Porphyry on the Cave of the Nymphs

Porphyry and Thomas Taylor · Hellenic and Hellenistic Papers Series · 24 pages

From Thomas Taylor's translation and commentary, Select Works of Porphyry, first edition 1823, reissued Frome: The Prometheus Trust, 1999, as Volume II of The Thomas Taylor Series, pages 145–67, typographically enhanced by the series editor. The frontispiece is Sir Edward Poynter's The Cave of the Storm Nymphs of 1903. Taylor's appendix to the same volume, on the wanderings of Ulysses, is held separately in this section and continues the method used here.

The treatise begins from a short passage of Homer and asks what is to be understood by it. The cave on Ithaca is described with an olive at its head, bowls and amphorae of stone in which bees store honey, long stone beams on which the nymphs weave purple webs, perpetual waters flowing through, and two gates — one to the north by which mortals descend, the other to the south, more divine, impervious to mankind and affording passage only to ascending immortals. Porphyry gives the lines both in verse and in a plain prose rendering so that the details are unmistakable, and then argues that the poet is not describing an actual cave known to travellers. Each feature is read as carrying a meaning: the cave itself as the world of generation, the two gates as the paths by which souls descend into birth and return, the stone bowls and the honey, the perpetual water and the purple webs each answering to something in the soul's passage through matter. Taylor's exegesis accompanies the argument throughout, supplying the Platonic doctrine that Porphyry assumes and connecting the reading to the wider allegorical interpretation of Homer.

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