Philology and Philosophy in Porphyry of Tyre: Reading, Interpretation and Authority at the Edge of Late Antiquity

Abstract

For the Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry of Tyre (234–305ca CE) philosophy and exegesis are intimately entangled. And indeed, most of Porphyry’s production consists of commentaries and other forms of metaliterary writings. In these works, Porphyry engages with a wide variety of source texts, ranging from the Homeric poems to Plato’s dialogues, from scientific treatises to oracular utterances and even the Hebrew Bible. Thanks to such a diverse production, Porphyry constitutes an almost unique case-study for scholars who are interested in commentaries in the ancient world. This dissertation aims at reconstructing the coherent hermeneutics that shapes Porphyry’s reading practices. Porphyry believes that the original meaning of a text can be accessed thanks to the philological method, a method that ideally owns its allegiance to nothing but the text itself. Alternative interpretations are dismissed, and their proponents are blamed for trying to superimpose preconceived ideas on the text that they are reading. In my analysis, I consider three case studies. Chapter 1 and 2 deal with Porphyry’s works on Homer, focusing respectively on the Homeric Questions and on the Cave of the Nymphs in the Odyssey. In Chapter 1, I show that Porphyry consciously situates his HQ within the philological tradition of literary criticism stemming from Aristotle’s Poetics. Accordingly, Porphyry argues that the poet is completely in control over the meaning of his work, as he himself guides the readers towards a correct interpretation. At the same time, Porphyry envisions the interpretation of Homer as a two-step process, according to which a more basic analysis of Homer’s style and diction, that he performs in the HQ, prepares readers for more sophisticated forms of exegesis, like the allegorical readings that he presents in De Antro. This latter work is the focus of my second chapter, where I argue that even Porphyry’s fanciful allegorical interpretations of Homer are informed by aesthetic theories belonging to the Aristotelian tradition, and thus are fully compatible with the methodological principles that he states in the HQ. At the same time, Porphyry stretches the limits of this tradition, with the goal of making it compatible with a more Platonic conception of art and artistic creation, according to which the poet is an analogue to the demiurge. In chapter 3, I consider Porphyry’s criticism of Christian figural interpretations of the Hebrew Bible. I argue that Porphyry dismisses Christian readers for not following the correct philological method. Their interpretations are not based on a careful reading of the text, but rather on a desire to exploit the authority of the Hebrew Bible for the benefit of their own new religion. This leads to even more serious philosophical errors, since an allegorist like Origen ends up undermining the doctrine of the uniqueness and transcendence of God that is conveyed by a correct reading of the Old Testament. Finally, chapter 4 looks at Porphyry’s Commentary on Ptolemy’s Harmonics. I show that while his attitude towards Ptolemy is more agonistic, his core methodological commitments do not change since he practices a form of philosophical philology. At the same time, he negotiates the tension between source text and commentator by means of a ‘charitable criticism’: he corrects what he perceives to be minor flaws in Ptolemy’s theory with the goal of preserving the overall scientific value of Ptolemy’s approach to harmonic science.