The Golden Chain

The Golden Chain — in Greek the seira, the 'chain' or 'cord' — is the tradition's own image for itself: an unbroken succession of teachers and pupils through whom the wisdom of Plato was handed down, link by link, across more than a thousand years. The metaphor reaches back to the golden cord by which, in Homer, Zeus could draw all things up to himself; the Neoplatonists read it at once as a figure for the descent of the divine through every level of reality and for the living line of philosophers who kept that wisdom alight.

The predecessors and the founder

At its head stand the great predecessors — Pythagoras, with his teaching of number and the soul's rebirth, and Socrates, the questioner — and then Plato himself, in whom the streams converge. Aristotle, his greatest pupil, is counted a link in the chain even where he dissents.

The Academy and its heirs

From Plato the succession passes through the heads of the Academy: his nephew Speusippus, then Xenocrates, Polemo, and Crantor. After the sceptical interlude, Antiochus of Ascalon revived the old dogmatic teaching and opened the age of Middle Platonism — Plutarch of Chaeronea, Numenius, Apuleius, Maximus of Tyre, and, on its frontier, Philo.

The Neoplatonic succession

With Ammonius Saccas and his pupil Plotinus the chain enters its greatest age. Porphyry edited and transmitted Plotinus; Iamblichus joined philosophy to theurgy and, through Aedesius, Maximus of Ephesus, and the emperor Julian, carried the teaching across the empire. The Athenian school was reborn under Plutarch of Athens, Syrianus, and the great Proclus, and continued through Marinus, Isidore, and the last scholarch Damascius, down to the commentator Simplicius. In parallel the Alexandrian school flourished — Hypatia, Hierocles, Hermias, Ammonius son of Hermias, and Olympiodorus — until the pagan schools were closed in 529.

The later links

The chain did not end there. Pseudo-Dionysius carried its metaphysics into Christian theology; Michael Psellos kept it alive in Byzantium; Gemistos Plethon rekindled it and inspired Marsilio Ficino, who gave Plato and Plotinus back to the Latin West; and at the last Thomas Taylor rendered the whole tradition into English, passing the golden cord into the modern world — and, in a sense, into this very library.