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Plato's Tyrant in Neoplatonic Philosophy

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Plato's Tyrant in Neoplatonic Philosophy Chapter 8 Plato’s Tyrant in Neoplatonic Philosophy Dominic J. O’Meara This chapter contains two main parts. In the first part (I), I propose taking the figure of the tyrant, as it appears in Plato’s dialogues, with a view to describing the ways in which the Platonist philosophers of Late Antiquity interpreted this figure in their works. I will discuss in particular the work of Proclus (412–485), one of the major representatives of the Athenian school of Neoplatonism, con- centrating on his commentary on Plato’s Republic. Other texts by Proclus and by other Neoplatonists will also be considered. My purpose is not to comment on the value of these late ancient readings of Plato, as regards the interpre- tation of Plato himself, but to sketch the ways in which these philosophers viewed the nature and origins of tyranny, in the context of their reading of Plato. In the second part of the chapter (II), I will attempt to see to what extent these philosophers used their reading of Plato as a way of describing and analyzing the political realities of their time, in particular the form of politi- cal power which prevailed in the late Roman (or early Byzantine) Empire. I will suggest that Plato’s tyrant provided these philosophers with conceptual tools useful for diagnosing the evils brought by the rule of the emperors of their period. Thus the exegesis of Plato, for these philosophers, was relevant to understanding and criticizing the political conditions in which they lived: for them the Christian imperial rule of their time was indeed that described in Plato’s account of the tyrannical regime. In this connection I will refer, not only to Proclus, but also to Neoplatonists of the following century, in partic- ular Damascius and Simplicius, philosophers who lived during the Emperor Justinian’s reign (527–565), and I will briefly compare their views to those of two other intellectuals of the period, John Lydus and Procopius of Caesarea. I Plato’s figure of the tyrant is discussed in a number of places in Proclus’ Commentary on the Republic. Before considering these passages, it might be useful to recall that Proclus’ Commentary is not properly speaking a commen- tary, but is rather a collection of essays on various themes in Plato’s Republic. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/97890043�46�6_0�0 Plato’s Tyrant in Neoplatonic Philosophy 165 The essays are of varying length and difficulty, some being short summaries of Plato’s text (the sort of thing one might prepare for students), for example Essay I, others being quite extensive and elaborate, as in the case of Essay XVI, which is a long and learned monograph on the myth of Er in Republic Book X. We should not, therefore, expect this collection of essays to provide us with a complete and balanced coverage of Plato’s Republic. One should also note that the manuscript source of Proclus’ text is defective: parts of Essay I are missing,1 as is most of the last essay (Essay XVII). Proclus refers to Plato’s tyrant in Essays I, V, VI, XIII, XIV and, most exten- sively, in XVI, the essay on the myth of Er. This means that most of what we find on the theme of the tyrant in Proclus’ text relates to an eschatological context, rather than to direct political analysis. However, allowing for the somewhat unbalanced character of the evidence, we can still derive, I believe, even from the eschatological dimension, elements of use in reaching a view of Proclus’ concept of tyranny, as he finds it in Plato. I propose grouping Proclus’ various references to tyranny in his essays on the Republic under three headings: (i) the description of the ‘tyrannical’ life of the soul; (ii) the description of the tyran- nical regime in the State; (iii) the question as to why certain souls, in choosing their next reincarnated life, choose the life of a tyrant. (i) The tyrannical life of the soul. The tyrannical life is that characterizing a soul whose condition represents the maximum of moral injustice, i.e. a soul ruled, not by reason, but by the unlimited desire for pleasure or money. It is the life advocated by Thrasymachus in Republic Book I and by Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias: All these things, and the other things of this sort which the myth of the Gorgias [525d] also attributes to tyrants so that they undergo the great- est punishments, these [stories], together with the truth, are obstacles to a Thrasymachus or a Callicles who would both praise and be a partisan of the tyrannical life, be it through unlimited love of pleasure, or be it through uncontrolled love of money.2 This passage already brings in a political dimension, to which I will return below. The description here of tyranny as a moral state of the soul can be found elsewhere in Proclus, in particular in his Commentary on the Parmenides: 1 See In Remp. I, 6, 12–21. 2 In Remp. II, 176, 4–9 (my translation)..
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