SOURCE: Clark, Gillian. “Translate into Greek: Porphyry of Tyre on the New Barbarians.” In Constructing Identities in Late Antiquity, edited by Richard Miles, pp. 112-32. New York: Routledge, 1999.

[In the following essay, Clark explores Porphyry's major writings in order to glean how the philosopher may have understood himself—as an intellectual in exile, a Roman, a Greek, a Neoplatonist, and a man in search of God in solitude.]

[Amelius] dedicated the book to Basileus, to me. The name Basileus belonged to me, Porphyry, because I had been called Malkos in my ancestral language (it was my father's name too), and Malkos means basileus, if you want to translate it into Greek.

(Porphyry, Life of Plotinus 17)¹

When Porphyry told his readers about these versions of his name, it was not because he wanted to make a point about cultural identity in the late third century. He wanted them to know that it was he who had, years before, been the leading light in the seminar of Plotinus, and was therefore the best interpreter of his philosophy. His edition of Plotinus came out in 301, thirty years after Plotinus died, in the context of Diocletian's efforts to reaffirm Graeco-Roman traditional religion. There had probably been an earlier edition, but Porphyry rearranged the various writings of Plotinus into enneads, groups of nine, arguing that this made it easier to follow Plotinus' thought (Saffrey 1992: 31-64). To justify this forceful editorial activity, he gave the Enneads a preface, ‘On the Life of Plotinus and the Order of his Writings’, which includes an account of the seminar as he knew it in 263-8, its final years. The seminar of Plotinus raises, and helps to answer, questions about Roman citizenship and Greek culture in relation to languages, traditions and religions which were neither Roman nor Greek.

Porphyry's names trace his personal history (Smith 1987: 719-22). He was born Malkos of Tyre around 233, a generation after Septimius Severus gave his city the status of a Roman colony. If that was when his family became Roman citizens, his name could, when necessary, be L. Septimius Malchus. At Athens, where he went for advanced study, he acquired another name. His teacher Longinus duly translated Malkos into Greek Basileus, ‘King’ (Life of Plotinus 21), but also gave him the nickname Porphyrios, ‘purple’. This was a clever choice, for purple came from Tyre and was the colour worn by kings, and it stuck when he went on to Italy to work with Plotinus. Perhaps Malkos sounded too much like malakos, ‘soft’; perhaps L. Septimius Malchus adopted Porphyrius as an agnomen (Millar 1997: 249); or perhaps it was just that Plotinus and Amelius liked nicknames (Life 7, 17), and either ‘Tyrian Purple’ or ‘The King’ seemed an appropriate comment on Porphyry's arrival. He began by reading a paper which aimed to refute Plotinus on a fundamental question of late Platonist philosophy, whether there are objects of thought distinct from acts of thought (or, in Platonist terminology, intelligibles outside the intellect). If there are, Plotinus was wrong to think that the philosopher discovers his true nature by returning into his own acts of thought. It took several attempts (Life 18) to convince Porphyry that Plotinus was right.

Thereafter, Malkos/Basileus was Porphyry the philosopher, sometimes called Porphyry the Tyrian or Porphyry the Phoenician. He left Rome in 268 for Sicily, and spent some time there: Christians seized the chance to label their most hated opponent as Porphyry the Sicilian (Augustine, Retractations 2.25.1), a name implying backwoods stupidity. He also visited Carthage, the daughter-city of Tyre, but it is not known how long he stayed, when he returned to Rome, or whether he settled in Rome for the rest of his life. Eunapius, writing biographies of philosophers a century later, reported only that he lectured in Rome and was said to have died there (Brisson 1982: 104-8). Porphyry did not deny his ancestral name, and although he allowed it to be displaced by a Greek nickname, the nickname at least invoked his native city. He may have had property, or family, in Tyre throughout his life. But he did not choose either to settle there as a teacher of philosophy and a respected citizen, or to represent himself to his readers as a Phoenician from a glamorous eastern city (Bowersock 1990: 45-8), drawing on the ancient wisdom of his heritage. Do any, or all, of the names that others gave him help us to understand how he might have understood himself? Was he ‘always on the move, a pure intellectual with no true fatherland’ (Saffrey 1992: 33), a Phoenician, a Hellene, a Roman, or a philosopher, journeying in search of wisdom wherever it could be found?

I

Plotinus taught in Rome from the 240s to the late 260s (Brisson 1992: 6-9), and brought together philosophers from very different regions of the empire. He had a Latin name and came from Egypt. Amelius, who worked with him for twenty years, was from Etruria. Porphyry mentions, among his students, Eustochius and Serapion from Egypt, Zethus from Arabia and Paulinus from Scythopolis in Palestine. They may not have come, as Porphyry did, specifically to work with Plotinus. Serapion was a rhetor with business interests, the other three were doctors, and Zethus had political concerns from which Plotinus failed to dissuade him. Zethus also had a personal connection in that his wife's father Theodosius had, like Plotinus, been a student of Ammonius, who taught in Alexandria. The seminar met (Life 9) in the house of Gemina, who was certainly a Roman lady, possibly even the widow of an emperor (Saffrey 1992: 32; this was, admittedly, a time of many and short-lived emperors). Plotinus himself was on good terms (Life 12) with the emperor Gallienus, who reigned from 253 to 268; the murder of Gallienus, combined with the terminal illness of Plotinus, may have caused Plotinus to leave Rome and his students to disperse (Brisson 1982: 75-6). Roman senators also came to the seminar. Most of them combined philosophy with politics, but Rogatianus, who refused either to perform his duties as praetor or to live in his own great house (Life 7), was a living proof that asceticism is good for the health (On Abstinence 1.53.3). He had been so crippled (perhaps by arthritis) that he had to use a carrying-chair, but was cured by eating only every second day.

This looks like a Roman seminar in every sense of the word, located in the capital city, connected to the urban elite, and exemplifying the famous claim of Aelius Aristides (To Rome 61) that Rome had made an empire into a city, politically united and with a common culture. According to Porphyry, anyone who wanted could come to the meetings (though perhaps Gemina's porter would not have admitted strangers who lacked an introduction). But the seminar was inclusive only within limits, for its common culture, like its working language, was Greek. Greek was the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean and of all cultured people from the West, and Rogatianus and his fellow-senators were probably bilingual. But, as Augustine discovered a century later (Confessions 1.14.23), the kind of Greek that less prosperous westerners struggled through at school was just not adequate for dealing with Greek philosophy.

The easterners could probably have managed some Latin. Even before they came to work in Rome, they might have learned Latin for political reasons, especially if there were long-established Roman colonies in their homelands (Millar 1997: 245-6). But they saw no reason to do philosophy in Latin. Porphyry grew up in a Roman colonia (and near Berytus, which later became a centre for the study of Roman law) and lived in Rome for at least five years, but his writings do not acknowledge any personal knowledge of Latin. Even a passing comment that ‘some Latins are called, in their own language, Aper and Scorpus and Ursus and Merulus’ (Abst. 4.16.5) was derived from his source. Interestingly, he did not include Latin in his examples of languages that Greeks cannot understand (Abst. 3.3.4-5), but that might mean either that Latin was not a problem (it was far closer to Greek than the examples he did use, such as Aramaic and ‘Indian’), or that Latin was being deliberately ignored (cf. Swain 1996: 41-2). He did not mention any students of Plotinus from the western Mediterranean, or show any awareness of a western philosophical tradition.

The focus of late Platonist philosophy was Greece and the Near East, and its traditions invoked Egypt and Syria, Babylon and India (Festugière 1944: 19-44). Italian philosophers could connect themselves to these traditions through the Pythagorean presence in the Greek cities of the south, which was supposedly (but anachronistically) an influence on the laws and cults ascribed to King Numa (Cicero, Rep. 2.289). Poseidonius (Rankin 1987: 221-2) made a valiant attempt to extend the cultural club to Gaul, and Celts, especially Druids, earn an occasional mention in the third century. Diogenes Laertius, unusually, adds the Druids to the roll-call of barbarian wisdom, and links them (but very briefly) with the Indian Gymno-sophists (1.1, 1.6); Hippolytus, a Christian contemporary of Porphyry, claims (Refutation of all Heresies 1.2.17) that Zalmoxis the Pythagorean taught them; and Iamblichus (Pythagorean Life 151) has Pythagoras synthesising wisdom learned not only from Orphics, Egyptians, Chaldaeans and Magi, but from the rituals at Eleusis, Imbros, Samothrace and Lemnos, and of the Celts and Iberians. If these are western Celts and Iberians (rather than those of the Black Sea region), perhaps the Iberians were contributed by the neo-Pythagorean Moderatus, who came from Cadiz. But the rarity of such claims suggests that no one was very interested in making them.

The seminar of Plotinus was a Greek-speaking enclave which depended on the presence of Plotinus in Rome. We do not know why he went there, but perhaps no special explanation is needed: several philosophers chose to work in the capital city (Frede 1997: 218). After his death, Platonist philosophy continued to have an effect in Italy. Marius Victorinus, who translated some Platonist texts into Latin, may even, in his youth, have met Porphyry in Rome (Aug. Conf. 8.2.3 with O'Donnell 1992: 3.13-15). Augustine was given some of these translations, when he arrived in Milan a century after the death of Plotinus, probably by Manlius Theodorus who led a Platonist study group (Aug. Conf. 7.9.13, with O'Donnell 1992: 2.419-20). Ambrose of Milan read Plotinus in Greek (Madec 1974: 61-71). But the group that worked with Plotinus did not outlast his death, and Porphyry, though he may have continued to teach in Rome, had no known successor or students there. Eunapius (456) clearly lacked traditions and memories of Porphyry as a teacher, but located him firmly in the eastern Mediterranean succession of Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus and the students of Iamblichus.

II

The seminar of Plotinus exemplified both ease of movement under the Roman peace and within the common Greek culture, and the continuing divide between Hellenism and the western Mediterranean. It also exemplified a less welcome consequence of ‘making the empire into a city’, namely the drain of talent away from cities. Philosophers could travel in search of wisdom, but their cosmopolitanism and their philosophical commitment might mean that their native cities lost resources, both human and financial. Philosophy, almost always, required an advanced and therefore expensive education. (Cynic and Epicurean claims that it did not were usually made by people who had previously had the education.) Anyone who could afford to devote his life to philosophy, however simple his needs, probably had enough inherited wealth to incur civic obligations in his home town. Teachers were sometimes (not consistently) exempt from such obligations on the grounds that their work was a contribution to the city (Kaster 1988: 114-21); but the exemption was for teachers of literature and rhetoric who trained young men in the skills they needed for civic life, and who could themselves be used as ambassadors, not for teachers of philosophy who tried to avoid the distractions of civic life and perhaps lived somewhere else.

Platonists had to decide how the traditional obligation of the good man to maintain family, city and cult could be reconciled with Plato's teaching on the philosopher's need to disengage the soul from worldly concerns and desires. Many students of Plotinus continued to have families, property, financial and political concerns. But Plotinus himself had left his obscure Egyptian birthplace to seek a teacher in Alexandria, travelled into Persia with the Roman army, and settled in Rome for reasons not known to us. Porphyry tells us (Life 1, 3, 9) that he refused to talk about his family, parents or country, and though he had wards, he had no children. Amelius left Italy to settle in Apamea in Syria, perhaps because it was the home town of the philosopher Numenius whom he greatly admired, and adopted a son there (Brisson 1982: 65-9). Porphyry may have maintained property and family ties in Tyre. He had stepchildren in Italy from his marriage to Marcella, widow of another student of Plotinus, but declared that he had not married her in the hope of children of his own (To Marcella 1). In On Abstinence (4.20.3), so far from endorsing the usual Platonist opinion that the only proper use of sex is for the procreation of legitimate children, he argued powerfully that all sexual intercourse is contamination because it is a mixing of opposites: male and female, soul and body if conception occurs, living body and dead seed if conception fails.

On Abstinence is exceptional in its portrayal of a philosopher seeking God in solitude, ‘alone to the alone’ (2.49.1). It is almost obsessively concerned with contamination by what goes into the body, and it rejects both political involvement and traditional civic worship. The Life of Plotinus shows a much wider range of lifestyles and varieties of civic involvement among the students of Plotinus, and Porphyry's own student (or fellow-student) and sparring-partner Iamblichus provides a contrast (Clark 1999). After some philosophical travels, he settled on estates in his Syrian homeland (though in a different area from his birthplace Chalcis), and Ariston son of Iamblichus, who married a woman student of Plotinus, was probably his son (Dillon and Hershbell 1991: 17-24). His students (Fowden 1982: 40-3) continued mobile: they did not move so far as the students of Plotinus, but perhaps that was because Iamblichus lived in Syria, not in Rome. They came from Greece and Cappadocia as well as the eastern Mediterranean coast. Aidesius returned to Cappadocia then moved to Pergamum; Chrysanthius went back to Sardis, where he taught Eunapius, and spent some time in Ephesus. Iamblichus, unlike Porphyry, emphasised community living and shared worship. He imagined a philosophic lifestyle for the disciples of Pythagoras, and used it to inspire his own students. His Pythagoreans live in philosophical communities, with their families, at a peaceful distance from the cities of South Italy. Nevertheless, at least some of them help to administer the cities—but only after lunch (Pythagorean Life 97), having spent the morning in philosophy.

III

The diverse Roman citizens who studied with philosophers shared Greek culture and readiness to put philosophy above local ties, and were always willing to journey in search of the right teacher. They did not always return from their journeys, and may not have kept any special commitment to their homelands or to their ancestral traditions. Twentieth-century scholarship on Porphyry, and on other philosophers from the eastern empire, has only recently begun to notice the dangers of orientalism (Millar 1997: 241-2). Numenius, Plotinus, Porphyry and Iamblichus all came from the Near East, and that has too often been taken to show that Neo-platonism is a place of struggle between the darkness of oriental superstition and the light of Greek rationality. The present trend is rather to suggest that Iamblichus, in particular, reconciles Greek philosophical understanding with a deeper religious commitment derived from his ancestral tradition (Athanassiadi 1981, Fowden 1986, Shaw 1995). But Porphyry and Iamblichus came from the one area of the Near East where there is no clear evidence for the survival of a local language and its culture (Millar 1993: 264-309).

Even if tradition survived, Porphyry ‘the Phoenician’ shows no sign of identifying himself as either Syrian or Phoenician, of understanding local languages (Phoenician if it was still spoken or written, Aramaic, biblical Hebrew), or of knowing local customs and traditions otherwise than in the reports of Greek authors (Millar 1997). His perspective throughout is that of a Greek writer dependent on Greek sources for an account of non-Greek cultures. Did he speak any languages other than Greek and, presumably, some Latin? In the course of an argument that animals have language, even if we cannot speak their languages, he comments that ‘not every human being finds it easy to learn or to imitate not just animal languages, but as many as five human languages’ (Abst. 3.4.6). Speculation is tempting here. Traders, or even scholars, in Phoenicia might well want to use Greek, Latin, Aramaic in its Syriac and Nabatean versions, Palmyrene, perhaps one of the Persian languages. (This is less daunting than it sounds: present-day Anglophone classicists are usually assumed to have at least a reading knowledge of French, German and Italian in addition to their Greek and Latin, and some add Spanish or Russian or Hebrew or other languages from countries where Rome once ruled or where the classics are still studied.) Perhaps Porphyry implies that he did speak five languages, but still could not converse with animals or birds, not even with the partridge which made friends with him at Carthage and responded when he spoke to it (Abst. 3.4.7; Sorabji 1993: 80-6). He notes that it never started the conversation, and that it made different sounds when conversing with partridges.

But Porphyry's argument about animal language depends on the experience of hearing a language which you cannot translate, or even hear as language rather than noise, whereas other people can:

Now since that which is voiced by the tongue is logos [discourse] however it is voiced, whether in barbarian or Greek, dog or cattle fashion, animals which have a voice share in logos, humans speaking in accordance with human customs and animals according to the customs each has acquired from the gods and nature. And if we do not understand them, so what? Greeks do not understand Indian, nor do those brought up on Attic understand Scythian or Thracian or Syrian: the sound that each makes strikes the others like the calling of cranes. Yet for each their language can be written in letters and articulated, as ours can for us; but for us the language of Syrians, say, or Persians cannot be articulated or written, just as that of animals cannot be for any people. For we are aware only of noise and sound, because we do not understand (say) Scythian speech, and they seem to us to be making noises and articulating nothing: they just make a sound which sometimes lasts a longer time and sometimes a shorter time, but the modification to convey meaning does not strike us at all. Yet to them their speech is easy to understand and very distinct, just as our accustomed speech is to us; and similarly in the case of animals, understanding comes to them in a way which is peculiar to each species, but we can hear only noise deficient in meaning, because no one who had learned our language has taught us to translate into it what is said by animals.

(Abst. 3.3.3-5)²

But, Porphyry observes, there are humans who do understand at least some of what birds and animals say, so their speech is in principle translatable (even if not by him). He later claims some understanding on the other side: ‘animals do not hear our speech as noise, but they have an awareness of the difference among [linguistic] signs, and that comes from rational understanding’ (Abst. 3.15.2). His argument here reworks a traditional comparison between the speech of barbarians, such as the half-Egyptian Danaids in Aeschylus, Suppliants (57-62), and the calls of birds. The priestesses at Dodona were called ‘doves’, Herodotus suggests, because they originally spoke a barbarian language:

I think the Dodonans called the women ‘doves’ (as they still do) because they were barbarians, and seemed to them to make sounds like birds. They say that after a time the dove spoke with a human voice: that was when the woman said things they could understand. But so long as she spoke barbarian, she seemed to them to make sounds like a bird, for how could a dove speak with a human voice? And by saying it was a black dove, they show that the woman was Egyptian.

(Hdt. 2.57; Harrison 1998)

Porphyry uses the comparison to argue that birdsong may be a language, just as the speech of barbarians, unintelligible to us, is nevertheless a language. ‘We’ are Greek speakers and explicitly not Syrians—though it would be unwise to build too much on familiar examples of foreigners. Indeed, ‘we’ are speakers of pure Greek. Porphyry, a true pupil of Longinus, comments (Life 13) that Plotinus sometimes made mistakes in Greek; they were of the kind which, we learn from Augustine (Conf. 1.18.28), were called ‘barbarisms’, faults of pronunciation rather than grammar. His argument about animals suggests an awareness of Atticist snobbery (cf. Swain 1996: 17-64):

How can it not be ignorant to call only human speech logos, because we understand it, and dismiss the speech of other animals? It is as if ravens claimed that theirs was the only language, and we lack logos, because we say things which are not meaningful to them, or the people of Attica said that Attic is the only language, and thought that others who do not share in the Attic way of speaking lack logos. Yet an Attic speaker would understand a raven sooner than a Syrian or Persian speaking Syrian or Persian. But surely it is absurd to judge rationality or irrationality by whether speech is or is not easy to understand, or by silence or voice.

(Abst. 3.5.2-3)³

But, as these two quotations show, the point about logos is more important than snobbery or even ethnocentricity. It is puzzling that logos, the ability to reason and to make sense of the world, should express itself so differently in human languages and make human communication such a problem. Julian (Against the Galilaeans 143a) says that the presiding daimones of nations, which give them their distinctive characters, also give them different languages. Augustine remarks (City of God 19.7) that ‘dumb animals’ even of different species can associate more easily than humans who do not speak each other's language: when people cannot communicate, difference of language outweighs similarity of nature, and a man would prefer to be with his own dog than with a foreign human. Porphyry's argument goes further: by refusing to acknowledge that an unfamiliar sequence of sound is a (potentially) intelligible language—something that could, if we found an interpreter, be translated into Greek—we also refuse to acknowledge that those who utter the sounds are engaged in (potentially) intelligible thought.

IV

The ‘ancestral language’ which gave Porphyry his original name of Malkos, like the ‘ancestral language’ of Egypt (Abst. 4.9.5, 10.4) and the ‘local language’ of the Magi (4.16.1), could be translated into Greek, but was not part of Greek culture.⁴ Porphyry's self-identification with Greek speakers, and with their inability to understand non-Greek language, might seem to relegate Phoenicians (and other Near Easterners) to the status of barbarians, makers of unintelligible noises. But here we meet an ambivalence which has a long history. When Philo of Byblos, in the late first or early second century, wrote what he said was a translation of the ancient Phoenician history of Sanchuniathon, he was prepared to call his ancestors barbarian, but he did it with respect: ‘the most ancient of the barbaroi, especially the Phoenicians and the Egyptians’ (Bowersock 1994: 43). According to Greek prejudice, Phoenicians not only did not speak Greek, but had effeminate oriental customs, and inherited the role of the Trojans in the great war against Greece. (Nero's tour of Greece was enlivened by the ‘discovery’ of the pre-Homeric version of the Trojan War, allegedly written in Phoenician letters by Dictys the Cretan (Bowersock 1994: 23).) But it was Phoenician letters, transmitted from Tyre by Cadmus in the distant past, which had allowed the Greeks to record Greek language (Swain 1996: 17-18). Likewise, Egyptians did not speak Greek and their customs were, according to Herodotus, the reverse of Greek. But Herodotus also thought (2.49-50) that Egypt gave Greece its religious traditions and the names of its gods; and Plato (Timaeus 21e-22b) imagined Solon the lawgiver being instructed by Egyptian priests, who told him that the Greeks were children in comparison with Egyptian antiquity. The ‘ancient barbarians’ were the source of the nomoi, the laws and religious rules, which structured Greek society, and of the writing which allowed those rules, and other expressions of thought, to be made intelligible to all.

In the early centuries ce, the cultural role of the barbaroi was changing. Aelius Aristides continued to use the opposition of Greek and barbarian, but commented (To Rome 63) that Romans divided the world into Roman and non-Roman, those who did or did not accept the civilisation which the Romans had inherited from the Greeks. Phoenicians and Egyptians were within the Roman empire and by Porphyry's lifetime were Roman citizens. (So, of course, were Gauls and Germans, but this did not make them any more widely used as a source of barbarian wisdom.) Christianity was a further complication, because Christians (including Greek Christians) used ‘Greek’ as a label for aliens who were outside the household of faith and unwilling to accept the truth, argued for the superiority of Jewish scripture over anything Greek, and made Egypt a symbol not of ancient wisdom but of enslavement to worldly goods. It is very difficult to document just how much influence Christians had, before Constantine, on the self-awareness of non-Christians; but for those (including Porphyry) who identified themselves as culturally Greek, Christians, whatever their origin and education, had rejected Hellenism for barbarian scriptures.

These cultural shifts may help to explain why, in Graeco-Roman philosophy and religion, the ancient admiration for barbarian wisdom was on the increase. This too has often been interpreted as a falling away from Greek rationality in pursuit of ‘le mirage oriental’—a Neoplatonic decline from unity into multiplicity and confusion (Festugière 1944: 1.20-44). But Neoplatonists saw themselves as engaged in the right understanding of Plato, who said (Laws 657a) that Greeks were restless and innovative, several times acknowledged a debt to the wisdom of Egypt, and, according to tradition, actually travelled there to participate in its mysteries. Jews and Christians said that this explained his obvious borrowings from Moses, who grew up in Egypt (Frede 1997: 234-5), and the philosopher Numenius (O'Meara 1989: 10-14) famously referred to him as ‘Moses talking Attic Greek’. Numenius, and other Neoplatonists, also held Pythagoras in respect (though they had different opinions on his status relative to Plato), and the traditions about Pythagoras showed him travelling the Mediterranean world to absorb wisdom from all possible sources. When Porphyry compiled accounts for the life of Pythagoras included in his Philosophic History, he found stories (Life of Pythagoras 6, 11) that Pythagoras studied with Egyptians (geometry and theology), Chaldaeans (astronomy), Phoenicians (arithmetic), Magi (ritual and ethics), and even Hebrews (dream interpretation) and the king of Arabia (unexplained): the last two are from Antoninus Diogenes, who had a lively imagination. The mobile philosophers of late antiquity thought it right to continue this tradition, whether by personal travels or by reading. Plotinus, according to Porphyry (Life 3), wanted to study the philosophy of the Persians and Indians, and therefore joined the army, which was about to leave on an expedition against the main national enemy. Porphyry may be wrong (Edwards 1994); what is interesting is that he suggests it.

Texts which claimed to record the ancient wisdom of Chaldaeans and Egyptians, Magi and Brahmans, were interpreted as reinforcing the authority, universality and antiquity of Platonist teaching (Festugière 1944, Turcan 1975). This was not difficult, since their authors, even if not themselves Greek, were usually influenced by Greek culture and especially by Platonism. Any ‘oriental’ inheritance in these texts has been filtered through Greek ethnography and philosophy, and different beliefs about the soul have more to do with philosophical debates about Plato and Aristotle than with Egyptian or Iranian theological tradition (Blumenthal 1996). As Iamblichus said, Hermetic texts often use philosophical language, ‘because they were translated from Egyptian by men who were not ignorant of philosophy’ (Mysteries of Egypt 8.4.265). The texts ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus are probably from the late first to the third centuries ce; but Plato said that Egyptian priests translated sacred texts for Solon, so other Greek translations could claim antiquity (Copenhaver 1992). The ‘Chaldaean Oracles’, which Porphyry appears to have put on the philosophical agenda with his Neoplatonist commentary, were probably compiled by a Platonist father-and-son team in the second century: they too laid claim to ancient wisdom (Majercik 1989).

The ‘pagan oecumenism’ (Athanassiadi 1993: 3) of late Platonism may look like the insouciant confidence of the late twentieth-century New Age that Black Elk, Lao Tse, the Zend-Avesta and Celtic priestesses all taught ecologically sound pantheism. It was also an accepted rhetorical strategy for claiming an authoritative voice. Thus, when Porphyry wrote a Letter to the Priest Anebo which asked a series of questions about Egyptian metaphysics, Iamblichus recognised that it was directed to him and concerned with the theology and religious practice of philosophical Greeks. He replied in the person of Anebo's spiritual master Abammon, citing (Myst. 8.5.267-8) not only the Hermetic Corpus, but the prophet Bitys who interpreted Hermetism to King Ammon, having found it engraved in hieroglyphs in the sanctuary at Sais: the very place where Egyptian priests, according to Plato, had instructed Solon.

This debate on religion included an important question about barbarian language. One of Porphyry's challenges to Anebo was about translation: why do priests engaged in theurgic ritual (that is, the use of sacramental words and objects to convey spiritual help) use barbarian divine names rather than ‘ours’, that is, Greek? Iamblichus replied that the language of sacred races, such as the Egyptians and Assyrians, is itself sacred and appropriate to the nature of the gods. The divine names are not just a human convention, and some things are not translatable.

When words are translated, they do not keep entirely the same sense: every people has some particular characteristics which cannot be conveyed in language to another people. And even if it were possible to translate these words, they would not retain the same power. Barbarian words have great impact and consciseness; they lack ambiguity, complexity and multiplicity of expression, and for all these reasons are appropriate to the Greater Ones.

(Myst. 7.5.257)

If words and prayers have lost their effectiveness, it is because of Greek liking for novelties and departure from tradition.

The Greeks are natural innovators; they have no ballast, but are carried about in every direction. They do not safeguard what they receive, but quickly lose it and change everything in their restless search for words. But the barbarians are stable in their customs and remain constant to the same words, so they are dear to the gods and offer them words which find favour: no one is allowed to change them in any way. That is my reply to you on the subject of names which are unutterable and of those which are called barbarian but are really religious.

(Myst. 7.5.259)

Iamblichus claimed the religious high ground as a barbarian (rhetorically Egyptian, perhaps Syrian by tradition), casting Porphyry as an argumentative Greek, in a neat variant on the well-known tactic of claiming that one's opponent is interested only in debate, not in finding the truth. The theme of Greek inferiority recurs in a text of the Hermetic Corpus which argues&,dash;in Greek—that Egyptian mysteries cannot be translated into Greek.

Hermes […] said that those who read my books will find the composition very simple and clear, but on the contrary it is obscure and conceals the meaning of the discourse; and it will be even more obscure when later on the Greeks want to translate our language into theirs. This will be the greatest distortion and obscuring of the text. The discourse, when expressed in our ancestral language, makes clear the meaning of the words, for the quality of the sound [phônê] and the ‹lacuna› of the Egyptian words have in themselves the activity of what is said. Do everything you can, O king (and you can do everything) to prevent these mysteries reaching the Greeks, and to prevent their pretentious, dissipated, over-ornamented idiom from eroding the gravity and solidity and active idiom of these words. The Greeks, O king, have pointless discourses which achieve only demonstrations, and that is what Greek philosophy is, a noise of discourses. We use not discourses, but sounds [phônai] full of action.

(Corpus Hermeticum 16.2)

This contrast challenged a distinction considered by Porphyry, among others: that non-rational creatures may have phônê which expresses a state of feeling, but only rational creatures have articulate discourse, logos (Sorabji 1993: 80-6). But another text of the Corpus took the opposite view:

Father, do not the other animals use logos?

No, my child, only phônê, and logos is very different from phônê. Logos is common to all humans, but each species of animal has its own phônê.

But do not humans have different logos, father, in different nations?

Different, yes, my child, but humanity is one, so logos is also one, and when translated it is found to be the same in Egypt or Persia or Greece.

(CH 12.13)

Porphyry and Iamblichus agreed that ancient barbarian religious traditions can be interpreted as conveying a Platonist message: the soul must be detached from material concerns, and must return to God by moral and intellectual purification. But Iamblichus argued that Greek philosophers must, like Plato and Pythagoras, learn from barbarian wisdom by entering into its mysteries, whereas Porphyry's position was that all non-Greek languages (including, for him, those of non-human animals) express a common logos and are potentially translatable into Greek, just as the religious practices of non-Greek cultures express a common understanding and can be interpreted through the reports of Greek authors.

V

Porphyry saw in religion both a common philosophical culture uniting all devotees of the truth, and a Herodotean display of cultural diversity. Greeks do not sacrifice camels because there are no camels in Greece, Jews and Phoenicians do not sacrifice pigs because there were once no pigs in their countries (Abst. 1.14.4); different cultures ban different animals as food (4.5.5). There are also exotic variants in the asceticism which expresses the purity, and the undistracted closeness to the gods, of the religiously committed. The Samaneans of India, for instance, abandon their families without a backward look; when their souls are ready, they may choose suicide, and climb onto their funeral pyres surrounded by their joyful companions who charge them with messages for those already in the other world (4.17.7-18.3). But all cultures have taught some kind of asceticism.

According to Augustine, Porphyry said at the end of On the Return of the Soul, book 1, that

he had not yet found any one philosophical sect which provided a universal way of liberating the soul: not in any most true philosophy, nor in the ethics and discipline of the Indians, nor in the ‘elevation’ of the Chaldaeans, nor in any other way.

(City of God 10.32)

Augustine was not out to give a balanced review of what Porphyry said, and in book 10 of City of God he was looking for ammunition. We need not accept his interpretation that Porphyry clearly acknowledges the existence of a universal way of salvation which he has not yet found: Porphyry might well have continued, in book 2, to expound the common Platonist truth which is adumbrated in other traditions.

But if a tradition was used to challenge Platonism, not to harmonise with it, Porphyry went onto the attack. Eusebius indignantly reports what he says is a quotation from Porphyry about Origen:

Origen, a Greek educated in Greek literature, made straight for barbarism, putting himself and his literary training on the market; he lived like a Christian, lawlessly, but thought like a Greek about the divine and about things in general, insinuating Greek ideas into foreign fables. He lived with Plato; he was familiar with the writings of Numenius and Kronios and Apollophanes and Longinus and Moderatus and Nicomachus and the distinguished Pythagoreans; he used the books of Chaeremon the Stoic and Cornutus, from which he learned the allegorical interpretation used in the Greek mysteries and applied it to the Jewish scriptures.

(HE 6.19.7)

Eusebius might well be annoyed. Quite what Porphyry meant by living paranomôs, ‘lawlessly’, is unclear. Iamblichus, in the persona of an Egyptian high priest, said that the Greeks are paranomoi in that they do not maintain religious tradition. Porphyry may have meant that Origen practised a religion which was actually forbidden by law, or more generally that his life as a celibate Christian was contrary to the nomoi of his society. But Porphyry himself challenged Greek social nomoi, and deployed allegory to find a Greek philosophical message in seemingly unphilosophical texts.

In On Abstinence (2.38-43), Porphyry regarded ancestral custom as strictly for the ignorant masses, and rejected animal sacrifice as a delusion imposed by greedy daimones. So far as the evidence goes, he declined to support his city and its gods by providing funds, cult and successors. But it would be too much to claim that he consistently rejected the nomoi. In the Letter to Marcella (18) he said that ‘the greatest fruit of piety is to honour the divine in accordance with ancestral tradition, not because the divine has need of this, but because we are called to revere it by its awesome and blessed majesty’. (This need not mean acceptance of animal sacrifice: in On Abstinence (2.59.1) Porphyry argues that when the Delphic Oracle says ‘sacrifice according to ancestral tradition’, it means the tradition of the ancients, who made offerings of grain.) Philosophers do change their minds and see different aspects of a question (Smith 1987: 734-7). We do not know when Porphyry wrote On Abstinence: its extreme and isolationist tone suggests the depression of the late 360s for which Plotinus (according to Porphyry, Life 11) recommended a holiday, and Porphyry insisted (Abst. 2.3.3-4) that the way of life it commends is only for some philosophers.

It is less easy to defend Porphyry on the use of allegory. In The Cave of the Nymphs he allegorised Homer with the help of Platonised Mithraism (Lamberton 1986: 119-33; Turcan 1975: 23-43). According to the Christian theologian Didymus the Blind, he said that the conflict of Achilles and Hector was a more appropriate symbol than the conflict of Christ and Satan (Sellew 1989). Porphyry was on shaky ground when he complained that Christian allegorisation distorted a straightforward, but morally suspect, narrative. Homer, of course, is a Greek ‘mystery’, and therefore a suitable case for allegory, but here too Porphyry was not consistent in opposition. Numenius (O'Meara 1989: 13) had said that Jewish scripture, like Pythagoras, taught that God is non-material, and both Eusebius and Augustine cite Porphyry on the wisdom of the Hebrews and its relationship to the universal tradition (Eus. Preparation for the Gospel 9.10.1-5; Aug. City of God 19.23). But for Porphyry in polemic mode, the Old Testament is the wrong sort of text for allegorical interpretation because Christians put forward their sacred text, and their new claimant to divinity, not in support of Greek philosophical tradition but in deliberate rivalry. There were limits to pagan oecumenism.

Porphyry acquired the reputation of Christianity's fiercest opponent, but he did not stop at Christianity. He remarked in the Life (16, with Igal 1981) that there were many Christians among the students of Plotinus, but he distinguished the ‘many’ from heretics who argued that Plato had not understood the depth of being. They had texts which they said were ancient and authoritative, including some ascribed to Zoroaster. Some of the texts that Porphyry names have been found at Nag Hammadi, and it would not be difficult to give them a Platonist interpretation (Tardieu 1992). Why did Porphyry reject them, whereas he wrote commentaries on the Chaldaean Oracles? As with Christian allegory, the problem was that the ‘Zoroastrian’ texts were being used to challenge Plato, not to support him. Plotinus, according to Porphyry, often refuted these people, and Amelius and Porphyry showed that their texts were modern fabrications. These Gnostic opponents also appear in On Abstinence (1.42.1), claiming that their profound understanding frees them from ordinary concerns about purity, just as the depth of the sea absorbs all the impurities that enter it. Porphyry calls them barbaroi: these are the people he regards as aliens in terms of the Hellenic tradition they have studied but fail to understand, and who utter incomprehensible noises.

Porphyry, then, identified himself with the Greeks, who either marginalised or venerated non-Greek cultures, including the traditional culture of Phoenicia. His Greek education fitted him to share in the common culture of philosophy. This culture taught him that Greek and barbarian meet in the return to the divine, that the spiritual elite of barbarian peoples are far superior to the ordinary Greek, and that their barbarian language may express an awareness of the divine which is superior even to that of the philosophical Greek. Philosophy also taught him to be detached from his city, to travel in search of the right teacher, to resist the concerns of householding and politics; and to define his identity not as a Phoenician or Greek or Roman, but as a soul working for return to God. Porphyry, the pure intellectual, did have a true fatherland:

Our fatherland is where we have come from, and our father is there. How shall we get there, how shall we escape to it? Not on foot, for our feet carry us here and there over the earth, from one land to another; nor should you hire horses or sea-transport, you must let all that go, not look at it, and as if you had closed your eyes awake another kind of sight which everyone has, but few use.

(Plotinus, Ennead 1.6.8)

We are like those who, whether involuntarily or voluntarily, have gone away to another people, and not only are excluded from what is their own, but are filled by the foreign land with alien passions and habits and customs, and have acquired an inclination towards them. A man who is preparing to return from there to his homeland not only is eager to be on the journey, but also, so that he may be accepted, practises putting aside any alien way that he has acquired, and reminds himself of what he once had but has forgotten, without which he cannot be accepted among his own people.

(Abst. 1.30.2-3)

The foreign land might be Rome as much as Phoenicia, Athens as much as Egypt. The true philosopher is in exile even in the place of his birth, and perhaps especially there because he has more to hold him there. The fatherland is common to people who are, in this life, resident foreigners in any number of countries. For Porphyry, its language is the Greek of the highly educated, but he allows for other, translatable, expressions of shared understanding. The real barbarians are those who cannot, or will not, speak the language of the fatherland.

Notes

1. All translations are my own; translations of On Abstinence are from Clark fc.

2. My translation differs from Millar 1997: 254 in emphasising logos, which in Porphyry's argument is both reason and the articulate speech which expresses reason.

3. Prophyry uses phônê both of voiced sound, as in the first sentence of this quotation where it is (twice) translated ‘speech’, and of language, as in the second sentence.

4. Egyptian is a patrios phônê or patrios dialektos; the Magi speak as epichôrios dialektos. Latin is a dialektos in 4.16.5; so is Greek, Hellênis dialektos, as well as Porphyry's patrios dialektos, in the passage from the Life of Plotinus translated at the beginning of this chapter.

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