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PLATO'S AUTHORITY AND THE FORMATION OF TEXTUAL COMMUNITIES*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2014

Dirk Baltzly
Dirk Baltzly*
Affiliation:
University of Tasmania and Monash University
*
[email protected]
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Extract

It is widely agreed that, in the re-emergence of Platonism as a dogmatic school of philosophy following the demise of the sceptical academy, Plato's works came to have an authoritative status. This paper argues for a particular understanding of what that authority consists in and how it was acquired.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 64 , Issue 2 , December 2014 , pp. 793 - 807
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2014 

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Footnotes

*

Work on this paper was supported by the United States’ National Endowment for the Humanities and Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study.

References

1 Theol. Plat. 1.5.8–10: τὸν ἐν αὐτοῖς κεκρυμμένον νοῦν καὶ τὴν ἀλήθειαν τὴν ὁμοῦ τοῖς οὖσι συνυϕεστῶσαν (‘revealing the intellect hidden in them [sc. the divine beings who imparted Plato's philosophy to him] and the truth that exists simultaneously with these beings’).

2 Ibid. 1.5.18: τὴν περὶ αὐτῶν τῶν θείων μυσταγωγίαν (‘an initiation into the rites of divinity itself’). The phrase is repeated again at 6.12, 24.12, and 25.27. It is not an idle thought or a casual simile.

3 Ibid. 1.5.16–6.7.

4 Sedley, D., ‘Plato's auctoritas and the rebirth of the commentary tradition’, in Barnes, J. and Griffin, M.T. (edd.), Philosophia Togata II: Plato and Aristotle at Rome, (Oxford, 1997), 110–29Google Scholar.

5 Sedley, D.N., ‘Philosophical allegiance in the Greco-Roman world’, in Barnes, J. and Griffin, M.T. (edd.), Philosophia Togata I (Oxford, 1989), 97–119Google Scholar.

6 Boys-Stones, G.R., Post-Hellenistic Philosophy (Oxford, 2001), 102–4Google Scholar.

7 On the whole, I think that Boys-Stones is right about this. There are a few exceptions – just enough to prove the rule. So, consider the very concrete and specific question of the order of the planets. Proclus (In Ti. 3.59.32–63.31) recognizes that the Chaldean order differs from the Platonic order. He also wants to adopt the Chaldean one. In order to do this, he first argues that we cannot have a demonstration for either view, in spite of Ptolemy's best efforts. He adds that there is a reading of some passages from the Oracles that could suggest the Platonic order. Thus the Platonic reading is not obviously wrong, nor obviously in conflict with the divine revelation of the Oracles. He finally concludes in favour of the Chaldean order on the basis of a quotation from the Theurgist – ‘[an assertion] it would not be licit to remain unpersuaded by’. In any case, Proclus says, Plato's attention was not so much on the spatial order of the physical bodies that are the planets, but on the manner in which the Sun is linked with the Moon in the order of procession. These twists and turns nicely illustrate Proclus’ implicit belief that if Plato wrote ‘S’ meaning P, then this is normally sufficient evidence for the truth of P.

8 Consider what proved to be the most controversial point in the Elements – the fifth postulate on parallel lines. Ptolemy thought that Euclid was mistaken to regard this as a postulate and that instead a proof could be offered. There was no question that the claim was true – the only question was its status as a postulate.

9 Sedley thinks of this linguistic impetus for the formation of the commentary tradition as complementing other explanations rather than supplanting them. So Hadot, P., ‘Théologie, exégèse, révélation: écriture dans la philosophie grecque’, in Tardieu, M. (ed.), Les Règles de l'interprétation (Paris, 1987), 13–34Google Scholar, had argued that after 88 b.c.e. the living school traditions in Athens had perished and philosophy as an activity was now scattered around other cities. Absent the day-to-day interaction between Stoics and Academics within the philosophical traditions of Athens, it was natural for the isolated groups to turn their attentions to the texts of their founders – hence the writing of commentaries. Donini, P.-L., ‘Testi e commenti, manuali e insegnamento: la forma sistematica e i metodi della filosofia in età postellenistica’, Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt II.36.7 (1994), 5027–5100Google Scholar, supposed that the tradition of commenting on the works of Plato and Aristotle arose as Peripatetics and Platonists tried to codify a view of the school to compete with rivals, the Stoics and Epicureans.

10 See Richard, M., ‘Apo phônês’, Byzantion 20 (1950), 191–222Google Scholar.

11 Baltussen, H., Philosophy and Exegesis in Simplicius: The Methodology of a Commentator (London, 2008), 202Google Scholar.

12 Boys-Stones (n. 6), 54.

13 Ibid., 115.

14 Stock, B., The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, NJ, 1983)Google Scholar.

15 Ibid., 90.

16 As Stock develops this idea, there are other features of textual communities that concern literacy and orality. Since the Neoplatonic schools would have contained the most literate and textually oriented individuals in the Empire, I ignore these further dimensions of Stock's original notion.

17 Niehof, M., ‘Did the Timaeus create a textual community?’, GRBS 47 (2007), 161–91Google Scholar.

18 See Proclus’ criticisms of Longinus in his Timaeus Commentary. Plato's works were read in the schools of rhetoric, but Proclus and his fellow philosophers would not have regarded such teachers as having a proper understanding of the real meaning of these works.

19 See Baltzly, D., ‘Pathways to purification: the cathartic virtues in the Neoplatonic commentary tradition’, in Tarrant, H. and Baltzly, D. (edd.), Reading Plato in Antiquity (London, 2006), 169–84Google Scholar.

20 See Watts, E. J., City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria (Berkeley, CA, 2006), 111–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The law of 531 (C. Just. 1.11.9) forbade pagans and pagan institutions to receive bequests. C. Just. 1.11.10 exhorted them to be baptized, forbade them to teach or receive a municipal salary, and mandated confiscation of property and exile for recalcitrant pagans. The prohibition on bequests would certainly have been the financial death knell. That the members of the Athenian school left prior to this suggests to me that the teaching role was more than a financial necessity.

21 Hadot, P., Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique (Paris, 1981)Google Scholar.

22 Hadot, P., La citadelle intérieure: introduction aux Pensées de Marc Aurèle (Paris, 1992)Google Scholar, examines Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations as a set of spiritual exercises, not as a repository of Stoic doctrine.

23 For one bold hypothesis, see Tarrant, H., ‘Antiochus: a new beginning?’, in Sharples, R.W. and Sorabji, R. (edd.), Greek and Roman Philosophy 100 bc–200 ad (London, 2007), 2.317–32Google Scholar, at 321.

24 See Clay, D., Paradosis and Survival: Three Chapters in the History of Epicurean Philosophy (Ann Arbor, MI, 1998), chs 1–3Google Scholar.

25 Cicero, Fin. 1.29; Plutarch, Non posse suaviter vivi secundum Epicurum, 1089D.

26 Epicurus, Ep. Men. 123–4; Lucr. 6.68–79.

27 Sedley, D.N., Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom (Cambridge, 2003), 102–8Google Scholar.

28 See Ammonius, In Cat. 7.7–14, for the claim that the ‘lesser mysteries’ that introduce the student to Plato (i.e. the works of Aristotle) are deliberately obscure. Ammonius likens this to the curtains in temples that keep the many from encountering things that they are not pure enough to witness.

29 I am grateful to the anonymous referee for CQ who pressed me to clarify the sense in which the Epicurean schools do and do not anticipate the Platonic textual communities.

30 H. Tarrant, ‘Moral goal and moral virtues in Middle Platonism’, in Sharples and Sorabji (n. 23), 2.419–29.

31 Against the attribution, see Göransson, T., Albinus, Alcinous, Arius Didymus (Göteborg, 1995)Google Scholar. M. Bonazzi, ‘Eudorus and early Imperial Platonism’, in Sharples and Sorabji (n. 23), 2.365–77, suspends judgement. Tarrant, H., Plato's First Interpreters (London, 2000), 227Google Scholar, settles for the claim that the passage reports a ‘broadly Eudoran’ approach to Plato.

32 First we can see that Plato is presented as amplifying what is already stated briefly in Pythagoras and in a riddling way in Homer. This is a philosophical lineage that looks similar to that which Numenius would give for Plato's views. But it is unlikely to be a later Platonic source since the opposition involved in the statement ‘not by means of what is visible or what proceeds, but by the intelligible and by the harmony of the cosmic order’ (οὐχ ὁρατῷ καὶ προηγουμένῳ, νοητῷ δὲ καὶ τῆς κοσμικῆς εὐταξίας ἁρμονικῷ) is not expressed in terms that would be typical of post-Plotinian Platonism. The talk of the possession as opposed to the exercise of virtue, or indeed possession generally as opposed to use, is common in Peripatetic sources, and especially in Aspasius.

33 That pagans had hopes and expectations for such divine epiphanies is amply documented in Fox, R. Lane, Pagans and Christians (New York, 1987), 102–67Google Scholar, in a fascinating chapter aptly titled ‘Seeing the gods’.

34 It is not implausible, it seems to me, to see it as related to the distinction within Numenius’ second god – or the distinction between his second and third gods, depending on what you make of Numenius’ theology in the much-discussed fr. 11. Perhaps the second god – or the first phase of the second god – creates the cosmos by dint of contemplating the first god, but administers the universe in its second phase by being engaged with it. In a sense, the details are not that important. What is important is that we see a tendency here to cast god(s) in an image that nicely corresponds to the picture of the virtuous and blessed life. The latter is, after all, supposed to be a model of the former. Thus if we imagine that such a life will be not only active and engaged in the benevolent and providential administration of the world, but also peaceful and self-sufficient, we will also be inclined to see counterparts to these in the divine upon which such a life is modelled.

35 See Plotinus, Enn. 1.2.3; Baltzly, D., ‘The virtues and “becoming like god”: Alcinous to Proclus’, OSAPh 26 (2004), 297–322Google Scholar.

36 See Anonymous Prolegomena to Platonic Philosophy, 26.23–6.

37 Note that Plutarch's discussion of the Theaetetus passage also invokes the Pythagorean precept: De sera 550D3, ἕπεσθαι θεῷ.

38 715e7–716a1: ‘Our address to them should go like this: “Men, according to the ancient account there is a god who possesses the beginning, the end and middle of all things.”’ The scholiast adds: ‘Zeus is the beginning, Zeus the middle, Zeus the completion of all things; Zeus is the foundation of both the Earth and the starry heavens’ (Ζεὺς ἀρχή, Ζεὺς μέσσα, Διὸς δ᾽ ἐκ πάντα τέτυκται· Ζεὺς πύθμην γαίης τε καὶ οὐρανοῦ ἀστεροέντος) = fr. 21a Kern. Cf. Plutarch, De def. or. 436d9 and Comm. not. 1074e3.

39 The Anonymous Prolegomena to Platonic Philosophy, 26.12–14, reports that Iamblichus reduced the division to the physical and the theological. In fact, the typical Neoplatonic method is to suppose that many passages in the dialogues admit of simultaneous readings in different modes: physical, ethical, and theological. So the scheme in which the same message is communicated in different dialogues in a manner corresponding to the nature of the dialogue is replaced with one in which each Platonic dialogue is a cosmos, containing all things (i.e. physical, ethical, and theological teachings) when read in different ways. See Tarrant, H., ‘Proclus on how Plato communicates’, in Boudouris, K. and Poulakos, J. (edd.), The Philosophy of Communication (Athens, 2002), 177–83Google Scholar.

40 Stock (n. 14), 90.

41 Trans. Clark, G., Iamblichus: On the Pythagorean Life (Liverpool, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 Cf. In Prm. 617.5–618.8.

43 The idea is not always expressed in terms of assimilation or ὁμοίωσις. Thus at Republic 500c9–d1 the philosopher, through his love of wisdom – and thus of the eternal and unchanging order of the intelligibles – becomes both well ordered and as divine as it is possible for a human to be. Plato goes on to discuss the way in which the wise and virtuous person is rendered ‘divine in form or godlike’ (θεοειδές τε καὶ θεοείκελον, 501b7).