Porphyry’s On the Cave of the Nymphs in the Odyssey is a short allegorical treatise from late antiquity, translated here by Thomas Taylor. It takes a single passage from Book 13 of the Odyssey—the cave on Ithaca sacred to the Naiads, with its two gates, one for men and one for gods—and reads it as a compressed map of the cosmos and of the soul’s descent into bodily life. The work belongs to the tradition of Neoplatonic philosophy and pagan religious exegesis, and it treats Homer not as a storyteller but as a theologian who hid ancient wisdom under poetic images.
The Cave as a Puzzle to Be Solved
Porphyry opens by quoting the Homeric verses in full: the branching olive above the cavern, the dark but pleasant grotto of the Naiads, the stone bowls and urns, the stone beams where the Nymphs weave purple webs, the bees storing honey, the ever-flowing waters, and the two gates—one opening north for men, one south for the gods. He then sets out to answer a series of objections raised by Cronius, a Pythagorean. Island chroniclers record no such cave, and it would be absurd to suppose poetic license could carve out roads for gods and mortals, or that nature assigned one descent for humankind and one ascent for the divine. Since the whole world teems with gods and men, the poet must be concealing a mystery beneath allegory.
The puzzles multiply. Why is the cave both pleasant and obscure, when darkness usually repels? Why Naiads specifically? Why do the bowls and amphorae receive no liquid, while the bees fill them with honey? Why are the weaving beams made of stone rather than wood? How do goddesses weave purple in the dark? And why are the gates oriented north and south rather than east and west, when temples face east while worshippers turn west toward the statues? Porphyry’s answer is that the passage is neither mere fiction for pleasure nor topography: it is allegory. He grants that a real cave may have existed—Artemidorus the Ephesian, in the fifth book of his eleven, describes a port on Ithaca called Phorcys with a shore and cave where the Phaeacians were said to have left Ulysses—but whether Homer invented it or the ancients consecrated it, the symbolic inquiry stands, since the more ancient the cave, the more it is full of ancient wisdom.
Caves as Images of the World
The ancients, Porphyry explains, consecrated caves to the world, either as a whole or in its parts. Earth symbolizes the world’s matter, so a cave indicates a world generated from matter: spontaneous, connate with the earth, concave within and extended without. Matter itself the ancients secretly called stone and rock, for its sluggish, resistant nature, and because it is infinite through privation of form it is ever-flowing—hence the streams and the darkness inside the cave. Through matter the world is obscure; through the connecting power and formal order imposed on it, it is beautiful. That is why the cave is lovely to the first entrant but dark to the intellectual surveyor.
The Persians, he notes, initiated the mystic in a cavern signifying the soul’s descent into the sublunary regions and its return; Zoroaster first consecrated a spontaneous, flowery cave with fountains in the Persian mountains to Mithra, maker and father of all, arranged to resemble the world, with its contents set at measured intervals to symbolize the elements and climates. After Zoroaster, mysteries were performed in caverns, and temples, groves, and altars followed the same logic: caves and dens were given to the world and to the Nymphs because of the trickling water over which the Naiads preside. Caverns also signify invisible powers whose essence is occult—Saturn hollowed a cavern in the ocean to hide his children; Ceres educated Proserpine among Nymphs in a cave. The Pythagoreans and Plato alike treated the world as a cave and a den, and Porphyry cites Empedocles’ verse about arriving at a secret cavern and the allegory of the subterranean prison in Book Seven of the Republic, with its entrance open to the light.
Why Naiads, Why Honey, Why Stone
The cave images sensible rather than intelligible essence, since it is stony and humid and contains ever-flowing streams—hence it is sacred to Naiads, nymphs of streams, rather than mountain Nymphs. “Nymph” itself, Porphyry says, applies to all souls descending into generation. Numenius held that souls rest upon divinely inspired water; a prophet said the Spirit of God moved upon the waters; the Egyptians depicted daemons, the sun, and the planets on a sailing vessel rather than solid ground, because descending souls fly to moisture. Heraclitus taught that moisture is delightful, not deadly, to souls, and that “we live their death, and we die their life.” Souls drawn toward body, especially those bound to blood and moist bodies, grow humid and are corporealized; the dead are evoked with bile and blood; body-loving souls attract a moist spirit and condense around themselves a cloud-like vehicle.
Honey, in turn, symbolizes the pleasure that draws souls down into generation, and also serves as an antidote to putrefaction—fitting for aquatic Nymphs because of the purifying and generative power of water. The bowls stand for fountains (a bowl was placed near Mithra in place of a fountain), the amphorae for water-drawing vessels. The ancients called souls bees, as the efficient causes of sweetness; Sophocles described souls humming in swarms from the dead; the priestesses of Ceres were called bees, Proserpine was called honied, and the moon, which presides over generation, was called both a bee and a bull. Honey also symbolizes death, since libations of honey were poured to the terrestrial gods, while gall symbolizes life. Not every soul entering generation is a bee, but those who will live justly and return to their kindred stars—the insect returns whence it came, just and sober, and honey-libations were accordingly called sober. Bees will not settle on beans, a plant whose stalk is perforated throughout without knots, symbolizing generation proceeding in a right line without deviation.
The Two Gates and the Solstitial Signs
Homer gives the cave two gates, one north and one south, the northern open to men’s descent, the southern inaccessible to mortals but the path of the immortals. Porphyry turns to astronomy. The heavens’ two extremes are the summer tropic in Cancer, the most northern point, and the winter tropic in Capricorn, the most southern. Cancer, nearest to us, is assigned to the Moon, nearest of the heavenly bodies; Capricorn, remote and invisible, to Saturn, the highest planet. The signs between them are ordered in sequence—Leo the house of the Sun, Virgo of Mercury, Libra of Venus, Scorpio of Mars, Sagittarius of Jupiter, Capricorn of Saturn—and inversely back again. The theologians called these two entrances; Plato called them entrances. Cancer is the gate through which souls descend, Capricorn the gate through which they ascend. The northern gate is pervious to men descending into generation; the southern is the avenue not of the gods but of souls ascending to the gods—hence Homer says “immortals,” an appellation Porphyry takes as common to our essentially immortal souls. Parmenides mentions these gates in On the Nature of Things, and they were not unknown to the Romans or Egyptians. The Romans celebrate the Saturnalia when the sun is in Capricorn, when slaves wear free men’s shoes and all things are shared in common, obscurely signifying that those born slaves will be liberated through the Saturnian festival and Capricorn, when they live again and return to the fountain of life. January, named from janua, a gate, marks the month when the sun turns from Capricorn eastward toward the north. For the Egyptians the year begins not with Aquarius but with Cancer, since the star Sothis, the Dog, rises near Cancer and its rising is their new moon, the principle of generation to the world.
The gates, then, are not dedicated to east and west, nor to the equinoctial signs Aries and Libra, but to north and south and the solstitial signs, because the cave was sacred to souls and aquatic nymphs—places suited to souls descending into generation and afterward separating from it. Mithra, by contrast, has his seat near the equinoctial circle, bearing the sword of Aries and carried in the Bull, the sign of Venus; as the Bull, Mithra is the Demiurgus and lord of generation, with northern parts on his right and southern on his left. The winds, too, were connected with souls: the north wind suits souls falling into generation, since northern blasts refresh the dying who can scarcely draw breath, while southern gales dissolve life. The north wind, by its superior cold, congeals and retains life in the frigidity of terrene generation; the south wind, being hot, dissolves life and sends it upward toward the heat of a divine nature.
The Fable’s Hidden Truth
The treatise closes by conceding that its author has “obscurely indicated the images of things of a more divine nature in the fiction of a fable.” The whole hypothesis, Porphyry argues, could not have been devised unless the figment had been transferred to an appropriate meaning from certain established truths; fuller discussion is reserved for another treatise, and the explanation of the Cave of the Nymphs is here finished.
The edition’s endnotes extend the argument well beyond Porphyry’s text. Cronius the Pythagorean reappears in Porphyry’s life of Plotinus. Hermias’s scholia on the Phaedrus call the Nymphs goddesses presiding over regeneration, ministers of Bacchus, dwelling near water because they are conversant with generation. Proclus unfolds an Orphic fiction: the vivific cause of partible natures, while weaving the order of celestials on high, was a nymph connected with Jupiter who left her web unfinished, was ravished, married, and generated life in mortal things—the unfinished web indicating that the universe is imperfect as to perpetual animals. Claudian’s De Raptu Proserpinae is cited, and the editor notes that the ancients took the shuttle as a signature of separation, the sceptre of ruling, and the key of shutting. Hermias distinguishes ambrosia, analogous to dry nutriment, from nectar, analogous to moist providential attention; the gods are said to drink nectar when they energize providentially. Ebriety ascribed to divine natures signifies a deific superessential energy—Saturn intoxicated with honey or nectar means he energizes providentially.
The editor then faults Porphyry himself: excellent in philosophy, deficient in theology, as shown by his account of the castrations of Saturn and Heaven. Preternatural things adumbrate transcendent nature, irrational things a power more divine than reason, base things incorporeal beauty; the genital parts symbolize prolific power, and castration its progression into a subject order. Pythagoras’s abstinence from beans signified bewaring of continued descent into generation. A long extract from Macrobius’s commentary on Scipio’s dream, derived from Porphyry, describes Pluto’s empire beginning downward from the Milky Way; souls in Cancer not yet leaving the galaxy rank as gods, and at the Lion begin their future condition; Aquarius opposite the Lion explains why funeral rites fall when the sun is in Aquarius. The soul is produced from a round figure into a cone, from monad into duad; matter flows in material tumult, and the soul is drawn into body “staggering with recent intoxication,” as in the Phaedo; the starry cup between Cancer and the Lion symbolizes this, and oblivion accompanies intoxication. The falling soul is clothed with a luminous body and energizes ratiocinatively in Saturn, practicly in Jove, sensitively and imaginatively in the Sun, by desire in Venus, by pronouncing and interpreting in Mercury, vegetably in the Moon. The lunar sphere is the last of the divine orders and the first in terrene situation; the soul dies when enclosed in the fallen region yet is not extinguished but overwhelmed, and when purified returns to perennial life. Proclus is quoted on the planetary causes—the Moon of nature, the Sun the Demiurgus of sensibles, Mercury of phantasy, Venus of appetite, Mars of anger, Jupiter of vital powers, Saturn of gnostic powers—and further notes cite Phanes or Protogonus, the bull-headed paradigm of the universe absorbed by Jupiter, along with Homeric passages, the suitors’ souls passing beyond the people of dreams, and the old claim that southern regions are more favourable to genius than northern.
What the Treatise Means
Read as a whole, the book is an exercise in a vanished way of reading: Homer as a theologian whose images, properly decoded, disclose the structure of reality. The cave is the sensible world; its stone is matter; its streams are the flux of generation; its darkness is the obscurity of embodied existence; its beauty is the formal order that makes the same world lovely to those who first enter it. The Naiads and the bees mark the soul’s attraction to moisture and to pleasure, the two forces that pull it into body. The two gates turn the whole cosmos into a threshold: descent through Cancer in the north, ascent through Capricorn in the south, with the solstices as the hinges of the soul’s traffic between the sensible and the divine.
The method is cumulative rather than linear. Porphyry piles up authorities—Cronius, Numenius, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Plato, Zoroaster, the Egyptians, the Romans and their Saturnalia—until the Homeric verses sit at the center of a web of pagan wisdom. The endnotes carry that web further, into Orphic myth, Macrobius’s astronomy of the soul, and Proclus’s hierarchy of planetary powers, while the editor’s corrections show how contested this allegorical reading remained even among its inheritors.
The treatise’s significance lies in what it preserves. It is one of the fullest surviving statements of the ancient idea that a poem can be a cosmology, and it transmits, in compressed form, doctrines of the soul’s descent and return, of the solstitial gates, and of the planetary governors of the fallen soul that would echo through later Platonism, medieval cosmology, and Renaissance readings of myth. For a modern reader, its interest is double: as a document of late antique religion and philosophy, and as a demonstration of how seriously the ancient world took the hidden sense of its own poetry.
