Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition (Transformation of the Classical Heritage) (Volume 9) - Softcover

Lamberton, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520066073 ISBN 13: 9780520066076

Publisher: University of California Press, 1989

Synopsis

Here is the first survey of the surviving evidence for the growth, development, and influence of the Neoplatonist allegorical reading of the Iliad and Odyssey. Professor Lamberton argues that this tradition of reading was to create new demands on subsequent epic and thereby alter permanently the nature of European epic. The Neoplatonist reading was to be decisive in the birth of allegorical epic in late antiquity and forms the background for the next major extension of the epic tradition found in Dante.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Lamberton is Assistant Professor of Classics at Princeton University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition

By Robert Lamberton

University of California Press

Copyright 1989 Robert Lamberton
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520066073


I
The Divine Homer and the Background of Neoplatonic Allegory A. Homer's Pretensions

Our concern here will be to examine one among several traditions of the interpretation of Homer in antiquity: that characterized by the claims that Homer was a divine sage with revealed knowledge of the fate of souls and of the structure of reality, and that the Iliad and Odyssey are mystical allegories yielding information of this sort if properly read. It will be necessary to omit from discussion the larger part of the history of the interpretation of Homer in antiquity1 in order to look specifically at the tradition closing that history and looking forward to the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Nevertheless it seems appropriate to begin by examining the earliest testimonia (including the Homeric texts themselves) providing insight into the prehistory and early history of the conception of Homer as a sage.

It has been customary among recent students of Homer to minimize the importance of the prophetic element in Homeric diction and, on the

This vast field was approached as a whole by Flix Buffire in Les Mythes d'Homre et la pense grecque . His work, though anticipated to some extent by iconographical studies such as those of Franz Cumont, broke new ground and has remained the definitive treatment. Buffire's vast scholarship permitted him to sketch out a comprehensive history of the interaction between Homer and Greek philosophy. The debts of all subsequent work in this field to his study are very great. Of comparable importance, but more general in scope, is Jean Ppin's Mythe et Allgorie: Les Origines grecques et les contestations judo-chrtiennes .

contrary, to emphasize the absence of any pretense to supernatural insight in the narrative voice. J. Tate sums up the negative evidence:

Homer . . . does not claim to be "controlled" by a spirit not his own, or to utter oracles containing a manifold significance. . . . Nor does he claim the standing of a priest. . . . The Homeric claim to inspiration does not imply profound wisdom or even veracity.2

Tate's point is that the "divine" Homer of Plato, whom the Neopythagoreans and Neoplatonists systematically expanded (in isolation from the ironies and contradictions of the relevant passages of Plato) into a seer and sage, has no Homeric roots whatsoever. Tate does not place great weight on his own argumentum ex silentio , but at the same time he takes it for granted that any reasonable reader will agree with him. The Homeric narrative voice, though, is notoriously opaque with regard to its own identity and function, and Tate's argument does have decided weaknesses. For the sake of a full appreciation of the qualities of the poems, this commonly held view deserves to be examined and questioned.

No one will deny that direct access to information about a mode of existence beyond the human, about the fate of souls after death, and about events on the human plane but hidden from everyday perception is a possibility in the imaginative world of Homer. Revelation is the stock-in-trade of Homeric seers from Calchas to Theoclymenus and Tiresias, and direct, accurate perception of divine reality is commonly extended to the heroes themselves.3 The contrast between human ignorance and divine omniscience is repeatedly drawn,4 and the epiphanies that provide breakthroughs from perception on the human level to perception on the divine are among the most dramatic moments of the poems.

There is ample basis, then, on which to claim that the epics contain a complex model of perception in which the world of experience of ordinary mortals is seen as severely limited. The perceptions of the heroes remain similarly limited except for occasional moments of insight. Those of the seers differ from those of the other heroes only in degree: for

J. Tate, "On the History of Allegorism," p. 13.

The instances are so numerous and conspicuous as scarcely to require enumeration. In the Odyssey , Odysseus is repeatedly given privileged information by Athena. In the Iliad , her striking apparitions to Achilles at 1.294-222 and to Diomedes at 5.123-33 and 799-845, along with that of Apollo to Achilles at 22.7-20, all involve the imparting of privileged information, available only through the superhuman perceptions of a divinity.

E.g., in the line that opens Achilles' response to Thetis's questions at Il . 1.365.

them, epiphanies are the rule rather than the exception. The gods, whose experience otherwise in many respects resembles human experience, are omniscient, and though this principle is commonly incompatible with the demands of the narrative,5 it is nevertheless repeatedly expressed and seems an integral part of Homeric theology.6

Where are we to place the bards in this hierarchy? It has been a commonplace of Homer criticism since antiquity that there is an element of self-portraiture in the bards of the Odyssey .7 This principle extends to the Iliad as well, and the portrait of Achilles as amateur bard singing the by his tent (Il . 9.189) is surely included to increase the prestige of the Homeric bard and the tradition of Homeric song. Without insisting, with Proclus, on the symbolic values of the portraits of the individual bards and their relationship to the various levels of poetry in the Homeric corpus, we may reasonably assume that we have, at least in Phemius and Demodocus, figures whom the Homeric tradition created in order to glorify its own self-acclaimed roots in the Heroic Age and to provide us, if not with a self-portrait, then at least with an ancestor-portrait of the founders of the Homeric line. The epithet "divine" applied to bards in the Odyssey 8 doubtless in part explains the application of the same epithet to Homer by Plato, and the bardic performances depicted provide opportunities for numerous compliments that reflect upon the whole tradition of heroic song,9 though focusing, it is true, rather on the capacity of the bards to delight the senses and the imagination than upon other "divine" qualities.

The characteristics of the Odyssey bards are not explicitly claimed by the Homeric narrative voice for itself, but the implication is very strong that the listener is expected to make the connection and to associate with the bard whose voice he is hearing the qualities of the bards whom that

E.g., the scene between Zeus and Hera at Il . 1.536-94, which is unthinkable if they are both truly omniscient. Pushing the concept to its logical conclusion, all dialogue between omniscient gods would be impossible or simply superfluous.

It is stated broadly in the formula , which occurs twice in the Proteus episode (Od . 4.379, 468). Vast knowledge leaping the boundaries of space and time is also characteristic of the Sirens (Od . 12.191). Achilles assumes that Thetis already knows what she has asked him to tell her at Il . 1.365, and Menelaus makes a similar assumption addressing Proteus at Od . 4.465.

E.g., Proclus In Rep . 1.193. See ch. 5D below.

and occur twelve times in the Odyssey and once. The usage is foreign to the Iliad , where bards play little part.

E.g. Od . 8.44-45 and 478-81.

voice describes and impersonates. At one point, moreover, the narrative voice groans under the difficulty of the task and reminds us that superhuman demands are being made upon it:

It is a hard thing for me to tell all this like a god.

(Il . 12.176)

A more complex, though largely tacit, claim to superhuman powers and knowledge can be found in the narrative voice's claims regarding its own performance. The salient characteristic of privileged knowledge in the context of Homeric psychology is the ability of the mind to move freely in time and space. The gods' knowledge is infinite because it extends into the past and into the future and is not limited to a single location or perspective. Normal human knowledge, however, extends only to that portion of the past the individual has experienced or been told about, and to that portion of the present currently within the grasp of the senses. Calchas the seer, however, is characterized as one

Who knew those things that were, those that were to be and those that had been before,

(Il . 1.70)

and this is clearly the core of his claim to competence as a seer. The narrative voice, it is true, never makes explicit claims to share in this sort of privileged knowledge. It does, however, frequently request supernatural aid in order to comprehend or transmit the relevant information, and the invocation immediately preceding the catalogue of ships makes explicit the function of Homer's Muses:

Tell me now, Muses of Olympus
for you are goddesses, here beside me, and know everything,
while we hear only reports and know nothing
who were the leaders and chiefs of the Greeks?
For I could not remember them all and name them,
not if I had ten tongues in ten mouths,
an invincible voice and a heart of bronze,
unless the Olympian Muses, daughters of
aegis-bearing Zeus, remind me who came to Ilium.

(Il . 2.484-92)

Homer's humility, then, extends only to his own unaided voice. When aided by the Muses he can perform tasks of memory and song that go far beyond normal human limitations. Specifically, in this instance, he claims the ability to include within the scope of his song a vast and complex body of information about the past.10

Here, the invocation constitutes an inflated introduction to a set piece of exceptional complexity and the intention of the narrative voice seems to be to bring the magnificence of its own upcoming performance to the attention of the audience. In other instances, however, the narrative voice gratuitously destroys the dramatic coherence of a scene in order to impress us with its own broader perspective on the matters at hand, its ability to contemplate past and future, whereas the actors in the drama it relates cannot see beyond their immediate surroundings.

Thus, when Helen looks down on the Greek troops in the episode of the "View from the Wall," she mentions finally that she does not see her brothers Castor and Polydeuces, and conjectures that they may be absent because they are ashamed on her account. The narrative voice, however, closing the episode, observes:

Thus she spoke, but the fertile earth already held them fast,
back in Lacedaemonia, in their own land

(Il . 3.243-44)

The moment for the interruption is carefully chosen. We have been exposed for the last 180 lines to a complex dramatic situation the focus of which is discovery. One limited perception is played off against another: Priam's (rather unaccountable) ignorance, Helen's relatively great knowledge of the Greeks, and Antenor's limited, but complementary, knowl-

Hesiod (Theog . 36-38) adapts the description of Calchas's wisdom to describe that of the Muses:

edge. The drama has been a drama of revelation in which we have been intensely conscious of the horizons of experience of each individual. This is the moment at which the narrative voice reveals something of the scope of its own knowledge, and the effect is one of a rapid alteration of perspective, analogous, perhaps, to a retreating zoom shot in the narrative vocabulary of cinema: we pass from an intense and claustrophobic dramatic situation, viewed from within, to a distant, ironic vantage point, which is that of the poet himself.

The particular instance we have examined relates to the past, and it is certainly true that the primary focus of the Homeric narrative voice's claims to privileged wisdom is retrospective. Homer is equally capable, however, of making such leaps to reveal some fact about the future, as when Patroclus has just requested of Achilles that he be allowed to lead the Myrmidons into battle and the narrative voice interjects, before Achilles can answer:

So the fool pleadedhe was asking
for his own foul death and doom.

(Il . 16.46-47)

The effect is to emphasize the vast gap between the knowledge of past, present, and future available to the narrator and the limited knowledge of the actors in the drama. This gap generates the tragic irony characteristic of the narrative technique of the Iliad .11 It necessarily involves the raising of the narrator to a level of perception for which the most obvious analogy is that of the gods. Thus the narrative voice does in some sense assimilate "divine" wisdom and adopt a privilege that implies such wisdom.

In the context of the implicit claims made by the Homeric narrative voice for its own powers and for the wisdom it taps, the descriptions of the Odyssey bards take on a new seriousness. Demodocus, in particular, the blind protg of the Muse, is seen to enjoy that protection as more

There are numerous examples beyond those given here. The most frequent pattern is an interjection at the moment of an oath or prayer, in which the narrative voice indicates that what is prayed for or sworn will not be fulfilled. Cf. Il . 2.36 and 3.302. The narrative voice of the Odyssey seems far less concerned with this dramatic contrast, and in general the effect sought in the Iliad , with its cultivation of the brutal contrast between ignorance and knowledge, seems rooted in the far more bitter ironies of the military epic.

than an empty convention.12 What appears to be simply insistence on the vastness of his repertory

for the god made him able to
delight, however his heart might impel him to sing.

(Od . 8.44-45)

has overtones of an extraordinary power of the mind to move in space and time, along with the implication that Demodocus is "divine," not only in his power to delight, but also in his ability to exercise that power in casting his mind over a vast range of poetic material.13 The only singers who make such claims explicitly in the poems are the Sirens:

For we know all that the Trojans and Greeks
suffered in Troy by the will of the gods.
We know all that happens on the rich earth.

(Od . 12.189-91)

The coincidence is far from gratuitous, and the Sirens resemble the Odyssey bards in other ways as well: they "bewitch" (, Od . 12.44) as Phemius's songs are called "bewitchings" (, Od . 1.337). Thus they share both of the supernatural qualities attributed to the bards: the power of the mind to violate the normal limitations of space and time and the power to entrance their audience. The Sirens' claim to exceptional wisdom corresponds closely to the implicit claim of the Iliad poet, aided by his Muse, to universal knowledge of the Troy tale. By the time of Hadrian, the identification of Homer with his own Sirens must have been a commonplace, for in the Certamen (38) an oracle calls Homer himself an "ambrosial Siren" . The evolution of Homer's Sirenswith the help of the quite different Sirens who generate the music of the celestial hemispheres in the myth of Er in

Cf. Od . 8.44-45, 61-63, 489-91.

See Od . 8.492-98 on the relationship of repertory to inspiration. The same claim may be implied in Penelope's line to Phemius,
,
Od . 1.337. The idea expressed with reference to Demodocus (Od . 8.45) that his mind was able to move freely from song to song is brought up by Telemachus at Od . 1.346-47 with a moral thrust: Telemachus insists that Phemius must be allowed free choice of his song.

Plato's Republic into symbols of the divine order in the universe14 is an important part of the evolution of the claims for Homeric wisdom from esthetic convention to cultural and philosophical mythmaking.

This, then, is the range of Homeric singers to whom we can turn for self-portraits of the creator of the Iliad and Odyssey . But there is one other Homeric teller of tales whom a part of the later tradition was able to identify with Homer: Tiresias. Though there is no surviving evidence of the assimilation of Homer to Tiresias in antiquity, the engraving that appears on the title page of Chapman's Odyssey is unlikely to represent an invention of the early seventeenth century. This plate (see frontispiece) has often been reprinted,15 but its contents and importance do not seem to have been examined, though Allardyce Nicoll describes it briefly and notes that a figure of Homer stands in the center.16 There is little doubt that the figure is, in fact, Homer. The head, with blind eyes turned to heaven, illustrates a tradition, at least as old as Proclus,17 that made of the myth of Homer's blindness a metaphor for transcendent vision. It is virtually the same head that appears on the title page of Chapman's Iliad and is there explicitly labeled "Homer."18 The Homer of the Odyssey title page is, however, someone else as well. He is surrounded on all sides by ghosts, whose outlines are dotted. His is fully drawn, and the epithet over his head, solus sapit hic homo , along with that of the ghosts, reliqui vero umbrae moventur , clearly constitutes a paraphrase of Circe's description of Tiresias:

Even in death, Persephone granted to him alone the use of his
wisdom, but the others are shadows that flit around.

(Od . 10.494-95)

In the foreground sit Athena and Odysseus, the latter looking up a t Homer/Tiresias in response to the goddess, who is pointing upward.

The profile of Dante from Raphael's Parnassus is certainly the inspiration for the most clearly defined of the ghosts contemplating Homer, and the scene as a whole includes elements both of the Odyssey and of the

See Pierre Boyanc, "Les Muses et l'harmonie des spheres."

E.g., as frontispiece to George deF. Lord, Homeric Renaissance , and to the second volume of the Bollingen edition of Chapman's Homer , edited by Allardyce Nicoll (see "Works Cited: Ancient Authors").

Chapman's Homer , ed. Nicoll, vol. 2, p. xii.

Proclus In Rep . 1.193-94.

See Chapman's Homer , ed. Nicoll, vol. 1, frontispiece.

Divine Comedy .19 Raphael's fresco is the principal source both of composition and of detail, but the scene has been moved from Parnassus back to the underworld. The ghosts swarming around Homer/Tiresias and crowned with laurel must surely be equated with the crowd of poets of the fourth canto of the Inferno , rather than those of the fresco. Homer is presented in the form of Tiresias as a seer and the founder of the poetic tradition. Though the literary conceit of visiting Homer in Hades is at least as old as Plato,20 the vision of him surrounded by the other poets, all of whom look up to him as their leader, is Dantesqueor, rather, Dante and Raphael are the proximal sources that have most influenced the artist of the title page. The concept of Homer as the focus of a literary court in the other world has been traced to the Pythagoreans,21 and Lucian was able to parody it in the second century, leaving little doubt that such a figure was taken seriously a millennium before Dante.22 The notion of the assimilation of this vision of Homer to his own creation Tiresias, the one ghost able to provide true information about past, present, and future, may likewise have had a long history antedating Chapman. The iconography of the title-page clearly belongs to the Renaissance, and the baroque style of the engraving, with its aggressive and exaggerated classicism, is a reminder of its distance from classical antiquityyet, as the examples above have shown, the possibility of a Homeric self-portrait in the form of a seer rather than a bard is not out of the question.

This survey of the claims, implicit and explicit, of the Homeric narrative voice to privileged knowledge has provided us with a range of possibilities and the rudiments of a historical outline. The widespread myth of Homer's blindness is probably an indication that, even before the classical period, the description of the blind bard Demodocus was read as a Homeric self-portrait. The bard of the Hymn to Apollo who describes himself as a blind man (Hymn 3. 172) provides attractive support for this interpretation. By Proclus's time, the perception of the Odyssey

The Raphael drawing of Dante juxtaposed with a Homer of the Hellenistic "blind" type (actually drawn from the recently discovered Laocon group), reproduced as frontispiece to Hugo Rahner, Griechische Mythen in christlicher Deutung , and on the jacket of this volume, is a study for the great Vatican fresco of Parnassus.

Plato Ap . 41a.

"L'immortalit, conue comme une rcompense de la science, devait ncessairement crier un paradis d'intellectuels." Franz Cumont, Recherches sur le symbolisme funraire des Romains , p. 315

Luc. Ver. hist . 2.14-16.

bards as Homeric self-portraits had become an apparent commonplace of interpretation. With Proclus, and perhaps earlier, those multiple portraits became metaphors for multiple levels of meaning in the poems. In the form in which it reaches us,23 the assimilation of Homer's voice to that of the Sirens may be no more than a lovely, but fanciful, Hellenistic conceit, but it implies a history of interpretation that had already identified Homer's voice with the limitless knowledge of his Muses, and had seen the connection between that composite figure and the Sirens. Finally, the assimilation of Homer to Tiresias, though we glimpse it only in the context of the declining northern European Renaissance, casts some light on a lost portion of the history of the interpretation of the Iliad and Odyssey that had made of their poet a prophetic figure only dimly foreshadowed in the ancient critical tradition before the Neoplatonists.

B. Interpretation, Allegory, and the Critics of Homer

The interpretive tradition that made of Homer a theologian and, beyond that, a sage providing access to privileged information about the fate of souls and the structure of the universe has, in the past, been studied primarily by students of philosophy and of religion. The goal of the present study, however, is to examine that tradition's contribution to the history of literature. It represents, on the one hand, a substantial part of the neglected interpretive, non-formalist aspect of ancient literary criticism. Perhaps more important still, after the text of the Iliad and Odyssey had become inaccessible, this interpretive tradition, as transmitted piecemeal through the philosophers, provided the Latin Middle Ages with an image of the kind of poet Homer was. Its importance for the history of literature is thus both direct and indirect, and it has information to yield concerning ancient habits of reading and interpretation, as well as about medieval attitudes toward the poet, who was revered as the founder of the tradition but no longer read.

In examining the origins of this tradition of reading, we must bear in mind that our concept of a corpus of European literature with its origins in archaic Greece is a modern construct. At least in the period previous to the fourth century B.C. , the problems of reading and interpretation could not be solved in terms of a body of material comparable to what we

See Plutarch Quaest. conv . 9.14.6 145d-e, and Certamen 38.

are accustomed to call "literature." Each preserved text had an identity of its own and a claim to truth, historicity, or beauty that was unique and hot easily compared with the claims of other texts. Formal criteria provided convenient and seductive categories, of course, and the idea of a competition (essentially a dramatized comparison) of Homer and Hesiod is far older than the third-century papyrus that preserves part of an early Certamen .24 Homer, in any case, remained a discrete category of experience to a degree that may be difficult for us to appreciate, and an understanding of Homerof what as well as how the Iliad and Odyssey communicatedcould not easily be compared to the understanding of other literature.

The uniqueness of antiquity's response to Homer may be traced to a number of factors closely bound up with unique qualities of the text itself. It was, first of all, a body of material manifestly conceived with the primary goal of entertainment (if we may use so unpretentious a term for the relationship between the bard and the audience of whose imagination and emotions he took possession). At the same time it was a text that spoke constantly about the gods and that enjoyed the prestige of enormous antiquity. These two qualities of the text demanded a response that was to some extent divided. Homer is clearly innocent of the characteristic scruples expressed by Herodotus with regard to "speaking of divine things,"25 and his freedom in this regard must have been disturbing to Greek piety even independently of such philosophical reactions as that of Xenophanes. Again by Herodotus's account, Homer and Hesiod were the very first poets, and that "the most ancient is the most revered"26 was a pervasive principle in Greek culture. The Iliad and Odyssey were thus inevitably placed in a position of very great honor and inspired an awe that must sometimes have jarred uncomfortably against the response demanded by such passages as the deception of Zeus and the song of Ares and Aphrodite.27 If Homer demanded laughtereven bawdy laughtertradition demanded that this response somehow be made compatible with the dignity of the divine and the respect due the

See Homer (OCT) vol. 5, P. 225. Rudolph Pfeiffer (History of Classical Scholarship , p. 11) traces the tradition back to the sixth century.

Herod. Hist . 2.65.

, Arist. Metaph . A 983b.

Ps.-Plutarch (De vit. Hom . 214) lists a number of "comic" passagesthough one is not quite sure he does not simply mean passages in which laughter is mentioned. In any case, he is more sensitive than most ancient commentators to the humor in Homer.

text itself by virtue of its antiquity. Finally, much of the "theological" material other than the Iliad and Odyssey that the tradition transmitted was indeed deliberately obscure and oblique. The most obvious examples were the hexameter oracles in which the gods expressed themselves with characteristic coyness, constantly saying one thing and meaning something quite different. The impulse to resolve the contradictory responses demanded by text and tradition through the imposition on the poetry of Homer of a structure of meaning analogous to that of the oracles must be far older than the surviving interpretive texts can demonstrate.28

Many of the apparently contradictory elements in the response of ancient "critics" to Homer thus have their roots in the impact of Homer on Greek society in a preliterate or protoliterate phase. There is no doubt that Homer was expounded and read in other ways from that reflected in the tradition of interpretation under examination here, but it is nevertheless true that the attitudes of the mystical allegorists are anticipated in contradictions that belong to a period before the Iliad and Odyssey could comfortably be included in a larger class approximating what we call "literature." The texts we shall examine belong to a period in which such a category did exist, but Homer continued to demand a unique response, which gave him a special status. He had to be read both as "literature" and as something more. It is primarily that nebulous secondary element that will occupy our attention, but we would be mistaken to assume that a more down-to-earth response to the poems could not coexist with mystical allegory and with extraordinary claims for the authority of Homer. Indeed, the juxtaposition of such attitudes as those of the allegorists, who were willing to leap far beyond the text to discover its "true" meaning, with the sort of sensitivity to the text that we demand of a modem critic is a characteristic paradox of the interpretive literature.

Alongside the problems of the identification of "literature" in the Greek tradition, and of the relationship of the Iliad and Odyssey to that category of experience, stands that of the identity and role of the critic in antiquity.29 Here again we find no clear one-to-one equivalent, no identi-

The Derveni papyrus (bibliography in Preface, n. 6, above) of the fourth century B.C. contains Orphic texts with allegorical commentary. The Iliad (24.527-28) is quoted to explain (incorrectly) an expression in the Orphic poem, and it is clear that the author feels that Orpheus was sufficiently close to Homer for Homer to be useful in illuminating his language.

On the evolution of the terms , and their Latin equivalents, see Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship , vol. 1, pp. 4-11. Porphyry describes Longinus as a "critic" (Vit. Plot . 20.1-2).

fiable role in early Greek society corresponding to that of the critic in our own. With Rudolph Pfeiffer, we should, perhaps, conceive of the poets themselves and the rhapsodes (including such philosopher-poets as Xenophanes) as the first interpreters of poetry, succeeded in the fifth century by the sophists.30

In the Hellenistic age the term takes on a meaning that may include at least a part of the function of the modern critic, and in Cicero and other Roman authors both grammaticus and literatus can refer to interpretes potarurn .31 The , or criticus , likewise engaged in literary scholarship, and these terms seem simply to designate a grammaticus of a higher degree of distinction. It is difficult, however, to determine whether these designations implied interpretive skills in the modern sense, or rather the ability to expound grammatical points. In a valuable sketch of modes of interpretation, Seneca portrays the grammaticus futurus commenting on Virgil's fugit inreparabile tempus (Georg . 3.284) by pointing out other instances of Virgil's use of fugit to talk about the passage of time,32 and then shows him commenting on another passage by citing instances of Virgil's characteristic use of the epithet tristis with the noun senectus .33 In the same passage, Seneca illustrates the sort of comment that might be offered by a philosophically inclined reader,34 and what emerges is a sensitive, serious paraphrase and elaboration of the meaning of the verses, incorporating a rich sense of their human content. In short, the philosopher and not the grammaticus appears here in the role of the modern critic.

It seems to have been generally true in antiquity that exegesis was the province of the educator, and specifically of the philosophical educator.35 Only infrequently was such exegesis given an importance that implied a pretense to permanence, and so only infrequently has it entered the preserved literature, beyond the scholia. Methods of reading and interpretation were doubtless varied: the Stoa favored allegorical exegesis and passed that taste on to later Platonism and to-the tradition under examination here, though we have no reason to believe that Stoics or Platonists

Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship , pp. 8-12, 16-36, and 43-45.

Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship , vol. 1, pp. 7-9.

Sen. Epist . 8.24.

Sen. Epist . 8.28-29.

. . .ille, qui ad philosophiam spectat (Sen. Epist . 8.24-25).

See N. J. Richardson, "Homeric Professors in the Age of the Sophists" for a summary of the evidence for the use of allegorizing commentary on Homer by the sophists of the fifth century.

invariably approached all myths and texts as allegorical, or that what we can learn of their response to Homer from the surviving bits of ancient exegesis constituted their entire response, or even their normal response, to the poems.36

The available evidence suggests that modes of response to the poems that seem contradictory to us remained complementary in the eyes of the philosophical traditions of late antiquity, and that no clear distinction was made between reading Homer as "literature" and reading him as scripture. The philosphers, moreover, are more likely to offer us insights into methods of reading and interpretation in antiquity than those whose training was specifically grammatical or rhetorical.

In practice, each of the authors under consideration faced the problem of defining a tradition of his own. Philosophical training naturally provided a model. If one studied under a Platonist, one would be exposed to a predictable body of philosophical literature, though its exact contents might vary from teacher to teacher and from school to school. Similarly, all of these writers contemplate the past and its written artifacts in terms of specific traditions. Porphyry and Proclus are, of course, Platonic philosophers, and their attitudes toward the literature of the past are colored by the canon progressively developed by that school. Of all the authors discussed here, Numenius was probably the most radical in terms of his personal and creative redefinition of the tradition on which he drew.37 But common to all is the effort to define the field of useful writings from the past and so to create for themselves a context, canon, or tradition. Their criteria are never stylistic: they are interested in literature as a source of truth, and they are all, to a greater or lesser extent, in search of what we might call a body of scripture rather than a literature.

Thus, when Ps.-Plutarch makes Homer the founder of the whole sphere of human (i.e., Greek) discourse, he is claiming Homer to be the source of Greek literature broadly defined to include science, rhetoric, history, philosophy, and, rather incidentally, comedy, tragedy, and other poetry. There does exist for him, then, an extremely broad concept of "literature," but it is so general that he needs no word for it, and, inscriptions and fortuitously preserved ephemera aside, it comprises the collective verbal artifacts transmitted in writing from the past.

Perhaps the most important distinction our authors make within this

Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship , p. 237.

See ch. 2B below.

vast field is the one Heinrich Drrie singled out in Plotinus,38 that between works that contain some eternally valid truth and those that do not. The latter category, including the relatively recent poets and dramatists, may be used for decoration or to illustrate a point, but the discussion of the meaning of these authors would be superfluous. For the former category, however, interpretation is essential, and the nature of the verbal artifact and its relationship to the truth it reflects must be defined.

Thus for each of our "critics" there exists a category of literature for which, were they to give it any attention at all, the formalistic criteria often said to constitute the whole of ancient literary criticism might well be the relevant ones. Discussion of the meaning of such texts would, in any case, be of minor importance. In practice, however, they focus their critical talents on the other category, the literature in which they see the possibility of discovering some enduring truth. The elucidation and articulation of such truths constitute the impetus of interpretation.

The need to articulate the truth thought to be contained in the Iliad and Odyssey can be traced to two primary motives: the desire of the interpreters to use the prestige of the Homeric poems to support their own views and the desire to defend Homer against his detractors.

If we conceive the interpretive tradition to have its origins in the sixth century B.C. , whether in Pythagorean circles or elsewhere,39 then the desire to tap Homer's prestige probably came earlier than the desire to defend him.40 This suggests that Homer was already something of a in the sixth century (though the word itself may be an anachronism), or at the very least that he was viewed as an authoritative source of information, a possibility that should not be too surprising in the light of Herodotus's testimony.41

Much of the interpretive literature that comes down to us is, however, concerned with the defense of Homer against his detractors. It is this "defensive" tradition that Porphyry traces back to Theagenes of Rhegium, ca. 525 B.C. 42 Defensive interpretive efforts must then have been first stimulated by such critiques as that of Xenophanes of Colophon, and

See ch. 5D, with n. 59, below.

See Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship , p. 12, on Pherecydes and the sixth-century sources of allegorism, and ch. 1D below.

The primacy of "positive" over "defensive" allegory was convincingly maintained by J. Tate, "Plato and Allegorical Interpretation," p. 142. See also his "On the History of Allegorism," p. 105.

Herod. Hist . 2.53-54, discussed ch. 1C below.

See ch. 1D below.

at an early date the philosophical reaction against the anthropomorphic gods of Homer and Hesiod may have produced defensive interpretations relating to the nature of the poetic utterance and its structure of meaning.43

In the history of the reading of Homer, however, one critiquethat of Socrates in Plato's Republic stands out above all others, both for its devastating condemnation of the poet and for its influence on subsequent readers.44 This critique is central to the concerns of Heraclitus (the author of the Homeric Allegories ), who condemns Plato severely and insists on the superiority of Homer, and to those of Proclus, whose extended consideration of Homer was focused on a reconciliation of the poet and the philosopher. The attempt at reconciliation goes back at least to Telephus of Pergamon and Numenius in the second century after Christ, and must have been an issue of some importance to any Platonist who wished to place Homer alongside Plato in the canon of authors who might provide a glimpse of the truth. This tendency to emphasize the spiritual and cosmological authority of Homer (and of the other ) is a growing trend in Platonism under the Roman Empirein part, no doubt, because of a need to offer an authoritative scripture able to bear comparison with the scriptures of the increasingly threatening Christian tradition.45 It is significant that, for his part, Augustine was able wholeheartedly to praise Plato's banishing of the poets.46

Since the Platonic critique was so important to later Platonists, it will be useful to review its major points briefly here. The context in the Republic in which Socrates first comments on Homer is the discussion of the education of the guardians of the state. Admitting the necessity of stories (myths) for the education of the young, Socrates asserts (Rep . 2.377b-c) that they must be carefully controlled by the state and that most of those currently in circulation (i.e., the myths of Homer and Hesiod) must be rejected. They are to be rejected not simply because they are liesit is explicitly accepted that all myths are lies that contain a kernel of truth (377a)but because they are ugly lies.47 Ugly lies are said to be lies that

Diogenes Laertius (2.46) mentions a critic of Homer antedating Xenophanes and said to be contemporary with the poet himself.

See Stefan Weinstock, "Die platonische Homerkritik und seine Nachwirkung," and Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato , ch. 1.

Moses the allegorical of Philo (De vit. Mos . 2.115) foreshadows Homer the allegorical of the Neoplatonists. See ch. 1C below.

See August. Civ. Dei 2.14.

. . .. Rep . 2.377d.

distort that about which they speak, just as a bad painter distorts his subject (377e). The preeminent example chosen is Hesiod's treatment of Ouranos and Kronos (377e-378a). Each offensive myth mentioned is viewed in terms of its potential educational impact on the guardians. The myth of Ouranos and Kronos will encourage the young to punish their fathers (378b), and stories of the gods fighting with one another and plotting among themselves will encourage them to believe that internal strife in a society is an acceptable state of affairs (378c-e).

The only solution is to abolish all the existing myths and have new ones made up according to certain basic principles set by the lawmakers (379a-c). The first example of a is the principle that god is not responsible for evil (379c-380c). Both the jars of Zeus (Il . 24.527-33) and the attribution of responsibility for Pandarus's treachery to Athena and Zeus (Il . 4.30-204) are rejected as violating this (379d-e). The second requires that the divine be immutable and, as a corollary, that the gods by nature never deceive men (380d-383a). This entails the rejection of several offending Homeric passages: the assertion by one of the suitors in the Odyssey (17.483-87) that gods travel among men in disguise (381d), the "falsehoods about Proteus and Thetis" (Od . 4.351-592) (381d),48 and the false dream sent by Zeus to Agamemnon (Il . 2.1-34) (383a).

At the beginning of book 3 it is emphasized that these when exemplified in myths should have beneficial effects on the young. Specifically, they should make the young honor the gods and their parents and take their friendships seriously (386a). Now the problem is approached from the opposite direction. We start from a quality we wish to instill, in this case bravery , and ask what sort of stories will produce it. Clearly, they will be stories that will cause the listeners not to fear death, and on this score all the mumbo jumbo in Homer about the sufferings of ghosts must go (386a-387b).49 A Homer who portrays death negatively is unfit for the ears of free men (387b). It is also important that the citizens bear misfortune with a stiff upper lip (387e). To be

Thetis undergoes no transformations in Homer, but (as Jowett and Campbell point out in their edition of the Republic (ad. loc ., vol. 3, p. 105), a fragment of Sophocles' Troilus (fr. 561 Nauck) indicates that she was commonly said by the poets to have performed changes of shape to escape her marriage to Peleus.

The verses specifically rejected are Il . 16.856-57, 20.64-65, 23.103-4, and Od . 10.495, 489-91, and 24.6-9, but it is clear that their exclusion implies the excision of most of the content of the Odyssey nekyias and of much of the moral core of the Iliad .

excised on this score are Achilles' mourning (Il . 24.9-21), Priam rolling about in the dung of his courtyard (Il . 22.414), Thetis lamenting her fate (Il . 18.54), and even Zeus's moments of sadness (Il . 22.168, 16.433), along with other portrayals of good men or gods overcome by emotion (388a-d)even by laughter (Il . 1.599) (389a). A few passages in which Homer portrays restraint are praised (389e), but Achilles' insults to Agamemnon (Il . 2.225-32) are rejected, along with praise of feasting in the Odyssey (Od . 9.5-11, 12.342), the entire episode of Hera's deception of Zeus (Il . 14.153-351), and the song of Ares and Aphrodite (Od . 8.266-366) (389e-390c).

The profit motive must be removed from the embassy to Achilles in book 9 of the Iliad , and Achilles may accept neither Agamemnon's nor Priam's gifts (390d-e). Various excesses of Achilleshis threat to Apollo at Il . 22.15, his fighting with the river god and going back on his promise to the Spercheios by giving his shorn hair to Patroclus's pyre, his treatment of the corpse of Hector and the human sacrifice at Patroclus' funeralare branded "not to be believed " (391a-b). Further strictures are laid on the moral content of acceptable stories about men (392a-c), but Homer is not directly involved in this discussion. A few pages later, however, the description of the universal poet able to imitate anything, who if he visits Plato's state will be honored profusely and immediately deported (398a), foreshadows the more sinister discussion in book 10.

Plato returns to Homer in book 10 in the context of general observations on mimetic art, of which Homer is said to be the founder (595b). The model of art-as-imitation developed here is familiar and need not be examined in detail. As Proclus and other Platonists realized, however, the blanket rejection of virtually all art forms as mimeticand, as such, far removed from realityis inconsistent with the conception of inspired (if irresponsible) poetry articulated in the Phaedrus . Yet, for purposes of this discussion, there seems to be no way out: Homer is to be banished along with the other artists on the grounds that they are merely generators of images "at the third remove from truth"

(599d). He is interrogated and found wanting because he did not (like Pythagoras) found a school, and because there is no further evidence that he had in his own time, or has now, any power to make men better (599d-600e). Stripped of their attractive poetic form, the poems are found to have no usable content (601b). Their appeal is to the emotions and not to reason, and their incitement to indulge in emotion is undesirable (602-607). One listens to them only at the risk of disturbing one's internal balance (608a-b).

This critique did much to shape the thinking of the later Platonists with regard to Homer. Clearly, the thrust of Socrates' arguments is a moral thrust from beginning to end, and esthetics are at issue only to the extent that they impinge upon moral issues. It is probably no coincidence that the passages singled out for condemnation include several of exceptionally rich and evocative language, such as the deception of Zeus and the song of Ares and Aphrodite. It is an unspoken corollary of the esthetics of book 10 of the Republic that the better a poem is (in terms of its appeal to the imagination and the emotions), the worse it is (in terms of its impact on one's internal order). The passages are rejected most obviously for the reason that they attribute to the gods motives and actions incompatible with Socrates' , but secondarily and implicitly because they are exceptionally attractive episodes.

The critique, then, invites response that will defend Homer first of all on the moral plane and secondarily on the esthetic plane. A defense on the level of esthetics will have to be compatible with the Platonic model of reality articulated in the Republic , with its absolute and transcendent realm of forms that constitute the "true" reality, situated beyond the material universe. On this score alone, any pre-Platonic approach to Homer (whether Pythagorean or other) will prove inadequate, for the simple reason that this model of reality begins with Plato. In the surviving literature, a complete defense on the esthetic level is to be found only in Proclus, but the central concepts on which that defense is built are anticipated by Numenius and Porphyry.

The passages rejected on moral grounds are most easily defended on those same moral grounds, by reasoning from the text of Homer and reaching conclusions different from those reached by Socrates. Thus the first tools of defensive commentators will be paraphrase and interpretation. The moral issues are in some cases far less obvious than Socrates would have them, and it is not beyond the powers of dialectical reasoning, for instance, to reduce to a minimum the responsibility of Athena for the crime of Pandarus.50 In such discussions, one is often reminded of the tendentious and playful sophistic tours de force by which, for instance, Helen was demonstrated to be innocent of causing the Trojan War.51 There was, by the time of the Neoplatonists, a long tradition of turning the moral world of Homer upside down, for a variety of reasons, both rhetorical and philosophical.

It is the second alternative open to the defender of Homer that will be

Cf. Proclus In Rep . 1.100-106.

E.g., Gorgias's Encomium on Helen .

of greatest concern in the present study, the mode of interpretation that we are accustomed to call "allegorical" in the context of antiquity. There is a general failure in antiquity to make a clear distinction between allegorical expression and allegorical interpretation. What we call "allegorical interpretation" in this context normally takes the form of a claim that an author has expressed himself "allegorically" in a given passage. This is summed up in the scholiasts' frequently repeated, compressed observation, "He says allegorically . . ." , by which they indicate that the passage in question says one thing, viewed superficially, but means another . There is never any suggestion that the goal of the commentator is anything but the elucidation of the intention or meaning of the author. Neither does the interpreter normally feel compelled to justify his claim that the text under consideration "says other things" than the obvious. His goal is to find the hidden meanings, the correspondences that carry the thrust of the text beyond the explicit. Once he has asserted their existence, he rarely feels the need to provide a theoretical substructure for his claims. If such a substructure is implied, it is often no more than the idea that a prestigious author is incapable of an incoherent or otherwise unacceptable statement, and that an offensive surface is thus a hint that a secondary meaning lurks beyond.

Thus our modern associations with "allegory" as an element of critical vocabulary are not particularly useful in this context. The ancient usage is broader and more difficult to define. The word has a specific definition in the sphere of rhetoric,52 but that definition has little relevance to the phenomenon under consideration here. A model of poetic expression in which multiple levels of meaning are possible exists at least as early as Plato. Ancient "critics" would normally make no distinction of kind between the observation that Homer says "Hera" but means "mist" i.e., that Homer is allegorical in the modern senseand the observation that Homer says that Athena tricked Pandarus into acting in a cowardly manner, but means only that he was a weak and cowardly character from whom such action was to be expected.

"Allegorical interpretation," then, can comprehend virtually the whole of what we call "interpretation," beyond mere parsing. Grube's claim that the Greek critics assumed that works of literature were able to communicate without intermediaries53 is thus in a sense justifiedthere

Ps.-Plutarch (De vit. Hom . 70) offers a definition linking it to irony and sarcasm.

See Preface, with n. 3, above.

does seem to be general agreement on the existence of a level of meaning that is obvious and often sufficient. There is also general agreement, however, that texts such as those of Homer "say other things" than the obvious (i.e., that they speak ), and that failure to apprehend one or more of these "other" meanings may often lead to failure to comprehend the author's full intention in the text.

The process of interpretation, thus conceived, clearly engages the reader in an active role. There are limits set by the text itself, and the Neoplatonists do not follow the Stoic lead that would seem explicitly to sanction the idea that the reader, not the text, determines the field of reference, and hence the scope of the meaning.54 Ultimately, however, all interpretation will prove unsatisfactory if we accept the model articulated by Socrates in the Protagoras 55 and give in to his final frustration that we can never directly interrogate the author and thus can have no hope of testing our conclusions about the actual meaning of a text that is conceived of as coextensive with the meaning (that is, the intention) of its author. Other models are, however, possibleincreasingly so when a text is no longer considered as a normal human utterance but as a piece of scripture, an utterance of a privileged sort that, whatever the frustrations and inadequacies of the process, must be interrogated for the sake of the important truths it is thought to contain.

It is difficult to say whether there was ever a time when the Iliad and Odyssey were not viewed as possessing this potential to reveal meanings beyond the obvious. What is demonstrable, however, is that the tradition of interpretation cultivated by the Neoplationists generated a model of the meaning of these poemsand of the structure of that meaningthat departed extraordinarily from the most obvious meaning, transforming the poems into revelations concerning the nature of the universe and the fate of souls. Since they never abandoned the idea that the meanings they

Plutarch (De aud. po . 34b) mentions with approval Chrysippus's observation that "what is good in a work must be transferred and carried over to similar things" . The examples given are trivial, and Chrysippus's remark may have been directed only toward the broader application of moral principles found in the poets. But the fact remains that Chrysippus was an allegorist, and the principle cited by Plutarch, however circumscribed its application, is perhaps the only point at which ancient literary theory bypasses the "intentional fallacy" and recognizes the active role of the reader in the creation of the meaning of the text. This role is expressed as the obligation on the reader's part to set the field of reference of the text and even to expand that field beyond what is given:
.

Plato Prot . 347e, discussed below in the Afterword.

found in the poems had been placed there deliberately by Homer, the image of the poet himself underwent a corresponding change. It is by a process such as this that the Homer antiquity saw reflected in Demodocus was transformed into the Homer of the title page of Chapman's Odyssey , assimilated to Tiresias.56

C. Homer as Theologos

That Homer, at least in Hellenistic usage, had virtually exclusive rights to the designation "the Poet" is well known,57 but when Porphyry casually refers to Homer as a term commonly used to refer to Orpheuswe seem to be in touch with claims on Homer's behalf to excellence of quite a different sort. In fact, however, Porphyry is relying upon the context of his remark to make us understand which is meant, and the suggestion that Homer is the

(i.e., "the Theologian") is but a gentle hint at most. Furthermore, the use of the word has good classical precedents that must be reviewed as background for the usage of the Neoplatonists.58

The earliest passage that prepares us for the application of the term to Homer is in Herodotus, who, though he does not in fact use the term,59 nevertheless provides an enlightened fifth-century testimony to the relationship between Homer's poetry and information about the divine. He is making the point that Greek culture had only relatively recently absorbed the basic elements of religion:

The Greeks later got this from the Pelasgians, and they were ignorant, so to speak, right up until yesterday or the day before about the origins of the individual gods and whether they were all eternal and what sort of shapes they had, for it is my belief that Homer and Hesiod were four hundred years older than myself and no more. These were the ones who provided the Greeks with an account of the origins of the gods and gave the gods their names and defined their honors and skills and indicated shapes for them. The poets who are

For a summary of ancient passages attributing magic powers to Homer, see Cumont, Recherches , pp. 4-8.

See A.M. Harmon, "The Poet ," for a history of the usage.

Porph. De ant . 32. Cf. L. Ziehen, "," whom I have followed in part.

Neither nor occurs in Herodotus.

said to have lived before these men in fact, in my opinion, lived after them.60

This peculiar conception of Homer as a source, a creator, at least in terms of the Greek tradition, rather than a transmitter of information, is rather unsatisfactory from our perspective. Herodotus seems to be recreating Homer in his own imageas many ancient critics were in fact to doas a sort of ethnographic curiosity seeker who sought out foreign and august sources of wisdom, which he then brought home and presented to a Greek audience in a unique new Greek form. The extravagant author of the essay on Homer attributed to Plutarch would only have to forget the Pelasgians and the Egyptians in order to move from this conception of Homer's creative role to a vision of Homer as an absolute source, a purely creative imagination.

Plato, likewise, is innocent of the term , though in an important passage in the Republic , discussed above, he refers to .61 The point Socrates wants to make here is that the basic patterns the poets are to follow in their mythmaking are the concern of the city founders.62 These are grouped under "the basic patterns of theology"
.
He clearly conceives, then, that the earlier tradition allowed its poets to be creatively mythopoeic. Either they were not bound by any basic rules or patterns, or those they followed were mistaken. His desire to impose correct patterns and norms in order to ensure the educational value of the poetry produced is consistent with his general mistrust of poetic inspiration.63

Aristotle lists "theological philosophy" among the types of "contemplative philosophy" (, Metaph . E 1026a19), and his reference to "those very ancient people who lived long before the pres-

(Herod. Hist . 2.53-54).

Rep . 2.379a. The passage is also discussed by Victor Goldschmidt ("Th-ologia"), who works from it toward a prehistory of the term .

(Rep. 2.379a).

Cf. Weinstock, "Platonische Homerkritik," pp. 124-25, and Tate, "Plato and Allegorical Interpretation," pp. 147-51.

ent age and were the first to theologize"64 probably does, as L. Ziehen asserts,65 take us back to Homer and to the other early poets. The possibility should also be taken into account, however, that Aristotle may, in fact, be referring to the early interpreters of the poets rather than to the poets themselves, for was probably already ambiguous.66 In general, Aristotle uses the term to speak of the early cosmologists as a class,67 but by the time of Cicero, it was used comfortably for such interpretive writers on divine matters as the Euhemerists and even the grammarians. Clearly, these are authors who worked from the primary and clarified the information on the divine transmitted through them. A passage from Strabo, quoted on page 26 below, indicates the necessary connection between theology as a field of philosophical inquiry and the myths and poems of the early tradition, which constituted the primary source material.

The distinction between "theologizing" by writing poetry in which information about the gods was presented in a more-or-less veiled form and "theologizing" by interpreting the poetry of the ancients in such a way as to bring out these meanings is, in fact, one that seems often to have been blurred in antiquity. From our perspective there is a world of difference between deliberate poetic allegory and the interpretation as allegory of existing poetry. By the fourth century, however, the verb and its complex of related words could refer to either activity.68 Precisely the same divided usage is found in Porphyry over six centuries later. 69

(Metaph . A 983b28-29).

Ziehen, "," col. 2031.

Cf. Ziehen, "." Particularly if we retain the words , in 983b, which were bracketed by Crist, it is tempting to believe that Aristotle has in mind the early interpreters, when he says about the "ancient people" just mentioned,
.
Both the first statement and the second ("They made the oath of the gods 'water,' whereas the poets themselves said 'Styx.'") might well represent Aristotle's idea of early theologizing from the poets, since neither interpretation is obvious from the passages in question without further commentary. The verb itself, however, may be an indication that these "ancients" expressed themselves in poetic form.

See Ross's comments on Metaph . A 983b29.

Cf. Ziehen, "," cols. 2031-32.

See below, p. 29.

Both Herodotus and Plato clearly view the mythopoeic "theologizing" of the poets as creative. Plato would go further and describe it as subjective and arbitrary. Neither suggests that the poets had any need to veil their teachings, or that the narrative surface of the poems is deliberately designed to be ambiguous or misleading. There is reason to believe that Plato had considerable sensitivity to the Homeric poems as complex verbal artifacts, but, unlike most later Greek philosophers, he is disinclined to make his points by appeal to earlier authority.70 Parallel with this reluctance is Socrates' genuine hostility to confusing and disrupting the dialectical process by inserting discussions of poetic texts.71 Plato is certainly aware of the possibilities opened up by the interpretation of epic according to "second meanings,"72 yet he seldom feels the need to enter into that activity. The obvious reason for this is that Plato is himself mythopoeic: when he abandons dialectic to "theologize," he does so not by interpreting existing texts or stories but by generating new myths. In any case, neither of our important sources from the fifth and early fourth centuries emphasizes the complexity of the structure of meaning of the verbal artifact, though Plato acknowledges that his contemporaries did so.73

It was no doubt in the early Stoa that the emphasis shifted, but the process must for the most part be reconstructed from relatively late evidence.74 Along with the Stoa's emphasis on the poets went an impulse to interpret the received myths "allegorically." This is the context in which the impulse to understand the qualities of a poetic text by reference to things entirely outside that text became prevalent, along with an inclination to view the myths as cryptic expressions of some further reality that the poets, for whatever reasons, chose to hint at rather than express directly.75 In the process, as Phillip DeLacy puts it, "poetic myth replaces philosophical example"76 and is forced to fit broader referents than the poets intended. Chrysippus is explicit that "what is good in a poem

He nevertheless refers to Homer as an authority sufficiently often that Proclus is able to argue (In Rep . 1.163-72) that such appeal is characteristic.

Plato Prot . 347c-348a.

(Rep . 2.378d).

Aside from the passage mentioned in n. 72 above, see the Protagoras (316d, discussed below) on poetry as a "screen" for sophistry.

This evidence is assembled in Phillip DeLacy's excellent study, "Stoic Views of Poetry," which remains the definitive treatment of Stoic poetics.

Ibid., pp. 259, 267.

Ibid., p. 267.

must be interpreted as applying to things of the same kind beyond the limits of the poem."77 Allegorical interpretation existed before the Stoics, but it was through their prestige that its influence became pervasive in Greek thought, culminating in such allegorical commentaries on Homer as those of Crates of Mallos and the other Pergamene grammarians, the rivals of Aristarchus and the Alexandrians. These commentaries reach us only in fragments, but the Heraclitus whose Homeric Allegories survives largely intact is their direct heir.78 This shift of emphasis reflected in the Stoic attitude toward myth and poetry is a crucially important one for the development of the conception of the meaning of Homer that concerns us, yet properly speaking it forms only part of the prehistory of that conception.79

Returning to the evolution of the term and the related vocabulary, we find in Strabo, early in the first century A.D ., a capsule summary of the Stoic conception of theology that had its roots in the fourth and third centuries B.C . He has just indicated in no uncertain terms that he himself dislikes myths:

Every discussion of the gods [i.e., all theology] is built upon the examination of opinions and myths, since the ancients hinted at their physical perceptions about things and always added a mythic element to their discussions. It is not an easy thing to solve all the riddles correctly, but when the whole mass of mythically expressed material is placed before you, some of it in agreement and some in contradiction with the rest, then you might more easily be able to form from it an image of the truth.80

It is easy to see from this fascinating passage how the verb could simultaneously refer to the poets and to those who interpret them. The text is doubly valuable because Strabo professes himself hostile to

Ibid., p. 267. The source for Chrysippus's observation is Plutarch De aud. po . 34b. See n. 54 above for the text.

See Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship , pp. 237-46.

Aside from DeLacy, cited above, see Buffire's extensive treatment of Stoicizing allegory of Homer, Mythes d'Homre , pp. 137-54, and passim.

(Geog . 10.3.23 [C474]). The passage is cited in part by Ziehen, "," col. 2032. The attitude expressed is close to that of Plutarch (cf. Robert Flacelire, "La Thologie selon Plutarque").

the whole process. His is a practical and scientific intellect with no taste for ambiguities and contradictions.

This is not to say that he is bereft of literary sensitivity, or that the Iliad and Odyssey fall beneath his scorn when he describes himself as "not in the least a lover of myths."81 He makes this clear in the first book of the Geography , where he extracts geographical information from Homer in an intelligent and sympathetic way, simultaneously rejecting interpretations of the poems that depart into allegory and demonstrating a strikingly modern critical acumen. The demands he makes upon the text are quite reasonable ones from our perspective, and he is refreshingly free of the conviction that Homer is omniscient.

In the passage quoted above, however, Strabo is specifically concerned with the recovery of "theological" informationa class of knowledge with which he is ill at ease. There are certain truths that can be approached only by an attack upon the forbidding mass of lies, half-truths, and contradictions bequeathed by antiquity, for these are the primary source material in the field of theology. The process of sifting the "opinions and myths" of the ancientsand particularly of Homerfor kernels of truth about the gods is as a whole, then, one undertaken not only by idle dreamers but by the most practical of men as well.

Porphyry is heir to the double meaning of the term and related vocabulary, but he is likewise heir to a somewhat different usage. This occurs as early as Aristotle and designates a body of poetry from which we might want to exclude Homer. It is clear from what has already been said that the , from the fifth century B.C . on, are the early poets and their interpreters. But which poets? It is clear enough to us that there is a difference of kind between the Iliad and Odyssey on one hand and the Theogony on the other. The difference between the works that fit these two categories and the Orphic poems is even more striking. The word , in some of its earliest occurrences, seems more obviously appropriate to Orphic and mantic poets, and perhaps to Hesiod, than to Homer, and throughout the tradition , without explanation, is most likely to refer to Orpheus.

A fragment of Philolaus (a Pythagorean contemporary of Socrates) preserved by Clement of Alexandria and attested by Athenaeus, and perhaps even by Plato in the Cratylus , asserts: "The ancient theologians and seers bear witness that the soul has been yoked to the body as a pun-

, plural to agree with an "editorial we" (Geog . 10.3.23 [C474]).

ishment, and buried in it as in a tomb."82 Philolaus is unique among the early "primary" sources for Pythagoreanism in that, at least in part, the surviving fragments attributed to him offer some evidence of the pre-Platonic traditions of Pythagoreanism.83 Here, he links the in question with as witnesses to the relationship of soul and body. One might be inclined to assume that all of this must have absolutely nothing to do with Homerindeed, poetry is unmentioned, not to say epic poetry. However, the implied etymology ( from ) became very much attached to Homer and was used to link the conception of the body as the "tomb" of the soul to the Iliad .84 Even if it is not as early as the historical Philolaus, the fragment is unlikely to be post-Hellenistic, and the important point in the present context is that it links the quite possibly including Homerwith mantic poetry in support of a doctrine concerning the soul.

Aristotle also sometimes uses , for the poets of the mystical traditions. "Hesiod and his school and all the theologians" (

Metaph . B 1000a9) may or may not include Homer. Here, Aristotle is merely bringing up a group of mythic creation accounts in order to reject them, and Homer, by reason of his subject matter, may well be spared. Likewise, the expression "the theologians who generate everything from night"

Metaph . L 1071b27) again points directly to the Orphics, not to Homer.

That a distinction of kind had indeed been made in the fifth century between Homer and the Orphic poets (though Hesiod, because of the nature of his subject matter, might fall on either side of the line) is dramatically attested in the Protagoras , where the pompous sophist defends the hoary antiquity of his profession by insisting that there have always been sophists, but that the early practitioners of sophistry, "fearing the jealousy it provokes, made a screen and masked it, some with poetry,

(Philolaus fr. 14 D-K).

See Walter Burkert, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism , pp. 218-38, for the evidence for the existence of Philolaus and for his authorship of an account of Pythagoreanism known to Aristotle.

This is one of the most frequently encountered of the etymological explanations of Homer that have been traced to Pythagoras. For the literature, see De-latte, Littrature pythagoricienne , p. 132, and for the later evolution of the (non-historic) etymology, C. J. de Vogel, "The Soma-Sema Formula: its Function in Plato and Plotinus Compared to Christian Writers."

like Homer, Hesiod, and Simonides, some with initiations and oracles: Orpheus, Musaeus and their associates."85 The breakdown of categories such as these and the indiscriminate lumping of Homer with the rest of the early hexameter poets as with cosmological and mystical pretensions is one of the crucial developments in the history of the interpretation of Homer.86

Porphyry uses the term eight times in his essay on the cave of the nymphs in the Odyssey .87 Six of these occurrences are in the plural and refer broadly and rather vaguely to the poetic and philosophical traditions.88 The occurrences of the word in the singular refer specifically to Orpheus (De ant . 68.6) and to Homer (De ant . 78.15-16). A striking comparison to these instances of is found in Philo, who uses the term to refer to Moses in a context where, on the one hand, obscure symbolism is being discussed, and on the other, the very strong implication is that Moses is .89 Though Porphyry does not make this claim for Homer, it is clear that his use of the term has affinities with that of Philo.

The development of this complex of words, then, is not at all what one might have expected. The earliest instances of point to an already ambiguous meaning spanning the semantic fields "poet" (with sometimes, but not always, the suggestion that allegorical mystical or

(Plato Prot . 316d).

Numenius, rather surprisingly, uses and (fr. 23.5, 16) in a perfectly neutral way, referring simply to the Athenians' (and more specifically Euthyphro's) thoughts about the gods. Our word "theology" would be adequate to translate his , whereas the word in Plato would require at least a footnote. Plotinus uses the word only once (Enn . 3.5.8.21), referring to "priests and theologians" who interpret myths in a certain way.

To look only at that essay constitutes an arbitrary sampling, but one with obvious relevance to the concerns of this study. Further analysis is rendered difficult by the absence of concordances to the works of Porphyry.

The at De ant . 61.5, 66.24, and 77.22 could be virtually any poets, interpreters of poetry, or philosophers. Those of 71.17 must, on the evidence of Numenius, fr. 35, include Homer. Those of De ant . 62.10 refer back to the unknown author of a hymn to Apollo as well as Pythagoras, Empedocles, and Plato. Those of 76.23 are difficult to identify, though the Buffalo editors of the essay point to Pherecydes, fr. B6 D-K. All references to the essay are to page and line of Nauck's text.

Philo De vit. Mos . 2.115.

cosmological poetry is meant) and "interpreter of poetry." This ambiguity remains with the complex of words as they acquire a yet broader field of reference to include, along with virtually the whole of archaic poetry and its interpretation, an important branch of philosophy. For Porphyry, the philosophy in question is specifically the tradition of Platonic dogmatic theology inextricably bound up with "Pythagoreanism." Porphyry's location of Homer at the center of this field represents a substantial evolution of thought with regard to the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey , involving the loss of any perception of the difference of kind between his narrative poetry and the cosmological and mystical hexameters attached to the traditions labeled "Hesiod" and "Orpheus." That Porphyry, who was the first of the Neoplatonists to declare open war on the Christians, should thus treat Homer in somewhat the same way Philo had treated Moses suggests a defensive posture adopted by a fighter who knew his enemy well.

At the end of the ancient Neoplatonic tradition, with Proclus, Hermias, and then Olympiodorus, the complex of words retains much of its earlier meaning. can mean "theology" in the modem sense, a category of philosophy, with no hint of any connection with poetry.90 , at the same time, can refer to the poetic activities of the early hexameter poets, including Pisander91 and Orpheus.92 Proclus often uses this complex of words in his defense of Homer and likewise in the Timaeus commentary, where the clearly include Homer.93 Proclus appears to broaden the field of reference of the complex to include still more mystical writings, with no apparent sense that, in his usage, the term suits Homer less and less well. In the commentary on Euclid, after quoting the Chaldaean Oracles and Orpheus in the context of a discussion of the circular movement within the universe and the "triadic god," he observes: "Thence have those who are wise and most initiated into the theological given him his name."94 The unmentioned epithet in question is probably "trismegistos" and the reference would thus

E.g., Proclus In Alc . 317.18, where theology is contrasted with ethics.

(Olymp. In Phaed . 172.3-4).

(Proclus In Tim . 1.427.20).

See ch. 5D, with notes 63 and 64, below.

(Proclus In Euc . 155.26-156.1).

be to the tradition that produced the Hermetic corpus.95 There is little doubt that Homer remains central to the group Proclus qualified as the , as attested by such expressions as "the ancient theology according to Homer," in the Euclid commentary.96

Hermias is the only author in the group in whom I have found the singular used in isolation to refer to Homer,97 much in the manner of Porphyry. His understanding of the term does not differ conspicuously from that of his contemporary Proclus, and his include all the early poets and a variety of other authors. He explicitly equates the procedure of the myths of Plato with that in use among the early ,98 though he may, like Proclus, also be sensitive to important differences. When he refers to "the theologians and the inspired poets and Homer," the series appears to represent a centering process: the inspired poets are central to the group "theologians," and Homer in turn stands at their center.99 Numerous other references make it clear that the group includes Orpheus, the Orphics, Hesiod, and Plato.100 His understanding of the structure of meaning of early epic, along with the other material mentioned, may stand for that of all the late Platonists: "Mythology is a kind of theology," and the characteristic mistake of the uninitiated is "to fail to grasp with wisdom the intention of the mythoplasts, but rather to follow the apparent sense."101

D. The Pythagoreans

It is no doubt significant that our earliest indications of the existence of an allegorical understanding of Homer are associated with southern Italy and can be dated to a period very shortly after Pythagoreanism be-

See Morrow's notes to his translation of the commentary, ad loc. : p. 132, n. 129, and p. 38, n. 88.

(Proclus In Euc . 141.24-25).

In Phdr . 151.7, 11.

In Phdr . 233.21.

(In Phdr . 77-10-11).

E.g., In Phdr . 154.15; 247.20; 148.18; 142.10, 14; 193.6.

(In Phdr . 73.18-21). Cf. Proclus In Rep . 1.176 on Socrates' "mistake" in the Phaedrus .

came established there. A Porphyrian scholion on the battle of the gods in Iliad 20102 explains the battle as a physical, then a moral allegory, and continues: "This kind of answer [to those who attack Homer] is very old, dating from Theagenes of Rhegium, who was the first to write about Homer."103 Several other ancient sources, none referring specifically to allegorical interpretation, confirm that Theagenes was an early Homer scholar and make it possible to fix his floruit around 525 B.C .104 Among the modern scholars who have examined the problem, Armand Delatte105 suspected Pythagorean influence on Theagenes, but Flix Buffire106 was reluctant to believe that the Pythagoreans were concerned with the sort of physical allegory attributed to Theagenes by Porphyry. The most recent scholar to look into the question is Marcel Detienne,107 whose conclusions are convincing. He argues that we have good reason to believe that Theagenes was a grammarian and hence unlikely to be the creator of the allegorical method. Furthermore, the Porphyrian scholion quoted above seems to attribute to Theagenes the simultaneous creation of both physical and moral allegoryan unlikely accomplishment for any one individual, much less a grammarian. Theagenes, Detienne concludes, was simply a grammarian who wrote on Homer and who may or may not have been influenced by the Pythagoreans who were undoubtedly present in Rhegium in his time: he simply mentioned the modes of interpretation he knew to be in use, which included physical and moral allegory. The important point to be gained from our meagre information on Theagenes is that both of these modes of allegory date from the period of the first Pythagoreans, ca. 525 B.C .

Given, then, that moral and physical allegory are at least as old as Pythagoreanism and that the contributions of Neopythagoreanism to the mystical allegorical interpretation of Homer articulated and transmitted by the Neoplatonists are quite substantial,108 one must ask to

B scholion on Il . 20.67; Schol. in Il ., ed. Dindorf, vol. 4, P. 231; see Porph. Quaest hom ., ed. Schrader, vol. 1, pp. 240-41.

(Porph. Quaest. hom ., ed. Schrader, vol. 1, p. 241, lines 10-11).

If the attack on Homer goes back to the poet's own time, then the apologia for Homer must be of comparable age (see above, n. 43). On the dating of Theagenes, cf. Buffire, Mythes d'Homre , pp. 103-4.

Delatte, Etudes sur la littrature pythagoricienne , p. 115.

Buffire, Mythes d'Homre .

Detienne, Homre, Hsiode, et Pythagore , pp. 65-67.

See ch. 2B below on Numenius.

what extent the latter mode of exegesis may have depended on early Pythagorean interpretation. Buffire minimized the importance of early Pythagoreanism in the evolution of the allegorical tradition and placed great emphasis on the late second centurythe period of Numeniusas the cradle of the mystical allegory of Homer, which for him is primarily Neoplatonic.109 Other scholars have reacted strongly against his formulation, however, and have argued eloquently for the archaic roots of the mystical allegory of Homer in early Pythagorean ism.110

The traditionor rather traditionsof ancient Pythagoreanism are notoriously difficult to reconstruct. The school's emphasis on secrecy prevented the general dissemination of a Pythagorean literature and favored the production of pseudepigrapha. The nature of the evidence is such that scholarly consensus on the content of the teaching of Pythagoras himself and of Pythagoreans before the time of Plato is a remote goal. In spite of this, substantial advances have been made in this century, and

Cf. Buffire in his edition of Heraclitus's Allegories , p. xxix: "l'exgse mystique et pythagoricienne, dont on ne trouve aucune trace prcise avant le temps de Plutarque." At the same time, he acknowledges the Pythagorean sources of Porphyry's essay on the cave of the nymphs (Mythes d'Homre , pp. 423-24), though it is clear he thinks of Neopythagoreanism as a phenomenon created by the second century after Christ.

In a study that appeared simultaneously with Buffire's, Jrme Carcopino denounced the attribution to the Neoplatonists of the creation of mystical allegorical iconography and imagery relating to Homer: "Elles remontent tout au moins jusqu'aux gloses que, bien avant notre re, des Pythagoriciens avaient r-diges" (De Pythagore aux aptres , p. 199). Robert Flacelire, in an otherwise largely positive review of Buffire's work, questioned the late date for the beginnings of mystical allegory and remarked, "je croirais volontiers, pour ma part, que le pythagorisme du v et du iv sicle avant J-C, aussi hostile que Platon h Hombre, a pu, tout comme Platon lui-mme, utiliser des vers d'Homre ses propres fins" (Revue des tudes grecques 70 [1957], p. 261). He nevertheless went on to affirm that Buffire was no doubt correct in emphasizing the importance and originality of the Neoplatonic tradition of interpretation that begins with Porphyry and whose sources cannot be traced back with certainty beyond Numenius. Boyanc, introducing Detienne's study, is clearly referring to Buffire's work when he observes discreetly, "C'est tort, croyons-nous avec M. Detienne, qu'un livre important, paru rcemment, n'a pas accord une attention suffisante a l'ancien pythagorisme" (Boyanc in Hombre, Hsiode et Pythagore , p. 7). Finally, Detienne makes it clear throughout his Homre, Hsiode et Pythagore that he considers Buffire's emphasis wrong and that the mystical allegory of Homer, along with the other modes of allegory, had Pythagorean roots. He views these traditions as continuous from the sixth century B.C . to the end of paganism and beyond.

it is possible at least to propose a model to account for the development of Pythagoreanism and to examine the evidence for an early Pythagorean interpretation of Homer in its light.

Shortly after the pioneering work of Delatte,111 the seminal study of Erich Frank appeared,112 the thrust of which was to locate many of the discoveries of "scientific" Pythagoreanism in the early fourth century and to demonstrate the dependence of much of what has been transmitted as Pythagoreanism on Platonism, and, more specifically, on the generation of the successors of Plato, Speusippus and Xenocrates. Frank's focus was on the natural sciences, but Walter Burkert's more recent synthesis113 has extended the same principles and concluded that much of what we have been accustomed to call Pythagoreanism is simply dogmatic Platonism, and that the Platonization of the Pythagorean tradition began far earlier than Eduard Zeller and the other historians of the last century dreamed:

One might . . . define later Pythagoreanism as Platonism with the Socratic and dialectic element amputated. . . . Scholars have shown in different ways that Neoplatonism is quite closely dependent on the Old Academy, and "Pythagoreanism" too belongs in this category. It is also basically Platonism, existing at a time when Plato (as interpreted in Pythagorean fashion) had lost his position in the Academic school. Later, neo-Pythagoreanism converges, in the philosophical realm, with Neoplatonism.114

It is in the light of this understanding of Pythagorean tradition that any evidence for a pre-Platonic Pythagorean interpretation of Homer must be viewed.

Littrature pythagoricienne (1915).

Frank, Plato und die sogenannten Pythagoreer .

Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism , first (German) edition, 1962.

Burkert, Lore and Science , p. 96. For purposes of the present study, the embroiled question of whether the dogmatic Platonism expounded by the Neoplatonists can be traced to a secret teaching of Plato himself, or only to the generation of his successors, need not be answered. I have taken Letter 7 as an authentic document able to throw light on Plato's attitude toward the written word. This does not, however, imply a belief in a transmitted secret teaching traceable to Plato himself, and anyone disposed to believe that the existence of such a teaching is established should consult the sensitive and perceptive analysis of E. N. Tigerstedt in Interpreting Plato . Tigerstedt accepts, however, the principle that the Early Academy was dogmatic (p. 105) and the evidence assembled by Frank and Burkert makes it probable that much of what we receive as "Pythagoreanism" can be traced to that context.

What, then, is the evidence for an archaic Pythagorean exegesis of Homer? The testimonia that indicate a concern with Homer on the part of the early Pythagoreans were examined by Delatte115 and have more recently been reviewed by Detienne.116 The conclusions that may be reached are disappointing, and although it is highly probable that some of the dozens of interpretations of Homeric verses attributed to Pythagoras are in fact pre-Platonic, there is no single interpretive idea that can be dated with certainty to that period.

Most credible as early contributions are probably those "Pythagorean" interpretations that suggest a ritual use of the poems. Excerpts from Homer and Hesiod were sung for cathartic purposes, to "tranquilize" the soul."117 Also credible is the attribution to early Pythagoreanism of a moralizing interpretation of the Iliad as a whole that made it the story of the disastrous consequences of the lack of self-control of a single man (Paris).118

Overall, the significant thing that emerges from the testimonia is the emphasis that early Pythagoreanism placed on Homer and Hesiod, as revealed in the choice of these bodies of poetry for incantation over such more obvious choices as Orpheus and Musaeus.119 In spite of the anecdote of Pythagoras's trip to Hades, where he is said to have seen Homer and Hesiod undergoing punishment for slandering the gods,120 it does indeed seem that early Pythagoreanism was less hostile to the Homeric poems than were other religious and philosophical movements of the sixth century B.C . Both Porphyry and Iamblichus pass on the tradition that Pythagoras was the student of the Homeridae of Samos,121 and there is little doubt that in early Pythagoreanism the Iliad and Odyssey were indeed used as sacred booksas sources of both magical incantations and moral exemplaat a time when Ionian thinkers such as Xenophanes were denouncing Homer as the representative of an outdated and misleading account of the divine. Pierre Boyanc has pointed out that an

Delatte, Littrature pythagoricienne , pp. 109-36.

Detienne, Hombre, Hsiode et Pythagore . See also Boyanc, Le Culte des Muses chez les philosophes grecs , pp. 121-31.

Porph. Vit. Pyth . 32; cf. Iambl. De vit. Pyth . 111 and 113.

Iambl. De vit. Pyth . 42.

Cf. Boyanc, Culte des Muses , pp. 120-22.

Cf. Delatte, Littrature pythagoricienne , p. 109, n. 4, for numerous testimonia to the legend.

Porph. Vit. Pyth . 1.2; Iambl. De vit. Pyth . 9.11. Cf. Delatte, Littrature pythagoricienne , pp. 116-117 and Detienne, Homre, Hsiode et Pythagore , pp. 13-14.

attested cult of the Muses in early Pythagoreanism is an appropriate symbol of their bond with Homer.122

The relationship of this use of Homer in early Pythagoreanism to a transmitted Pythagorean interpretation of Homer is at best obscure. There is no evidence that a systematic early Pythagorean exegesis of Homer, in whole or in part, was ever committed to writing,123 and the oral tradition is impossible to reconstruct.

It is nevertheless clear that, from an early period, Pythagoreanism was divided into two sects, one, commonly called the Akousmatikoi, that was more traditional and placed its emphasis on the original revelation and on ritual, and another, the Mathematikoi, that was mathematical and scientific in orientation.124 The first of these sects was the vehicle for the transmission of many short sayings, or , which come down as an important element of Pythagoreanism, though generally it is impossible to date individual even approximately. Some have a Homeric flavor or are in some way relevant to Homer,125 and it is quite possible that whatever elements might have survived of a primitive Pythagorean exegesis of Homer might have done so in this form. Some few shreds of Homer exegesis are also to be traced to Aristotle's account of Pythagoreanism, and others can be traced to various early sources that, though not unimpeachable, may well represent the early tradition of Pythagoreanism.

Boyanc, Culte des Muses , p. 241.

Diogenes Laertius's puzzling discussion of the numerous "simultaneous" Pythagorases (8.46-48) includes a "doctor who wrote about squill [or "Scylla" or "hernia"] and put together some things about Homer."

The other Pythagorases mentioned all seem to have something to do with the traditions regarding the founder of the sect, and it is possible that we have in this observation a hint that such an early Pythagorean interpretive essay existed. The thread, however, is a weak one. The Derveni papyrus (see above, Preface, n. 6) demonstrates that interpretive material in a tradition closely related to the Pythagorean was available in written form by the early part of the fourth century B.C .

See Delatte, Littrature pythagoricienne , pp. 29-31, and Burkert, Lore and Science , pp. 193-206.

E.g., the that held that one must hold one's place in battle so as to be wounded only in the front (Iambl. De vit. Pyth . 18.85; cf. Burkert, Lore and Science , p. 172, with references). This is taken up by Ps.-Plutarch (De vit. Hom . 198) and shown to be illustrated in Homer, but there is no suggestion that the tradition was thought to be Pythagorean by the author of the essay.

Homer is credited by these Pythagoreanizing interpretations with having described the music of the spheres126 and metempsychosis,127 and having presented a personification of the monad in Proteus, "who contains the properties of all things just as the monad contains the combined energies of all the numbers."128 He is said to have held such Pythagorean doctrines as the existence of a lunar paradise,129 and his Sirens are transformed into the benevolent Sirens of the Pythagoreanizing myth of Er in the Republic .130 This last instance is a striking one, illustrative of the central position of the dialogues of Plato in the establishment both of the canonical versions of "Pythagorean" myths and of the connections between those myths and Homer.

The use of the myths of Plato to explicate the myths of Homer and the idea that the two bodies of storytelling had like structures of meaning were perhaps the most important developments in the history of the reading of Homer in Platonic circles. The process at work in the early development of the interpretation of the myth of the Sirens was essentially the same as that which emerged more clearly in the second-century interpretation of the cave of the nymphs in the Odyssey by the Neopythagorean Numenius, whose "exegesis" of that passage was in all probability included entirely in a commentary on the myth of Er.131

In practice, the myths of Plato became central texts of a "primitive Pythagoreanism" that was little more than dogmatic Platonism disguised under the name of Pythagorasa tradition rejected by the skeptical Academy, which Numenius attacked bitterly. Numenius would have fully assimilated the conception of Pythagoras and his doctrine elaborated by the successors of Plato. In proposing to demonstrate that the doctrines of Plato and Pythagoras were identical, he was simply restoring a primitive unity (though one with no necessary connection with Plato himself if we view dogmatic Platonism as the product of his suc-

Heraclit. Quaest. hom . 12.2-13.1. Cf. Delatte, Littrature pythagoricienne , p. 116.

Schol in Il ., ed. Erbse, vol. 4, PP-310-11. Ps.-Plut. De vit. Hom . 122. Eust. In Il . 1090.31-33. Cf. Delatte, Littrature pythagoricienne , p. 127

(Iambl. Theol. arith . 7.20-23).

Porph. ap. Stob. Ecl . 1.41.61.

Plut. Quaest. conv . 9.14.6.145d-e. See also the Certamen (38) and the opening remarks in Eustathius's introduction to his commentary on the Iliad (translated by C. J. Herington in "Homer: a Byzantine Perspective").

See ch. 2B below.

cessors). In going beyond Pythagoras to demonstrate the same doctrine in Homer, he may well have been working in a Pythagorean tradition as old as the sixth century B.C ., but which had been so radically reworked in the fourth and third centuries that little, if any, of its pre-Platonic content was or is perceptible. Similarly, the interpretations of the passages on the Sirens and on the arrows of Apollo that generated the music of the sphere of the sun were doubtless articulated by thinkersPlutarch is an excellent case in pointthoroughly steeped in Platonism. Some, identifying their positions more emphatically with those of dogmatic Platonism, may, along with Numenius, have called themselves, or have been called, , but the myths of Plato loomed large among their sources and there would have been little in their Pythagoreanism traceable to sources earlier than those myths.

Beyond the specific passages in the scholia and the surviving interpretive literature that have been claimed as illustrations of Pythagorean influence on the early interpretation of Homer, there is the larger question of the sources of etymology as an interpretive tool.

Commentators on the meaning of the Homeric poems began earlycertainly before Plato's timeto focus upon individual words (whether words of particular difficulty or simply words of particular importance) and to explain them by analogy to words of similar sound. This was done in a manner utterly devoid of historical perspective and without any perception of the actual phonetic principles according to which words evolve, and hence appears invariably arbitrary and naive. Nevertheless, it is a mode of explication as old as Homer himself.132 Institutionalized in the encyclopedic Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville (ca. 570-636), moreover, it knew a tremendous vogue throughout the Middle Ages.

Since its roots are demonstrably Homeric, there is little point in searching elsewhere for the originator of this exegetic technique, but it has nevertheless been suggested that the early Pythagoreans may have made a substantial contribution to the considerable body of interpretation by etymology transmitted in the scholia and elsewhere. The Cratylus of Plato is the ancient work we might hope would throw light on the question of the sources of pre-Platonic etymological thought, yet

See, among others, the passage on Odysseus's name (Od . 19.407-9), which Homer derives from , providing a story to confirm the etymology, and that on Scylla, which he derives from (Od . 12.85-86). Cf. also Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship , pp. 4-5, and references, p. 4, n. 5.

here, as so often, Plato is frustratingly vague regarding the background of the ideas he presents. In an important article Pierre Boyanc has analyzed the indications given for the source of the theory lying behind Socrates' etymological speculations in the Cratylus .133 Using the principle asserted by Frank that only Aristotelian testimony about early Pythagoreanism is likely to reflect a tradition anterior to the Platonizing Pythagoreanism traceable to the generation of Speusippus, Boyanc arrives at the conclusion that it is authentic Pythagoreanism that we perceive dimly behind the position adopted ironicallyand yet seriouslyby Socrates, a position that includes the combination "d'une mthode d'exgse des noms de dieux et d'une philosophie religieuse."134 This idea is substantially developed by Detienne,135 who places emphasis on Proclus's observation that Pythagoras shared the opinion, expressed by Cratylus in the dialogue, that names are established by an infallible nomothete and so correspond to the natures of things.136 Proclus links this principle to Pythagoras by means of an representing the sage questioned by a disciple: "What is the wisest of beings?Number. What is the second in wisdom?He who established the names of things."137 The same saying is reported in slightly different form by Iamblichus.138

Examined in isolation, however, the passage in Proclus is an excellent example of the kind of thought that later Neoplatonism attributed to Pythagoras. Proclus goes on to explain the :

When [Pythagoras] speaks of the name-giver he hints at soul, which itself came to be from mind. With respect to things themselves soul is not primary, as mind is, but rather it contains images of them and detailed, essential which are like statues of things themselves, just as names mimic the noetic forms that are numbers. And so being for all things comes from mind, which knows itself and is wise, while naming comes from soul mimicking mind. So, says Pythagoras, naming is not random but comes from that which contemplates mind and the nature of things and therefore names exist by nature .139

Boyanc, "La 'Doctrine d'Euthyphron' dans le Cratyle. "

Boyanc, "Doctrine d'Euthyphron," p. 175.

Detienne, Homre, Hsiode et Pythagore , pp. 72-76.

Proclus In Crat . 16:5.25-6.19.

(Proclus In Crat . 16:5.27-6.2).

Iambl. De vit. Pyth . 18.82.

(Proclus In Crat . 16:6.10-19).

The conception of ideal numbers expressed here is decidedly Platonic, not Pythagorean,140 and the "hypostases" mind and soul belong to the vocabulary of Plotinian Neoplatonism. Yet Proclus claims to be expounding the thought of Pythagoras by explaining it in terms of thinking that postdated the historical Pythagoras by two to eight centuries. What for us can be nothing but a grotesque anachronism, however, was for him sound and time-honored philosophical method.141

The fact that the later Neoplatonists attributed an anachronistic conceptual model to Pythagoras does not, however, entirely obscure the fact that this gives us substantial reason to suspect that early Pythagoreanism understood there to be a real and explicable relationship between words and the things they represent, names and their sounds being keys to the essences of things.

The doxographic miscellany entitled The Life and Poetry of Homer , attributed to Plutarch, and in all probability belonging to the second century after Christ, throws considerable light on the relationship between Pythagoras and Homer as understood by late antiquity. The author's concern with Pythagoras is incidental to his larger, indeed megalomaniacal, plan to demonstrate that Homer is the source of all philosophyand not simply of philosophy, but of rhetoric and of many other human skills as well.142 Working in a heterogeneous tradition that doubtless owed much

Cf. Burkert, Lore and Science , p. 27.

See ch. 5C below on Proclus's relationship to the literature of the past and specifically to Homer. The notion that Pythagoras and early Pythagoreanism recognized a non-material reality is universal in Neoplatonism from the time of Plotinus himself (Enn . 5.1.9) and can be traced still earlier to the second-century Neopythagoreans.

The idea was certainly not original with our author. It is implied in Socrates' attack on Homer's supposed ability to impart wisdom in all areas, in the Ion , and stated emphatically by Niceratos in Xenophon's Symposium :

(Xen. Symp . 4.6). Socrates attributes this attitude to "certain people" at Rep . 598d.

to the Stoa, the author of the Life embraces a variety of doctrines and explicitly rejects very few. What we see at work in this text is the process by which Platonizing litterateurs of late antiquityPlutarch himself is an outstanding exampleincorporated much of the philosophical tradition into a matrix compatible with the thought of the successors of Plato in the Academy. The peculiarity of the Life is that the matrix is made coextensive with the Iliad and Odyssey and their sphere of influence, and the roots of the entire tradition are located in the "enigmatic and mythic language"143 of Homer. The author often indicates that Homer "hints at" various doctrines of later thinkers, and makes it clear that the poems are a vast encyclopedia with a complex, sometimes obscure, structure of meaning.

It is principally in the context of the discussion of souls that Ps.-Plutarch brings up Pythagoras, asserting that "of all the doctrines [concerning the soul], that of Pythagoras and Plato is the noblest, that the soul is immortal."144

For this author, as we shall see, there are certain doctrines that are specifically Pythagorean and others that are Platonic, though borrowed from, or at least shared with, Pythagoras.145 The immortality of the soul is one of the latter, and though it doubtless does have pre-Platonic Pythagorean roots, as expressed by Ps.-Plutarch it represents a thoroughly Platonized Pythagoreanism.

Metensomatosis is introduced in the Life as a properly Pythagorean doctrine that "was not beyond the understanding of Homer."146 The talking horses of Achilles and the old dog that recognizes Odysseus indicate that the souls of men and other animals are related, and the destruction of Odysseus's crew as punishment for killing the sacred cattle is viewed as a general indication that all animals are honored by the gods (De vit. Hom . 125). The subsequent passage (De vit. Hom . 126) on Circe as the symbol of the cycle of metensomatosis, to which "the thinking man"

Odysseus is immune, already suggests something more sophisticated and the patterns of the myths of Plato begin to be visible behind this hero who is liberated from reincarnation by the pos-

(De vit. Hom . 92).

(De vit. Hom . 122).

The idea of the dependence of Plato on Pythagoras is at least as old as Aristotle (Metaph . A 987a).

(De vit. Hom . 125).

session of reason . The fact that is here identified with the Hermes of the myth likewise points back to the Cratylus , though this may be only the proximal source of the idea.147 It points at the same time, however, to later developments of the same identification that lead, for example, to the identification, by the Naassenian Gnostics of the first and second centuries, of Hermes the Psychopomp (Od . 24.1-14) with the creative and redeeming that is, with Christ.148 In a fragment preserved in Stobaeus (Ecl . 1.41.60), Porphyry develops the allegory of Circe, making it clear that this "Pythagorean" tradition became part of the Neoplatonic reading of the passage.149

When Odysseus's descent to Hades is viewed as "separating soul from body,"150 we have fully entered that bizarre realm of Platonized Pythagoreanism where the influence of the legend of Pythagoras's own temporary death and resurrection becomes indistinguishable from that of the similar story of Er in the Republic . From the present perspective, the important point, though, is that a comprehensive view of Odysseus the hero as a "thinking man," freed by reason from the round of reincarnation, a hero whose heroism consists precisely in the denial of existence on the material plane and the attainment of a higher state, exists here in isolation from doctrines of astral immortality and from elaborate demonologies. Whatever the later Neopythagorean and Neoplatonic contributions to the understanding of the poems, this core was already available for elaboration: a redefined Odysseus, far removed from the archaic Homeric hero and transformed by a complex and unrecoverable process into a hero of the denial of the flesh.

Finally, a word should be said about possible Pythagorean interpolations in the text of Homer. This is clearly not the place to reopen the question of the analysis of the Homeric text that dispersed the energies of so much of the classical scholarship of the nineteenth century. Suffice it to say that virtually every passage of Homer with a "Pythagorean" flavor has at one time or another been branded on internal evidence as "late." Burkert, who doubts that Pythagoreans ever were in a position to modify the received text, provides a list151 that includes among other passages the larger part of the nekyia (the journey to the dead) of Odyssey 11

Cf. Buffire, Mythes d'Homre , pp. 289-90.

Carcopino, De Pythagore aux aptres , pp. 180-82.

See ch. 3B below.

(De vit. Hom . 126).

Burkert, Lore and Science , p. 279, n. 10.

as well as the second nekyia of Odyssey 24. Delatte152 made a strong case for Pythagorean interference with the received text and pointed to evidence for a Pythagorean editorial team behind the Pisistratean recension. The question cannot be solved here and the most judicious attitude to adopt is a prudent doubt akin to Burkert's.

The evidence for early Pythagorean concern with Homer, then, is considerable, but evidence that demonstrates the early Pythagorean sources of the reading of the Iliad and Odyssey as mystical allegories is slim at best. Buffire's reluctance to believe that early Pythagoreanism was concerned with physical allegory does, however, seem unnecessary. Perhaps the most important lesson to be learned from this inquiry is that we should not insist too strongly on discrete categories of physical, moral, and mystical allegory. There is no reason to believe that the distinction was made in the classical period and the lines separating the categories are difficult to draw.

All the same, the chief aspects of the Neoplatonic tradition of interpretation as passed on to the Middle Ages are the ideas (1) that Homer was a sage who was acquainted with the fate of souls, and (2) that the model of the universe he articulated was characterized by an idealism compatible with the thought of Plotinus and the later Neoplatonists. The first of these aspects may well have had pre-Platonic Pythagorean roots, but the second cannot have done, for the simple reason that the concepts involved are, by Aristotle's testimony,153 absent from pre-Platonic Pythagoreanism.

Delatte, Littrature pythagoricienne , pp. 134-36.

Arist. Metaph . A 989b29-990a32. Cf. Burkert, Lore and Science, p. 31.

Continues...

Excerpted from Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition by Robert Lamberton Copyright 1989 by Robert Lamberton. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520066073
• ISBN 13: 9780520066076
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 385