Recent years have witnessed an ever-increasing interest in the early history of Platonism and the doctrines that the circle of Plato’s immediate disciples developed in the Academy. Yet, while figures such as Speusippus and Xenocrates have captured most of the attention, Philip of Opus’ Epinomis[1] has often been left to the side in recent scholarly attempts to reconstruct the doctrines advanced by Early Academic philosophers.[2] This omission is particularly striking if we consider that while the thought of Speusippus and Xenocrates is extant only in fragments,[3] in the case of Philip, we have access to the entire Epinomis. Vera Calchi’s book claims for the Epinomis a central place in the doctrinal production of the Academy. This aim is, I believe, successfully fulfilled by the author, and the book is most welcome in Platonic as well as specialist studies on the Early Academy.
The book contains eight chapters organised into two main sections. After a short introduction, the first section (chapters 2 to 5) is devoted to exploring the theoretical background from which the Epinomis takes its start. Specific attention is paid to the Phaedo, the Timaeus, the Cratylus, and, of course, the Laws, with the aim of showing how the author of the Epinomis, while drawing numerous elements from a well-established set of Platonic doctrines, capably re-shapes and adapts them by relocating the linguistical borrowings in a completely renewed cosmological perspective. In a world where Forms are absent and god is immanent, the very same vocabulary that the Epinomis borrows from Platonic dialogues is repurposed entirely to serve a different philosophical agenda. After Philip’s contextual and literary panorama has been established, the second section of the book (chapters 6 to 8) explores the social and philosophical background in which Philip operates. The aim is to show the novelty of the Epinomis project in its own times and the challenges that Philip aims to tackle with his theological, political, and philosophical enterprise. Overall, the book provides the reader with a very vivid and fascinating account of the religious and social dynamics of the V-IV century BC and the originality of a philosophical project that acts as a bridge from the classical to the Hellenistic age. Philip depicts a psychic god who is immanent in the material world and, most importantly, whose orderly structure revealed by the order of the cosmos can be grasped by humankind, a visible moral example and a model of virtue for the citizens. Against this background, Calchi effectively shows how the Epinomis is able to advocate the institutionalisation of theology within the city, where theology is considered the highest part of a political project. The immanentistic theology advanced by the Epinomis does not break with the past altogether, though, since it embraces the worship of the traditional gods alongside the new astral cult it proposes, successfully tying together the traditional with the new.
The two sections of the book display two very different methodologies and kinds of arguments. The first section is devoted to an analysis of the vocabulary that Philip appropriates from Plato’s dialogues and repurposes in his prose. To begin, Calchi identifies the Platonic passages Philip is looking at when he is constructing crucial passages of the Epinomis; next, she pinpoints borrowings and changes in vocabulary and highlights the syntactical choices of the author; lastly, Calchi assesses how much weight divergences from or repetitions of Platonic vocabulary carry in the new context, especially insofar as they are transposed into a completely different cosmological perspective. In so doing, Calchi highlights how Philip reshapes the Platonic language to fit a de-transcendentalised framework that emphasises god’s immanence and omni-pervasiveness, its providence and voluntary beneficial action towards humankind, as well as its psychic constitution. Conversely, the second section of the book focuses on social, historical, and contextual analyses. Calchi aims to expose the innovative philosophical proposal that Philip advances against the background of the social, political, and religious climate of its times, and to stress the originality of the Epinomis’ project compared to other philosophical projects in the Academy. This section highlights the aims and motivations for the political endeavour envisaged by the Epinomis and emphasises Philip’s awareness and sensitivity to the religious, political, and philosophical environment in which he operates. By advocating a new, institutionalised astral theology, which, however, also leaves space for the traditional religion, Philip combines the old and the new, thus effectively extending Greek belief and tradition across and beyond the classical era.
The distinction in aim, argument, and style of the two sections accommodates readers who may be interested in different aspects of the book. While in the first section the author often engages in technical, linguistical analysis, with a level of detail that may not always be suitable for entry-level students or readers who are not acquainted with the text of the Epinomis, in the second section Calchi guides the reader into the complex social, political, and religious transformations of ancient Greece, persuasively explaining Philip’s legacy and highlighting the originality of such a politico-theological project.
Students of the early Academy might welcome further discussion of two questions. One concerns Philip’s relationship to the dialogues and the material he is reworking. Calchi examines in detail the changes in language and framework that crucial passages of the Epinomis show compared to the dialogues they appear to engage with. Yet the reader is left wondering what kind of value these comparisons have and how we are to assess Philip’s relationship to Plato’s legacy. Is Philip openly challenging Plato’s project in the Laws? Or, alternatively, is he adjusting it by attempting to fix its inconsistencies? More generally, to what extent can we say that the design of Philip’s new cosmological landscape is deliberately constructed by means of re-adapting the Platonic borrowings? These and similar questions become particularly pressing in chapters such as that on the Cratylus (chapt. 4: ‘The Cratylus and the Epinomis. Homoiosis theo(i) and astral worship’) where Calchi, in order to show that the two books share a set of crucial topics, argues at length that the same thematic organisation that features in the Epinomis also emerges, in the same order, in the Cratylus. Hence the question arises naturally: what motivates the closeness in order and content? The conclusion that ‘the Cratylus and the Epinomis can be said to have [a] common thematic background’ (p. 88) does nothing if not harm the argument that the author attentively crafted in the previous sections.
The other concerns the crucial theological themes of the Epinomis compared to other philosophical programmes in the Academy. The title of chapter 7, ‘Philip of Opus’ contributions to the Early Academy’, sets expectations high. Although Calchi aims to demonstrate that Philip’s interest in politics makes the Epinomis stand out with respect to other Academic philosophical projects, fellow companions of Philip in the Academy are, in general, not frequently mentioned in the chapter and throughout the book, and references to their doctrines are often general and not always entirely accurate (Speusippus’ One, is, for instance, said to be the ‘cause of goodness’ at p. 5). It is true that we have only little evidence left about the political and theological views of Speusippus, Xenocrates, and their companions, and the material’s assessment presents undeniable difficulties. This is, however, precisely the reason why it would be crucial to benefit from the material preserved by the Epinomis to shed some light on other Academic philosophical projects as well and to help us identify missing elements in the discussions.
The fact that the book raises further questions about the Academy, Philip’s Platonic legacy, and the role of the Epinomis does not, of course, detract from the author’s analysis. On the contrary, the curiosity for more that the book arouses demonstrates the success of Calchi’s analysis and validates the urge to bring Philip’s Epinomis back toward the centre of our discussions about the first developments of the Platonic tradition.
Notes
[1] To avoid periphrases such as ‘the author of the Epinomis’, for simplicity I will here work on the assumption that Philip of Opus is the author of the text.
[2] Two exceptions are F. Alesse and F. Ferrari (eds). Epinomide: Studi sull’opera e la sua ricezione. Napoli 2012, where, however, a paper focusing specifically on the god is missing, and F. Aronadio, M. Tulli, F. Petrucci, [Plato]. Epinomis. Napoli 2013.
[3] I use the term ‘fragment’ loosely here.