The Stoics were notorious for their addiction to etymology. Chrysippus very likely invented the term, which is first attested in book titles of his (D.L. 7.200). And many Stoic etymologies have come down to us. So, for instance, Chrysippus derived λαός (laos, people) from λαλѽ (lalō, speak), and maintained that people are so called because speech is what sets human beings apart from other animals; ἄνθρωπος (anthrōpos, human being) yields a similar message by alluding to the possession of articulate voice (διωρθρωμἑνη ὄψ, diōrthrōmenē ops) (Herodianus, Reliquiae GG 3.1.108, 9–16 Lentz = FDS 671). Fate (ἡ πεπρωμἑνη, peprōmenē, or ἡ εἱμαρμἑνη, heimarmenē) is the perfected (πεπερασμἑνη, peperasmenē) administration of the world and, so to speak, something strung together (εἰρομἑνη, eiromenē) by the will of god (Diogenianus apud Eusebium, PE 6.8.1–10 = SVF 2.914). It would be easy to add more examples, but these should be enough to give the flavour of Stoic etymology. The belief that words encode descriptive content that can be recovered by finding the words from which they are derived is the basis for Stoic etymology as it was for the etymologies proposed by Socrates in the Cratylus. And as these examples show, the information that the Stoics believed that they were able to recover in this way may be important and illuminating. On their view, the opinions reflected in the words that were formed at the beginning of human history, when language was young, were in important points superior to those of their own day, and their motive for practising etymology was the recovery of this primitive wisdom.

Despite the fact that Greek culture (and consequently Roman as well) was intensely language conscious, the systematic investigation of language, its origin, its structure, and its varieties was a relative late bloomer in the ancient world. This is bound to surprise us. To be sure, there were reflections on the relation between speech and its objects from early on among the poets, the Presocratic philosophers, and especially among the sophists, the first professional rhetoricians and teachers of ‘how to do things with words’. That such concern did not immediately lead to the development of language as a field of research seems to be due to several factors. Though the Greeks were aware of the existence of different languages, the acquisition of a foreign language was not part of even an elite education in the Greek world, but was left, rather, to professional interpreters. Furthermore, despite a great wealth of speculation on the origin of culture, language was not a major topic in those considerations. Though there is a host of stories of divine gifts of craftsmanship to human beings, including the civic virtues as a means of survival and the Promethean clandestine handing down of fire, there is no parallel depiction of a miraculous distribution of language to a miserable horde of speechless primitive men. The lack of a mythological account of the origin of language is certainly no accident in a religious culture that presupposes that there is a language common to gods and men: such a mythical background quite unreflectively presupposes that language has ‘always’ been around, even before the creation of humankind (if such a creation was part of the common lore).

Stoic philosophers, probably at least from the time of Chrysippus, were interested in Plato's Cratylus and were influenced by the dialogue. This is not directly attested in so many words, but its correctness is frequently and rightly assumed. Two points of similarity are self-evident. First and most significant is the Stoics' recourse to etymologising. We have copious evidence of Stoic etymologies, especially for the names of gods. Some of these etymologies are identical to ones advanced by Socrates in the Cratylus, and the principles involved are also identical: interpreting the name under investigation by aligning it with one or more words whose meaning is known, on the basis of phonetic similarity between the two sets of words. Thus the Stoics, like Plato's Socrates, explain the name Zeus and its inflection Dia by reference to zēn, ‘to live’, and dia meaning ‘because of’: the name Zeus signifies ‘the cause of life’.

The second point of immediate similarity is the concept of elementary or primary sounds that signify things mimetically. Socrates advances this proposal as an analytical device for discovering whence names, that are compounded out of letters and syllables, derive their capacity for representing things correctly, i.e. as they really are (421c–425c). He then develops the hypothesis that the ancients took elementary sounds or letters to imitate things or properties of things, especially motion.

The prevalence of philosophical appeals to universal agreement in ancient thought indicates that a limited notion of ‘common sense’ was around, at least implicitly, from the fourth century bc. But, despite the partial justification Aristotle gave for such appeals, a developed theory of common sense was not possible until the Socratic insight that rationality is in some sense constitutive of all adult human beings was adapted and elaborated by the Stoics. In this paper, I argue that the earliest theory of common sense in the ancient world was not this Stoic doctrine – the theory of the ‘common conceptions’ – but a transformation of it found in Cicero's later rhetorical works.

This transformation is part of a broader series of developments, from the Stoic understanding of common conceptions, and in the direction of ‘common sense’, in a variety of later philosophical and rhetorical traditions ranging from Carneades in the second century bc to Simplicius in the sixth century ad. Some of the earlier stages of this process seem relatively clear. Carneades initiated a sceptical attack on Chrysippus' theory of common conceptions, by reducing them to common-sense beliefs, and showing how the Stoics' doctrines conflict with those beliefs. And in the hands of his more dogmatic Academic successors (Philo, Cicero, Plutarch), this form of argument acquired a more positive role, parallel to that of the various traditional arguments from consensus omnium of the Hellenistic schools, with the result that, rather than merely showing the inconsistency of the Stoics, it was taken to show the falsity of their basic doctrines.

In his Letter to Herodotus (75f.), Epicurus offers a strikingly non-teleological theory of the origin of (spoken) names, the first phase of which (75) is emphatically and explicitly naturalistic:

The details are much contested, but the general picture seems to be the following: in early humans, involuntary vocal responses were produced indirectly by the external environment, directly by internal psychophysical states themselves caused by external objects. These vocalisations were shaped both by the different objects which came to be named by these vocalisations, and by the physiological and psychophysical idiosyncrasies of the populations of different regions. The notion that people may be differently constituted not only physiologically, but also psychologically, according to their physical environment, was, of course, a fairly common one in antiquity, and not at all a ‘curious idea’, as Bailey describes it (1926: 248, ad Ep. Hdt. 75.8). In brief, that different things have different names within languages, and that the same things have different names in different languages, are alike explained by differences in both the constitutions and the environments of different peoples, who come to make up different language communities.

INTRODUCTION

In recent years, there has been an upsurge of interest in ancient Cynicism, which has benefited in particular from renewed attention to the notion of rhetorical practice. It was recognised that even though the Cynics never formulated an explicit body of philosophical theories, their life-style could be analysed as the exercise of a philosophical rhetoric, intended to convey a particular set of ethical messages.

In this contribution, I will focus on Cynic strategies of communication, and on problems of the interpretation of Cynicism resulting from their communicative choices. First, I will look at the Cynics' use of transgressive non-verbal communication with the help of modern socio-linguistic theories of non-verbal communication and impression management. The Cynics scandalise their audience by their conscious use of the body and its processes for philosophical purposes; anthropological ideas about transgression will be helpful here (section 2).

In section 3, I will turn to verbal communication, and investigate the Cynics' characteristic use of language and literature, regarded as an aspect of their self-fashioning. Here, I argue that Cynic ideas on language correspond to a specific type of folk-linguistics, represented for us by a well-delineated literary tradition of iambos and comedy. I claim that the literary representations of Cynicism that have come down to us cannot be fully understood, unless their intertextual relations with other ancient transgressive genres are explored.

Epicurus' theory of the origin of language has been investigated many times, both in the context of his general theory of the origin of culture and in its own right. Among the various aspects of his theory that have attracted attention, the epistemological has played the most important role. What I try to provide here is not a complete account of the successes and limitations of previous studies, but an outline of Epicurus' theory about the development of language as it can be reconstructed from his own writings and from other relevant texts. In trying to elucidate the details, I will concentrate on some which are controversial and others which have gone altogether unnoticed by scholars. It is, of course, possible that some of the texts I shall use to throw light on the less clear aspects of Epicurus' theory may reflect nothing more direct than the influence of Epicurean ideas. I hope I shall manage to use such evidence with suitable caution. As the title of this chapter suggests, my subject includes the relation of Epicurus to his predecessors. I will discuss this mainly from the point of view just mentioned, by asking what is known of the stages of development of human language discerned by thinkers before Epicurus.

In the Summer of 47 bc Varro promised to dedicate a large and important work to Cicero (Att. 13.12.3 = 13.24.3 Kasten). In mid 45 Cicero was still waiting for the fulfilment of Varro's promise, and his irritation over this delay may have caused him not to accede immediately to Atticus' advice to dedicate a work to Varro. Scholars agree that the large work Varro intended to dedicate to Cicero was the treatise De lingua Latina, which in its eventual twenty-five books was certainly weighty enough. It was also appropriate as a gift to Cicero, offering both theoretical discussions of the methods to be used in determining linguistic correctness and counsel on how to apply the methods deemed best in practice.

Varro organised his work according to a three-fold division of speech into the ‘imposition’, ‘flexion’, and ‘combination’ of words (8.1). For each of the first two of these, corresponding to the study of etymology and of analogy in inflection-derivation (or ‘flexion’: declinatio, Greek klisis), Varro wrote six books, the first three dealing with the discipline itself – one arguing against the existence and utility of such a discipline, one arguing for the discipline, and one expounding it – and the next three comprising applications of the discipline. Since we know, at least for the second century ad, that there were arguments for and against the existence of a discipline of syntax, it is likely that the last section of the work, that on syntax, followed a similar pattern, only at twice the length.

The ninth Symposium Hellenisticum was held in Haus Rissen at Hamburg, 23–28 July 2001 under the sponsorship of Hamburg University. Nine of the ten papers presented here are revised versions of drafts distributed to the participants in advance and discussed at the meetings; Bobzien's paper could not be presented at the conference and the editors are pleased to be able to include it. The final versions of all the papers bear the mark of much discussion, reflection and revision over the months following the conference.

The participants at the Symposium (and their affiliations at the time) were: Keimpe Algra (University of Utrecht), James Allen (University of Pittsburgh), Julia Annas (University of Arizona), Catherine Atherton (Oxford University), Jonathan Barnes (University of Geneva), Gábor Betegh (Central European University, Budapest), David Blank (University of Reading), Susanne Bobzien (Oxford University), Tad Brennan (Yale University), Charles Brittain (Cornell University), Myles Burnyeat (Oxford University), Walter Cavini (University of Bologna), Sten Ebbesen (University of Copenhagen), Theodor Ebert (Erlangen University), Dorothea Frede (Hamburg University), Nikolai Grintser (Moscow State University), Christoph Horn (Bonn University), Frédérique Ildefonse (University of Paris), Anna Maria Ippolo (University of Rome), Brad Inwood (University of Toronto), André Laks (University of Lille), Anthony Long (University of California), Gretchen Reydam-Schils (Notre Dame University), David Sedley (Cambridge University), Ineke Sluiter (University of Leiden), Gisela Striker (Harvard University), Alexander Verlinsky (University of St Petersburg), Hermann Weidemann (Münster University).

Stoic logicians attended to words rather than to things: so claimed Galen, a dozen times or more; and so claimed Alexander of Aphrodisias. Galen and Alexander meant the claim as an accusation and a criticism: it was because they thought not of things but of words, that the Stoics made fundamental errors in their logic.

Nineteenth-century historians of logic echoed the ancient claim, and they too thought that Stoic logic was ruined by its passion for words. Twentieth-century historians of logic also echoed the ancient claim. But for them it was not a criticism. On the contrary, it was a sign that the Stoic logicians were ‘formalists’ – and it is good thing for a logician to be a formalist.

But whether it is bad or good to attend to words rather than to things can scarcely be decided until we know what it means to attend to words rather than to things. In the following pages I shall discuss one or two aspects of the ancient claim and one or two of the texts pertinent to it. The texts concern complex propositions – conditionals, conjunctions, disjunctions. Such items form the foundations of Stoic logic. According to Galen and Alexander, the Stoics made fundamental errors about these fundamental items: they did so because they attended to words rather than to things, because their misdirected gaze encouraged them to misclassify compound propositions.

The Stoics extensively discussed logical paradoxes and fallacies, both of which they would call sophisms (σοφίσματα). They wrote numerous books on the paradoxes of the Liar and the Sorites, which today – again – are the subject of extensive research; they investigated a number of paradoxes and fallacies that are based on puzzles connected with demonstratives, identity, presuppositions and ambiguities, and there are still many questions unanswered about their treatment of each of these. In this paper I take up the Stoic treatment of sophisms or fallacies which contain ambiguities, more precisely which contain an ambiguous word which is responsible for there being a fallacy. In modern terms, these are lexical, as opposed to grammatical or structural, ambiguities, and this kind of fallacy is often called ‘fallacy of equivocation’, although we cannot assume that the Stoic understanding of such ambiguities fully coincides with any modern ones. The Peripatetics called such fallacies fallacies of homonymy, and the Stoics are likely to have called them fallacies of homonymy in single words. The Stoic discussion of this type of fallacies has been written upon with fruitful results by several scholars, but the precise nature of the Stoic view is still a matter of debate. In this paper, I try to sort out the difficulties for an interpretation of the Stoic treatment of such fallacies based on lexical ambiguities, compare it with Aristotle's treatment of this type of sophisms, and explore what we can learn from it about Stoic theory of logic and language.