375 Pagan Religious Resilience: Reinventing Zeus in Athenian Neoplatonism ONLINE 11:50 - 13:20 Tuesday, 31st August, 2021 Ilinca Tanaseanu Doebler The workshop addresses religious resilience by focusing on the transformations of Late Antiquity. Faced with the increasing dominance of Christianity in the Roman Empire and the corresponding status loss and, eventually, repression of pagan cults, adherents of traditional Greek and Roman religion develop a variety of strategies to cope with the changes and to adapt their understanding of religion and their religious practices to the new parameters. For pagan intellectuals, Neoplatonism provides an institutional as well as theological crystallisation nucleus. Neoplatonism offers a more or less unitary metaphysical frame for reinterpretations of traditional texts, deities, and practices. Its schools provide institutional anchors for developing and stabilising a novel pagan identity, marked by a habitus of intellectual superiority vis-à-vis the Christians as well as by a strong sense of being the guardians of an age-old tradition. Especially the Athenian Neoplatonic school develops into a conspicuous institution which marks the intellectual and religious map of the Empire. The workshop enquires into the various strategies which figures of the Athenian school employ to recast the traditional religion as the superior counterpart to Christianity. While the importance of Athenian Neoplatonism as a stronghold of intellectual paganism is generally acknowledged, further research is needed not only on the individual strategies and their respective dynamics, but even more on their interrelation and conscious combination. To enquire into this interrelation, the workshop will concentrate on one deity, namely Zeus, the ruler of the Hellenic pantheon, and explore his Neoplatonic interpretations. We will retrace how a distinctive and novel philosophical theology is combined with the recourse to authoritative texts and to tradition to create a distinctive profile for Zeus, which at once serves as an intellectually satisfying religious option ad intra, for the pagan peer group, and also takes a clear stance in the conflict with Christianity, as it emphatically departs from pagan approaches which cast Zeus as the one supreme god and thus allow for bridge-building between paganism and Christianity. By concentrating on the comparatively well-documented Athenian school, we will ground our research in a well-defined historical context, situating the aims and strategies of the protagonists in specific urban settings, sacred landscapes and concrete interreligious relationships and conflicts and thus highlighting how religious resilience is intricately linked with other social factors and processes. Beyond shedding new light on late antique pagan resilience, the workshop will repertorise general patterns of religious resilience (e.g. distinctive forms of recourse to tradition or the positive valuation of the minority status creating elite identities) which can serve as a basis for further comparative study and eventually theorizing of religious resilience. 405 How to Save the Father of the Gods: Hermias’ Explanation of Zeus through the Exegesis of Orpheus and Homer Benedetto Neola Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, Naples, Italy Abstract In the hands of late antique Neoplatonists, Zeus becomes a means to expound metaphysical views. In my paper I will explore the reading of Zeus’ figure in Hermias’ Commentary on Plato’s Phaedrus, the only ancient commentary on the Phaedrus that has survived. Hermias was a pupil of Syrianus, who was head of the Athenian Academy, and the co-disciple of Proclus, Syrianus’ successor. He himself taught Platonic philosophy between around 435-455 AD in Alexandria, i.e., in a predominantly Christian city. In order to forge a new and acceptable religious system and faced with the dominance of Christianity in Alexandria, Hermias endeavours to rescue and save the ancient deities of the pagan pantheon by means of textual exegesis, which now becomes the main tool for pagan resilience. Only by synoptically reading the pagan authorities such as Orpheus and Homer and integrating their deities into a new and coherent metaphysical system could a late antique Neoplatonist like Hermias hope to cope with the changing times. And this also applies to the father of the gods: Zeus. Once a threatening divine figure, now the father of the Olympians is threatened, too, like all his sons and daughters. In his Commentary on Plato’s Phaedrus (In Phaedr. 87, 5 ff. Lucarini-Moreschini), Hermias unfolds a rich and multi-faced analysis of Zeus, whom Plato had presented as the leader of the twelve gods in Socrates’ so-called Palinode (cf. Phaedr. 243e4 ff.). Indeed, the interpretation of his figure could not be unique: for Hermias needed not only to explain Plato’s Zeus, but also to show Plato’s agreement with other pagan authorities who had talked about Zeus, namely Orpheus and Homer. It is not a matter of anodyne exegesis, but of pagan resilience. Hermias needed to show the mutual interdependence and support of a religious system’s elements, thereby strengthening coherence ad intra. Also, he tries to forge a new religious system mirroring the metaphysical one. This is what is at stake when Hermias says: Ζητητέον δὲ ἐν τούτοις τίς ὁ Ζεὺς καὶ τίνες οἱ δώδεκα θεοί (In Phaedr. 141, 25-26). According to what seems to be the official Athenian view (ἡμεῖς), Hermias interprets Zeus by presenting (i) a unique and transcendent Zeus as demiurgic monad, (ii) a Zeusian triad (Zeus, Poseidon, and Pluto), and (iii) a Zeus as being-giver and leader of the twelve gods. Significantly, this multilayered exegesis is supported by both Homeric verses (cf. Hom., Il. 1, 534-535; 423-425; 5, 428-429; 15, 187-195) and Orphic theology (namely the doctrines of the Nights and the triad Ouranos-Kronos-Phanes, according to which Zeus would be the king of the hyper-cosmic dimension and the limit of the νοεροὶ θεοί). I will thus try to bring to the fore Hermias’ complex exegesis of Zeus’ figure, thereby shedding light on the philosophical means whereby pagan philosophers like Hermias endeavoured to react and adapt to a changed religious context that threatened to cast out of the intellectual and religious panorama the ancient deities and those who once tried to celebrate them. 418 Theology and Religious Resilience: Zeus as the Demiurge in Proclus’ Commentary on the Timaeus and in the Teaching of Syrianus Ilinca Tanaseanu-Doebler Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany Abstract The contribution will explore the identification of the Platonic demiurge with Zeus in Proclus‘ commentary on the Timaeus, a work from the beginning of Proclus‘ career, according to the plausible information given by his biographer Marinus. Proclus‘ numerous references to the exegeses of his predecessors, mostly crowned by a reference to the teaching of his master, Syrianus, allow us to anchor his equation of the demiurge with Zeus in earlier philosophical tradition and also to gauge his debt to Syrianus and at least partly reconstruct the latter’s doctrine, especially when we compare Proclus‘ references to Syrianus to Hermias‘ information about their common teacher. In the Timaeus commentary, Proclus attributes to Syrianus a complex scheme which distinguishes the demiurge in an absolute sense (the demiurgic monad) from a lower demiurgic triad, and combines the Timaeus and excerpts from the Orphic Rhapsodic Theogony to identify the demiurge as Zeus. In so doing, Syrianus and Proclus take up an older tradition of philosophical exegesis of an Orphic hymn to Zeus that we can trace back to the fifth century B.C., but fit it into a distinctive metaphysical hierarchy, marked by a multiplicity of levels between the highest principle and the material world and by vertical multiplication of the individual divine figures of Greek traditional religion. Throughout Proclus‘ commentary, the identification of the demiurge as Zeus projects his exegesis of the Platonic passages that refer to the demiurge onto the traditional figure of Zeus, adding to Zeus‘ Neoplatonic profile. The paper will explore how Proclus links Neoplatonic metaphysics, the exegesis of Plato and poetic quotations to create a theology of Zeus. It will enquire which specific myths or passages emerge as crucial for understanding Zeus and discuss the comparative scarcity of references to religious practices and realia. Lastly, the paper will outline the implications of the identification of Zeus with the demiurge, which effectively demotes the god to a comparatively low position in the divine hierarchy, for pagan religiosity and pagan religious identities in the increasingly Christianised culture of Late Antiquity. In treating all these points, the paper will attempt wherever possible to retrace the position of both Proclus and Syrianus, as far as it emerges from the commentary. The comparison of the results with the other two papers of the session will lead to a comprehensive perspective on Zeus in Athenian Platonism: the comparison with Hermias‘ exegesis of another Platonic passage featuring Zeus will bring out more clearly the Syrianic background which the two philosophers share, and the comparison of the Timaeus commentary with the Platonic Theology, which stands at the end of Proclus‘ career, will help gauge to what extent we can speak of a development in Proclus‘ thought. 531 From Mythical Figures to Philosophical Principles: Resilience through the Amalgamation of Orphism and Platonism in Proclus’ Platonic Theology Jörg von Alvensleben Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany Abstract In ages of religious tensions, having sovereignty over the discourses of tradition helps to make sure of one’s own identity. Those who regard themselves as representatives of a long succession of religious doctrines are better able to cope with the tumultuous events of their days. To know that one’s own point of view was never popular in history can cause a feeling of resilience and self-awareness. This strategy is also used by one of the last pagan philosophers of late antiquity, namely by Proclus, the charismatic head of the neoplatonic school in Athens for almost five decades.