Language and Literature 3 page

[67] Plotinus, Ennéades , ed. Bréhier, vol. 4, p. 81, n. 2.

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lease by Heracles likewise indicates that he has the potential of being freed from that creation. "This seems to be the sort of thing the myth is hinting at."^[68]

Plotinus expresses some misgivings and hesitation about the interpretation, but his conclusion asserts his faith that the core is sound and that the story in question does indeed have the sort of meaning just elaborated: "Whatever one may think of these things, [the myth] does present the bestowing of gifts upon the cosmos and is in harmony with what we have said."^[69] There is room, then, for a number of possibilities, and interpretation is far from an exact science.

The Hesiodic succession myth elaborated in the Theogony and only casually evoked in Homer (Il . 14.203-4) provided Plotinus with a mythic precedent for his breakdown of reality into the three "ruling hypostases."^[70] The anthropomorphic representation of the One

would constitute a grotesque paradox, and Plotinus avoids expressing this idea directly. It is implied, however, in the passage already quoted,^[71] in which Zeus is envisioned contemplating not only his father but his grandfather as well. The significance of Kronos and Zeus is elaborated in the context of a historical survey highly suggestive of the method of Numenius, in which Plotinus proposes to demonstrate the sources of the doctrine of the three hypostases, first in "the mysteries and the myths," and then in Plato, Parmenides, and numerous other philosophers, concluding with the assertion that the ideas involved are Pythagorean as well (Enn , 5.1.7-9). The passage that concerns us opens with a decorative echo of Homer, itself simply a stylistic hint that the discussion is now to be extended to the sphere of heroic myth:

This, then, is the generation of this

, and worthy of

in all its purity: it came to be [in the first place] from the first principle [i.e.,

], and when it had already come to be, it produced all those things that truly are: all the beauty of forms, all the noetic gods. It is full of those things that it produced and, as if it had swallowed them up

^[68][69]

[70] Pierre Hadot has recently explored Plotinus's use of the Hesiodic creation myth ("Ouranos, Kronos, and Zeus in Plotinus' Treatise Against the Gnostics") and offered the most complete exploration to date of the Plotinian elaboration and adaptation of a single myth. See also Pépin, "Plotin et les mythes," pp. 21-27.

[71] Enn . 5.5.3.16-25, quoted in n. 57 above.

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again, contains them in itself lest they spill out into matter and be nursed by Rhea. Thus the mysteries and the myths about the gods say riddlingly^[72] that Kronos, the wisest of the gods, shuts up again within himself that which he produces before the birth of Zeus, so that he is filled full and is

in its satiety

. After this, they say that in its satiety,

produces Zeus, for

in its perfection produces

. [They are saying that] being perfect, it had to produce, and that it is impossible for such a force to remain unproductive.^[73]

Thus Zeus represents soul, the lowest hypostasis, spilling over into matter. His father Kronos is mind, and his grandfather Ouranos is implicitly the transcendent first principle. This is the truth that the myths hint at and that the philosophical tradition has elaborated on a secondary level. This same myth is evoked at the end of the essay on noetic beauty (Enn . 5.8.12-13), where it is suggested that the binding of Kronos represents the unaltering transcendence of

, which leaves the governing of this world to its offspring,

. In this last instance, the best passage to consider as Plotinus's source may well (as Henry and

^[72][73]

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Schwyzer suggest) be the capsule summary at Il . 14.203-4, rather than Hesiod.

The myth here serves the function for Plotinus of providing a colorful and dynamic model of the hypostases and their relationships to one another. As Pierre Hadot has ingeniously pointed out, it also serves to focus Plotinus's attack on the rival Gnostic model, in which the world is viewed as the evil creation of an evil demiurge.^[74] The Hesiodic model, with its violence minimized through Plotinus's emphasis on the simultaneity and necessity of the two revolts, nevertheless retains an inseparable sense of the superiority of the original ruler over the two rebels, whose sovereignty "is tainted at its root."^[75]

This adaptation of the Homeric-Hesiodic account of the generations of the gods to his own triadic model of reality was probably Plotinus's most important contribution to the interpretation of myth. It did not become canonical, and many later Neoplatonists located the Olympians in the realm of

rather than

, but it provided a point of departure for later attempts at reconciliation of myth and idealist cosmology. Indeed, Plotinus himself is inconsistent and freely compares Zeus to

and even to the One, as Jean Pépin has noted.^[76] Myth may be used to enliven Plotinus's exposition of his world-system, but the elements of myth remain subservient to that exposition and constitute a poetic language whose referents can be shifted as needed.

There is no indication in the Enneads that the meaning of the Troy tale as a whole, and of the Iliad in particular, was of any concern to Plotinus.^[77] The Odyssey , however, provides him with several opportunities to reinforce his own points, and he makes it clear that he considers its stories to "hint at" meanings beyond the most obvious.

The only specific episodes mentioned are those of Circe and Calypso, between whom Plotinus makes no distinction. His presentation does, however, seem to pay particular attention to the position of the material in the Odyssey narrative, in that he emphasizes that it is Odysseus

[74] P. Hadot, "Ouranos, Kronos, and Zeus," pp. 124, 133-34.

[75] P. Hadot, "Ouranos, Kronos, and Zeus," p. 134.

[76] Pépin, "Plotin et les mythes," p. 25.

[77] The single explicit interpretation of an Iliad story (Enn . 3.3.5.42-43) is merely the evocation of a moral exemplum. Idomeneus, Plotinus points out (thinking perhaps of the teichoscopia in Il . 3.230-33), was not affected as Paris was by Helen's beauty. The point is utterly foreign to the Homeric narrative and tells us nothing about Plotinus's understanding of the meaning of the Iliad .

― 107 ―

himself who tells the stories. The context is the discussion of the quest for

and the necessity of first fleeing the obscurity of matter:

"Let us flee to our own land," one might better urge. What is this flight and how shall we be borne away? Just as Odysseus says he was delivered from a witch like Circe or Calypso, claiming—and I believe he hints at some further meaning—that it did not please him to stay, though there he enjoyed visual delights and was in the presence of enormous beauty on the level of the senses. Our land is that place from which we came and our father is there.^[78]

The opening citation recalls situations in the Iliad (2.140, 9.27), but the crucial formula

occurs nineteen times in the Odyssey , and the Iliad passages do not seem terribly important for the understanding of the use of the Homeric material here.

Odysseus has become explicitly a hero of the renunciation of the material world, along with the pleasures and beauties accessible to the senses, in favor of the transcendent, eternal beauty, and his own words in the narrative of books 9 through 12 are taken to constitute a symbolic structure hinting at further meanings. There is, of course, a particular appropriateness in the attribution: Odysseus is, in fact, the one Homeric character who habitually says one thing and means something quite different. The idea of placing emphasis on his creative storytelling and suggesting that he imposes upon it a complex structure of meaning seems, however, not to have been developed in antiquity.

This spiritualized Odysseus likewise appears in one of the earliest essays (Enn . 5.9), where Plotinus is distinguishing among three classes of men: those who do not attempt to rise above the physical, those who try but cannot, and the third class who succeed and arrive "there"

, "just as a man arrives in his well-governed land after a long journey."^[79] Odysseus is not mentioned, but the mythic pattern of the return of the voyager has been adapted from the Odyssey . Here Odysseus has become a type, symbolic of the highest class of humanity: those who have, in Plotinus's sense, reached home.

^[78][79]

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B. Porphyry

Porphyry and Homer

It is to Porphyry, the disciple, editor, and friend of Plotinus, that we owe the single largely complete essay in the explication of a Homeric text—one might even say of a literary text—that survives from antiquity. Though the chronology of Porphyry's life has been reconstructed with care,^[80] it is extremely difficult to locate his essay on the cave of the nymphs in the Odyssey within that chronology.

It has been traditional to attribute the essay to the latter part of Porphyry's career, later at any rate than 262, when he joined Plotinus's circle in Rome. We have few hard facts on which to rely and the thinking of the scholars who have examined the issue has been founded primarily on comparison of the essay with other works of Porphyry, and particularly with his Homeric Questions . Hermann Schrader, who assembled the remains of the latter work from the scholia where they are preserved, believed that the Homeric Questions belonged to an early period in Porphyry's career, antedating his association with Plotinus, and that the cave essay showed the influence of Plotinus's circle on Porphyry's thought and must therefore be later than 262.^[81] Porphyry's modern biographer Joseph Bidez contented himself with repeating this judgment.^[82] Both scholars emphasized the difference in method between the Questions and the essay and the absence, in the former, of mystical allegory of the Neoplatonic type.

It seems, however, that by restoring the order and balance of the opening of the essay, A. R. Sodano's recent edition of that portion of the Questions that survives intact likewise restores our perspective on Porphyry's understanding of his task.^[83] Early in his introduction to the Ho-

[80] See Joseph Bidez, Vie de Porphyre .

[81] Porph. Quaest. hom ., ed. Schrader, vol. 1, p. 349.

^[82]

[83] The text is buried in the back of Schrader's edition, p. 281, but stood at the head of the original essay. Schrader included more material by far than previous editors, but had in the process fragmented the portion surviving intact, relegating to obscurity much of the introductory and connecting material, left out by the scholiasts who were his major sources. Cf. Porph. Quaest. hom ., ed. Sodano, pp. xxiii-xxiv.

― 109 ―

meric Questions , Porphyry explicitly puts off treatment of major Homeric problems to a more appropriate place: "I shall attempt . . . to defer the larger treatises on Homer to a time appropriate to their consideration, making the present work a sort of preliminary training for the Homeric 'contests'"^[84] —that is, for debate over the meaning of Homer. The Questions , then, are to include only matters of limited scope, and specifically those where the Aristarchan principle that "Homer in many instances explains his own meaning" applies.^[85]

The Questions are announced as an inquiry of a special sort with the specific goal of resolving Homeric problems by reference to other Homeric passages. A vast number of points can be thus resolved, and the fundamental methodology is unimpeachable. The real question, however, concerns the degree to which this methodology and the far less easily defended one revealed in the essay on the cave of the nymphs and in the fragments of Porphyry preserved in Stobaeus are mutually exclusive. The latter texts show the strong influence of Numenius and the mystical allegorical tradition of interpretation. In Numenius himself, however, we have noted the juxtaposition of two comparable and likewise apparently contradictory attitudes toward the text of Homer and its meaning, and we have absolutely no reason to believe that these two approaches belong to different phases of his career, separated in time. Our own inability to reconcile the two attitudes toward the text in Porphyry has its roots in the great hermeneutical revolution of the Reformation. Martin Luther's fundamental principle—scriptura sui ipsius interpres —is, after all, simply a distant echo of Aristarchus, and we have a tendency to transpose the modern conflict to the ancient context. We imagine Crates and the Stoic litterati at Pergamon (and later Proclus and the Platonists at Athens) in the role of the Vatican, championing tradition and its baggage of allegory as the only path to the meaning of Homer, while in Alexandria Aristarchus and the librarians, bathed in the harsh light of reason, pare away the accretions and painstakingly liberate the text from them. The evidence of the surviving interpretive literature does not support this vision of methodological conflict rooted in ideology. The differ-

^[84][85]

― 110 ―

ence between the schools, real enough in itself, is one of emphasis, and in Porphyry and Numenius we find no suggestion that sensitivity to the text on the level of language (and the ability to deal with such matters with an appropriate methodology) is incompatible with an understanding of the meaning of the text rooted in a tradition of allegorical interpretation. Caution is clearly prescribed, and we have, finally, no basis on which to claim that the Questions must belong to a different period from the essay.

Bidez's observation that the essay shares a great deal on the level of method with the early interpretive work on statues

^[86] further suggests that Schrader's model may be unsound. As Bidez pointed out, fr. 1 of this work bears a close resemblance to Ps.-Plutarch (De vit. Hom . 113) in its discussion of the role of statues in representing for the senses that which in reality they cannot perceive.^[87] The third fragment explicitly extends the principles of interpretation of statues to the interpretation of poetry about the gods. An Orphic fragment (fr. 123 Abel) is examined on the basis that the

who wrote the verses were creating an

of the god—an image with attributes like those of a statue and thus susceptible to explanation on the same basis. The remaining fragments examine the attributes and iconography of the Greek gods and then go on to a discussion of Egyptian iconography.^[88]

If the work on statues is in fact early, we must conclude that Porphyry could probably have produced the essay on the cave of the nymphs at any point in his career—that is, at any period from the mid-250s until his death shortly after 300. It does not contradict, but rather complements, the Questions , and must surely constitute one of the "larger treatises" Porphyry promises in the introduction to that work.

The only help we have in situating either work, then, is the probability that the Questions belong to the period of Porphyry's association with Longinus, which must have begun in the 250s and extended to the time of his departure for Rome in 262. Even here, however, there is little to be said, since we know nothing of Longinus's understanding of the meaning of Homer, and a knowledge of his lost work Was Homer a Philos-

^[86]

[87] Cf. Bidez, Vie de Porphyre , p. 1, note on fr. 1 (Appendices).

[88] This is decidedly reminiscent of the comparative method of Numenius. The section of fr. 10 on the Egyptian sun-boat (p. 19, lines 7-12) recalls De ant . 10 (63.13-17q which is explicitly Numenian (= fr. 30.7-10).

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opher? or a simple indication of the answer he proffered to the question posed in his title would be essential to the use of the evidence of Porphyry's association with Longinus to date either work.^[89] The fact that a work with a similar title, "On the Philosophy of Homer,"^[90] is attributed to Porphyry himself makes the problem even more interesting.

We do know, however, that when Porphyry arrived in Plotinus's circle, he had a reputation as a philologist,^[91] and in the self-portrait in his "Life of Plotinus" we see him in that role as well as in that of poet (Vit. Plot . 15). Plotinus himself asked Porphyry to edit his writings (Vit. Plot . 7). The qualities of the man of letters, extending, according to the Alexandrian tradition, from meticulous philology to the writing of poetry, would surely have been qualities Porphyry acquired or perfected during his studies in Athens with Longinus, whom he himself calls "the preeminent critic of our time."^[92] It is in part through Porphyry's praise that Longinus maintained his exalted reputation—so exalted that the essay "On the Sublime" was long attributed to him on little other basis. Little though we know of the true Longinus, however, it is clear that he and his circle cultivated a tradition of learning rooted in Platonism that made of their literary scholarship something substantially different in emphasis from that of the Alexandrians five centuries earlier. Porphyry need hardly have joined Plotinus's circle to be exposed to the teachings of Numenius and Cronius: Longinus himself pointed out that Plotinus had covered the same material as Numenius and the other Neopythagoreans.^[93] It would not be surprising to find that the Athenian Platonists of the mid-third century, including Longinus, found in Homer the sort of meaning implied in Plotinus and developed by Porphyry in the essay on the cave of the nymphs. Neither is it beyond the realm of possibility that sometime in the years between 262 and 300, many of which he spent in relative seclusion, Porphyry should have found time, in spite of his undoubtedly increased philosophical activity, to exercise his mind on philological problems in Homer. The received dating, as Bidez implies, is en-

^[89][90]

[91] Cf. Porph. Vit. Plot . 16.14-18.

^[92]

[93] Porph. Vit. Plot . 20. Cf. Dillon, Middle Platonists , pp. 362 and 385. See n. 10 above.

― 112 ―

tirely hypothetical, and we can do little more than affirm, once again, a deeply divided response to Homer, corresponding to a deeply divided methodology of explication.^[94]

Whatever the date of the Homeric Questions , the absence in them of the type of interpretation we are tracing makes them relatively unimportant from our standpoint. They participate in a tradition of commentary at least as old as Aristotle and had an enormous influence on the content of the Byzantine scholia, an influence that, even with Schrader's edition, has not been exhaustively explored.^[95]

Several passages in the largely intact first book of the Questions strongly suggest the tone and method of Ps.-Plutarch in The Life and Poetry of Homer . After suggesting that Plato might appear to have been the first to assert that anger and suffering were mixtures of pleasure and pain, but that Homer had, in fact, seen this first and had thus "taught" Plato, Porphyry goes on, very much in the manner of Ps.-Plutarch (De vit. Hom . 130), to discuss the heart as the seat of emotion and then in a more characteristic manner to examine in detail the Homeric vocabulary relating to the emotions.^[96] He likewise occasionally compares Homeric rhetorical devices to those used by the orators, and once mentions Pythagoras in the portion that survives intact.^[97] To this extent he participates in the eclectic tradition represented by the Ps.-Plutarch essay, which he may well have known. For the most part, however, the Questions are neither so rhetorically oriented nor so exaggerated in their exaltation of Homer as The Life and Poetry of Homer . As the preface announces, they are content with the elucidation of minor, but often genu-

[94] The internal evidence for dating is inconclusive. The Homeric Questions are addressed to one Anatolius, mentioned by Eunapius (Vit. soph . 457-58) as the teacher of Iamblichus during the period before the latter attached himself to Porphyry. (On this, however, see A. C. Lloyd in CHLGEMP, p. 295 and n. 4.) Thus he could easily have been the same age as Porphyry and the dedication is unhelpful. The essay on the cave of the nymphs has no dedication, though Nauck suggested that a formula of address might be restored to explain the fragmented syntax of the opening sentence. In this case, the name of the addressee would have been lost along with the opening words of the essay.

[95] On the continuous tradition of works on "Homeric Questions" from Aristotle to Porphyry, see Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship , pp. 67-70. On Schrader's contribution to scholarship on Porphyry's Questions , see Bidez, Vie de Porphyre , p. 33, n. 3.

[96] Porph. Quaest. hom ., ed. Sodano, 68.8-83.16.

^[97]

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inely difficult and puzzling, problems, and even here the underlying conviction that Homer was a philosopher is present.^[98]

The exegetical principles Porphyry applied to the "larger" Homeric matters are suggested in a fragment from the lost work The Styx (

), preserved in the doxographer Stobaeus:

The poet's thought is not, as one might think, easily grasped, for all the ancients expressed matters concerning the gods and

through riddles, but Homer went to even greater lengths to keep these things hidden and refrained from speaking of them directly but rather used those things he did say to reveal other things beyond their obvious meanings. Of those who have undertaken to develop and expound those things he expressed through secondary meanings, the Pythagorean Cronius seems to have accomplished the task most ably, but on the whole he fits extraneous material to the texts in question since he is unable to apply Homer's own, and he has not endeavored to accommodate his ideas to the poet's words but rather to accommodate the poet to his own ideas.^[99]

Porphyry here reveals his mistrust of even the best interpreters and his simultaneous conviction that the model of the structure of meaning of the text of Homer on which those interpreters base their work is a valid one. The problem would seem to be insoluble. The author of these lines clearly has in mind the sound Aristarchan principle he stated at the beginning of the Questions : Homer is the best basis on which to elucidate Homer. Yet at the same time he accepts the idea that there are certain aspects of the meaning of Homer, certain truths contained in the Iliad and

^[98][99]

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Odyssey , that Homer deliberately refused to treat explicitly and that therefore must somehow be illuminated from without. It is no surprise that this careful and often plodding student of Homer left us with little in the way of elucidation of "major" Homeric problems. The only essay in that mode that survives is as profoundly divided, as dubious of its own methods, and as ambiguous in its conclusions as the paragraph quoted above might lead us to expect.

Before going on to examine the essay on the cave of the nymphs, however, it will be fruitful to consider the other fragments of Porphyry preserved in Stobaeus. They number over thirty, but few contain significant references to Homer. Another passage from The Styx contains a sensitive paraphrase and explanation of Anticleia's description of the dead (Od . 11.219-22). After quoting the lines Porphyry observes:

The idea is that souls are like the images appearing in mirrors and on the surface of water that resemble us in every detail and mimic our movements but have no solid substance that can be grasped or touched. This is why he calls them "images of dead men" [

,
Od . 11.476, cf. 24.14].^[100]

This is something more than the scholiasts give us but falls far short of a thorough analysis. In clarifying Homer's image, however, Porphyry displays his ability to enter imaginatively into the text and to convey his rich experience of it to the reader. There is nothing about his more extravagant allegorical interpretations that suggests that he was not always able, as in this example, to respond to the text in a humbler manner, free of the often nitpicking scholarship of the Questions and of the radical departures from the superficial meaning found in the essay on the cave of the nymphs.

Another passage from The Styx makes the claim that Homer envisioned three places where souls exist: this earth; the Elysian Field, where they go from this earth without dying, and hence must take their bodies along; and, finally, Hades, where they go after death and so without their bodies.^[101] Porphyry schematizes Homer's Hades somewhat more

^[100][101]

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rigidly than the text justifies, maintaining that it contains concentric rings of beings: souls of women, souls of men, and finally gods at the center. Nevertheless, his description of the genuinely Homeric possibilities for souls is admirably accurate and entirely incompatible with the Numenian claims that dominate the essay on the cave of the nymphs, identifying the disembodied souls with the Homeric

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