Proskynesis and the Deification of Alexander

[On the background to the proskynesis debate and its significance. With specific reference to Ernst Badian.]

In his article on the deification of Alexander the Great, Ernst Badian [in Ancient Macedonian Studies in Honour of Charles F. Edson, 1981] considers the question from two different angles:

1. The significance of the proskynesis debate in the context of 'the classic theory of religious demarcations within the spheres of the divine, and between it and the human' [p28] as set out by one of the participants in the debate, Callisthenes.

2. The nature of the evidence for the 'deification' of Alexander in his lifetime, and the successors, and whether or not any evidence can be found for the deification of living men among the Greeks before the time of Alexander.

Badian's treatment of the latter question is inadequate because he does not clearly distinguish between types of cult - i.e., Heroic and divine - which, within the supposed 'classic theory of religious demarcations within the spheres of the divine and between it and the human' must be of importance. Evidence of cult of a living man is insufficient to support an argument that the particular individual has been deified, and to discuss the question of deification of individuals without considering the distinct types of cult and their implications, is something of a dereliction.

As for the first angle, Badian does not go into great detail about what 'the classic theory of religious demarcations' is. This is not surprising: we have no, and apparently cannot have, inside understanding of this 'classic theory' - all we have is evidence from contemporary literature, from which we must infer as far as possible the nature of the demarcations, without necessarily understanding the precise logic of those demarcations. Thus far, in principle, Badian's approach is reasonable. He does not take the evidence reported in the surviving accounts at face value, but interprets it in the frame of the available historical evidence for deification: i.e., what the prior practice of the Greeks suggests in terms of religious demarcations between the divine and the human. But does he successfully use the relevant evidence to consider both Alexander's understanding of deification, and the understanding of his companions and contemporaries?

Although he is aware of the concept of deification promulgated by Aristotle, the tutor of Alexander (footnote 9, page 31), he is unfamiliar with the chronology of the appearance of the idea in the Aristotelian corpus;  giving as well a faulty reference, citing the remark at 1284a as 1248b, where Aristotle makes 'the much misunderstood statement' that ‘the individual: whose virtue is so pre-eminent... may truly be deemed a God among men'. This appears to be as much as Badian knows about Aristotle's concept of deification, and thus his understanding of the proskynesis debate is severely circumscribed.

Turning to the debate itself, it is depicted as taking place between two individuals named in the account of Arrian as Anaxarchus and Callisthenes (Curtius Rufus gives the name 'Cleon' to the former participant - which matter will be discussed later). Anaxarchus suggests that the time has come for Alexander to be worshipped as a god, on the basis of his achievements and his descent, and asks: 'why not now in his lifetime, rather than uselessly after his death?' By stressing the use of the deification Anaxarchus indicates his motive is the ideological advantage to be gained by Alexander, and that the step is for some reason an unprecedented one. He is attempting to persuade Alexander away from some perception of the divine which makes such a step unthinkable. He (Anaxarchus) argues after the death of Alexander's friend Cleitus that: 'the wise men of old made Justice to sit by the side of Zeus... to show that whatever Zeus may do is justly done. In the same way all the acts of a great king should be considered just, first by himself, then by the rest of us'. Plutarch, writing much later,  provides reinforcement for the idea that Alexander was tempted by this argument for the arrogation of divine status, stating that, while in Egypt, Alexander was 'most pleased by the statement of an Egyptian philosopher 'that all men are governed by God for in everything that which rules and governs is divine'.

The issue of divinity came to a head (according to Arrian) when Alexander 'wished people to prostrate themselves in his presence'. Arrian suggests that the matter of prostration (proskynesis) arose due 'partly to the notion that his father was not Philip but Ammon (referring to the declaration of the Oracle of Ammon at the Siwa Oasis), and partly to his growing admiration, expressed also by the change in his dress and in the general etiquette of his court, of Median and Persian extravagance'. Arrian suggests that there were plenty of servile courtiers willing to flatter Alexander's vanity, and that 'Anaxarchus the sophist was one of the worst'.

The argument of Anaxarchus was opposed by Callisthenes of Olynthus, a nephew of Aristotle (it is of some importance to note that Arrian agrees with Callisthenes argument, though he disagrees with the tastelessness with which he responded to the raising of the issue). Arrian explicitly accuses Alexander of deliberately setting up the debate with Anaxarchus as the protagonist, who argued that 'Alexander had a better claim... to be considered divine than Dionysus or Heracles' and that 'there would be greater propriety' in him being paid divine honours, and that there was 'no doubt that they would honour him as a god after he had left this world; would it not therefore, be in every way better to offer him this tribute now, while he was alive, and not wait till he was dead and could get no good of it?'

Before passing on to Callisthenes response, it should be noted that the notion of tribute here is important, for it implies one or both of two things: that the honour of being called a god is within the capacity of man to give (i.e., part of the spectrum of honours available to mortal judgement: gods were normally revealed via oracular pronouncement); and secondly that it is perceived by Anaxarchus as an honour, an awestruck and indebted response, and not a precise intellectual concept.

Both of these implications are opposed by Callisthenes. He argues that Alexander is 'fit for any mark of honour that a man may earn' (meaning that divinity cannot be earned), but emphasises the separateness of the divine, instancing the examples of the divine being marked by 'the building of temples, the erection of statues, the dedication of sacred ground... sacrifice is offered and libations are poured... yet of all these things not one is so important as this very custom of prostration... a god, far above us on his mysterious throne, it is not lawful for us to touch, and that is why we proffer him the homage of bowing to the earth before him'  (i.e., the act of prostration symbolised to the Greeks the transcendent nature of the object of worship, and to have accepted prostration would involve the idea of Alexander as a transcendent being). Hence he continues, 'it is wrong... to make a man look bigger than he is by paying him excessive and extravagant honour, or at the same time, impiously to degrade the gods (if such a thing were possible) by putting them in this matter on the same level as men' (my emphasis).

As the result of Callisthenes response the matter was dropped, but Arrian further emphasises the supposed inhuman arrogance of Alexander with his account of the plot of Hermolaus (with which Callisthenes was implicated) to kill him for his crimes and to free the Macedonians from evils 'which were no longer to be borne'.

We can clarify the nature of the debate and the implications for Alexander's career by considering what we know of the participants and those responsible for the transmission of the story.

1. Anaxarchus: described as featuring as the 'court philosopher' in the Alexander tradition by Badian, was a pupil of Democritus. After the death of Alexander, Anaxarchus was 'thrown by shipwreck into the power of Nicocreon, king of Cyprus, to whom he had given offence, and who had him pounded to death in a mortar' (i.e., atomised, which suggests strongly that either Nicocreon had an informed sense of humour, or that the incident is fictionalised).

2. Callisthenes: Badian observes that he is related to Aristotle but denies that he was a philosopher, which is incorrect. As well as being Aristotle's nephew he was also his pupil (he is supposed to have sent back from Babylon records of eclipses for the preceding 1900 years).

This is an interesting philosophical opposition. Democritus (and his doctrines) was so hated by Plato that he could not bring himself to mention his name. The Democritean school was essentially materialistic and deterministic, the state of things being explained as the concourse of atoms (indivisibles) and hence was very untheological: subtle theological distinctions were meaningless to them. Democritus 'explicitly denied that anything can ever happen by chance' and, unlike Aristotle in particular, 'sought to explain the world without introducing the notion of purpose or final cause' [Russell, History of Western Philosophy, ch.ix]. Further, 'he disbelieved in popular religion'.

3. Arrian: with regard to Arrian's competence to accurately report the proskynesis debate Badian supports his contention that Arrian was a philosopher by referring to a colleagues’ discovery of a statue base which declares this fact. But Arrian's status as a philosopher has never been in dispute: Arrian is responsible for preserving the teachings of Epictetus in the form of lecture notes (the latter promoted 'a gospel of inner freedom to be attained through submission to providence and a rigorous detachment from everything not in our power').

Arrian's essentially teleological perspective naturally involves an acceptance of the interpenetration of fact and value (in other words, everything means something). So that, given Alexander's aspiration to more than his proper due, he must, of necessity, fall. This is the programme of Arrian's account of Alexander's life: Alexander very nearly merited the status he is supposed to have desired, but even he did not merit the status of divinity. This argument dictates the pattern of the rhetorical contest between Anaxarchus and Callisthenes, as it dictates the change of name of one of the participants by Curtius Rufus. As Badian notes, Curtius Rufus rhetoricizes and has a bad record on names. The substitution of 'Cleon' for Anaxarchus is probably an allusion to the opponent of Pericles, whom both Aristophanes and Thucydides speak of as 'a vile, unprincipled demagogue'. Hence, if Anaxarchus followed his master in disbelieving in popular religion and had no teleological outlook (a proper sense of the equivalence of place and worth) then Curtius might well choose to suggest that the arguer of the view that Alexander should be a god while he lives is a 'vile, unprincipled demagogue', interested only in the ideological function of religion.

Both Callisthenes and Alexander were pupils of Aristotle, and his views are likely to have had impact on both of them (Arrian points out [bk. 7] that 'Alexander was not wholly a stranger to the loftier flights of philosophy', though he yokes to this observation that 'he was to an extraordinary degree, the slave of ambition'). Aristotle argued that divinity was 'merited' or at least was the ultimate target at which men pursuing virtue were aiming in reality. However, the characteristics of divinity argued by Aristotle [bk.x, Nicomachean Ethics] must have been very disagreeable to a man pursuing virtue through action. Throughout the Ethics runs a division between the moral and the intellectual virtues: it is the former which make us human, and the latter which make us something more. As Aristotle says, 'the student of intellectual problems (in this case Alexander) has no need of all the paraphenalia (of moral life)... moral activities are human par excellence', and in completing the circuit of moral excellence we are liberated from these merely human observances and can pursue 'the activity of the intellect...'.

 So far the argument would be pleasing to Alexander, exonerating him from the normal human obligations. But what follows must have caused him disquiet, for this 'activity of the intellect' takes 'the form of contemplation, and not to any end beyond itself... but such a life will be too high for human attainment'. Aristotle continues that the life of contemplation 'will not be lived by us in our merely human capacity but in virtue of something divine within us'. But to do this Aristotle counsels that we forget our mortality and that we should, 'so far as in us lies... put on immortality and... leave nothing unattempted in the effort to live in conformity with the highest thing within us'.

While this argument makes some kind of sense, it proposes a desperate contradiction for someone like Alexander, in pursuit of all achievement as his portion: he cannot be both human and divine - which appears from the evidence to be consistent with the traditional Greek view concerning the divine. Aristotle characterizes the divine as above all forms of virtuous activity, remarking that if the gods are living beings from whom all forms of activity have been removed there is nothing left but contemplation; and thus he concludes that the activity of god is contemplation.

It is likely that the problem of his divinity - framed in this context - did exercise the mind of Alexander: the events of his last days are informed with sense if this is so. The brooding, the obsessive concern with sacrifices, ritual bathing and omens, all argue that Alexander was at war with himself over an impossible problem: this time the knot could not be cut. All achievement was not to be his as promised by the oracle and the work remained incomplete. Had he been deserted by the gods because of hubris? And even if he could cross the gulf between the human and the divine, in the light of Aristotle's argument concerning the nature of the divine, would he be any better than dead, if still living? It may be that he came to believe that he could only achieve the ultimate happiness (and status), as described by Aristotle, in death (note Alexander's reaction to the gymnosophist Dandanus who asserted his self-sufficiency and who was happy that in death he would be free of his body, which he described as his 'unseemly housemate' [Arrian, bk. 7].

In conclusion, it is possible to disinter from the proskynesis debate much more than Badian achieves, despite his close analysis, if the relevant information is brought to bear. Not only is it possible to make more sense of the actual debate, it is possible to make sense also of Alexander's career as a totality as well as in its details. The meaning of his life to the Successors becomes clearer, as does his importance to the transmitters of the information, who shaped the tradition according to their concern with its significance, and not merely the desire to narrate a remarkable career.

Works consulted:

Badian, E. 'The Deification of Alexander the Great', in Ancient

Macedonian Studies in Honor of Charles F. Edson, 1981

Badian, E. 'Some Recent Interpretations of Alexander' &

Schwarzenberg, E. 'The Portraiture of Alexander': both in

 [Entretiens sur L'Antiquite Classique vol. 22 (1975)]: Alexandre Le Grand: Image et Realite

 [Fondation Hardt]

Walker, S. & Burnett, A. The Image of Augustus, 1981

Russell, B. A History of Western Philosophy, 1961 [2nd ed.]

Speake, J. (et al) A Dictionary of Philosophy, 1979

Aristotle Politics; Nicomachean Ethics

Wallbank, F.W. The Hellenistic World

Sinclair, T.A. ”A History of Greek Political Thought, 1967 [2^nd ed.]

Austin, M.M. ”The Hellenistic World, 1981.

Plutarch, Lives ‘Life of Alexander’
Arrian, The Anabasis of Alexander

Thomas Taylor and the Ancient Theology

This is the main text of Thomas Taylor’s introduction to his translation of On the Mysteries by the Platonist philosopher Iamblichus. I’ve removed all the footnotes, modernised Taylor’s orthography, and the paragraphing. So it is much easier to read than it is in its original form.

I read On the Mysteries in this translation before I learned to read Greek. Once read it is impossible to unsee its argument, and the important information it gives us about ancient thought. Iamblichus wrote centuries after Plato, but Taylor suggests that he was drawing on a body of information which was known to both Plato and Pythagoras, and I think that, broadly speaking, he is right. Plato makes a lot more sense if you read Iamblichus first (Proclus too).

Taylor wrote at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in London. There were interesting people around at the time who he knew (Blake, Shelley, etc.), but classical scholarship was largely happening in Germany. However German scholarship was engaged in a project diametrically opposed to Taylor’s – they were attempting to take ancient Greek culture entirely out of the run of other civilizations (Egypt, Babylonia, Israel) as part of a Eurocentric political agenda, whereas Taylor argued that the was a profound commonality shared by these cultures, based on an ancient theology which underpinned ritual practice, divine worship, and the development of Greek philosophy. The study of Egypt and the ancient Near East still suffers as a consequence of that Eurocentric agenda. However, much interesting information has come out of the ground since the early nineteenth century, and much of it supports Taylor’s argument, which is given shape and context by Iambichus’ book.

What is most radical about both Taylor and Iamblichus, is the suggestion that ancient polytheism is actually a product of a form of monotheism, built on philosophical argument concerning the nature of reality, the nature and function of the soul, the significance of divine worship and religious ritual, and the pursuit of knowledge.

Thomas Yaeger, April 12, 2019

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It appears to me that there are two descriptions of persons by whom the present work must be considered to be of inestimable worth, the lovers of antiquity and the lovers of ancient philosophy and religion. To the former of these it must be invaluable, because it is replete with information derived from the wise men of the Chaldeans, the prophets of the Egyptians, the dogmas of the Assyrians, and the ancient pillars of Hermes; and to the latter, because of the doctrines contained in it, some of which originated from the Hermaic pillars, were known by Pythagoras and Plato, and were the sources of their philosophy; and others are profoundly theological, and unfold the mysteries of ancient religion with an admirable conciseness of diction, and an inimitable vigour and elegance of conception. To which also may be added, as the colophon of excellence, that it is the most copious, the clearest, and the most satisfactory defence extant of genuine ancient theology.

This theology, the sacred operations pertaining to which called theurgy are here developed, has for the most part, since the destruction of it, been surveyed only in its corruptions among barbarous nations, or during the decline and fall of the Roman empire, with which, overwhelmed with pollution, it gradually fell, and at length totally vanished from what is called the polished part of the globe. This will be evident to the intelligent reader from the following remarks, which are an epitome of what has been elsewhere more largely discussed by me on this subject, and which also demonstrate the religion of the Chaldeans, Egyptians, and Greeks to be no less scientific than sublime.

In the first place, this theology celebrates the immense principle of things as something superior even to being itself; as exempt from the whole of things, of which it is nevertheless ineffably the source ; and does not, therefore, think fit to enumerate it with any triad or order of beings. Indeed it even apologizes for giving the appellation of the most simple of our conceptions to that which is beyond all knowledge and all conception. It denominates this principle however, the one and the good; by the former of these names indicating its transcendent simplicity, and by the latter its subsistence as beings. For all the object of desire to all things desire good. At the same time, however, it asserts that these appellations are in reality nothing more than the parturitions of the soul, which, standing as it were in the vestibules of the adytum of deity, announce nothing pertaining to the ineffable, but only indicate her spontaneous tendencies towards it, and belong rather to the immediate offspring of the first God than to the first itself. Hence, as the result of this most venerable conception of the supreme, when it ventures not only to denominate it, though ineffable, but also to assert something of its relation to other things, it considers this as preeminently its peculiarity, that it is the principle of principles; it being necessary that the characteristic property of principle, after the same manner as other things, should not begin from multitude, but should be collected into one monad as a summit, and which is the principle of all principles.

The scientific reasoning from which this dogma is deduced is the following. As the principle of all things is the one, it is necessary that the progression of beings should be continued, and that no vacuum should intervene either in incorporeal or corporeal natures. It is also necessary that every thing which has a natural progression should proceed through similitude. In consequence of this, it is likewise necessary that every producing principle should generate a number of the same order with itself, viz. nature, a natural number; soul, one that is psychical (i. e. belonging to soul); and intellect an intellectual number. For if whatever possesses a power of generating, generates similars prior to dissimilars, every cause must deliver its own form and characteristic peculiarity to its progeny ; and before it generates that which gives subsistence to progressions, far distant and separate from its nature, it must constitute things proximate to itself according to essence, and conjoined with it through similitude.

It is, therefore, necessary from these premises, since there is one unity, the principle of the universe, that this unity should produce from itself, prior to every thing else, a multitude of natures characterized by unity, and a number the most of all things allied to its cause; and these natures are no other than the Gods. According to this theology, therefore,  from the immense principle of principles, in which all things causally subsist, absorbed in superessential light, and involved in unfathomable depths, a beauteous progeny of principles proceed, all largely partaking of the ineffable, all stamped with the occult characters of deity, all possessing an overflowing fulness of good. From these dazzling summits, these ineffable blossoms, these divine propagations, being, life, intellect, soul, nature, and body depend; monads suspended from unities, deified natures proceeding from deities. Each of these monads, too, is the leader of a series which extends from itself to the last of things, and which, while it proceeds from, at the same time abides in, and returns to, its leader. And all these principles, and all their progeny, are finally centred and rooted by their summits in the first great all-comprehending one.

Thus all beings proceed from, and are comprehended in, the first being : all intellects emanate from one first intellect ; all souls from one first soul; all natures blossom from one first nature; and all bodies proceed from the vital and luminous body of the world. And, lastly, all these great monads are comprehended in the first one, from which both they and all their depending series are unfolded into light. Hence this first one is truly the unity of unities, the monad of monads, the principle of principles, the God of Gods, one and all things, and yet one prior to all.

No objections of any weight, no arguments but such as are sophistical, can be urged against this most sublime theory, which is so congenial to the unperverted conceptions of the human mind, that it can only be treated with ridicule and contempt in degraded, barren, and barbarous ages. Ignorance and impious fraud, however, have hitherto conspired to defame those inestimable works ' in which this and many other grand and important dogmas can alone be found; and the theology of the ancients has been attacked with all the insane fury of ecclesiastical zeal, and all the imbecile flashes of mistaken wit, by men whose conceptions on the subject, like those of a man between sleeping and waking, have been turbid and wild, phantastic and confused, preposterous and vain.

 Indeed, that after the great incomprehensible cause of all, a divine multitude subsists, cooperating with this cause in the production and government of the universe, has always been, and is still, admitted by all nations and all religions, however much they may differ in their opinions respecting the nature of the subordinate deities, and the veneration which is to be paid to them by man; and however barbarous the conceptions of some nations on this subject may be, when compared with those of others. Hence, says the elegant MaximusTyrius, "You will see one according law and assertion in all the earth, that there is one God, the king and father of all things, and many Gods, sons of God, ruling together with him. This the Greek says, and the Barbarian says, the inhabitant of the continent, and he who dwells near the sea, the wise and the unwise. And if you proceed as far as to the utmost shores of the ocean, there also there are Gods, rising very near to some, and setting very near to others."

The deification, however, of dead men, and the worshiping men as Gods, formed no part of this theology, when it is considered according to its genuine purity. Numerous instances of the truth of this might be adduced, but I shall mention for this purpose, as unexceptionable witnesses, the writings of Plato, the Golden Pythagoric Verses, and the Treatise of Plutarch on Isis and Osiris. All the works of Plato, indeed, evince the truth of this position, but this is particularly manifest from his Laws. The Golden verses order that the immortal Gods be honoured first, as they are disposed by law ; afterwards the illustrious Heroes, under which appellation the author of the verses comprehends also angels and daemons,  properly so called; and in the Iast place, the terrestrial daemons,  i. e. such good men as transcend in virtue the rest of mankind. But to honour the Gods as they are disposed by law, is, as Hierocles observes, to reverence them as they are arranged by their demiurgus and father ; and this is to honour them as beings not only superior to man, but also to daemons and angels. Hence, to honour men, however excellent they may be, as Gods, is not to honour the Gods according to the rank in which they are placed by their Creator; for it is confounding the divine with the human nature, and is thus acting directly contrary to the Pythagoric precept. Plutarch too, in his above mentioned treatise, most forcibly and clearly shows the impiety of worshiping men as Gods. " So great an apprehension indeed," says Dr. Stillingfleet) " had the Heathens of the necessity of appropriate acts of divine worship that some of them have chosen to die, rather than to give them to what they did not believe to be God.

We have a remarkable story to this purpose in Arrian and Curtius concerning Callisthenes. Alexander arriving at that degree of vanity as to desire to have divine worship given him, and the matter being started out of design among the courtiers, either by Anaxarchus, as Arrian, or Cleo the Sicilian, as Curtius says ; and the way of doing it proposed, viz. by incense and prostration ; Callisthenes vehemently opposed it, as that which would confound the difference of human and divine worship, which had been preserved inviolable among them. The worship of the Gods had been kept up in temples, with altars, and images, and sacrifices, and hymns, and prostrations, and such like ; but it is by no means fitting, says he, for us to confound these things, either by lifting up men to the honours of the Gods, or depressing the Gods to the honours of men. For if Alexander would not suffer any man to usurp his royal dignity by the votes of men ; how much more justly may the Gods disdain for any man to take their honours to himself. And it appears by Plutarch," that the Greeks thought it a mean and base thing for any of them, when sent on any embassy to the kings of Persia, to prostrate themselves before them, because this was only allowed among them in divine adoration.

Therefore,  says he, when Pelopidas and Ismenias were sent to Artaxerxes, Pelopidas did nothing unworthy, but Ismenias let fall his ring to the ground, and stooping for that, was thought to make his adoration; which was altogether as good a shift as the Jesuits advising the crucifix to be held in the mandarin's hands while they made their adorations in the Heathen temples in China. Conon also refused to make his adoration,as a disgrace to his city; and Isocrates accuses the Persians for doing it, because herein they showed that they despised the Gods rather than men, by prostituting their honours to their princes. Herodotus mentions Sperchies and Bulis, who could not with the greatest violence be brought to give adoration to Xerxes, because it was against the law of their country to give divine honour to men And Valerius Maximus says, "the Athenians put Timagoras to death for doing it ; so strong an apprehension had possessed them, that the manner of worship which they used to their Gods, should be preserved sacred and inviolable." The philosopher Sallust also, in his Treatise on the Gods and the World, says, "It is not unreasonable to suppose that impiety is a species of punishment, and that those who have had a knowledge of the Gods, and yet despised them, will in another life be deprived of this knowledge. And it is requisite to make the punishment of those who have honoured their kings as Gods to consist, in being expelled from the Gods."

When the ineffable transcendency of the first God, which was considered as the grand principle in the Heathen religion by the best theologists of all nations, and particularly by its most illustrious promulgators, Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Plato, was forgotten, this oblivion was doubtless the principal cause of dead men being deified by the Pagans. Had they properly directed their attention to this transcendency they would have perceived it to be so immense as to surpass eternity, infinity, self-subsistence, and even essence itself, and that these in reality belong to those venerable natures which are, as it were, first unfolded into light from the unfathomable depths of that truly mystic unknown, about which all knowledge is refunded into ignorance. For, as Simplicius justly observes, "It is requisite that he who ascends to the principle of things should investigate whether it is possible there can be any thing better than the supposed principle ; and if something more excellent is found, the same inquiry should again be made respecting that, till we arrive at the highest conceptions,  than which we have no longer any more venerable. Nor should we stop in our ascent till we find this to be the case. For there is no occasion to fear that our progression will be through an unsubstantial void, by conceiving something about the first principles which is greater and more transcendent than their nature. For it is not possible for our conceptions to take such a mighty leap as to equal, and much less to pass beyond, the dignity of the first principles of things." He adds, " This, therefore, is one and the best extension [of the soul] to [the highest] God, and is, as much as possible, irreprehensible ; viz. to know firmly, that by ascribing to him the most venerable excellences we can conceive, and the most holy and primary names and things, we ascribe nothing to him which is suitable to his dignity. It is sufficient, however, to procure our pardon [for the attempt], that we can attribute to him nothing superior." 

"If it is not possible, therefore, to form any ideas equal to the dignity of the immediate progeny of the ineffable, i. e. of the first principles of things, how much less can our conceptions reach that thrice unknown darkness, in the reverential language of the Egyptians, which is even beyond these? Had the Heathens, therefore, considered as they ought this transcendency of the supreme God, they would never have presumed to equalize the human with the divine nature, and consequently would never have worshiped men as Gods. Their theology, however, is not to be accused as the cause of this impiety, but their forgetfulness of the sublimest of its dogmas, and the confusion with which this oblivion was necessarily attended.

But to return to the present work. To some who are conversant with the writings of Porphyry, who know how high he ranks among the best of the Platonists, and that he was denominated by them, on account of his excellence, the philosopher, it may seem strange that he should have been so unskilled in theological mysteries, and so ignorant of the characteristics of the beings superior to man, as by his epistle to Anebo he may appear to have been. That he was not, however. in reality thus unskilful and ignorant, is evident from his admirable Treatise on Abstinence from Animal Food,  and his Auxiliaries to Intelligibles. His apparent ignorance,therefore,  must have been assumed for the purpose of obtaining a more perfect and copious solution of the doubts proposed in his Epistle, than he would otherwise have received. But at the same time that this is admitted, it must also be observed, that he was inferior to Iamblichus in theological science, who so greatly excelled in knowledge of this kind, that he was not surpassed by any one, and was equaled by few. Hence he was denominated by all succeeding Platonists the divine, in the same manner as Plato, "to whom," as the acute Emperor Julian remarks, " he was posterior in time only, but not in genius.

The difficulties attending the translation of this work into English are necessarily great, not only from its sublimity and novelty, but also from the defects of the original. I have, however, endeavoured to make the translation as faithful and complete as possible; and have occasionally availed myself of the annotations of Gale, not being able to do so continually, because for the most part, where philosophy is concerned,  he shows himself to be an inaccurate,  impertinent, and garrulous smatterer.

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Postscript, April 21, 2019 

I first became aware of Thomas Taylor as an important figure in the history of philosophy (and the wider history of ideas) when I was about twenty-four or twenty-five. At the time (around 1981) most of his work was generally unavailable, barring the occasional reprint of books by specialist presses (there were some of these partial reprints in the late nineteenth century, and again in the 1920s). The only practical recourse was to obtain a reader's ticket for the National Library of Scotland, since the legal deposit legislation which had been in place since the eighteenth century meant they should have copies on their shelves. 

Sure enough, they were there in the catalogue, and in numbers. I spent a lot of time in the main reading room over the next few months. The catalogue at the time was on rolls of microfilm, so it was difficult to get hard copy of the metadata about Taylor's books from there, without having to write it down. Which is what I did (the catalogue was replaced with an electronic version within a year or so). It felt like doing a form of archaeology - digging up something for the most part long forgotten, and only of specialist interest. However the reading room was warm and quiet, and I was spared  wind and rain while I dug my trenches.

Now everything is different, and spectacularly so. In the early years of the new century a massive reprint of Taylor's work was undertaken by the Prometheus Trust, which had been set up expressly to bring his works back into print. I bought these editions as and when they became available. In the end I had everything the Trust had reprinted, which included the translations of Plato and Aristotle undertaken by Floyer Sydenham, the translations of Aristotle and the Neoplatonist writers by Taylor, including Iamblichus, Porphyry, Proclus, etc., and the dissertations he wrote on various aspects of ancient philosophy, including on the ancient interest in mathematical series.

The Trust has now expanded its scope, and has reprinted English texts of other ancient philosophical writings (often with the Greek text on the opposite page, which Taylor did not supply with his editions, most probably on account of cost: some of his translations were printed in editions of only 50 copies). I’ve been adding these to my collection also.

Many of Taylor’s books are now available in digital form (several formats) from the Internet Archive,  established by Brewster Kahle. Taylor was read more in the United States, and many copies made the trip across the Atlantic. Which is why they produced poets like Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman. The Internet Archive has many digital copies of Taylor texts from American University collections, and copies also of some which found their way into libraries in India.

The editions from the Prometheus Trust cost money (though they are not that expensive). The digital editions are available free of charge. So Thomas Taylor’s work is now more readily available than it has ever been. If you want to read his work, you can.

These are the relevant links:

The Prometheus Trust. This is their complete catalogue.

Thomas Taylor’s works available from the Internet Archive can be found by following this search string. There are more than 600 items, with many duplicate copies. 

Thomas Yaeger, Easter Sunday, 2019.

[Since I posted this article, the URL of the complete Thomas Taylor catalogue has changed. The link was updated on January 24, 2020.] 

A Berlin Conversation (Part Three)

This is Part Three of A Berlin Conversation. A conversation between Drs. Ralf Ganz and Sadiq Kishati, set in  March 2003, in a university office near the Unter den Linden in Berlin.

Sadiq: One of things I’d like to ask is, why is it that the Greeks were the ones who invented philosophy? Why not some other culture elsewhere, or even before?

Ralf: That’s a tough question to answer. A classicist might just refer to the genius of the Greeks and leave it at that.

Sadiq: That wouldn’t be a terribly useful answer.

Ralf: It isn’t. But it might just be the right answer. The Greeks were curious in a way which other cultures were not.  There are no instances elsewhere of the kind of close analysis of the physical world that you find in the works of Aristotle for example. That kind of observational and analytical work in physics and in biology is new.  How can that be explained without invoking the notion that they were more curious than other peoples? Aristotle doesn’t refer to previous workers in physics and biology, and doesn’t suggest that he is drawing on an existing body of research.

Sadiq: So there is no tradition of close observation of nature before the rise of Athenian philosophy?

Ralf: Not of that kind. Though Greeks a few centuries before the classical period did observe the nature of the seasons and write about it, and various other phenomena relevant to the practice of agriculture. The Egyptians were interested in being able to determine various points in the year by observing the sky, including the heliacal rising of stars, which is when a star rises just before sunrise. But all of that stuff was tied to ideas of the gods. With Aristotle he simply observed what he saw, and attempted to gain an understanding of what he was looking at through classification

Sadiq: How does Aristotle classifying what he is looking at give him an understanding of it?

Ralf: Essentially what Aristotle did was to compare and contrast. He looked at the whole animal, and also at the parts of animals. Some of these details would be paralleled in other animals, and in other animals the same parts would be quite different. So by collecting together the variety of details, he was able to group various types of animals together, and to define by description what those animals had in common.

Sadiq: So he was a forerunner of Linnaeus?

Ralf: In a sense. Linnaeus gave us a naming scheme in addition to a system of classification.

Sadiq: So Aristotle could define the difference between men and animals, between men and dolphins, the differences between dolphins and fish, etc?

Ralf: Man is an animal, but a two footed one. One which has four feet will not be a man. Aristotle was able to define what was essential in the definition of creatures.

Sadiq: So why did Aristotle want to create such a classification? Just to be able to describe the appearance of animals and the functions of their parts?

Ralf: Why does anyone want to understand anything? He was looking at the natural world, and was looking for likenesses and difference in what he saw.  So he was looking for order in nature. And he found it.

Sadiq: And he didn’t see in that order anything to do with the gods?

Ralf: Not in the texts. You have to understand that philosophy as the Greeks understood it in the classical period was largely an attempt to understand the world outside what was divine. They didn’t necessarily deny a role in the world for what was divine, but it was not their starting point. You won’t find any connection with divine genealogies in Aristotle’s research.

Sadiq: I'm not sure I would agree. You are saying that the Greeks understood both philosophy and natural philosophy – which is what Aristotle was doing – as a secular activity?

Ralf: That wouldn’t be true, stated in that way. Aristotle, Plato and Socrates all discussed what the divine was. But only Aristotle looked in detail at the natural world. And treated his study in a secular way.

Sadiq: So we are back to curiosity again. Are you saying that there is no connection between Aristotle’s classification of the parts of the fauna of the natural world, and philosophical argument concerning the divine?

Ralf: That’s an interesting question. Not many people read all of Aristotle’s work. I know some of it. Generally scholars don’t assume that the various works of Aristotle are connected. When he was doing scientific work, he was doing science. When he was writing about ethics, his mind was on ethical questions, and when he was writing about metaphysics….. etc. etc.

Sadiq: I see. Do you think the assumption that Aristotle’s books don’t connect with each other is sound? I mean, the opposite assumption is often made about Plato’s work, despite the great differences between the dialogues in language, subject and style.

Ralf: That’s true. But Aristotle’s work is systematic in a way that Plato’s work is not. In fact some of it is written in such a cramped style that it looks like lecture notes. So each subject he treated was treated in a systematic way. There is no need to look for connections with his other works, since everything you need to know about the subject under his consideration, you will find in the treatise.

Sadiq: So it would not be true to suggest that Aristotle’s work was undertaken to support any kind of theological understanding of the world? I’m looking here for a way in which it might be tied together, and ‘theological’ is probably not the right word to use. What I’m suggesting is that a motive for undertaking so much observation of nature would be to understand something of the role of the divine hand in the world.

Ralf: The Greeks were polytheists. They had a supreme god of course, the great Zeus, but their theogonies are loosely constructed, and I don’t think they would have had a concept of ‘the hand of the divine’ as you put it, standing behind every detail of the animal world. The various gods in the pantheon were abstractions of forces and powers in the world, and as we all know, the Greek gods were often fighting amongst themselves.  The gods could create, and could destroy, but the idea of a rational coordination of such forces and powers in order to create the physical world and its inhabitants would have seemed absurd to the Greeks.

Sadiq: Yet it might be the sort of conclusion you might come to as a result of the close observation of biological detail.

Ralf: Perhaps. But Aristotle is unlikely to have conceived of such a notion before he began his research. In other words, the notion might occur to him afterwards, but it can’t be the reason why he undertook the research in the first place.

Sadiq: So we are still no further forward.  Aristotle was curious about the natural world. Perhaps we should return to my original question, which was ‘why were the Greeks the first to invent philosophy?’ If they did. We ended up discussing Aristotle’s research into biology. Is that a philosophical activity? If so, how is it philosophical?

Ralf: That’s a good question, but you still have the idea in your mind that all of his work is of a piece. At least in some sense. That isn’t the impression that most scholars of Aristotle have. He isn’t doing philosophy when he is examining the innards of a tuna fish, or exploring the bone structure of a dog’s foot.

Sadiq: So how do we define what philosophy is? If we can define what it is, we can understand something of the Greek achievement in creating the discipline.

Ralf: Ok. According to the historical record, the Greeks were the first people to attempt to understand their world through rational discourse. That is, to understand the world through the power of logical argument, rigorously applied to the subject in hand. 

Sadiq: We've already touched on the limitations of  discourse which is deemed to be rational. 

Ralf: Quite so. 

Sadiq: Even if they were discussing the divine, the divine would not enter into the argument except as a conjecture which was the subject of discussion.

Ralf: Yes. All other cultures would simply jump to the conclusion that the nature and powers of the gods were responsible for anything which was hard to fathom. The gods are pleased, the gods are angry, etc. How does the sun move across the sky? It’s mounted on a divine chariot of course, pulled along by horses. They would give the ensemble a name (Phaeton), and that would be their understanding of the phenomenon.

Sadiq: Are you saying that the development of philosophy represented a clean break with the past? Did the Greeks arrive at philosophical argument all at once, or is there a detectable development over time?

Ralf: Yes and no. The quality of philosophical discussion in the classical period is way beyond anything in the immediately preceding centuries. Scholars often use the writings of the presocratics (those which survive) as a way of constructing a history of philosophy before the classical period, but it isn’t very satisfactory. Many of the ideas discussed by the presocratic philosophers clearly have a near eastern origin, and were not the subject of the sort of rational scrutiny encountered in 5^th century Athens. They often invoke the idea of a fundamental reality, such as that water is the primary substance, but don’t seek to support the assertions with any kind of rational argument. But these notions show that there was an interest in ideas in Greece long before the classical period.  Quite how the Greeks got from there to the quality of argument found in Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum is unclear.

Sadiq: And the fact that many of the presocratic texts are found in the writings of Aristotle makes them a little problematic.

Ralf: You mean that they served Aristotle’s purpose? Yes. Aristotle did not write a history of philosophy as such, but he was keen to show the superiority of what he was doing.

Sadiq: What we find is that there is a great deal of systematic thought present in Classical Greece. And that logical argument was developed to the point where there was a systematic understanding of it as a tool for the understanding the world, which we might term the good use of logic, and its obverse, a systematic understanding how to argue in order to persuade the hearer, irrespective of whether or not the argument is logically sound.

Ralf: Their understanding of the modes of argument, good and bad, is one of the characteristics of Greek civilisation. Of course they didn’t think about logical argument in such simplistic terms. Persuasion was vitally important in what had been for centuries an essentially oral culture. Arguing with sophistry (as we now understand the term) would not necessarily be regarded as a bad thing. The point was to persuade the listener of the rightness of your case. If you used a few rhetorical tricks along the way, that would be fine.

Sadiq: Except that the use of rhetorical and sophistical tricks makes it possible to make the worse cause appear the better. It also means that argument is always suspect. The actual motive underlying an argument might be quite different to what the speaker suggests that it is. Everything needs to be unpicked, and subjected to an informed technical scrutiny.

Ralf: Which is why Aristotle wrote his treatises on Rhetoric and Sophistical argument. An essential part of the critical armoury of the Athenian citizen, who would hear lots of argument to persuade those with voting rights of the worth of a case.

Sadiq: So this is a peculiarly Greek thing, would you say? If we didn’t have the works of Aristotle, would we have any idea of the kind of intellectual sophistication of the Greek understanding of argument, both logical and illogical?

Ralf: I think it is peculiar to the Greeks. There is no parallel elsewhere for this level of understanding in the middle of the first millennium BCE. I wouldn’t divide the modes of argument into logical and illogical however. They involve different applications of argument. There is a very strict form of logic which cannot be escaped or gainsaid. And there are other forms in which the logic is subservient to the purpose of the speaker. The first of these is the kind of logic around the idea of identity, and of what a thing is. Aristotle defined three laws of thought, which is the strict form of logic. A thing is what it is, and not something else, which is the law of identity. Secondly,  a thing cannot be at the same time what it is and its opposite. Thirdly, a thing cannot share in the properties of itself and the properties of something else, which is the law of the excluded middle. That is proper logic, which Aristotle appears to have been the first to formalise. Or at least the first to teach it.

 

Sadiq: That begs the question which I asked! If we didn’t have the works of Aristotle, would we have had any idea that these things were formally taught in Greece, and were part of the intellectual armoury of the Greeks?

Ralf: Ok. We don’t know for sure. And we don’t know if we could tell that these things were taught.

Sadiq: It seems that one of the things which defines the nature of Greek civilisation is something which might have been present in other cultures too. That is the survival of their teaching materials, as well as some of their literature. That is one of the things which makes them special to us, and other cultures seem less special and interesting. We know that there were formal debates held in the near East long before the rise of classical Greece. Some of them were recorded and have survived.  Usually in the form of the discussion of the properties and virtues of one thing against another. Say, the virtue of the palm, compared the usefulness of a goat. Or the plow against the axe.

Ralf: That’s interesting.

Sadiq: But we don’t know anything about a formal training which might lie beneath these debates.  You can tell some things about these debates at a phenomenological level, but that doesn’t clearly indicate anything beyond the fact that the performance of these debates was prized in ancient education in the east.

Ralf: Though it does show that argument towards some purpose was prized. And skill in that was probably important in the life of scribes and scholars. Particularly for the practice of law. It may be that such skills were developed informally, through the holding of these debates. Even now lawyers sometimes practice their skills in mock cases in mock courts, before they are called to the bar.

Sadiq: But we know that lawyers get a formal theoretical training which supports their practical experience. And we know the importance of formal education in the near east. Many of the cuneiform tablets which have survived come from ancient classrooms.

Ralf: But systematic education? Or just a general education in the literature of their civilisation?

Sadiq: Mathematics was a highly prized skill. I find it hard to imagine that there was not some kind of systematic teaching standing behind the specific mathematical problems which have survived. Though we have no formal treatises from the near east which talk us through the principles of mathematics or geometry or algebra.

Ralf: No Euclid.

Sadiq: If they had the equivalent of Euclid we have not found him yet.  Perhaps we are looking in the wrong place, or for the wrong kind of evidence.

Ralf: Would we not know the name of someone who wrote a systematic treatment of an important subject such as mathematics?

Sadiq: Not necessarily. We often find the names of scribes or asipu priests who were responsible for the copying of tablets, which happened often. But rarely if ever the original author.

Ralf: Why would that be?

Sadiq: We have many tablets and inscriptions which claim to be authored by kings and by diviners. Kings and diviners had a special relationship with the gods, and so who they were and what they did was regarded as important. In a sense, all important things were understood to be authored by the divine, or to emanate from the divine.  Knowledge itself was regarded as having a divine origin.

Ralf: So the name of the mediator might be attached to a document, but not the actual author?

Sadiq: The actual author being the divine which stands behind specific instances of things.

Ralf: An interesting idea. Does that mean that literary or religious texts were fixed? Were they exactly copied by the scribes?

Sadiq: Sometimes they were. But not always. Often they were reworked to reflect changing circumstances, a changed hegemony, or to reflect the rededication of a temple. Knowledge was something which needed to be found out. It was not something which was just given to the human race. It was associated with extreme difficulty, and was difficult to access. So there was a divinatory aspect to finding things out, which meant that the process was understood in terms of a dialogue between the understanding of the scholar, and the divine.

Ralf:  And of course there are strong parallels with that understanding in ancient Greece. But why the association between knowledge and the idea that it has to be dug out of information. I mean, we know that is how it is anyway, but why should it be associated with divinity, to the point where knowledge was considered to be divine property?

Sadiq: A good question. Aristotle reflects the idea of knowledge being both difficult and a property of the divine in the Organon, where he describes paradox. Paradox means ‘according to opinion’. Not all opinions make sense when subjected to logical analysis: an idea may involve what appears to be a contradiction, without actually containing a contradiction. So it is possible for an idea which appears to contain a contradiction to be logically sound. By saying this he was referring to the fact that human understanding and divine understanding are different. An increase in our understanding may resolve the paradox.

Ralf: Was he arguing that divine knowledge does not contain inconsistency and contradiction?

Sadiq: I think that he was. The divine is what the divine is, and isn’t something other than it is. So he is arguing that the divine is, in its essence, subject to, or at least consistent with, the laws of thought. Though how it might look to us, especially if we have an imperfect understanding of the evidence, as though it has properties which contain contradictions.

Ralf: So many of the problems in understanding, and in acquiring knowledge, is a consequence of the human point of view?

Sadiq: Yes. Much like the myth of the cave, which is outlined in Plato’s Republic – where we are and the limitations of our circumstances, both physical and intellectual, are constraints on our understanding. Plato argued that the prisoners in the cave are analogues of the normal human  condition, and see only the shadows of reality, cast on the walls of their cave by the sun (the image of the Good in this myth), rather than reality itself. Since they see only the shadows, they mistake the shadows for what is real.  In that position, were they to be suddenly released into the light of day, they would experience extreme disorientation, and be unable to make any sense of the new information presented to them. The only way to release the prisoners without throwing them into confusion and anger, would be to present them with the image of reality itself, reflected in dark pools, so that reality was not revealed to them all at once.

Ralf: So reality is a problem in itself for human beings, in that it can look both problematic and profoundly unreal if the viewer is exposed to it without the right intellectual apparatus?

Sadiq: Yes. And the appropriate intellectual baggage provided by a proper education, to enable a proper understanding of what is being presented to the viewer.

Ralf: I think what you have said means that reality is problematic and unreal even for those with a proper education as you put it. Just that their education means that the experience of reality does not throw them into a state of confusion and anger. They know that the apparently paradoxical way in which reality presents itself to them, and the extreme difficulty of understanding the knowledge which can be acquired by the study of reality, is just a consequence of the difference between divine and purely human understanding.

Sadiq: I agree. The difficulty is always present. Which is why the skilled inquirer, the knowledgeable scholar, is so important to the ancient cultures of both east and west. Interpretation is inevitable. Interpretation is everything.

Ralf: It seems to me that what you are saying is, that while the nature of reality may be consistent with the laws of thought, from our point of view, it may appear to be full of paradoxes and contradictions. And that it is inevitable that this is the way in which it presents itself to us. Or at least, that is how it must look to us in some degree.

Sadiq: Indeed. From our point of view, it must appear to be foaming and churning in its nature, though it is what it is, and does not foam and churn with paradox and contradiction.

Ralf: We haven’t, however, defined with any clarity, what reality itself is.

Sadiq: That’s because we’ve approached the question from the point of view of the human perspective. From the point of view of the necessity of the education of the human mind. You can understand the idea of resolving apparent contradictions and paradoxes without having a concept of reality, or even the notion of reality being entirely consistent with itself.

Ralf: You mean that the human mind can climb up to an understanding of reality from things which it has come to understand in the here and now?

Sadiq: Up to a point. At least it is possible to have the idea that, if it is possible to resolve these difficulties  in the here and now, it might be possible to imagine the end point of a continual ascent through apparent contradictions, to the nth degree of the chain. Whether you could actually arrive at a clear and distinct notion by following such a procedure is problematic. It’s like imagining infinity as the end point of an infinite series. There is no end point to an infinite series, so it is impossible to arrive at infinity. As a mathematician will tell you.

Ralf: So is infinity real, and is reality identical with infinity?

Sadiq: That might be to limit the nature of what reality is. It is reality first, without the definition of limit. But if you started to look at the likely properties of reality, an unlimited nature might be one of those.

Ralf: That’s a very Greek perspective.

Sadiq: It is. But as I said, if we don’t have documents from other cultures which show a systematic understanding of various subjects, it is very hard to tell if that is an illusion created by the absence of these documents, or alternatively, near eastern cultures conducted education largely or entirely without formally organised treatises.

Ralf: The consensus view has been for many years that the near-east took a different path when it came to teaching students.

Sadiq: That is the consensus view. But that is all it is. The basis of the view was formed before the tablets and the inscriptions came out of the ground. Greece was being promoted to a dizzying cultural superiority from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards. There is a very interesting question there which needs to be addressed. Why was ancient Greece being prioritised in this way, when there was little evidence with which its cultural achievement could be compared and contrasted?

Ralf: I think you have answered your own question. Since there was nothing to match its achievements, at least in terms of available evidence, it became the benchmark of civilisation and intellectual development.

Sadiq: That is true. But, if the assessment of Greece as superior to the cultural production of other civilisations was being conducted wholly at a rational level, some degree of reassessment should have been part of the study of classics as the materials from other cultures began to emerge from the ground. Calling the discipline ‘classics’ does suggest that there wasn’t much conception that the cultural status could or should be open to question. That didn’t happen.

Ralf: There is a whole raft of things established for Greece which make it reasonable even now to assert the cultural superiority of Greece. The use of a formal and defined logic in intellectual argument, as we have discussed. The creation of formal and systematic treatises on a range of subjects, also as discussed. We can add other things to the list of things which can be taken to indicate that they held first place among the cultures long before the evidence for the cultures of the near-east started to emerge.

Sadiq: What sort of things do you have in mind?

Ralf: Their supremacy in sculpture, and also in aesthetics. The quality of their literature, their development of the idea of ethics, of justice, their appreciation of beauty, both in literature and in art. Their achievements in mathematics and particularly in geometry are also peerless.

Sadiq: That is a good list of what the Greeks can be understood to have excelled at. You might also add that they seemed to do it entirely by themselves. As if the genius of the Greeks somehow emerged from the soil of their country.

Ralf: I think that the idea that the cultural development of Greece was autochtonous is less prevalent than it was.

Sadiq: I will concede that. But that is only the case because the argument that it was wholly a Greek phenomenon eventually became untenable through the archaeological discoveries on the Greek mainland, which showed that there had been a lot of cultural exchange with the east and with Egypt, mainly in the seventh and eighth centuries BCE. What came to be labelled the orientalising period.

Ralf: Yes. There was a great deal of exchange between the world of the east and Greece, but we only know this from what has been recovered through the archaeology. So what we know about is objects found in the soil, and evidence of the influence these imported objects had on the cultural production of the indigenous population. We know virtually nothing about the importation of ideas from the east.

Sadiq: The importation of objects from the east is not surprising. The Greeks established their entrepots – their trading posts in the Levant and on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt, while the Phoenicians traded on the Iberian coast. This does not mean that classics no longer believes in an autochtonous cultural development in Greece. Just that it is now something which happened afterwards – in the period before the rise of classical Athens.

Ralf: Indeed. But you cannot show that the Greeks imported ideas from the near East along with the objects. What they did after the orientalising period seems to have been a wholly Greek phenomenon.  Perhaps influenced by what they took from eastern cultures, which might have included a number of ideas rather than objects.

 

Sadiq: That’s the view of the classicists. But we have ignored so far the second millennium BCE in our conversation. The critical exchanges between east and west may have occurred then, rather than in the first millennium. It may be that the differences between Greece and the east are to some extent an artefact of looking at Greece mainly from the point of cultural contact in the first millennium, where the evidence is limited.

Ralf: The evidence for contact in the second millennium is very limited too!

Sadiq: In terms of archaeological evidence, yes. But there are other forms of evidence. Such as the borrowings from near-eastern languages, and from Egyptian in particular. There are various aspects of the Greek language which point to early borrowings from other established civilisations around the Mediterranean and in the near east.

Ralf: Can you give me an example?

Sadiq: I can give you several. The Greek word for wisdom, ‘sophia’ may have been borrowed from the Egyptian term which means ‘teaching’, which might be vocalised as ‘sba’ or ‘spa’. And the esoteric cult of the Great Gods in Samothrace, which Herodotus was unwilling to tell us much about, the Kabeiroi, clearly has a near-eastern origin, since the semitic trilateral root ‘kbr’ means ‘great’. By themselves these two examples do not amount to much, but there are so many more examples. Many of which were known by scholars in the nineteenth century. I collect old dictionaries of Greek, and it is striking how much discussion of linguistic parallels and borrowings has been let slip.

Ralf: Michael Astour attempted to demonstrate early borrowings by the Mycenaeans in terms of the content and shape of Greek myth. It didn’t cut a lot of ice with scholars.

Sadiq: You mean his Hellenosemitica? There were so many unspoken and unexplored things in that book. Possibly because he understood that its essential thesis – that Greece was plugged into the cultural milieu of the 2^nd millennium and not at all isolated from it – might be unpopular with its target audience. It is easy to dismiss his argument because so much depends on things which the classicists have chosen to write out of the record.

Ralf: Which things?

Sadiq: The credibility of the references to colonisations. The reliability of statements to the effect that the names of gods come from somewhere else, and the dependency of mythic structures on near eastern models. Things which, to the classicist, were essentially figments of the Greek imagination.

Ralf: Classicists have to make critical choices about the quality of the evidence they are considering. It’s the same in any scholarly discipline.

Sadiq: That’s true. But the motive for making judgements isn’t something which always exists apart from any kind of scholarly bias. Indeed, that’s why they weigh the quality of evidence, because the Greeks sometimes expressed a discernible bias concerning their own culture and history. What I’m interested in is why the classicists have had to reframe their own subject, their own focus of interest, in order that it can be properly understood.

Ralf: You might want to think about that process in terms of a normalisation of the data. You said at the outset that you were trying to make certain things fit together, and that it was difficult to do this. The classics scholars were faced with similar issues when their subject and discipline was first formalised. They had an imperfect set of texts available to them at first, and of variable quality. So the first thing they had to do was to collect together what still existed, and could be recovered, and to produce critical editions which were sound enough for scholars to use. That was a normalisation of the data for the field. They also had to develop a critical understanding of the context in which these materials were produced and consumed. There are lots of accounts of the history of Greece which were produced in the classical and Hellenistic worlds, but not all histories are of equal value. They don’t always agree with each other, which is what you would expect. So it was necessary to make decisions about what had value, and what was of more doubtful value.

Sadiq: I grant you all of that. But it should be a process which is always taking place. Source criticism is perfectly sound in principle, but there are certain assumptions built into the practice of classical scholarship which suggest the existence of an understanding that certain judgements necessarily trump others.

Ralf: Perhaps it would help our discussion if you expanded on that. 

Sadiq: Ok. As we have discussed, the scholarly compact understands the rise of Greek culture essentially as an autochthonous development. That the Greeks developed an understanding of poetry, philosophy, art, sculptural form, justice, mathematics, geometry, and so on, which was massively in advance of other cultures. That this presentation of Greek culture is not a consequence of an accidental bias in the survival of evidence. That it is a feature of classical scholarship that it is possible to make sound judgements about what is, and is not of value to an understanding of the source materials. That it is not a valuable exercise to compare and contrast Greek civilisation with other cultures, and certainly not in detail, because that would not be to compare like with like. That normalisation results in an objective presentation of the evidence. Normalisation of the evidence of course produces no such thing. The evidence remains as messy as it was – it is just that we choose to use a redacted version of that evidence instead. Such as a critical version of an important text; a redacted understanding of what is and isn’t reliable in terms of the Greek discussion of Greek history; a redacted version of the Greek understanding of poetry, art, justice, philosophy, and so on. In other words, that there is an essential core of what Greek culture is, and that essential core can be disinterred from centuries of accretion and decay, and form the basis of the discipline of classics.

Ralf: I fundamentally disagree. You are making it sound as if the classicists are looking for something at the core of Greek culture which is solid and unchanging. They make no such assumption. Critical study of the evidence is always taking place. It is true that some things are regarded as essentially settled, and not the focus of much contemporary interest. That can change according to new discoveries, new lines of approach, and developments in other related fields, such as anthropology or linguistics.

Sadiq: I’m not saying that they are looking for a core of Greek culture in the objective world, and one which does not change. In fact the classicist often doesn’t return directly to the raw materials of the classical model, because there often is no perception of a need to do that. What is constant is that they believe that the essence of Greek culture is discoverable by the classicist, that they have discovered it, and that their discipline is about the business of unfolding it for the world. It isn’t the case that there is an essence of Greek civilization which is not subject to change, but there is a priesthood in existence which is tending the phenomenon. The priesthood knows what the classical is. Classicism is essentially about the development of the classicist, and always has been. As you know there is strong connection between the rise of humanism in the European renaissance, and the development of the discipline of classics. Both were understood in terms of the intellectual and moral development of man. What I’m suggesting is that the classical world lives in the minds of the classicists, and that the bit of the subject which is supposed to have an objective reality, is no such thing.

Ralf: You are suggesting, I think, that the re-evaluations which take place within classics are about aligning the concept of classics with what we imagine it to be in our minds? If that changes, there has to be a corresponding change in the model of reality which supports what we imagine classical Greece to be?

Sadiq: That is something like what I mean.  But the understanding of what classics is, and its concerns, does not change much, so there is often little friction between the established model of the classical world, and the idea of the classical in the minds of scholars.

Ralf: I think that’s probably just as outrageous a suggestion as the idea that there might be an objective changeless core to classical civilization!

Sadiq: It may be that there are scholars of classical Greece who honestly believe that the Greece that they understand was a cultural exemplar beyond all the others, and that what they are learning about it is improving their understanding of what Greece was. On the other hand, there may be others who believe that they are extracting the essence of what was present in Greece, though hidden, in the manner perhaps of an alchemical reduction, revealing what is there to be found. It is also possible that both ways of thinking about Greece could exist in the same mind.

Ralf: Obviously there is an element of the observer’s point of view involved in the approach to ancient Greece. But then there always is, irrespective of the subject in question.

Sadiq: Yes, of course. But the understanding which is brought to bear by the classicist contains assumptions which are specific to the discipline of classics.  And I think those assumptions are more important than any of the materials which the scholars work with or study.

Ralf: It seems we are straying once more into the territory established by Martin Bernal in Black Athena. If the assumptions of the scholar, or of the discipline collectively, are more important than the evidence itself, then you have a case for saying that the subject is a fabrication. Of a sort.  He of course argued that the source of the effort to fabricate the culture of Greece was a developing Eurocentric racism, wrapped up in a proto-romantic notion of European cultural superiority. Are you arguing for a fabrication based on the same basis?

Sadiq: It’s an interesting argument, which seemed to be more transparently true at the time the first volume of the set came out in 1987, than it does now. It fits in very well with the deprecation of colonialism and its consequences after world war two.  It is easy to run together a Eurocentric racism with the development of commercial empires from the Spanish conquest of the Americas in the fifteenth century onwards, all the way through the long history of British colonialism and the exploitation of subject territories by the British from Queen Elizabeth the First (when the Spanish lost their edge to some extent) up to the carving up of Mesopotamia after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in World War one. The nineteenth century scramble for Africa – Belgium, France, and the British in particular – was a naked exercise in colonial exploitation of both people and resources. I think it is important to see things this way round. The exploitation is the thing the empires want. The racism is something which develops in its train. The expression of power needs its justification. Eurocentric racism became part of the justification.

Ralf: I see. Do you mean it was not present before the scramble for empires?

Sadiq: Not as an important component in shaping how people behaved and thought. Those who have not studied European history in detail are often surprised to find that there was an absence of anything resembling the modern nation state in the middle ages. That isn’t how things worked. Most of the power structures which existed were based on tribal groupings and their extensions. There was rivalry between these groupings. But tribes aren’t peoples or races. There was a consciousness that different groups of people looked different, spoke different languages, and had different patterns of thought and behaviour. Sometimes political power was invested in a key group – a family or even an individual. It could hang around for hundreds of years, or vanish in ten. So political power was not vested in racial groups. To think like that would have made no sense. There was no such conception. Enmity would have been directed at the group with which you had a political or economic or religious dispute. Hostility was not something which made any sense in terms of vast and inflexible generalisations about other human beings. That is relatively new.

Ralf: Yet the Greeks regarded everyone who wasn’t Greek to be a barbarian. That’s a pretty supremacist view, don’t you think?

Sadiq: Is it? My understanding is that the term ‘barbarian’ is essentially an onomatopoeic word for how the language of foreigners sounded to their ears: ‘bar-bar’. So originally it just indicated the speech, and indirectly the speaker of a foreign tongue.

Ralf: But it is very dismissive to label speakers of all other languages as ‘not Greek’.

Sadiq: Perhaps not. We have come to understand it as a marker of the Greek self-perception of a cultural supremacy. And indeed later on ‘barbarian’ became an insult. Particularly among the Romans. There is no question that a supremacist attitude was always built into Rome’s imperial ambitions, but not so for the Greeks. The change in the use of the term happens around the time of the rise of Macedonia, and ‘barbarian’ is a term of deprecation at the time of Alexander. You can see this as part of the objection to the bowing and kneeling episode during his conquest and attempted assimilation of the east. Alexander’s generals objected to bowing and kneeling as something that the peoples of the east did, not good Greeks.

Ralf: That objection to proskynesis could be interpreted as the consequence of a Greek sense of their superiority over the Persians and other eastern civilisations.

Sadiq: It could be so interpreted. But that is to read more modern perceptions back into antiquity. The Greeks had won many battles over the eastern kingdoms, and indeed the Persian empire as a whole. So in a sense, Alexander was king of the world and king of kings. Why should the Greeks adopt the manners of those who they had defeated?

Ralf: Perhaps because of what he had conquered. Not just this kingdom and that kingdom, but the entire edifice of the Persian empire, which understood that whoever was at the head of it was a king of kings. When Alexander conquered Persia he acquired the empire, and became its head. He had not been fighting to destroy the Persian empire, or to acquire booty and tribute, but to get control of it - to be the Great King in the place of the Persian king.

Sadiq: Indeed. So the manners and customs of the Persians and their allies were part of a culture which had effectively ruled the world through its system of satrapies, and could be seen as an essential component in the nature of that power. Hence the adoption of Persian dress, and Persian manners. Unfortunately not all of Alexander’s generals saw what Alexander was doing in such terms, and simply read the changes as Alexander giving too much influence to the Persians.

Ralf: Indeed. What Alexander was up to in acquiring the Persian Empire is still a problem for scholars. One writer argued some years ago (Tarn), that he was attempting to unify all mankind. That’s one way to read it, but it doesn’t make sense of a lot of the detail.

Sadiq: It doesn’t. Most of those who have an interest in the Persian empire have an interest because the Persians were the great antagonist to the Greeks. So their understanding of the Persians, and of the Greeks is seen in terms of that adversarial relationship.  So study of the Persians tells you something about the Greeks, and vice versa. They don’t usually have any sense of what the Persians owed to their imperial predecessors, the Assyrians. There is not a lot of direct evidence for the interaction between the Greeks and the Assyrians, though we know there was significant interaction – so much that Herodotus could promise a book about Assyria, which either he didn’t write, or it has not survived. As a consequence of this lack of information about the relationship between the Greeks and the Assyrians, classical scholars generally don’t study the Assyrians or any aspect of Assyrian culture.

Ralf: Do we have much information about what the Persians owed to the Assyrian Empire?

Sadiq: Yes and no. Again, not much direct evidence, but a great deal of indirect evidence.

Ralf: Such as?

Sadiq: We don’t have much in the way of Persian texts, so much of what we know about the empire comes from Greek sources. Most of which have been collected together in Amelie Kuhrt’s The Persian Empire: Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period. Not all of it is there, but most of it. One day perhaps a massive trove of documents may come out of the ground telling us direct detail of the administration of the empire, and its politics and religion. But we do have massive numbers of tablets from Assyria, and to a much lesser extent from Babylonia, particularly for the two hundred years immediately preceding the collapse of Ancient Assyria at the hands of the Babylonians and the Medes. Then about a hundred years later (in 510 BCE) the Persians captured Babylon. So we can infer quite a lot about the Persian version of the empire based on the detail we have for the Assyrian empire.

Ralf: I see.

Sadiq: The Assyrians ran things in a slightly different way, which involved much more fighting – often annual fighting – but they also ran subject territories in the manner of the Persian satrapies, usually with a governor who they had put in place. Or otherwise client kings and tribal chieftains. They got their tribute through annual razzias, where that was necessary. There seems to have been always some tribal group or grouping which was restless and spoiling for a fight. So warfare was a key component of Assyria’s civilization.

Ralf: As it was for Persia.

Sadiq: Indeed. But the Persians liked to control territory. Their satrapies covered territory – provinces, which their governors had the responsibility to control. Irrespective of which tribal or political groupings were in the satrapy. So the Persians controlled both the cities and the territory around them. In Assyria, the kings controlled the cities mainly, but not necessarily the surrounding territory. Hence the client kings and chieftains, who had that responsibility.

Ralf: Ok.

Sadiq: A digression. I remember one lecturer talking about the development of town planning in the ancient near east. A lot of early cities don’t show much of it. You have the citadel with its palace, a temple or temples, administrative quarters, a garrison, etc. And that is about it. The rest is higgledy-piggledy. No ordered development. You can read that as a failure of planning in the earliest days, which indeed is how it is usually read by archaeologists.

Ralf: You don’t think that is the case?

Sadiq: No. If you put yourself into the mind of an Assyrian king, which we can do because we have texts which tell us a lot about them, and how they thought about the world in which they were living, we can understand that part of the function of the king was to make order out of chaos. That’s how the world is – a place of chaos which has order imposed on it, at least up to a point. Assyrian theology describes an annual battle between the head of the pantheon Marduk (later known as Bel) battling the forces of chaos, as represented by the demon Tiamat. This combat formed a crucial part in the ceremony of the New Year Festival in Babylon.  Tiamat is represented in the form of a fierce winged creature with talons, faced by the King. Sometimes chaos is represented by the sea, by rolling waves. And the king’s mastery over the forces of chaos is shown by him sitting on his throne, mounted on a dais, in the middle of a rolling sea.

Ralf: I see.

Sadiq: So in a sense Alexander had taken control of an imperial franchise, started by the Assyrians, and refined by their successors, the Persians. By conquering it he became the master of the empire, and stood in the same relation to the godhead as did the Assyrian kings. Alexander was the recipient of a divine mandate, and charged with the responsibility of imposing order on the world, as the head of the Babylonian pantheon, Marduk, also did.

Ralf: So are you saying that the mission of Alexander was religious?

Sadiq: Not as we would understand it. But he had an understanding of the proper relationship between an all-conquering king and the divine. Plus the responsibilities that went along with that relationship.

Ralf: How is that not a religious mission as we would understand it?

Sadiq: Because the mission does not depend on a particular religion. Alexander is able to pass from Greek patterns of religious thought to those of the east. How he is able to do this is an interesting question. Part of the proskynesis debate revolves around the fact that not all of his companions were able to understand this transition, and how it might be possible.  And what it might be for.

Ralf: So, how was it possible, and what was it for?

Sadiq: As I said, he stood in the same relation to the godhead as the kings of Assyria did. For some reason he understood that concept, either because he had imbibed eastern ideas, or perhaps because the basis of these ideas was current in Macedonia and Greece, at an esoteric level. Alexander is quoted by Plutarch as writing to his teacher Aristotle on the publication of the Metaphysics, that Aristotle had published esoteric knowledge in that book, which perhaps he should not have published. Some of the ideas discussed in the Metaphysics not only underpin Greek ideas about the nature of reality itself, but also Mesopotamian ideas about the nature of reality, as we now know from texts recovered from their temples and libraries.

Ralf: The picture you are painting of the ancient intellectual world is quite different from the one which is present in my mind. It seems to me that you are suggesting that there are theological structures present in the ancient world which differ from what has been transmitted to us by ancient writers. How can that be?

Sadiq: It is no mystery that the world was divided in antiquity into what was on the outside, the exoteric, and what was on the inside, the esoteric. The question is, what have scholars made of it, and why? Many scholars choose to ignore what is esoteric, on the grounds that, since it is hidden, we cannot have knowledge of what that esoteric understanding involved. So the business of the classicist is to make sense of what is made available in the historical record, and not to indulge in futile speculation about what is not properly documented, and which may never have made any sense at all.

 

Ralf: That isn’t an unreasonable attitude. You can only work with what is susceptible to an understanding. Just as in the modern world, there is much that doesn’t seem to make a great deal of sense, and probably never did. There isn’t a lot of point in spending time and a career looking at something which was not based on anything which might be rationally understood.

Sadiq: But it means that we make presumptions about the rationality of ancient thought on the basis of what does not make sense to us, or what appears to be missing from the literary record. There is a danger here that both of these are presumptive judgements. Not everything which might make sense to us presents itself to us in an intelligible form, and very few scholars have a grasp of the significance of the legacy of all of the elements of ancient literature. Do we know the difference between something which appears to make no sense, and something which does not make sense? If things do not make sense to us, how can we understand the full range of what has been transmitted in the ancient literature which has survived to our own times?

Ralf: That is clearly a danger for scholars.  So you are suggesting that some of what was once esoteric, has in fact been transmitted to us. But because of some of our presumptions about the nature of the ancient world, and what they would and would not talk about, as well as the sheer quantity and diversity of ancient literature, we have been misled into thinking that we cannot know some things which in fact it is possible for us to know?

Sadiq: The esoteric has indeed been transmitted to us. And in multifarious forms. But we do not see it for what it is. The ancients were very bad at keeping secrets.

Ralf: How so? Secrecy was of great importance in the ancient world. From what you have said about Plato’s myth of the cave it would seem to have been of supreme importance, otherwise society could fall apart.

Sadiq: Yes. But you have to understand what they were protecting, and the model of reality in which it was necessary to keep it secret. The esoteric understanding of the world was necessarily secret, because it was arcane, and difficult to understand. It suggested a reality different from the one in which most people lived and functioned. The danger of disorientation was always present when the esoteric understanding was discussed. 

Ralf: So what were they protecting, and if it was so important, why were they so bad at keeping their secrets?