Proclus the Successor on Poetics and the Homeric Poems: Essays 5 and 6 of His Commentary on the Republic of Plato (review)

Anyone interested in the intellectual aftermath of Plato’s notorious banishment of Homer from his Republic (books 3 and 10) will find Proclus’ commentary on that dialogue particularly inspiring. Two sections of Proclus’ text are translated in the present book: essay 5 contains a swift general overview about the true essence and the ultimate goal of poetry and μουσική, whereas essay 6, in attempting to defend the poet from the charges of impiety and third-grade mimesis, provides a full-fledged allegorical reading of some famous Homeric myths (from the Theomachy in Iliad 20 to the love of Ares and Aphrodite in Odyssey 8), as well as a classification of the three kinds of poetry (inspired, didactic, and mimetic), allegedly emerging from Plato’s dialogues.

Proclus’ essays are pivotal to the development of poetics in Western culture, as Lamberton himself has already pointed out in a seminal study, Homer the Theologian (1986). The present book, by healing the lack of a complete English translation, should thus be welcomed not only by classicists, but also by theoreticians of literature and by historians of ancient and modern culture in general—all the more so because Proclus’ Greek is far from easy or readable. Lamberton’s achievement is generally good, though of course it occasionally leaves room for disagreement: at 46.9 K, “vivid representation” is perhaps unfair to the Greek ζωτικὴ ὁμοίωσις, “assimilation in the vital mode” (cf. Procl. in Plat. Parm. 903.26); at 47.10 K “The education of souls is also a form of medicine” should read “Education is medicine for the soul,” with an allusion to a widespread definition of philosophy (e.g., Elias in Porph. Isag. 27.14 Busse, or, in a Christian sense, Origen’s c. Cels. 1.63); at 51.9 K Greek drama does not “speak of the heroes in language unworthy of them,” but rather “attributes” such language to the heroes; 52.10 K “That [higher soul] set out to make the [en]cosmic one” should read “That [total activity, ὁλικὴ ἐνέργεια] set out to render it [viz. the human soul] universal.” One also regrets the absence of a glossary of philosophical terms (such as logos, kosmos, eidolon, eikon, etc.).

The Greek text has been typeset anew, although it follows ad litteram W. Kroll’s 1899 edition: it was an excellent idea to keep Kroll’s pagination and line numbers, and at the same time to break the text into paragraphs and subsections for the sake of readability—even though this subdivision is occasionally debatable; for example, the paragraph starting at 110.8 K (arguing that the words of Penelope’s suitors should not be passed as Homer’s own thought—a typical case of “solution according to the character,” or λύσις ἐκ τοῦ προσώπου) certainly belongs to Proclus’ reply, not to the question posed. Given the contraints of the SBL series, one cannot complain over the absence of a critical apparatus, though perhaps the idea of underlining conjectural words in the text can strike one as neither common nor consistently followed (e.g., the reader is not told that at 50.14 K γέλωτας is actually Bernays’ conjecture on the transmitted τελετάς).

What has to be more acutely regretted is something else: an opportunity has been missed to give the general reader a proper appreciation of Proclus’ arguments both in detail and in the general framework of recent studies on symbol and allegory in antiquity, and Proclus’ literary output. Thus, important books dealing also with these essays (such as P. Struck’s The Birth of the Symbol or L. Brisson’s How Philosophers Saved Myths) are simply neglected; no mention is made of R. M. van den Berg’s 2001 book on Proclus’ Hymns, which also tackles the issue of images and symbols in Proclus’ commentaries...