Ancient Readings of Plato’s Phaedo Philosophia Antiqua a series of studies on ancient philosophy Editorial Board Ch. Wildberg (Princeton) K.A. Algra (Utrecht) F.A.J. de Haas (Leiden) J. Mansfeld (Utrecht) C.J. Rowe (Durham) D.T. Runia (Melbourne) Previous Editors J.H. Waszink† W.J. Verdenius† J.C.M. Van Winden† volume 140 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/pha Ancient Readings of Plato’s Phaedo Edited by Sylvain Delcomminette Pieter d’Hoine Marc-Antoine Gavray leiden | boston Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ancient readings of Plato's Phaedo / edited by Sylvain Delcomminette, Pieter d'Hoine, Marc-Antoine Gavray. pages cm. – (Philosophia antiqua, ISSN 0079-1687 ; volume 140) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-28217-9 (hardback : acid-free paper) – ISBN 978-90-04-28954-3 (e-book) 1. Plato. Phaedo. 2. Immortality (Philosophy) 3. Death. I. Delcomminette, Sylvain, editor. II. Hoine, Pieter d', editor. III. 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Contents List of Contributors vii Introduction 1 Sylvain Delcomminette, Pieter d’Hoine and Marc-Antoine Gavray Aristote et le Phédon 17 Sylvain Delcomminette Strato of Lampsacus as a Reader of Plato’s Phaedo: His Critique of the Soul’s Immortality 37 Han Baltussen Le Phédon dans le Stoïcisme hellénistique et post-hellénistique 63 Francesca Alesse Sextus, the Number Two and the Phaedo 90 Lorenzo Corti Plutarch’s Reception of Plato’s Phaedo 107 Geert Roskam The Phaedo in Numenian Allegorical Interpretation 134 Harold Tarrant Plotin lecteur du Phédon: l’âme et la vie en iv 7 [2] 11 154 Riccardo Chiaradonna Syrianus and the Phaedo 173 Pieter d’Hoine Damascius, Olympiodore et Proclus sur les attributs «divin» (θεῖον) et «intelligible» (νοητόν) en Phédon 80a10–b1 dans l’argument dit «de la similitude» 212 Alain Lernould vi contents From ‘Immortal’ to ‘Imperishable’: Damascius on the Final Argument in Plato’s Phaedo 240 Sebastian Gertz La théorie de l’âme-harmonie chez les commentateurs anciens 256 Franco Trabattoni «Nombreux sont les porteurs de thyrse, mais rares les Bacchants». Olympiodore et Damascius sur le Phédon 270 Bram Demulder et Gerd Van Riel Au terme d’une tradition: Simplicius, lecteur du Phédon 293 Marc-Antoine Gavray Bibliography 311 Index locorum 336 Index nominum 357 Index rerum 360 List of Contributors Francesca Alesse is Senior Researcher at the Istituto per il Lessico Intellettuale Europeo e Storia delle Idee (iliesi) of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (Rome). Her main areas of research are the Socratic tradition and Hellenistic philosophy. Han Baltussen is the Hughes Professor of Classics at the University of Adelaide and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He has published on a wide range of topics in intellectual history and is the author of Theophrastus against the Presocratics and Plato (2000) and Philosophy and Exegesis in Simplicius (2008). He is currently preparing a monograph on grief and consolation in Antiquity. Riccardo Chiaradonna is Associate Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the Università degli Studi Roma Tre (Rome). His main areas of research are the Ancient Platonic and Aris- totelian traditions, Galen, and Plotinus. Lorenzo Corti is Lecturer in Ancient Philosophy at the Université de Lorraine and a member of the Archives Henri-Poincaré in Nancy, France. His research interests include ancient scepticism, Hellenistic epistemologies, Aristotle’s metaphysics, and the philosophy of language. Sylvain Delcomminette is Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He has written monographs on Plato’s Statesman (Brussels, 2000) and Philebus (Leiden, 2006) and is currently working on the topic of necessity in Aristotle. Bram Demulder is a PhD Fellow of the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek—Vlaanderen (fwo). At ku Leuven he is currently preparing a dissertation on the Platonism of Plutarch of Chaeronea. Pieter d’Hoine is Assistant Professor of Ancient Philosophy and Intellectual History at the De Wulf—Mansion Centre for Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy (ku Leuven). His main area of research is later Neoplatonic metaphysics. viii list of contributors Marc-Antoine Gavray is Research Associate of the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (Bel- gium). He teaches Ancient Philosophy at the Université de Liège. He works on the Sophists, on Plato, and on late Neoplatonism (mainly Damascius and Sim- plicius). Sebastian Gertz is Supernumerary Teaching Fellow in Philosophy at St. John’s College, Oxford. His main area of research is Ancient Philosophy, and particularly Neoplaton- ism. Alain Lernould is Research Fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Uni- versité de Lille). He has published Physique et Théologie. Lecture du Timée de Platon par Proclus (2001), Études sur le commentaire de Proclus au premier livre des Éléments d’Euclide (2010), and Plutarque, le Visage qui apparaît dans le disque de la Lune (2013). He is currently working on a new edition and trans- lation of Proclus’ commentary on Euclid’s Elements. Geert Roskam is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Arts (ku Leuven). He is the author of many books and articles on Hellenistic philosophy (esp. Epicureanism) and later Platonism (Plutarch and others). Harold Tarrant is Professor Emeritus at the University of Newcastle Australia, and worked in Australia from 1973 to 2011. His major publications tackle various aspects of the Platonic tradition in Antiquity. Franco Trabattoni is Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the Università degli Studi di Milano. His main areas of research concern Plato and the Platonic tradition, as well as Aristotle’s reception of Platonism and its repercussions within the Aristotelian tradition. Gerd Van Riel is Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the De Wulf-Mansion Centre for Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy (ku Leuven). His main research areas are Plato and the Platonic tradition, especially later Neoplatonism (Proclus, Damascius), and St. Augustine. Introduction Sylvain Delcomminette, Pieter d’Hoine and Marc-Antoine Gavray For Western culture, Plato’s Phaedo is above all the story of Socrates’ death. Set on the very last day of the great philosopher’s life, the dialogue begins with a gathering of his closest friends who pay him a last visit in prison, and ends with the drinking of the hemlock—followed by Socrates’ final words, an enigmatic reminder of a debt to Asclepius. Within this narrative frame, which arguably makes the Phaedo Plato’s most moving composition, the main part of the dialogue is devoted to the philosophical discussion that Socrates is supposed to have held with his friends on the day of his execution. As is well known, the theme of their exchanges is, appropriately, the immortality of the soul. In the course of their inquiry, however, the interlocutors address a wide range of issues, relating not only to psychology, but also to ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of nature, and cosmology. The importance of this dialogue for our understanding of Plato’s thought and indeed, for the history of Western philosophy as a whole, cannot be easily overestimated. Already in Antiquity, from Aristotle to the last of the Neoplatonists, the dialogue featured prominently in debates on the philosophical way of life, on the destiny of the soul in the afterlife, on Platonic Forms, on the acquisition of knowledge, on the virtues, and on many other topics. Even a superficial glance at the extant commentaries on the dialogue from Antiquity—all three derived from lecture notes by Damascius (ca. 462–550ad) and Olympiodorus (ca. 495/505–565) in the fifth and sixth century ad—reveals them to be the fruit of a long, although mostly lost, exegetical tradition. Unlike the dialogue itself, however, the Phaedo’s reception in Antiquity has received little scholarly attention in recent decades.1 This is unsurprising, given the provenance of the surviving commentaries: Damascius and Olympiodorus had to wait untill the quite recent past to re-emerge from a relative oblivion. Moreover, the 1 Notable exceptions include the excellent annotated edition and translation of the commen- taries by L.G. Westerink (The Greek Commentaries on Plato’s Phaedo, 2 vol., ed. and trans. by L.G. Westerink, Amsterdam: North Holland, 1976–1977), which provides a mass of informa- tion, as yet unsurpassed, on the exegetical tradition of the dialogue, and the recent mono- graph by S. Gertz, Death and Immortality in Late Neoplatonism. Studies on the Ancient Com- mentators on Plato’s Phaedo, Leiden: Brill, 2011, which represents the first systematic survey of the entire commentaries. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi: 10.1163/9789004289543_002 2 delcomminette, d’hoine and gavray great revival of Neoplatonic studies that we have witnessed in the past thirty or forty years was motivated less by a desire to better our own understanding of Plato by means of Neoplatonic insights into his writings than by the new- found appreciation for the Neoplatonists as important thinkers in their own right.