Note 425 — ADDITIONAL NOTES
Thomas Taylor translation
Proclus here alludes to the fabulous wanderings of Ulysses in the Odyssey. For Homer by these occultly indicates the life of a man who passes in a regular manner from a sensible to an intellectual life, and who being thoroughly purified by the exercise of the cathartic virtues, is at length able to energize according to the intuitive perception of intellect, and thus after becoming reunited to Penelope or Philosophy, meets with and embraces his father. This appears also to have been the opinion of the Pythagorean Numenius, as we are informed by Porphyry in his treatise De Antro Nympharum. “For he thought that the person of Ulysses in the Odyssey represented to us a man who passes in a regular manner over the dark and stormy sea of generation; and thus at length arrives at that region (i.e. the intellectual region) where tempests and seas are unknown, and finds a nation
Who ne’er knew salt, or heard the billows roar.”
See more on this subject in my Restoration of the Platonic Theology, p. 294.