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The Private Orations of Themistius

University of California Press

Preliminary Comment on the Oration
(omitted)Preliminary Comment on the Oration
( )

This oration of mine does not have as its goal the winning of honor or the display of oratorical talent; its aim is to express a sense of reverence towards my father, and its assumption was that this reverence would be greater and more solemn if given utterance in your presence. For this is the only audience that it regards as worthy of the dead man's virtue.

An oration such as this one generally tends to eschew verbosity. Besides, the only choice I had was to refrain from speaking at length, since the occasion did not permit me to prepare a long oration. What it required was a shorter rather than a lengthier panegyric. For any funeral oration written long after the death of its subject seems stale; and, [in any case], I have reserved all the particulars of the life of the deceased for a biography.1

If you should find that, in its style, this oration does not fully measure up to the ancient models, there would be nothing astonishing about that. It is difficult to achieve that level of precision in one's writing if one does not work at it constantly, but instead gives much more attention to other things. Also, a philosopher should not be that concerned with beauty of

"for a biography": see Ballriaux's reservations about this understanding of the Greek (AC 65 [1996]: 145, n. 56).

language. Rather, you should mainly pay heed to whether or not he has, on all occasions, been true to his sense of what befits a [philosopher's] son and one who is himself trying to be a philosopher.2

[233 ] You [who are my audience] say that you will not allow me to sing dirges and lamentations. Nor does philosophy permit this. Whenever she sees me overwhelmed by grief and brought to tears, she becomes angry and threatens to do dreadful and pernicious things to me. She threatens to deprive me straightway of what my father left meand I do not mean land and fields and flocks. I mean the thing that I strive for and lay claim to above all else, the thing that I alone among my brothers am trying to inherit.3 Philosophy threatens [234 ], if I am overwhelmed by grief, to strike my name off the list of her attendants. I must therefore keep my eyes as steady as iron or horn, just as Homer made the eyes of Laertes's son [Odysseus] stay fixed while he was concealing the pity he felt for his wife [Od. 19.20912]. Odysseus, though, did not need much endurance, for he was soon to have his Penelope and speak freely to her. But you, once gentlest of fathers and now gentlest of gods, when will I be reunited with you?

Philosophy has just now carried you across on that blessed journey. Having returned from there, she brings us the newsif we are to believe herthat, as soon as you were freed from the bond of nature, you immediately darted high up towards the aether and heaven. You did not have to break or pull away from that bond while it continued to hold you down; rather, it released you and let you go on its own. Philosophy tells us that you yoked together the pair of immortal horses that you raised and reared together over such a long period of time. These are the horses that you habituated to run in unison and to hasten upwards together, so that one of them does not force the yoke up while the other drags it down. It is because of the training you gave them, I suppose, that you did not just now have to use goads or reins on the pretentious and arrogant horse. No, that horse was gentle and kind to his fellow steed and cooperated in pulling your chariot upwards.4

With Deichgrber in Oppermann's edition, I have deleted the last three words of the , (viz., ). On this and other (pro ) that have survived in the Themistian corpus, see Seeck and Schenkl, RhM 61 (1906): 56066.

"dirges and lamentations": cf. Pl., Rep. 3.398d. "the thing that I . . . am trying to inherit": i.e., philosophy.

For the two horses of the soul, see Pl., Phaedr . 246ab, 247b.

The holy gathering of gods and the assembly of benevolent spirits [daimones ] received you. They blessed you, went forth to meet you and welcomed you because you had fulfilled the task for which they had sent you to the earth and then returned promptly in an unblemished and holy state. Neither before nor after your return did Rhadamanthys or Minos find any imprint or mark of defilement on your soul. Those two men sit you next to Socrates and Plato, having also brought out your favorite, the divine Aristotle. Even during your sojourn here [on earth] you used to strive greatly to associate with Aristotle. Your physical body was unable to bar you from associating with him, even though your favorite was then so very far away.5

O divine person, I imagine that the famous Aristotle now honors you and loves you more than he loves anyone else and is so full of joy that he does not know what to do with himself. He renders thanks to you [235 ] for having been his interpreter, a more lucid one than a Bacis or an Amphilytus was for Loxias [Apollo]. He is grateful to you for having explained the wisdom that he had discovered and cultivated but then concealed in darkness and wrapped in abstruseness. His intention had not been to grudge good men this wisdom; but he did not want to cast it out onto the streets either.6 You would determine who were worthy of his wisdom. You would remove the darkness and uncover Aristotle's handiwork [] for them.

Just as a person approached the inner sanctuary [of Aristotle's works], he would be filled with awe and anxiety. He would be in distress and gripped by a sense of utter helplessness, unable to take a step, unable to embark on any path that would lead him into the sanctuary. Then that interpreter [Eugenius] would open the gateway of the temple, clothe the god's statue [], and make it beautiful and clean on all sides. He would show the statue, now all sparkling and shining with a heavenly light, to the initiate. That fog and cloud would be completely broken up without delay. From the depths, meaning would emerge, full of light and splendor instead of the original dark-

Rhadamanthys and Minos were judges in the next world (e.g., Pl., Apol. 41a, Gorg. 523e24a). The Greek for "associate" (, ) in the last two sentences of this paragraph is commonly used of a pupil's relation to a teacher.

"O divine person": as at Them., Orat. 3.46b, 9.128a, 14.183d; cf. Pl., Phaedr. 234d, Tim. 44d. "a Bacis or an Amphilytus": famous prophets (interpreters of the god's will). Cf. Pl., Theag. 124d; Ael. Aristid., Orat. 5.40 Lenz-Behr; Liban., Orat. 56.11; Them., Orat. 2.26c, 3.46b. Bacis was originally a title; several well-known prophets bore the name (Kern, "Bakis 1," RE, 2 [1896]: 28012). "He is grateful . . . onto the streets either": cf., for this and the next paragraph, Them., Orat. 23.294d, 26.319bd.

ness. And Aphrodite would be at the torch-bearer's [i.e., Eugenius's] side, and the Graces would also attach themselves to the sacred rite.7

To be sure, the visage and shape impressed upon these sacred mysteries were almost entirely those of Aristotle....