PROCLUS and the ANCIENTS Steven K. Strange Emory
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.
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