Jeremiah Coogan: What To Do With a Late Antique Table of Contents? The Cases of Porphyry and Eusebius

Interest in Roman tables of contents has recently flourished, especially focused on Pliny’s Natural Historyand Aulus Gellius’ Attic Nights. Yet despite the what S. F. Johnson has called a Late Antique “archival aesthetic,” tables of contents in Late Antiquity have not received comparable scrutiny. Addressing this lacuna in scholarship, my paper explores how Late Antique tables of contents served to both structure and disrupt knowledge. By extending Gérard Genette’s influential theorization of the paratext, I situate the Late Antique table of contents as a technology for organizing knowledge. This function is especially visible in the editorial construction of anthologies and other composite texts. I focus on two examples from the early fourth century: Porphyry of Tyre’s outline of the Enneads in his Life of Plotinus and Eusebius of Caesarea’s gospel canons.I argue that both Porphyry and Eusebius use tables of contents to rewrite their respective anthologies. The table of contents constitutes a creative intervention which generates and constrains possibilities of reading—sometimes in ways which run against the grain of the anthologized material. What the table of contents gives with one hand, however, it takes with the other. Although a table of contents structures a text in particular ways, it also invites readers to refuse this structure. Both Porphyry and Eusebius consciously engage this subversive possibility; by inviting certain sorts of creative (especially disordered) reading, they harness the counter-possibilities of the table of contents in the service of their own editorial projects.

Ky Heinze: Origen's Ransom to the Devil and Porphyry's Sacrifices to Evil Daemons

In this paper, I argue that Origen's use of the Devil in his later commentaries (c.240s) was similar to Porphyry's use of evil daemons in De abstinentia (c.260s). Heidi Marx-Wolf's recent publications show that Porphyry sought to discredit traditional animal sacrifices and the ordinary priests who offered them by saying that they interacted with evil daemons rather than with the true gods. Marx-Wolf believes that Porphyry learned to use evil daemons polemically in this way from Origen and the Judeo-Christian tradition, which portrayed paganism as a religion of daemons. Marx-Wolf's claim has merit, but I argue that Porphyry's evil daemons were not simply polemical: they allowed him to reconcile traditional stories of successful propitiation and blood sacrifice with his philosophical belief that the gods never accepted such sacrifices. By saying that evil daemons desired these sacrifices, Porphyry simultaneously validated tradition and saved his philosophical gods. In light of this, Porphyry's strategy was not related to Origen's polemic against pagan religion but to his theory of Jesus' ransom to the Devil. In 1979, Frances Young observed that, because Origen believed in a philosophical God without change, anger, or vindictiveness, he could not understand why the Father would have required the death of his own Son as a sacrifice or ransom to forgive sins. According to Young, Origen solved the problem by saying that Jesus had offered himself, not to the Father, but to the Devil. Thus, both Origen and Porphyry used evil spirits to reconcile philosophy with their respective religious traditions.

Ariane Magny: Porphyry and Julian on Christians

This paper will discuss the remaining fragments of Porphyry’s Against the Christians and Julian’s Against the Galilaeans as found mainly in Eusebius, Jerome, Augustine and Cyril of Alexandria. It will argue that Julian may have used more of Porphyry’s work than recent studies have suggested.

Sébastien Morlet - « Un nouveau fragment du traité de Porphyre contre les chrétiens ? (A new fragment of Porphyry’s Against the Christians ?) »

The paper discusses the possibility that an attack against Origen, transmitted by Marcellus of Ancyra and quoted by Eusebius of Caesarea, may derive from Porphyry’s Against the Christians. Though it is possible that Marcellus is the author of this criticism, there are also good reasons to assume that Porphyry may be behind the text quoted by Eusebius.