Chapter Five - The marriage of Homer and Plato
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2012
Summary
It is tempting to speak of a later Platonist reconciliation of Homer and Plato. But from their point of view, this description would miss the point. According to them, Homer and Plato have no need of reconciliation, since they were never seriously estranged. Perhaps, then, marriage provides a more appropriate symbolic image of their relationship. As Homer says, ‘there is nothing better or finer than this, when husband and wife keep house, the two of one mind in their thinking’ (Od. 6.182–4). The question which this chapter addresses is not whether the later Platonists were right to believe that Homer and Plato were of one mind, nor whether the interpretative approach to Plato that sustained this conclusion was correct. The aim is to understand how the later Platonist consensus, paradoxical though it may seem, was a reasonable one, relative to its own premises. There is not space to follow in detail the development of the tradition from Porphyry (§4.7) to Syrianus and his pupils Hermias and Proclus in the fifth century ad. I have therefore chosen to focus on three case studies from the late second and third centuries, illustrating different ways in which these ideas could be applied at the transition between what modern scholarship terms Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism. But first, I survey some of the resources available to later Platonists when they attempted to demonstrate that Homer and Plato were of one mind.
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- Ancient Philosophical Poetics , pp. 138 - 179Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012