Hierocles of Alexandria

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A man climbs a staircase he did not build. The Pythagorean Golden Verses — seventy-one hexameters of plain moral counsel, honor the gods, respect your parents, examine the day before you sleep — had circulated for centuries as a schoolroom text, the kind of thing a boy memorized and an adult half-forgot. Hierocles of Alexandria read them as a single graded ascent, each precept a tread, the whole flight leading from the keeping of ordinary duties to the soul’s resemblance to God. His commentary on that small poem is the one complete work of his that survives, and through it the most undecorated voice in late Platonism still gives its account of what philosophy is for: not the gathering of doctrines, but the purification of a life until it is fit to look upward.

Pythagoras at his book, a detail from Raphael’s School of Athens (1509-1511); the Golden Verses ascribed to his school furnished Hierocles his text. — Raphael, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Life and the Alexandrian chair

The documentary record is thin and built largely from his own pages and from later notices. Hierocles flourished around 430 CE. He came from Alexandria, studied at Athens under the Neoplatonist Plutarch of Athens — the scholarch who had brought the Iamblichean reading of Plato into the Academy and who counted Syrianus and the young Proclus among his pupils — and after a period that included a stay in Constantinople, returned to his native city to teach. There he held the successor’s chair of the Alexandrian school, the lineage of Platonic instruction that ran, by direct descent and self-understanding, from the Academy Plato founded; his Commentary on the Golden Verses was composed during that tenure, somewhere between roughly 415 and 450.

Alexandria in his century was no longer the singular intellectual capital it had been when Philo and Clement wrote there, but its schools endured, and its Platonism had a temper distinct from the Athenian. Where the Athenian house of Syrianus, Proclus, and Damascius pressed the Iamblichean program of theurgy and an elaborately tiered hierarchy of gods, the Alexandrian teachers — Hierocles, and after him Hermias, Ammonius son of Hermias, Olympiodorus — kept to a more restrained register, foregrounding logic, ethics, and exegesis and leaving the ritual machinery in shadow. Hierocles stands near the head of that sober line. The school of Hypatia, murdered in the same city a decade or so before his commentary, belonged to the same broad Alexandrian milieu of Platonic and mathematical study, though his own descent runs through Athens and Plutarch rather than through her circle.

The Pharos of Alexandria, the city’s emblem, in a 1572 engraving; Hierocles held the successor’s chair of the Alexandrian school here. — Philip Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

A biographical fragment preserved by the later writer Damascius reports that Hierocles, while at Constantinople, fell foul of the authorities and was flogged; bleeding from the beating, he scooped up his own blood, flung it at the judge, and threw back at him the Cyclops’ line from Homer — drink, now that you have eaten human flesh — a defiance the anecdote pointedly turns against his Christian persecutors. Whatever its exact occasion, the scene fits the man his prose suggests: a teacher who held that the philosopher’s task is to keep the reasoning part of himself sovereign over everything that can be done to the body.

The Commentary on the Golden Verses

The Golden Verses (Chrysâ épê, the Carmen Aureum) are a Pythagorean catechism in verse, almost certainly the work of later Pythagoreans rather than of Pythagoras himself, gathering the school’s ethical commonplaces into memorable lines. Hierocles took this modest poem and made it the armature of a complete philosophy. His method was to treat the sequence of verses not as a loose anthology but as a deliberate order — an ascent in which the earlier precepts secure the ground on which the later ones build.

The climb has stages. It begins with the practical or civic virtues, the ordering of conduct toward gods, parents, kindred, and fellow citizens — the disciplining of action, mind, and feeling together in the business of ordinary life. These are not preliminaries to be discarded; they are the floor of the structure, and a soul that has not steadied itself in them cannot rise. From the practical the Verses move toward self-examination, the nightly accounting of one’s deeds, and from there toward the contemplative — the turning of the cleansed soul to the divine realities that are its true kin. What looks, on the surface, like a string of maxims becomes in Hierocles’s hands a curriculum of the whole person.

Two great ideas govern the reading, both inherited from the Platonic tradition and both pressed by Hierocles into unusually clear form: katharsis, purification, and homoíosis theôi, becoming like God. Philosophy, on his account, is the purification of human nature from the irrational and the material, and its perfection in the recovery of a happiness proper to a being whose highest part is rational and akin to the divine. The end of the whole ascent is likeness to God — not absorption, not the loss of self, but the soul made resemblant to its source by the steady practice of virtue and the steady exercise of reason. The phrase is Plato’s, from the Theaetetus, where flight from the world is defined as becoming like God so far as a human can; Hierocles makes it the destination of his staircase.

Plato in a Roman copy after Silanion; the goal of becoming like God comes from Plato’s Theaetetus, which Hierocles set at the summit of his ascent. — photograph by Marie-Lan Nguyen, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.5)

What is distinctive in his treatment is the anatomy of the purification. He does not speak of cleansing a single, simple soul. The human being, as he describes it, is composite: a rational soul, and joined to it a luminous body — the augoeidès, the radiant or pneumatic vehicle (óchēma) that clothes the soul and mediates between it and the gross flesh. Purification therefore has two methods, distinct but mutually dependent. One discipline cleanses the rational soul through the practice of virtue and the work of reason; another cleanses the luminous body, fitting the soul’s vehicle for ascent. Neither can be completed without the other, for the rational soul does not travel naked. This doctrine of the soul’s luminous vehicle, which Hierocles shares in outline with Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Proclus while giving it his own ethical accent, is among the most studied features of his thought — the point at which his sober moralism touches the wider Neoplatonic account of how the embodied soul descends and how it is made fit to return.

Hierocles writes throughout for the formation of character rather than for technical display. His prose is plain where the Athenian commentators are dense; he is sparing with the crowded divine hierarchies of his contemporaries and silent on theurgic operation, treating the religious life as the practice of virtue and the rational reverence of the gods rather than as a technique for compelling them. The result is a Platonism that a reader outside the schools could follow — which is one reason the commentary outlasted so much denser work, copied and read and, far later, turned into English while the great Athenian commentaries waited centuries for translators.

On Providence: the lost treatise

His second work survives only as a report. The treatise On Providence (Perì pronoías) is known through the Bibliotheca of the ninth-century Byzantine patriarch Photius, who read it and set down a summary — in codex 214, with further extracts in codex 251 — and through scattered notice in the anthologist Stobaeus. The full subject, as Photius gives it, was providence and fate and the relation of human freedom to the divine governance of things; the work was dedicated to a patron, Olympiodorus, whom Hierocles named as the judge of his argument.

The patriarch Photius in a twelfth-century miniature from the Madrid Skylitzes; his Bibliotheca summary is the chief surviving witness to Hierocles’s lost On Providence. — Madrid Skylitzes, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The doctrine, so far as the summary preserves it, is of a piece with the commentary. At the head of all stands the demiurge — the creating, ordering intellect, a single maker who frames the cosmos and sustains it by providence. Providence is not blind necessity but rational governance: the apportioning of consequences to free acts, so that what each soul becomes follows from what it chooses. Fate, in this scheme, is not a power that overrides the will; it is the lawful sequel of free action, the just distribution of outcomes within an order that providence has already laid down. Against the astrologers who made the stars a chain of compulsion, Hierocles held that such fatalism substitutes an irrational necessity for the divine and reasonable foresight of God — and so dissolves the very responsibility on which the moral life depends. The professed aim of the treatise, as Photius reports it, was to show providence at work while drawing the teaching of Plato and Aristotle into agreement, the harmonizing of the two masters being a hallmark of the late Alexandrian school in which Hierocles taught.

Sobriety among the Platonists

Set beside the founders of the tradition, Hierocles is recognizably their heir and just as recognizably his own kind of thinker. He works within the architecture that Plotinus raised — the soul fallen into body and called to return, the graded reality through which it climbs — but he does not dwell, as Plotinus did, on the heights of the intelligible or the union with the One; his eye is on the ascent’s lower and middle rungs, on the discipline that makes the climb possible at all. From Iamblichus and the Neopythagorean current he takes the reverence for the Pythagorean inheritance, the conviction that the Golden Verses carry a real wisdom; but he sets aside the theurgic apparatus with which Iamblichus and the Athenians surrounded that wisdom, and reads the Pythagorean path as ethical formation rather than ritual operation. His own stamp is the way he joins the moral to the metaphysical. The ascent he describes purifies a person twice over — the rational soul by the discipline of virtue and truth, and the soul’s luminous vehicle, its augoeides, by a philosophical purification he keeps firmly under the rule of ethics rather than of ritual — so that the Golden Verses, that schoolroom scrap, resolve into a single graded path: what a person must do, in what order, to become what reason shows he is meant to be.

Plato and Aristotle, central detail of Raphael’s School of Athens; the Alexandrian school in which Hierocles taught made the harmonizing of the two masters a hallmark. — Raphael, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

This is the temper the Alexandrian school made its own, and Hierocles is one of its early and clearest voices: Platonism turned toward the conduct of life, holding fast to a single providential God and a single demiurgic intellect, confident that the soul’s freedom is real and its destiny upward. The same restraint marks the witnesses who carried Plato to a general audience in earlier generations — the polished exposition of Maximus of Tyre belongs to that lineage of accessible Platonism — but Hierocles writes from inside the late school, as a holder of its chair, fusing the popular clarity with the technical inheritance of the Neoplatonists.

Texts, transmission, and scholarship

The Commentary on the Golden Verses is the one work to come down entire; On Providence exists only in the Photian summary and the Stobaean fragments. The standard modern Greek edition of the commentary is Friedrich Wilhelm Köhler’s Hieroclis in aureum Pythagoreorum carmen commentarius (Teubner, Stuttgart, 1974). Before it, the text was edited by Peter Needham at Cambridge in 1709 and printed by F. W. A. Mullach, first in a standalone Berlin edition of 1853 and then in the first volume of his Fragmenta Philosophorum Graecorum (Paris, 1860) — the public-domain Greek through which the commentary long circulated. (A persistent confusion should be set aside: the commentary is not in Migne’s Patrologia Graeca, which collects Christian ecclesiastical writers; the Hierocles who appears there, answered by Eusebius, is a different man — the governor Sossianus Hierocles, discussed below.)

The work reached English readers early and through a route that says much about its appeal beyond the schools. John Hall of Durham translated it as Hierocles upon the Golden Verses of Pythagoras (London, 1657), published after his death; half a century later André Dacier’s French version was rendered into English in The Life of Pythagoras, with His Symbols and Golden Verses (London, 1707), the Verses themselves there turned into English couplets by the poet Nicholas Rowe. In 1904 Florence M. Firth gathered the Hierocles material into The Golden Verses of Pythagoras and Other Pythagorean Fragments, with a preface by Annie Besant — the channel by which the commentary entered the modern esoteric revival. The definitive scholarly treatment in English is Hermann S. Schibli’s Hierocles of Alexandria (Oxford University Press, 2002), which prints the first complete modern English translation of the surviving works alongside a full study and is the standard point of entry; the Bryn Mawr Classical Review registered it as the best account of Hierocles available. For the wider setting — the restrained, exegesis-forward character of the Alexandrian Platonism in which he worked, as against the theurgic Athenian house — Christian Wildberg’s survey of Ammonius and the Alexandrian school for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy maps the lineage that runs from Hierocles forward.

Two persons must be kept apart from him, since the name is shared. Hierocles the Stoic, of the early second century, wrote the Elements of Ethics and the famous image of concentric circles of moral concern — the oikeíosis doctrine — and has nothing to do with the Alexandrian Platonist. Sossianus Hierocles, the Diocletianic provincial governor whose anti-Christian polemic Philalethes drew Eusebius’s reply, is a third man again. The Hierocles of the Golden Verses is none of these: he is the teacher of the Alexandrian chair, the philosopher of the upward path.

The shape of the ascent

What Hierocles left is finally a single, simple conviction worked out at length: that a human being is a composite of reason and its lower instruments, lodged for a time in a body, and that the whole point of living is to cleanse that composite and lift it. The practical virtues steady the will; self-examination clears the ground; contemplation turns the soul to its kin among the divine realities; and at the summit the soul, purified in both its reason and its luminous vehicle, is made like God so far as a human nature can bear the likeness — free in its choosing, answerable to a providence that rewards the climb, and at last resemblant to the intellect that ordered the world. The seventy-one verses of an old Pythagorean poem were enough, in his reading, to carry a person the entire distance. He spent his teaching life showing how each step bears the weight of the next, and how the man who keeps the lowest precept faithfully has already set his foot on the way to the highest.

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