The aim of all of Aristotle’s practical philosophy is to provide a description of the best life for a human being, along with an understanding of how that life is to be achieved or at least approached. The discussion of individual happiness (eudaimonia) in the ethical writings and the discussion of political arrangements in the Politics are complementary and equally necessary parts of that inquiry. The happiness of an individual is that of a naturally political animal whose life and happiness are essentially interwoven with that of his fellow citizens. The happiness of a city is nothing other than the happiness of the individuals who constitute it. The best or happy life is the life of virtue. Justice, in one of its forms, is complete virtue in an individual. The best life is thus the just life, and the best city the one populated by just citizens. This much said, much remains to be explained, in particular, what Aristotle thought justice was.

Aristotle’s writings about justice, found chiefly in the fifth book of the Nicomachean Ethics and the third book of the Politics, are notoriously difficult. If there is any explanation for this apart from the combination of the complexity of the issues being dealt with, the state of our texts, and the identity of the author, it has to do with Aristotle’s characteristic method of answering philosophical questions. He approaches all topics through the views of his predecessors, often quite explicitly.

Introduction

This chapter discusses four leading intellectuals in the first and second centuries ad. Their surviving or reported work (together with that of Seneca) provides points of access to the form that political thought took in a period in which there is no extant text that deals, in an obvious and systematic way, with political philosophy. These figures are interconnected in various ways. Musonius Rufus (c. 30–c. 101, these and all subsequent dates ad) taught both Dio Chrysostom (c. 40–c. 112) and Epictetus (c. 55–c. 135). The Stoic notebook (Meditations) of the emperor Marcus Aurelius (121–80) is avowedly influenced by Epictetus’ Discourses; and his version of Stoic theory is broadly similar to that of Epictetus and Musonius. Dio Chrysostom differs from the others in combining the roles of philosopher and ‘sophist’ (public speech-maker), and in his philosophical eclecticism. But a significant element in the thought of his speeches is Stoic (of a type comparable with that of the other three thinkers); he also sometimes deploys the Stoicized Cynicism that appears in Epictetus.

The lives and thought of these individuals illustrate certain more general features of the period. Dio Chrysostom was a leading figure in the so-called ‘Second Sophistic’ movement; and his career displays how sophists, as public performers, functioned as intellectual communicators and as vehicles of Greco–Roman culture throughout the (Greek-speaking) Eastern part of the Roman empire. More broadly, the careers of all four men exhibit the interlinking of Greek and Roman intellectual (and political) life, and the interplay between philosophy and politics in the period.

Preliminary considerations

The Platonism of the first centuries of the empire does not constitute a single current of thought, still less the work of a school. To refer to Platonist authors from the time of Eudorus (active c. 25 bc) until the rise of Neoplatonism the term ‘Middle Platonism’ is often employed: a historiographical category which poses considerable problems. There is not in fact any single Middle Platonist philosophy, but rather a group of writers who may be described as Platonist by virtue of their allegiance to a nucleus of ‘orthodox’ positions, contaminated in many instances by Aristotelian and Stoic doctrines, and not the same nucleus in all cases. That is true for political thought too. The authors of most interest from this point of view, Philo of Alexandria (20/15 bc– ad 45/50) and Plutarch of Chaeronea (ad 45–100), despite sharing features in common, stand far apart from each other. For the political thought of other Platonists of the period we do not have sufficient evidence, but there is nothing to suggest political theories of any great originality or with significant contemporary impact. The consolidation of Rome’s supremacy on the world stage in the first centuries of the empire certainly did not provide favourable conditions for theoretical political thought to flourish: the apparent inevitability of Roman domination limited the scope for political reflection. It tended to oscillate between wary pragmatism and purely theoretical idealism.

The Cynics had no ideals of their own and assumed the worst of everybody else; hence the modern usages ‘cynic’ and ‘cynical’.

Among non–classicists today these are perhaps the two dominant, although contradictory, images of Cynicism. The first projects Diogenes’ behaviour, which some might regard as merely loutish, as illustrating a truly admirable independence of spirit; indeed, some versions add that Alexander delightedly exclaimed: ‘Had I not been Alexander, I would have wished to be Diogenes’ (Plu. Alex. 14. 5; D.L. VI. 32). The second projects the Cynics as, if not positively immoral, at least unpleasantly amoral. Neither seems to encourage claims that the Cynics made an important contribution to ancient political thought, and the contradiction between the two is but a pale reflection of the many difficulties involved in the attempt to uncover a true picture of Cynicism. Any assessment, therefore, of the Cynic contribution must begin by resolving these difficulties.

Introduction: the nature of the Politics

One of the chief problems about discussing any aspect of Aristotle’s political thought, but especially his thinking about constitutions, is the apparent disorder of the Politics. The relatively loose and dialectical nature of the argument is certainly responsible for some of its unevenness: the repetitions, the omissions of promised discussions of particular topics, and the sudden turns, perhaps as the focus changes between two opposing series of reflections. But even when all of this is taken into account, it is hard not to conclude that at least some of the larger pieces do not quite fit together. This fact is reflected in the old fashion, begun in the nineteenth century, for placing Books VII and VIII after the end of Book III. Books VII and VIII contain a treatment of the ‘best constitution’; since the end of Book III, as it stands, promises one, there seem to be good grounds for allowing that promise to be fulfilled. Yet this easy solution turns out to cause as many problems as it resolves, since not only do Books IV–VI turn out to contain more backward references to III than VII and VIII, but IV–VI are a considerably more inappropriate sequel to VII–VIII than they are to III. In that case, the most that can be said is that VII and VIII might once, in some different Politics, have followed Book III.

According to W.K.C.Guthrie in his A History of Greek Philosophy ‘the primary aim of education for statesmanship never left [Plato’s] thoughts. It was certainly his intention that many of his pupils should leave the Academy for politics, not as power-seekers themselves but to legislate or advise those in power, and we have the names of a number who did so.’ The distinguished historian P. A. Brunt takes a different view:

As these contradictory assessments suggest, the sources on Plato and practical politics are not easy to handle, and interpretation tends to reflect the more or less self-conscious preconceptions of the interpreters about for example the Academy (how far was it yet an institution?), or the general credibility of ancient biography and epistolography, or the still more general issue of the impact on public life made by philosophy now or then. The present writer inclines to scepticism or minimalism in all these areas.

There is in Plato’s early dialogues (here labelled ‘Socratic’) a certain ‘intellectualism’ that is quite foreign to the middle and later dialogues (here labelled ‘mature Platonic’ dialogues). Indeed, that intellectualism, with its implication that only philosophical dialogue can improve one’s fellow citizens, is decisively rejected by Plato in the parts of the soul doctrine of the Republic. On that doctrine, it is essential to the improvement of citizens that their appetites and spiritedness be controlled, either by their reason or by the reason of the intellectual elite. This contrast between dialogue in ‘Socrates’ and control of one’s lower parts in ‘the mature Plato’ – one which even those most opposed to ‘developmentalism’ will be hard pressed to deny – is explored in section 1 below. But there are also striking continuities between ‘Socratic’ and ‘mature Platonic’ thought, of a sort sometimes missed by ‘developmentalists’. If for ‘Socrates’ what is required for an individual’s human goodness is that individual’s full intellectual grasp on the real human good, so for ‘the mature Plato’, such a grasp by those in the intellectual elite is quite as necessary for the goodness of all the citizens. These continuities (concerning attitudes to the good, the ideal, the sciences and practical politics) are explored in sections 2 and 3 and section 5 ad finem. Sections 4 and 5 explore these continuities and contrasts as they show up in the three most overtly political ‘Socratic’ dialogues: the Protagoras, the Apology and the Crito.

A century after Cicero’s death, another Roman senator, also a gifted orator, again demonstrated the power of philosophical writing in Latin, but in a different vein and a different style. Like Cicero Seneca regarded the moralis pars philosophiae, which traditionally included political theory, as the most important branch of philosophy, but unlike Cicero, who used a leisured periodic style suited to the balanced tone of a sceptical Academic, Seneca expounded ethics in a nervous epigrammatic style suited to the passionate tone of a committed Stoic. And whereas Cicero had been inspired by the example of Plato and the Peripatetics to compose a de Re Publica and to embark on a de Legibus, Seneca did not write about the relative merits of different constitutions and showed little confidence in what could be achieved by legislation. Indeed it is often said that Seneca showed no interest in political theory and restricted the moralis pars philosophiae to individual ethics.

Similar points have been made about Hellenistic philosophy itself, including Stoicism, and Seneca’s de Clementia, his most explicit work of political theory, is clearly indebted to lost Hellenistic works on kingship, of which there were many Stoic examples. Moreover, between Cicero’s time and Seneca’s there had been important political developments with the advent of the Principate. Cicero had placed his faith in the Roman Republican constitution which, he believed, had once realized the Greek ideal of the mixed constitution, equitable and durable. The divisive trends he perceived, however, led to protracted civil wars and Caesar’s dictatorship, which shattered the dream of constitutional stability.

The transition from Classical to Hellenistic philosophy coincided with the passage from a Greek world in which the polis was the dominant political formation to one presided over by large central states. The first of these was the kingdom of Macedon. The advance of Macedon was swift. In no more than four decades, beginning with the rise to power of Philip II in 359bc, Greece was subdued, the massive Persian empire conquered (334–327), and democracy in Athens crushed (in 319). In this last act Macedon was all but finishing off not only democracy (only Rhodes remained democratic, for a time), but also the independent polis. In fact, freedom and independence had been enjoyed in their fullness in the fifth and fourth centuries only by a few hegemonic poleis (principally Athens, Sparta and Thebes), which dominated the mass of smaller Greek poleis through their leagues, or polities (such as Caria under Mausolus in 377/6–353, and Thessaly under Jason in the 370s). Athens was the last of the hegemonic poleis. After the death of Alexander in 323, the unified Macedonian empire quickly gave way to the Successor Kingdoms of the Hellenistic age based on Macedon, Syria and Egypt, which in turn were absorbed, finally and conclusively, by Rome. After establishing itself, at the expense of Carthage, as the leading power in the Western Mediterranean, Rome in the course of the second century bc became dominant also in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The sophists

Let us begin by considering three Athenian texts of the fifth and fourth centuries bc.

The first, short enough to quote in full, is a fragment of what was probably a satyr (i.e. serio-comic) play. Controversy continues as to whether the author of these forty-odd lines of verse was the tragedian Euripides (c. 485–c. 406), or Critias, uncle of Plato, versifier, political pamphleteer, and leading member of the oligarchic junta that overthrew Athenian democracy in 404 following Athens’ defeat by Sparta, who was killed in the course of its suppression the following year. The speaker is Sisyphus, archetype of villainy and cunning – whose never-ending punishment was and remains legendary:

As later chapters will show, Plato’s political ideas were immediately and immensely influential. Aristotle’s own political thinking largely starts where Plato left off, and much of Hellenistic constitutional theory shows an indelibly Platonic imprint. However, at least at first sight, this influence seems to owe relatively little to the post-Platonic Academy itself. The major figures who immediately succeeded Plato, Speusippus and Xenocrates, seem by and large to have been more interested, or at any rate more innovative, in ethics (and metaphysics) than in politics, though Speusippus is reported as having written an On Legislation, Xenocrates a Politicus, in one book, and – interestingly – an Elements of Kingship for Alexander, in four. Polemon, who took over the headship from Xenocrates, and taught the Stoic Zeno, was also primarily known for his contributions in ethics. After him, with Arcesilaus, the Academy takes a sceptical turn; when Antiochus of Ascalon, in the first century bc, announces a return to the positive doctrines of the ‘Old Academy’, his version of ‘Platonic’ (and Aristotelian) political ideas turns out to be a heavily Stoicized one.

Yet this broad-brush picture cannot be quite right. There clearly was continuing and direct engagement with Plato’s political writings on the part of the Academy: the field was not left entirely to Aristotle. Thus the second part of the famous two-day disquisition at Rome, for and against justice, by the Academic sceptic Carneades seems to have exploited Glaucon’s case against, in Republic II; and we also have fairly secure, and reasonably extended, evidence of the close reading of both the Republic and the Laws within the ‘Old Academy’ itself.

Introduction

Cicero could read in his well thumbed text of Plato’s Republic that political constitutions did not endure forever. Experience reinforced the message of philosophy that the Roman Republic was unlikely to withstand the recurrent civil wars that marked the years of his adult life. Cicero, along with his contemporaries, preferred to analyse historical change in moral terms. Thus, he argued that the traditional constitution of the Republic was intrinsically the most stable available, and the only reason for its weakness was the corruption of the ruling classes. To the modern historian, his conservatism may seem nostalgic or impractical; yet his de Re Publica was received with immediate enthusiasm, while de Officiis proved one of the most influential of all Classical works. Cicero’s strength as a political philosopher lay in the creative and enduring expression that he gave to a remarkably fertile set of aristocratic ideals.

I have described Cicero’s political philosophy as creative. However, much scholarship since the late nineteenth century has been devoted to discovering the precise ways in which his thought is derivative. Cicero the philosopher has been supposed habitually to have imitated a lost Greek ‘source’; and his texts have been mentally translated back into Greek in order to learn more about their alleged author. Unsurprisingly, Cicero’s arguments have seemed both unoriginal and anachronistic. However, the presuppositions, the methods and the results of the source-hunters have not stood up to close scrutiny. In particular, we can no longer ignore the wealth of evidence for Cicero’s wide reading in Greek philosophy and history, and his easy familiarity with philosophical concepts (shown, for example, by jokes in his letters) as well as his outstanding ability to organize ideas and arguments.

Politics, the legislator, and the structure of the Politics

Aristotle’s Politics does not itself articulate any consolidated account of how the nature and scope of inquiry into politics are to be conceived. For that we need to turn to statements elsewhere in his writings, and particularly at the beginning and end of the Nicomachean Ethics. Adoption of this expository strategy is just one index of the fact that for Aristotle ethics and politics are not two distinct even if connected disciplines, but one and the same subject. The name for this subject is ‘polities’; and the systematic, drily analytical treatises which have come down to us under the titles of Ethics and Politics deal with different aspects of it. Politics so understood is a pursuit or a form of knowledge which has as its aim the achievement of the good for human beings – both individually and collectively, in their cities or peoples.

According to Aristotle that good consists in happiness or human fulfilment, which is analysed as ‘activity of soul in accordance with excellence’, i.e. a life exemplifying the moral and intellectual virtues. Roughly speaking, ethics – as its name indicates – is the subdivision of politics concerned with understanding the habits of character which constitute the moral virtues necessary for human fulfilment. The other subdivision studies politeiai or constitutions, construed as different ways of organizing government in a city or nation; it is presumably viewed as the more obviously or directly political part of politics. Under these rather bare and brute descriptions ethics and politics (in this narrower sense) might seem to have little to do with each other.

Introduction to Damascius and the Aporiai kai Luseis Peri Proton Archon (Doubts and Solutions Concerning First Principles)

Damascius (ca. 462–538) was scholarch when the Christian emperor Justinian shut down the Platonic Academy in 529, issuing a decree that banned all pagans from teaching in Athens. Damascius' title, Diadochus, marked him as last in the ancient lineage of Platonic Successors. His attempts to revitalize the foundering school no doubt made it a target of anti-pagan persecution, a persecution that followed in the wake of violent attacks directed against Neoplatonists active in the city of Alexandria. Upon the closing of the Academy, Damascius led a band of pagan philosophers out of their patron city and into exile. We learn from the historian Agathias that

There is some disagreement about the fate of the exiled philosophers after their disappointment over conditions in Persia. It is now disputed that they settled at Haran and thereby transplanted a branch of the school into Near Eastern soil.

In Reading Neoplatonism I discuss the history and nature of Neoplatonic textuality. Over many centuries, Neoplatonism, based now in Alexandria, now in Athens, associated itself with a fixed textual tradition – the corpus of Plato's dialogues and the exegetical tradition associated with it – despite or perhaps even because of this temporal and geographic breadth. And yet more than the adherants of any other ancient philosophical lineage the Neoplatonists insisted that wisdom could be located only outside all texts and outside all language.

Why were the Neoplatonists, who explored so intensively non-discursive or non-propositional thinking, and who subjected formal dialectic to such criticism, exegetical beyond all other schools of ancient philosophy? And how does their suspicion of discursive thinking manifest itself in their texts? Working with the texts of Plotinus, Proclus, Damascius, and others, I show how lack of confidence in discursive argument shaped the textual strategies available to these authors. These texts often appropriate elements from ritual, repeatedly investigate the limits of discursive thinking, and try to illustrate how non-discursive thinking is supposed to work. We find texts that are at odds with their own textuality, discourses that deny that anything has been asserted, and discursive strategies that set themselves against their very discursivity. What are the issues that shaped the very distinctive textual practices reflected in the Neoplatonic tradition?

Reading Neoplatonism touches on issues as diverse as Plotinus' critique of essentialism and Proclus' references to theurgy. What brings these strands of thought together, and how can a scholar justify tracing these disparate phenomena back to a single source? In this book, I claim that the wide variety of textual strategies we find in the Neoplatonic tradition arises largely as a means of circumventing the hestitations that the tradition as a whole has about discursive thinking. There is a diachronic movement to the book: I begin at the start of the Neoplatonic tradition and end with the last Platonic successor, Damascius.

What makes Neoplatonism a unified tradition, and what kinds of resources enabled Neoplatonists to maintain the continuity of this tradition? Formally, Neoplatonists remained allied over the acceptance of Plato's dialogues as constituting something like a foundational discourse. Yet obviously there is a great deal more to the tradition that brought about its cohesion, above all its metaphysical structures and its associations with pagan religiosity. In short, Neoplatonism was a textual tradition as well as a living school; its adherents practiced a minority religion that struggled to define and maintain itself against an increasingly intolerant mainstream ideology.

But if the Neoplatonists rely on the writings of Plato for their metaphysical enterprise, the central feature of this enterprise is nevertheless its insistence on the faculty of intuition, nous, for the truth of its deliverances.