Plutarch on Isis and Osiris: Text, Cult, and Cultural Appropriation

(Plutarch, Is. 2.351f)

The de Iside et Osiride (de Iside, Is.),¹ written late in Plutarch's life,² offers some of the most sophisticated formulations of middle-Platonic metaphysics that have come down to us.³ As scholars have long been aware, this is a deeply and explicitly philosophical text.⁴ Classicists have generally maintained that in the de Iside Plutarch merely uses the Egyptian material as a vehicle through which to express middle-Platonic conceptions about the structure and genesis of the cosmos; it is thus seen as incidental to the primary, philosophical aim of the text, an exegesis of Plato's Timaeus.⁵

In addition to its philosophical agenda, however, the de Iside has a fairly full discussion of the Egyptian cult of the goddess Isis and her consort Osiris as it existed in the Pharaonic period.⁶ As historians of Roman religion have been impressed by the depth of knowledge reflected in Plutarch's Quaestiones Romanae,⁷ so Egyptologists have often cited Plutarch's de Iside as a relatively accurate account of the cultic practices associated with Isis in the Pharaonic period.⁸ Both Gwyn Griffiths⁹ and Hani¹⁰ felt that Plutarch, despite his inability to read hieroglyphics or to converse with non-Alexandrian natives, was a good religious historian.¹¹

The present contribution seeks to answer the question of why Plutarch chose the ostensibly Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris as the vehicle for his most mature and developed thoughts on the divine and the structure of the universe. This is a question that has been posed before, both of Plutarch's text itself¹² and in broader intellectual histories of the early Roman Empire.¹³ Most scholars, Hani among them, have assumed that the prestige of Egyptian wisdom motivated Plutarch's attempt to discover in the cult of Isis reflections of Greek philosophical speculation. Hani maintained that, despite Plutarch's general suspicion of non-Greek forms of cult,¹⁴ the religions of Egypt and Persia "ont trouvé grâce devant lui (sc. Plutarch) … à cause de leur élévation morale."¹⁵ Smelik and Hemelrijk see a similar motivation behind the de Iside and go so far as to claim that "in his well-disposed appreciation of Egyptian religion Plutarch exceeds all earlier authors including Herodotus."¹⁶

In what follows, I shall suggest that Plutarch's de Iside was motivated less by early imperial Egyptomania than by an unwillingness to accept what he saw as the culturally derivative status of Greece that an Egyptian origin of Greek wisdom implies.¹⁷ This is not to say that the de Iside dismisses the Egyptian material as worthless; a deep respect for the wisdom of Egypt and an insistence on the priority of Greek philosophical speculation are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, I believe that Plutarch chose to explicate his middle-Platonic metaphysics via an allegorical interpretation of the cult and myth of the Egyptian goddess Isis in an effort to renegotiate the traditional, derivative status of Greek cult.¹⁸ On my reading, the de Iside is an appropriative text that has as one of its central aims the demonstration of the priority of Greek philosophy over Egyptian cult.

In a recent and provocative book, David Dawson has explored the potential of literary allegory for cultural appropriation.¹⁹ According to Dawson's model, ancient authors, Philo and early Christian apologists prominent among them, used allegory as a means of appropriating pagan culture for their own ends. Frederick Brenk has argued that the de Iside is in fact an exception to Dawson's rule and that the ultimate end of the text is not the Hellenization of the Egyptian cult of Isis and that in Plutarch's text we find rather "Egyptomania and a kind of religious Egyptianization of Rome, up to a point."²⁰ I think that Brenk is right to observe that Plutarch's choice of the Isis material as the vehicle for the philosophical message perhaps unintentionally egyptianizes the Platonic text. But I am asking a different question here and would distinguish...