C. Julian and Sallustius

After the death of Porphyry, we hear little more of the disciples of Plotinus in Italy and the West, and the main stream of Platonic thought must be traced through Iamblichus (who taught in Syria during the first two decades of the fourth century) to the schools of Athens and Alexandria, which flourished in the fifth and sixth. The break between Porphyry and Iamblichus is significant in the history of Platonic thought from a number of points of view, and principally in the new prominence given to theurgy by Iamblichus and his followers. More important from our standpoint, however, is the almost complete lack of concern for the interpretation of early poetry that characterizes Iamblichus and his immediate circle.^[141] This sort of exegetical interest will surface again as a central and worthy subject of philosophical inquiry only with Syrianus and Proclus in fifth-century Athens—no doubt "Iamblichans" themselves, as has recently been asserted,^[142] but at the same time thinkers who made extraordinary demands of doctrinal coherence and compatibility on a heterogeneous literary tradition extending from Homer to Plato to the Chaldaean Oracles. It was this concern to demonstrate the unity of the tradition that led to the great synthesis of Platonic interpretation of Homer in Proclus, as well as to a renewal of a properly literary scholarship that would seem to be nearly absent from fourth-century Neoplatonism.

Two thinkers of this period do attract our attention, however, though the nature of their contribution itself suggests the degree to which Porphyry's interpretive zeal had, in fourth-century Platonist circles, been dispersed in other concerns. The essentials of a coherent and rather re-

[141] Iamblichus's contribution to the exegesis of the Platonic dialogues and to the formulation of the principles that governed that exegesis was of the greatest importance. See Wallis, Neoplatonism , pp. 134-37, and Bent Dalsgaard Larsen, Jamblique de Calchis, exégète et philosophe , esp. pp. 429-62. As Wallis likewise asserts, however, Iamblichus was not concerned with the "piecemeal" exegesis cultivated by Porphyry. There are a few hints of Pythagorean use of Homer in his Theologoumena arithmeticae , but his other works yield little information on the development of the understanding of Homer. See B. Dalsgaard Larsen, "Jamblique dans la philosophie antique tardive," who observes (p. 7): "Il n'y a plus trace, chez Jamblique, d' exégèse homérique s'inscrivant dans la tradition de l'allégorie stoicienne."

[142] Garth Fowden, "The Pagan Holy Man in Late Antique Society," pp. 44-45. See the same insightful article, pp. 58-59, on the failure of the "Iamblichan sages" in Julian's circle.

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served attitude toward myth, poetry, and Homer in particular as sources of truth emerge from the writings of Julian the Apostate (332-63).^[143] In the tradition of Iamblichus, Julian on the whole shows relative indifference to the interpretation of early poetry. On the other hand, Julian's rhetorical use of Homer is frequent and widespread.^[144] There are countless examples of decorative phrases and allusions, used in the manner of the rhetors of the imperial period to mark a point or simply to embellish the classicizing diction. Homer is likewise a rich source of exempla and comparanda , though these are not always used to his advantage.

The second panegyric on the emperor Constantius (Or . 2) offers the richest selection of such allusions, undertaking with characteristic bravado to demonstrate that in all the virtues Constantius outdid the heroes of the Iliad . At the time of the composition of the panegyric (between 355 and 359), the emperor had made Julian a Caesar and provided him with an army by means of which—willingly or unwillingly—he was to wrest away Constantius's empire within a few years. The heavy artifice of the rhetoric of the panegyrics, however, permits no irony to penetrate. The audience—assuming the discourse was in fact delivered—is offered a detailed comparison of the emperor with Agamemnon, Nestor, Odysseus, Hector, Achilles, and the other Iliad heroes, to whom he is shown to be superior in every particular. The striking point is that the rhetorical pretext leads Julian to emphasize the negative qualities of the heroes and their shortcomings. Agamemnon, for example, failed to honor Achilles, and Julian, adopting the persona of Achilles singing the

, asserts that Constantius has studied his Homer and would not make a similar mistake (50c). Likewise, Nestor's and Odysseus's failures are emphasized to underline the superiority of Constantius (75b-76b).^[145]

In this context, Julian takes time to remind his audience that, in order

[143] On the broader subject of Julian's relation to tradition, see Polymnia Athanassiadi-Fowden, Julian and Hellenism , and in particular her introduction (pp. 1-12) on Julian and the conflict of Hellenism and Christianity.

[144] This is widely recognized, but little analyzed—see, for instance, W. C. Wright in the Loeb Julian, vol. 1, pp. xi-xii. Julian's use of Homer has also been frequently exaggerated and misunderstood. One cannot agree, for example, with T. M. Lindsay's assertion that "Julian quotes Homer as frequently and as fervently as a contemporary Christian does the Holy Scriptures" (The Cambridge Medieval History , vol. 1, p. 110).

^[145]

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to use them for Constantius's praise, he does not need to torture the meaning of the poems as do certain contemptible exegetes who "cut up the poems into convincing and possible assertions, starting from the least hint of a second meaning

and from very vague principles, and try to persuade us that these things are precisely what the poets were trying to say."^[146]

This skepticism with regard to interpretation by

is, of course, as old as Plato, and it goes hand in hand with a willingness to call Homer "divine" (

, Or . 3 128b, Ep . 17 383d) and "inspired" (

, Or . 4 149c), which likewise points to Plato. Julian's careful irony in using these terms with regard to Homer is no doubt very close in spirit to the attitude of Plato himself, though for somewhat different reasons. In Julian's case, it seems based on a faith in the availability in the mysteries of the direct testimony of the gods themselves, obviating the need to make frequent appeal to ambiguous and frustrating poets for information about the divine.

That Julian had personal knowledge of the Iliad and Odyssey is unquestionable. In the Misopogon (351d-352b), he himself describes the way in which his tutor Mardonius deflected him from real horse races to the horse races in Homer, from real trees to the trees and landscapes of the Odyssey : "There are many plants in Homer more lovely to hear about than those one can see with one's eyes."^[147]

The imaginative world of Homer was thus offered Julian as a more desirable substitute for the real world, and he had fully entered into it. The tradition of interpretation by

was part of his education as well, as his hostility indicates. That hostility, however, does not prevent him from making claims for Homer as a theological authority. He rebukes an impious official—probably a Christian—for striking a priest and thus indicating that he thinks of the punishment of the Greeks in Iliad 1 for dishonoring Chryses as "mere fable" (

, Ep . 62 450d). He is violently contemptuous of teachers who interpret Homer and Hesiod for their pupils and poison the children's minds by calling the poets impious. He goes so far as to invite such teachers to go preach to the "Galileans" and expend their exegetical talents on Matthew and

^[146][147]

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Luke (Ep . 42 423a-b). There is a hint here that allegorical interpretation of texts in general is a mode of teaching Julian associates with the muddled vulgarizing of the Christians and excludes from his own purer religion.

He is skeptical of the general value of myth, which he views as pap for infantile minds. His aristocratic bias colors his approach to this commonplace: myths were generated to make truth accessible to souls that, in the language of the Phaedo , are just sprouting their wings (Or . 7 206d). Philosophers who have recourse to them are like physicians who are also slaves and so are reduced to the necessity of pampering their patients as they cure them (Or . 7207d). This passage, though specifically directed against the offensive fables of the Cynics, holds to a lesser extent for the ancient poets as well. Julian's contempt does not reach so far, certainly, but his mistrust of fables does.

Though the great hymn to the sun (Or . 4) makes more generous use of Homer than Julian's other surviving writings, it also supplies us with the clearest statement of his misgivings about Homer as a source of truth. Homer and Hesiod are evoked in support of Julian's solar theology, primarily for purposes of supplying precedents for idiosyncratic associations of gods, and particularly for the association of the major gods with the sun. The poets' qualifications as witnesses are asserted in a tone that contrasts with the usual coolness: "This is not new at all but was previously held by the earliest of the poets, Homer and Hesiod, whether it was their opinion or whether like seers they were inspired with a frenzy for the truth by divine inspiration."^[148]

The illustrations from Homer turn on standard elements familiar from other commentators: the word

shows that Homer associated the visible sun with the higher sun(s) from which it emanates; Zeus's respect for Helios in the Odyssean episode of the cattle of the sun indicates the respect in which the sun was held. Finally, several physical allegories are evoked, based on the identification of Hera with "mist"

, by implication the antithesis of the sun and its penetrating light (136d-137b). The departure from Julian's usual method is short-lived. He abandons these allegories abruptly:

But let us dismiss the poets' stories at this point. Along with the divine they contain a great deal that is merely human. Rather, to what

^[148]

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the god himself seems to teach us both about himself and other things, let us go on to that .^[149]

There is, then, more than one level to poetry of the sort Julian has been discussing, and more than one sort of truth. The problem had been formulated in similar terms, with a similar note of frustration, by Strabo,^[150] and it was to be elaborated defensively with great ingenuity by Proclus.^[151] If Julian does not, like Strabo, approach the problem of sorting through the "poetic license" of Homer with resignation, it is because he believes in a direct revelation that is far less ambiguous and more accessible. When, a few pages later, he argues that the information gleaned from the mysteries should be viewed not as "hypotheses"

but rather as "doctrines"

, he has revealed the nature of that alternative: "They [sc., the priests in the mysteries] speak, having listened to the gods or to great

"^[152] In short, they have the poets' potential for direct perception of transcendent reality without the poets' ambiguities and human failings.

The enormous importance of the mysteries in Iamblichan Neoplatonism thus reduces the importance of the "scriptures" the Iliad and Odyssey had become earlier in the period of the confrontation of paganism with Christianity. In Julian we see an approach to the poems that owes little to the allegorical tradition, though it clearly needs to define itself with reference to that tradition. In asserting the value of the poems against Cynics and Christians, Julian is glorifying them as cultural monuments, not as scripture. His intense commitment to the integral coherence of Hellenism—to the necessary interrelation of religion, literature, and institutions—involved him in a problematic relationship to the texts themselves.^[153] He himself is our best witness to the fact that the real conflict on the level of texts had become a conflict of interpretive communities. By explicitly barring Christians from teaching, and so from interpreting, Homer, he implicitly conceded the power of the interpretive community to shape the meaning of the poems. For him, a Christian Homer was worse than no Homer at all.

^[149]

[150] See ch. 1C above.

[151] See ch 5D below.

^[152]

[153] On Julian's view of literary culture, see Athanassiadi-Fowden, Julian and Hellenism , pp. 122-24 and passim.

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Julian himself emerges as the champion of a misconceived and unexamined literalism, an interpretive tradition existing only in fantasy, though shakily grounded in Socratic mistrust of interpretation (while committed in a fundamentally un-Socratic way to the educational use of Homer). He is by no means unique in his distrust of allegorists, but the combination of hostility toward other interpreters with his own muddling and impatient mode of explanation of texts marks him as a figure immersed in a conflict he only half understands. Christianized Hellenism was well on its way to absorbing Homer into its cultural heritage, as Julian's contemporary Basil of Caesarea makes clear.^[154] Julian's quixotic task, for which he was ill equipped, was in essence to rescue those texts from that interpretive community, but the community with which he would have replaced it had ceased to exist. Porphyry had been at heart a popularizer, and Julian is the very opposite. Moreover, it is reasonable to believe that, after Constantine, there was little need for new pagan popularizers. In its period of greatest activity, the mystical allegorical tradition tried to bond the content of Neoplatonism to the popular classics of Greek culture. That endeavor had a very limited place in the brief pagan renaissance of the 360s, and when the tradition surfaces again with Proclus, its goals are academic and theoretical rather than practical.

An exception proving this rule can be found in the essay Concerning the Gods and the Universe of Sallustius. This popularizing manual from Julian's circle was indeed an attempt to communicate the basic truths of pagan Neoplatonism to a wide audience, and it does confront the problem of the relationship of myth to truth. Nevertheless, Homer's name is never mentioned, and none of the stories discussed is specifically Homeric. Myth is treated in a way not incompatible with the attitude expressed by Julian^[155] and is brought in only to be dismissed in favor of direct (and therefore relatively abstract) statement of the basic truths of Neoplatonism.^[156] Sallustius's popularization is thus quite different in its thrust from that of Porphyry in his exegesis of the symbolism of cult and of the early poets. Sallustius's primary goal is to state the difficult abstractions in the simplest possible form, not to relate them to received and authoritative mythic accounts.^[157]

In spite of Sallustius's neglect of Homer, his chapters on myth will repay brief attention in view of the fact that some of the ideas on the

[154] See ch. 6C below.

[155] Cf. A. D. Nock in his edition of Sallustius, p. xlv.

[156] The discussion of myth is in Sallust. De diis 3-4.

[157] Porphyry had once taken a similar approach, in the work usually referred to as Sententiae ad intelligibilia ducentes .

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nature of myth to be found in them likewise appear a century later in Proclus's defense of Homer.

Sallustius begins his essay by stating the basic prerequisites for learning about the gods: the student must be educated and of good character and must accept certain universally held truths. Among these is the principle that "every god is good, immune to experience and emotion, and unchanging."^[158] He should furthermore believe that "the essences of the gods never came to be . . . nor are they material . . . nor do they have spatial limits . . . nor are they separate from the first cause or from one another."^[159] The string of negative assertions recalls the negative theology of Plotinus and his successors, but beyond that there is an echo of the prescriptions Socrates laid down in the Republic for the content of the new myths.^[160] The conflict between this conception of the divine and the mythic accounts is obvious. Deities that possess the qualities enumerated here are qualitatively different from the gods of Homer and Hesiod. The implied conflict is so great that Sallustius's Neoplatonism sounds decidedly aniconic or even iconoclastic. It is this problem that inspires Sallustius to discuss myth and its relationship to the truth concerning the gods. His discussion is in effect a brief, but necessary, digression before he goes on to the more serious problem of stating the basic concepts about the gods directly.

The ancients, we are told, shied away from stating these facts directly and preferred to clothe them in myth. Sallustius mentions casually that one function of this procedure is to provide the listener, the student, with mental exercise: we are forced to inquire into the intention of the mythmakers, and are thus stimulated to mental activity. The divinity of myths is guaranteed by the fact that "the inspired poets and the best philosophers"^[161] used them, as well as the founders of rituals and the gods themselves, expressing themselves in oracles.

The juxtaposition of the four classes of evidence to establish a presumption of validity again recalls the method of Numenius. Sallustius makes it clear that he views the myths of the poets in the same light as the myths of Plato, the stories associated with the mysteries, and the

^[158][159]

[160] See ch. 1B above.

^[161]

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oracles. All must have comparable structures of meaning and mask the same ultimate truths. The relationship of myth to the divine can, to some extent, be explained. On the principle that like rejoices in like, the stories about the gods had to resemble them in order to please them. The mythoplasts, in representing the gods themselves, used complex statements built on the pairs of opposites spoken/secret, revealed/unrevealed, manifest/hidden . That is, each of their imitations has a surface meaning masking a hidden meaning intimately related to it. This structure of meaning is itself explained as an imitation of divine goodness, which functions on two levels. The gods provide benefits on the sense plane to all, but restrict the benefits on the level of

to the wise

; in imitation of them, the myths reveal the existence of the gods to everyone but restrict information regarding their true identities to those equipped for such knowledge.

The raw truth would produce only scorn in crude souls unprepared for it and would make the diligent lazy by failing to challenge them. Thus, by using the screen of myth, the mythoplasts shielded the truth from the scorn of the former and stimulated the latter to exploit the capacities of their minds

. The immorality of some of the stories—adulteries, abuse of fathers, and so on—is part of the overall design, calling the alert student's attention to the complex structure of meaning through the strangeness and inappropriateness of the surface meaning.^[162]

Sallustius divides all myths into five categories: those relating to the gods, to the nature of the universe, to the soul, to matter, and to more than one of these spheres (De diis 4). The category of theological myth is illustrated by the story of Kronos swallowing his children. "Since the god is noetic, and all

returns to itself [i.e., contemplates itself], the myth hints at the essence of the god."^[163] The same myth, however, is also a myth relating to the nature of the universe and if we view it on the level of the gods' activities "with regard to the universe" (

), this level of meaning becomes central. In this interpretation, Kronos is "time"

and his children are the divisions of time, contained within the whole. Thus a single story has the potential of at least

^[162][163]

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four levels of meaning beyond the superficial. The model anticipates that elaborated for literature in Dante's famous letter to Can Grande and may not be unrelated to the somewhat earlier one to be found in Origen the Christian.^[164] Sallustius does not, however, choose to insist upon the capacity of a given myth to be interpreted on all the levels. His categories suggest, rather, that the normal situation would be that in which a given myth would clothe a specific truth, belonging to one of the four classes. Nevertheless, the Kronos myth proves to be coherent on all levels.

Sallustius does not maintain a clear distinction between the deliberate allegory of the mythoplasts and the allegorical interpretation of the explicators. The relationship of the categories of myth (apparently reflecting the intentions of the mythoplasts) to the corresponding modes of interpretation (reflecting the multiple perspectives of the interpreters) remains undefined. The third type of myth—that on the level of soul—is not explored. We are told, however, that if we want to understand the Kronos myth in this mode, we should "focus on the activities of the soul itself, for the thoughts of our souls, even if they go forth to others, yet remain in those who bore them."^[165] Kronos, then, can be read as soul itself, projecting its thoughts

into the world, presumably in the form of

, and yet simultaneously retaining them within itself. This treatment of myth on the level of soul is frustratingly vague, particularly in view of the fact that, as we later learn, myths of this type, along with myths relating to the structure of the universe, are those suited to poetry.

Myths representing the parts of the physical universe as gods (earth as Isis, wine as Dionysus, and so forth) are dismissed as the lowest form, characteristic of the Egyptians. A brief explanation of the judgment of Paris as a "mixed" myth, with multiple levels of meaning, closes the enumeration of types. Thus the only examples actually presented have proven to be "mixed" myths.

Sallustius's categories imply the Neoplatonic model of reality as their prototype. Though he does not make the correspondences explicit, it is clear that Sallustius associates the highest level of myth with the tran-

[164] See ch. 6E below.

^[165]

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scendent divine and the lowest level with the deceptive perceptions within the realm of the senses, with the other two, like the hypostases

and

, lying between these extremes. His association of the various classes of myth with different groups of users makes it clear that the mixed category is viewed as the highest, uniting all the rest (with the probable exception of the lowest): "The theological myths are appropriate to philosophers, the ones relating to the nature of the universe and to souls to poets, and the mixed myths fit the mysteries, since every initiation endeavors to establish for us relationships both with the universe and with the gods."^[166]

The discussion of myths in general closes with another explanation of a myth of the mixed type and its imitation in the festival of Attis. Several elements of this analysis recall Numenius and Porphyry. The nymph of the myth, like those of the cave, presides over '

.^[167] The participants in the festival at one point drink milk as an emblem of their rebirth.^[168] The sequence of the festival, imitating the sequence of the myth, is a projection in time and space of an eternal truth.^[169]

In practice, the myths of the poets seem to be treated as mixed myths of the type Sallustius associates with the mysteries, and it is unclear why he considered myths relating truths on the level of the soul and the structure of the universe particularly suitable for poetry. He seems on the one hand to have in mind the physical allegories of the Stoics, and on the other to want to define the position of poetry and to locate it just below the mysteries and philosophy in the hierarchy of the users of myth. The most striking fact in all of his discussion, however, is the restricted role given myth in the communication of truth, and, within that, the even smaller role reserved for the poets.

^[166][167]

[168] Sallust. De diis 4; P. 8, line 24 in Nock ed. Cf. Porph. De ant . 28.

[169] See ch. 5B below for the same ideas developed by Proclus.

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Date: 2015-12-17; view: 736