that the poets had any need to veil their teachings, or that the narrative surface of the poems is deliberately designed to be ambiguous or misleading. There is reason to believe that Plato had considerable sensitivity to the Homeric poems as complex verbal artifacts, but, unlike most later Greek philosophers, he is disinclined to make his points by appeal to earlier authority.^[70] Parallel with this reluctance is Socrates' genuine hostility to confusing and disrupting the dialectical process by inserting discussions of poetic texts.^[71] Plato is certainly aware of the possibilities opened up by the interpretation of epic according to "second meanings,"^[72] yet he seldom feels the need to enter into that activity. The obvious reason for this is that Plato is himself mythopoeic: when he abandons dialectic to "theologize," he does so not by interpreting existing texts or stories but by generating new myths. In any case, neither of our important sources from the fifth and early fourth centuries emphasizes the complexity of the structure of meaning of the verbal artifact, though Plato acknowledges that his contemporaries did so.^[73]

It was no doubt in the early Stoa that the emphasis shifted, but the process must for the most part be reconstructed from relatively late evidence.^[74] Along with the Stoa's emphasis on the poets went an impulse to interpret the received myths "allegorically." This is the context in which the impulse to understand the qualities of a poetic text by reference to things entirely outside that text became prevalent, along with an inclination to view the myths as cryptic expressions of some further reality that the poets, for whatever reasons, chose to hint at rather than express directly.^[75] In the process, as Phillip DeLacy puts it, "poetic myth replaces philosophical example"^[76] and is forced to fit broader referents than the poets intended. Chrysippus is explicit that "what is good in a poem

[70] He nevertheless refers to Homer as an authority sufficiently often that Proclus is able to argue (In Rep . 1.163-72) that such appeal is characteristic.

[71] Plato Prot . 347c-348a.

^[72][73]

[74] This evidence is assembled in Phillip DeLacy's excellent study, "Stoic Views of Poetry," which remains the definitive treatment of Stoic poetics.

[75] Ibid., pp. 259, 267.

[76] Ibid., p. 267.

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must be interpreted as applying to things of the same kind beyond the limits of the poem."^[77] Allegorical interpretation existed before the Stoics, but it was through their prestige that its influence became pervasive in Greek thought, culminating in such allegorical commentaries on Homer as those of Crates of Mallos and the other Pergamene grammarians, the rivals of Aristarchus and the Alexandrians. These commentaries reach us only in fragments, but the Heraclitus whose Homeric Allegories survives largely intact is their direct heir.^[78] This shift of emphasis reflected in the Stoic attitude toward myth and poetry is a crucially important one for the development of the conception of the meaning of Homer that concerns us, yet properly speaking it forms only part of the prehistory of that conception.^[79]

Returning to the evolution of the term

and the related vocabulary, we find in Strabo, early in the first century A.D ., a capsule summary of the Stoic conception of theology that had its roots in the fourth and third centuries B.C . He has just indicated in no uncertain terms that he himself dislikes myths:

Every discussion of the gods [i.e., all theology] is built upon the examination of opinions and myths, since the ancients hinted at their physical perceptions about things and always added a mythic element to their discussions. It is not an easy thing to solve all the riddles correctly, but when the whole mass of mythically expressed material is placed before you, some of it in agreement and some in contradiction with the rest, then you might more easily be able to form from it an image of the truth.^[80]

It is easy to see from this fascinating passage how the verb

could simultaneously refer to the poets and to those who interpret them. The text is doubly valuable because Strabo professes himself hostile to

[77] Ibid., p. 267. The source for Chrysippus's observation is Plutarch De aud. po . 34b. See n. 54 above for the text.

[78] See Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship , pp. 237-46.

[79] Aside from DeLacy, cited above, see Buffière's extensive treatment of Stoicizing allegory of Homer, Mythes d'Homère , pp. 137-54, and passim.

^[80]

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the whole process. His is a practical and scientific intellect with no taste for ambiguities and contradictions.

This is not to say that he is bereft of literary sensitivity, or that the Iliad and Odyssey fall beneath his scorn when he describes himself as "not in the least a lover of myths."^[81] He makes this clear in the first book of the Geography , where he extracts geographical information from Homer in an intelligent and sympathetic way, simultaneously rejecting interpretations of the poems that depart into allegory and demonstrating a strikingly modern critical acumen. The demands he makes upon the text are quite reasonable ones from our perspective, and he is refreshingly free of the conviction that Homer is omniscient.

In the passage quoted above, however, Strabo is specifically concerned with the recovery of "theological" information—a class of knowledge with which he is ill at ease. There are certain truths that can be approached only by an attack upon the forbidding mass of lies, half-truths, and contradictions bequeathed by antiquity, for these are the primary source material in the field of theology. The process of sifting the "opinions and myths" of the ancients—and particularly of Homer—for kernels of truth about the gods is as a whole, then, one undertaken not only by idle dreamers but by the most practical of men as well.

Porphyry is heir to the double meaning of the term

and related vocabulary, but he is likewise heir to a somewhat different usage. This occurs as early as Aristotle and designates a body of poetry from which we might want to exclude Homer. It is clear from what has already been said that the

, from the fifth century B.C . on, are the early poets and their interpreters. But which poets? It is clear enough to us that there is a difference of kind between the Iliad and Odyssey on one hand and the Theogony on the other. The difference between the works that fit these two categories and the Orphic poems is even more striking. The word

, in some of its earliest occurrences, seems more obviously appropriate to Orphic and mantic poets, and perhaps to Hesiod, than to Homer, and throughout the tradition

, without explanation, is most likely to refer to Orpheus.

A fragment of Philolaus (a Pythagorean contemporary of Socrates) preserved by Clement of Alexandria and attested by Athenaeus, and perhaps even by Plato in the Cratylus , asserts: "The ancient theologians and seers bear witness that the soul has been yoked to the body as a pun-

^[81]

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ishment, and buried in it as in a tomb."^[82] Philolaus is unique among the early "primary" sources for Pythagoreanism in that, at least in part, the surviving fragments attributed to him offer some evidence of the pre-Platonic traditions of Pythagoreanism.^[83] Here, he links the

in question with

as witnesses to the relationship of soul and body. One might be inclined to assume that all of this must have absolutely nothing to do with Homer—indeed, poetry is unmentioned, not to say epic poetry. However, the implied etymology (

from

) became very much attached to Homer and was used to link the conception of the body as the "tomb" of the soul to the Iliad .^[84] Even if it is not as early as the historical Philolaus, the fragment is unlikely to be post-Hellenistic, and the important point in the present context is that it links the

—quite possibly including Homer—with mantic poetry in support of a doctrine concerning the soul.

Aristotle also sometimes uses

, for the poets of the mystical traditions. "Hesiod and his school and all the theologians" (

Metaph . B 1000a9) may or may not include Homer. Here, Aristotle is merely bringing up a group of mythic creation accounts in order to reject them, and Homer, by reason of his subject matter, may well be spared. Likewise, the expression "the theologians who generate everything from night"

Metaph . L 1071b27) again points directly to the Orphics, not to Homer.

That a distinction of kind had indeed been made in the fifth century between Homer and the Orphic poets (though Hesiod, because of the nature of his subject matter, might fall on either side of the line) is dramatically attested in the Protagoras , where the pompous sophist defends the hoary antiquity of his profession by insisting that there have always been sophists, but that the early practitioners of sophistry, "fearing the jealousy it provokes, made a screen and masked it, some with poetry,

^[82]

[83] See Walter Burkert, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism , pp. 218-38, for the evidence for the existence of Philolaus and for his authorship of an account of Pythagoreanism known to Aristotle.

[84] This is one of the most frequently encountered of the etymological explanations of Homer that have been traced to Pythagoras. For the literature, see De-latte, Littèrature pythagoricienne , p. 132, and for the later evolution of the (non-historic) etymology, C. J. de Vogel, "The Soma-Sema Formula: its Function in Plato and Plotinus Compared to Christian Writers."

― 29 ―

like Homer, Hesiod, and Simonides, some with initiations and oracles: Orpheus, Musaeus and their associates."^[85] The breakdown of categories such as these and the indiscriminate lumping of Homer with the rest of the early hexameter poets as

with cosmological and mystical pretensions is one of the crucial developments in the history of the interpretation of Homer.^[86]

Porphyry uses the term

eight times in his essay on the cave of the nymphs in the Odyssey .^[87] Six of these occurrences are in the plural and refer broadly and rather vaguely to the poetic and philosophical traditions.^[88] The occurrences of the word in the singular refer specifically to Orpheus (De ant . 68.6) and to Homer (De ant . 78.15-16). A striking comparison to these instances of

is found in Philo, who uses the term to refer to Moses in a context where, on the one hand, obscure symbolism is being discussed, and on the other, the very strong implication is that Moses is

.^[89] Though Porphyry does not make this claim for Homer, it is clear that his use of the term has affinities with that of Philo.

The development of this complex of words, then, is not at all what one might have expected. The earliest instances of

point to an already ambiguous meaning spanning the semantic fields "poet" (with sometimes, but not always, the suggestion that allegorical mystical or

^[85][86]

[87] To look only at that essay constitutes an arbitrary sampling, but one with obvious relevance to the concerns of this study. Further analysis is rendered difficult by the absence of concordances to the works of Porphyry.

^[88]

[89] Philo De vit. Mos . 2.115.

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cosmological poetry is meant) and "interpreter of poetry." This ambiguity remains with the complex of words as they acquire a yet broader field of reference to include, along with virtually the whole of archaic poetry and its interpretation, an important branch of philosophy. For Porphyry, the philosophy in question is specifically the tradition of Platonic dogmatic theology inextricably bound up with "Pythagoreanism." Porphyry's location of Homer at the center of this field represents a substantial evolution of thought with regard to the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey , involving the loss of any perception of the difference of kind between his narrative poetry and the cosmological and mystical hexameters attached to the traditions labeled "Hesiod" and "Orpheus." That Porphyry, who was the first of the Neoplatonists to declare open war on the Christians, should thus treat Homer in somewhat the same way Philo had treated Moses suggests a defensive posture adopted by a fighter who knew his enemy well.

At the end of the ancient Neoplatonic tradition, with Proclus, Hermias, and then Olympiodorus, the complex of words retains much of its earlier meaning.

can mean "theology" in the modem sense, a category of philosophy, with no hint of any connection with poetry.^[90]

, at the same time, can refer to the poetic activities of the early hexameter poets, including Pisander^[91] and Orpheus.^[92] Proclus often uses this complex of words in his defense of Homer and likewise in the Timaeus commentary, where the

clearly include Homer.^[93] Proclus appears to broaden the field of reference of the

complex to include still more mystical writings, with no apparent sense that, in his usage, the term suits Homer less and less well. In the commentary on Euclid, after quoting the Chaldaean Oracles and Orpheus in the context of a discussion of the circular movement within the universe and the "triadic god," he observes: "Thence have those who are wise and most initiated into the theological given him his name."^[94] The unmentioned epithet in question is probably "trismegistos" and the reference would thus

[90] E.g., Proclus In Alc . 317.18, where theology is contrasted with ethics.

^[91][92]

[93] See ch. 5D, with notes 63 and 64, below.

^[94]

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be to the tradition that produced the Hermetic corpus.^[95] There is little doubt that Homer remains central to the group Proclus qualified as the

, as attested by such expressions as "the ancient theology according to Homer," in the Euclid commentary.^[96]

Hermias is the only author in the group in whom I have found the singular

used in isolation to refer to Homer,^[97] much in the manner of Porphyry. His understanding of the term does not differ conspicuously from that of his contemporary Proclus, and his

include all the early poets and a variety of other authors. He explicitly equates the procedure of the myths of Plato with that in use among the early

,^[98] though he may, like Proclus, also be sensitive to important differences. When he refers to "the theologians and the inspired poets and Homer," the series appears to represent a centering process: the inspired poets are central to the group "theologians," and Homer in turn stands at their center.^[99] Numerous other references make it clear that the group includes Orpheus, the Orphics, Hesiod, and Plato.^[100] His understanding of the structure of meaning of early epic, along with the other material mentioned, may stand for that of all the late Platonists: "Mythology is a kind of theology," and the characteristic mistake of the uninitiated is "to fail to grasp with wisdom the intention of the mythoplasts, but rather to follow the apparent sense."^[101]

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 716