Porphyry This complex passage could be interpreted in various ways, and need perhaps
be claiming no more than that, as a matter of fact, for the majority of Greeks,
the languages of Thracians, Scythians, Syrians, and Persians are all unintelli-
gible, and cannot, when heard, be interpreted in written form. But what is
absolutely undeniable about the passage is that Porphyry implicitly fails to
claim any personal capacity in terms of the potential mutual translatability
of the two major languages of the wider region to which he belonged, Greek
and Aramaic.
All conclusions about Porphyry’s culture and identity must be very tenta-
tive. We cannot prove that there was not a still living Phoenician literature
and tradition, nor that a Tyrian of good family in the third century would
not have spoken and written Phoenician, as he certainly did Greek; nor that
Syriac (in Mesopotamia) and Jewish Aramaic (in Syria Palaestina) were the
only branches of Aramaic in which literary or religious works were currently
being composed; nor that, on the basis of a personal knowledge of Phoeni-
cian, Porphyry did not also read the Hebrew Bible. But all such suppositions
remain pure hypotheses, and the passage fromOn Abstinence just quoted
strongly suggests that such hypotheses are fragile. The Porphyry whom we
can encounter is solely the Porphyry embodied for us in a series of works
written in Italy and Sicily, in Greek. We should not base our interpretation
of them on a real-life ‘‘Phoenician,’’ ‘‘Syrian,’’ or ‘‘oriental’’ Porphyry whom
we ourselves have constructed.
An Oriental Culture?
So far, we have looked at the possible ‘‘identity’’ of Porphyry in terms of his
Tyrian origins, and the possible relevance of these origins to his relationship
to the Semitic-language cultures of the areas in the Near East which in Por-
phyry’s time were Roman provinces. As we have seen, there are profound
problems as regards Porphyry’s (possible) knowledge of written or spoken
Phoenician, and even more profound ones as regards his supposed knowl-
edge either of any of the dialects of Aramaic which we know were written
languages in his time (Palmyrene, Syriac, Jewish Aramaic, and—marginally,
since the vast majority of the relevant inscriptions, and all the known papyri,
are earlier—Nabataean), or of Hebrew.
No negative conclusions can be reached, and all these possibilities remain
open. But it is significant, firstly, that when Porphyry has occasion to refer
to Bardesanes he identifies him as a ‘‘Babylonian.’’ It is even more significant
that, just when he might have stressed the possibility of understanding across