Philosophies of Language, Theories of Translation, and Imperial Intellectual Production: The Cases of Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Eusebius

摘要

POSTCOLONIAL theorists have often examined the ways in which intellectualnpractices are conditioned by and contribute to imperial systems ofnknowledge and power. Scholars of late antiquity, for their part, havenpointed to the ways in which late-ancient religious and ethnic identities werenconstructed linguistically and textually. This paper examines the works ofnthree contemporaries—the Neoplatonic philosophers Porphyry of Tyre andnIamblichus of Chalcis and the Christian bishop Eusebius of Caesarea—innorder to explore the ways in which ancient linguistic theories and practicesnserved as a kind of border-post in which late-ancient intellectuals constructednand contested imperial subjectivities.