Apocalypse of the Alien God: Platonism and the Exile of Sethian Gnosticism

Apocalypse of the Alien God

DIVINATIONS: REREADING LATE ANCIENT RELIGION

SERIES EDITORS

Daniel Boyarin

Virginia Burrus

Derek Krueger

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Apocalypse of the Alien God

PLATONISM AND THE EXILE OF SETHIAN GNOSTICISM

Dylan M. Burns

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS Philadelphia

THIS BOOK IS MADE POSSIBLE BY A COLLABORATIVE GRANT FROM THE ANDREW W. MELLON FOUNDATION.

© 2014 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Burns, Dylan M.

Apocalypse of the alien god : Platonism and the exile of Sethian gnosticism / Dylan M. Burns. — 1st ed.

p. cm. — (Divinations : rereading late ancient religion)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8122-4579-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Apocalyptic literature—History and criticism. 2. Gnostic literature—History and criticism. 3. Gnosticism. 4. Neoplatonism. I. Title.

BL501.B87 2014

299’.932—dc23

2013032143

Im Abstande erst erzeugt sich ja mein Leben.

—Gerschom Scholem, Tägebücher 2:245

CONTENTS

Abbreviations

Introduction

1.  Culture Wars

2.  Plotinus Against His Gnostic Friends

3.  Other Ways of Writing

4.  The Descent

5.  The Ascent

6.  The Crown

7.  Between Judaism, Christianity, and Neoplatonism

Appendix: Reading Porphyry on the Gnostic Heretics and Their Apocalypses

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

ABBREVIATIONS

Following those given in the SBL Handbook of Style and Oxford Classical Dictionary. Sigla in quotations of ancient texts follow the Leiden Conventions, with the exception that [ … ] indicates a lacuna of unknown length, as well as longer stretches of multiple words or lines where the text is too fragmentary to render in any readable manner.

Apocalypse of the Alien God

Introduction

The terms Christianity and Judaism are difficult for students of these ancient religions. Church historians remain unable to pinpoint once and for all the emergence of Christianity from Judaism; scholars of Judaic studies debate when Judaism was invented.¹ Christianity and Judaism can feel like vacuous terms that house a great diversity of groups, practices, and ideas whose differences seem to outweigh their resemblances. Consequently, some scholars feel more comfortable discussing Christianities and Judaisms, and nobody is comfortable with the term used for groups that exist on the borderlines between them: Jewish-Christian(!).² Even more problematic is the term paganism, which is essentially a wastebasket for the religious life of every ancient person who did not identify with a cult of the God of Abraham. Yet we persist in using these terms, despite our misgivings, and not just as a heuristic sleight-of-hand. Sometimes there are significant differences between various groups and their ideas, differences that do correspond somewhat to the way that we moderns might use the terms Jewish or Christian or Hellenic (pagan I renounce in this book).³ These differences did not fall from the sky. They were manufactured, in words, art, and ritual, by cultural warriors who believed that such differences mattered and used them to legitimize their own interests.

This book is about some of those real differences and the development of the ideologies that crafted them—in this case, the competing worldviews of Christian and Hellenic (i.e., Greek) philosophers. It argues that one can identify when and where these worldviews split for good: in the 260s CE, in Rome, in the reading group of the great Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus. The master had a falling out with some of the Christian interlocutors of the group, sparked by the texts they read. After this controversy at the onset of late antiquity, it becomes very difficult to find academic, Hellenic philosophers with cordial relationships with their Christian counterparts. Instead, they regularly wrote polemical treatises denouncing each other’s philosophy (even while still exchanging ideas). Here it becomes meaningful to talk of a Christian philosophy distinct from Hellenic philosophy—as a matter of cultural identity as well as intellectual enterprise—and a closed Platonic tradition, unfriendly to Jewish and Christian sources.

Unfortunately, this story gets (very) complicated when we try to learn about the Christian interlocutors of Plotinus and their controversial texts, and it is largely occupied—as is the bulk of this book, really—with what we know about them and, in turn, what these details tell us about the situation in Plotinus’s circle. Fortunately, these details are not uninteresting: in fact, they furnish valuable evidence for deepening our understanding of an obscure Judeo-Christian literary tradition, Sethianism (so called due to its focus on the figure of Adam and Eve’s third son, Seth, as savior and revealer). This book explains the contribution of Sethianism to Greek philosophy, and the reasons for its subsequent exile from the Hellenic schools; its relationship to Judaism, Christianity, and the Jewish-Christian groups that existed in the cracks between them; and the development of Jewish mystical traditions we know from the apocalypses and Qumran. This same tradition provides the most valuable evidence modern scholars possess for understanding the thought, background, and historical importance of any group of Gnostics—early Christians who were associated by their opponents with a myth of the creation of the world by a demiurge (craftsman) of ambivalent ability and mores.⁴ It appears that these sects referred to themselves as γνωστικοί (knowers).

Plotinus’s student Porphyry provides our only record of a personal encounter with ancient Gnostics that does not come from one of their bitter opponents among the church fathers:

There were in his (Plotinus’s) time many others, Christians, in particular heretics who had set out from the ancient philosophy, men belonging to the schools of Adelphius and Aculinus—who possessed many texts of Alexander the Libyan and Philocomus and Demostratus of Lydia, and who produced revelations of Zoroaster and Zostrianos and Nicotheus and Allogenes and Messos and others of this sort who deceived many, just as they had been deceived, actually alleging that Plato really had not penetrated to the depth of intelligible substance. Wherefore, Plotinus often attacked their position in his seminars, and wrote the book which we have entitled Against the Gnostics. He left it to us to judge what he had passed over. Amelius went up to forty volumes, writing against the book of Zostrianos, and I, Porphyry, wrote a considerable number of arguments against the book of Zoroaster, showing the book to be entirely spurious and contemporary, contrived by the founders of the heresy to fabricate the idea that the doctrines which they had chosen to honor were in fact those of the ancient Zoroaster.⁵

The translation of this passage will be discussed in detail below, but it is immediately clear that Porphyry gives us evidence more specific and reliable than what we have about any other Gnostics. First, he says that, in Plotinus’s time, there were Christian heretics, Plotinus’s refutation of whom he entitled Against the Gnostics; therefore, Gnostics were present in Rome and known to Plotinus and his group. Second, Plotinus discussed philosophical questions with these Gnostics, which means that they were sufficiently educated to participate in a sort of ancient postgraduate seminar. Third, these discussions led to disagreement, much of whose substance is extant in Plotinus’s treatise Against the Gnostics. Finally, Porphyry mentions the books the Gnostics considered authoritative: revelations (ἀποκαλύψεις, i.e., apocalypses).

Luckily for us, titles identical to several of the apocalypses mentioned by Porphyry were unearthed at Nag Hammadi (Upper Egypt) in 1945.⁶ Thus the especial importance of Porphyry’s evidence; when read in concert with Porphyry and Plotinus, these apocalypses, and other texts (mostly apocalypses as well) from Nag Hammadi that belong to the same literary tradition, enable us to pose and answer significant questions about the social background, literary preferences, theological proclivities, and ritual life of a particular group of Gnostics, who came into serious conflict with the great Platonic academics of their time.⁷ One of these titles, Allogenes, means foreigner, or alien. As we will see, the concept of alienation figures strongly in the Sethian apocalypses, texts that describe a god so utterly transcendent and divorced from creation that he can only be revealed by an avatar who bridges a chasm between human and divine, descending from heaven to preach to the elect, who reside as aliens on this strange planet. Conversely, to Plotinus, everything about this message—from its vigorous use of Judeo-Christian language and literary traditions to its treatment of specific philosophical problems (such as divine providence or the afterlife of the soul)—seemed wrong, wrongheaded, and decidedly foreign: that is, alien. For both parties, albeit in entirely different senses, the Sethian literature offered a revelation (apocalypse) of the alien god to his alien worshippers.

One might then ask how it is that the Sethian literature and its Christian Gnostic readers wound up in Plotinus’s circle in the first place. The Nag Hammadi discovery answers this question: some of the now extant Sethian literature—in particular, a group known as the Platonizing texts (Zostrianos [NHC VIII,1], Allogenes [NHC XI,3], Marsanes [NHC X,1] and the Three Steles of Seth [NHC VII,5])—appears to have been deeply conversant with advanced Platonic metaphysics and does not mention the figure of Jesus.⁸ The question of dating the copies that were known to Plotinus and others, and thus the possibility of mutual philosophical influence between them, remains controversial; however, there is a scholarly consensus that some version of this literature was present at a crucial period in the development of Platonic metaphysics, and may have even contributed to the thought of Plotinus himself.⁹

Yet the importance of the Sethian literature is not limited to our understanding of the history of later Greek philosophy or even Gnosticism. Its indebtedness to the literary traditions and genre of Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature merits its inclusion in the study of Jewish and Christian pseudepigrapha of the second and third centuries, a period for which our evidence is otherwise scarce. Some of these traditions deal with themes of self-transformation that we know not just from these apocalypses but from the Dead Sea Scrolls, again, furnishing valuable evidence for an obscure field of study—the development of Jewish mysticism between Qumran and the late antique ascent literature known as the Hekhalot (palaces) corpus, a field the great scholar of Kabbalah, Gershom Scholem, termed Jewish Gnosticism. Finally, these texts also occupy a liminal position along the notoriously permeable boundaries of Judaism and Christianity, and some of their doctrines are most recognizable in the context of the Syrian groups scholars label Jewish-Christian, particularly the Elchasaites. The Sethian evidence from Nag Hammadi is thus indispensable for scholars trying to understand the negotiation and mutual permeation of the boundaries between emerging Christianity and Judaism.

The evidence for these conclusions is set out in the first six chapters of this book. Chapter 1 addresses an overlooked but significant implication of Porphyry’s evidence: the physical presence of these Gnostics in the social context of a philosophical study group. The chapter thus explores the context of such groups in the Hellenic culture wars of the second and third centuries CE, where the Second Sophistic movement developed a Hellenophile ideology permeating educational life and was countered by a spike of interest in Oriental sages like those invoked by Plotinus’s Christian Gnostic opponents.

Chapter 2 takes a close look at Plotinus’s own writing about these opponents, who, he says, were once his friends. He viciously attacks their cosmology, anthropology, and soteriology, accusing them of developing a kind of deviant Platonism. His criticisms apply not only to the apocalypses his Gnostics read but also to contemporary Christian Platonism in general, serving as evidence of the Christian background of the group and the more generally Judeo-Christian valence of their texts.

Chapters 3 through 6 introduce and discuss the Sethian Gnostic apocalypses themselves, alongside evidence from Plotinus that has been hitherto read in isolation from them. Chapter 3 examines the genre of the texts, grounding their rhetoric, motifs, and especially claims to authority in contemporary Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature. Their approach to myth and revelation is sharply contrasted with contemporary Platonic models, which employed allegory to interpret myths; thus, to Plotinus, they appeared to be another, alien way of writing. Chapter 4 discusses the apocalypses’ attitudes toward soteriology, focusing on the identity of the Sethian savior (a cosmic Seth who descends to earth throughout history to intervene on behalf of the elect), the ethnic valence of their soteriological language, and Plotinus’s complaints about these conceptions with respect to his philosophy of divine providence. Chapter 5 looks at Sethian eschatology, both personal (handling the postmortem fate of the soul) and cosmic (handling the fate of the cosmos). In both of these chapters, it is clear that the apocalypses’ stances, from a philosophical perspective, resemble Christian Platonism, not its Hellenic counterpart. Chapter 6 studies the strategies for divinization in these Gnostic texts. A review of these practices shows that they drew not from Platonic but from Jewish and Christian sources, particularly those associated with ancient Jewish mysticism, as preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls, apocalypses, and Hekhalot literature. Moreover, recalling scholarly debate about vision and experience in Jewish literature helps us resolve obscurities in Sethian rituals themselves and theorize for what they could have been used in an ancient context.

Chapter 7 summarizes the aforementioned conclusions, offering a clearer picture of the function of the Sethian apocalypses, the lives of their authors, and their relationship to the Gnostics in Plotinus’s circle. Moreover, the chapter discusses the texts’ relationship with Judaism, Manichaeism, and Christianity (or Jewish Christianity), emphasizing the important role that Jewish literature plays in understanding Sethianism, the ways that Sethian literature helps elucidate the thorny problem of Jewish Gnosticism, and the significance of the Sethian literature for the history of Jewish mysticism. Similarly, significant parallels to Manichaeism emerge that invite a reevaluation of exactly what kind of baptismal groups Sethianism grew out of, and where they might have been.

Finally, this book will defend a Judeo-Christian authorship of the Sethian treatises—even the Platonizing texts that do not mention Jesus Christ or Scripture!—thus rejecting the scholarly consensus that the texts represent a non-Christian or pagan development of Sethianism, or evidence of an outreach to paganism. Some have recognized already that a lack of Christian features does not necessarily indicate Jewish or pagan provenance.¹⁰ Yet the boundary between Judaism and Christianity seems impossible to divine in much of the Sethian literature, particularly the Platonizing texts, which are laden with Neoplatonic jargon instead of biblical references. Perhaps this is no accident, because many of their Jewish and Christian features are associated specifically with groups that flourished precisely along these borderlines, groups (such as the Elchasaites, Ebionites, and author[s] of the Pseudo-Clementine literature) that have duly been named Jewish-Christian by modern scholars. As I will argue in the concluding chapter, it is likely that Sethian traditions developed in a Jewish-Christian environment like that which produced Mani, who also drew widely on Jewish apocryphal traditions in formulating a religion that honored Jesus of Nazareth as one of many descending savior-revealers—important, but not the object of every prayer or treatise.

The apocalypses brandished in Plotinus’s seminar were thus the products of intellectuals from a community that, like Manichaeans or the Elchasaites, dwelt on the boundaries of Judaism and Christianity. Drawing from the literary traditions of the Jewish pseudepigrapha, they wrote their apocalypses as manuals for eliciting an experience of visionary ascent, using Platonic metaphysics as a meditative tool. While such practices are best understood in the context of contemporary Jewish mysticism, the Platonism that informs them also permeated the cosmological and soteriological thought of their authors, producing a Platonism that was at the forefront of Christian theology—hence their appeal to the Christian heretics mentioned by Porphyry. He and Plotinus recognized the Christian valence of this Platonism, and here drew a line in the sand between the Platonism of their Christian Gnostic interlocutors and their own thought. Hellenic Platonism thus began to be seen not just as a school interpreting Plato but a Hellenic philosophy distinct from and actively opposed to Jewish and Christian traditions, which the Platonists hoped to exile from their schools once and for all.

CHAPTER I

Culture Wars

Who were these followers of Adelphius and Aculinus in the time of Plotinus? Porphyry says that they were Christian heretics, but also trained Platonists. Nothing is known about Adelphius or the authors of other texts (now lost) the heretics brandished, Alexander the Libyan and Philocomus and Demostratus of Lydia.¹ Aculinus appears to have enjoyed a reputation as a Platonist roughly contemporary with Plotinus.² Alexander the Libyan was known to Tertullian and Jerome as a Valentinian.³ These figures all bore normal names (i.e., epigraphically attested as used by everyday people), not pseudepigraphic, authoritative titles.⁴ They are Greco-Roman, showing that in this context, at least, the heretics identified themselves as Hellenes, who followed a Hellenic philosopher, Aculinus. Whence then the animosity of Porphyry and Plotinus? Porphyry’s remarks about these Christian Platonists and the works they read tell us that cult, culture, and authority were at stake. The followers of Aculinus and the rest are accused of having sailed from the safe harbor of Hellenism, deceiving many others and themselves being deceived, actually alleging that Plato really had not penetrated to the depth of intelligible substance.⁵ These thinkers began their careers as students of the Hellenic ancient philosophy, but came to betray it. He dubs them impostors, for they esteem the works of Oriental prophets over those of the Hellenes. Porphyry calls these works apocalypses, or revelations, a genre with which he was not unfamiliar, and lists the prophets who purportedly authored them—individuals with alien, foreign names like Zoroaster and Zostrianos and Nicotheus and Allogenes and Messos.⁶

What did it mean to challenge the authority of Plato with the invocation of alien authorities? Was Oriental wisdom prized or despised among ancient philosophers? What kind of people did one meet in these circles anyway? Where did they come from, and how did they feel about the ruling powers—the non-alien authorities of Hellenism and Rome? Answering these questions requires us to step back momentarily and ascertain the social environment in which the appeals to these foreign authorities took place. As we will see, analysis of contemporary Christian and Hellenic philosophical circles themselves sheds scarce light on the problem. Study groups in the second and third centuries were small, ad hoc affairs, about which it is difficult to generalize—except that their participants all came out of a deeply ideological rhetorical environment known today as the Second Sophistic.⁷ Modern research into this wider educational environment has blossomed, yielding important data for a thick description of members of a group like that of Plotinus—and the Christian Gnostics who belonged to it as well,⁸ thus providing the most extensive sociological information on the background of any known Gnostic group.⁹

PHILOSOPHY CLUBS

Gnostic literature itself says virtually nothing about the relationship of Gnosticism to contemporary philosophical circles, much less the culture informing them. References to philosophy in the Nag Hammadi corpus indicate that the Gnostics adopted stances about philosophical issues but excoriated contemporary philosophers, striving (like Tertullian), to distinguish themselves from contemporary Greek education. Such anti-philosophical polemic is striking.¹⁰ While recorded Gnostic groups did not proclaim adherence to any particular philosophical sect, the high philosophical import of their texts demonstrates that they must have spent quite a bit of time among the philosophical sects, particularly the Platonists.¹¹ Irenaeus referred to a school (διδασκαλεῖον) of Valentinus.¹²

Recalling the Judeo-Christian background of Gnosticism, one can turn to Jewish and Christian texts in hopes of finding something like a school in which Gnostics could learn philosophy. One looks in vain. Rabbinic sources are silent about the interaction between Jews and the Greek philosophical schools.¹³ We are left with Philo, whose account of the Therapeutae contrasts the sages’ allegorizing of scripture with the oratorical display of the sophists.¹⁴ Elsewhere, he refers to his own education as propaedeutic.¹⁵ Philo’s status as a Jewish Platonist is obviously not comparable to that of the Sethian traditions and thus provides no social context for them. His testimony indicates nothing more than small schools of exegesis of the Septuagint. Here he is very much in agreement with the greater movement in Hellenistic Judaism, as seen in the Letter of Aristeas, to defend the faith with the idiom of Greek philosophy without becoming a partisan of it.¹⁶

Christian literature offers more information. There certainly was a need for education in the instruction of catechumens, but anything resembling formal schooling in theology seems unknown prior to Pantanaeus’s catechetical school in Alexandria in the mid-second century CE.¹⁷ The school’s representatives, Clement and Origen, give us examples of exegetical education in their day (like Philo), but not of how or where they taught Platonism.¹⁸ Origen’s own homilies and commentaries never refer to Greek philosophical sources, and explicitly discourage instruction in rhetoric.¹⁹ Other sources give a different picture: Porphyry, not the most impartial of witnesses, says that the textbooks used in Origen of Alexandria’s school were essentially the same as those in Plotinus’s, which would mean Middle Platonic commentaries, chiefly those of Numenius, and a good dose of Stoics and Peripatetics.²⁰ Eusebius describes a wide curriculum ranging from the basic to advanced study, where Origen was so overwhelmed by classes that he assigned his student Heraclas to teach the preliminaries.²¹ Yet there is no conclusive evidence that the school was formal, was officially affiliated with the (proto)-orthodox community, or had a steady succession of teachers; rather, we see that a range of instruction, including both elementary education and introduction to philosophy, was available in a Christian context in the third century CE.²² However, this education was largely propaedeutic and in the service of ethical, hermeneutical, and apologetic concerns.²³ It is hard to imagine Parmenides commentaries or the Chaldean Oracles being read or composed there. If Plotinus’s opponents were educated in a Jewish or Christian milieu like that of Philo or the Alexandrian catechetical school, their texts do not show it. If we are to understand the background and significance of Plotinus’s Christian opponents and their claims to foreign authorities, we must look at the culture of the Greek schools themselves.²⁴

It is no comfort that our knowledge of the social makeup of philosophical circles in the Roman Empire is also limited.²⁵ However, the modus operandi of philosophical discourse at least appears to be clear: Platonists of the first two centuries CE seem to have preferred a medium akin to the modern reading group or philosophy club. The character of each group seems to have been dependent on that of each particular teacher, as well as attendant circumstances.²⁶ For instance, Ammonius taught at what looked like his home.²⁷ (The same has been suggested of Philo, Justin Martyr, and Origen.)²⁸ Plutarch organized a group (σχολή) in which he lectured and texts were read and debated.²⁹ Like Apuleius of Madaura,³⁰ Aulus Gellius attended a formal but improvised classroom—his instructor, Calvenus Taurus Gellius, would have students over for dinner and even supervise outings.³¹ Similarly, Iamblichus had his own school in Syria, where he set up a curriculum, lectured, and supervised journeys, in addition to taking his students to local festivals.³² Very little is known of Porphyry’s school, if he founded one at all.³³ If it existed, it could have been funded, like Plotinus’s school, by a wealthy matron.³⁴

Plotinus’s career in Rome may give us a good idea of how philosophers set up shop—it was ad hoc.³⁵ When he arrived in Italy, he held his salons in the homes of his wealthy patrons.³⁶ Everybody there was considered to be comrades, from the serious students, like Amelius, to the wealthy patrons dropping in and out, like Marcellus Orontius or even the emperor himself.³⁷ In their seminars, they debated and conducted exegesis on difficult passages in his favorite treatises.³⁸ Fellow teachers engaged the group by epistle and the occasional visit.³⁹

We see, then, that the philosophical reading groups were private, even if ostensibly open to anybody, which usually amounted to the philosophers’ patron(s), advanced students, and young nobles getting their feet wet or completing their educations.⁴⁰ This distinction was fluid: a patron or noble could abandon politics for philosophy.⁴¹ The bulk of serious students are said to have started their careers by studying in several groups before settling on a particular mentor within a particular school (αἵρεσις).⁴² The most earnest students would formally declare their devotion to the study of philosophy.⁴³ Once ensconced within the school atmosphere, the students formed extremely close, even devotional, relationships with their masters.⁴⁴ While these groups were clearly small (perhaps up to a dozen people at a time, allowing for a revolving door of veterans and new arrivals) and ad hoc, they still followed the schedule of the ancient school year.⁴⁵ Relatively formal (if equally small) rival institutes of advanced study do not appear in Athens and Alexandria until the later fourth century CE.⁴⁶

This brief survey of the evidence underscores how important Porphyry’s evidence is among the ancient philosophical sources but tells us little about what the Gnostics known to Plotinus were like. As scholars like Arthur Darby Nock have suggested, sophistic literature offers us great evidence for fleshing out a picture of the social context of ancient philosophy.⁴⁷ The logic of the move is simple: philosophers (or at least Platonists) were, presumably, educated individuals; education in the Roman world began with grammar school and led to rhetoric; rhetoric was taught by sophists.⁴⁸ Philosophers, then, came from similar backgrounds to those of sophists and spent a good deal of their formative years, if not their entire lives, around them. Indeed, many philosophers began as professional rhetoricians before moving to philosophy.⁴⁹ An analysis of the culture motivating rhetorical education in the Roman Empire might answer our questions about Plotinus’s Gnostic opponents and their interest in foreign authorities. Even Gnostics had to go to school, especially if they wanted to join the philosophy club.

GOING TO SCHOOL

Philostratus (early to mid-third century CE) understood himself to be part of a revival of the art of rhetoric traced back to the legacy of the classical sophist Aeschines, and distinguished from its more ancient counterpart today by the name Second Sophistic.⁵⁰ The term describes the rhetorical culture spanning the years 50–250 CE, with roots in the mid-first century and ebbing away in the Rome of Plotinus and the rhetor Longinus.⁵¹ This culture was no mere linguistic development in the history of rhetoric but a social movement that produced a concrete ideology.⁵² This culture was shared with contemporary philosophers, through their common experience in basic schooling, rhetorical training, and religious life—and it strongly contrasts with Gnostic thought.

The close association of sophism and philosophy is indicated foremost by the terminology used by the ancients themselves.⁵³ Philostratus says he is writing about both sophists and philosophers, and that his circle, whose matron was the philosophical Julia, included sophists, philosophers, and astrologers (γεωμετρίαι) in the 190s CE.⁵⁴While many intellectuals themselves sharply distinguished sophists and philosophers (the lady doth protest too much),⁵⁵ the professions were also occasionally confused.⁵⁶ Such confusion is not surprising, given that philosophical and sophistic texts often circulated in the same schools. Philosophy was part of the sophistic education, if only as one of many branches of study; the Platonic corpus itself loomed large in rhetorical study.⁵⁷ Moreover, sophists were interested in all the various philosophical sects, at times eschewing adherence to any particular one.⁵⁸ Finally, sophists and philosophers were bound in the legal sphere, occasionally sharing the privilege of exemption from taxation.⁵⁹ Such comparable civic status was to be expected, given the similarity of their civic roles.

These roles were deeply politicized. Some have emphasized that Greek philosophers under the empire were quietists, bystanders to the civic turmoil of their age. The crises of the imperial period, especially the third century,⁶⁰ have been repeatedly invoked in explaining not only the origins of Gnostic anti-cosmism⁶¹ but the pronounced turn to mysticism that seems to occur with Plotinus.⁶² This approach is unsound for several reasons. The concept of a general political crisis is far too general as a singular, blanket explanation for particular anecdotes (such as Aristides’ hypochondria). Gnosticism, supposedly a symptom of decline, is traceable to