PROCLUS AND THE ANCIENTS

Steven K. Strange Emory University

My title may be somewhat misleading. My subject will not be Pro- clus in general, but only his Parmenides Commentary, and I will only be concerned with those figures whom he calls in this commentary “the ancients” ( ? παλαι ), i.e., the older commentators on the dialogue, a group that certainly includes Porphyry, Amelius Gentilianus, and other early Neoplatonists, and perhaps Iamblichus, and some others whom we might suppose to be Middle Platonists, pre-Plotinian commentators. Who exactly is to be included in this category is, however, a some- what difficult and interesting question, which I wish to take up. I will examine the principal passages in which Proclus uses the expression ? παλαι in his commentary on the Parmenides,inorder,Ihope,topoint to some of the ways that they might be exploited to yield information about the earlier history of Parmenides-interpretation. I will be building throughout on the work of John Dillon in his notes and introductory material to his and Morrow’s translation of the Commentary,butIhope to be able to advance the discussion a little farther than he has done. There would be no difficulty, of course, if only Proclus had named the previous commentators whom he discusses, as he had done throughout his commentary on the Timaeus, which seems to have been among his earliest works. But the targets of his discussions in the Par- menides Commentary, in general, remain anonymous, their positions being introduced only by phrases like “some people say”, “others say”, and so forth: as Dillon argues in his Introduction,1 not naming names appears to have become Proclus’ standard practice in his later commentaries. It is however misleading for Dillon to say2 that only Proclus’ men-

1 Proclus’ Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides, translated by Glenn R. Morrow and John M. Dillon, with introduction and notes by John M. Dillon (Princeton: Princeton Uni- versity Press, 1987), xxxv–xxxvi. (I will use “Dillon” to refer to the introduction and notes to this volume.) I am indebted throughout to Dillon’s fundamental work. 2 Dillon, xxxv. 98 steven k. strange tor Syrianus is mentioned by name in the Parmenides Commentary,for Proclus does indeed mention a few other names, such as Syrianus’ teacher Plutarch of Athens, Xenocrates, and, in an important passage from the portion of the commentary preserved in William of Moer- beke’s medieval Latin translation, Speusippus. There is also the case of the somewhat mysterious and Carthaginian-sounding Ammikartos (V.1020), a Platonist of uncertain date who was apparently the only fig- ure to attempt to write works in accordance with Parmenides’ strictures on method from the ‘bridge passage’ between the First and Second Parts of the Parmenides. On the other hand, Proclus seems to know nothing about Ammikartos save this one fact, which suggests that his knowledge is derived from an earlier commentary by someone else. My list of named philosophers in the Commentary may not be complete, but we certainly should note in this regard the mysterious “philoso- pher from Rhodes” (VI.1057), whom Proclus credits with being the first to formulate the correct scheme for distinguishing the Hypotheses of the Second Part of the Parmenides from one another, and to whom we will return. Though this label is entirely opaque to us, Proclus clearly expects that the designee of this phrase will be well-known to his read- ers even though he does not give the name, which he avoids doing in line with his usual practice in this commentary. And we should surely suppose that the same is true as well for all or the greater part of the anonymous positions he mentions in the course of his commentary: he is writing for his own circle of students or for contemporary Pla- tonists, who can already be expected to know who it was that held the positions he is discussing, or only to need a gentle hint to remind them. Now Speusippus and Xenocrates are genuine παλαι or “ancients”, in the usual sense of later antique philosophical usage, i.e., philosophers from the classical or pre-classical periods of Greek philosophy. This normal use of the term is found in the Parmenides Commentary,forthe Speusippus fragment already mentioned, viz.: For they held that the One is higher than Being and is the source of being, and they delivered it even from the status of a principle [i.e., that of being an αρ6], for they held that given the One conceived as separated alone without others, with no additional element, nothing else would come to be…3 (VII.39–40K, Fr.48 Tarán)

3 Translation by Dillon/Morrow with modifications. I shall continue to quote from this translation throughout.