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From Robert Lamberton, Homer the Theologian

The Iliad

It is almost casually, in the second part of the essay [on The Republic], that Proclus mentions his understanding of the meaning of the Iliad story in the broadest sense and offers an interpretation of the myth of the Trojan War. He is specific on the point that this reading is his own, or at least that it is the one to which he subscribes. The passage occurs in the context of a discussion of the secondary myth of Homer's blindness and the motives of the mythoplasts in that particular fabrication. He concludes:

The myths want to indicate, I believe, through Helen, the whole of that beauty that has to do with the sphere in which things come to be and pass away and that is the product of the demiurge. It is over this beauty that eternal war rages among souls, until the more intellectual are victorious over the less rational forms of life and return hence to the place from which they came.

Helen, then, is worldly beauty, the fragmented, imperfect copy of the form of the beautiful inhabiting the material world. The implication is that it is this beauty that entices souls (i.e., the Greeks) to leave their true home and to enter into a mode of existence for which war provides the most apt metaphor. Once they have "overcome the barbarous flood," in the tenth year (representing the millennial cycle of souls of the myth of Er), they return to their own realm. A similar conception of the Troy tale's allegorical meaning is implied in Plotinus (Enn. 1.6.8.16--21). As a myth of the descent of souls into matter, this interpretation is distantly reminiscent of a passage in the Hermetica where the "archetypal man" is described breaking through the superstructure of the cosmos, seeing the beauty of the material world (in this case his own image reflected in it), falling in love with that beauty, and thus being committed to existence in the flesh. The entire allegory of the Troy tale, in a form related to that found in Proclus, is elaborated in terms of etymologies . . . by Hermias (In Phdr. 77-79), and Sheppard argues convincingly that we can trace the larger exposition to Syrianus as well.

This, says Proclus, is the level of truth that Homer loved to contemplate, and it is in this sense that the mythoplasts called him "blind"; his characteristic vision was turned toward the suprasensory, not toward the objects of this world.

The interpretation itself appears to belong to the same stratum of Neoplatonic allegory as the comprehensive frame allegory formulated in Porphyry's explanation of the cave of the nymphs. The ambiguous relationship of soul (life, consciousness) to matter (the body) is, for this tradition, the compelling mystery of the world of our everyday experience. Any text that is obscure and is assumed to have some claim to represent a transcendent truth may, sooner or later, be found to be an expression of some fact concerning that relationship. . . . (199-200)

[The Odyssey]

The Odyssey is far less interesting and suggestive to Proclus than the Iliad, though he indicates his awareness of the tradition of allegorical interpretation of the poem. Moreover, he shies away from an allegorical interpretation in his defense of Odysseus against the charge of lack of moderation and of a generally positive disposition toward the pleasures of the flesh:

Now, with regard to the blame laid upon Odysseus, let it be said that, first of all, those who refer the wanderings of Odysseus to secondary, allegorical meanings and place the Phaeacians and the "good cheer" among them beyond the sphere of mortal nature, prefer to interpret these things more symbolically. Thus "banquet," "feasting," and "harmonious song" will be said, as far as they are concerned, in another sense and not the one recognized by most men. It should be emphasized, however, that those who interpret the poem literally are also able to answer such accusations.

Proclus goes on to build a conservative argument based on careful attention to the text and on the demonstration that Odysseus praises "good cheer" (euphoria) not "pleasure" (idone). It is the latter that Socrates (together with virtually the entire Greek philosophical tradition with the exception of the Epicureans) condemned as a goal in life, and that has the associations of indulgence in the appetites of the flesh. . .

In the Parmenides commentary he again develops the general meaning of the figure of Odysseus:

Many are the wanderings and circlings of the soul: one among imaginings, one in opinions and one before these in understanding. But only the life according to nous has stability and this is the mystical harbor of the soul to which, on the one hand, the poem leads Odysseus through the great wandering of his life, and to which we too shall draw ourselves up, if we would reach salvation.

As Porphyry suggests in the essay on the cave of the nymphs (34), the stable "mystical harbor" of the soul is indicated in the Odyssey myth by the central, but decidedly problematical, prediction of Tiresias that Odysseus will finally travel inland to a place where the sea is unknown (Od. 11.119--34). It is clear, in any case, that in the present passage, Odysseus represents the soul (and not the understanding), and the goal to which the poem "leads" him is still union with the nous, far from the chaos of life as we know it. A passage in Hermias indicates that this was a current interpretation. It may have originated in the first or second century after Christ, found expression in the interpretations of Numenius and his circle, and been passed on to Proclus through Porphyry and others. By way of Macrobius it enters the medieval Latin tradition. (222, 225-226)