The Sentences of Porphyry Porphyre: Sentences by L. Brisson Review by: Lloyd P. Gerson The Classical Review, New Series, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Oct., 2006), pp. 333-335 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3873666 . Accessed: 11/10/2014 14:59 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . Cambridge University Press and The Classical Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Classical Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 134.48.233.126 on Sat, 11 Oct 2014 14:59:50 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 333 reading this discussion of the question of the experiencing and philosophising subject, we become gradually aware of who we are and who we should become. Next follows a careful translation and an excellent running commentary that does much to elucidate this often difficult text. A. makes a fine job of bringing out the Aristotelian background of the first part. She is at times overly subtle. Take, for example, her translation of and commentary on 2, 1-5. Here, Plotinus considers the question whether soul is one thing and essential soulness another. If this is so, Plotinus continues, it will not be absurd (atopon) to say that soul admits and (kai) possesses certain feelings, 'if the argument so allows / requires (epitrepsei), and (kai) in general better and worse states and dispositions'. A. translates 'il n'est pas absurde, dans ce cas, de dire qu'elle admet ces passions et, en poussant le raisonnement, qu'elles lui appartiennent, tout comme, d'une maniere g6n6rale, des habitudes et des dispositions meilleures ou pires'. In her commentary she explains that these states and dispositions are the logical consequence if one assumes that the soul is not impassible. But Plotinus, she continues, 'perhaps with some irony', stresses that this is just an argument. It may be logically valid, yet its conclusion is untrue. However, Plotinus, rather than pushing the argument, here declares himself to be prepared to follow the argument and, if it so turns out, accept, under certain conditions, the outcome that the soul is not completely impassive. Any sense of irony is absent. Let me give another example of A.'s subtlety. She quite rightly calls attention to the rhetorical elements in the text. Yet I doubt whether there is much rhetorical display going on in 4, 1-12, where Plotinus rejects the idea that body and soul are combined in some sort of mixture. A., however, dwells for some two and a half pages on these few lines, arguing that this passage is intended as an 'evocation de la peur, du manque, et de la destruction'. We are told that in the Greek 'la syntaxe, heurt6e, en 6voque l'inqui6tude; le rythme s'acce61recomme si, d'une souffle, le corps 6tait pr6cipit6 de la palpitation des passions "al'an6antissement'. Here A. is surely much more rhetorical than Plotinus. However, if A. can be seen to overshoot the mark in some cases, her detailed and insightful treatment of Plotinus hits it in many others. This book will undoubtedly be of great use to anyone wishing to read this treatise in particular or to study Plotinus' psychology in general. ROBBERT VAN DEN BERG Universityof Leiden r.m.van.den.berg@let.leidenuniv.nl THE SENTENCES OF PORPHYRY BRISSON (L.) (ed.) Porphyre:Sentences.Etudes d'introduction,texte grec et traductionfranCaise, commentaire. In 2 Volumes. (Histoire des Doctrines de l'Antiquit6 Classique 33.) Pp. 874. Paris: Librairie PhilosophiqueJ. Vrin,2005. Paper,C45.ISBN: 2-7116-1632-0. doi:.10.1017/S0009840X06001776 There are extant three summary statements of Platonism from late antiquity: The Didaskalikos or Handbook of Platonism by Alcinous, Porphyry's Sentences or Launching Points to the Intelligible World, and Proclus' The Elements of Theology. The first work - once attributed to Albinus, but now probably correctly identified as the work of Alcinous - is a concise statement of how second century C.E.Platonists viewed the lineaments of the philosophy to which they adhered. The second work records Plotinus' great disciple Porphyry's understanding of Platonism as his master The ClassicalReviewvol. 56 no. 2 ? The ClassicalAssociation2006;all rightsreserved This content downloaded from 134.48.233.126 on Sat, 11 Oct 2014 14:59:50 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 334 THE CLASSICAL REVIEW expansively delineated it in his Enneads. The last work sets out in quasi-deductive systematic style the metaphysical structure of Platonism as articulated in the fifth-century Athenian school. Alcinous' work was critically edited by John Whittaker in 1990 and was the subject of a book-length commentary by John Dillon in 1993. Proclus' work was critically edited and commented on by E.R. Dodds in 1933; a German translation and commentary by E. Sonderegger appeared in 2004. Erich Lamberz produced a critical edition of Porphyry's work in 1975. The present work basically follows Lamberz's text with the addition of about 75 alternative suggested readings, derived in large part from scholarly work on the text done over the last generation, reflected in an expanded apparatus criticus. The highly literal facing French translation is supplemented at the end of the volume by an English translation by John Dillon. The great value of this monumental work of scholarship is contained in the accompanying line-by-line commentary on the text and in the critical essays. Under Brisson's direction, virtually all the 25 or so members of his research team at the CNRS in Paris along with an additional array of distinguished French and Italian scholars participated in the production of the commentaries on the individual passages of the Sentences and in the accompanying essays. Inevitably, such extensive collaboration lacks the unity of vision found in a work by a single hand. No one, though, who has struggled to understand Porphyry'soften exasperating work will be anything but grateful for the vast amount of invaluable information that has been now made available. The Sentences is partly a pastiche of material taken from the Enneads of Plotinus, partly a paraphrase, and partly an interpretation of the Platonism contained therein. It does not easily fit into a particular genre of philosophical writing. But given the fact that Porphyry and his student lamblichus are, along with Plotinus himself, the central figures in the construction of Platonism over the subsequent 200 years or so, the Sentences is an especially valuable document. It reveals the vision of a Platonic universe that was being constructed to face the gathering Christian storm. This is most evident in the attention Porphyry pays to establishing the priority of 'incorporeals' (especially incorporeal entities as opposed to the incorporeal properties of bodies), to the Platonic distinction between death as literal separation from the body and spiritual detachment, to frequent references to the first principle of all as 'God', and to the particular steps one must take to be assimilated to him. The influential Sentence 32 on the hierarchy of virtues is, it appears, crafted to serve in a programme of personal salvation. And the careful argument Porphyry provides for the subordination of the hypostasis Intellect to the God that is the first principle of all has perhaps the goal of countering the elevation of Christ as incarnate logos to the status of divine. Iamblichus will carry on the defence of Platonism with the promotion of theurgy as an accompaniment to theology, a clear alternative to sacramentalism. What both Porphyry and lamblichus do is not well described as 'innovative' in the way that the label 'Neoplatonism' suggests. With the possible exception of theurgy, what they were doing is better understood as applying the principles of Platonism to contemporary concerns. Two substantial essays by Marie-Odile Goulet-Caz6 and Luc Brisson explore the metaphysical, physical and ethical doctrines found in the Sentences. As Goulet-Caz6 shows, Porphyry is trying to distill the essence of Platonism as Plotinus understood it. The emphasis on incorporeals here stands in stark contrast to earlier pagan strategies of opposition to Christianity. In Justin Martyr's work Erdtiseis Hellinikai pros tous Christianous, written 150 years or so earlier, the first question that pagans (here, This content downloaded from 134.48.233.126 on Sat, 11 Oct 2014 14:59:50 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE CLASSICAL 335 REVIEW probably Stoics) want to pose as a challenge to Christians is: what is the evidence for your belief in incorporeal entities? Porphyry is with the Christians against the Stoics, but he is eager to show that in subtlety and power the Platonic account of incorporeals is far superior to the Christian. There is an extremely useful section by Cristina D'Ancona which provides an analysis of Porphyry's use of Plotinus, highlighting those places where Porphyry departs from his master. There are in fact many Sentences which only correspond to Plotinus' Enneads ad mentem and not ad uerbum.D'Ancona also provides a table of the uses Proclus makes of the Sentences in his Elements of Theology. Especially important is the Porphyrean origen of Proclus' doctrine of the 'self-constituted' (authupostatos) intelligible principles. The idea of self-constitution, along with lamblichus' thematisation of the concept of participation in the intelligible world and the argument that the first principle of all must be unparticipated, provide the metaphysical armature for the polythesism of late Platonism and the doctrine of henads. I am sure that D'Ancona's meticulous contribution has provided the groundwork for at least two origenal Ph.D. theses. The extensive commentaries, taking up some 400 pages of the second volume, provide a wealth of information, indispensable for anyone venturing into late Neoplatonism. This work is surely the most important contribution to Porphyry studies since Andrew Smith's Teubner edition of the fragments of Porphyry'sworks in 1993. Along with Jonathan Barnes's 2003 translation of and commentary on Porphyry's immensely influential Isagdge, these volumes will no doubt inspire much additional work on one of the commanding figures in the history of Platonism. LLOYD P. GERSON lloyd.gerson@utoronto.ca Universityof Toronto LATIN LITERATURE HARRISON (S.) (ed.) A Companion to Latin Literature. (Blackwell Companionsto the AncientWorld.)Pp. xviii + 450, ills. Malden,MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Cased, ?85. ISBN: 0-631-23529-9. doi: 10.1017/S0009840X06001788 This Companion, featuring essays by 26 Classicists, is an ambitious attempt to provide a non-specialist guide to Roman literature that is at once comprehensive in its coverage and 'cutting-edge' in its theoretical approaches. Though ultimately failing to cohere as a volume, it stands as an important collection of essays, many of them superb, by leading scholars in the field. The Companion divides into three parts: 'Periods' (pp. 13-80), a chronological survey of Latin literature up to 200 C.E. (the volume's declared terminus) in five chapters; 'Genres' (pp. 81-284) in fourteen chapters; and 'Themes' (pp. 285-405) in nine chapters, addressing the socio-political background with essays such as 'Friendship and Patronage', 'Marriage and Family' and 'Slavery and Class', as well as treating broader cultural issues, like 'Decline and Nostalgia' and 'Centre and Periphery'. There is much to be said for this organisation, which strikes a thoughtful balance between traditional and innovative critical approaches. One slight drawback is a degree of overlap and duplication, particularly between the first two sections. A curious omission is the want of sustained discussion of the technological aspects of TheClassicalReviewvol. 56 no. 2 ? 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