readings, one book at its own scale — the direct
answer to the last reading: the founder’s route given a location, a cave
in the Odyssey read as the cosmos, two gates, and a frame whose
uncheckable part is a reading of versesTwenty-fourth of the readings, and it answers the
twenty-third. Plotinus ended
the last reading with a finding about location: his ascent has none.
There is no seat, no practice, no stated axiom for the uncheckable part
of the route to occupy, and the blog’s instrument was corrected to ask
whether the route terminates in the practitioner’s own state, and
whether there is anything at all that someone other than the
practitioner could inspect. Porphyry is Plotinus’ own pupil and the
editor of his papers, and this is the first time the series has read him
as a book rather than cited him. What he does with the same subject is
give the route a place: a cave in Ithaca, in the
thirteenth book of the Odyssey, with two gates turned north and south,
water, honey, a loom on stone beams, and an olive at the mouth. The
descent into generation is drawn as geography. So the route is located —
and what is located turns out to be a reading of fourteen lines of
Homer, which is the finding this post has to report carefully, because
it is not quite the finding the series went looking for. The same
succession, one generation apart, produces a frame with no location and
a frame whose whole content is a location. The answer to “is the
route located?” is not a property of the tradition. It is a property of
the individual text.
Status. This post reads one short treatise at its own scale, and it is shorter than the recent readings because the book is short: Porphyry’s On the Cave of the Nymphs is a single treatise in eighteen numbered sections, a commentary on one passage of one poem, and reading it at the length of the Enneads or the Elements would be a different kind of dishonesty. Two printings of one translation are used, and every quotation says which printing it came from. The first is On the Cave of the Nymphs in the Thirteenth Book of the Odyssey, From the Greek of Porphyry, Translated by Thomas Taylor (London: John M. Watkins, 1917) — the 1917 printing below, cited by Porphyry’s own section number in it. The second is the same translator’s Select Works of Porphyry (London: Thomas Rodd, 1823), which reprints the treatise alongside the four books On Abstinence from Animal Food and the Auxiliaries to the Perception of Intelligible Natures, and adds Taylor’s own Introduction and an Appendix of his own; quotations from it are marked as coming from the 1823 printing, and Taylor’s prose is marked as Taylor’s. Every quotation is checked against the printing named. Straight ASCII quotation marks are used throughout; the printers’ curly apostrophes and quotation marks are normalised, spaces the printing leaves before its punctuation and before a closing quotation mark are closed up, a word split across a line — with or without a hyphen — is rejoined so it reads whole, and two words the printing runs together are separated. Both printings are damaged in places, and differently in each — the 1917 title page is one of the damaged places — so where a quotation’s printing is broken the quotation stops at the break rather than being mended, elisions are marked with a bare ellipsis, and where the 1917 printing spoils a passage the 1823 printing carries cleanly the quotation is taken from the 1823 and said to be. Nothing is spliced, and no word is inserted into a quotation. The reading of this material through the blog’s frame is an inference, offered as one. Nothing here claims that the cosmos is as Porphyry reads it, that souls descend through a gate, that the nymphs preside over generation, or that Homer meant what Porphyry says he meant; nothing here claims the contrary of any of these either. Porphyry’s claims are reported as his, Taylor’s as his, and the later Platonists quoted in Taylor’s notes as theirs. No living or dead person is diagnosed, and nothing here validates or invalidates anyone’s practice. As everywhere: describe structures, diagnose no one.*
The book is a short treatise doing one thing: explaining a passage of Homer. It opens with its question and never leaves it.
“What does Homer obscurely signify by the cave in Ithaca, which he describes in the following verses ?”
— Porphyry, section 1; Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing.1 What follows is not a treatise on the soul that happens to use Homer as an illustration. It is an exegesis of fourteen lines of the Odyssey, book thirteen, and every sentence of it is accountable to those lines. This is also the blog’s first direct Porphyry. He has been a figure on the edge of the series all along: the pupil who arranged and edited Plotinus, and the author of the Letter to Anebo that Iamblichus, On the Mysteries answers. Here he is read as a book, and the edition matters. Taylor published the treatise in 1823 in the Select Works, where the title page advertises, after the translations, “AN APPENDIX, EXPLAINING THE ALLEGORY OF THE WANDERINGS OF ULYSSES. BY THE TRANSLATOR.”2 So the 1823 volume does two things the 1917 reissue does not: it carries an Introduction in which Taylor frames the treatise, and an Appendix in which he extends its method over the whole Odyssey. Taylor’s Introduction is where he says what he thinks the treatise is for:
“Porphyry, in his treatise On the Cave of the Nymphs, having informed us, that Numenius, the Pythagorean, considered the person of Ulysses, in the Odyssey, as the image of a man who passes in a regular manner over the stormy sea of generation, or a sensible life, and thus at length arrives at a region where tempest and seas are unknown, and finds a nation …”
— Thomas Taylor, Introduction to the 1823 Select Works, page xii.3 Two things there are Taylor’s and not Porphyry’s: the double gloss “the stormy sea of generation, or a sensible life”, and the claim that Porphyry “informed us” of the Ulysses reading. Porphyry does give that reading — but to Numenius and his followers, not to himself. The post comes back to that.
The 1917 printing is a cheap reissue of the same translation, read first here because it prints the treatise alone at section numbers that run unbroken from one to eighteen, and because its title page advertises the treatise as “From the Greeh of Porphyry”4 — the condition of both printings, and the reason each quotation below says which one it came from.
The passage is the cave at the head of the harbour of Phorcys, where the Phaeacians leave the sleeping Odysseus. Taylor’s version of it, as Porphyry quotes it:
“High at the head a branching olive grows And crowns the pointed cliffs with shady boughs. A cavern pleasant, though involved in night, Beneath it lies, the Naiades’ delight : Where bowls and urns of workmanship divine And massy beams in native marble shine ; On which the Nymphs amazing webs display, Of purple hue and exquisite array. The busy bees within the urns secure Honey delicious, and like nectar pure. Perpetual waters through the grotto glide, A lofty gate unfolds on either side ; That to the north is pervious to mankind : The sacred south t’immortals is consign’d.”
— Porphyry, section 1, quoting Homer; Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing.5
Everything in the treatise hangs on those lines, and the first move is not interpretation but a refutation of the obvious reading. Porphyry denies that Homer reports a real cave, with a borrowed argument — that the poet
“under the veil of allegory, conceals some mysterious signification”
— Porphyry, section 1; Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing.6 The argument is Cronius’, and Porphyry marks it as his from the start: those who have described the island have, as Cronius says, “made no mention of such a cave being found in it”,7 and Cronius insists the story cannot be history. Porphyry’s own sentence making the point states the treatise’s premise:
“And it is equally absurd to suppose, that nature herself should point out, in this place, one path for the descent of all mankind, and again another path for all the Gods.”
— Porphyry, section 1; Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing.8
From there it builds a question list out of the physical details, and the list is what makes it a commentary rather than an essay: why the cave is of the nymphs called Naiades and not of nymphs simply; why there are bowls and jars when nothing is said to fill them, but bees deposit honey in them as in hives; why the weaving beams are stone rather than wood; why the gate of men is turned north and the gate of the gods south.9 Then a concession, and a passage of geography: Porphyry allows that something like the cave may exist, quoting Artemidorus the Ephesian on the island, and concludes, “This cave, therefore, will not be entirely an Homeric fiction.” But whether the poet describes it as it is or adds something of his own, “the same inquiries remain”.10 The treatise will not settle whether the cave is real. It will settle what it means.
The first identification is the large one, and Porphyry gives it in the second section: the cave is the cosmos, consecrated to the cosmos “collectively, according to the whole of itself, or separately, according to its parts”. The reasoning runs through matter, which is what a cave is made of:
“through the cave indicating the world, which was generated from matter”
— Porphyry, section 2; Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing.11 Caves are spontaneous productions, connascent with the earth and hollow inside; and the world, produced from no external cause and self-adherent, is allied to matter. Matter, on this account, is “denominated a stone and a rock” for its sluggish and repercussive nature with respect to form.12 Then the sentence that makes the allegory turn:
“through the connecting power, and orderly distribution of form, from which also it is called world, it is beautiful and delightful.”
— Porphyry, section 2; Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing.13 Hence the cave is properly denominated a cave: lovely to him who first enters it through its participation of forms, obscure to him who surveys its foundation with an intellectual eye, its exterior parts pleasant and its interior parts dark.
That is the frame, and the kind of claim it makes should be marked. It is not that the cave is like the world: a cave is a symbol of the world, on the grounds that the two share matter, darkness and a hollow shape. The treatise then establishes that caves were dedicated in fact. In the second section the Persians perform their initiation “in a place which they denominate a cavern”, and Eubulus reports that Zoroaster first consecrated a cave in the mountains of Persia “in honour of Mithra, the maker and father of all things”.14 And in the third section, in Porphyry’s own summary sentence, “to the world they dedicated caves and dens; as likewise to Nymphs … on account of the water which trickles, or is diffused in caverns, over which the Naiades, as we shall shortly observe, preside” — the ellipsis standing for a cross-reference the printing carries there.15
The fourth section separates two senses, and it is where the treatise is most careful. A cave can be a symbol of the intelligible world too — invisible to sense, of a firm and stable essence — and Porphyry says the ancients used both senses “by different and not the same conceptions”. This cave has a twofold entrance and contains flowing water, so it is an image of the sensible essence, not the intelligible, and it is sacred to the Naiades, the nymphs of streams, rather than to the mountain nymphs. And the identification that does the work:
“For the ancients thought that these souls are incumbent on water which is inspired by divinity, as Numenius says”
— Porphyry, section 4; Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing.16 The thesis follows in one clause:
“for souls descending into generation fly to moisture”
— Porphyry, section 4; Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing.17 The witnesses are stacked behind it: Heraclitus, that “moisture appears delightful and not deadly to souls”, and again that “We live their death, and we die their life”;18 and the Egyptians, for whom the planets sail rather than stand. Water is the substance of the descent, and the fifth section is a short physiology of it: souls, corporeal or incorporeal, while they attract body, are “drenched in moisture” and so verge to humidity, the dead being evoked by the effusion of bile and blood; Heraclitus gives the maxim in the other direction — “a dry soul is the wisest” — while Porphyry gives the mechanism: the spirit becomes moist through the desire of generation, the soul attracting a humid vapour from verging to generation.19 And then the identification that ties the water to the nymphs, in five words:
“…into generation are the nymphs called naiades”
— Porphyry, section 5; Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing.20 The nymphs of the water are the souls on their way in; marriage is called being a nymph, because it is being joined to generation.
The gates are the sharpest part of the treatise and the part the blog came for. Porphyry builds to them through cult: caves were consecrated to gods before temples were built, and wherever Mithra was known “they propitiated the God in a cavern”.21 Then he returns to the verse he quoted at the start:
“Homer was not satisfied with saying that it had two gates”
— Porphyry, section 9; Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing.22 The rest of that sentence the 1917 printing breaks and the 1823 printing carries: the poet adds that one of the gates “was turned towards the north, but the other, which was more divine, to the south”.23 And Porphyry marks a piece of authorial care: the poet calls the northern gate pervious to descent, but says nothing of the southern gate’s perviousness at all, only that it “is inaccessible to men, but it is the path of the immortals”.24
The identification of the gates is where the cosmology becomes astronomy. Porphyry states the premise as received, and attributes it:
“as Numenius and his familiar Cronius assert”
— Porphyry, section 10; Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing.25 That is the attribution he gives for the claim that a cavern is an image and symbol of the world; the two caps of the heaven are his own mapping on top of it. The summer tropic is in Cancer and the winter tropic in Capricorn, Cancer being nearest to us and attributed to the Moon, Capricorn invisible from here and given to Saturn.26 Then the gates are named:
“that Cancer is the gate through which souls descend; but Capricorn that through which they ascend.”
— Porphyry, section 11; Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing.27 Cancer is northern and suited to descent, Capricorn southern and suited to ascent, so the verse’s two gates are the two solstitial signs and the direction of travel in the poem’s geography is the direction of travel in the cosmos: north is down, south is up.28
Porphyry then does something worth marking, because it is the treatise’s most exact piece of reading. Homer gives the southern gate to “the immortals”, not to “the gods”, and Porphyry insists on the difference:
“but the southern gates are not the avenues of the Gods, but of souls ascending to the Gods.”
— Porphyry, section 11; Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing.29 The reason he gives is a claim about us: the name “immortals” is also common to our souls, “which are per se, or essentially, immortal”.30 The poem’s word is honoured exactly, and the honouring changes what the gate is for: if the southern gate were the gods’ own avenue, the cave would be a picture of divine traffic, whereas with the word “immortals” it is a picture of souls going home. A reader can check that move against the verse, and it is one of the two things in this treatise a second person can check.
The winds follow the gates, the north wind suiting souls falling into generation, the south wind dissolving life,31 and in the fourteenth section the general principle is stated: every twofold entrance is a symbol of a nature that runs in two directions, so that one gate pertains “to Gods and good (daemons)” and the other “to mortals and depraved natures”.32 Parmenides, Porphyry adds, “mentions these two gates” in a treatise on the nature of things, and Pherecydes Syrus “also mentions recesses and trenches, caverns, doors, and gates”.33
The sixth section brings the allegory down to objects, and there the treatise is at once most like a diagram and most like an argument. The cave is consecrated in common to souls and to the nymphs who preside over waters, and the question is which symbol belongs to which. The stony bowls and jars are for the aquatic nymphs, the stone suiting nymphs “who preside over the water that flows from rocks”, while the jars of baked earth are symbols of Bacchus.34 And to souls coming in:
“what symbol can be more appropriate than those instruments pertaining to weaving?”
— Porphyry, section 6; Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing.35 The answer to the stone beams is anatomy: the formation of the flesh is on and about the bones, “which in the bodies of animals resemble stones”, so the beams of the loom are stone because the frame of a living body is bone, and the purple web is flesh woven from blood.36 The body then gets the treatise’s second large figure:
“the body is a garment with which the soul is invested, a thing wonderful to the sight”
— Porphyry, section 6; Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing.37 The figure is not Porphyry’s coinage, and he says so: Proserpine is represented by Orpheus as weaving a web, and the heavens are called a veil by the ancients.38
The seventh and eighth sections are about honey, and they are the best example in the treatise of how far one physical detail stretches. The jars hold honeycombs and not water; honey is the nutriment of bees, and also what is offered to the dead, since the poet pours nectar and ambrosia into the nostrils of corpses to prevent putrefaction. Being both cathartic and preservative, it is “the symbol of a preserving and defending power” when the Persians offer it to the guardian of fruits.39 And then the reading on which the section turns, because it is a reading of a myth:
“the sweetness of honey signifies, with theologists, the same thing as the pleasure arising from generation, by which Saturn, being ensnared, was castrated.”
— Porphyry, section 7; Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing.40 In Orpheus, Saturn is caught by Jupiter through honey, is intoxicated, and sleeps, so the sweetness of honey means the pleasure that draws souls down. Bees are read the same way — the priestesses of Ceres were called bees, Proserpine was called honied, the moon was called a bee — and honey is at the same time a symbol of death, which is why libations of honey go to the terrestrial gods. Even the boundary is policed: all souls proceeding into generation are not simply called bees, Porphyry says, “but those who will live in it justly and who, after having performed such things as are acceptable to the Gods”.41
The last stretch turns to the olive at the head of the cave, where the allegory becomes advice. Porphyry starts by refusing the trivial reading:
“But the growth of the olive in such a situation is not fortuitous, as some one may suspect, but contains the enigma of the cavern.”
— Porphyry, section 15; Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing.42 The olive is the plant of Minerva, and Minerva is wisdom — the 1917 printing breaks that sentence and the 1823 printing carries it:
“hence an olive, the symbol of this wisdom, flourishes near the present cavern, which is an image of the world.”
— Porphyry, section 15; Taylor’s translation, 1823 printing.43 The olive is ever-flourishing, its leaves turning white end upward in summer and downward in winter, which is why suppliants extend olive branches, exchanging “the sorrowful darkness of danger for the fair light of security and peace”; the Demiurgus “invigorates miserable and suppliant souls”.44
Then the sixteenth section, which is the treatise’s nearest thing to an instruction, and the sentence to read twice:
“it is requisite to sit at the foot of the olive, and consult with Minerva by what means we may most effectually destroy that hostile rout of passions which insidiously lurk in the secret recesses of the soul.”
— Porphyry, section 16; Taylor’s translation, 1823 printing. The 1917 printing carries the same sentence with two words broken.45 That is the treatise telling someone to do something — and the someone is Ulysses, inside the allegory. Porphyry’s preamble makes that clear: “Here, naked, and assuming a suppliant habit”, afflicted in body, averse to the energies of sense, one sits at the foot of the olive.46 The person who sits is the figure in the poem, read as the soul.
And then the identification the series went looking for, which Porphyry attributes rather than claims:
“it was not without reason that Numenius and his followers thought the person of Ulysses in the Odyssey represented to us a man, who passes in a regular manner over the dark and stormy sea of generation, and thus at length arrives at that region where tempests and seas are unknown, and finds a nation”Who ne’er knew salt, or heard the billows roar.””
— Porphyry, section 16; Taylor’s translation, 1823 printing.47 So Odysseus is the soul that comes in through the water and goes out through it. The port of the cave is named Phorcys, which Porphyry reads as a statement about matter — “It is the port of the ancient marine Phorcys”48 — and the seat under the olive belongs to Ulysses precisely as a suppliant, “as to one who implores divinity, and would appease his natal demon with a suppliant branch”.49 The story ends at the oar mistaken for a winnowing fan; then the eighteenth section defends the method against the charge that interpretations of this kind are “forced, and nothing more than the conjectures of ingenious men”.50 The defence is not a rule for reading but a claim about the poet — that it “must not be denied that he has obscurely … indicated the images of things of a more divine nature in the fiction of a fable”, the ellipsis standing for the printing’s page-break — and its ground is Homer’s wisdom:
“it would not have been possible to devise the whole of this hypothesis unless the figment had been transferred (to an appropriate meaning) from certain established truths.”
— Porphyry, section 18; Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing.51 Then the treatise stops: “But reserving the discussion of this for another treatise, we shall here finish our explanation of the present Cave of the Nymphs.”52
The last reading ended on a question, and the question was the blog’s own instrument being corrected. Plotinus’ frame, the twenty-third reading found, has no location for the part of it that cannot be checked: no seat, no practice, no stated axiom, nothing outside the thinker at all. The route terminates in the practitioner’s own state, so the instrument gained a fourth question: does the route terminate there, and is there anything at all that someone other than the practitioner could inspect? The blog came to Porphyry expecting the answer to be yes, because he is Plotinus’ pupil and because his treatise is a location — a cave, a map, two gates.
The answer is yes, and it is not the answer the blog was expecting.
First, the route is located, and it can be pointed at by anyone. The verses exist. A second person can read book thirteen and see that there is a cave with two gates and that one of them is north; can see that Homer gives the south gate to “immortals” and not to “gods”, and that Porphyry’s reading of it turns on exactly that word; can check the identification of the gates with Cancer and Capricorn against the verse’s directions; and can find Cronius and Numenius named and see what Porphyry takes from each. The uncheckable part of this frame occupies a location, and the location is a text. That is a real answer to the fourth question, and a different kind of answer from anything else in the series.
Second, and this is the part the blog owes honestly: what the location locates is a reading, and nothing in the treatise adjudicates it. The instrument had been asking about the uncheckable part as though all uncheckable parts were the same shape. They are not, and one school, one generation apart, shows the difference. In Plotinus the uncheckable part is a state — the soul turned inward, unshareable in principle, which someone else cannot inspect and could not if they tried. In Porphyry it is a reading — a public object, quotable and arguable and checkable for consistency, and still undecided. Someone else can inspect it perfectly well; what they cannot do is decide it, because nothing in the treatise and nothing in Homer settles why a cave should be a cosmos rather than a sanctuary, or why water should mean generation rather than purification.
So the correction is not the one the blog expected. The instrument had been treating “location” as a property of a frame, and Plotinus’ answer as a property of the school. Porphyry shows both are properties of the individual text — the pupil of the man whose route terminates in a private state writes a route that terminates in a public poem.
Third, the treatise does not station a practitioner, and its form says so. Its only imperative sits inside the allegory: the sentence that puts someone under the olive to consult Minerva, whose subject is the figure in the poem, read as the soul. There is no initiation prescribed, no object to be used correctly, no office. The comparison with the neighbours is exact, because the series has just read them. Iamblichus’ frame puts the efficacy in an act performed on symbols, so its uncheckable part is a practice, with the gods’ knowledge as its operative content. Proclus’ frame is two hundred and eleven propositions, so its uncheckable part is the first principle, offered at the head of a proof. Porphyry’s treatise has neither: no act whose performance could be checked, no proposition to inspect. Its whole external content is fourteen lines of Homer and a claim about what they mean, and Porphyry grounds that claim in Homer’s wisdom rather than in a criterion.
That is why the fourth question needs one more cut: a reading is public and arguable, and being public and arguable is not the same as being decidable. The instrument can now ask whether a frame’s uncheckable part is a state or a reading, because it has one of each, in one line of succession, from the hand that arranged the Enneads.
First, the allegorical warrant, which is the structural cost, and the treatise states it itself. Porphyry’s method is total: every physical detail in the passage gets a meaning, and the meanings are supplied from outside the poem. His defence answers the charge of forcing with a premise about Homer rather than a rule — the figment could not have been devised at all “unless the figment had been transferred (to an appropriate meaning) from certain established truths”. That is not a criterion of correct reading but a claim about the poet’s competence, and the cost is that the treatise’s interpretations cannot be wrong in a way a reader could detect, because there is no test outside the reading itself. A reader is free to say that Homer simply described a cave, and nothing in the treatise can defeat that, because its defence of allegory is itself allegorical. The objection is available; he reports it, and answers it with the standing of Homer. That is a real and unsolved structural cost, and the treatise is not naive about it.
Second, the method is named, and this is the checkability the treatise actually offers. Its argument is dense with attributions, and they can be sorted. From Cronius, the claim that the cave is not historical; from Numenius, the identification of souls with water — “as Numenius says” — and, with Cronius, the assertion that a cavern is an image and symbol of the world; from Numenius and his followers, the Ulysses reading, said in the opening of the sentence, which is why Taylor’s Introduction’s “informed us” is Taylor’s summary and not Porphyry’s claim. From Artemidorus the Ephesian the geography of the island; from Eubulus the report about Zoroaster and Mithra; from Parmenides and Pherecydes Syrus the two gates and another mention of doors and gates; from Heraclitus the moisture maxims; from Empedocles the secret cavern; from Plato the cave of the Republic and the tubs of the Gorgias; from Pythagoras the people of dreams in the galaxy; from Orpheus the honey and the weaving of Proserpine; from Sophocles the bees. What is Porphyry’s own is the mapping of the two tropic signs onto the two gates, the argument from bone to stone beam, and the insistence that the verse’s word “immortals” rather than “gods” gives the southern gate its passengers. A reader can see whose reading each one is, and can check the attribution — which does not make the readings decidable but makes them attributable, and is why this post can report the allegory as the treatise gives it rather than as Porphyry alone gives it.
Third, the translation, which is a Romantic rendering of a late-antique Greek text and should be said to be. Both printings read here are Thomas Taylor’s, made in 1823 and reissued in 1917; this reading had no critical English edition to work from and no second translator to set against him. Two consequences matter. Taylor’s own frame is printed with the text, and he annotates and criticises the author. He introduces the treatise in 1823, and the same volume carries an Appendix extending the method over the whole Odyssey, its sources named as plainly as Porphyry names his: “from the hints afforded by Porphyry … to unfold the latent meaning of the wanderings of Ulysses, as narrated by Homer.”53 His note on the castration of Saturn is a direct charge:
“Porphyry, though he excelled in philosophical, was deficient in theological knowledge; of which what he now says of the castrations of Saturn and Heaven is a remarkable instance.”
— Thomas Taylor, note to Porphyry, section 7; 1917 printing.54 So the apparatus is a second reading with its own standing, and it brings in Hermias and Proclus — a later Platonic reading of Porphyry’s reading, in which the nymphs are “Goddesses who preside over regeneration, and are ministrant to Bacchus, the offspring of Semele”.55 And the two printings are damaged, and differently, so a reader has no clean copy of the treatise to fall back on. Where one is broken the quotations here come from the other and say so, which is a way of working, not a critical text. Nothing in this post rests on a word that only one of the two printings carries.
One. Porphyry’s On the Cave of the Nymphs is a commentary on fourteen lines of Odyssey 13, in eighteen numbered sections, and a whole book at that size: it opens with its question — what Homer obscurely signifies by the cave in Ithaca — and closes by announcing that it has finished.
Two. The method is total allegory, built on a premise stated at the outset: the story cannot be history, because nature does not put one path in one cave for all humanity and another for all the gods. Every physical detail then receives a meaning drawn from outside the poem — stone is matter, water the descent of souls, bone the stone beam of a loom, purple flesh, honey the pleasure that draws souls down.
Three. The two gates are the sharpest part of it. The northern gate is the descent of souls and the southern the path of the immortals, and the two are identified with the tropic signs, Cancer and Capricorn. The treatise’s most exact reading — that Homer writes “immortals” and not “gods”, so that the southern gate is the way home for souls rather than an avenue of the gods — is checkable against the verse.
Four. The correction. The last reading found a frame with no location for its uncheckable part, and asked whether the route always terminates in the practitioner’s own state. Porphyry, Plotinus’ own pupil, gives the route a place. So “is the route located?” is not a property of the tradition but of the individual text. But what the location locates is a reading, and a reading is public and arguable without being decidable. The instrument therefore gains a fifth cut: ask whether the uncheckable part of a frame is a state or a reading.
Five. The counterweights, in the body. The allegorical warrant is the structural cost: the treatise answers the charge of forcing with a claim about Homer’s wisdom rather than a criterion of reading, so no interpretation in it can be shown wrong by anything outside the interpretation. The method is named, and that is the real checkability: Cronius, Numenius, Artemidorus, Eubulus, Parmenides, Pherecydes, Heraclitus, Plato, Orpheus and the rest — a reader can see whose reading each one is, which makes them attributable without making them decidable. And the translation is a Romantic rendering with no critical English edition behind it, printed with its translator’s own Introduction, Appendix and notes — the notes criticising the author whose text he is translating.
Marking: a reading, and an inference. Documented — every passage in quotation marks, taken from one of two printings of Thomas Taylor’s translation of Porphyry: On the Cave of the Nymphs in the Thirteenth Book of the Odyssey (London: John M. Watkins, 1917), cited by Porphyry’s section number and identified as the 1917 printing; and the Select Works of Porphyry (London: Thomas Rodd, 1823), cited the same way and identified as the 1823 printing, with all quotation from the Introduction, the Appendix and the notes attributed to Thomas Taylor and not to Porphyry. Every address — printing, section, note and page — was read off the printing named, and quotations of prose are taken from whichever printing carries the passage cleanly, as said at each one. The reading is an inference. Nothing here claims that the cosmos is a cave, that souls descend through a gate, that the nymphs preside over generation, or that Homer meant what Porphyry reads him to mean; nothing here claims the contrary either. Porphyry’s claims are reported as Porphyry’s, Taylor’s as Taylor’s, and the words of Hermias, Proclus, Olympiodorus, Macrobius and the rest as theirs. Nothing here validates or invalidates anyone’s practice, and no living or dead person is diagnosed. As everywhere on this blog: describe structures, diagnose no one.
Porphyry, On the Cave of the Nymphs, section 1, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. In that printing the section’s numeral is one of the spoiled readings — the opening marker reads “I i. What does Homer obscurely signify…”. For that reason, and because the 1823 printing numbers the same opening section plainly, sections are cited throughout by the numbers the treatise carries, one to eighteen, and never by a numeral either printing prints ambiguously.↩︎
The title page of the 1823 Select Works, quoted in the capitals the printing uses: “SELECT WORKS OF PORPHYRY; CONTAINING HIS FOUR BOOKS ON ABSTINENCE FROM ANIMAL FOOD; HIS TREATISE ON THE HOMERIC CAVE OF THE NYMPHS; AND HIS … AUXILIARIES TO THE PERCEPTION OF INTELLIGIBLE NATURES. TRANSLATED FROM THE GREEK BY THOMAS TAYLOR.” The ellipsis stands for a mark the printing leaves between “HIS” and “AUXILIARIES”. The same page advertises, below the dedication and above the epigraph, “AN APPENDIX, EXPLAINING THE ALLEGORY OF THE WANDERINGS OF ULYSSES. BY THE TRANSLATOR.” The volume is given as London: printed for Thomas Rodd, 1823.↩︎
Thomas Taylor, Introduction to the 1823 Select Works, page xii. The sentence continues into the verse Taylor quotes there — “Who ne’er new salt, or heard the billows roar :” — which the same printing spells “new” rather than “knew”; the quotation above therefore stops before it. The same Introduction, a few pages earlier, gives the biographical link the series has been running on: Porphyry “was also a disciple first of Longinus, and afterwards of the great Plotinus”, and, the printing’s page-break falling in the middle of the sentence, “and it is to Porphyry we are indebted for the publication of the inestimable and uncommonly profound works of that most extraordinary man.”↩︎
The 1917 printing’s title page names the work and then reads “From the Greeh of Porphyry” above “Translated by Thomas Taylor”, with the publisher given as John M. Watkins, 21 Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road, 1917. “Greeh” is one of the printing’s spoiled readings, on the page a reader meets first, which is why the Status note says what it says about damaged readings.↩︎
Porphyry, section 1, quoting the Odyssey, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The verses are printed as fourteen lines and are quoted here as lines. Spacing before the punctuation is closed up (so “delight :” reads “delight:”), and the apostrophes in “Naiades’” and “t’immortals” are the printing’s.↩︎
Porphyry, section 1, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The clause is Cronius’, reported by Porphyry: the poet “under the veil of allegory, conceals some mysterious signification”.↩︎
Porphyry, section 1, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The same sentence continues: “This likewise, says he, is manifest …” — and the printing breaks into the following words, which are not quoted here. Taylor’s note to this passage identifies the source: “This Cronius, the Pythagorean, is also mentioned by Porphyry in his life of Plotinus.” (Taylor, note to section 1, 1917 printing.)↩︎
Porphyry, section 1, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The preceding sentence names the alternative: the poet does not narrate these particulars “from historical information”, because those who describe the island make no mention of such a cave.↩︎
Porphyry, section 1, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The list includes why the cave is said to be both pleasant and obscure, “since darkness is by no means delightful, but is rather productive of aversion and horror”.↩︎
Porphyry, section 1, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. Artemidorus is named as “Artemidorus the Ephesian”, in the fifth book of a work of eleven books, and the island’s extent is given in stadia, with Taylor’s note converting the measure.↩︎
Porphyry, section 2, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The words before the quotation, which put the two ways of taking the consecration — “whether assumed” — are separated from it by the printing’s page-break, so the quotation begins after it.↩︎
Porphyry, section 2, Taylor’s translation, 1823 printing. Quoted from the 1823 printing because the 1917 printing spoils the joining word of the same phrase. The sentence continues with the ancients’ assertion that matter is infinite through its privation of form, and with the fact that it is continually flowing; the phrase “with respect to form” is the 1917 printing’s, which carries that much cleanly.↩︎
Porphyry, section 2, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The sentence’s subject is the world: it is obscure through matter and delightful through the connecting power and the orderly distribution of form, “from which also it is called world”.↩︎
Porphyry, section 2. The first quotation is taken from the 1823 printing, because the 1917 printing spoils the same words; the second is the 1917 printing’s. Zoroaster and Mithra are named immediately after, and Eubulus is the source Porphyry cites for the report.↩︎
Porphyry, section 3, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The elision stands for a cross-reference the printing carries between “Nymphs” and “on account of the water”.↩︎
Porphyry, section 4, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The sentence continues across the printing’s page-break: “a prophet asserts, that the ’ Spirit of God moved on the waters.” — where the quotation mark the printing opens inside the sentence is left unclosed by the printing, which is why the quotation ends where it does.↩︎
Porphyry, section 4, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The printing breaks the word “descending” across a line, which is rejoined here.↩︎
Quoted in Porphyry, section 4; Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. Porphyry introduces the first as Heraclitus’ — “Hence also, Heraclitus says” — and glosses it: “but the lapse into generation is delightful to them”. The second he marks as being about disembodied souls: “And in another place (speaking of un- embodied souls), he says”.↩︎
Porphyry, section 5, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The preceding sentence quotes Heraclitus for the contrary maxim: “a dry soul is the wisest”.↩︎
Porphyry, section 5, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The sentence begins “Souls, therefore, proceeding” and the printing’s page-break falls inside it, so the quotation picks it up after the break; the words quoted end the sentence and close the section.↩︎
Porphyry, section 9, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The section opens with the general claim that caves were consecrated to the gods in the earliest periods of antiquity, before temples were erected to them, and then gives the instances.↩︎
Porphyry, section 9, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The sentence continues into a passage the printing spoils; the quotation stops before the damage.↩︎
Porphyry, section 9, Taylor’s translation, 1823 printing. Quoted from the 1823 printing because the 1917 printing breaks the same words.↩︎
Porphyry, section 9, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. Porphyry’s point is that the poet says the northern gate is pervious to descent “but does not indicate whether this was also the case with the southern gate”.↩︎
Porphyry, section 10, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The claim to which the attribution is joined is that “a cavern is an image and symbol of the world”, which the 1823 printing carries cleanly; the word joining that clause to the attribution is where the 1917 printing is spoiled.↩︎
Porphyry, section 10, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The same sentence’s two extremes are then mapped: the summer tropic is in Cancer, the winter tropic in Capricorn.↩︎
Porphyry, section 11, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The doctrine is attributed to the theologists, and Plato is named as calling the same signs “entrances”.↩︎
Porphyry, section 11, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The sentence is followed by Taylor’s note, which quotes Macrobius on the same doctrine.↩︎
Porphyry, section 11, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The sentence continues: “On this account, the poet does not say that they are the avenues of the Gods, but of immortals”.↩︎
Porphyry, section 11, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The printing breaks “appellation” across a line; the word is rejoined here.↩︎
Porphyry, section 12, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The section opens by saying the ancients “very reasonably connected winds with souls proceeding into generation”; the north wind suits the descent and refreshes the dying, the south wind dissolves life.↩︎
Porphyry, section 14, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The parentheses are the printing’s; “daemons” is spelled as the 1917 printing spells it, where the 1823 printing has “demons”.↩︎
Porphyry, sections 11 and 14. The Parmenides reference is section 11, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing, where the sentence is followed by the title of the treatise, which the printing encloses in quotation marks. The Pherecydes reference is section 14 and is quoted from the 1823 printing, which carries the whole list, where the 1917 printing breaks after “recesses”.↩︎
Porphyry, section 6, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The distinction Porphyry draws is between the jars’ composition — “fictile, i.e., consists of baked earth” — and the stone of the ones in the cave.↩︎
Porphyry, section 6, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The printing breaks “instruments” across a line; the word is rejoined here.↩︎
Porphyry, section 6, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The sentence after it makes the inference explicit: “Hence these instruments of weaving consist of stone, and not of” — and the printing then carries a stray mark before “any other matter”, so the quotation stops at “and not of”.↩︎
Porphyry, section 6, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The sentence continues with the qualification that this is so “whether this refers to the composition of the soul, or contributes to the colligation of the soul”.↩︎
Porphyry, section 6, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The reference to Orpheus is followed by a note of Taylor’s quoting Proclus on the unfinished webs of Proserpine.↩︎
Porphyry, section 7, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The passage runs through the Leontic rites, in which initiates pour honey on their hands instead of water, and through the purification of the tongue with honey.↩︎
Porphyry, section 7, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The reading is grounded in the Orphic scene the section quotes: Saturn filled with honey, intoxicated, and sleeping; and the paragraph adds that Porus in the banquet of Plato is filled with nectar, “for wine was not (says he) yet known”.↩︎
Porphyry, section 8, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The printing breaks “however” across a line; the word is rejoined here. The sentence continues beyond the quotation, distinguishing the souls that will live in generation justly.↩︎
Porphyry, section 15, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The printing breaks “situation” across a line; the word is rejoined here.↩︎
Porphyry, section 15, Taylor’s translation, 1823 printing. Quoted from the 1823 printing because the 1917 printing spoils several words of the same sentence. The 1823 printing reads on to identify the olive with the plant of Minerva and Minerva with wisdom.↩︎
Porphyry, section 15, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The clause’s parentheses are the printing’s: the Demiurgus connects and contains the world “in ineffable comprehensions”.↩︎
Porphyry, section 16, Taylor’s translation, 1823 printing. Quoted from the 1823 printing because the 1917 printing breaks two words in the same sentence — the article before “olive” and the adjective before “rout”. The words of the quotation are otherwise the same in both printings.↩︎
Porphyry, section 16, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The words quoted are the opening of the sentence that ends where the 1823 printing’s is quoted from; the rest of it describes the condition of the person who sits down.↩︎
Porphyry, section 16, Taylor’s translation, 1823 printing. The verse at the end of the quotation is printed as a separate line in the printing and is quoted as such. The same sentence in the 1917 printing is broken at “a man, who passes in a”, which is why this quotation is taken from the 1823 printing.↩︎
Porphyry, section 17, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. Quoted from the 1917 printing, which carries the phrase; the 1823 printing spoils its adjective. Porphyry’s reason for the name follows in the same paragraph, where the deep, the sea and a tempest are said to be images of a material nature.↩︎
Porphyry, section 17, Taylor’s translation, 1823 printing. The 1823 printing spells “demon” where the 1917 printing spells “daemon”.↩︎
Porphyry, section 18, Taylor’s translation, 1823 printing. The sentence continues: “but when we consider the great wisdom of antiquity, and how much Homer excelled in intellectual prudence, and in an accurate knowledge of every virtue”.↩︎
Porphyry, section 18, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The printing breaks “meaning” across a line; the word is rejoined here. The parentheses around “to an appropriate meaning” are the printing’s.↩︎
Porphyry, section 18, Taylor’s translation, 1917 printing. The complete sentence is: “But reserving the discussion of this for another treatise, we shall here finish our explanation of the present Cave of the Nymphs.”↩︎
Thomas Taylor, Appendix to the 1823 Select Works, headed “ON THE WANDERINGS OF ULYSSES”. The Appendix treats the whole Odyssey episode by episode, in Porphyry’s method and, by Taylor’s own account, from “the hints afforded by Porphyry”.↩︎
Thomas Taylor, note to Porphyry, section 7, in the 1917 printing (the tenth of the notes). The note continues by explaining what Taylor takes the Orphic fables to mean instead, and is a reading of Porphyry rather than a report of him.↩︎
Thomas Taylor, note to Porphyry, section 3, in the 1917 printing, quoting Hermias’ scholia on the Phaedrus of Plato. Taylor introduces the quotation as Hermias’ words, and the note is where the frame’s title-role is given in another hand: the nymphs “are Goddesses who preside over regeneration, and are ministrant to Bacchus, the offspring of Semele.”↩︎
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