Porphyry belief systems (or Greek representations of them); and, thirdly, he does not
seem to give any special place to ‘‘Phoenicians’’ or ‘‘Syrians,’’ or to assert any
positive relationship to them. This point is illustrated, for instance, in a pas-
sage from the second book ofOnAbstinence: ‘‘For it would be a terrible thing,
that while the Syrians do not taste fish and the Hebrews pigs, and many of
the Phoenicians and the Egyptians cows...’’^42 It must, I think, be admitted
that it cannot be proved that Porphyry himself read texts in any non-Greek
language, even Phoenician or Hebrew or the varieties of Aramaic, or that he
explicitly identifies himself, as represented in his works, as ‘‘belonging’’ to a
‘‘Phoenician,’’ to a ‘‘Syrian,’’ or to a wider ‘‘oriental’’ culture. Even so, it would
be legitimate to suppose that there is something more than (approximate)
coincidence of time and place in the fact that Porphyry’s recurrent deploy-
ment of representations of alien wisdom is clearly paralleled by the pres-
ence of the same feature in the work of Numenius and Iamblichus. Nume-
nius came from Apamea in the Orontes valley (an area which, as it happens,
has produced no Semitic-language documentary material from the imperial
period) and seems to have been writing in the second half of the second cen-
tury. His Neoplatonic works survive only in fragments, so assertions about
either ethnic or cultural self-ascriptions on his part cannot be made with
certainty. All the same, it is at least hazardous to assert that his undoubted
knowledge of the Old Testament should be interpreted as knowledge of
‘‘Semitic literature.’’^43 The half-stated implication that he might himself have
been a speaker of a Semitic language, or have been acquainted with other
Semitic literatures, is without positive confirmation. Numenius does, how-
ever, like Porphyry, evoke a variety of forms of alien, or ‘‘oriental,’’ learning,
asserting that one must go beyond Plato’s works and ‘‘appeal to peoples of
good reputation, comparing their rites of initiation and their doctrines and
propositions insofar as they are accepted as chiming with those of Plato, those
that is such as the Brachmanes and Jews and Magoi and Egyptians have laid
down.’’^44 The passage would surely not lead anyone to assert that Nume-
nius actually knew the (at least) four wholly separate languages involved, or
had read texts in each of them. But it could, of course, be seen as a typically
‘‘oriental’’ view, putting Greek culture in a wider perspective.
Much the same could be claimed of the much better known works of
Iamblichus, a younger contemporary of Porphyry, born (it would seem) soon
after the middle of the third century, and coming from the small city of Chal-
.De abst. , , trans. Stern,Greek and Latin AuthorsII, no. .
. So des Places (n. ), .
. Numenius, ‘‘On the Good,’’ fr. a, des Places (n. ).