Introduction

Greek and Roman philosophy developed in a close and frequently adversarial relationship to various literary genres, especially epic and lyric poetry and tragic and comic drama. Moreover, philosophers themselves used some of these genres and created still others (such as the philosophical dialogue, the philosophical epistle); the literary form of philosophical texts is frequently an essential ingredient in their philosophical expression. Philosophers thought in subtle ways about what literary genres themselves express about human life and what is important in it; their contest with the tragedians and other authors was thus fought both on the level of content and on the level of form or style itself. At the same time, literary authors made their own claims to tell the truth about important human matters, going in some cases deliberately against the theories of philosophers. This being the case, the topic of philosophy’s relation to literature in ancient Greece and Rome is as vast as the subject of philosophy itself, and cannot be treated exhaustively.

Introduction

The title of this chapter would have struck most Romans at the time of Cicero as provocative if not downright inapt. Philosophy had entered Rome as a Greek importation, and those who taught it mainly stemmed from Greece or from still further east of Italy. Romans who wished to study philosophy generally travelled to Athens or to other Greek-speaking centres. Early in the principate of Augustus (27 BC-AD 14), Quintus Sextius founded a school that combined Stoic ethics with such principles of Pythagoreanism as abstention from meat. But, apart from this short-lived and unremarkable sect, there were no exclusively Roman schools of philosophy, as distinct from the long-established Academics, Peripatetics, Epicureans and Stoics. The Cynic movement, which gained Roman adherents in the early Empire, did not count as a formal institution, and it too was originally Greek, looking back to Diogenes whom the Stoics had appropriated along with Socrates. There was no home-grown option of any consequence, and therefore no Roman philosophy as such.

Yet, with the benefit of hindsight, that verdict will hardly stand. On many thinkers from the early Renaissance to the middle of the eighteenth century, the influence of Cicero and Seneca was enormous, outstripping in its general diffusion the impact of even Plato and Aristotle (see further, chapter 12).

The beginnings of Physical Science

The earliest literary survivals from the Greek world, the epic poems of Homer and Hesiod, contain, inter alia, accounts of natural phenomena and of the origins of the universe. But the latter are speculative mythology, while the former invariably impute large-scale natural phenomena to supernatural forces: Zeus coruscates miscreants with thunderbolts; Poseidon shakes the earth in anger; Apollo visits plagues upon the impious. There is no attempt to explain events in naturalistic terms (that is, as the natural result of natural forces and the intrinsic properties of things), and no effort to reduce the apparent diversity of phenomena to a small set of explanatory concepts in terms of which they are to be accounted for.

The Greeks themselves considered that with Thales (fl. c.585 BC) there emerged a wholly new way of looking at things, one characterized by Aristotle as the search for the archai, or basic ‘principles’ of things. According to tradition, Thales, the first of the so-called Presocratics, made water his archē. Water was fundamental to the world and its processes, perhaps, as Aristotle says, because of the observation that moisture is necessary for life and that ‘heat comes from moisture’; moreover, the earth ‘rests on water’, a feature which accounts both for its general stability, and also (probably) for the occasional earthquake. Thales also claimed that magnets possess souls, presumably because they have that power to induce motion which is characteristic of animate life.

Introduction

This chapter covers a fascinating stretch in the history of ancient Greek philosophy, ranging from the dawn of the Roman empire in the first century BC until the Arab conquest of Alexandria in AD 640. It is well known that in this period most of the ancient legacy to Byzantine, mediaeval and Renaissance philosophy received its definitive shape. However, in the transmission of this legacy to later centuries much of the depth, detail and motivation of late ancient philosophy was lost. Only in recent decades has the period begun to receive the attention it deserves. Within the confines of the present chapter we shall bring together a selection of the first - often tentative – conclusions in this rapidly advancing area of ancient philosophy.

First a few words on labels and periods. There is some justice in speaking of late ancient philosophy as Imperial philosophy. Nearly all philosophers mentioned in this chapter lived and worked in the Roman empire (western, eastern, or both), and some of them even owed their position to emperors.

Introduction

The 'Hellenistic' age is a politically defined one, bounded at its beginning by the demise of Alexander the Great's empire (on his death in 323 BC) and at its end by Augustus' inauguration of the Roman empire, notionally in 27 BC. These three centuries were a time of major geo-political upheaval in the Greek-speaking world, due first to the growing power of eastern kingdoms and later to that of Rome.

In one way or another, philosophical developments kept pace with these political ones. At the start of the new age, Alexander’s death was almost immediately followed by that of Aristotle (322), who in earlier days had been his personal tutor. In Alexander’s later years, by contrast, he had been accompanied on his eastern campaign by Pyrrho, around twenty years Aristotle’s junior and the philosopher whose name was to become synonymous with scepticism (later known as#x2018;Pyrrhonism’). Pyrrho was as much the voice of the newly emerging age as Aristotle had been of the old.

Ancients and Moderns

While ancient philosophy continues to live on, and indeed to flourish, in the modern discipline of philosophy, the religions of ancient Greece and Rome have left very little discernible trace upon the religions of the modern world. It was only because, and only to the extent that, the pagan religions of Greek and Roman antiquity were radically transformed, almost beyond recognition, into the vast, eclectic world religion of Christianity, that anything of them at all managed to survive the fall of the classical world. The result is that, while the Christian Church shrewdly adapted its practices to the traditional conditions of the mass pagan world it found itself in and while the Christian Fathers elaborated a brilliant theoretical synthesis of certain elements of pagan intellectual culture with Judaeo-Christian theology, religion in the modern world is so different from what it was in antiquity that it requires considerable effort to appreciate ancient religiosity without a feeling of bewilderment, repulsion or superiority.

At the beginning of Book Gamma of his Metaphysics, Aristotle announces the existence of a peculiar branch of knowledge:

The science which considers everything which exists, insofar as it exists, Aristotle calls first philosophy. It is usually named metaphysics.

Introduction

It has been claimed, with some justification, that the 'legacy of Greece to Western philosophy is Western philosophy'. The Greeks, after all, not only defined the main areas of philosophical inquiry – metaphysics, logic, epistemology, ethics and so on – but also formulated the questions which that inquiry has always sought to answer. Yet it was in the period from the twelfth to the seventeenth century that Greek thinkers, together with their Roman interpreters and followers, exerted the most profound influence on later philosophy. During this long epoch, extending from the late Middle Ages through the Renaissance and into the start of the early modern era, everything which survives today of ancient philosophy, with the exception of a few works, was recovered after the losses incurred in the aftermath of the Roman empire's collapse. Moreover, continuing the work of the Church Fathers, vigorous efforts were made, at different times and with varying degrees of success, to bring the major schools of pagan philosophy into line with Christianity. Once restored and reconciled with Christian theology, ancient philosophical traditions supplied the framework within which the philosophers operated and the foundation on which they built their own systems.

Introduction. From fossils to Philosophy

Hippolytus, antipope in the early third century AD, has this to tell us in the course of the survey of pagan Greek philosophy he presents in the first book of his Refutation of all Heresies (exhibit A):

You might think that Xenophanes’ heresy was to have been someone who left God out of the creation story. But that does not seem to have been a point Hippolytus was wanting to make. What leaps out of his report is the picture it paints of Xenophanes as pioneer practitioner of the scientific method.

The Platonic Corpus

From any perspective, Plato's dialogues are extraordinary. Others have tried to write philosophical dialogues, frequently in imitation of his. Indeed other associates of Socrates had already used the genre before Plato adopted it; bits and pieces, along with titles, remain. But the Platonic dialogues remain essentially sui generis, whether taken singly or as a whole. There are somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five genuine works which, while always returning to ethics and politics, between them cover a vast range of topics, and cover them in often startlingly different ways; always, however, using a cast of characters that excludes the author, even in disguise. A main feature is that they define - and would later be taken as having defined - what philosophy itself is, not just in terms of its subject matter but in terms of method and attitude or approach. This they do chiefly by exhibiting philosophy in action; or rather, typically, by exhibiting a philosopher - usually Socrates - going about his business, often in confrontation with others (teachers of rhetoric, sophists, politicians, poets) who dealt with the same subject-matter but in different, non-philosophical ways.

Life

Aristotle (384-322 BC) was a wealthy native of Stagira, a Greek coastal city on the Chalcidice peninsula of Macedonia, not far from modern Thessaloniki. His father, who died in Aristotle's childhood, was physician to the Macedonian king. In 367 Aristotle was sent to Athens, at the age of seventeen, to complete his education at Plato's school, the Academy. Instead, he remained there until Plato's death in 347, studying, writing and lecturing over a wide range of philosophical subjects having roots in Plato's own work - the theory of rhetorical argument and persuasion, logical theory, ethics, and questions of metaphysics, among others. At Plato's death he, together with Xenocrates, another of the leading members of the school, left Athens for the north-western coast of Asia Minor, where the local ruler Hermias (whose daughter Aristotle married - later the mother of his two children) established them at the town of Assos. Aristotle continued his work there, and afterwards for a time at Mytilene on the nearby island of Lesbos, where he apparently first collaborated with the younger philosopher Theophrastus: it appears that his most important researches on sea animals date from this period. In 343 King Philip II of Macedon called him (accompanied by Theophrastus and others) to the royal court to become tutor to his son Alexander (‘the Great’).

Compare the following two questions, both of which greatly exercised ancient Greek and Roman thinkers:

1. 1 What is a good human life?

2. 2 Why isn't the earth falling?

They appear about as different as any two questions could be. The first is one that most of us continue to consider important today. The second is not a question we are likely even to think worth asking: however little physics we know, we know enough to realize that the question itself rests on false suppositions.

Despite this and other contrasts, those who manage to get inside the subject – Greek and Roman philosophy – to which this book aims to provide an entry route should find that the two questions come to exercise an equal fascination. They may even find that the two of them have more in common than at first appears, as I shall suggest below.

Most of the chapters published here originated at a conference held at the University of Toronto in September of 2000. At the original suggestion of Jon Miller, who was working at the time on the topic of Spinoza and the Stoics, the organizers invited a number of leading scholars working in either Hellenistic or early modern philosophy, and several whose work already spanned both periods, to explore various aspects of the relationship between these two periods. Some chose to deal with historical connections and the transmission of ideas between ancient and modern times, but most focused on the comparisons and contrasts between and among the ideas themselves. Jerome Schneewind and Myles Burnyeat drew the session to a close with a roundtable discussion suggesting provisional conclusions as well as future directions for work. From the outset, the organizers of the conference aimed at including a wide range of styles and methods in the history of philosophy, and that variety is evident in this collection. We would like to think that a project of this kind might encourage communication among those who work in different ways on the history of philosophy, as well as among those who work on different historical periods.

Diffusion and Diminution

Of all the ancient philosophies, Stoicism has probably had the most diffused but also the least explicit and adequately acknowledged influence on Western thought. No secular books were more widely read during the Renaissance than Cicero's On duties (De officiis), the Letters and Dialogues of Seneca, and the Manual of Epictetus. Thomas More's Utopians define virtue as “life in accordance with nature,” and this is characteristic of the way slogans and concepts of Stoic ethics were eclectically appropriated from about 1500 to 1750. Neo-Stoicism (capitalized) is a term often used to refer to currents of thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it is quite appropriate to such figures as Lipsius and du Vair. Yet in spite of the Stoic traces in Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Rousseau, Grotius, Shaftesbury, Adam Smith, and Kant (traces that modern scholars are increasingly detecting), Neo-Stoicism scarcely had an identifiable life comparable to Medieval Aristotelianism, Renaissance and later Scepticism, seventeenth-century Epicureanism, or Renaissance Platonism and the Cambridge Platonists. It was not determinate enough to mark a whole period or intellectual movement.

In recent decades, ancient Stoicism has become a mainstream scholarly interest. Not coincidentally, this revival is echoed in work by such well-known thinkers as Foucault, MacIntyre, and Taylor, and we now have Becker's intriguing book, A New Stoicism, which offers itself as the kind of ethical theory that a modern Stoic could and should defend. But Stoicism as systematic philosophy has hardly been refashioned at any time.

Introduction

In “Idealism and Greek Philosophy,” Myles Burnyeat asks two questions:

1. How did it come about that philosophy accepted the idea that truth can be obtained without going outside subjective experience?

2. When and why did philosophers first lay claim to knowledge of their own subjective states?

Burnyeat argues that “it is Descartes who holds the answers to [these two] questions.” The ancients, he alleges, do not view the subjective as a realm about which there are truths. Correspondingly, neither do they view it as a realm about which there is or might be knowledge; for knowledge (both in fact and according to the ancients) implies truth. Nor, Burnyeat argues, do the ancients view the subjective as a realm about which there are or could be beliefs. As he puts it in “Can the Skeptic Live His Skepticism?”:

In Meditation Two, by contrast, Descartes “discovers … the truth of statements describing the subjective states involved in the process of doubt itself”; “[s]ubjective truth has arrived to stay, constituting one's own experience as an object for description like any other.”