 Welcome everyone to a very special episode of We Are Being Transformed. Here at this podcast we explore the liminal spaces and contours of reality, the myriad of ways people interact with their world through the vehicles of ritual, cult, and lore. Our guest this evening is Dr. George Boye-Stones. Dr. Boye-Stones is a professor of classics and philosophy at the University of Toronto. A leading scholar of ancient philosophy, George has a special interest in the philosophical movements of the post-Hellenistic period. George, thank you for joining me tonight. George Boye-Thank you for inviting me to this to be here. George Boye-Absolutely. Pleasure is all mine. I'm a big fan of your work. We're talking about your book, Post-Hellenistic Philosophy. I know this is a text you haven't visited in a while, but I do appreciate you taking the time to talk about the ideas within. I wanted to see if we could get a general overview of the development of Stoic exegesis. This is something that was adopted by Platonism and finally by Christianity. Before we get started, I just want to preface that there is often a misconception that allegorical reading of text started with Christianity in the second and third centuries of the Common Era. But in fact, as you point out in the book, the ancients traced allegorical reading of Homer back to the 6th century BCE. It seems that as soon as Homer and Hesiod's works appeared, they were causing problems, so to speak, and people felt the need to remedy these through allegorical method. And really, you pointed out that the allegorical methodology we're familiar with today springs from Stoic thought translated by a middle and neoplatonic thought. So I didn't know if you could tell us a little bit about this process, how did it differ from, say, the allegorical readers of Homer and Hesiod that came prior? Right, yeah. So I guess Homer was already causing problems to himself in a certain way. I mean, he's conscious of his own symbolic moves. His language of the gods is already doing service for symbolic ways of thinking about nature and human choices and faith and so on. So the process of finding those other levels of meaning in Homer starts with Homer, perhaps. How the tradition develops is a lot to do with the way you think about Homer and also Hesiod, the other great ancient poet, as figures in the intellectual tradition. So one way you might think about them, and I take it this is, I mentioned Theogenes of Regium. He thinks that Homer and Hesiod are more or less the philosophers, the wise men of their day. So he's looking to see how they're thinking about the world. And Theogenes gets some press in certainly later antiquity because he's supposed to be the first person who thinks about Homer's pantheon systematically as a kind of symbolic representation of the physical forces in the world, the element. So when you get battles between the gods, this isn't really about gods fighting each other. It's about the elements exhibiting difference and sometimes opposing forces in the interplay of natural processes. And so this is the basis for what's thought of as an apologetic reading of Homer. Plato characterizes him a kind of anti or a negative theological thinker, someone who thinks about the gods as sometimes malignant forces or contradictory forces. But because it has this symbolic meaning that's rooted in a softball view of the world, it makes it theologically hygienic as it were sound. So he's thought of as sort of the first apologist for Homer. This is before Plato comes along, but he's the answer that's already there when Plato is criticizing Homer. And he thinks that because he thinks of Homer and he sees others being, as I say, the kind of philosophers of their day. So that's one thing you might think about them, and I think we'll see other people who think about it in the course of this conversation. But another thing you might think is that they're not themselves really philosophers that being opposed is a different kind of thing. They're more about entertainment than about thought. So in that case you might think that what's interesting about Homer and he's the odd is that they kind of draw on earlier traditions of storytelling or of thinking about the world. And that in general traditions of mythology and religious ritual as well transmit traditions of force and wisdom. What becomes interesting about Homer is that you might be able to discern through this the earliest written poem that we have, which is why I'm going back to him. But you might be able to discern through that even earlier a ways of thinking about the world. And of course that's quite intriguing. I mean that's in itself historically enticing to think that you might be hearing the voices of very early people, perhaps even the very earliest people. I think what happens a little bit later on through Plato's thinking, through Aristotle's thinking, but then in the stir is that there's a particular view that emerges that earlier people have somehow a kind of purer, more innocent way of thinking about the world. So that knowing what they think isn't only interesting, it's not just intriguing and enticing, but it's actually potentially quite informative that it might actually have something to contribute to a philosophical conversation to think what would it be like to think about these issues before the complications of a technological society, the complexities of political life in between. So there comes to be this interest of looking towards Homer and Hesiod not as themselves thinkers about the world, but as kind of evidence conduits for earlier thinking that we could sort of rescue and somehow use. So one thing to say about early stokes in relation to Homer and Hesiod, this was a sort of revolution in the literature a few decades ago when this started coming to people's notice much more, is that they really don't like Homer and Hesiod. They don't think that Homer and Hesiod are these great, clever, allegorical philosophers. What they think actually is that they're kind of rather stupid poets and they're just doing entertainment. But the exact value of that is that they're passing on without too much intervention of their own. This kind of pure primitive, innocent perspective on the world that you can find at the core of their mythologies. That's fascinating. Thank you for that. Yeah, it's very... I just found it very intriguing that Homer and Hesiod are obviously monoliths unto themselves in terms of transmission history. And I just found it fascinating how the Stoics could see these poets as perhaps sometimes misunderstanding, but nonetheless transmitting some truth that they could get to through this very interesting method which I wanted to ask you about. So what was the process by which Stoics believed they could get this wisdom from an earlier age? So it's a fairly simple set of tools to begin with, I think. The key to it is not so much allegory as people often emphasize, but etymology actually. So what you do is you look at the names that the gods have, the names of the actors in our mythologies. And I think the thinking there is that, well, the process goes like this. You have these people very early on in history, maybe right at the beginning of human history, who have a certain kind of view of the world, which they express a certain kind of way, and then later on the poets come along and they pick up these accounts, but they misunderstand and they misunderstand references to elements of the world as being references to actual people or actors or gods. So the names that the gods have in home, this is the key insight, the names that the heroes have aren't really originally supposed to be the names of people or gods. They're actually references to things in the real world. And they're exactly the things that the poets are least likely to have messed around with. So the poets will embroider new stories around the 12 gods of the Olympian pantheon, for example. They'll tell a new story about Zeus, but they won't mess with the name Zeus. So you've got the name Zeus, so what do you do with that? What do you think about where that name comes from? And there are all sorts of theories about this. It's related somehow to the Greek word for through, and so Zeus is some kind of process through which the world comes to be. It's a standard word for tackling Zeus. Here is an easy one, so Zeus's sister and wife, Hera, is linked. It's very close to the Greek word for air. So Hera is really a reference. So all the stories about Hera originally kind of claims about the way air works or the way air relates to fire or water or whatever it is. So that unpacking of names, thinking about the origin of names is really key. And then once you've done that, you can sort of see how these names relate to each other, how the elements, in this case, are being posited in relation to each other within the stories. And where the stories kind of make sense as physics, once you've translated all the names back into the elements, you can think you've probably got a bit of primitive insight there. And where it doesn't make sense or there's contradictions or something else happens, well that's obviously where the poets have made up some things of their own. So it's quite an interesting, I find this a very fascinating process. I mean, it says not that anyone at any point in this process is deliberately forming allegories, but that a sort of original discourse about the world is being misunderstood into a sort of de facto allegory, which is what we get in Homer. And the trick is to distinguish the bits of Homer that might be misunderstandings of this original thought from the bits that are just poetic addition. That's basically the Leistoric method, I think. Well said. Thank you for that. Yeah, I also wanted to touch upon something that I didn't, I'm not sure if I actually put it in the agenda, but I wanted to add this to the questions. So I know I'm going to ask about the concept of rationality, but I also wanted to ask, so I'm going to cut right here, and then I'm going to start this question. So yeah, it's very fascinating. I didn't know if you could also explain just how the stoic conception of the cyclical conception of the world and the stages and ages of man tie into this and how this knowledge is transmitted. Yeah, that's a really great question because it relates to a sort of prior stage in the story which concerns Aristotle, actually. He has sort of walked on part in the story because Aristotle, so I'm not talking about the Stoics now, but by contrast with him, Aristotle thinks that the world is eternal, so there have always been people. But he has a problem with that, which is if there have always been people, we should know everything by now. We should have done everything by now, and we clearly don't. So what he thinks is that there are periodic stages in world history where there are massive floods, earthquakes, whatever, basically civilization gets destroyed but somehow humanity survives and they happen regularly but fairly infrequently. So what Aristotle thinks is that kind of towards the end of those historical cycles, you have people who are very sophisticated, who really are close to understanding everything. In fact, Aristotle himself says that he thinks he's there. He thinks he's really within a generation knowing everything, which is Aristotle for you. But anyway, this is how these cycles work. But one of the things that happens at these sort of periodic turns is that the people who survive, who tend to be the people living up on mountains out of harm's way, so Shepards are not necessarily the most educated people. Nevertheless, they picked up some things. And so what you get is fragments of the knowledge that was accumulated in the previous cycle, surviving over that process into the sort of folklore and sayings of people in general in the current cycle. So Aristotle, he doesn't do very much with this but he does occasionally say, this is why we talk about the stars as gods, for example, because this is a sort of folk memory, if you like, of the philosophy of the previous cycle. And he says, we don't have evidence of his doing this, but he says if you go around looking at popular sayings, you can find these fragments lying around. So that's very relevant to Aristotle's relationship to this idea about going back to a previous historical phase to find insights. The stakes also believe in cycles. But unfortunately, their cycles destroy the entire world, so nothing survives in terms of human invention or discovery. So for the Stoics, people sometimes conflate these two things, but it really has to be very different because, as I say, nothing survives. Everything starts again. So what the Stoics think is that the world is finite in duration but repeating. And this seems to be linked to the idea that if God's going to make the perfect world, he needs to know how it ends as it were. So you can't make a perfect, infinite world. So you make the same world over and over again. That's kind of how it works here. So the world doesn't ever get very, very old. And every single time the same things happen. And what happens is that humans are somehow born from the earth. They don't know how that happens, but there's very clearly a first generation of human beings. And they're born without any knowledge of anything that's happened before. So it all has to start again. So actually what the Stoics think is important about getting back to the early people is not that they have any kind of memory, folk memory, whatever kind of memory of anything that went before, but it's exactly the fact that anything that they said, they've said without, as it were, the possibility of error. They haven't had time to make mistakes yet. So they have this very fresh, very innocent view of the world. And that's exactly why they're interested, precisely because you don't have that continuity. That's fascinating. Yeah, thank you for that distinction. Just getting back to the methodology and exegesis of the Stoics, how does the Stoic conception of rationality tie into this method? Right, so it's very important that the Stoics, again, to make another contrast with Plato this time. Plato, if you know anything about Plato, you might know that he has this very rich theory of rationality which connects with the forms. And all knowledge is a recollection of some previous state where you experience these things. The Stoics, by contrast, have empiricists, which means that all of the stuff going on in our heads comes from our experience of the world. We don't bring anything into the world with us. There's no forms, there's no recollection of any sort. We come into the world as blankslates. They've invented that method for which it's taken up later. So everything we think about the world comes from the experiences that we have of it. And the reason that's relevant here is because, well, for us now, our experience as children includes all of the stuff that our parents tell us, include all of the stuff that the society around us feeds us in terms of values and theories and orthodoxies and so on. So it's very hard for us in this age to trust our own intuitions as a matter of fact because we've fed so much stuff, some of which must be wrong for various reasons. So the thought is that if you have this kind of theory of mind but you have generations of people so early that there is no societal civilisation, accumulation of orthodoxies that prejudice the question, they will just get a really sort of simple but really clear and accurate perspective on the world. That matters particularly for ethics, for example. So if one thing that they're very keen on is where you place value in ethical terms and they think that a large part of our problem is that we're brought up nowadays in societies that put a lot of weight on reputation and prestige and money and good looks and all that sort of stuff. The first people wouldn't have had that because they wouldn't have had anyone telling them that. They just have a sense of their place in nature and that's really what the Stokes want to get back to in their ethics too. So it's that very pure relationship with nature that the Stokes are positing in their theory of mind that is relevant in their ethics. Thank you for that amazing answer. I appreciate it. So when we get to the figures themselves who are practising this Stoic exegesis allegory etymology, there are two figures who really stand out for me. And the first one is absolutely paradigm shifting in this type of thought. That would be, of course, Posidonius. So I didn't know if you could tell us a little bit about Posidonius and his methods. Sure. So Posidonius was born around, I think, 135 BC and lived and worked on the island of Rhodes. So he's about 150 years into the history of the Stoic school and he's a sort of revolutionary figure, a bit of a sea change. He's very, very interested in history. He's quite influential on the practice of history. He's also very influential on science. They're major preoccupations. We don't have any of his works as with all of these people we've lost, everything they've written really. But his influence is massive and we can see that through other people. Now he's not actually, one of the things he isn't interested in is allegory or poetry very much, in fact. But he's very relevant for the story because one of the radical things he does is to challenge the view of the soul and the mind that we've just been talking about. That in many ways has been quite not only characteristic but almost definitional of Stoicism up to his point. In fact, it remains very controversial what he actually thought about this because it seems so radical. But it basically goes like this. The early Stoics think that human decision making is almost entirely, is entirely rational really. It's about, it's entirely about what you believe. So your rationality dominates, leads the whole of your relationship with the world and life. And that means that emotional surges, passions, all of those things are real of course, but they come out of your beliefs. Your emotions are really manifestations of your beliefs. You know, you get angry because you believe someone has threatened you. But that's a belief really. So anger is, even something like anger is a belief. Now that's important because when we talk about this sort of pure, unsullied view that the early Stoics think, sorry, yes, the early Stoics think that early human beings had. Part of that purity is that their perspective on the world isn't distorted by sort of free-floating emotions. They're not emotionally driven. They're driven by their sort of understanding of the world. Cosodonius thinks that's just not true, basically. He's very influenced by Plato and Aristotle. He doesn't revert to them entirely, but he thinks that the Stoics have sort of thrown the baby up with the bathwater a bit with them. And both Plato and Aristotle think that a lot of our actions and decisions have to be explained by entirely independent movements of emotion, passion. Even sometimes contrary to the things we believe. And that's a lot of the issue with human psychology. And Cosodonius, as I say, it's a little bit unclear and controversial how he shoe-horns this back into a Stoic system, but he clearly thinks that actually the emotions, the passions do have powerful, independent existence in our lives and sometimes oppose what we believe. Now, why is that relevant? The reason that's relevant is because if you now think about how early people operated, if you now think about them popping out of the Earth or however it is they come to be, but the first generation of humans, not, of course, being evolved. I mean, that's not on the table, but they're actually, they emerge as human beings in a generation. But they're driven by emotions, anger, selfishness, greed, whatever. How are you going to get them, you know, how are they going to survive? How are they not going to just fall into battle with each other immediately? How are we going to get these creatures surviving and living in communities? And this is something Posidonius worries about. He actually clearly did write about this and we have fairly good evidence of what he thought from a later discussion of this topic in Seneca. And what he thinks is that given these emotions you have to have something counterbalancing that in the rational part of the mind. So he thinks, and in a way this is the most extraordinary part of his theory here, he thinks that among early human beings they have to have been quite sophisticated, reflective, explicit philosophers because you need to have that kind of explicit, reflective understanding of the world in order to keep your emotions in check. And if there hadn't been actual philosophy, proper sort of theoretical, scientific understanding of the world in the community there wouldn't have been a community. There wouldn't have been people capable of bringing people together and seeing the bigger picture. So Seneca has this extraordinary view that the very first generations of human beings were already philosophically sophisticated. So it's not just innocent appreciation of the world, it's a positively philosophical understanding of it that he brings into the picture. Now he doesn't go anywhere with that, but you can see that if that's the case, and this is why you talk about this as a sort of paradigm shift, but I think this is why it might be, because if that's the case then if it's also the case that you can somehow hear the voice of these early people then you're not just hearing the voice of innocence, you're hearing the voice of innocence plus some sort of technical theory, some sort of technical understanding of the world and that would be super interesting to know about. Yeah, that's fascinating. So you're not just hearing the voices of these auto-cathons who are just like innocent and living along with the good, I mean you're actually hearing the voices of the philosophers and the kings and things like that very interesting. And just to say it, so one way of cashing that out is that the early Stoics really only seem to have thought that there is ethics that you get from the early people, but I think possibly this is quite explicit that they have physics too, they have the whole gamut of philosophy going on there. Right, doesn't he also believe that they also have architecture, things like these, maybe not architecture, but what am I saying, they know how to do the arts and things like that, am I getting that correct? I know right, so one question is if civilization is so bad for us in the end, why does it happen? So why do people start becoming uncomfortable with what nature provides and the early Stoics don't have a great answer for that. They just think it comes about and then it's bad for us and then we all suffer from the consequences of the unnatural ease that we live in nowadays and then we just want more and more and it's all very disruptive. And actually one of Posadena's arguments for his way of cutting things is that if you have people who are technologically reflective at a very early period and they need to be because they have a technological job of work to do with our own social interactions, then whether the seeds of civilization are already the history of civilization is already seeded in that. So there's this constant dialectic history of humanity between our pool to greed and our ability to constrain it and that manifests itself in the development of civilizations too. I love that. I would love to have Posadena in the 21st century for just one day to hear his reflections on. Yeah, I know. Love him. So we're going to move on to another figure who's I believe just as important in the development of the Stoic method that of Cornutus. So Cornutus inherits from Posadena a similar allegorical methodology of reading the text, you know, the allegory, the etymology, all of these things. So he, him, and other Stoics, like Caramon, seem to have this in common. So is it safe to say that these are common coigne, so to speak, of the time among the Stoa? Tell us more about Cornutus. Tell us more about where this method is at this time with Caramon, Cornutus, these Stoic figures. Yeah, so as I say, Posadena himself doesn't show any signs in our evidence for him anyway of having done, applied his thinking to the reading of Homer or to have seen through implications of this for the ex-Juice-Galagorical method. But Cornutus and Caramon are the two, kind of the first people we do see Posadena's implications being worked through with. They're both, they're really, they do seem to be key figures. So later on, in the third century, Porphyry has a list of people he thinks of as the great ex-Juice of the traditions and Porphyry's a Platonist. He lists only Platonists except the first two people on his list are Cornutus and Caramon, who are Stoics. So it looks like they do, they are certainly thought of as being quite carvalry in history. So, I mean, I've got more to say about Cornutus in a way because we have much more information about him. Caramon's super interesting because he was an Egyptian priest, so he gets very interested in Egyptian traditions in particular. But Cornutus, so he's really a fascinating figure. He's a North African, probably a Carthaginian, occupies the sort of middle of the first century AD, probably in 2010 and 20. And he goes to Rome. He's moving in very elevated circles there. He's an absolute polymath. He is at least trilingual. So he must have, I think spoken Carthaginian and Latin and Greek. He writes about Latin language very interestingly. He's the first person, pretty much the first person I think who writes a commentary on Virgil. So he's very interested in poetry. He teaches Perseus and Lucan, so he's very interested in poetry, which is relevant here, of course. But he's also very engaged in technical Greek philosophy. He has contributions to logic and so on and so on. But the work that we have that survives and he was best known for in antiquity, too, is called the Greek theology. And basically he gives us a rationalising, allegorising account of the Greek theological tradition. We're a bit listy in a way, so it's not the greatest re-sort of, except that every bit of it is just fascinating. And the most fascinating thing is to see how he's working to get to the kind of theories that he has. And you're right. I think Cornutus clearly, sort of more explicitly than anything we know of Kyrimon, is developing a Posidonian anthropology. So he says that the first human beings were philosophers, just as Posidonius says. So he's aligning himself with Posidonius against the earlier Stokes and saying that. But he also says, he says something like, they were inclined to express themselves allegorically. So not only were they philosophers, but they were also quite deliberately. So remember with the story earlier on with the early Stokes, is that the first people just said what they thought about the world, and then that gets misunderstood by the poets. In Cornutus, it's pretty much the first time. I think that's not, the story is much more sort of straightforward. The first people are themselves expressing a philosophy in deliberately allegorical form. Quite why they did this is a little bit unclear. It might be that they thought that was exactly the way to prevent it from getting misunderstood and corrupted. It's a way of encoding it and protecting it from corruption. Or maybe they didn't want it to get in the hands of people who wouldn't understand it or something like that. It was unclear. But they did that. And then the exciting thing about that is that when we start looking at Homer, Hesiod, the mythological traditions in general, we're no longer trying to sort of clear away, well, we're partly trying to clear away things that have been misunderstood. But what we're going to get to is not just the names and some little bits and pieces about how the elements that stand behind the divine names relate to each other, but we're going to find fragments of stories that can be interpreted as actual philosophical theories expressed allegorically. So that's the sort of revolution here, that we can get through a reading of Homer. Not all of it. It's not all of Homer. They still, at this point, are thinking that Homer is a poet and entertainer, cares more about entertaining his audience than preserving philosophy. He doesn't understand it himself. But he's going to be passing on actual encoded philosophy. But then here's the thing. This is where it gets, I think, particularly interesting with Cornutus. If you think about how this works, so we're thinking about the first generations of human beings now, or the philosophers among them, deliberately constructing allegorical philosophical stories that get transmitted down the persical line. Because that's not just going to happen in Greece. That's going to happen through all of the mythological lines that have any antiquity in the world. So I think the thing that's, to me, most exciting and interesting about Cornutus is that he gets, although his book is about Greek theology in particular, the Greek tradition, he's very, very interested in what other ancient mythological traditions have to say. Because one of the ways in which you can guarantee the antiquity, the originality of a bit of philosophical allegory is if it recurs in parallel mythological traditions that have no, as far as he's concerned, have no other contact with each other. So, for example, he mentions the example of the story of Demetrum, the Saphony in the Greek tradition, being quite like the story of Isis and Osiris in the Egyptian tradition and quite like the story of Adonis and so on and so forth. It was a rebirth of the crops kind of story. So he says, here you can see, there's a story that they all have. It's pretty much the same. You can see little bits added here and there, but basically the core is the same. So that must be a really ancient part of the tradition. So he does, we see for the first time, this real interest in world mythologies, essentially, and a sort of method of comparative mythology, it's a vertical, I think, as a tool for allegorical exegesis. That was a great answer. Thank you. Yeah, it brings to mind two observations from me. One was just getting to this point where Cornutus and Karimond and the Stoics of this day believe that these lines of knowledge were transmitted intentionally as allegories and as poetry. It brings to mind almost the, I guess what I would call a social capital of mystery and things like that at the time. You have mystery, cults and things like that going on. You know, secrecy and mysteries brought kind of a social capital to your methodology. And also it's really interesting just thinking about how he could come to these conclusions, but also they don't really have a hermeneutical tool to narrow down what you can sift from the bad stuff and the good stuff. And of course the middle and then the later neopladeness would use Plato as that benchmark. But at this time it's just very interesting. That's a great point. I mean both points are really helpful because they use the mysteries as a kind of paradigm for what they're doing. Exactly this. This is what allegory is. It's hiding sophisticated knowledge from an audience that will not treat it with sufficient respect or might change it or whatever. The process of allegory is like the process of initiation and mysteries, they do say that. And yeah, the other point, very good. Yes, what do you get out of this? I think it's true. There's no sense in cornutis that you can all carry on for that matter, that you can learn anything new because you have to sort of be able to recognize that the philosophy is there, the methodology precisely because there is so much rubbish in the mix. The methodology requires you to be bringing your own philosophical understanding to bear on this. So that's right. You can sort of confirm. I think that's the thought. You can sort of confirm that you're on the right lines and you can give yourself a bit of rhetorical backup against other schools if you can say, well look, this is what people always thought. But you can't just open a page of Homer and discover something new theory about the stars or something like that. Yeah, great point. It's also very interesting. They're still at this point really looking. I mean, there's an interest, like you said, in looking at these world, the lore in the world, like the myths and other terms. They're looking at Egyptian myth. They're looking at Hebrew myths, things like this. But they're still interpreting it through the lens of the interpretatio Gregi in a way. It's very interesting. I was talking to another scholar, Matthew David Litwa, about how Philo turns this on its head. And he's, in a sense, trying to outgreek the Greeks with his life of Moses. So it's very interesting. Also, I think this gets to my final question for this segment. Platonism is very interesting to me. It seems to be very malleable and adjust itself to the thought, the currents and thought of the time. So the stoic methodology is no exception. So I didn't know if you could talk about the impacts that these developments had on later Platonic thought. Obviously culminating in the approaches of philosophers like Platonists and porphyry. So, oddly enough, though, the book of mine that you were kind enough to wave earlier on was supposed to be about Platonism. I don't get to it until about two thirds of the way through, because I think... So one of the great mysteries with Platonism is kind of where it comes from. And I'm not sure I think exactly what I thought when I wrote that, but still. But it is still a great mystery, because really we don't see it being invented. We see the results of it. We don't see its emergence. So you've got Plato in the fourth century Aerosol. The Hellenistic period, third century through to the end of the first century BC, let's say. And then suddenly halfway through the first century AD, there are Platonists, and they're sort of fully formed. And we don't know where they came from or... There are lots of theories about this, of course, but there's no smoking guns, not clear. And they're distinguished by the fact that they go back... They're now treating Plato like a source of authoritative doctrine. And they see their job as being... Well, they see the way forward in philosophy, let's say, as being to understand why Plato said what he said. But the working assumption, at least, is that he was right. And this is quite strange. I mean, it's not the philosophy that we've had for the past 400 years. It's not even how the people we know about are reading Plato. Even the people are interested in it. So it's a slightly mysterious phenomenon. And actually what motivated my project when I... Out of which that book came originally was to think, well, you know, why on earth would you say that? And why would you suddenly think that the way to do philosophy was to latch on to the authority of this figure and run with that? And so I was coming at that from various angles. And my thought, ultimately, was that... I was very interested by the fact that they... The biographies of Plato, you get quite a lot of biographies of Plato at this time, and they're all very keen, they're all very interested in the thought that Plato traveled very widely without any real historical precedent for this. I mean, we know Plato maybe went to Egypt, he certainly went to Sicily, places around the Mediterranean. But now they have him going off to India and going to the Celtic lands and Persia and just all over the place. Explicitly to engage with the wisdom traditions of those cultures. And so my thought was, well, hold on a minute, we've got with Cornutus, as I just said, we've got this sudden interest in the Stoic-Executical tradition in the wisdom traditions of other cultures as a hermeneutical device for establishing the kind of philosophical core of the mythologies. So maybe the thought is with Plato, I mean, there needs to be other things going on too, this can't be the whole story, but maybe part of the story with Plato is that people are thinking that the reason Plato has such authority and it rewards thought with so much is that he had done this, that he's actually traveled the world, talked to the representatives of these wisdom traditions and kind of done that work of reconstruction that Cornutus was talking about and distilled into the dialogues that we have now. So that was my thought. And then the idea would be you would look to Plato as a distillation of the primitive philosophy, the original philosophy. And that would be, if you believed that, that would be at least a reason for taking Plato very seriously and might be part of the reason why he suddenly requires this strange kind of authoritative position. And yeah, as you say, so we get figures like Plutarch in the 1st and 2nd century, lots of other little figures around that period, and then Plotinus in the 3rd century who really becomes the foundation for a whole tradition. I mean, we don't get so much exegesis called interest in Plotinus, but even he, you find these extraordinary passages where he's suddenly very interested in Egyptian hieroglyphics. So it's certainly in the background that I think. Yeah, well said. Great point about Plato. It's very strange that there's a misconception, I think in the general public, that before the Bible, Homer was the Bible of antiquity. But as you're showing, like nobody considered Homer some authority, like they considered Plato an authority. And I think you, yeah, you're right. Because Platinism was so malleable and it could intake so many different sources. It's also taking a lot of Pythagoreanism, right? And you also have that figure of Pythagoras. And the figure of the pagan holy man is very important in, you know, this movement of time, you have later things like the bio way of, you know, Plotinus and Procholus by their students, right? It's very, these provide paradigmatic kind of ways of living for people. And like you're saying, like somebody like Plotinus, while he doesn't necessarily have that much of an interest in the exegesis that's going on, you still see that as a current. And then that ultimately, you know, like the interest he has in the Egyptian hieroglyphics and you find that culminating obviously and the most fullest form in somebody like Yamblichus, right? Right, exactly. Yeah, it's very interesting. Plato, I think, yeah, like you were saying, is just an example of somebody distilling all this wisdom by traveling widely. You even see it in somebody like Diogenes Lertius, right? Book one, the first thing he says is, yeah, philosophy, you know, is the same thing as they practice in these exotic Eastern provinces and the Magi and things like that. So very interesting. Who knows ultimately where it came from? Dr. Boystones George, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much. We'll see you again soon. Thank you very much. Take care.