Jews and Others
Daniel from Syrian exegetes, perhaps Jews as well as Christians. Un-
fortunately the first Syrian writer on Daniel whose work has survived
was Aphrahat, whose fifth Demonstration was composed in...—M. Casey, ‘‘Porphyry and the Origin of the Book of Daniel,’’JThSt
(): –, on A Problem of Identity
Does Porphyry, the important Neoplatonist of the third century, really be-
long in a volume dedicated to ‘‘Plato and Aristotle at Rome’’? Should we not
instead interpret his works as the product of an ‘‘oriental’’ culture and men-
tality, which produced a significant re-formulation of the legacy of classical
Greek philosophy? The answer cannot be simple, and the texts cited above
ought to be sufficient to illustrate how preconceptions about the ‘‘Orient’’
have been used as the starting point for interpretations of Porphyry’s works.
Yet, on the other hand, there is much, both in the nature of his works and
even in the plain facts of his biography, to suggest that we can and should see
him as a late Platonist who belonged, literally and figuratively ‘‘in Rome.’’
Porphyry was the pupil and successor of Plotinus, and after Plotinus’ death
was recognised as the leading philosopher of his time. He was a Platonist by
profession, but he held that Aristotle’s thought could largely be reconciled
with Platonism, and wrote numerous commentaries on Aristotle’s works,
which had an immense influence on all subsequent scholarship. All his works
were written in Greek, and there is no categorical proof that he knew, or
could write in, any other language. If he did know any other languages, the
most probable candidate is Latin. For, as we shall see below, his native city,
Tyre, had been a Roman colony since the s. All his works were written
between the s and the early years of the fourth century, either in Rome
or in Sicily.
Yet all modern scholars who have studied the works of Porphyry have
rightly felt that we ought if possible to understand his original local context,
and to ask if there is something distinctively ‘‘oriental’’ in his thought. In
themselves, these presuppositions are wholly justified, and are supported by
the fact that two other important Greek philosophers of the mid-imperial
period also came from the same region: Numenius, in the later second cen-
tury, from the major city of Apamea on the Orontes, and Iamblichus from
the small city of Chalcis, which lay between Apamea and Beroea, on the edge
of the Syrian steppe.
All three, however, wrote solely in Greek; whether there is evidence