A Threat to Public Piety: Christians, Platonists, and the Great Persecution by Elizabeth DePalma Digeser (review)

Developing arguments advanced in several previously published articles, Elizabeth DePalma Digeser has produced what amounts to a rewriting of Greek intellectual history in the third century of our era. According to Digeser, Ammonius Saccas was not only the teacher of both the Christian Origen and Plotinus the neo-Platonist but also the fountainhead of Greek philosophical thought in the third century. She asserts that “Lactantius, Arnobius, Eusebius, and Methodius all wrote in response to Porphyry, and all were Christians who had connections to Ammonius Saccas, either through Origen or through Porphyry himself” (p. 5). Digeser identifies the Origen of Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus (who “wrote nothing except treatises ‘On demons’ and ‘that the King is the sole creator’”—the latter in the reign of Gallienus—and attended Plotinus’s seminars in Rome [3:30–32, 14:20–25]) with the prolific Christian writer Origen, who died at the age of almost seventy before Valerian and his son Gallienus became emperors. She also identifies the blind philosopher in Nicomedia in 303—whom Lactantius derided as rich, avaricious, and lustful; as a glutton who dined better at home than he did in the palace of Diocletian; as a man who ingratiated himself with officials to seize both the land and houses of his neighbours; and as someone who was blind and “did not know where to place his feet” one in front of the other (Lactantius, Divine Institutes 5:2.2–3, 9)—as none other than Porphyry, the disciple and editor of Plotinus. Moreover, she sees both the polemic between Porphyry and Iamblichus and disagreements between Porphyry and Methodius of Olympus as representing “schism in the Ammonian community” (p. 98).

The book contains many illuminating and suggestive individual observations. But is its historical reconstruction correct? Space considerations permit mention of only a few obvious problems. Digeser evaluates Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus as “a bios, a genre that in antiquity, whether in the hands of Plutarch or Suetonius, presented its subject as a moral exemplar for good or for ill” (73). But Porphyry’s Life is primarily an introduction to the Enneads—that is, to Porphyry’s edition of Plotinus’s works thirty years after his death—and Digeser seems not to have noticed that this work, to which Porphyry appears to have given the title “About the Life of Plotinus and the Order of His Books,” adopts a strange and idiosyncratic biographical schema that implies that all of Plotinus’s best work was written under Porphyry’s own inspiration (as this reviewer has pointed out¹). Second, Digeser seems unaware of Thomas Hägg’s proof² that the author of the Contra Hieroclem was not Eusebius of Caesarea in Palestine, but an otherwise unknown sophist of the same name in northeastern Asia Minor. Hence Digeser is mistaken when she locates Sossianus Hierocles “in Antioch shortly before 303” and argues that, since Porphyry “probably first sent” his anti-Christian writings to Iamblichus in nearby Daphne, “from there they could have quickly found their way into the hands of the administrators, priests and diviners of this capital city” such as Hierocles himself (p. 8).

Digeser reiterates her identification of Porphyry as the philosopher who “vomited out” his three books “against the Christian religion and name in Nicomedia in the spring of 303” (Lactantius, Divine Institutes 5:2.4). To do so, she rejects this reviewer’s argument that Lactantius must mean that the philosopher whom Lactantius heard was literally blind, not merely morally or metaphorically blind, with the claim that this “literal reading” fails to see that the “passage pointing to Porphyry parodies the philosopher Thales in Plato’s Theaetetus 174a” (5n14). Unfortunately, Digeser fails to provide any details of her reasoning on this point. Let us grant that Lactantius alludes to Plato. But the Theaetetus presents Thales as absent-mindedly thinking...