dialogues belonging to the larger body of philosophical dialogues (“Hermetica”) starring the ancient demigod Hermes Trismegistus, presents a more complicated case, due to disputed provenance and the internal diversity (and thus dogmatic inconsistency) of its contents.228 Accordingly, the Hermetica present dissonant views on Hellenism and alien philosophy, sometimes seeing learning and language as universal,229 but also belittling the wisdom of the Hellenes and their puny attempts to render Egyptian wisdom in the Greek tongue.230 As with the Oracles, however, the setting of the texts themselves—conversations between a decidedly Egyptian sage and other demigods—demonstrates that the texts seek to set themselves apart from contemporary Hellenophilia, even as they discuss Hellenic ideas. The pose was a success, and the Hermetica received a warm welcome among both Hellenic Platonists and Christian theologians.231
It is no surprise, then, that the “Orientomaniac” pseudepigraphy, as I shall call it, of the Chaldean Oracles and the Corpus Hermeticum has been contextualized in the Numenian milieu of Middle Platonism that reaches to the Orient for authority.232 Yet, as discussed above, Numenius and others actually cite alien authorities in order to subordinate them to the Platonic and Pythagorean traditions. Still other thinkers, like Plutarch, instead saw ancient wisdom as manifest in the teaching and ritual of all nations.233 The Oracles and Hermetic literature represent a third approach, which capitalizes on the prestige of ancient Oriental teaching to authorize a discourse composed in the Greek language about contemporary Greek metaphysics, by simply ignoring Hellas’s claim to authority.234 Some treatises among the Hermetica go further, and seem to actively rebel against Hellenic predominance by proclaiming the antiquity and superiority of alien speech and alien wisdom.
Each of these ways of negotiating the relationship between Greek philosophy and the traditions of older, Eastern cultures is a form of what James Walbridge calls “Platonic Orientalism,” the respect of Platonists for the authority of the wisdom of the East.235 The term retains much of the sense of Edward Said’s concept of “Orientalism,” as an idea that does the work of defining the self (i.e., “the West”) through the creation of and reflection on an “other,” here a distillation of the manifold civilizations east of Greece and Rome (Numenius’s “justifiably famous nations”) to a set of teachings and rites whose actual relationship to any “Orient” is negligible.236 As argued above, the interest in the Orient as a primeval source of wisdom was nothing new in the second to fourth centuries CE. “Platonic Orientalism” simply describes the popularity of this interest among the Platonic thinkers of the time in conducting what Chapter 4 terms “ethnic reasoning,” the negotiation of their identities in decidedly ethnic terms, here in the context of Greek higher education.
Weighing their knowledge of the Orient against this Platonic tradition, thinkers reached diverse conclusions about which authorities to prize, and articulated their choice in the language of Hellenic identity developed during the Second Sophistic. Plutarch, on the cusp of this movement, eschews the language of παιδεία when talking about Egyptian mythology; Dio Chrysostom and Celsus engage the “barbarian wisdom” of the Orient while distancing themselves from it; Numenius, Diogenes Laertius, Philostratus, and Porphyry, all deeply invested in the language of Hellenism, take care to defend the priority of its canon over the Orient. “Julianus” and “Hermes,” finally, ignore the Greeks altogether, attempting to validate themselves by auto-Orientalizing. A champion of both the Oracles and Hermetica, Iamblichus auto-Orientalized within the context of discussing Greek philosophy, identifying his views on psychology and the afterlife as those of “the ancients” (as in De anima), or posing as an Egyptian ritual expert (in De mysteriis) with the same authority as the masters of Plato and Pythagoras. We might, then, ask which of this diversity of positions on the relationship between Oriental and Hellenic wisdom we see articulated by Plotinus—and which by his Gnostics.
CONCLUSION: A “THICK DESCRIPTION” OF PLOTINUS’S GNOSTICS AND THEIR TEXTS
The first of the “revelations” Porphyry mentions as read by the Christian Gnostics was purportedly authored by the famous Persian sage Zoroaster. We cannot know the contents of his “apocalypse,” but the pseudepigraphic currency of the name “Zoroaster” was strong indeed, even in Jewish and Christian circles.237 The founder of the Persian cult was at times equated with Nimrod, apocalyptic seers such as Baruch, Jeremias, and Balaam, and even Seth himself.238 Porphyry’s remarks—this Zoroaster was “spurious and contemporary”—show that the pseudepigraphic identification of authority with sources both remote and antique was, to Plotinus’s group, offensive, deceptive, and futile.239
The other four figures are associated with extant Sethian apocalypses from Nag Hammadi, and with the world of intertestamental Judaism. “Zostrianos” was known to the Greeks as the grandfather of Zoroaster.240 While the narrative pericope of the Nag Hammadi text Zostrianos (NHC VIII,1) seems to describe the eponymous sage as growing up in a community of Greeks and renouncing his paternity for another race—the “seed of Seth”—he must have been associated, by virtue of his famous grandson, with Armenia and Persia.241 An Apocalypse of Nicotheus per se is not extant, but the name of the eponymous prophet is associated (in the Untitled Treatise found in the Bruce Codex) with the name Marsanes, which does adorn a Sethian apocalypse extant in Coptic (NHC X,1). Whether this treatise was present at Plotinus’s circle is uncertain, although the copy we know from Nag Hammadi shows signs of thought from the fourth century CE.242 The characters of both Nicotheus and Marsanes are present in the Untitled Treatise, exhibiting “powers” through which they achieve visions of the “only-begotten Son” of the Father that impress even the local angelic beings in heaven.243 The figure of Nicotheus possessed considerable pedigree in the world of the Jewish apocalypses; according to Mani, he was in the same league as S(h)em, Enosh, and Enoch.244 “Hidden” and “unable to be found,” he was also associated by the fourth-century alchemist Zosimus of Panopolis with Zoroaster, Hermes, and others, as a mediator of knowledge about the celestial Adam.245 “Marsanios” (certainly another form of the name “Marsanes”) was known to Epiphanius as an Archontic (Gnostic) prophet who was “snatched up into heaven for three days.”246 Unlike that of Nicotheus, it is possible that his name is Semitic.247 Both figures thus recall contemporary Jewish traditions of rapt antediluvian seers.248
A Jewish background is also indicated for the treatises assigned to Allogenes and Messos. “Allogenes” is a common Hellenistic Jewish word for a “stranger” or “alien or foreigner,” for Seth, and apparently a common title for texts circulated by the fourth-century Gnostics known as the Archontics.249 As Epiphanius writes, “(the Archontics) have also portrayed certain books, some written in the name of Seth and others written in the name of Seth and his seven sons, as having been given by him. For they say that he bore seven <sons>, called ‘foreigners’—as we noted in the case of other schools of thought, viz. gnostics and Sethians.”250 It is impossible to say whether the treatises he mentioned are related to the Apocalypse of Allogenes known to Porphyry.251
“Messos” is a name extant elsewhere only in the Sethian apocalypse from Nag Hammadi entitled Allogenes (NHC XI,3), appearing when the eponymous protagonist addresses the reader as “Messos, my son.”252 There is no extant work entitled “Messos,” but the possibility of an existence of one in Plotinus’s circle cannot be ruled out.
For Porphyry, then, the source of the controversy between Plotinus and the local Christian “Gnostics” was the problem of how to weigh the authority of Plato against those of Jewish antediluvian sages and the apocalypses that bore their names. On the one hand, the adherents of Aculinus and others were educated interpreters of Plato. On the other hand, they thought that Plato was simply one of many teachers, some of whom were more ancient, geographically remote (i.e., Oriental), and hence more authoritative. Each of these teachers was associated with
