Plutarch on Isis and Osiris: Text, Cult, and Cultural Appropriation

Abstract

The de hide et Osiride {de hide, h.)} written late in Plutarch's life,2 offers some of the most sophisticated formulations of middle-Platonic metaphysics that have come down to us.3 As scholars have long been aware, this is a deeply and explicitly philosophical text.4 Classicists have generally maintained that in the de hide Plutarch merely uses the Egyptian material as a vehicle through which to express middle-Platonic conceptions about the structure and genesis of the