The Letters of Iamblichus of Chalcis.

• Author: Van Dam, Raymond
• Position: Book review

Translated with an introduction and notes by John M. Dillon and Wolfgang Polleichtner. Writings from the Greco-Roman World, vol. 19. Atlanta: Society of biblical literature, 2009. Pp. xxv + 119. $24.95.

Iamblichus of Chalcis was one of the more illustrious of the sequence of famous teachers who kept alive the traditions of Pythagorean and Platonic doctrines in the Roman empire. During the later third century lamblichus studied with Porphyry, himself a student of the eminent Plotinus. Afterward he returned to his native region of Syria to establish his own school at Apamea, where he died in the early 320s. His philosophical legacy lived on, however. In the mid-fourth century Iamblichus' Neoplatonist ideas influenced the impressionable Julian, who even as emperor still fancied himself to be an intellectual. In one of his orations Julian acknowledged the impact of that "distinguished hero."

Iamblichus made his philosophical reputation as an exegete and a commentator. His so-called Life of Pythagoras was in fact a description of the Pythagorean lifestyle, including its ethics and theology. He also wrote commentaries on numerous works by Plato and Aristotle. Many of his writings are now lost, however, or they survive only as excerpts quoted by later authors.

During the sixth century Damascius, a philosopher at Athens, and Olympiodorus, a philosopher at Alexandria, both referred to Iamblichus' letters. Their citations seemed to imply that a collection of Iamblichus' letters was still in circulation among learned circles throughout the eastern Roman empire. Perhaps it was already only a collection of excerpts, however. In the later fourth or the early fifth century John of Stobi, now often also known as Stobaeus, had included excerpts from Iamblichus' letters in his large anthology of selected passages representing all of Greek literature from Homer to his own times. Since John of Stobi organized these extended quotations according to topics and themes, subsequent Byzantine readers frequently treated his anthology as a substitute for a complete collection of Iamblichus' original letters. As a result, these excerpts are all that have survived of his letters.

John Dillon and Wolfgang Polleichtner now provide an edition and a translation of the excerpts of Iamblichus' letters. Their Greek text reprints the text of the standard edition of the anthology of John of Stobi by Curt Wachsmuth and Otto Hense (published in the late nineteenth and early...