The Essays and Hymns of Synesius of Cyrene, Vol. 1

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INTRODUCTION

Such is the crown of wild olives that the ‘heir of Time’, to quote one of Synesius’ favorite phrases, has awarded to these victors in games greater than the Olympian.

As we watch the last glow of the sun linger in golden warmth on the Temple of the Virgin Goddess, we are insensibly reminded of the last words in what is perhaps Plato’s greatest work:

‘Wherefore my counsel is, that we hold fast ever to the heavenly way, and follow after justice and virtue always, considering that the soul is immortal, and able to endure every sort of good and every sort of evil. Thus shall we live dear to one another and to the Gods, both while remaining here, and when like conquerors in the games who go round to gather gifts, we receive our reward. And for ourselves, both in this life and in the pilgrimage of a thousand years which we have been describing, may we fare well.’ ¹

The stream of time has taken us more than a thousand years beyond the point that Plato foreshadowed as the goal of his pilgrimage. Whether his successors have succeeded in keeping to the ‘Heavenly Way’, I leave to the reader to determine; but he had one follower at least who was worthy to make the pilgrimage which he adumbrates (sketches out) in the great Myth of Er, and that follower, always a Platonist at heart, was Synesius of Cyrene, who flourished eight centuries after his death, and most of whose works have come down to us.

Looking at this still-beautiful shell of the city of the past with all the illusion of the sun’s last touch to vivify it, we are again irresistibly, if sadly, reminded of that other sunset that was rapidly approaching Athens when Synesius visited it for the first time at the end of the fourth century after Christ. Its light, which had so long illuminated the world, was soon to be extinguished in the early days of the sixth century by the orders of the Emperor Justinian.

The seat of the great University—to which Greeks had flocked from the ‘sprinkled isles’ of the Aegean, from Magna Graecia, and from Ionia, and to whom, even in the fourth century B.C. as Isocrates ² tells us, ‘all other Greek cities were in comparison villages’—was sadly declining at the time of Synesius’ visit. ‘It is nothing to be wondered at’, writes Libanius to one of his friends some seven hundred years after Plato’s...

¹ Plato, Republic 621 c.
² Isocrates, Against the Sophists (or On the Exchange) 299.