I. PLATO'S AUTHORITY CONSISTS IN MORE THAN HIS BEING RIGHT

David Sedley applied the term auctoritas to the kind of authority that Platonists came to attribute to Plato's works and noted that it expresses in Latin a syndrome of notions for which Greek had no single handy word: leadership, ownership, prestige, and validation.Footnote ⁴ Sedley had already explored the authority of the founders of the Hellenistic schools and the idea that their authority was subtly different from the auctoritas that Plato held for Platonists.Footnote ⁵ Boys-Stones then went on to investigate this thought in more detail.Footnote ⁶ Members of the Stoa might argue that the views that they advocated were consistent with those of Zeno, but quoting Zeno was not an argument for the truth of a view – only its right to be called a Stoic view. By contrast, Platonists regarded the fact that some statement, S, by Plato (when properly interpreted) means P as a good ground for regarding P as true. The genuine philosophical work consists in the task of figuring out what Plato really meant. There is no conceptual space for the additional step of asking whether this is really true.Footnote ⁷ This is why Boys-Stones understands Platonism – a movement that he claims arose only in the later first and second centuries c.e. – as the conjunction of two theses: that Plato's philosophy was dogmatic and that it was authoritative.

I think that this debate about the peculiar nature of Plato's auctoritas takes too narrow a view of what that authority consists in. Proclus’ Platonism includes the claim that Plato's philosophy is authoritative and dogmatic in Boys-Stones's sense, but it is not limited to that. Authority in Boys-Stones's narrower sense does not include the sense of moral urgency for those souls who are able to discern the truth in Plato's philosophy – a notion that is captured but largely unanalysed in Sedley's wider notion of auctoritas. This philosophy is not merely true: it is the possibility of salvation. The works of Euclid would have had a similar authority to those of Plato in Boys-Stones's understanding of ‘authority’. By the first century c.e., there would be an overwhelming presumption that any apparent mistake in a proof in Euclid is in fact a misunderstanding of Euclid rather than a real mistake.Footnote ⁸ But we do not have ‘Euclidism’ in the same way in which we have ‘Platonism’. The nature of the truths to be found in Plato and how the apprehension of those truths affects souls matter. Boys-Stones's understanding of Plato's authority misses the moral urgency and soteriological character that we see at the end of the trajectory in Neoplatonism. If we want to see how the evolution of Plato's authority culminated in such a soteriological character, we need to start with something richer.

In his 1997 paper Sedley was, I think, aware of this in some sense because he explores the question of Plato's authority in the context of understanding the origins of the practice of writing commentaries. He thought that the earliest commentaries by Crantor took their impetus from the need that speakers of koinē Greek would have had for guidance in understanding Plato's Attic style. Implicit in this need is a classroom setting. Implicit in this, in turn, is the notion that it is worthwhile to spend one's time elucidating what Plato said in order that young men might better understand the dialogues.Footnote ⁹

When we turn to Neoplatonism, this teaching dimension is clear. Many of the commentaries on Plato (and Aristotle) have their origins in lectures given to students. This is clearest in the fifth- and sixth-century commentaries that are explicitly described as notes from lectures.Footnote ¹⁰ None the less, even where there are questions about the existence of a school – perhaps in the case of Porphyry – we find works such as the surviving Categories Commentary in question and answer form. Simplicius had no live audience of students, but he wrote for the hypothetical audience he would have had.Footnote ¹¹ Thus the late antique Platonists did not merely think that Plato's philosophy was true, but also that it needed to be communicated. So Sedley was right when he said that the notion of auctoritas involved leadership: it is important to follow Plato and thus to follow one's teacher's account of Plato. Yet the kind of leadership is of a very different sort from that of the Hellenistic schools. From reading Zeno and Chrysippus, the aspiring Stoic learns that she must discipline her assent to presentations so that she assents only to those that are cognitive. It is not the case that in reading Zeno or Chrysippus she acquires this discipline. Contrast this with Proclus’ picture of Plato as chief initiator into mysteries. One has the revelation of the god in the mystic initiation. The guidance that the aspiring Stoic receives from her leader is guidance to a destination – ὁμολόγια or agreement with nature – where the destination is independent of the experience of being guided. Platonic philosophy as mystagogy involves leadership of a very different sort.

Boys-Stones's own explanation for the emergence of Platonism – understood as the view that Plato's philosophy is dogmatic and authoritative – appeals to ideas developed in the Stoic school. He identifies the Stoics Cornutus and Chaeremon as authors who worked on the assumption that ancient myths preserve, together with extraneous accretions, remnants of primitive wisdom expressed in allegorical ways from a golden age in which people perceived the world with uncorrupted concepts.Footnote ¹² These philosophers of the distant past occupied a better epistemic vantage point than we currently do because they had not been corrupted by too much technology and luxury. They thought that this primitive wisdom could be recovered by allegorical interpretation of ancient myths, cultic rites, and poetry. This notion of primitive wisdom was adopted by Plutarch of Chaeronea, Celsus, and Numenius. Numenius added to it the idea that Plato himself had already achieved a complete understanding of this ancient wisdom. Plato's philosophy was, in effect, ‘a textbook of ancient wisdom, reconstructed, compiled and explained’.Footnote ¹³ The truth of Plato's philosophy was then guaranteed by its origins in an epistemic golden age.

Grant for the sake of argument that these Platonists believed, along with the Stoics, that there was such a thing as primitive wisdom whose truth was guaranteed by its origins in a superior epistemic vantage point. But a vantage point on what? The work by Cornutus that has come down to us is A Cursory Examination of the Traditions of Greek Theology. In it he uses etymological means to reveal Zeus and Hera as natural forces: Zeus as the sustaining cause and soul of the universe, Hera as the air. When the project of recovering primitive wisdom is transplanted to the Platonist context, Boys-Stones's examples are similarly theological. From the fragments of Plutarch's On the Festival of the Images at Plataea we get an allegory of Zeus and Hera in which they symbolize fire and the ‘wet and windy nature’. In On the Face of the Moon (938F) Plutarch tells us, on the authority of ‘ancient tradition’ (παλαιὰ ϕήμη), that Artemis is to be identified with the Moon because she is virgin and sterile, but helpful to women in childbirth.

Theology is, of course, an important branch of knowledge in Stoic philosophy. But it is difficult to see the moral urgency behind attaining this particular sort of ancient wisdom. If one were trying to understand what is really important about Stoicism, a work on proper functions would be more to the point. If one were trying to become a Stoic, Epictetus’ Discourses or Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations would offer better insights into the techniques of psychological self-transformation necessary to effect this change in one's outlook and responses. It is indeed true that the Stoic sage, in living in agreement with nature, lives in agreement with god, where the latter is understood in terms of fate or the sequence of causes and effects played out in each world cycle. But theological knowledge of the sort on offer in Cornutus’ work seems to do little to facilitate this goal.

Of course, a Platonist such as Numenius, who shares this Stoic picture of primitive wisdom, would have had a different story about its source and nature. Rather than coming from a time when men in general did not suffer from the corrupted concepts to which we are now heirs, it came from Pythagoras. The gods that Numenius discusses are also very different from the natural forces allegorized in the Stoics. While the latter are immanent, Numenius’ gods – at least some of them – are transcendent (and radically so). If Boys-Stones is right, then we can see why Platonists such as Plutarch, Celsus, and Numenius thought that Plato's philosophy contained ancient theological truths. We can also see that these theological truths may be rather different in their content from those recovered by Stoic allegorists. However, it is still a mystery why this theological knowledge should be regarded as one that it is urgent for us to recover, and thus why one should spend time composing commentaries to elucidate Plato's wisdom or attending lectures to hear about it.

II. TEXTUAL COMMUNITIES AND THE MIDDLE PLATONIC FOUNDATIONS FOR NEOPLATONISM

Let us step back and ask just what it is that we are seeking an explanation for. I think that the professional consensus is that the terminological distinction between Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism serves to obscure a not inconsiderable degree of continuity. There has long been a tendency to think about these continuities in terms of doctrine. So, for instance, we look for intimations of a wholly ineffable and utterly transcendent first principle. This is not, I think, a mistake. But it is importantly incomplete. The notion of auctoritas as Sedley thinks about it, or Boys-Stones's stipulative definition of Platonism in terms of the authority of Plato's text, starts to move beyond it. Authority is not so much a matter of doctrine as an attitude towards the text of Plato.

I wish to go even further. Neoplatonism of the sort associated with the Athenian and Alexandrian schools is not merely a body of doctrine, nor even a body of doctrine justified in a special way – that is, by appeal to Plato's authority. It is a set of privileged texts, subjected to a repertoire of reading strategies, and interpreted in front of an audience of people for the purpose of transforming their souls. Neoplatonic philosophy should really be thought of as Neoplatonic philosophizing. At its heart, it is a community convened around the practice of interpreting Platonism – one that does not merely seek to understand the dialogues, but to live a life in and through the concepts derived from this understanding, and by living this way to attain union with the divine.

Proclus’ school in Athens is a clear example of what Brian Stock has called a ‘textual community’.Footnote ¹⁴ Stock initially developed the concept as a means of thinking about religious dissenters, heretics, and reformers in western Europe in the eleventh century. In his book, a textual community refers to a group (1) that defines itself in opposition to a religious or cultural mainstream and does so on the basis of a text that members of the group regard as authoritative. Textual communities are (2) convened around leaders whose authority stems from the fact that they are regarded as having the correct insight into the meaning of the authoritative text. The surrounding culture may share the text, but understand it differently. A third key element in Stock's idea is that textual communities (3) understand themselves, their salvation, and the surrounding culture in terms of beliefs and concepts drawn from their authoritative texts. Stock's description of monastic communities such as the Cistercians applies in large measure to the Neoplatonic schools of Late Antiquity:

Let us call this last feature (4) progressive salvation via text.Footnote ¹⁶

As you can see from feature (1), the notion of an authoritative text plays a key role in the idea of a textual community. At a minimum, this means that members of the community think that the text contains teachings (δόγματα) and that, under the correct interpretation, what the text says is true. But this notion of authority is magnified and changed by its relations to other features of a textual community. Thus we should not consider it in isolation. Importantly, (4) places significant constraints on the content of the authoritative text. It has to be one whose teachings plausibly assist in the redemption of the human being from an existing separation from god. Further, if a text is to play the role of defining such a textual community, its meaning must be unobvious and/or contested. Otherwise there would be no need to distinguish between those who grasp its real meaning – those within the community – and those who do not: the outsiders. Nor would there be a place for leadership (2) based on insight into the text if its meaning were plain to see. Finally, the text or texts that are deemed to be authoritative must be rich enough to allow members of the community to define themselves in terms drawn from it (3). The authoritative text or texts must thus speak to a wide range of human experiences and relations. Viewed in this light, Euclid's Elements looks like an unlikely candidate for the basis of textual community, even if it is authoritative in some sense.

The Neoplatonic schools of Late Antiquity look like textual communities. With respect to (1), Niehof has already argued that one function of the writing of Timaeus commentaries was to deny the attempts by Christians and Jews to appropriate the prestige of this text to the cause of those who supposed that the world had a beginning.Footnote ¹⁷ She does not give an explanation of the authoritative status of Plato's dialogue. Rather, she employs the notion of authority that is found in Boys-Stones. None the less, the article does serve to show how pagan Platonic textual communities defined themselves in relation to others by appeal to a genuine understanding of the text. One might add that Platonist philosophers contrasted the genuinely philosophical treatment of Plato's works in their readings with the superficial and philological readings of those too close to the rhetoricians and grammarians.Footnote ¹⁸ Here, then, is an example of Platonists defining those outside the community by reference to the text in a way that does not necessarily coincide with the religious distinctions between Christian and pagan.

One very striking feature of Neoplatonic interpretative practice concerns (4). The Iamblichean curriculum seeks to align the student's advancement through progressively more advanced works of Plato with a moral advancement through a hierarchy of virtues. The steps from the Gorgias to the Phaedo to the Parmenides are very much steps by which one re-ascended to the gods’ presence.Footnote ¹⁹

With respect to (2), Marinus’ biography portrays Proclus’ inevitable rise to leadership of the Platonic school after Syrianus not only as a matter of his natural, ethical, and cathartic virtues but also as a result of his easy grasp of the most difficult parts of Plato's philosophy (Vit. §13). Similarly, Damascius portrays the problems that beset the succession upon Proclus’ death as coinciding with an absence of insight into the works of Plato on the part of Marinus (Philosophical History fr. 97 Athanassiadi).

To choose but one example under the heading of (3), consider the parallel drawn between the contemplative and yet providential demiurge and the teacher of philosophy. Thus Marinus describes Proclus himself as ‘the father of many doctrines’ (Vit. 21.1), a phrase that echoes Proclus’ own parallel between the Demiurge as father of works and Timaeus/Plato as father of logoi (In Ti. 1.9.16–18 and 1.95.15–17). Finally, if the communal life of teaching Platonic philosophy – and thus conserving the souls of their auditors – was not at the absolute heart of the Platonic school, then why did the Platonists feel the need to leave Athens in 529 c.e.? Even the prohibition against leaving estates to the pagan school would not have prevented its members from a private discussion of the contents of Plato's works.Footnote ²⁰ The order closed the school because the school was not a body of doctrine, or even an attitude towards the works of Plato. It was, rather, a textual community in which the writing about philosophy was grounded in a practice of psychological transformation (ψυχαγωγία) and the shared reading of authoritative texts. When the ban on teaching removed the Platonic school's core activity, ψυχαγωγία, the shared reading of the authoritative texts could have had only a vestige of life left – a vestige apparently extinguished after Simplicius’ voluminous works were composed for his purely hypothetical audience.

I think it is equally obvious that neither the Stoic school nor the sceptical Academy was a textual community. This is not to deny that being a Stoic involved more than allegiance to a body of doctrine. In the Hellenistic period, philosophy was indeed a way of life, as Hadot once argued.Footnote ²¹ Textual communities have a communal way of life too, but not every shared way of life counts as a textual community. We have already discussed the difference between the kind of authority had by Zeno and that characteristic of Plato's authority in the Neoplatonic schools. We have noted that homologia with nature is a kind of communion with the divine only in a rather adventitious way. We can add that the Stoic scholarchs had their authority as defenders of Stoic philosophy, not as interpreters of Zeno. Nor can we even say that they resembled leaders of textual communities in as much as they derived their authority from their insight into the proper interpretation of Socrates – the man whom the Stoics took to embody all the virtues – for Socratic tradition was not one that sought reunion with the divine through the interpretation of texts. Finally, Stoic philosophers sought to live in accordance with the tenets of Stoic philosophy, but not in and through the works of Zeno. This contrast is one that is easier to illustrate than to define. Epictetus’ Discourses urge his audience to conceive themselves and things around them in one way or another: for instance, imagine your loved ones as fragile things, like a cup, so that when they die you are not surprised (Ench. §3). These re-imaginings are for the purpose of training the power of assent so that it operates in accordance with the precept that one should not assent to things that are incognitive (ἀκατάληπτος).Footnote ²²

Contrast this with the way in which Proclus uses the notion of god and matter as a means of revealing the similarity between the wise person and the person in the grips of double ignorance – that is, one who is ignorant and unaware of his ignorance (In Alc. I. 189.16–190.5). Each resembles the other in not going outside itself, but while god (and the wise man) are self-sufficient and full of goodness, matter (and the doubly ignorant person) are pure passivity and emptiness. Proclus uses images (allegedly) from Plato's philosophy to enrich our conceptual resources for understanding ourselves and those around us. Epictetus uses images drawn from life as a purely instrumental means of bringing one's power of assent into conformity with the Stoic norm. The role of Plato's dialogues in the communal life of the Academy is largely a matter of speculation.Footnote ²³ However, there is no reason to believe that his works played any role remotely like the one they play in Neoplatonism.

After the death of Epicurus, the Epicurean school more closely resembled the Neoplatonic textual communities than did the Stoa or the Academy. If those textual communities can be characterized as a kind of ‘Plato cult’, then the Garden was something of an Epicurus cult.Footnote ²⁴ But even so, there were some important differences of emphasis. First, the idea that one achieves divinization through an understanding of the master's authoritative text is slightly different. Epicurus’ philosophical revelations were meant to facilitate a mortal ataraxia, which was an imitation of the blessedness of the gods – albeit for a limited duration. While the gods served as perfect examples of the blessed life, free from pain and disturbance, the content of that life was thought to be obvious to anyone capable of experiencing passions (παθή).Footnote ²⁵ One did not need to grasp a positive picture of the gods’ nature in order to facilitate ataraxia. Rather, one simply needed to avoid falling into the mistake of supposing that gods are vengeful or pose any threat to us. So, rather than relying on an understanding of the gods to transform the student and reunite his or her fallen soul with its divine, intelligible origins, Epicurean philosophy required correct theology only as a prophylactic against false and harmful conceptions of the divine.Footnote ²⁶ Thus the sense in which the members of the community sought to recover a life in communion with god through an understanding of the authoritative text is importantly different.

It is also true that Epicureans wrote commentaries on Epicurus’ works, just as the members of the Platonic textual communities wrote commentaries on Plato's works. We know of commentaries on Epicurus’ massive work On Nature from both Artemon of Laodicea and his pupil Philonides. So both the Epicureans and the Platonists thought that the works of their respective masters contained important truths and stood in need of exegesis. The reasons for the generation of the commentary traditions, however, were rather different. Sedley describes the nature of Epicurus’ On Nature and the challenges that it would have presented to the student's understanding.Footnote ²⁷ The work is long, the material difficult, and Epicurus’ style problematic. By contrast, the commentary tradition in Neoplatonism is predicated on the idea that the core texts of the curriculum have a meaning that has been deliberately veiled.Footnote ²⁸ The different sources for the obscurity of the texts that stand at the centre of the Epicurean and Platonic communities invite different ways of thinking about leadership within the communities. An Epicurean scholarch was regarded as expert and insightful, but would not be characterized as a mystagoge or an initiate into divine mysteries. So, while the Epicureans anticipate the notion of textual community that I have attributed to the Neoplatonic schools in many ways, there are none the less some important differences as well.Footnote ²⁹

If the argument up to this point is correct, then the dominant social form of late antique Platonism is the textual community. The schools of the Hellenistic period were not similarly textual communities – or perhaps, in the case of the Epicureans, not textual communities of a similar sort. It is widely agreed that one of the key elements in the transition to a new, post-Hellenistic form of Platonism is the fact that Plato's dialogues became authoritative for Platonists in a novel way. If we reconsider this question in light of the notion of a textual community, then our question should not be merely ‘How did Plato's dialogues come to be regarded as true?’ but rather ‘How did Plato's dialogues come to constitute the defining text for Neoplatonic textual communities?’

The questions are related, but importantly different. The only texts that can stand at the centre of a textual community's way of life are those of a certain kind: those (a) whose interpretation is unobvious or hidden; (b) which can be seen as an essential means for the redemption of the members’ souls and communication with god; and (c) which are broad enough in their contents that members can understand themselves and their world in the text's terms. What orientation on Plato's dialogues must one have in order to see them as candidates for this role?

III. THE PLATONIC TELOS AND THE ORIGINS OF PLATO'S AUCTORITAS

Tarrant has documented the earliest occurrences of the formulation of a distinctively Platonic telos in Middle Platonism.Footnote ³⁰ The anonymous Theaetetus commentator, Plutarch, Alcinous, Albinus, Philo of Alexandria, Theon of Smyrna, and (perhaps) Eudorus all tell us that, according to Plato, the goal of living is ‘assimilation to god in so far as possible’ (ὁμοίωσις θεῷ κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν). This, of course, is an idea drawn from Theaetetus 176a–c, Timaeus 90a–d, and (less directly) Republic 613a–b. The doxography in Stobaeus (Ecl. 2.7), which may go back to Eudorus of Alexandria, mentions all three texts as places in which this insight is communicated, albeit in different modes.

This formulation has the advantage of being novel, but not wildly at variance with its philosophical competitors. The framework within which the Platonic telos is presented is, of course, the Hellenistic formalization of the framework for discussing ethics in Aristotle. To read the dialogues’ various comments on the good, happiness, and the rationality of action within this framework is already to take a significant step towards seeing them as presenting a unified, positive ethical view.

The virtues are naturally connected with the telos since they are virtues precisely because they enable the achievement of the telos, whether instrumentally or constitutively. Thus the famous Theaetetus passage goes on to tell us that the virtues are ways of being assimilated to god: ‘to become like god is to become just and holy in conjunction with wisdom’ (ὁμοίωσις δὲ δίκαιον καὶ ὅσιον μετὰ ϕρονήσεως γενέσθαι). This passage, which has been attributed to Eudorus of Alexandria,Footnote ³¹ is worth quoting at length for the various elements that it weaves together.

Even if the author(s) whose views are being related here is not Eudorus, I take it that this report has Neopythagorean or Middle Platonic origins.Footnote ³² With respect to the sort of authority that would be relevant for a text to stand at the centre of a textual community, this passage is pregnant with many possibilities for the Platonic corpus.

First and most obviously, it suggests that there is an intimate connection between becoming a better person and an understanding of divine nature. This is not merely the Stoic or Epicurean platitude that the wise and virtuous person will act in conformity with the divine will or enjoy a condition that approximates the condition of the gods. The connection is far more intimate. In each of the passages where it is said that Homer teaches the same thing ‘enigmatically’, Telemachus or Odysseus is guided by a goddess, Athena (save for Od. 5.30, where it is Calypso), who appears to him, and receives benevolent treatment at her hands.Footnote ³³ Thus ‘following god’ is interpreted at a variety of levels. On the one hand, it means living the virtuous life. This moral condition is itself equated with cognitive excellence or ϕρόνησις. However, both these achievements are illustrated by appeal to an account of a divine epiphany or communication with a god. Here, then, we close the circuit that I said was left open in Boys-Stones's view of the evolution of dogmatic Platonism. An understanding of the primarily theological content of primitive wisdom acquires a moral urgency once one comes to believe that the goal of living is assimilation to god.

This connection between ethics and theology invites an equal and opposite reaction. If the goal of life and the virtues are to consist in assimilation to god, which god? And what is this god like? We can see this implicit demand for a suitably abstract conception of god at work in the quoted passage. In it we have the following account of likeness with god: ‘the world-making [faculty] and the world-governing [faculty] are in god, on the other hand the settled order of life and the management of life are in the wise way of life’ (ἐν μὲν γὰρ θεῷ τὸ κοσμοποιὸν καὶ κοσμοδιοικητικόν‧ ἐν δὲ τῷ σοϕῷ βίου κατάστασις καὶ ζωῆς διαγωγή). It is not easy to know what to make of the former distinction in the divine between τὸ κοσμοποιὸν καὶ κοσμοδιοικητικόν.Footnote ³⁴ This question about the identity and nature of the god to which the soul should be assimilated is posed by Alcinous, but not answered very satisfactorily. As it turns out, in the history of Neoplatonism the working through of this problem is the impetus for the idea of degrees of virtues – natural ones, ethical ones, cathartic ones, intellectual ones, and even hieratic ones.Footnote ³⁵ In the fullness of time, Neoplatonic interpreters will ‘discover’ that the Gorgias teaches us about constitutional virtues, while the Phaedo teaches us about purificatory ones.Footnote ³⁶

The use of Pythagoras and Homer in the passage just considered also reveals the tendency on the part of Platonists (as rightly noted by Boys-Stones) to seek confirmation of an interpretation of Plato by reference to ancient wisdom. The involvement of PythagorasFootnote ³⁷ and Homer is obvious. What is less obvious is the connection to the Orphic tradition. The Laws passage that is invoked alludes to an Orphic poem immediately prior to the discussion of conformity with god.Footnote ³⁸ The content of the Orphic verses that it cites does not, of course, directly confirm the identification of the telos with assimilation to god. None the less, their ‘oracular and majestic tone’ alerts the enlightened Platonist that something very important is about to be announced. A text, or the entire corpus of an author, is better able to play the foundational role in a textual community if it is one that can be seen to epitomize a wider body of earlier wisdom. Thus this passage from Stobaeus marks an important way-point in the process through which Plato's works come to ground the Neoplatonic textual communities.

The final foretaste of the future of Platonism consists in the notion of Platonic polyphony. Plato communicates the same truths in different modes or voices in different kinds of works. The dialogues are here given a threefold distinction: physical, logical, and ethical. While this specific tripartite division of the dialogues will not itself become part of the standard Neoplatonic doctrine, the basic notion that dialogues communicate one and the same philosophical content in different modes is one that will endure.Footnote ³⁹

This point about how Plato communicates affords a convenient occasion for clarifying an aspect of textual community that is left vague in Stock, but which needs to be made more precise for our purposes. The founding texts around which such a community is convened must be texts that could be seen as ‘steps, so to speak, by which the individual climbed towards a perfection thought to represent complete understanding and effortless communication with God’.Footnote ⁴⁰ The image is vivid and arresting, but it can and must be more clearly analysed. A text might (i) convey information that is instrumental in achieving understanding of and communication with god. It might, for instance, tell one how to pray or how to perform a ritual to invoke a divine presence. This is information that could be conveyed by another text, so that there is nothing unique about this one. Alternatively (ii) a text might uniquely contain information that is instrumentally valuable for understanding of and communication with god. This uniqueness might be historical: the text is one written by the sole person to whom these insights were granted, perhaps even divinely revealed. Alternatively, the uniqueness might be owed to the manner in which the information is conveyed. In the former case, the uniqueness is not a matter of principle – though one might well prefer to have it right from the horse's mouth, so to speak. The latter basis for uniqueness is harder to grasp. One might suppose that the information is conveyed in such a manner that the form and the content are inseparable, or at least exist in a mutually reinforcing relation that is hard to replicate. In fact, I think we find such a claim made on behalf of the Pythagorean sayings (ὑπομνήματα) by Iamblichus:

Where both the form and content serve to communicate information that is relevant to achieving understanding of and communication with god, the act of interpreting might take on a special significance. Thus we can distinguish (iia) texts of sort (ii) where the act of extracting the hidden meaning itself sanctifies and makes one ready for communion with the divine. This would be a kind of ‘perlocutionary hermeneutics’, where the interpretation of the text does not merely reveal information that is subsequently useful in achieving communion with the divine, but by the interpretative act itself one comes closer to god. Texts of this sort will be mystagogic ones, and it is clear that this is precisely how Proclus regards the texts of Plato. This is very clear from the prayer that opens the great Parmenides Commentary. Proclus asks different blessings from different levels of gods in order that he may ‘receive the inspired guidance of Plato’ and be ‘in intellectual converse with those realities from which alone the eye of the soul is refreshed and nourished’. Syrianus is not merely his teacher, but ‘a true hierophant of these divine doctrines’ (τῶν θείων τούτων λόγων ὄντως ἱεροϕάντης).Footnote ⁴² To have Plato's guidance mediated to you by a qualified teacher is not simply to receive instructions that are useful for achieving salvation and happiness. It is itself a communion with souls who are filled with god (ἔνθεος). Texts that can be seen to be mystagogic in this sense are an ideal foundation for a textual community. Not only is their content such as to facilitate communion with the divine, but the very act of interpreting them is already a step on the path that leads to the divine epiphany. The model is the mystery ceremonies in which rites of initiation and purification culminate in the revelation of the divine manifestation (ϕάσμα).

Merely identifying assimilation to god as an important ethical theme in a dogmatic Platonism is not yet to see Plato's dialogues as mystagogic in the sense just identified. It is, however, to look at the dialogues from an orientation that is conducive to such a conception. Think of the Platonic dialogues as a devilishly complex child's toy. It consists of an irregular solid with holes of different dimensions and different sizes on different faces. Looking through different holes, you see different things. To construct a dogmatic Platonism, you must first make a decision about the right orientation in which to hold the device and the proper hole into which to look. You then select any one of a number of slender tools that come with the game in order to draw the doctrines out of that hole and set them on the table in an orderly fashion.

For much of the latter part of the twentieth century, the developmentalist view suggested that the right hole to look through was the one on the face labelled ‘chronological order of composition’. The chosen tool was one that did very well in extracting arguments, but largely left matters of setting and characterization inside the mysterious box. I submit that, for Neoplatonism, the relevant face of the toy is one labelled ‘assimilation to god’. The preferred tool for extraction is one that favours pieces that can be aligned with ancient wisdom of the sort found in (what the Neoplatonists take to be) Pythagoreanism and the allegorical interpretation of Homer, the Orphic poems, and – in due time – the Chaldean Oracles.

In this orientation the Platonic dialogues can serve as the basis for a textual community. Any text or set of texts that is to serve as the authoritative text for a textual community must, by definition, serve as a means for direct communication with the divine. The Platonic telos envisions the goal of living, and thus happiness, as just some kind of communion or κοινωνία with the divine.Footnote ⁴³ Second, this passage weaves together Plato's text with those of Pythagoras and Homer. If a textual community is to be made up of creative, philosophically inclined minds, then the greater the scope for intertextuality had by its authoritative text, the better for that particular community. Third, the passage identifies several means or modes by which the message of the Platonic telos is communicated. Within Plato's works themselves, the message is communicated physically, ethically, and logically, corresponding to the genres of the dialogues in which it is embedded. Moreover, we have Homer communicating the same message in an enigmatic or hidden way. As we noted, semantically simple texts are not likely to function as the defining text for a textual community. Such communities have leaders whose authority is grounded in their particularly acute insight into the meaning of the central text. What can this authority amount to if the text wears its meaning on its sleeve? Platonic polyphony and Homeric allegory provide a rich basis for leadership within the community. When we add to this the sort of numerical allegory of the Pythagoreans (for example, that friendship is 220 and 284), then the semantic ground to be mined for philosophical gold is particularly rich. The person with the right insight can reveal to other members of the community many unexpected things that had been hidden up to that point.

I have argued that it would be useful to understand the notion of Plato's auctoritas in terms of the existence of a textual community centred around Plato's dialogues – and, of course, such other works as may have standing for a Platonist given the Neoplatonists’ understanding of what constitutes Platonism. We know that it is not inevitable that the dialogues compel a textual community. They did not in the Old Academy, nor in the sceptical Academy, and they do not now. It is easy to see why. First, to revert to the image of the toy, the dialogues do not come with a set of hermeneutic instructions: ‘This Side Up’. Second, only on some orientations will the dialogues appear to be principally concerned with the soul's communion (κοινωνία) or assimilation (ὁμοίωσις) with the divine. The Middle Platonic identification of the telos provides exactly such an orientation. It thus forms the basis of Plato's auctoritas, at least in the terms in which I think it is most fruitful to consider that complex phenomenon.