Porphyry Conclusion
By its nature, a discussion such as this has to operate at a number of different
logical levels, and cannot lead to definite conclusions. Above all, it cannot
lead to definitenegativeconclusions. At the end, almost all possibilities still
remain open.
However, if we do distinguish carefully between the different logical
levels involved, we can at least map out the nature of the problem more
clearly, and also bring out explicitly the unstated implications of the bold
presuppositions which have been deployed in interpreting the works of the
Neoplatonic philosophers from the Roman province of Syria. Is it either
meaningful or helpful to describe Porphyry as ‘‘Phoenician,’’ ‘‘Syrian,’’ or
‘‘oriental’’? Some empirical tests can be applied, even though wider questions
remain open.
All his works are in Greek. Documentary evidence shows that Hebrew,
Aramaic, Nabataean (marginally), Palmyrene, and Syriac were all written
languages in the third century..There is no comparable evidence for
Phoenician. There is no positive evidence that Porphyry spoke or wrote
Phoenician, or that he could read Biblical Hebrew, or that he was aware of
contemporary Jewish writing in Hebrew (theMishnah) or in Jewish Aramaic.
Unlike Eusebius, he shows no explicit awareness that Bardesanes’ works had
originally been written in Syriac, gives Bardesanes the distancing appellation
of ‘‘a Babylonian,’’ and appears to go out of his way to deny the intelligi-
bility, to Greeks, of ‘‘the language of theSyroi.’’ Still less is there any concrete
evidence that he could or did study texts in Egyptian or Akkadian, or in
Iranian or Indian languages.^49 All theexplicitindications which we have for
the sources of his awareness of non-Greek cultures, or of representations of
them, show that these sources were in Greek.
The hypothesis which this paper tentatively advances is that we should
begin our attempts to understand Porphyry, like Numenius from Apamea
and Iamblichus from Chalcis, not by applying ethnic labels to them (or to
their culture or cast of mind), but by recognising that all three came from
precisely that area of the Near East—the only one indeed—where in the
third century we have no documentary evidence for the use of any language
except Greek (and indeed Latin, a strangely forgotten factor, in that Tyre
was now a colony). Porphyry, furthermore, left this area as a young adult and
. For possible learning of Akkadian by someone from Roman Syria, see the evidence
from theBabyloniakaof the other Iamblichus, the novelist of the second century.., dis-
cussed at length in F. Millar,Roman Near East(n. ), ff.