The Uses of Literature

The earliest identifiable figure of importance in the history of the Neoplatonists' conception of the meaning of Homer is a shadowy and enigmatic Pythagorean of the mid- to late second century A.D^[32] Virtually nothing is known of Numenius's life beyond the fact that he is connected with Apamea in Syria and, less convincingly, with Rome.^[33] Rudolf Beutler^[34] was reluctant to date him any more precisely than the second century, but more recently, in support of the general tendency to place his floruit at or shortly after mid-century, John Dillon is inclined to accept the identification of his associate and probable near-contemporary Cronius with the recipient of a work of Lucian datable to 165.^[35] E. R. Dodds saw "no chronological difficulty in supposing that Numenius was writing in the time of Marcus [161-80] or even a little later."^[36]

[31] Sandmel's suggestion that Numenius spoke of Philo (Philo of Alexandria , P. 4) is bewildering and unsupported by any of the fragments or testimonia collected by Leemans or Des Places. Numenius does mention Philo of Larissa (fr. 28), but this can hardly be what Sandmel had in mind.

[32] After E. A. Leemans, Studie over den Wijsgeer Numenius van Apamea, met Uitgave der Fragmenten (1937), the most useful contributions on Numenius are the recent Budé edition of the Fragments by Des Places, whose numbering is used here, P. Merlan's summary in CHLGEMP, pp. 96-106, and Dillon's in The Middle Platonists , pp. 361-78. Also note E. R. Dodds, "Numenius and Ammonius," and on the specific problem of the relationship between Numenius and Porphyry, J. H. Waszink, "Porphyrios und Numenios."

^[33]

[34] Beutler, "Numenios," col. 665.

[35] Dillon, Middle Platonists , p. 362.

[36] Dodds, "Numenius and Ammonius," p. 11.

― 55 ―

The works of Numenius are lost, with the exception of sixty fragments (including testimonia), preserved primarily in Eusebius, whose method of direct quotation provides us with extensive passages that may be taken to be the ipsissima verba of his source,^[37] but also in a dozen other authors, pagan and Christian, from Clement of Alexandria (150-ca. 215) to John Lydus (sixth century). Most of the fragments not transmitted by Eusebius make no claim to reproduce the exact words of Numenius, and were classified by E. A. Leemans as testimonia. It is unfortunate, from the point of view of the present study, that Numenius's contributions to the allegorical interpretation of Homer are transmitted almost exclusively in Porphyry's essay on the cave of the nymphs in the Odyssey ,^[38] which is itself the major source for the entire tradition of interpretation of the passage. The fact that Porphyry does not quote Numenius directly but refers to him repeatedly, along with Cronius, as the source of the core of the allegory developed in his own essay makes it difficult to define the limits of Numenius's contribution with any precision, though the importance of that contribution is unquestionable. From Porphyry's testimony and from the fragments, it is possible, however, to reconstruct something of Numenius's attitude toward Homer and more generally toward the literature of the past, and to gain an idea of the possible sources of that attitude and of the scope of his application of allegorical methods of interpretation.

Sixty fragments, varying in length from 3 to 361 lines, can hardly form a satisfactory basis for assessing the readings, or even the borrowings, of an author, but a few points do emerge from an examination of Numenius's use of previous writers. Initially striking are the divided nature of his output and the two very different sorts of use of past literature that correspond to the two major divisions of his work.

Numenius was simultaneously a philosopher and a polemical historian of philosophy, and he would appear to have distinguished very clearly between these two activities, both of which are well represented in the surviving fragments. His primary contribution to the history of philosophy was a work on the betrayal of Plato by his successors in the Academy

, shown by the fragments preserved by Eusebius to have been notable for biting satire and a supple ingenuity in the manipulation of language for comic effect. The following example will serve to illustrate the skillful

[37] Cf. Des Places in Numenius, Fragments , p. 32.

[38] Frs. 30, 31, 32, 60.

― 56 ―

and ironic intermingling of levels of discourse characteristic of the work (leading John Dillon to proclaim Numenius and his contemporary Lucian two "island[s] of wit in [the] sea of bores" of the late second century):^[39]

At first, Mentor was the disciple of Carneades, but he did not succeed him. What happened was this: before Carneades died he caught Mentor in bed with his mistress. In order to grasp this, Carneades did not depend on "a credible impression," nor did he have to deal with the element of "incomprehensibility"—in fact, he had only to believe his own two eyes, and he dismissed Mentor from the school. For his part, Mentor went off and turned the force of his sophistry on Carneades, setting himself up as his rival and claiming that Carneades' doctrines themselves suffered from "incomprehensibility."^[40]

Numenius produces his comic effects here by introducing lofty, technical philosophical jargon

into what is essentially an obscene anecdote, and—less easily translated—by playing on the multiple meanings of

(=seize, grasp, catch—both intellectually and in the more obvious physical sense). He is clearly very sensitive to the expressive possibilities opened up by playing one sort of vocabulary off against another.

Numenius's discussion of the early history of the Academy is filled with examples of rhetorical sophistication and manipulation of tone comparable to the one given above. Rather surprisingly, it is in the context of this category of his work that Numenius makes most extensive use of the literature of the past, and specifically of Homer. The doctrinal arguments among the early Academicians and Stoics are inflated into mock-heroic warfare by means of complex borrowings and echoes of the Iliad :

Arcesilaus and Zeno, with henchmen such as those just mentioned and arguments mustered on both sides, entirely forgot their common beginnings (they were both students of Polemon) and, taking their stands and arming themselves, crashed ox-hide shields, crashed spears and rage of heroes armed with bronze. Bulging shields fell upon one another and a great roar went up from the murderous victors mixed with the howls of the dying . . . Stoics. For the Academics went unscathed, and the Stoics,

[39] Dillon, Middle Platonists , p. 379.

^[40]

― 57 ―

in their ignorance of their vulnerable points, were taken when their foundations were shaken from beneath them, unless they had some basis or first position from which to fight. Their first position was to accuse the Academics of not speaking "Platonically."^[41]

The italicized words and sentences represent borrowings from or echoes of Homer. It is deceptive to print the passage as prose interrupted by a poetic quotation^[42] because the actual situation is far more complex than this procedure would suggest. Numenius is not quoting Homer here: he is making a complex pastiche of Homer. The dactylic hexameter verse actually starts a bit earlier than Edouard des Places's arrangement of the text indicates, and continues longer. The core is a passage of the Iliad that occurs first in book 4 (446-51) at the beginning of the first major battle and recurs in book 8 (60-65). In other words, it is a stock description. Four and a half of the six lines appear in Numenius's prose just as they do in Homer, but they are introduced by a partly quoted and partly paraphrased line from book 12 (86), then interrupted first by another stock line (13.131=16.215) and later by the Iliadic hapax

from Il . 4.472, breaking the meter. They are followed by several phrases that drag on the pompous and parodic dactylic sing-song, using utterly un-Homeric vocabulary.^[43]

Unlike his contemporaries of the Second Sophistic, such as Maximus of Tyre,^[44] who quote Homer extensively in their rhetorical exercises,

^[41]

[42] Cf. note 41 above, which respects Des Places's (and Leemans's) arrangement of the text.

^[43]

[44] See Jan Fredrik Kindstrand, Homer in der zweiten Sophistik , pp. 59-66.

― 58 ―

Numenius adapts the vocabulary and style of Homer to his own needs, rising to a crescendo of Homeric bombast from which he eventually (but gradually) returns to his own more usual level of discourse. His technique has affinities with that of the Batrachomyomachia in that he juxtaposes his own decidedly non-heroic subject matter with the Homeric style and capitalizes on the distance between the heroic diction and the trivial disputes of the Academicians. Numenius also plays with the meter in subtle ways. He does not require full lines or, for that matter, complete sentences—his purpose is not to use Homer to support an argument or to display his own culture, but rather to exploit Homeric diction and its associations. If the line-ends are a bit confused and if the out-of-place

breaks the rules of the hexameter, still the dactylic rhythm is maintained and

does strengthen the Homeric flavor of the pastiche. After the last quoted hemistich,

, however, the words

do break the all-important rhythm, producing a "line" whose awkwardness reinforces the bathos of the descent from Homeric battle to Academic squabble.

As well as these and other Iliad citations and echoes, the fragments of the polemical history contain satiric hexameters borrowed from Ariston of Chios and from the Silloi of the Cynic Timon of Phlius,^[45] an echo of Pindar,^[46] and an anonymous tragic fragment.^[47] These constitute the only true borrowings from earlier non-philosophical authors to be found in the surviving fragments of Numenius. The very strong suggestion is that Numenius knew a considerable body of poetry, including satiric poetry, and in this discrete section of his work could make excellent use of his culture, but that (with the exception of Homer) it was of no use to him when he was functioning not as an anecdotal historian but as a serious philosopher.

Numenius himself provides an observation on the sharp division of his activities into separate categories. Shortly after the passage of Homeric bombast cited above, he goes on to note that Zeno refrained from attacking Arcesilaus directly:

Whether out of ignorance of Arcesilaus's theories or out of fear of the Stoics, he turned from the great maw of bitter war in another direction, on Plato. But I shall talk about the foul and irreverent fabrications of

[45] Fr. 25, lines 21 and 6, respectively.

[46] Fr. 25.151-52 echo Isth . 2.6.

[47] Fr. 25.40 = Trag. adesp . 323 Nauck^[2] .

― 59 ―

Zeno against Plato some other time, if I have leisure from philosophy, though I hope I never shall have the leisure—for this sort of thing, I mean—except as a diversion.^[48]

Numenius explicitly characterizes as a game or "diversion" his witty, scandalmongering history, while the sphere of "philosophy," implicitly the serious pursuit of wisdom and truth, is kept quite separate. To these two spheres of activity correspond two very different literary styles, as well as different attitudes toward the literature of the past. The distinction itself demonstrates in an extreme form a divided approach to the cultural heritage that is visible also in Plotinus and Proclus.^[49] The evidence of the satiric-historical fragments is admittedly scant, but it indicates a knowledge on Numenius's part of lyric and dramatic poetry, and beyond that of satiric poetry, that may have been considerable. Reinforced by the stylistic sophistication of the excerpts quoted, it is enough, in any case, to indicate that this Neopythagorean had a literary culture extending far beyond "sacred texts" and an ability to use that culture, whether to draw on it for quotation, to build a pastiche, or simply to provide him with models for the subtle and witty manipulation of the tone of his own discourse.

On the other hand, the fragments of Numenius's work On the Good

offer little hint of this culture but reveal another sphere of the writing of the past that Numenius knew well and approached in a significantly different manner. In the twenty-two fragments Des Places associates with this work, Numenius quotes or paraphrases Plato seven times, but there are no identifiable quotations from, or paraphrases of,

^[48]

[49] See ch. 5D below at n. 59.

― 60 ―

any other author. Beyond these, there are three references to Plato, one to Pythagoras, and one to Moses (or Musaeus).^[50] Finally, the sources of the fragments attribute to Numenius in this work further references to Plato (several times), to Moses (three times), and to Jesus (once).^[51]

There are no other significant bodies of fragments assignable to any single philosophical work of Numenius, but the sketchy picture provided here is adequate to the present purpose. The constant reference to Plato is not surprising, though the predominance of Plato over Pythagoras might seem odd in a thinker repeatedly designated as

. ^[52] The frequency of references to the Old Testament and the claim of acquaintance with the New Testament must be viewed in the light of the motives of the Christian apologists who preserved the fragments and provided the testimonia, but whatever distortion may arise from these sources, there can be no doubt that Numenius drew into his work material from the Jewish tradition. A direct quotation from

(in Eusebius) clarifies his motives and priorities:

[With regard to theology] it will be necessary, after stating and drawing conclusions from the testimony of Plato, to go back and connect this testimony to the teachings of Pythagoras and then to call in those peoples that are held in high esteem, bringing forward their initiations and doctrines and their cults performed in a manner harmonious with Plato—those established by the Brahmans, the Jews, the Magi, and the Egyptians.^[53]

^[50][51]

[52] E.g., frs. 1a, 5, 24, and 29. The imbalance in the references may well be a function of the Platonizing tradition that preserved the memory and the text of Numenius.

^[53]

― 61 ―

Plato, then, is a proximal witness to a truth earlier revealed to Pythagoras and expressed, perhaps less articulately, in the cult practices of certain non-Greeks. The attitude is one that is echoed repeatedly through the history of ancient Neoplatonism, but it is the influence of Numenius on Plotinus and, especially, on Porphyry that provides us with the earliest indication of its source within that school.^[54] There is nothing new in Numenius's appeal to remote history for authoritative information; the innovation lies in the scope of the literature and the cultural source material he proposes to explore. This broad approach has led some scholars to assert that extensive "Eastern" influence can be seen in Numenius, though the more recent trend is to discredit these arguments and to point to Greek sources for many of the elements of his thought.^[55]

It is clear that Numenius, in his role as philosopher, drew on a vast amount of earlier literature, Greek and non-Greek, in which he felt some direct revelation of absolute truth to be present. This category of writings has some overlap with the literature on which he drew in his role as historian, but it remains largely discrete. His use of this literature, or at any rate of some parts of it, was of a sort that is of particular interest in the present context. According to Origen the Christian, Numenius "did not shrink from using in his own writings the words of the [Jewish] prophets and treating them allegorically."^[56] Origen has been cited above^[57] using the same verb,

, to refer to the treatment of a New Testament story by Numenius. The verb occurs often in his writings but has virtually no existence in Greek outside the literature of Hellenizing Juda-

[54] Cf. Dillon, Middle Platonists , p. 378 and Des Places in Numenius, Fragments , pp. 22-23.

[55] See esp. Dodds, "Numenius and Ammonius," for an attempt to define the "oriental element" in Numenius, and Henri-Charles Puech, "Numénius d'Apamée et les théologies orientales au second siècle," p. 754 (discussed below), on the belief on the part of some scholars that Numenius was a Jew.

^[56]

[57] See n, 51 above.

― 62 ―

ism and of Christianity.^[58] There is no obvious difference in meaning between

, and

, and a passage in which Origen uses the two words together suggests that he makes little distinction between them.^[59] It seems quite unlikely that the word would have been used by Numenius to refer to his own methodology, but the possibility that he did use it cannot be eliminated. Whatever vocabulary he chose, however, there can be no doubt that Numenius made use in his teachings of figuratively or allegorically interpreted passages from the Old Testament and possibly the New.

Porphyry provides us with an undoubted sample of this Old Testament explication when he mentions that the ancients "believed that souls settled upon the water, which was 'god-inspired' as Numenius says, adding that it is for this reason that the prophet said 'the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the water.'"^[60] It becomes clear in the remainder of the passage that Numenius used Genesis 1.2 in association with illustrations from the iconography of Egyptian religion and with citations from Heraclitus to demonstrate that all these sources point to a single truth about souls and their relationship to the material world. If this was his manner of dealing with the literature of the Jews and the iconography of the Egyptians, we may assume that he made similar use of whatever Indian and Persian sources he had available. Here, however, the sources that preserve the fragments are silent.

Numenius's approach to the literature he took to contain directly revealed truth was not, however, limited to the search for comparanda and the formulation of synthetic generalizations based upon multiple sources. Perhaps the most revealing passage of Numenius for the light it throws on his sophistication as a critic is the single fragment of the work On the Secrets in Plato

, fr. 23. Numenius emerges here as the probable founder of a tradition of the in-

^[58][59][60]

― 63 ―

terpretation of the dramatic elements of the Platonic dialogues that survived at least until the end of Platonism in antiquity.^[61]

Had he openly attacked the traditional stories that formed the core of the official religion, Numenius reasons, Plato would have given the Athenians reason to treat him as they had treated Socrates. His solution was to dramatize the critique in a cryptic dialogue:

Since speaking the truth was more important to him than life itself, he saw that there was a way he could both live and speak the truth without risk: he made Euthyphro play the part of the Athenians—an arrogant twit and a remarkably bad theologian—and set Socrates against him in his usual character, confronting everyone he met just as he was accustomed to do.^[62]

Eusebius, who transmits the fragment, has just quoted a passage from the Euthyphro and cites Numenius in the guise of commentary, introducing the citation with the pregnant remark, "Numenius clarifies the meaning [of Plato]."^[63] It is often said that the Neoplatonic tradition of commentaries on the dialogues begins with Porphyry, in that sense the first scholastic. The method of teaching by commentary on existing texts was clearly much older,^[64] however, and although we have no reason to believe that Numenius published commentaries on individual dialogues, nevertheless On the Secrets in Plato must have been made up of a series of commentaries on selected passages that posed specific problems—a procedure suggestive of the common approach to Homeric interpretation through a series of "problems" or "questions." This same work may, in fact, have included the commentary that Proclus indicates Numenius wrote on the myth of Er in the Republic ,^[65] and that commentary in turn

[61] Cf. Dillon, Middle Platonists , p. 364.

^[62][63]

[64] Not only did the followers of Plato in the Academy teach by commentary on his works, but the Gnostics against whom Plotinus argued had their own commentary on the Timaeus (Puech, "Numénius d'Apamée," p. 778). There is some reason to believe that Posidonius (d. ca. 50 B.C. ) wrote a commentary on the Timaeus (cf. Burkert, Lore and Science , p. 54, and n. 8 for references).

[65] Proclus In Rep . 2.96.11.

― 64 ―

was the probable original source of the core of the exegesis of Odyssey 13.102-12 transmitted by Porphyry.^[66]

Whether or not this work contained the original version of the cave allegory, however, the fragment indicates a critical approach of an unprecedented sort. The dramatic form itself is conceived as an integral part of the structure of meaning of the work and examined for the light it can throw on the total meaning (the

, a word that, like English "meaning," combines the notions of thought and intention). The conclusion reached is rudimentary, even disappointingly obvious. It is clear enough that Numenius is correct to the extent that pretentious, muddle-headed Euthyphro represents the Athenian priestly establishment and, beyond that, the corresponding weaknesses of Athenian religion and religious thought. Numenius does not explicitly complete the equation: if Euthyphro "plays the part" of the Athenian people, then clearly Socrates on his side speaks for Plato. Here again, an approach that became basic to the later Platonic tradition is implicit in Numenius: when certain char-

^[66]

― 65 ―

acters speak in the dialogues—Proclus's list, for example, includes Parmenides, Socrates, and Timaeus—"then we take it that we are hearing the opinions of Plato."^[67]

Though the results that we can measure directly are slight, Numenius's insistence on the expressive function of the total dialogue as a system of meaning may well lie behind the sophisticated attitudes toward the mimetic art of Plato developed by the later Neoplatonists.^[68] These culminate in such formulations as an anonymous commentator's explanation of Plato's choice of the dialogue form: "He chose it, we say, because the dialogue is a kind of cosmos."^[69] The commentator goes on to develop the analogy between the strata and hypostases of the Neoplatonic model of the cosmos and the characters, setting, style, manner, arguments, problem, and goal of the literary composition respectively.^[70]

That Numenius interpreted the myth of Atlantis from the Timaeus and attached to it meanings that have little to do with the apparent intention of Plato's text emerges from a passage in Proclus's commentary on that dialogue (fr. 37). Numenius apparently explained the war between Athens and Atlantis as a battle between a superior group of souls, associated with Athena, and another group "concerned with generation"

and consequently associated with Poseidon as the god presiding over

. To judge by Proclus's presentation of the interpretation, Numenius would appear to have taken this myth of Plato (and no doubt others as well) as a system of meaning comparable to the stories of Homer and to the symbols and doctrines of those non-Greek peoples whose value as sources of wisdom he asserted. It is difficult to say whether he made a distinction of kind between the mentality that produced the complex cryptic dramatic structures he apparently analyzed with some subtlety and the utterances of Egyptian priests and Greek bards.

^[67][68][69]

[70] See Coulter, Literary Microcosm , pp. 102-3.

― 66 ―

Homer

As mentioned above, the evidence for Numenius's contribution to the exegesis of Homer comes exclusively from the Neoplatonists who used his interpretations, combined with others from sources that are sometimes revealed, sometimes not, to elaborate upon the meaning of various texts. Porphyry's essay on the cave of the nymphs is the most important source (frs. 30-33), followed by Macrobius's commentary on Scipio's dream in Cicero's Republic (fr. 34) and finally by Proclus's commentary on Plato's Republic (fr. 35). If we include Numenius himself, this chain extends from the time of Marcus Aurelius (or perhaps earlier) very nearly to that of Justinian, and the suggestion is very strong that Numenius's comparison and reconciliation of the views expressed by Homer and Plato on the fate of souls became an established (though not universally applauded) part of many later Platonists' understanding both of Plato's myth of Er (and with it even the parallel myth from the end of the Republic of Cicero) and of Homer's fiction.^[71]

Although Porphyry's version is more attractive in that it integrates Numenius's explication of the myth into a broader examination of the Homeric passage, it is Proclus who appears to give the most complete account of what Numenius himself actually wrote on the subject. Furthermore, his overall tone of disapproval suggests that he is going through Numenius's exegesis point by point in order to give an account of its extravagances. The text is corrupt and the following translation avoids both the reconstruction offered by Buffière^[72] and that of Festugière^[73] in favor of a direct translation of the received text. A few Homeric phrases have been restored and the most problematical crux is indicated by a footnote.

Proclus is discussing the problem of locating the place of judgment described in the myth of Er in the Republic of Plato:

Numenius says that this place is the center of the entire cosmos, and likewise of the earth, because it is at once in the middle of heaven and in the middle of the earth. There the judges sit and send off some souls to heaven, some to the region beneath the earth and to the rivers there. By "heaven" he means the sphere of the fixed stars, and he says there are two holes in this, Capricorn and Cancer, the one a

[71] On the history of the exegesis of the cave of the nymphs and a possible pre-Numenian exegesis, see Appendix 4.

[72] Buffière, Mythes d'Homère , p. 445, n. 23.

[73] Cf. Des Places, Fragments , p. 86 (fr. 35, n. 6).

― 67 ―

path down into

, the other a path of ascent, and the rivers under the earth he calls the planets, for he associates the rivers and even Tartarus with these, and introduces a further enormous fantasy with leapings of souls from the tropics to the solstices and returns from these back to the tropics—leapings that are all his own and that he transfers to these matters, stitching the Platonic utterances together with astrological concerns and these with the mysteries. He invokes the poem of Homer as a witness to the two chasms—not only when it calls

the one from the north a path for man to descend [Od . 13.110]

since Cancer brings to completion by advancing into Capricorn,^[74] [and says]

the other, toward the south [is divine] [Od . 13.111, part],

through which it is impossible for men to [enter], for that path belongs exclusively to immortals [= paraphrase of Od . 13.111-12], since Capricorn, as it draws the souls upward, undoes their life in the human realm and accepts only the immortal and the divine—but also when it sings of

the gates of the sun and the people of dreams [Od . 24.12]

calling the two tropical signs the "gates of the sun" and the Milky Way the "people of dreams," as he claims. For he also says that Pythagoras in his obscure language called the Milky Way "Hades" and "a place of souls," for souls are crowded together there, whence among some peoples they pour libations of milk to the gods that cleanse souls, and when souls have just fallen into

milk is their first food. Furthermore, he claims that Plato, as mentioned, is describing the gates in speaking of the two "chasms" and that in describing the light that he calls the "bond of heaven" he is really referring to the Milky Way, into which souls ascend in twelve days from the place of the judges, for that place was in the center and, starting from there, the dodecad is completed in heaven. This consists of the center, the earth, water, air, the seven planets, and the fixed sphere itself. He claims the signs of the Tropics, the double chasms and the two gates are different only in name, and again that the Milky Way, the "light like a rainbow" and the "people of dreams" are all one—for the poet elsewhere compares disembodied souls to dreams. . . . But how could one accept the conflicts between this and what Plato himself has said? [Proclus goes on to reject several points, including the conflation of the rivers of the underworld with the planetary spheres .] Moreover, [Numenius] fills the Milky Way uniquely with souls that have gone up from here to heaven. [Plato] says that the fortunate souls do not go down to the underground

[74] The implications of this bizarre and apparently corrupt sentence have led to various attempts at emendation.

― 68 ―

place, while [Numenius] is forced to take them there first, if indeed it is necessary for every soul to go before the judges, and then to make them go to the heavenly place, where in fact the souls have their heavenly life.^[75]

This outline of Numenius's ideas on the myth of Er, though it does not include all the supplementary details available in Porphyry and Ma-

^[75]

― 69 ―

crobius, is nevertheless a fairly strong indication that Numenius discussed the passage from Homer only casually, in the context of explicating Plato. The progress of the argument and the sequence of supporting and illuminating testimonia (Plato, astrology,^[76] the mysteries, Homer, Pythagoras) and the focus on the harmony of the scattered revelations are reminiscent of the program for On the Good laid down in fr. 1a, where the search for the truth about the gods was to lead from Plato to Pythagoras and thence to the ritual and dogma of the Brahmans, Jews, Magi, and Egyptians.^[77] Homer, then, would have been for Numenius a source of primitive revelation, comparable on the one hand with Pythagoras (who may have been seen by Numenius as a reincarnation of Homer, as he was by some Pythagoreans),^[78] and on the other with the wisdom to be gleaned from the Old Testament, from Egypt, and from Persian astrology. There is no reason to believe that Numenius undertook a systematic exegesis of all or even part of the Iliad and Odyssey , but the Homeric corpus would appear to have bridged the chasm dividing his work: in the polemical history Homer was available for rhetorical pastiche, and in the serious philosophical works Homer provided a touchstone, a point of contact with a primitive revelation of the structure of reality and the fate of souls.

The attitude toward Homer that finds its fullest expression in Proclus is, then, already present in Numenius, though we have no basis for believing that Numenius articulated the complex theory of the Homeric text as a system of meaning that emerges in the later Neoplatonists. The essential point is that both perceived a single, absolute, static truth as having been revealed repeatedly and in different ways by a series of voices from the past—Homer, Pythagoras, and Plato among them. With

[76] I.e., the wisdom of the "Magi" of fr. 1a (see n. 53 above).

[77] Fr. 30, from Porphyry, follows a similar procedure, omitting Pythagoras, but explaining a doctrine by reference to the revelations of the Jews and the Egyptians.

^[78]

― 70 ―

his considerable rhetorical and literary acumen, Numenius clearly understood the subtleties of the various modes of discourse, but at the same time he looked beyond the rhetorical surface of certain texts, beyond their superficial meanings, for hints of new correspondences, new data to fill in the enigmatic coded picture of the absolute. There is a certain irony in the fact that Proclus, whose methods and attitudes in so many ways resemble those of Numenius, should be so intensely critical of his eclectic method here and should accuse him of introducing irrelevant astrological information and material from the mysteries. In the same work, Proclus himself, in fact, defends Homer against the Socratic attack by appeal to the mysteries.^[79] There would seem to be some danger of being misled by Proclus's impatience here. He is not rejecting Numenius's method as a whole, but criticizing the passage at hand where certain elements—in particular the problem of the conflict of Numenius with Plato on the matter of the location of the place of judgment—present irreconcilable difficulties.^[80]

As they emerge from Proclus's summary, the elements of the Numenian "interpretation" of the Homeric passages in question—the description of the cave of the nymphs at Od . 13.110-12 and the second nekyia at the opening of Od . 24—are the following:

1. The identification of the two gates of Od . 13.109-11 with:

a. the two chasms of the myth of Er (though there is room for some confusion in the details of the comparison) (Rep . 10.614b8-c2)

b. the astrological signs Cancer and Capricorn, taken respectively as the entrance and exit by which souls pass in and out of this world

c. the "gates of the sun" of Od . 24. 12

2. The identification of the "people of dreams" of Od . 24.12 with

a. disembodied souls

b. the Milky Way

c. "the light that binds heaven" of Rep . 10.616c

The unavoidably Numenian elements supplementing these ideas preserved in Porphyry's essay on the cave of the nymphs are the claims that:

1. Homer refers—apparently at Od . 6.201—to certain souls as "wet," and means by this that they are in

(fr. 30)

[79] Proclus In Rep . 1.110.21-112.12.

[80] Cf., contra, Puech ("Numénius d'Apamée," p. 748), who paints a picture of blanket refutation and rejection of Numenius by the later Neoplatonists. There seems to be no doubt that his reputation was at its peak with Plotinus and Porphyry, but their prestige guaranteed the survival in later Neoplatonism of much that is Numenian.

― 71 ―

2. The cave is an image and symbol of the cosmos (fr. 31)

3. Odysseus represents a man proceeding through the successive stages of

to regain his place among those who are beyond the material world; hence, for Homer as for Plato, water and waves were an image for the material world (fr. 33)

Several other points in Porphyry's essay are less securely linked to Numenius. The Pythagoreans, he tells us, used the name "Naiad Nymphs" for all souls descending into

, and also said that "souls cling to water." He then goes on to give what is explicitly Numenius's interpretation of Genesis 1.2 and the Egyptian iconography of gods riding on boats. There is no solid reason to believe that the connection of these ideas of Numenius with this particular passage of Homer existed before Porphyry, though it is quite likely that the connection was in fact made by Numenius himself (fr. 30).

The elaborate astrological summary and the comparanda from the rituals of the Romans and the Egyptians in fr. 31 may have come from Numenius's observations on the Homeric passage,^[81] as may the discussion of the meaning of milk in rituals involving souls in fr. 32, but neither passage throws much light on his understanding of the meaning of the Homeric text itself, though they do provide further indication of the scope of Numenius's comparative approach.

Macrobius (fr. 34) does not mention Numenius by name, but Proclus's summary of Numenius's comments on the myth of Er, supplemented by the fragments from Porphyry, makes an ultimate Numenian source of Macrobius's ideas undeniable.^[82] His discussion of the descent of souls ô propos of Scipio's dream connects the account given there to the "divine wisdom of Homer" (Homeri divina prudentia ) in the description of the cave, but vaguely refers the expression "gates of the sun" (solis portas , clearly the '

of Od . 24.12) to the physici . He provides no further details of the specific relationship between the Homeric description that "represents" (significat ) this transcendent reality and the reality itself.

The conclusion to which one is forced by the assembled unavoidably Numenian elements of the allegory is that Numenius's response to Homer was as divided as his use of Homer. There is a hint of close attention to

[81] In the astrological material, however, one must suspect an interpolation. The argument at hand hardly necessitates a description and summary of the entire zodiac.

[82] On this problem and others relating to the transmission of the allegory, see p. 270 below, and Appendix 4.

― 72 ―

the text at fr. 31.24-26, where it is pointed out that the two gates are not attributed respectively to men and gods

but to men and immortals

, and that the latter term appropriately includes human souls. Nevertheless, this is one of the many points at which Porphyry switches from indirect to direct discourse in reporting Numenius's ideas, and I am inclined to believe that he is here offering his own observation and not that of Numenius. On the one hand, close attention to the text is elsewhere characteristic of Porphyry's essay; on the other, the point being made is one that may have bothered Porphyry more than it would have done Numenius—who, after all, was willing to identify human souls with the "spirit of God"

of Genesis 1.2 and with the "gods"

of the Egyptians (fr. 30). Macrobius, relying on an ultimately Numenian source, claims that the "souls . . . [once disembodied] return to be counted among the gods" (animae . . . in deorum numerum revertuntur ), and Numenius's doctrines of the double soul (fr. 44) and of the in-corruptibility of the soul (fr. 29) leave room for virtual identification of individual human souls with gods. Porphyry, working from the basis of the more complex psychology of Plotinus,^[83] may have been less likely to accept this identification uncritically, and so may have chosen to clarify the point by insisting upon the vocabulary of the passage.

In any case, this insistence on the meaning of

would be the only indication of close attention to the text in what remains of Numenius's strictly philosophical use of Homer. Elsewhere, he responds not to words or expressions but to images that catch the imagination: the gates of the sun, the people of dreams, the bizarre double cave; and then to elemental categories (here water and dampness). At the very least, Numenius stretched the puzzling

of Od . 6.201 into a claim that Homer associated "wetness" with the descent into

, and quite probably he made the connection mentioned above (pp. 70-71) and provided Porphyry with the link between the dampness of the cave of the nymphs and its role as a symbol of the material world. He certainly believed that Homer shared with Plato a basic association of the element of water with the material universe as opposed to the immaterial reality (fr. 33).

In fact, Numenius may well have been willing to change the text subtly to meet his needs, if indeed the substitution, of

for the usual

of Od . 13.111 can be traced to him. The variant appears

[83] In contrast to thinkers like Iamblichus, Plotinus did leave open the path for human souls to attain full participation in the divine. Cf. Dillon, Middle Platonists , p. 219, on an interesting passage in Plutarch that anticipates this doctrine.

― 73 ―

when the passage is quoted in Porphyry's essay and again in Proclus's paraphrase^[84] and in both cases may come from Numenius.

In his search to define the constants in a series of literary statements regarding an elemental category, Numenius anticipates the activity of critics, such as Gaston Bachelard, who have tried to draw conclusions from the imagery of earth, air, fire, and water in a broad spectrum of literature. An obvious difference lies in the fact that Numenius believed in the absolute reality of the hidden archetype and viewed the various inspired utterances as ambiguous keys to it, whereas Bachelard's goal, the elucidation of the major lines of imagery, is far more humble. Both undertakings, though, share an impulse to define the meaning of the basic categories of the material world and both look beyond diction to search for meaning in images that express the relationship between the material and the human.

Sources

As mentioned above, Numenius is constantly referred to as a Pythagorean, and the evidence of the fragments (in spite of the predominance of references to Plato over references to Pythagoras) supports the epithet. It is extremely likely, then, that whatever use was made of Homer by earlier Pythagoreans was known to him, and it is surprising to find that very little that we know of his reading of Homer corresponds in any way to other interpretations passed down as Pythagorean. He is concerned, as the program of fr. 1a would lead one to expect, with establishing the concord of Pythagoras and Homer—that is, with demonstrating that the same truth is revealed by each, though in different terms. Proclus indicates that Numenius, in connection with his astrological elaboration on the cave of the nymphs, quoted Pythagoras as having used the expressions "Hades" and "place of souls" to refer to the Milky Way, "since souls gather together there."^[85] The same doctrine is reflected in the version of Macrobius^[86] and in that of Porphyry,^[87] who attributes directly to

[84] Proclus In Rep . 2.129.17.

^[85]

[86] Fr. 34.17-20. Macrobius here seems to conflate this idea with the related Pythagorean idea of the sublunary Hades. Cf. Burkert, Lore and Science , p. 367, and the references in his n. 93.

[87] Fr. 32.6-9.

― 74 ―

Pythagoras (without mention of Numenius) the doctrine that the Homeric "people of dreams" are souls gathered up into the Milky Way. This last doctrine is attributed by Proclus to Numenius (fr. 35.41-43). The question is simply whether (a) "Pythagoras," which is to say some pre-Numenian Pythagorean source, made the connection between the Homeric phrase and the Milky Way, and Numenius followed that source, or (b) the synthesis reported by Proclus is entirely the work of Numenius, who would thus independently have drawn together the Homeric image of the "people of dreams" (

, Od . 24.12), the Platonic "column of light, like a rainbow" (

Rep . 10.616b), and the Pythagorean equation of the Milky Way with Hades and its designation as a "place of souls"

. In the latter case, Porphyry would loosely have attributed a Pythagorean doctrine, known to him through Numenius, to "Pythagoras" without giving credit to Numenius as its actual author. Since the sort of synthesis represented in Proclus's paraphrase of Numenius's commentary on the myth of Er seems characteristically Numenian—he clearly was concerned with establishing correspondences and wished to relate to Pythagorean principles elements from outside the received Pythagorean tradition—one is tempted to give Numenius full credit here (at Porphyry's expense) for making the reported connections, and to assume that no text of "Pythagoras" could be produced that referred to Homer in this context.

Whether or not Numenius is independent of earlier Pythagorean tradition in associating the Homeric

with the Milky Way, the important point is that there is little beyond this to demonstrate that his reading of Homer was directly influenced by the treatment of Homer in Pythagorean tradition, however deeply colored by Pythagorean doctrine that reading may have been. Even if this element of the complex synthesis may be traceable to pre-Numenian Pythagoreanism, the arguments by which Armand Delatte^[88] and Jérôme Carcopino^[89] connect other parts of the exegesis transmitted by Porphyry to pre-Numenian Pythagorean tradition are based on little more than hypothesis. One viable possibility, though still not demonstrable, is influence in the form of a collection of traditional exegeses stemming from earlier Pythagorean-ism. That such a tradition of interpretation existed can hardly be questioned. As I attempted to demonstrate in chapter 1, little of what may be

[88] Delatte, Etudes sur la littérature pythagoricienne , p. 131.

[89] Carcopino, De Pythagore aux apôtres , pp. 201-2.

― 75 ―

called the "Pythagorean" interpretation of Homer is likely to predate Plato, but much of it doubtless predates Numenius. The mechanism of its transmission, however, remains a complete mystery.^[90]

We remain in the dark with reference to Numenius's debts to earlier Pythagoreanism in his exegesis of Homer in somewhat the same way that we remain ignorant of Philo's debts to earlier Jewish tradition in his allegorical interpretation of the Old Testament. It seems highly unlikely, however, that Numenius's approach to the relationship of Homer, Pythagoras, and Plato was entirely original with him. Much of what he says could have its sources as early as the Old Academy. It is nevertheless clear from his prestige and reputation that his grand synthesis was dynamic and grasped the imaginations of many listeners and readers. Whether his originality and personal creativity matched that dynamism remains a frustrating and unsolved question.

The problem of the possible dependence of the exegetical thought of Numenius on that of Philo is a doubly complex one. We have no evidence, on the one hand, that Philo's work was known or studied outside the Jewish and, later, Christian communities. That Philo and the pagan allegorists tap the same Stoic and Platonic traditions is universally accepted, and, given that their common background would explain all the evident similarities between Philo's exegesis of the Old Testament and the allegorical tradition of late paganism, and that no author in the pagan tradition mentions Philo or his exegeses, it is nearly impossible to determine whether Philo did in fact have an influence outside the Jewish and Christian communities.

Numenius would provide the perfect link; his knowledge of the Old Testament is evident^[91] and has led to the suggestion that he himself may have been a Jew.^[92] If Numenius not only had access to the literature of Judaism but was himself a member of the thriving Jewish community of second-century Apamea,^[93] the probability that he was acquainted with the allegorical method and writings of his Alexandrian predecessor would be very great.

Unfortunately, however, there are no hard facts from which to work, and few scholars have seen any positive reason to believe that Numenius was a Jew. The fact that Origen applies the same verb,

, both

[90] Cf. Delatte, Littérature pythagoricienne , p. 134.

[91] Frs. 9, 10, 30, 56, and perhaps 13.

[92] See Puech, "Numénius d'Apamée," p. 754.

[93] See ibid., p. 750.

― 76 ―

to Numenius's treatment of biblical stories^[94] and to Philo's exegesis^[95] is another tempting but inconclusive hint that the two were very close. It is possible to find striking comparanda in Philo for several images in the fragments of Numenius,^[96] but in the absence of any demonstrable link between the two authors, they remain comparanda and nothing more.^[97]

Conclusion

Before leaving Numenius, it should be asked whether any comprehensive theory of the relationship of language (and hence of literature) to reality can be deduced from the fragments. The emphasis on the mystery and ambiguity of texts and on the consequent necessity of explication for the understanding of the relationship of a text to the reality to which it refers emerges from the titles (e.g.,

) as well as from the fragments and testimonia. Nothing indicates that Numenius approached this problem directly, however, and he may not have felt the need to articulate a conceptual framework for his activity in the form of a theory of the nature of the linguistic or literary sign.^[98]

In a fragment from On the Good , there is, however, a hint that Numenius may have explored the meaning of language and its relationship to other phenomena:

—But what is being

? Is it these four elements

, earth, fire, and the two in between? Are these themselves the things that are

, either collectively

or individually?

[94] Cf. notes 51 and 58 above.

[95] Orig. Contra Cels . 5.55.

[96] Cf. Des Places in Numenius, Fragments , fr. 2, n. 2, p. 104; fr. 4b, n. 4, p. 106.

[97] Dillon, Middle Platonists , p. 144; cf. Pépin, "Porphyre, exégète d'Homère," p. 270, and Puech, "Numénius d'Apamée," p. 764 with n. 1, the latter for bibliography on scholars such as Guyot who positively affirmed an influence of Philo upon Numenius. For Sandmel's curious suggestion that Numenius actually mentioned Philo, see n. 31 above.

[98] The statement (fr. 24. 57-64) that Plato's writings were deliberately coded for political reasons has already been mentioned. In spite of the apparent similarity between Numenius's approach to the myths of Homer and his approach to the myths of Plato, this statement with regard to the dialogues seems to cover only that special case and not to provide a basis for constructing a general theory of meaning in literary texts.

― 77 ―

—Come now, [How can you suggest this of] things that partake of

and change? Things that can be seen being born out of one another and undergoing change and having no real existence either as elements

or as aggregates

?^[99]

The hint is by no means obtrusive, but double meanings are extremely unlikely to be matters of chance in an author of Numenius's stylistic subtlety (one might even say preciosity). Karl Mras, the most recent editor of Eusebius, noted the word play and is followed by Des Places.^[100]

Numenius's authoritative speaker builds on the ambiguity of the questioner's word

(used since Plato for the "elements" of the universe and likewise for the primary sounds of Greek, its phonemes, and more loosely, for "letters" and the sounds they represent) and moves from the questioner's neutral adverb

"collectively," to the noun

, which may refer, properly speaking, to any "collection" or "aggregate" but in practice had as early as Aeschylus been used primarily as a rough equivalent of its modern English descendant, "syllable."^[101] Is this simply, as Mras put it, a "Witz"?

The implied metaphor suggests an equation that goes beyond the scope of a witticism: the elements of the material world are compared to the phonemes of a language, their compounds to aggregates of phonemes, or syllables. Syllables themselves are the building blocks of meaning in language, the beginnings of language as a structure of meaning.^[102] If Numenius's authoritative speaker plays with the idea that language at its lower levels is organized like the cosmos, he surely suggests that the more complex structures are analogous as well, and that language as such provides a metaphor for the material world, itself the unstable, sublunary expression of a remote, permanent, and true reality.

^[99][100]

[101] For both definitions and uses, see LSJ and Lampe.

^[102]

― 78 ―

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 657