Postcolonial theorists have often examined the ways in which intellectual practices are conditioned by and contribute to imperial systems of knowledge and power. Scholars of late antiquity, for their part, have pointed to the ways in which late-ancient religious and ethnic identities were constructed linguistically and textually. This paper examines the works of three contemporaries—the Neoplatonic philosophers Porphyry of Tyre and Iamblichus of Chalcis and the Christian bishop Eusebius of Caesarea—in order to explore the ways in which ancient linguistic theories and practices served as a kind of border-post in which late-ancient intellectuals constructed and contested imperial subjectivities.

I. Egyptian Fictions: Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Philosophy of Language

In the late third or early fourth century, the philosopher Porphyry sent a letter to an otherwise unknown Anebo, purportedly an Egyptian priest. The letter is an example of the popular genre of erōtapokrisis, or “question-and-solution literature.” Porphyry poses a series of metaphysical and theological zētēmata, “questions,” that anticipate a reply on the part of Anebo that will supply luseis, “solutions.” Although “Anebo” did not respond to Porphyry, his letter was answered by Anebo's teacher, “Abamon,” in the form of a long treatise that has come to be known by the title On the Mysteries of Egypt (Myst. I.1–2).Footnote ¹ The fifth-century Neoplatonist Proclus easily recognized that “Abamon” was really none other than Porphyry's former pupil and present disputant, Iamblichus. In Porphyry's letter and “Abamon's” reply, then, we have a polemical exchange between two scions of Greek philosophy written in the form of an elaborate epistolary fiction that was as transparent to their contemporaries as it is to modern scholars. How are we to understand the odd ethnic play in these texts?

Porphyry's letter and Iamblichus's response mark a critical debate in late-ancient Platonism over the value of theurgy. As practiced by Iamblichus and others, theurgy consisted of ritual incantations and other practices held to purify the philosopher's soul and assist its ascent from the realm of matter and becoming to the realm of Intellect and Being. Porphyry objected to theurgy for a number of reasons: it seems to presume that the gods are passible and subject to human cajoling; ritual offerings suggest that the gods experience sense-perception; and theurgical divination smacks of the laughable excesses of the devotees of Cybele or Magna Mater (Myst. I.11.37.4–5; 15.48.11–12; III.9.117.10–12, 118.1–2).

One of Porphyry's objections concerns late-ancient philosophy of language. First, Porphyry questions the use of “meaningless names” (sequences of nonsense syllables) in the ritual invocations that theurgists practiced (Myst. VII.4.254.11–12). Iamblichus answers that “meaningless” names do not signify conceptions in the human intellect, but are rather “united” with the gods non-discursively (Myst. VII.4.255.13–256.2).Footnote ² Next Porphyry asks, “why, of meaningful names, do we prefer the barbarian to our own?” (Myst. VII.4.256.3–4). Why should Greeks use Egyptian, Persian, or other non-Greek names when invoking divine beings rather than “Hellenizations” of those names—why should a Greek invoke “Thoth” rather than “Hermes”? Iamblichus responds that certain barbarian languages use names that are better fitted to the nature of the gods they name. To translate the barbarian names into Greek would be to dilute their imaging of divine essence.

Porphyry's critiques assume a “conventionalist” theory of language, developed from his reading of Aristotle's On Interpretation, which holds that words signify the mental images we form of perceived objects. The relationship between signifier and signified depends only on the agreement of a community of language users.Footnote ³ On this view, words can be translated into another language without losing any of their meaning or power. Thus Porphyry inveighs against the theurgists: they must assume that certain gods understand only Egyptian, while the idea that foreign names possess special power is a flight of fancy (Myst. VII.5.258.1–2;5;8–10). Iamblichus's responses, in contrast, assume a “naturalist” theory of language based on his reading of Plato's Cratylus. According to this theory, different languages use different combinations of sounds, all of which stand as better or worse versions or materializations of putative ideal signifiers.Footnote ⁴ Thus Iamblichus argues that the Hellenes' desire to translate everything into their native tongue contributed to the “decline” of ancient theurgical language and the necessity of its “restoration” by theurgists (Myst. VII.5.259.4–12).

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was common to read Iamblichus and Porphyry as symptomatic of the late-antique miscegenation of classical Greek culture. Late-ancient philosophers' dabbling in irrational barbarian religious and cultural traditions tainted the purity of classical Greek rationality, in this reading.Footnote ⁵ More recently the debate between these two philosophers has been read as an example of “multi-culturalism,” or at least a tempering of Greek chauvinism.Footnote ⁶ Each of these assessments miss a larger point; namely, that the manner in which these philosophers handle the difference between Greek and barbarian reflects the discursive systems of power that condition the imaginative geography we find in these texts. Late-ancient Platonists inhabited a system of knowledge and power that situated the philosopher/philologist as an active knowing subject and Egypt and the barbarian (or the Orient and the Oriental) as the passive object of scholarly analysis and academic production. Edward Said's description of nineteenth century Orientalist philology is apt: “what was the philologist on the other hand if not … a harsh divider of men into superior and inferior races, a liberal critic whose work harbored the most esoteric notions of temporality, origins, development, relationship, and human worth?”Footnote ⁷

Iamblichus's “naturalist” theory of language claims for theurgists a privileged heuristic and hermeneutic position in relation to all linguistic expression. “Meaningless” names bear value not as embodied sounds but as terms of ontological connectedness to transcendent universals. To speak this most potent, authentic type of language is to occupy a privileged subject position that lies outside the parameters of anything one would normally consider linguistic or semantic; it thus transcends ethno-cultural particularity. “Meaningful” ethno-culturally specific phonemes (for example, Egyptian and Persian words), on the other hand, are valorized to the extent they image the essence of transcendent being. Iamblichus claims the power to mine these native languages for elements of the ancient, sacred language. It is not Egyptian or Persian language as Persian or Egyptian that Iamblichus values, but putatively ancient phonemes that have been removed from their ethno-cultural and syntactic contexts and situated within the theurgist's incantations.

Insofar as it offers a theoretical basis for universal translation, Porphyry's “conventionalist” theory of language is also a powerful tool for extracting and constructing ethnological knowledge. The possibility of secure translation is, after all, an implicit theoretical basis for the Letter to Anebo; Porphyry can pose Greek philosophical questions in Greek to his putatively Egyptian addressee about Egyptian theology and, in turn, expect an intelligible response in Greek, because foreign, Egyptian signifiers must be unproblematically translatable.

We are now in a better position to reconsider the “why” of this correspondence. Why do these two philosophers conduct this elaborate Egyptian pantomime? What does it mean for the Letter to Anebo and On the Mysteries to be about Egypt? The place in which Iamblichus and Porphyry interact with Egypt is emphatically not Egypt. At least it is not any Egypt that Porphyry or Iamblichus could have visited in 300 c.e. “Abamon” and “Anebo” help Porphyry and Iamblichus conjure an imagined Egyptian past. This epistolary fiction creates temporal and spatial distance between an esoteric, venerable Egyptian past and any contemporary, embodied Egyptian reality. As Porphyry and Iamblichus each establish a privileged position in relation to Egyptian traditions that are putatively ancient and foreign, these rivals are also competing for dominance and prestige within late-third and early fourth-century Platonism.

There are homologies here between the practices of empire and the practices of philosophy.Footnote ⁸ The periphery is a source of raw materials for imperial production—and these Greek philosophers mill the raw material of Egyptian tradition into usable philosophical products much as the grain of Egypt was milled to feed Rome, and later, Constantinople. The provinces are also convenient theatres of war. Much as the great battles that led to the foundation of the Roman Empire were fought far from Rome and often with Egyptian proxies, Porphyry and Iamblichus fought a key battle of late-ancient Platonism in an imagined Egyptian territory and with imagined Egyptian surrogates.

II. Eusebius: The Library as Imperial Border-Post and Marketplace

The same discourses of (imperial) knowledge and power at work in Porphyry's debate with Iamblichus also conditioned early Christian intellectual production. In the beginning of his Gospel Preparation, Eusebius considers the questions that may be put to the Christians: “In all likelihood someone may raise the aporia: who are we who propose to take up the pen, that is, are we Greeks or Barbarians, or what might there be between these?” Christians might be said to “cut out for themselves a new, trackless desert path, that keeps neither the ways of the Greeks nor of the Jews” (PE 1.2.1–4).Footnote ⁹ Christianity is an ethnological quandary that demands resolution and clarification. Eusebius exploits this limbo between Hellenism and Barbarism, Jew and Greek. According to the Preparation, Christianity is precisely what others might fear—a people identified by the explicit rejection and erasure of ancestral identities.

To carve out this imagined territory between Hellenism and Judaism, Eusebius sets up a synkrisis, or formal rhetorical comparison, of Hebrew theology with that of the Greeks and other gentiles (PE 7.11.13). But Eusebius faces a conundrum—Hebrew theology is found in Jewish books. Eusebius solves this problem by making his Hebrews reside in a territory between Jew and Gentile (PE 7.8.20). Hebrewness (and Christianity) is defined by adherence to a timeless, universal, transcendent theology, in contrast to the embodied, parochial customs of Jews and other ethnē.Footnote ¹⁰ As I have suggested elsewhere, this simultaneous affirmation and denial of ethnicity is a site of productive ambivalence in which Eusebius constructs Christianity as an ethnos descended from the Hebrews and understands membership in that group as the transcendence of ethnicity and embodiment.Footnote ¹¹ The category “Hebrew” creates a tear in the ethnological fabric, exposing a gap between the warp of Judaism and the woof of Hellenism—a gap within which Eusebius can assemble Christianity.

Eusebius's construction of Christianity requires a physical space as well—the locus of readability and interpretability constituted by written language. In being written, theologies become readable, making it possible to remove them from their ethno-cultural contexts and place them in the arena of rhetorical comparison, synkrisis. Thus the Caesarean library lies like a tantalizing palimpsest behind the whole of Eusebius's work. Though he does not discuss the history or role of his library explicitly in the Preparation, he does reflect on another—the library of Alexandria. He provides extensive quotations from the Letter of Aristeas, well-known to Eusebius and to modern scholars for its account of the origin of the Septuagint. Eusebius prefaces these selections with his own brief account: God, foreknowing the ascendancy of the Romans and the role their empire would play in making possible the transmission of Christianity to all peoples, prompted Ptolemy to commission Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible for “public libraries” (PE 8.1.6–8). The Ptolemaic library figures as the place in which traditions become readable through translation into an imperial koinē (Greek), and in turn, in which theologies become available for circulation and comparison. The universal (oikumenikos) library and the empire (oikumenē) are homologous; the Ptolemaic library (like Eusebius's own) is a collection of different nations' books, much as the empire is constituted by diverse peoples. The library is a marketplace where Eusebius can acquire the textual raw materials that serve as fodder for the mill of his own intellectual productions. The library is also a border-post where Eusebius can orchestrate the intertextual migrations and incursions that constitute texts such as the Gospel Preparation and the Ecclesiastical History.