thought.204 His Life of Plotinus provides a clue as to how to resolve these attitudes: the student Eustochius is said to have acquired “the character of a true philosopher by his exclusive adherence to the school of Plotinus.”205 Throughout his career, Porphyry is adamant about asserting the authority of the Platonic-Pythagorean tradition, particularly as manifest in the teaching of Plotinus. Like Numenius, he esteems barbarian wisdom but subjugates it, in the service of his own Greek tradition.
Iamblichus’s attitude toward barbarian wisdom is even more ambivalent. In On the Pythagorean Life, he asserts that Pythagoras obtained knowledge of geometry and astrology from Egypt, numbers from Phoenicia, and astrology from Chaldea, yet the sage’s trademark numerical theology is Orphic.206 Iamblichus demarcates Greek and barbarian in the same breath as humans and animals, philosophers and the common rabble.207 Disagreeing with Porphyry in his Timaeus commentary, he accuses his doctrines of being “alien to the spirit of Plato” or simply “barbarous.”208 On the other hand, in his commentary on Aristotle’s De anima, he repeatedly sets the opinion of “all the ancients” (ἀρχαῖοι πάντες) against Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, or simply “Platonists and Pythagoreans.” Sometimes they agree, sometimes not, as when the “ancients” affirm that the souls of the pure are spared judgment, because they are pure already, while “the Platonists and Pythagoreans do not agree with the ancients on this matter, but subject all souls to judgment.”209 Writing in De mysteriis under the guise of an Egyptian priest, “Abammon,” he prioritizes “Assyrian” and ancient Egyptian wisdom as the sources of Pythagoras and Plato.210 In the same work, he invokes the Dekadenztheorie that we have already observed in Plutarch: primordial wisdom is being forgotten, and who better to remind the Hellenes of its contents than an Egyptian priest?211 Yet one can also read this fetishization of Oriental wisdom as typical Hellenism, rather than a departure from Hellenism.212
The incongruency between these attitudes, noted but not resolved by commentators, is difficult to explain.213 Iamblichus could have simply changed his mind over the course of his life, affirming Hellenism at some times more strongly than others. Unverifiable, this thesis also suffers from the impossibility of determining a chronology of his corpus.214 Second, he may have chosen his rhetoric according to polemical context; if the Vita of Pythagoras is an anti-Christian work, as some have suggested, perhaps Iamblichus amplified the Hellenic tone accordingly.215 With Porphyry, on the other hand, he would have required a different approach: to assume the pose of an Egyptian priest (Mysteries) or tar his opponent with the brush of barbarism (Timaeus Commentary). Third, like many innovators, Iamblichus commonly delights in “condemning his predecessors”; his identification with the “ancients” of the East may be less ideological than simply rhetorical convenience.216
After a review of this evidence, it seems clear that, under the early Roman Empire, classical clichés about universal learning and cultic practices of hoary, Eastern provenance underwent a dual change: intensification (hence increased frequency in the sources) but also reconsideration. With “ancient wisdom” universally present and accessible, the Greeks—identified with Plato, and especially his Pythagorean and Orphic sources—became, for some, first among equals. Dio Chrysostom’s coy invocation of the “barbarous” Zoroastrian myth to communicate typical Stoic cosmology anticipates this development, and Diogenes defends the Greek origins of learning more zealously than any other pre-Julianic thinker. Yet the most consistent approach, mediating the doctrine of alien wisdom and the Greek tradition as the best manifestation of it, is somewhat later and mostly Platonic: Numenius, Philostratus, and Porphyry.
This shift away from the classical universalism of Plutarch (and Plato) coincides, not surprisingly, with the Second Sophistic and its celebration of Hellenic identity in παιδεία and civic cult. A second context, crucial for the more philosophically inclined sources discussed here, is the rapid growth of the Neopythagorean movement and the identification of Platonists with it.217 “Plato pythagorizes” became a new cliché.218 Numenius argues that Plato and Socrates were both actually Pythagoreans.219 Pythagoras became a Hellenic culture hero by which the Greeks both engaged and subdued barbarian wisdom.220 Third, the period witnesses the adoption of Orpheus, a barbarian by virtue of his Thracian heritage, as a Greek.221 In earlier catalogues of sages, he is simply one of the ancient theologians of the barbarians;222 but Diogenes claims Orpheus for the Greeks, Plotinus begins his anti-Gnostic work, the so-called Großschrift, with an allegorical reading of an Orphic cosmogony, Porphyry identifies Greek learning with Orphic hymns, and Iamblichus simply sets Pythagoras in the Orphic tradition.223 By the time we arrive at Proclus, a Thracian is the Greek theologian par excellence.224
ALIEN PLATONISTS (AUTO-ORIENTALISM)
Other Platonists rallied instead to the Chaldeans and Egyptians: Julianus the Theurgist and Hermes Trismegistus. The Middle Platonic, Greek hexameters known as the Chaldean Oracles were reportedly produced by one “Julian the Chaldean” or his son, “Julian the theurgist,” or both. Next to nothing else is known about them, and, despite, their association with the East, there is nothing in the Oracles that need be identified outside the realm of imperial Platonism.225 Its doctrines of a transcendent first principle, a feminine World-Soul, ascetic ethic, and emphasis on soteriology and ritual are all at home in Middle Platonism, probably belonging to the second century CE.226 Only Greco-Roman deities such as Zeus or Hecate are mentioned in the text, and the collection did not become known by its modern title—“Chaldaean Oracles of Zoroaster”—until the fourteenth century.227 The “Chaldaean” origin of these verses is a facade used to layer an exotic veneer over Greek philosophy in Greek verse, but its Oriental pose was precious to its readers—the Neoplatonists, beginning with Porphyry—and, clearly, its author(s).
The Corpus Hermeticum, a collection of Greek dialogues belonging to the larger body of philosophical dialogues (“Hermetica”) starring the ancient demigod Hermes Trismegistus, presents a more complicated case, due to disputed provenance and the internal diversity (and thus dogmatic inconsistency) of its contents.228 Accordingly, the Hermetica present dissonant views on Hellenism and alien philosophy, sometimes seeing learning and language as universal,229 but also belittling the wisdom of the Hellenes and their puny attempts to render Egyptian wisdom in the Greek tongue.230 As with the Oracles, however, the setting of the texts themselves—conversations between a decidedly Egyptian sage and other demigods—demonstrates that the texts seek to set themselves apart from contemporary Hellenophilia, even as they discuss Hellenic ideas. The pose was a success, and the Hermetica received a warm welcome among both Hellenic Platonists and Christian theologians.231
It is no surprise, then, that the “Orientomaniac” pseudepigraphy, as I shall call it, of the Chaldean Oracles and the Corpus Hermeticum has been contextualized in the Numenian milieu of Middle Platonism that reaches to the Orient for authority.232 Yet, as discussed above, Numenius and others actually cite alien authorities in order to subordinate them to the Platonic and Pythagorean traditions. Still other thinkers, like Plutarch, instead saw ancient wisdom as manifest in the teaching and ritual of all nations.233 The Oracles and Hermetic literature represent a third approach, which capitalizes on the prestige of ancient Oriental teaching to authorize a discourse composed in the Greek language about contemporary Greek metaphysics, by simply ignoring Hellas’s claim to authority.234 Some treatises among the Hermetica go further, and seem to actively rebel against Hellenic predominance by proclaiming the antiquity and superiority of alien speech and alien wisdom.
Each of these ways of negotiating the relationship between Greek philosophy and the traditions of older, Eastern cultures is a form of what James Walbridge calls “Platonic Orientalism,” the respect of Platonists for the authority of the wisdom of the East.235 The term retains much of the sense of Edward Said’s concept of “Orientalism,” as an idea that does the work of defining the self (i.e., “the West”) through the creation of and reflection on an “other,” here a distillation of the manifold civilizations east of Greece and Rome (Numenius’s