 We're joined again by Dr. George Boy stones George. Welcome. Thank you for joining us once again. Thank you for having me, but the last time we talked We really went through the development of stoic allegorical and Exegetical means as a way of retrieving ancient wisdom in this segment I wanted to talk about how the middle and later neoplatonist took these methods and applied them not only to ancient wisdom but also to reinforce the primacy of Plato himself you point out in your book Post-Hellenistic philosophy that the Platonist added a single premise that made all the difference in the world that the ancient wisdom had been Reconstructed in its entirety by Plato. Tell us a little bit about how stoic exegesis was absorbed by platonic thought as I was saying last time We talked about how the stoics about the thought that you can reconstruct the wisdom of the earliest people which has a certain privilege status through Fragments above the Greek mythological tradition, but then other mythological traditions too by some process and comparative mythology I wanted to apply that to In my mind the mystery of how it is that just around that period you suddenly get people who are talking about Plato as being a Figure of tremendous authority in philosophy Someone whose thought is to be not not just engaged with he's always been taken seriously But someone who you can sort of assume has got it right and I want to see whether we could put those two things together And my thought was well What if it's the case that they think that Plato has that the place is special place in the history of philosophy kind of comes from The fact that he already knew that this was the case that you could reconstruct this privileged philosophy from study of ancient Swiss done traditions and that in fact what his philosophy is is an expression of a Program of reconstruction that he successfully achieved and I must have been encouraged in that thought by the fact that you get a lot of Biographies of Plato at this time that have him travel around all over the place to to meet the sages of Traditions around the world and not just Greece not just Egypt people have been saying is From that, you know from his own day people talk about him going to Egypt But also to India and to Persia and All over the place. So why are they saying that well? Maybe they're saying that because they want to explain how it is that that he comes to Occupied this position of authority for them that he's successfully Reconstructed the ancient wisdom. So Platonists take I think that's a theory that they have and they take they take on those methods themselves So you get examples of Platonists engaging in the exegesis of mythology this way themselves and So for example talks about myth of either Pisces and Osiris at some legs and Zoroastres, Reykino and other things too And I take it that they're doing that then to sort of try and prove the point that if you can show that This platonic wisdom is there within These ancient myths from other traditions that sort of proves that that's where Plato got up from in the first Space which shawls up the idea that he has some sort of special authority that was my thinking about move from the Stoic sonority to the Establishment of this whole new movement ready, which is based in this book. It's very interesting that in this early 1st century Period onward Plato in a sense gets For lack of a better term canonized even right like Thracilus is canonizing Plato for the first time And then you have these groups kind of springing up Maybe having less to do with Plato's immediate successors who are very skeptic strangely enough about everything I know you touched upon a few of them But I didn't know if you could go through some of the thinkers who are pioneering this way of Looking at that the myths and lore this time one of the problems that we have with with Platonism is that we don't Know who the pioneers were so so Thracilus you've given Pretty good early example of someone who clearly is thinking about pleasure in this way But we know about him because he establishes he arranges the dialogues in The order that we used today advanced or so great sort of reference for the canon I think it was established that just was an honor just wasn't put them in order So on so in terms of people who are thinking about the the use of allegory We can only really talk about we can't talk about who pine is this but we can talk about Conspicuous examples, and they would be people like Pluto is one of the most surviving Platonist period He's got a whole work on the myth of Isis and Osiris how one might interpret it which goes through a series of interpretations But then shows in the end how the Platonist interpretation is the best the one that explains most about it So does that sort of job? I think I'm right in saying by the way that's the earliest Full account of an Egyptian myth that we have But he's also very keen on as I say on Zoroastra He likes the dualism of Zoroastrians He has things to say not in surviving words We've got some very intriguing fragments about some Greek ritual traditions which talk about explicitly talk about the first people the old talk than us first people and Their views about God and how they're preserved through these traditions So he's clearly taking that sort of way of thinking from the stove figures We talked about for that qualities incurring someone else who weaponizes this really interestingly is a guy called Kelsus We don't know anything about him except that he wrote a big long attack very well-informed very early attack on Christianity Which in the third century the Christian origin gives an even bigger longer reply to Thanks to which we know what Kelsus was saying But one of the things that Kelsus is a little bit obsessed with actually is the fact that the Christians And the Jews but even more so than the Christians just fall outside the kind of range of ancient authoritative Wisdom traditions and that's one of the problems with them that they sperm The Greek tradition and the Egyptian tradition and their own but their own is really a sort of corrupt version of this so that whole way of thinking about Getting back to ancient wisdom becomes a polemical weapon Art in the hands of Kelsus. So he's very he's very key on that and then there are some fragments here and there Numenius who's self-described as a Pythagorean but really thinks what any Platonist thinks is quite interested in the exegesis traditions There's a very funny fragment relating to him where he's supposed to have had a dream one day where the goddess is appear to him naked and he says this is Not decent what he do and they say well, this is what you've done to us You've gone and through explaining what those sort of mysteries of the alicinium brights are and plant all these allegorical accounts of a divinity in the tradition and you've stripped us naked. This is what you've done So he clearly we don't have a lot of it, but he clearly was very interested in in Getting back to primitive truth through a theory of understanding of the traditions to so there's a lot of it about I think in method is quite interesting. I mean it's really Really interesting to read but it's doing more Disturbing stories set set us up to do is a lot Platonism just seems to be this very malleable force that is very permeable to new ideas and taking those ends and in a sense It's it's kind of like early Christianity in that regard. It's very interesting You were mentioning just now about it was not only Plato, but like you also see these figures like Orpheus and Pythagoras as well people are constantly Appealing to these figures who were further and further back in time for authority I was talking to a scholar named Dylan Burns who has this book about Scythian Gnosticism and the Scythian Gnostics at Porphyry's Lectures and his book two of the inniates against the Gnostics and how These Scythians were using this very polemical weapon like you were saying of Appealing to this ancient wisdom, but they were doing it in the exact opposite of how a proper Platonist would do it with Saying Plato was the benchmark for this like for them who Plato wasn't the benchmark he was figures like Zostrianos Zoroaster all these all these Pre-flood figures very very interesting. It shows you that it can be used to Prop up status quo or be a counter cultural kind of current That's what I wanted to talk about just for a moment just these when they're reconstructing this primordial wisdom Like I said, they're appealing not only to how Plato did it, but they're also appealing to figures like Orpheus and Pythagoras So I didn't know if you could just talk a little bit more about this This is something else which really struck me when I was thinking about this originate Which is that I think traditionally people have thought well somehow or other platonists just have this kind of so quasi religious Attachment to Plato and that's why they take him to be authoritative but one of the really interesting things about The attitude towards Plato's authority is that although they take it to be Absolute or at least they treat it as if it is absolute It is not exclusive. So they're very happy to say that Pythagoras has equal authority with Plato And indeed there are Pythagoras. I just mentioned Numenius who and all of his work is Referencing Plato is exegesis of Plato is is I mean he's indistinguishable from a platonist But he clearly thinks of himself as a Pythagorean and everyone else calls him a Pythagorean too So in a way, you know what you call yourself It's not about the individual figure and Plato is not the only person who's done this and You know, why would he be the clearly they think it's a it's a some cultural movement where people recognize the value of Of mythologies and Plato the thing about Plato is that he is the one guy who wrote all this stuff out pretty clearly So however hard you find to interpret the platonic tachylox, at least we have them, right? So Plato is is the best access we have to that generation or that there's sort of era of of Mythological people are thinking with the mythologies. I think that's how it works Plato isn't exclusively authoritative, but he's he's uniquely clear in the way he he transmits the system But absolutely Pythagoras everyone would agree is on the same page and the list really expands I mentioned Kelsus earlier here one what gives a big list of people that he thinks counts as authoritative and all sorts of people I said Orpheus who as far as kind of modern historians are concerned is is pretty much a mythological figure, but he there is a Corpus of hymns that are ascribed to him and they come from a Pythagorean Platonist milieu And so there's a sort of neo-Orpheus around this period too. So they look back to Orpheus other early poets as well Linus Mousseus and of course, you know the big figures in in other traditionsites are Aster as you say In a way one of the most interesting things here is that Homer comes back into the picture So so far we've had Homer as a conduit for earlier thought But now now we've got this idea that there's this sort of These generations of earlier Greeks who themselves were reconstructing ancient thought there are people who think That Homer is one of them. So after all now for the first time Actually, we get people who think that Homer is systematically readable as deliberate philosophy Because Homer like Plato has reconstructed the ancient philosophy Only Homer has himself decided to pass on allegorically as well Now this is the period where you start to get people who write whole works on Homer as if Homer's an authoritative figure But they're all saying the same thing. I mean that that's not a contradiction because You know more than one person can be right at once. And in fact for Platonist the sort of glory of the era that This obviously idealizing in a hopelessly extreme way But but they sort of think of the era as one where really people didn't disagree very much because they were very anchored in this In this ancient tradition. But as I say, Platonism leads the charge just because Plato I'm gonna say Plato says what he thinks I mean the one the frustrations people have with Plato is He doesn't really because he puts all in the mouth of Socrates and you have these dialogues and all that's very complicated But it's a hell of a lot clearer than anything we have from anyone else as the point so we can do something with Plato The whole thing I find ironic about if you're reading something like the phaedrus What Plato ultimately says, you know, you can't if you write something down That's not how you obtain knowledge old kids First generation of successors are all skeptics Skeptical of knowing anything at all right Plato himself is writing with these dramatic voices Almost polyphonic voice, right? It's interesting that people would see him as Writing down the ultimate wisdom, but you're right. The dialogues are just by very fact Like we were saying earlier that you have a canon You know Plato has that primacy and it also ties into right to what Dylan called the the platonic underworld You have all these other things going into it too We're just mentioning the orphic revival with the orphic hymns caldean oracles. Well, maybe not as important to Somebody like platinus. It becomes extremely important to later neoplatonic thinkers like yamblichus and people after him It's one of the reasons that the people start to Talk about why people have done philosophy and an allegory in the first place Talks this a lot actually, which is that it's somehow you're starting to address issues which Can't be said in normal language I mean very difficult concept concepts, which you need to grasp intuitively and be led to rather than than than have explained to you And I think that's why poetry has a role in this and allegory has a role in this and and that Aracula fork has a role in this and so your your observation our place was really helpful there But it's not a place. So in fact is able to say all of this super clearly, but it's just more clear than it he's found this kind of clever way of Both telling you and some problem making you think about it at the same time So he's some clearer But no one can say I really clearly so you get all these different ways of experimenting with trying to lead the reason towards it I make a lot of music analogies music is like my second love like when people think of golf They think of a band like the cure because the cure has this massive catalog of stuff But really it was created by these bands that are maybe around for three or four years like bowhouse Maybe leave three or four records out there. You know people are creating a canon They're looking back on maybe a romanticized idealized time that didn't necessarily exist I feel this next question is kind of important for Definition of terms So I didn't know if you could tell us what the argument from disagreement is You've mentioned that Plato's successors went skeptical, which is right. So What happens between Plato and the period we're talking about now first thing in satiety, let's say Is you get a kind of explosion of debate after Plato after Aristotle Again, this is a slightly idealizing history because actually if you if you You know do the spot can go back There are a lot of schools and debates going on in the fourth century Third century in the context of Plato in the context of Aristotle there's a lot going But most of it doesn't survive. Most of these schools kind of fizzle out So from a from a later perspective, you can kind of round up a bit and say basically You've got Plato. You've got Aristotle and then you have in the Hellenistic period this kind of explosion of major schools that have real traction and Subscribership and they they're the major debates. You've got Stoicism and Bureaucureanism and you've got Aristotelianism in the mix somewhere All these new theories But what Plato's school does that was the academy is still surviving as a school the school that Plato found it But what they do is they sort of step back at this point and say well, hold on a minute We've got all these people who have very very different views about the world and you know We could do Plato and have yet another view but actually What's our criterion now? How do we how do we judge between these different views? And so Plato's school becomes quite interested in both some epistemological issues about how you can Tubes, how you can know anything is actually and and they Push the line that you can't And there are lots of ways in which they do that. It's a very interesting topic in its own right but one of the you know, some simple foundational arguments that the Skeptics have is the very fact that people who have views disagree with other people who have views That no one can agree on anything and there doesn't seem to be a way of deciding between And this debate is intractable. So, you know, you've got three centuries of Stokes banging heads with Epicureans and they don't get them for work So, um, what even if you yourself So think well, Stoicism kind of seems right to me You've got to take into account the fact that there are as many people who think Exactly to say about Epicureanism. So that needs to do some question your own intuition is maybe So the argument from disagreement is essentially An argument that challenges any dogmatist to give a reason why we should leave them All of their opponents and so long as people disagreeing there's probably a reason to disagree and we probably shouldn't choose And and my thought is that well, I think you can sort of see this in in movements towards the What what we now think of as the end of the Hellenistic period is the first century You see you can see that a sort of stalemate has started to Uh settle in at this point. So none of the old debates getting resolved. There are there are new Moves tried, but you know, nothing's really going anywhere and I think it's sort of one of the philosophical Challenges of the day is to find a new way forward. How do you answer the? argument from disagreement and you see different people try different things So there's a someone who's attracted lots of interest in recent decades called Antiochus of Ascalon who was Maybe the last head of places academy. In fact, he he sort of steps back from this and says well You know, we've been going on about how much debate there is between everyone But is there really that much debate? Is there really that much debate about the essential things? So he tries a move where he says that that the amount of debate has been exaggerated They're the skeptics and he comes up with a philosophical system that shows how A lot of these people really agree much more than they say they're agreeing So that's one way I think you can see people really grappling with that challenge But the reason I think it is relevant to the maintenance question is because I think that Another part of the story of why you get Platonism in the sense of a movement that takes Plato as an authority figure Is that that I see them as trying to make their own Innovative move against that argument That if you could establish somehow that that any particular figure has authority If you could find some sort of non philosophical argument for that Then of course you'd have a reason to At least provisionally align yourself with them So the suggestion I made is that one of the motivating factors for Platonism is Well, two thoughts really one is If you can't identify anyone who has some Sort of a priori reason you have some a priori reason for believing then let's be skeptics Right, but then the second thing is there are actually the maybe reasons Ahead of time as it were to think that Plato has some special status in all of this and the reason is to do With what I was just characterizing as that slightly idealizing view of the history of philosophy where everyone was agreeing before the Hellenistic period started And I think that the thought they have is that you can sort of trace the history of disagreement Back to Plato Plato has a kind of point of departure And that you can you can do a sort of historical etiology of disagreement In terms of the way in which people sort of go in opposite directions away from Plato and then they start arguing with each other But that gives you some hope that maybe Plato was right in the first place Because if you disagree with him, you never find a position that other people are happy with So you go from this historical position where not true But let's say everyone everyone agrees with Plato to a historical position where everyone who disagrees with Plato disagree with each other as well So no one disagrees with Plato and doesn't also disagree with other people who disagree with Plato So that's a it's a slightly weird argument, but it's at least a way of saying Here's a reason to take Plato serious And then you add that to some historical hypothesis that I was talking about before That Plato has traveled widely thought widely Engaged with these ancient traditions and that gives you an explanation for how it might have been historically speaking the place It would have had a system that was so robust So we've got an explanation for how Plato comes to have a good system We've got an explanation for why things go to pot after Plato and all of this I think presents a reason for taking Plato very seriously and either You just admit that the skeptics arise and give up or you take Plato very seriously and that's my view of what Platonism possibly Kind of is and then the more you study Plato the more you realize that you were right, of course I mean the results have to justify that but it's a good working hypothesis That's where I think Plato is coming. Platonism is coming from my final two questions Are going to harken back to my actually my very first episode on ancient barbarian wisdom And we did touch upon this a bit already with figures like orpheus Pythagoras things like that I didn't know if you could kind of talk a little bit about what ancient barbarian wisdom is for those who are perhaps unfamiliar With the concept the emphasis on the barbarian isn't so important in my few things But the the the ancient is so the thought is that for various reasons you think That a lot of the problems that we have a lot of the icons that we have a lot of the misunderstandings We have come from centuries of of prejudice also of technological intervention in our lives. So we we Have become very used to messing with nature building our own environments and so on and so on and so we that removes us from a kind of natural relationship with the world and and is is that sort of technological intervention is part of of our own mental corruption in a certain way the thought is that if you could know what it was like to be a thinking Human being before all of that stuff when when humans lived in a more natural relationship with nature you'd have a really interesting insight into Ethics but also physics the way the world works the way parts of world work together in The sort of harmony that's not always visible to us now So people become very interested in thinking about what the very earliest human being this Thought and of course there's a premise here that there are such things as the earliest human beings But that's what most people do believe The human beings are created or emerge from the earth at a certain point So it'd be really interesting to know what they thought and the idea is that the one hope we might have of hearing their voices Is by looking at the kernel of the the mythological religious traditions that that we'd inherit it through Originally an oral tradition of course and the the so-called barbarian wisdom becomes interesting here because one of the checks on whether you're finding genuine voices of antiquity within your own traditions Is whether you're hearing those same voices the same kind of perspectives in the traditions of other barbarian non-greek Traditions too and and you go and look at what the Egyptians are saying and what the Celts are saying and what the Persians are saying And what the Indians are saying and so on and so on everywhere you can or the Jews are saying to But some people are very interested in that and then you see where they converge and That's the thought that you can you can use that as a method of It disinterring so the ancient wisdom As a check on all your own philosophical thinking You were talking earlier about how these concepts can be often Weaponized at this point in time and they certainly get weaponized in a couple of figures that I'm going to talk about later So we see these methods used in philo where we're just talking about it moses as this Figure from antiquity. It was a very why to the meaning is that they say it was moses speaking greek Absolutely, we see this taking a detour in the alexandrian jewish milia a philo But then it really gets weaponized in somebody like Cation right? I wanted to know what the repercussions of these platonic developments are for the later christian exegesis Especially in somebody like tation who's really weaponizing this and saying that our wisdom is the penultimate wisdom And everybody else is just borrowing or like a corruption So I didn't know if you could talk about that a little bit So as soon as you have the kind of view that we were just talking about where you're looking to reconstruct The ancient wisdom through these traditions of course What you want to do is to find the traditions that have been least Messed about within the meantime So you want to find the the most conservative traditions and the oldest traditions and that's where the Talk about weaponization, but that's where the polemical edge to this comes to you because if you can say to someone That your tradition is kind of older than theirs Or more conservative than theirs then you have a way of saying that you're kind of culturally better than they are And and this becomes a bit of a debate or or any Before maybe lateness we even start to see this a little bit and and it really reverses the kind of ways in which cultures talk to each other Actually, I mean that there was a point in time where The greeks would say, you know, we're better than the egyptians because we've taken on That there's of early insights mathematics and so on we've developed it is best great Innovative culture and the egyptians are too conservative. They're behind the times, but then suddenly you get this kind of switch Ground the period we're talking about where people say hold on the egyptians are older and more conservative, which means they have a better You know, phone line through to to the voices of the ancients So that's a better thing to be and and in particular there's a debate that that arises between Jewish and egyptian traditions actually about Whether one is derivative of the other. So some people argue that the Judaism is a is some kind of offshoot of Egyptian Our religion other people argue that it's the other way around that Egypt is a sort of Egyptian religion is a kind of offshoot of a corruption of Jewish religions Of course the figures of of moses and joseph to a very important among the bait So it's really interesting and it becomes very heated and that gets carried through so that the debates that christians and platinists Have we talked about kelsus for example a platinist who attacks christianity on the basis that it's a religion That's an offshoot a corruption Of another religion namely Judaism Which itself is in his eyes an offshoot of a corruption of egyptian religion too. So it's a doubly corrupt an utterly worthless and and why so, you know Why would you be christian? It's actually a fairly some central part of his argument and indeed a central part of the response that we get from origin in the third century to the fact kelsus is wrong about this that christians is the Is the pure reception of Judaism which itself is is a is the most ancient and least messed about with tradition that there is So that's the kind of argument that you get it also I mean it has a particular infection in christianity, which is quite interesting as well In fact, I sort of played a sail around and think this is a bit of an argument for my view of platinism in a way, which is that um There's a whole discourse within christianity that grows up from from the second century about heresy As a as a concept heresy versus orthodoxy And I think that you can see in in the people who talk about heresy that they're using exactly the same language That we've been using to talk about the argument from disagreements and the response to it with inflatism Namely you only get heresies where you get people going in some opposite directions away from some original truth And they never agree with each other again So heresies starts with the the notion of It really means faction But you get factions that split off from from some kind of original Truth makes the question, but okay, they think it's the truth But then they never agree with each other again. So that's how we know that heresies are problematic and and probably wrong That they just create disagreeing So I think that's a very important part of the christian reception of the platinist playbook on this So it works at a kind of macro level and a micro level So in within the christian tradition heresies can be branded as as can be sort of proved to be wrong by their innovative Nature their lateness their failure to establish agreement that on the contrary to create disagreement Um, so that's on the micro level but then on the macro level they can start to say well in fact because christianity and The hebrew christian tradition is the most ancient the most pure tradition all these other ones We can think of as being themselves kind of quasi heretical divisions off from it. So Egyptian religion is is a sort of it's kind of a heresy and in a in a big historical perspective it's a division off from Judaism which has created these disagreements and so is greek culture and so you get these Culture wars based on this big argument now about about the genealogy of of these mythological traditions and christian heresy and logical writing is very interesting for that reason because it does Spend a weird amount of time if you don't see this picture I think it spends a weird amount of time aligning the heresies with mistakes that the pagan nations have made A few observations It's very interesting that you were talking about how calces is viewing christianity as an offshoot of an abomination of an offshoot of another older tradition and I think the strange ingenuity of christianity was to ultimately take that and it culminates in somebody like Constantine who effectively invents the concept of christian progress by saying that this hebraic christian tradition is the original way man was before the corruption because Constantine was living in a time where rome has this kind of idea of decline and fall and restoration and renewal But there's no concept of restoration and renewal like with the christian god So constantine has to kind of do what the theologians and the christian philosophers are doing and say No, this is the natural state of how people were before and i'm just restoring it and this is what people like tation are doing maybe in a more polemical sense where they're calling the greek deities demons for lack of a better term This is a very good example. So you're what you're seeing there is an explanation of how you get the greek tradition It's not like and it's a corruption of the the hebra. So there are angels. It's quite true Right, um, but what the greeks Forgot is that there there's a god above them So they start worshiping the angels call them demons now, but we worship those Inignorance and so you've got a whole explanation for how this corruption happened as well as just an assertion which is What interesting just the concept of the heresy illogical writings And the heresiologists themselves what they're doing with tracing these heresies back to founders and Quotum quote teachers is not unlike what deogenes laertes is doing with the philosophical schools, right? heresis, um, I think you can translate heresis as school They're finding the original founder of this school and they're creating a succession just like they're creating their own Counter succession of apostolic authority what they're doing is not any different than what the Platonists and other Philosophical schools have been doing in terms of tracing that succession. It's quite interesting if we kind of get into this in terms of Looking at these heresies as Gnostic or not if you ask any scholar who specializes in these Gnostic and heresiological schools nobody's always going to agree with Labeling these groups Gnostic because even if you put a term Gnostic on top of these groups It obscures the fact that not everybody even in these other So-called divergent groups aren't they're not necessarily always agreeing with each other So like even there you have disagreement in these groups. Well, george. Thank you so much I'm a great scholar. Thank you for having me. You have a wonderful evening. You say thanks very much. Yes. Thank you. Goodbye