(Middle) Platonic philosophers in Lucian^*

Abstract

This paper attempts to assess whether we can find Platonic philosophers with more or less distinct Middle Platonist traits depicted in Lucian’s works. After a look at the terminology Lucian employs for denoting philosophers claiming allegiance to Plato, some case studies (on Platonists in Vitarum auctio, Nigrinus, Hermotimus, Piscator, Convivium, and Philopseudeis) address the question formulated above.

1. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

It is well known that—at least most of the time—philosophers are not treated all too kindly in the works of Lucian of Samosata: very often they are depicted either as pompous asses or as mean-spirited misers; all too often, moreover, their lives are mercilessly exposed as contradicting their pious teachings in the most blatant way; and quite often, too, they are revealed as being nothing more than simple frauds who are most apt at projecting an image of ascetic rigour, while at the same time secretly cultivating all sorts of appalling vices—which, however, their solemn-looking cloaks and impressive beards can only very imperfectly conceal.

This is more or less the picture drawn in a number of Lucianic writings (e.g. Icaromenippus, Necyomantia, Piscator, Hermotimus, and others): in these texts, philosophers (regardless of their ideological affiliations, i.e. regardless of their being Stoics, Cynics, Epicureans, Platonists, etc.) come across as being nothing more than great pretenders. In some of these writings, however, our author is also able—and willing—to more subtly differentiate between the various philosophical sects that were visible and active during his lifetime. Furthermore, we can see in these texts that some of them are more to his liking than others: Sceptics, Epicureans, and—in a number of instances—even Cynics are depicted with a certain amount of sympathy; on the other hand, especially the Stoics, but (to a somewhat lesser degree) also the Platonists come in for heavy criticism and are more than once relentlessly made fun of.¹ The following remarks will focus on the depiction of Platonists in Lucian’s works; they will especially focus on whether this depiction takes account of or reflects typically ‘Middle Platonic’ traits—even if it may distort them considerably—or whether it restricts itself to general commonplaces that would apply just as well to Plato (and even Socrates) as to later representatives of the Platonic school.

Two things should be stressed in advance:

1. This paper purposely considers only Lucianic works in which Platonic philosophers are explicitly introduced as such by calling them Πλατωνικοί (or Ἀκαδημαϊκοί; see below, § 2). As I have said, there also are Lucianic texts in which philosophers are attacked in general, but the traits for which they are attacked have nothing specifically Platonic about them;² therefore, no sound conclusions about Platonists can be drawn from these passages.

2. It might be asked: ‘How can we be sure that Lucian talks about Platonists of his own time and not of Platonic philosophers tout court?’ Two points can be made in support of the first of these propositions. In The Dead Come to Life, or: The Fisherman (Piscator 5–6, 8, 29–37) Lucian’s alter ego, Parrhesiades, goes to considerable lengths to stress that he has no intention of ridiculing the eminent philosophers of old (like Plato), but only their degenerate descendants (or those who merely pretend to be their descendants); if we may transfer this claim also to the author himself, we have a good reason to think that the Platonists ridiculed in Lucian’s oeuvre are those of his own lifetime. Second point: in most of the Lucianic works which will be considered below in § 3, an alter ego of the author plays a prominent role. The Nigrinus is introduced by a letter addressed to the title figure by ‘Lucian’. In Hermotimus and Symposium, the author’s alter ego is called Lycinus, in Piscator Parrhesiades, and in Philopseudeis Tychiades. All these dialogues, then, are set within Lucian’s own times, and to these times also belong the Platonic philosophers who appear in them.

2. PLATONIC PHILOSOPHERS IN LUCIAN’S OEUVRE I: TERMINOLOGY

Before we now go into the details of Lucian’s presentation, a brief look at the terminology employed by our author is imperative. Philosophers in Lucian who are somehow associated with Plato are either called Ἀκαδημαϊκοί, i.e. members of Plato’s Academy, or Πλατωνικοί (which is the slightly more frequently used denomination). Now these two terms do not have exactly the same connotations. The Ἀκαδημαϊκοί that are found in Lucian’s works are repeatedly associated with scepticism: e.g., in True Story 2.18, they are tellingly described as a group of philosophers who would in fact very much like to join the merry ‘dead philosophers society’ on the ‘Isle of the Blessed’ (on which the first-person narrator has just arrived), but who ‘were still holding off and debating, for they could not arrive at a conclusion even on the question whether such an island existed’.³ In Icaromenippus 25, even the highest Olympian god Zeus himself is infected by this ‘Academic’ scepticism: ‘he was in the same plight as the Academicians and could not make any affirmation at all, but suspended judgement for a while and thought it over, like Pyrrho’.⁴ Now the interesting thing is that neither here nor anywhere else in this dialogue are Platonic philosophers called Πλατωνικοί: when, a little later, Zeus delivers a thundering invective against philosophers in general (Icar. 29), we get an enumeration of the various philosophical sects that have aroused his ire, and among these sects (between Epicureans, Stoics, and Peripatetics) Zeus also names the Ἀκαδημαϊκοί.⁵ Moreover, in the dialogue About the Parasite 27 Lucian again presents the same foursome who cannot agree on anything: ‘for Epicurus has an opinion about things, the Stoics another, the Academics another, the Peripatetics another’.⁶ In other Lucianic works it is just the other way round, i.e. only Πλατωνικοί are mentioned and no Ἀκαδημαϊκοί: this is the case in Nigrinus,⁷The Symposium, or: The Lapiths, Hermotimus, and The Lovers of Lies.⁸

There is, however, also a third group of Lucianic texts, in which both terms are actually found side by side. In The Dead Come to Life, or: The Fisherman 43 we find both Πλατωνικοί and Ἀκαδημαϊκοί vying for the substantial sums of money and the sweets that have been offered to lure these dubious philosophers up to the Athenian Acropolis. Here, the latter (i.e. the Ἀκαδημαϊκοί) are distinguished from the former (i.e. the Πλατωνικοί) not by being σκεπτικώτεροι but ἐριστικώτεροι than all other philosophers.⁹ An even more interesting juxtaposition of the two terms is offered by the short dialogue Eunuchus, which very wittily describes the rather undignified rivalry of two pretenders for an imperially financed chair of Peripatetic philosophy in Athens: in Eunuchus 3, Πλατωνικοί are named besides Stoics, Epicureans, and Peripatetics as the holders of imperially financed philosophical chairs in Athens, but in chapter 7 there is also an allusion to ‘a certain Academic eunuch hailing from among the Celts, who shortly before our time achieved a high reputation among the Greeks’.¹⁰ This is a quite clear reference to Favorinus of Arelate, who not only was a successful sophist and declaimer of the generation preceding Lucian—and, besides, rather famous for some physiological intersex traits¹¹ to which he probably owes the sobriquet ‘eunuch’—but who also had philosophical ambitions and considered himself to be an heir to Academic Scepticism.¹² As for Πλατωνικοί, we will see that they are associated with a certain solemnity of behaviour and a sometimes almost religious adherence to Plato’s metaphysical doctrines (see below, § 3, towards the end, and § 4).

Thus, the terms used in Lucian’s oeuvre for philosophers associated with Plato may be evidence of a certain awareness on Lucian’s part regarding the complex developments concerning Platonism between the times of Plato and the second century ad. The label Ἀκαδημαϊκοί points back to that period of Plato’s school, the so-called ‘New’ Academy, when this school—in the times of Arcesilaus and Carneades in the third and second centuries bc—had taken a remarkable turn towards scepticism, which only came to an end (in the earlier first century bc) when the school very probably¹³ did not survive the Roman general Sulla’s siege of Athens (though it had at least some spiritual heirs in imperial times like the already mentioned Favorinus). A few decades later (still in the first century bc)—after Antiochus of Ascalon had steered Platonic thinking away from scepticism—, Eudorus of Alexandria may have been the first to exhibit distinctly Middle Platonic traits, namely a renewed interest in metaphysical questions (he wrote a commentary on Plato’s Timaeus and a treatise on metaphysics).¹⁴ Eudorus’ successors developed these interests further, and by Lucian’s time—as we will see—they formed the dominant current of Platonism (as is confirmed by the inclinations some of Lucian’s Platonists exhibit; see below). Nevertheless, even after this ‘metaphysical turn’, sceptical traits lived on to a certain extent,¹⁵ and apparently also Lucian still knows something of an older, ‘Academic’ stratum, as his use of Ἀκαδημαϊκός—and his allusion to Favorinus in Eunuchus 7—demonstrates.

3. PLATONIC PHILOSOPHERS IN LUCIAN’S OEUVRE II: CASE STUDIES

Now what can we learn from Lucian about ‘Platonic’ philosophers and their thinking? After all, philosophers proclaiming allegiance to Plato are quite prominent in a number of his writings. In chapters 15–18 of the so-called Sale of Philosophical Lives (or Philosophies for Sale, Βίων πρᾶσις/Vitarum auctio), a kind of composite Socrates–Plato is sold: typical ‘Socratic features’ of this ‘philosopher for sale’, as they can already be found in Plato’s dialogues,¹⁶ are his pederastic interest in pretty boys and his swearing by strange gods—e.g. the dog and the plane tree. More characteristic of Plato himself are the invention of a city of his own with strange laws—the most peculiar of which¹⁷ is that women are to be treated as common property—and, of course, the ‘doctrine of Forms’ (ἰδέαι), defined as separately existing models (παραδείγματα) of the things that are found on this earth.¹⁸ This is actually an element that recurs also in other Lucianic depictions of contemporary Platonic philosophers, as we will see.

Apart from this ‘doctrine of Forms’, however, the composite Socrates–Plato of Philosophies for Sale does not exhibit other typical features of contemporary Platonism, and the same holds true for the title character of the dialogue Nigrinus: though Nigrinus is explicitly called Πλατωνικὸς φιλόσοφος (Nigr. 2), and though in his house his visitor sees certain accessories that might be characteristic of a follower of Plato—namely ‘a tablet filled with figures in geometry and a reed globe made … to represent the universe’¹⁹—in the continuing depiction of this philosopher, and especially in his great harangue that fills the main part of this piece, there is next to nothing that one would call ‘typically’ Platonic.²⁰

There have been a number of attempts in the last two decades trying to come to grips with the enigmatic Nigrinus.²¹ On the one hand, the startling ‘non-distinctiveness’ of this allegedly Platonic philosopher might actually be intentional: did Lucian perhaps want to show that a typical Platonist of his time was nothing more than a faceless non-entity?²² It has even been proposed that Nigrinus should be regarded as a kind of ironic self-portrait of Lucian,²³ but this would even further undermine any possibility of finding a Platonic philosopher here—thus, it may well be doubted that Nigrinus can tell us very much about second-century Platonists. On the other hand, the recent interpretations of the Nigrinus (see n. 21) suggest that Lucian might also have intended to warn his listeners or readers against the seductive power of protreptic speeches like the one Nigrinus is supposed to have given.²⁴

Even the Hermotimus, Lucian’s most substantial dialogue in Plato’s style, in which a number of contemporary philosophical schools are repeatedly evoked—mainly to exhibit their shortcomings—does not convey a very distinct picture of the Πλατωνικοί, who are mentioned several times (cf. Herm. 16, 36, 48, 68). Only in Hermotimus 16 do we get at least a hint of how they may have been perceived by outsiders, because here the title character Hermotimus formulates what seems to be a widespread viewpoint regarding contemporary Platonists: ‘they are puffed up and love glory’.²⁵

There is a similar unsympathetic depiction of Πλατωνικοί in another rather critical survey of contemporary philosophers, namely in Lucian’s vivid theatrical dialogue The Dead Come to Life, or: The Fisherman (Piscator): in chapter 43 they are the first—among all the numerous pseudo-philosophers here depicted—who want to get their hands on the substantial gifts of money and the sweet cakes that have been set up as bait to lure the all too many pseudo-philosophers in Athens to reveal themselves for what they really are, namely money-grubbers and gluttons. A few chapters later (Pisc. 49), Lucian’s alter ego Parrhesiades (‘son of free speech’) initiates an operation with fishing tackle to catch pseudo-philosophers by baiting them (again) with gold, and now a ‘Platonic’ is the second ‘fish’ to be caught. There are, however, also fake representatives of other philosophical sects who are caught in this way (Cynics, Peripatetics, and Stoics), so love for gold is not a very distinctive trait of these (fake) Platonists.

In two other Lucianic dialogues Platonists play a somewhat more individual and distinctive role: in The Symposium, or: The Lapiths (Convivium) and in The Lovers of Lies, or: The Doubter (Philopseudeis).

The Symposium, or: The Lapiths (Συμπόσιον ἢ Λαπίθαι, Convivium) is one of Lucian’s funniest pieces, namely a tale (presented in dialogue form) of how a stately wedding feast attended by the city’s foremost philosophers and other intellectuals gets totally out of control and degenerates into a violent brawl, in which the just-mentioned philosophers play the role of the drunken centaurs who once smashed the wedding feast of the Lapith king Pirithous to pieces.²⁶

In Symposium 6–7—way before things get so disastrously out of hand—the invited philosophers are introduced, and among them (as the last but not the least) Ion the Platonic.²⁷ He is, in fact, presented as the most venerable of them all (Symp. 7): ‘a grave and revered person to look at, with great dignity written on his features … When he came in, they all arose … and received him like a supernatural being; in short it was a regular divine visitation, the advent of Ion the marvellous.’²⁸ For quite a long time, Ion can keep up this solemn façade—even after he has got his share of a cup of wine flung towards his neighbours by an enraged Stoic philosopher (Symp. 33). Later on, however, he feels unfortunately compelled to propose a subject for philosophical discussion (Symp. 37): he himself rules out such typical Platonic themes as the theory of Forms or incorporeals or the immortality of the soul, but instead settles for something which in his eyes would be wonderfully appropriate for this wedding feast: ‘I shall take the topic of marriage and say what is fitting. It were best not to need marriage, but to follow Plato and Socrates and be content with loving boys … But if we must marry, we should have our wives in common, as Plato held …’²⁹ What a fitting subject indeed! It is met—fittingly again—with laughter all around, and when a grammarian dares ask Ion a rather irreverent question, Ion reacts with considerable indignation (Symp. 40). Later on, when most of the other philosophers have already descended into physical scuffling with each other, Ion still guards a kind of armed neutrality (Symp. 43) and indeed manages to come out of this melee with almost no damage at all. The last mention of him, however, puts him at least in a somewhat ambiguous light: in chapter 46—after a semblance of order has been restored after the havoc produced by the fighting before—a precious cup is seen falling out of the rhetorician Dionysodorus’ clothes, but he claims that it was Ion who gave it to him to keep it safe. So did these two collaborate in stealing that item? Lucian does not say so in so many words, but his description is suggestive enough.³⁰

This dialogue, then, has given us at least some inkling of how in Lucian’s eyes a Platonic philosopher of his times might behave and talk. Compared with other philosophers (like the Stoics and the Cynic), who very much disgrace themselves by their outrageous behaviour in this dialogue, Ion is treated with only a modicum of ridicule; his contributions to the discussion are not very fitting (to say the least), but unlike his much more unrestrained colleagues he refrains both from violent verbal abuse and even more violent physical behaviour. Why has Lucian provided us with this relatively benign depiction of a Platonic philosopher at a public dinner? Maybe the contrast between Ion’s conduct and that of his philosophical rivals is intended to darken even more the embarrassing impression these rivals give.

Still, Lucian has so far provided us with only limited insights into the themes which Platonists of his time talked about, though some passages both in Philosophies for Sale and in the Symposium have shown (if only rather succinctly) their interest in a metaphysical world beyond our earthly one. We will, however, get more of this in the last Lucianic piece to be considered here at some length: the Lovers of Lies, or: The Doubter (Φιλοψευδεῖς ἢ Ἀπιστῶν).³¹

In this dialogue, Lucian’s alter ego, Tychiades, narrates a meeting of various philosophers who have assembled at the sickbed of a wealthy man called Eucrates to whom Tychiades also wants to pay his respects. When he comes in, the philosophers present—among whom there also is a Platonic, again named Ion³²—have started to discuss remedies against rheumatism (from which their rich host happens to be suffering). These remedies, however, seem to Tychiades to be of a rather quackish nature and to involve a substantial amount of superstition; so Tychiades is rather unpleasantly surprised to find these philosophers taking those remedies totally seriously! Alas, their talk does not stop there—and it is none other than the Platonic Ion who moves it towards the next stage, by singing the praises of a Chaldaean sorcerer from Babylon who—according to Ion’s tale—not only cured one of his father’s labourers from a snake bite by singing an incantation and fastening a piece of stone from a virgin’s grave to the injured body part, but then also used his magical powers to destroy the whole snake population from which the aggressive snake had come (Philops. 11–12). Tychiades keeps his ironic stance, but fails to stop the even more outrageous tales which follow. One of them again originates with the Platonic Ion (Philops. 16), who now regales his listeners with tales about an exorcist from Palestine, whom he once saw—he claims—driving out a black smoky ghost from a human being.³³ On which Tychiades comments: ‘It is nothing much for you, Ion, to see that kind of sight, when even the “Forms” that the father of your school, Plato, points out are plain to you, a hazy object of vision to the rest of us, whose eyes are weak.’³⁴ And Ion demonstrates his vivid interest in supernatural or otherworldly phenomena yet again: when Eucrates relates that he once saw none other than the mighty goddess Hecate in the middle of dark woods jump into a mighty chasm that led straight into the Underworld, of which he then could see more or less everything, including his own dead father, Ion eagerly asks for more details (i.e. how the dead conducted themselves in this Underworld), and when he gets them he triumphantly exclaims: ‘Now let the Epicureans go on contradicting holy Plato³⁵ and his doctrine about the souls!’³⁶

4. CONCLUDING REMARKS

So what do we make of the Platonists depicted in Lucian’s oeuvre? They are repeatedly introduced as outwardly venerable and dignified personages (whose appearance is once even likened to a divine epiphany: Symp. 7), but they themselves quickly undermine this impression once they start to speak (e.g. in Symp. 39). For then they immediately reveal an absurdly naïve adherence to even the most provocative of Plato’s doctrines (i.e., for instance, the conception of women as common property, something Lucian repeatedly pokes fun at [see n. 17]), or an almost whimsical interest in paranormal or otherworldly phenomena, which Lucian portrays as a kind of consequence of their belief in the theory of Forms (on the other hand, somebody like Nigrinus curiously stands out by his utter indistinctiveness, as far as ‘truly’ Platonic thought is concerned). Faithfully adhering to Plato’s doctrines and positing a world beyond that accessible to human sensory perception are indeed traits found in Middle Platonic texts of Lucian’s time³⁷—so we may indeed find in these texts some reflection of how an intelligent ‘outsider’ like Lucian looked upon these philosophers, enhanced, of course, by a sizable amount of typically Lucianic humour.

Footnotes