Rome and the East
tions as fact. Even in the classical world, not everybody accepted this branch
of oriental wisdom without question. Very few, however, showed the scep-
ticism expressed by the great Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry in the third
century..,inhisLifeof Plotinus: ‘‘I, Porphyry, wrote a considerable num-
ber of refutations of the books of Zoroaster, which I showed to be entirely
spurious and modern, made up by the sectarians to convey the impression
that the doctrines which they had chosen to hold in honour were those of
the ancient Zoroaster.’’^52
Thus, we cannot continue to write the history of ‘‘Zoroastrianism,’’ from
remote antiquity onwards, on the basis of projections or representations
evolved by writers from within the classical world. That is to accept an an-
cient version of ‘‘orientalism,’’ and to absorb it into a modern one.
In the ancient world, as in the modern, Asia functioned as a free-fire zone
for the European imagination. Disparagement was not always the result. On
the contrary, the imaginations of intellectuals in the classical world were
repeatedly fired by visions of different forms of oriental culture and wis-
dom (some of them justified, like the antiquity of Egyptian civilisation, or
the derivation of the Greek alphabet from the Phoenician). In classical rep-
resentations of oriental wise men, Persian Magi, ‘‘Chaldean’’ or Babylonian
astrologers, and Indian Brahmins or ‘‘naked sophists’’ could all play a part.^53
One writer who repeatedly draws on non-Greek, and in particular oriental,
sources of wisdom is Porphyry, though he was often sceptical. Some modern
scholars take Porphyry himself to be ‘‘oriental,’’ on the grounds that he came
from Tyre in Phoenicia. There is no evidence, however, that he knew any
language other than Greek (and no doubt Latin), whether Syriac, Aramaic,
Hebrew, Egyptian, Akkadian, or Persian, or that he had, or could have had,
personal knowledge of writings in any of these languages. His view of non-
Greek sources of wisdom was formed from images already current within
Greek culture.^54
If we postulate Babylonia as a source of ‘‘oriental’’ learning, however, we
are faced with an unresolved puzzle. Documentary evidence shows that for at
least four centuries after Alexander’s conquest, Greek, Akkadian (still writ-
ten in cuneiform, though occasionally transliterated into Greek), and also
. Porphyry,Vita Plotini (trans. Loeb Plotinus, vol. I, ).
. Note the monograph by A. D. Momigliano,AlienWisdom: The Limits of Hellenisation
(), stressing the limits—above all the linguistic limits—of the real knowledge of other
cultures which the Greeks of the Hellenistic period acquired. See also Dihle (n. ).
. See F. Millar, ‘‘Porphyry: Ethnicity, Language, and Alien Wisdom,’’ in J. Barnes and
M. Griffin, eds.,PhilosophiaTogataII:Plato and Aristotle at Rome(), – ( chapter
of the present volume).