E. The Meaning of the Iliad and Odyssey 1 page

There is an extraordinary continuity in the Neoplatonic exegesis of Homer. The same myths would seem to have been explained again and again in essentially the same manner, over a period of centuries.^[136] Porphyry reminds us often that the interpretations he is presenting are not his own, but those of Numenius and Cronius, a century before his time. Proclus likewise refers frequently to his master Syrianus (diadochos from 432 to 437 or perhaps later)^[137] as the source of the doctrines he is

[134] In Rep . 1.76-77

[135] In Rep . 1.79.5-18.

[136] See Friedl, Homer-Interpretationen des Neuplatonikers Proklos , pp. 59-65, for a excellent discussion of the problem of sources in Neoplatonic allegory from the perspective of Proclus.

[137] On the problem of Syrianus's dates, see Karl Praechter, "Syrianos," cols. 1728-29. Praechter's date of 450 for his death is rather arbitrary, and with Sheppard (Studies , p. 38) I am convinced by the arguments for 437 put forward by Saffrey and Westerink (Proclus, Théologie platonicienne [Budé], vol. 1, pp. xv-xvii). On the dependence of Proclus's discussion of Homer on Syrianus, see Sheppard, Studies , ch. 2. Her analysis of Proclus's sources is far more meticulous than that of Friedl and shows us in detail how Proclus "is fitting Syrianus' comments on Homer, from a variety of sources, into a framework of his own" (Studies , p. 85). She attributes a substantial individual contribution to Syrianus in the development of Neoplatonist metaphysical allegory (Studies , pp. 48, 79), though since we know very little of the nature of Syrianus's sources, it would perhaps be more judicious to grant him priority over Proclus without passing judgment on his own originality.

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using in his defense of Homer, though at some points he does give us what is explicitly his own analysis.^[138] Olympiodorus makes no distinction in his commentary on the Phaedo between the teachings of Proclus and those of Syrianus,^[139] and in general it is possible to distinguish a very large element in Proclus's thought that goes back to that of his master. Proclus mentions a work of Syrianus's entitled "Solutions to Homeric Questions,"^[140] which must have been a major source for the interpretations found in his own defense of Homer.

A. J. Friedl distinguished two separate strata of sources in Proclus's essay: Syrianus for the specifically Neoplatonic material and another collection of allegories from various sources.^[141] The latter may have been the Homeric Questions of Porphyry, of which we have only the first book intact. Interpretations of this class are often preserved by the scholiasts as well. Proclus's major accomplishment in this context would seem to lie in his presentation of the theoretical analysis of the meaning of myth discussed above. His interpretations themselves are largely received ones, and his own contribution on this level is difficult to assess, though the sheer bulk of material he passes down to us makes him the most important of our ancient sources and the one that comes closest to presenting a comprehensive account of the Homeric epics as the Neoplatonists read them. Only Eustathius preserves a greater bulk of exegetical material on Homer in a single work.

In an attempt to reconstruct as much as possible of this comprehensive picture, I have ignored the structure of Proclus's essay (which is organized around his responses to the various Socratic criticisms) and rearranged the major interpretations in the sequence of the events and

[138] In Rep . 1.116.24-117.21 on Agamemnon's dream.

[139] Proclus had a contemporary and fellow student under Syrianus by this name, with whom he studied Aristotle (Mar. Vit. Pr . 9), but Wallis (Neoplatonism , p. 140, n. 1) cautions against identifying this Olympiodorus with the Alexandrian Neoplatonist.

^[140]

[141] Friedl, Homer-Interpretationen des Neuplatonikers Proklos , pp. 63-65, 69.

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references within the poems themselves.^[142] Many of Proclus's minor references, involving little or no interpretation on his part, have not been mentioned.

There are, of course, abundant references to Homer in the other works of Proclus as well, and occasionally interpretations cited below have been drawn from those sources to supplement the comprehensive picture offered in the Republic commentary. A sampling of the citations of Homer in the other works, however, indicates that the heart of what Proclus had to say about Homer is here, and the other works have relatively little to add.^[143]

The Iliad

It is almost casually, in the second part of the essay,^[144] that Proclus mentions his understanding of the meaning of the Iliad story in the broadest sense and offers an interpretation of the myth of the Trojan War. He is specific on the point that this reading is his own, or at least that it is the one to which he subscribes. The passage occurs in the context of a discussion of the secondary myth of Homer's blindness and the motives of the mythoplasts in that particular fabrication. He concludes:

The myths want to indicate, I believe, through Helen, the whole of that beauty that has to do with the sphere in which things come to be and pass away and that is the product of the demiurge. It is over this beauty that eternal war rages among souls, until the more intellectual

[142] The risk in this procedure is the equation of Proclus's undertaking with those of commentators such as Heraclitus, who treat the Homeric material sequentially, as it occurs in the epics. Nevertheless Proclus's essay does aspire to present a comprehensive analysis of the Homeric poems, although the emphasis and presentation are determined by the pattern of the Socratic charges.

[143] Taking the Timaeus commentary as an example (chosen because it is exceptionally well indexed in Festugière's translation), of seventy-two allusions or quotes listed by Festugière, the vast majority are without interest from our point of view, and eleven involve lines interpreted allegorically in precisely, or nearly precisely, the way they are treated in the Republic commentary. Ten passages seem to offer some slight extension of the material in the Republic commentary, but none is surprising or would change our impression of how Proclus understood the poems. All of these complementary passages, moreover, echo the patterns of interpretations found in the Republic commentary. To give an example, Athena's garments symbolize (a) her transcendent activity—the peplos of Il . 5.734, and (b) her providential activity—the chiton of Il . 8.385 (In Tim . 1.167).

[144] In Rep . 1.175-76.

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are victorious over the less rational forms of life and return hence to the place from which they came.^[145]

Helen, then, is worldly beauty, the fragmented, imperfect copy of the form of the beautiful inhabiting the material world. The implication is that it is this beauty that entices souls (i.e., the Greeks) to leave their true home and to enter into a mode of existence for which war provides the most apt metaphor. Once they have "overcome the barbarous flood,"^[146] in the tenth year (representing the millennial cycle of souls of the myth of Er), they return to their own realm. A similar conception of the Troy tale's allegorical meaning is implied in Plotinus (Enn . 1.6.8. 16-21).^[147] As a myth of the descent of souls into matter, this interpretation is distantly reminiscent of a passage in the Hermetica where the "archetypal man" is described breaking through the superstructure of the cosmos, seeing the beauty of the material world (in this case his own image reflected in it), falling in love with that beauty, and thus being committed to existence in the flesh.^[148] The entire allegory of the Troy tale, in a form related to that found in Proclus, is elaborated in terms of etymologies (

from

, etc.) by Hermias (In Phdr . 77-79), and Sheppard argues convincingly that we can trace the larger exposition to Syrianus as well.^[149]

This, says Proclus, is the level of truth that Homer loved to contemplate, and it is in this sense that the mythoplasts called him "blind"; his characteristic vision was turned toward the suprasensory, not toward the objects of this world.

The interpretation itself appears to belong to the same stratum of Neoplatonic allegory as the comprehensive frame allegory formulated in Porphyry's explanation of the cave of the nymphs. The ambiguous relationship of soul (life, consciousness) to matter (the body) is, for this tradition, the compelling mystery of the world of our everyday experience. Any text that is obscure and is assumed to have some claim to represent a transcendent truth may, sooner or later, be found to be an expression of some fact concerning that relationship. This is a major focus of Pro-

^[145][146]

[147] See ch. 3, with n. 78, above.

[148] Corpus Hermeticum 1 (= Poimandres ) 14.

[149] Sheppard, Studies , pp. 66-67.

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clus's mythoplasts' attention, though naturally they never express themselves directly on the subject.

In defense of Proclus and his tradition, it should be said that, however far the relationship of soul to body may have been from the minds of Homeric bards, his observation is no more absurd than Claude Lévi-Strauss's perception that a vast number of myths and folktales are concerned with the dichotomy between nature and culture. Proclus also resembles the structuralists in his emphasis on the broad patterns of myths and his use of paraphrases in preference to specific texts. Viewed in entire isolation from the historical circumstances that gave rise to the myths—viewed, that is, in the test-tube environment of structural analysis—a large number of stories do, in fact, fall into the pattern that an earlier generation of structuralists characterized by the formula "separation-initiation-return." The Neoplatonic tradition of exegesis recognized that pattern and went one step further, identifying it with what it took to be a true account of the nature of reality and viewing the stories as copies imitating that archetype. Perhaps the best way of describing the phenomenon before us is to say that Proclus has successfully analyzed a mythic structure and related it to a genuine pattern observable in a variety of instances, but from our perspective his accomplishment loses credibility when he immediately erects yet another mythic structure, taken as an account of "things as they are," around his explanation.^[150]

In speaking of the story of Troy as a whole, Proclus is dealing not with a literary text but with a myth that was never entirely contained in any one text (unless we take the epic cycle as a continuous work—and here we return to the shadowy Proclus of the Chrestomathy , who is responsible for the summaries that preserve the cycle as a single story for us). Proclus never examines extended passages from the text of the Iliad or the Odyssey . He prefers to refer, more or less explicitly, to specific statements or lines in the poems, rarely citing more than two verses together, or to speak more generally about whole episodes such as the battle of the gods in books 20-22 or the song of Ares and Aphrodite. The majority of the passages in the Iliad that attract his attention fall in the opening and closing books. There are no references to books 6-7, 10, or 12-13.^[151] Books 1-2 receive the same exaggerated attention from Proclus that J. F. Kindstrand observed in his examination of the use of Homer by the rhetors of the second sophistic, and it is quite probable that

[150] Sheppard likewise compares Proclus to the structuralists (Studies , p. 161).

[151] See Appendix 3.

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this pattern does reflect the emphasis these parts of the poem received in the schools.^[152] Since Proclus is primarily answering Socrates' accusations, however, and thus is concerned almost exclusively with the passages Socrates singles out for criticism, any conclusions drawn from the distribution of his quotations and references within the Iliad and Odyssey must be viewed with caution.

The judgment of Paris is not properly speaking a Homeric myth. The Proclus of the Chrestomathy indicates that it was narrated in the Cypria ,^[153] and the single reference in the Iliad (24.29-30) has been treated with suspicion since Aristarchus. Proclus apparently considers the story Homeric, however, and in the title of the seventh section of the first part of the discourse^[154] attributes it to

, which in the immediate context can be taken to refer to Homer. Proclus's understanding of the meaning of the story is that it "hints at"

the choice among lives of different sorts, the regal (Hera), the philosophical (apparently Athena), and the erotic (Aphrodite). An important source for this is to be found in two passages of the Phaedrus , but the passages from Plato are not very well suited to the explanation of the myth, and Proclus must twist them considerably in the attempt to make them appear so.^[155] In fact, the episode of the myth of Er, where Plato insists that souls choose their lives and are therefore responsible for the choices they make,^[156] seems a more important model in Proclus's mind here, though the association of various "lives" with gods who preside over them is borrowed from the Phaedrus passage. Whatever the source of his ideas, Proclus here elaborates a moral allegory so familiar in its basic claims that few of us would deny its relevance to the myth in question. Since there is conveniently no text to interpret, there is no danger of contradiction on that level. The vocabulary used to describe the structure of meaning of the myth is interesting: Proclus speaks of the myths as "transferring"

specific kinds of lives to the gods themselves in order to describe Paris's choice.^[157] The term from which our "metaphor" is derived is Aristotelian and is

[152] See Kindstrand, Homer in der zweiten Sophistik , p. 103.

[153] Homer (OCT), vol. 5, p. 102.

[154] In Rep . 1.108.1.

[155] Plato Phdr . 252e-f, 265b. Proclus himself refers us to the Phaedrus . Festugiére ad loc . in his translation (vol. 1, p. 126, n. 2) notes the distortion of the Platonic passages.

[156] Plato Rep. 10.627d-18b.

[157] In Rep . 1.108.15-17.

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not commonly used by Proclus to describe the ways in which discourse functions.^[158]

Among the passages in book 1 of the Iliad to which Proclus makes reference, the first three are relatively unimportant. Several lines are quoted and used to argue for or against charges of greed and lack of

on the part of Achilles.^[159] The apparition of Athena to Achilles is mentioned as an example of an attempt on the part of the mythoplasts to portray a "formless" apparition of an authentic goddess.^[160]

Three elements from the first book do, however, receive interesting explanations. Zeus's visit to the Ethiopians (Il . 1.423-25) is given as an example of a passage that anyone with any sort of experience of "this sort of doctrine"

could decipher.^[161] The greatest of the gods on his way from the realm of intelligible entities to a feast is clearly returning "to his own first principles"

, and he will renew himself "from those transcendent and uniform good things"

. There he will find the Ethiopians "glowing with divine light"

and primal Ocean "flowing from noetic springs"

,
and he and the gods dependent on him will receive their sustenance there.

This passage has been given in extenso because it provides a ready model typical of many of Proclus's minor exegeses. A myth is often explained by superimposing on it an abstract statement within which it takes on the role of imagery. Here Proclus paraphrases Homer's (or Thetis's) description, inserting the "hidden meaning" as a running commentary on the fiction. The demonstration is by no means "irrefutable," but if a few givens are accepted—that the gods exist in the realm of

, that every realm of existence springs from, is sustained by, and contemplates a higher, simpler realm—then it is, in fact, clear that the king of the gods cannot be conceived descending into the material world for sustenance (in spite of the fact that this is patently what Homer intends us to believe). Removed from the quite necessary logic of the original compo-

[158] See Arist. Rhet . 3.13.1405b.

[159] Il . 1.167-68 at In Rep . 1.145.1-2.

[160] In Rep . 1.14. These references are mentioned here to provide an indication of the range of Proclus's use of such passages, but in general no attention will be paid to references of this sort in the present discussion. On the last, cf. ch. 3, n. 44, above.

[161] In Rep . 1.166.28-167.9.

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sition, the elements of the imagery lend themselves rather well to Proclus's rearrangement—with the possible exception of the paradoxical Ethiopians. There is nevertheless little doubt that, if pressed, Proclus could find convincing equivalents for them in his cluttered celestial realms.

The fall of Hephaestus, cast out of Heaven by Zeus (Il . 1.590-94), is discussed early in the essay,^[162] along with the non-Homeric myths of the imprisonment of Kronos^[163] and the castration of Ouranos, all taken as preeminent examples of offensive myths that, by the very fact that they attribute indecent actions to the gods, invite interpretation not as mimetic representations of reality but as symbolic ones. As we have seen, symbolic representations of reality characteristically proceed by the use of opposites, and here Proclus elaborates on that principle and draws up what amounts to a table of equivalents for the actions described, contrasting the meaning of "bondage"

, "being hurled"

, and "mutilation"

, on the one hand "among us" and then "among the gods."^[164]

In our world,

means "violent movement caused by someone else," an explanation that might presumably be placed in the category of those

. On the higher level, however, it "indicates generative emanation and free and unrestrained attendance on all things, not separated from its own first principle but proceeding from this in an orderly manner through all things."^[165] To judge by this example, the opposites involved in the complex system of meaning of symbolic utterance are what we might call subjective elements. There is a shared objective, structural element that bonds the meaning of

"here" and its meaning "there." What we must overcome in order to perceive the link are our associations of (apparent) good and evil with this and the other terms, along with other aspects relevant to our own fragmented perceptions only. The concept "being hurled" is for us a negative, ugly one, implying

[162] In Rep . 1.82-83.

[163] Hera does in fact mention the underground imprisonment of Kronos at Il . 14.203-4, quoted by Proclus (In Rep . 1.93.16-17), though in another context. The canonical source is Hes. Theog . 717-35.

^[164][165]

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violence and separation. But "there" there is no violence; there is no separation. If we remove these "impossible" associations from the concept, then, and examine what remains, effectively subtracting process and time as well (further "subjective" elements, with no reality or meaning in the sphere in question), we are left with a description of creative emanation by which the first principle streams forth continually to create the world.

The other examples discussed in the passage bear out this description of Proclus's understanding of the double meanings of the symbolic building-blocks of myth. When we are dealing with isolated words

, etc), as here, we are again brought very close to a problem in Plato's own model of language, already mentioned. If the existence of a single term for a group of particulars implies that an

lies behind that group, how are we to conceive the

of groups whose very definition would appear to involve process or fragmentation, elements said to be absent from the realm of ideas? Proclus's analyses of the violent vocabulary of theological myth constitute attempts to resolve this problem and to show how these words can have referents beyond the sublunary realm.

In another context, late in the essay, Proclus again has occasion to speak of Hephaestus and his role as demiurge.^[166] There are no apparent contradictions with the present passage, and one is inclined to believe that Proclus had firmly in mind a comprehensive doctrine regarding the mythology of Hephaestus. He is described as "lame in both legs"

, Il . 1.607) because, as Timaeus had said, the created world is "legless."^[167] Just as the same name can be applied to various levels in the procession of a given divinity,^[168] so the name "Hephaestus" can extend even to the last expression of the demiurgical procession, the created world itself. Plato's explanation of the term "legless" is transferred to the Homeric myth: "that which is moved by the motion generated around intellect and thought had no need of feet."^[169]

Here, as in many of Proclus's observations, the formulations of the "reliable" speakers in the Platonic dialogues, and especially those of Timaeus, are presented as the interpretive discourse that resolves and

[166] In Rep . 1.126-27.

^[167]

[168] In Rep . 1.94.147.

^[169]

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"irrefutably demonstrates" the inner coherence of the inspired, but superficially chaotic, Homeric utterance. The fit is not always a perfect one, as the present example indicates, and one often has the impression that the Homeric poems are, for Proclus, a perverse and problematical sort of scripture, their language not quite in harmony with the myths they contain. Proclus appears to conceive his first task to be the elaboration of the structural principles and meanings of the myths. A secondary task, where feasible, is the explication of Homer's actual language, sometimes with the help of the more orderly presentation of what Proclus believes to be the same insights in the Platonic dialogues.

The gods' reaction to the limping Hephaestus, their "undying laughter" (

, Il . 1.599), is emblematic of their participation, as providential beings, in the created world. This level of their being, the lowest, in contact with the world of our immediate experience, is summed up in the Timaeus's description of the encosmic gods—that is, those implicated in the cosmos—as "young."^[170] Concern with this world is said to be "the play of the gods"

. Hence their laughter. This bizarre and rather beautiful interpretation of the scene recalls the continuing problem within Neoplatonism of relating the utterly detached highest reality to this world of our immediate experience: that the One should remain one and that divine providence should nevertheless exist in the world constituted an endlessly fascinating paradox. Still, the conception Proclus has articulated of the Iliad scene may perhaps suggest to a modern reader a poetic text with more affinities to Yeats than to Homer.

The only passage in book 2 that receives close attention is the dream sent by Zeus to Agamemnon (Il . 2.1-34).^[171] The problem as stated is clearly a moral one: Zeus appears to deceive Agamemnon by sending the "baneful dream" with its false promise of success, and yet the divine is "incapable of deception"

. To resolve this dilemma and free Homer of the charge of lying about the divine, Proclus offers first the rather unsatisfying solution of "most of the exegetes"

,^[172] and then that of his master Syrianus, followed by his own supplemental comments. This discussion provides an excellent illustration of the separate levels of exegesis that feed into Proclus's reading of Homer, but in this instance the passage is read

, and the

^[170]

[171] Proclus In Rep . 1.115-27. Cf. Sheppard, Studies , pp. 58-62.

^[172]

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assignment of responsibility is accomplished both by Proclus and by his master with devious logic, but without departing from the apparent meaning of the text, so that their arguments need not detain us at this point.

The mention at Il . 2.813-14 of a landmark on the Trojan plain with two names, one used by gods and the other by men, is explained along with similar double names by a compressed paraphrase of Plato's discussion of these pairs in the Cratylus (391c-393b).^[173] Again, Plato points to the metalanguage capable of bringing order out of the chaos of the Homeric statement. Proclus scarcely does justice to the CratyIus arguments in this discussion and is indifferent to the irony that most modern readers have detected throughout the dialogue.^[174]

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 647