ABSTRACT
Plotinus contrasts the stillness and introspection of a spiritual going home with the familiar activities of travellers booking their transport, covering ground, and enjoying new scenery and experiences. He makes the travel plans less prosaic by evoking the archetypal travels of Odysseus to his 'dear homeland' and the allegorical interpretation of Homer as concerned with the journey of the soul through spiritual dangers.s He also uses some consciously literary language. Land transport is a 'chariot of horses', hippon ochema/ sea transport is thalattion ti, 'something marine'. This passage made an impression on Ambrose, who used its imagery in Isaac 8.78-9, listing feet and ships and carriages and horses. Augustine may have heard that sermon, or read the passage of Plotinus in a Latin translation, or even made his own translation (O'Donnell, 1992, II pp. 413-24). In Confessions 1.18.28 he develops the theme of movement in space, also using consciously literary language. He adds the 'visible wing', pinna visibilis, perhaps as an allusion to the flight of Daedalus and Icarus described by Virgil (Aeneid 6.14-20).7 Translators find various solutions for the odd phrase 'making his journey with moved thigh', mota popUte,8 but all emphasize the sheer physicality of movement
S See on this tradition Lamberton, 1986.
