Reviewed by: Plotinus: Myth, Metaphor and Philosophical Practice by Steven R. L. Clark Raoul Mortley Steven R. L. Clark. Plotinus: Myth, Metaphor and Philosophical Practice. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2016. xvii +344 pp. Cloth, $55.00. Clark’s Plotinus is as expansive, creative, and generous as his other works in the area of ancient Mediterranean philosophy, and philosophy generally. Throughout the book one may find traces of that great contributor to our field, [End Page 384] A. H. Armstrong, but A. H. Armstrong writ large: this author is someone who has learned from Armstrong, but taken it further afield, and with even more audacity. The hallmark of Clark’s work is his holism, in that he seeks to place ideas in their context and to refrain from robbing them of their richness by virtue of our modern disciplinary classifications or norms of good behaviour. Thus his book Ancient Mediterranean Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2013) places the well-known philosophers of Greece alongside the rest of those of the Mediterranean, including Sicilians, Italians, and Jews, but also moves into the East, known as something remote in the era of Herodotus and Plato, but much more familiar after Alexander the Great dipped into the wisdom of the East, but in his own specific way. Clark’s writing tends to be personal and introspective, but with an objective self-examination which is also intended to enlighten others. An earlier work on Plotinus which referred to the anorexia of a person known to him then used the comparison of anorexia to propose an analysis of Plotinus’ attitude to his own body, of which, we are told, he was ashamed. It was a striking comparison because it opened up the possibility that the psychology of Plotinus may be different from his philosophy, which has its own rigour, and even rigidity, and is capable of exerting its own authority independently of any psychological state with which he may have been diagnosed in these contemporary therapeutic times. The book is mindful of Hadot’s warning not to take every use of metaphor (play, dance) as indicative of Plotinus’ psychological state, as these were most likely tradition-imposed themes which simply had to be evoked by one working in that tradition. These features of introspective analysis and imaginative reconstruction both recur in the present book and in addition there is a consciousness of the subsequent tradition, a welcome emphasis insofar as Plotinus fertilised so much more than simply the last stages of pagan Platonism: thus Clark notes that he has brought an interest in the Greek Orthodox tradition into the study of Plotinus and his inheritance (in particular through Evagrius, Maximus the Confessor, and Gregory Palamas [xvii]). There are unusual things dealt with, with chapters entitled “dancing,” “invoking demons,” and “remembering and forgetting”: such things are tantalisingly present in Plotinus and they cause one to wonder about his everyday life, his involvement in the religion of his time, his social mores, his interest in the magic of the day, and his interest in contemporary art. There are many inklings or hints suggestive of a wider background to all such issues and Clark has an eye for such things, and the imagination to fill out the possible background: one discussion, for example, concerns the idea of nakedness versus nudity (45). There is an emphasis in Plotinus on the need for those who would see the transcendent world to “strip off” what was overlaid in their descent (I.6 [1].7, 4–9). There is a wide discussion of nakedness as a form of preparation, the idea of nudity as a stylised art form—and we know that women unclad became the subject of sculptors from the Hellenistic age on—and the association of nakedness with preparation for gymnastics or military activity. The image of the nakedness of the athlete seems to commend itself for the understanding of readying oneself for the voyage into intellectual transcendence. [End Page 385] The book has an interest in the concept of metaphor and this crops up throughout, for example in the discussion of being subject to charms and magical arts (177): the question asked is whether these are entirely metaphors. It comes...