Chapter 10 Homer in Philo: Scylla’s Myth in Philonic Philosophical Context

Marta Alesso

The Homeric hypotext emerges in Philo by way of quotations or allusions on approximately sixty occasions. Homer is mentioned by name five times.1 Philo was not the only one to use Homer for his purposes of allegorical reading as a method. In the Hellenistic period, two ways of dealing with the problem of the apprehension of the meaning of a sacred text are foremost used. On the one hand the understanding of the Homeric poems under the light of a monotheis- tic perspective and, on the other, the reading of the Pentateuch illuminated by Greek philosophy. This practice, as a manner of understanding both the Bible and Homer’s poems, becomes after a few centuries a mode of interpretation of every text, when we arrive at Christian allegorism. Paradigmatic examples will be the Christian allegorism of Clement, who applied to Jesus the same argu- ments that Philo had used on Moses without mentioning his source; of Origen, in the polemic against Celso; of Ambrose, the bishop of Milan who practically plagiarized the Philonic texts. Ideas about Greek cosmology and cosmogony, genetically illuminated by etymologies, constitute the main instrumental basis of the exegetical method of Heraclitus (Homeric Problems), Lucius Annaeus Cornutus (Compendium of Greek Theology) and the Ps. Plutarch (On Homer), whose main objective is not to reveal the deep meaning of proper names and epithets (in the Stoic way) but to analyze extensive mythical episodes maintaining the coherence between the allegorical reading and the epic narrative, in order to demonstrate that Homer is the first and most enlightened enunciator of all philosophical conceptions about the physis of the universe. For example, Heraclitus the Allegorist asserts that Odysseus’s wanderings, if carefully studied, will be found to be allegorical, because Homer has produced in Odysseus “a sort of instrument of every vir- tue, and has used him as the vehicle of his own philosophy, because he hated the vices which ravage human life”. The Homeric passage of Scylla (which will be the nucleus of our exposition) is mentioned by Heraclitus, who says that the monster is an allegory “for the many forms of shamelessness, and so she

1 Conf. 4; Abr. 10; Prob. 31; Contempl. 17; Legat. 80.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004411616_011 232 Alesso naturally has a girdle of dogs’ heads, since she is fenced around with rapacity, audacity, and greed” (Homeric Problems 70, transl. by Russell-Konstan [2005]). The convergence of pagan, Jewish and Christian elements in allegory as a philosophical topic began to be actively investigated thanks to the circula- tion in the second half of the last century of two great manuals in the French language, those by Félix Buffière (1956) and Jean Pépin (1976). The study of ancient allegory with several religious and theological implications has sig- nificantly increased in the last decades. Just to name a few, we can mention Robert Lamberton (1989), David Dawson (1992) and Jon Whitman (2000). Lately, very interesting studies have been carried out by female researchers: Ilaria L. E. Ramelli (2008), Katell Berthelot (2011), Pura Nieto (2014) and chiefly Maren Niehoff (2011), (2012). All these studies confirm that Philo conceives his own project of Homeric myths to the extent that he constructs an explicatory discourse around figures from Iliad and Odyssey in order to demonstrate more systematically the rightfulness of Jewish beliefs on the oneness of God and the condemnation of idolatry. In On Providence, for instance, we find explicit men- tion of the multiple levels of meaning in Homer and Hesiod. Philo’s nephew Alexander attacks the idea of providence (πρόνοια) and our sage defends it. He says that if one applies the mythical story of Hephaestus to fire, of Hera to air and of Hermes to logos, and operate in the same way with respect to the other gods, one becomes a praiser of the poets that it is necessary to condemn. If one does not accept the principles of allegories or hidden meanings, it is the same as the boys who out of ignorance pass by the paintings of Apelles and are attached to the images stamped on little coins: they admire the laughable and scorn what deserves general acceptance.2 In addition to the Homeric hypotext there may also be historical situations that we cannot possibly know today, that is, a plurality of names for the same god in a cosmopolitan city like Alexandria. The development of the onomas- tics of divinities was common in the Hellenistic period.3 That is why Philo af- firms that nobody among those who profess piety (εὐσέβεια) may be compared with those who were schooled by nature to worship the Self-existent (the Therapeutae in this case), not surely those who revere the elements, earth, water, air, fire, which have received different names from different peoples who call fire (πῦρ) Hephaestus, air (ἀήρ) Hera, water (ὕδωρ) Poseidon and earth (γῆ) Demeter (Contempl. 2–3).

2 Prov . 2.41; only in Armenian language and quoted in English by Lamberton (1989), 50. 3 Cf. Buffière (1956), 60–65. See Diodorus Siculus 1.2; Plutarch, De Iside et Os. 352a and 363a–d; Cornutus 3.3–6.19.