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Scenes from the Later Wanderings of Odysseus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

M. J. Edwards
M. J. Edwards
Affiliation:
Corpus Christi College, Oxford
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Extract

That the most poetic of all the Greek philosophers should also be the severest judge of the poets was a perpetual embarrassment to his disciples and an invitation to enemies who could never have found their way into the difficulties of his thought. At the hands of Colotes, an early Epicurean, Plato became the butt of his own asperities; the allegorist Heraclitus, showing equal contempt for Plato and for ‘the Phaeacian Epicurus’, found that philosophy lent itself to vices for which the Iliad and the Odyssey had no name. Proclus, in his Commentary on the Republic, has the task of reconciling Homer with Plato, and of showing that the mythopoeic faculty is an instrument of the profoundest thought in both.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , December 1988 , pp. 509 - 521
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1988

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References

1 See Macrobius, , Comm. in Somn. Scip. 1.9.9Google Scholar. and Proclus, , Comm. in Rem Pub. ii. 105ff. (Kroll)Google Scholar.

2 Homeric Allegories 77.5 and 79.2.

3 Comm. in Rem Pub. i.69–205.

4 Proclus, , Comm. in Rem Pub. ii. 106ffGoogle Scholar. and Festugiere, A. J., Proclus, Commentaire sur la République, iii (Paris, 1970), pp. 47–52Google Scholar.

5 Porphyry, , Vita Plotini 15Google Scholar.

6 The closest resemblance in Homer is Il. 2.140; however, it is clear that Plotinus is thinking rather of Od. 5.37 and 5.204, which contain the formula φίλην εἰς πατρίδα but not the verb φύγωμεν. This is a sovereign instance of a principle which will be used in other parts of this paper, that the citation of a phrase in a certain context may involve a further allusion to other contexts in which this phrase occurs.

Here, as elsewhere, I underline all words and images that will be treated or referred to in this paper.

7 Cf. in Enneads 1.1.12.32ff. the symbolic use of Heracles, who is divided between Hades and Olympus. The figure of Heracles briefly advances in the Oracle of Apollo (see next section), when the author praises Plotinus for his ἀριθμὸς ἀέθλων (VP 22.59).

8 Republic 7.534a. Cf. Republic 7.515a.

9 Enneads 2.9.10.19ff. In the passage quoted, Plotinus makes the lover of mortal beauty repeat the primal sin of soul or Σοφία who either enters or illuminates the underlying darkness, leaving behind an εἴδωλον εἰδώλου.

10 Vita Plotini 16.9.

11 Plotinus goes on to charge the Gnostics with plagiarism from Plato's images of the afterlife, and in Enneads 2.9.4.1 alleges that they misuse the term πτερορρυήσασα from the Phaedrus.

12 On this Oracle see: Bidez, J., Vie de Porphyre (Ghent, 1913), pp. 122–6Google Scholar; Goulet, R. in Brisson, L. (ed.), Porphyre: Vie de Plotin (Paris, 1982), esp. p. 395Google Scholar for Odyssean references; Igal, J. in Emerita 52 (1984), 83–115CrossRefGoogle Scholar: ‘El enigma del oraculo de Apolo sobre Plotino’.

13 For the greatest density see VP 22.48–54, cited below.

14 Bidez, , op. cit., p. 123Google Scholar; Igal, art. cit., passim. See also Lamberton, R., Homer the Theologian (University of California, 1986), p. 133Google Scholar; Brehier's edition (Budé), i.25; Armstrong's edition (Loeb), i.66.

15 Compare ὑποβάθραν … τῷ νῷ with τῷ νῷ βάθη in Enneads 1.6.8, cited above.

16 For allusion to Plato see p. 61.17.

17 Epistle 7. 350d, with note in the Budé edition of Souilhé. On the voyage of Plato see further n. 35.

18 This is not the first occasion of his leaving the ship in Aeaea: see Od. 10.146ff.

19 Od. 13.79. Henry, and Schwyzer, , Index Fontium to Oxford text, iii. 466Google Scholar, cite Il. 2.2, where the formula νήδυμος ὔπνος has the same metrical position as in VP 22.40, but the word βλεφάρων does not appear.

20 , Xen.Anabasis 5.1.2Google Scholar. The point holds whether the speech is real or fictitious.

21 Discourses 22.1a–2a. Cf. 10.7b and 12.6c.

22 Numenius, Fr. 2 (Des Places). For Numenius on the Odyssey see Frr. 30–3 and remarks in Lamberton, op. cit., pp. 318–24. Fr. 2 may have inspired the imagery of the Oracle, but Fr. 33 does not suggest that Numenius would have interpreted the earlier adventures of Odysseus as examples of human infirmity rather than virtue. We cannot, however, exclude the possibility that second-century authors anticipated the exegesis of Porphyry, since Maximus does not regard all the actions of Odysseus as equally worthy of praise.

23 If we read, with Wolkmann, σκεδάσας κηλῖδα βαρεῖαν, the allusion to Homer is all the more striking, as the above citations show.

24 vp 22. 48.:

ἁβρὸς ἰδέσθαι,

εὐφροσύνης πλείων καθαρῆς, πληρούμενος αἰὲν

ἀμβροσίων ὀχετῶν θεόθεν, ὅθεν ἐστὶν ἐρώτων

πείσματα, καὶ γλυκερὴ πνοιὴ καὶ

ᾗχι νέμονται

Μίνως καὶ Ῥαδάμανθυς ἀδελφεοί, ᾗχι δίκαιος

Αἰακός, ᾗχι Πλάτων, .

Numerous echoes, cited by Henry and Schwyzer, are here underlined. VP 22.53 offers little resemblance to Il. 14.322, and might rather put one in mind of the Minos of Od. 11.568–9, the Δίος ἀγλαὸν υἱόν with his σκῆπτρν χρυσεί. Thus we find the image of Hades taken up into that of Elysium: Plotinus sees the other world as Odysseus does, but not in its terrible aspect.

25 On dating of the Cave of the Nymphs see now the commentary of Simonini, L. (Milan, 1986), pp. 30–1Google Scholar. Nothing suggests that the treatise is a late one; nothing shows that it was written before Porphyry's studies under Plotinus. If we find similar features in Enneads 1.6, either author could be indebted to the other, or to a common source, or to none.

Igal, pp. 113–15, argues that Amelius must be the author, but relies on our ability to distinguish I the erudition of Amelius from that of any other member of this very gifted school. The strongest argument for ascribing the Oracle to Amelius is the statement at the beginning of VP 22 that he received this utterance from Delphi.

26 See Lamberton, p. 131. For a favourable interpretation of this episode see Maximus, , Discourses 26.9h on PolyphemusGoogle Scholar.

27 Note use τυφλός of in Enneads 1.6.8, cited above.

28 Eusebius, , Historia Ecclesiastica 6.19.6Google Scholar, speaks of Porphyry as having settled in Sicily, thus requiring us to postulate either a second journey or a single, longer residence of the kind implied in VP. It is possible that VP is disingenuous: on the need to explain one's absence from the deathbed of one's master see Owen, G. E. L., ‘Philosophical Invective’ in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy i (1983), p. 12Google Scholar. It remains, however, unlikely that Plotinus would have undertaken such a voyage in pursuit of Porphyry in his debilitated state.

29 So Wright in his Loeb edition discounts the passage as an incompetent recollection of the VP.

30 Best consulted in Bidez, , Vie de Porphyre, Appendix p. 48Google Scholar. Other references to Eunapius are to Boissonade's pages.

31 Il. 10.515; 13.10; Od. 8.285.

32 Note many words denoting clarity or dullness of perception: ἰδεῖν, ἀκοῦσαι ἀλαοσκοπίην, ἀσαφείᾳ, σαφηνείας and εἱς φῶς.

33 See Strabo 1.2.16. On the wanderings of Odysseus in Sicily see Apollodorus, , Epitome 7.1Google Scholar; Polybius 34.3; and the criticisms of Strabo 1.2.1–18.

34 Diogenes Laertius 6.51.

35 For disparagement of this voyage, imparting symbolic associations, see Heraclitus, , Homeric Allegories 76.6Google Scholar. Has Plato anticipated Polybius 34.3.11–12 in the emendation of τρίς to δίς in Od. 12.105?

36 Homeric Allegories 73.10–13. For a short allegorization of the moly see Olympiodorus, , Comm. in Phaedonem p. 34.17 (Norvin)Google Scholar.

37 Enneads 1.9.1.9. This, since it was written before Plotinus made the acquaintance of his biographer, cannot be the treatise mentioned by Eunapius, unless the latter has made an error. The fragment printed in Henry and Schwyzer's text, i. 143, seems to allude to Porphyry's misguided self-denial, and rebukes those who imagine that their actions are concealed from the light of the sun.

38 On p. 453.19 the ὑπόμνημα is introduced as a source of biographical information. For further discussion of the word see Goulet, R., ‘Variations Romanesques sur la Mélancolie de Porphyre’, Hermes 110 (1982), 454Google Scholar. Goulet's theory that the ὑπόμνημα was nothing more than VP 11 does not account for the magnitude of the discrepancy in this case, or for the critical comments with which Eunapius introduces his use of the word.

39 See p. 454 and Bidez, Appendix p. 47.13ff.

40 See Il.. 12.323 and Od. 5.239.

41 I am indebted to Mr Ewen Bowie, Dr Philip Hardie and Dr Antony Meredith for their criticisms of earlier drafts of this paper.