Language and Literature 4 page

and the Milky Way. It is important to remember that Porphyry's vast knowledge of the Iliad and Odyssey placed formulations of this sort easily within his grasp. He was quite aware of the range of possibilities offered by the text, read without second meanings. When he offers us mystical or moral allegorical interpretations—his own or those he borrows from the second-century Neopythagoreans—we can never assume that he is unaware of the distance between the interpretations and what we may call a "normal" reading of the text. What most strikingly distinguishes his response from most modern readings, however, is that he apparently assumed that the Iliad and Odyssey could sustain multiple levels of meaning simultaneously and without contradiction.

Plato is not mentioned in the passages discussed thus far and it is impossible to say whether the problem of reconciling the nekyia with the myth of Er had become important for Porphyry when The Styx was written. He does use Plato to explain Homer in another passage from the same work (Stob. Ecl . 1.51.54), referring to the Philebus on the dependence of the imagination

on the memory

to explain the nature of the Homeric ghosts' experience of their former lives.

The most extensive interpretive piece from Porphyry preserved by Stobaeus comes to us without any indication as to which of Porphyry's lost works may have contained it. It focuses directly on cited texts from Homer in order to distil from them certain truths about the fate of souls, and as such imitates in miniature the structure of the essay on the cave of the nymphs:

What Homer says about Circe contains an amazing view of things that concern the soul. He says:

Their heads and voices, their bristles and their bodies
were those of pigs, but their minds were solid, as before.
[Od . 10.239-40]

Clearly this myth is a riddle concealing what Pythagoras and Plato have said about the soul: that it is indestructible by nature and eternal, but not immune to experience and change, and that it undergoes change and transfer into other types of bodies When it goes through what we call "destruction" or "death." It then seeks out, in the pursuit of pleasure, that which is fitting and appropriate to it because it is

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similar and its way of life is similar in character. At this point, by virtue of what each of us gains through education and philosophy, the soul, remembering the good and repelled by shameful and illicit pleasures, is able to prevail and watch itself carefully and take care lest through inattention it be reborn as a beast and fall in love with a body badly suited for virtue and impure, nurturing an uncultivated and irrational nature and encouraging the appetitive and passionate elements of the soul rather than the rational. Empedocles calls the fate and nature that preside over this transformation a

Wrapping souls in an alien tunic of flesh,
[fr. B126 (D-K)]

and giving them new clothes.

Homer, for his part, calls the cyclical progress and rotation of metensomatosis "Circe," making her a child of the sun, which is constantly linking destruction with birth and birth back again with destruction and stringing them together. The island of Aiaia is both the fate that awaits the dead and a place in the upper air. When they have first fallen into it, the souls wander about disoriented and wail and do not know where the west is
Or where the sun that lights mortal men goes beneath the earth.
[Od . 10.191]

The urge for pleasure makes them long for their accustomed way of life in and through the flesh, and so they fall back into the witch's brew of

,^[102] which truly mixes and brews together the immortal and the mortal, the rational and the emotional, the Olympian and the terrestrial. The souls are bewitched and softened by the pleasures that lead them back again into

, and at this point they have special need of great good fortune and self-restraint lest they follow and give in to their worst parts and emotions and take on an accursed and beastly life.

The "meeting of three roads" that is imagined as being among the shades in Hades is actually in this world, in the three divisions of the soul, the rational, the passionate, and the appetitive. Each path or division starts from the same source but leads to a life of a specific sort appropriate to it. We are no longer talking about a myth or a poem but about truth and a description of things as they are. The claim is that those who are taken over and dominated by the appetitive part of the soul, blossoming forth at the moment of transformation and rebirth, enter the bodies of asses and animals of that sort to lead tur-

^[102]

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bulent lives made impure by love of pleasure and by gluttony. When a soul that has had its passionate part made completely savage by hardening contentiousness and murderous brutality stemming from some disagreement or enmity comes to its second birth, gloomy and full of fresh bitterness, it casts itself into the body of a wolf or a lion, projecting as it were this body as a defense for its ruling passion and fitting itself to it. Therefore where death is concerned, purity is just as important as in an initiation, and you must keep all base emotion from the soul, put all painful desire to sleep, and keep as far from the mind as possible all jealousy, ill will, and anger, as you leave the body.

Hermes with his golden staff—in reality, reason

—meets the soul and clearly points the way to the good. He either bars the soul's way and prevents its reaching the witch's brew or, if it drinks, watches over it and keeps it as long as possible in a human form.^[103]

^[103]

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This conception of Circe resembles one found in Ps.-Plutarch (De vit. Hom . 126), and if we can assume Ps.-Plutarch to be earlier than Porphyry, then we can say with some confidence that the essentials of the present analysis were traditional by the late third century.^[104] The simple, unsupported assertion that the passage is an

may itself be an indication that Porphyry did not expect his reader to be surprised at the revelation. In any event, the fact that Porphyry does not cite a source permits us to take these views to be his own, even though we have good reason to believe that they were not original with him.

The density of "Pythagorean" doctrine—including the citation of Empedocles—and the absence of any development of the reference to Plato are striking. In speaking of the crucial moment of choice for souls, the essential preparation for which is philosophy, Porphyry must have in mind the myth of Er, and especially Socrates' interruption within the myth (Rep . 10.618b-619c), where exactly this point is made. If he does not make the reference explicit, it may be in order to avoid the problem that would certainly be raised by the discrepancy between the immediate reincarnation described above and the thousand-year interval of punishment or reward between incarnations postulated in the myth of Er.

The myth developed by Porphyry out of the Homeric material is decidedly more attractive than the myth of Er, where the soul's choice of a new life is viewed as a clearheaded one, rather like the choice of a new

[104] On the comparison of these two texts, see Buffière, Mythes d'Homère , pp. 516-17.

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suit, which may or may not still seem pleasing when the customer is out in the street. With Homer's help, Porphyry humanizes the story. The beautiful description of the anguish of the recently disembodied souls whose needs have not yet adapted to their altered state is reinforced by a line from the beginning of the Circe episode evoking the helplessness of Odysseus and his men faced with yet another unknown island. The entire episode, read as an allegory, becomes a substitute for the exhausted myth of the nekyia . It is a nekyia without punishments imposed by arbitrary and incomprehensible gods. The goal of Porphyry's elaboration from Homer is an understanding of the experience of the soul after death in terms of human truths that are observable in our own experience, our own motivations and weaknesses.

In Plato's myth, philosophy is necessary for the correct choice of a new life because the choice itself is a rational one and possibilities need to be intelligently weighed. In Porphyry's account, philosophy is the necessary preparation primarily because it is needed to subordinate the irrational parts of the soul to the rational. If philosophy fails, the choice will be made in a flash, by either the unbridled passions or the unbridled appetites, and the result will be disastrous. Only reason itself can ensure the attainment of the ultimate goal, the final liberation from the entire cycle of

.

Read sympathetically, then, this interpretive passage is something more than an extravagant exegesis. It responds to some of the needs already noted in Plotinus with regard to the traditional mythology and its interpretation. The claim that the Homeric passage itself is an

is finally unimportant: Porphyry elaborates his account in the manner of Plotinus, exploiting the myths and language of Homer to communicate abstract truths. The use of Homer is somewhat more obtrusive than in Plotinus, but the reason for this undoubtedly lies in Porphyry's general inclination to refer to authority rather than develop his thoughts independently. What is superficially a scholarly exercise, uniting myths from Homer and Plato and exploiting the richness of Homer's language, achieves an unexpectedly human and moving synthesis.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 594