Platonopolis: Platonic Political Philosophy in Late Antiquity (review)

It is quite difficult to give a detailed account of the political theories of the Neoplatonists. In his book, O'Meara attempts to trace down these theories, and he makes it clear that they must have played a subservient role within the whole body of philosophy. Their role was to contribute to the divinization of man. He emphasizes that Neoplatonic schools attracted many aristocrats and high government officials, taking it as evidence for the influence of Neoplatonism in political spheres. In Iamblichus' curriculum, students had the opportunity to discuss practical sciences when reading the Alcibiades Major and the Gorgias. The interest in such theories is evidenced by the fact that we know of sixteen commentaries on the Republic, Alcibiades Major, Gorgias, and Laws, as well as oral lectures on these dialogues. The proper politician is the sage who descends to the cave with the aim of helping the captives to get rid of their bonds. To reach that goal, however, what kind of activity is he supposed to display? The distinction between legislative and judicial parts of Platonic political science is informative. The eschatological myths in Plato's dialogues were taken to illustrate the latter. Inclusion of this sort of penology in the themes of political philosophy signals how great the divergence was between Neoplatonic political theories and their counterparts in Plato and Aristotle.

An important lesson is that Proclus constructed a model for the three levels of political reform and tied it to the three levels of demiurgy. This hierarchy of divine models was used to illustrate the ideal "city of gods" of the Republic, the second best city of the Laws, and the third best city. Proper emphasis has been given to the effort by Boethius to express political structures in terms of mathematical ratios. Three constitutional structures are related to the three kinds of mathematical proportion: oligarchy to arithmetical proportion, aristocracy to harmonic proportion, and democracy to geometric proportion. Boethius' sources must have been as much Platonic as Pythagorean. The last part of the book focuses on the influence of Neoplatonic political thinking on Christian and Muslim authors. Eusebius and, to a lesser extent, the anonymous author of the dialogue On Political Science took over many elements, while the Augustine of the City of God rejected it altogether. Al-Farabi was also familiar with many Neoplatonic theses on politics, as his Perfect State shows.

O'Meara refers to a dispute on the purpose of the Alcibiades Major (64): whether it concerns self-knowledge, thus giving a starting point for all sorts of philosophy, as Proclus thought, or whether it deals with political virtues, as Damascius assumed. If this is the case, then Proclus' work may not be taken to signal the importance of political philosophy in the Athenian school. What we know of that commentary may discourage one to call it political in any sense. We also read that in Iamblichus' view human souls are bound to matter more intimately than Plotinus supposed it, which entails that political and religious life must be of much greater instrumental value in Iamblichus than in Plotinus (125). One might ask, however, why we hear so much about theurgy in Iamblichus, and almost nothing about political action. One might get the impression that theurgical practices supersede or even replace political activity as a means to ascend to the higher world. Political activity may not have been so compelling under these circumstances. It remains a theoretical possibility only.

All in all, O'Meara demonstrates that politics was a bigger issue for the Neoplatonics than hitherto assumed. But in comparison to the elaborate theories in Plato's Republic and Laws and in Aristotle's Politics, respectively, the evidence that we have for the Neoplatonic approaches is meagre. To be sure, from this it would be unwise to draw the conclusion that the doctrines themselves were also inferior. But they may not have occupied such an important role in philosophy as the one that...