IAMBLICHUS’ EPISTLES, FOURTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHICAL AND POLITICAL EPISTOLOGRAPHY AND THE NEOPLATONIC CURRICULA AT ATHENS AND ALEXANDRIA

Abstract

As a literary genre and practice, philosophical and political epistolography seems to have been alive and well in the fourth-century Roman empire. We have fragments of twenty letters of the late third- and early fourth-centuryc.e. Platonist (Neoplatonist to us) philosopher Iamblichus of Chalcis (which are preserved in the early fifth-century Ioannes Stobaeus’Anthologium[ = Flor.]) to former students and other contemporaries, some of whom appear to have been imperial officeholders (see Appendix); theEpistle to Himeriusof Sopater the Younger (which is partially preserved in Stobaeus, 4.5.51–60, in sequential extracts; this Sopater is the homonymous son of the philosopher who had been Iamblichus’ student) to his brother Himerius on the latter's assumption of an unknown governorship (ἡγεμονία) in the East, probably sometime in the 340s or 350s (and so under the Emperor Constantius II); the Emperor Julian'sEpistle to Themistius, which was likely written and publishedc.December 361/early 362; and theEpistle to Julianof the Aristotelian philosopher Themistius on proper rule (preserved in two Arabic manuscripts from the eleventh and fourteenth/fifteenth centuries), which seems to have been a response, in part, to Julian'sEpistle to Themistiusand perhaps was written to the emperor when both men likely resided in Constantinople at the same time. These philosophical and political letters are but a few examples from this period. All four authors mentioned above, who are representative of intellectual life in the East during the fourth century, produced epistles which reflect Greek political theory in a Roman imperial context.