Maximus of Tyre

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Maximus of Tyre was a Greek lecturer and Platonist philosopher of the second century CE, remembered for forty-one short discourses — the Dialexeis, often called the Orations — that carry the doctrines of Plato to a general audience in the polished style of the public lecture hall. He stands at the meeting of two things the age did especially well: the Second Sophistic, the era’s revival of display oratory in classical Greek, and Middle Platonism, the long stretch of Plato-reading that runs between the old Academy and the Neoplatonism of Plotinus.

What is securely known of his life is little, and most of it comes from the discourses themselves. He was from Tyre, on the Phoenician coast; he travelled and taught as an itinerant intellectual; and a late notice places him at Rome during the reign of Commodus, in the years around 180. The dates assigned to him — roughly 125 to 185 — are estimates built on that footing rather than recorded facts. He was not an original thinker in the technical sense, and did not pretend to be: his work is exposition, the conveying of received Platonic positions in an accessible form, and that is precisely what makes it a useful witness to what an educated person of the period took Platonism to mean.

The discourses range across the questions a cultivated audience found gripping. Several are now read closely for their subject matter. One asks what Socrates meant by his daimonion, the inner sign that warned him off certain actions, and sets it within a wider order of daimones — intermediate beings ranked between the gods and humankind, carrying prayers upward and providence down. Another asks whether images of the gods should be set up at all, and answers, in effect, that the divine is beyond all form, so that statues are concessions to human weakness rather than likenesses of anything real. Others treat the nature of God, the aim of life, prayer, and the love described in Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus. Across them runs a consistent picture: a single supreme God, unnameable and beyond the reach of the senses, approached through a hierarchy of lesser powers.

That picture matters beyond Maximus himself. The transcendent God ringed by mediating daimones is the same theological furniture that the Hermetic writings, the Chaldean material, and the early Neoplatonists were arranging in the same centuries — evidence that the conception was the common property of the era’s religious philosophy rather than the invention of any one school. The resemblances are worth noting, and they are not identity: Maximus argues like a rhetorician building a set piece, where Plotinus argues like a metaphysician, and the difference in temper is as real as the shared vocabulary. His value to later readers lies largely there — as a clear, ordinary-language record of a worldview that more difficult authors would carry to its conclusions.

→ In the library: The Dialogues of Plato (Jowett, 1892)

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