Taylor on the Wanderings of Ulysses

Thomas Taylor · Hellenic and Hellenistic Papers Series · 25 pages

Thomas Taylor's The Wanderings of Ulysses, the appendix to his Select Works of Porphyry, first edition 1823, reissued Frome: The Prometheus Trust, 1999, as Volume II of The Thomas Taylor Series, pages 201–24. It is the companion to Porphyry's Cave of the Nymphs held beside it in this section, and applies the same allegorical method to the whole voyage rather than to one episode.

Taylor begins by placing this essay against his own earlier one. In his History of the Restoration of the Platonic Theology, and in a note to his translation of Porphyry's treatise, he had already attempted to unfold the latent meaning of the wanderings from hints in Porphyry and in an anonymous Greek writer, De Ulyxis Erroribus. Thirty-five years having passed, and forty years of continued application to Plato behind him, he says he now knows much more of that philosophy than he did, and attempts the explanation again — rejecting some things he had adopted before and retaining others. The first point he insists on is a limiting one, and it shapes the whole reading: Ulysses does not rank among the first heroic characters. He was not one of those heroes who descend into the regions of mortality not only from the necessity by which all partial souls descend periodically, but for the purpose of benefiting others and leading them back to perfection. He was therefore no such exalted figure as Hercules, or Pythagoras, or Socrates, or Plato, all of whom largely benefited others; Ulysses benefited only himself, since all his companions perished before he reached Ithaca — he could save himself but not others. Olympiodorus is cited from the manuscript scholia on the Gorgias for the saying that Ulysses wandered on the sea by the will of Neptune, and the allegorical reading of the voyage proceeds from that starting point.

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