Before tackling in detail the issue of the organization and structure of the philosophical schools, both in the Hellenistic period and more generally, one must try to find an answer to the question of what a philosophical school was. This is a difficult question, which has not yet found an answer that copes satisfactorily with all the problems it poses.

Until recently the theory of Wilamowitz prevailed, according to which the philosophers' schools were religious societies (thiasoi), dedicated to the worship of the gods, or the Muses in this particular case. Wilamowitz started from the presumption that all such ancient societies had cult characteristics and that, for this reason, they were recognized by Athenian law, giving them the status of legal bodies. From an outsider's viewpoint the philosophical schools would therefore have appeared to be religious societies devoted to the worship of the Muses, while internally they would have developed functions like those of modern universities. In the Academy and Peripatos, above all, there would have been activity in scientific research and teaching based on a division of duties between teachers old and young, and carried out in a series of public lectures and private seminars.

Wilamowitz's theory has attracted criticism and objections. In particular, it has been discovered that certain elements which for Wilamowitz were typical of a thiasos (statues of the Muses and their worship) were shared by other institutions like the gymnasia and children's schools, and were therefore not by themselves enough to support the identification of philosophical schools as religious societies.

Augustine, City of God 2.21: The discussion of this topic was put off to the next day, when it was the subject of a heated debate in Book 3. Philus himself undertook to give the argument of those who believe that the conduct of public affairs is impossible without injustice, while making a strong plea not to be taken to believe this himself. He gave a careful presentation of the case of injustice against justice: he tried to show by plausible arguments and examples that the former is useful to the state, while the latter is useless. Then Laelius at the request of everyone took up the defense of justice and asserted as strongly as possible that there is nothing so dangerous to a state as injustice, and that in fact a state cannot exist or be maintained without a high degree of justice.

When this subject had been discussed to everyone's satisfaction, Scipio returned to the previous topic; he recalled and commended his brief definition of the commonwealth, in which he had said that it was the concern of the people and that the people was not any large assemblage, but an assemblage associated with one another by agreement on law and community of interest.

[1a] Cicero, Letters to Atticus 7.3.2: If I had not had that idea about a triumph, which you also approve of, then you would not find me much short of that man who is described in the sixth book. Why should I be silent with you, who gobbled up those books? As it is, I will have no doubts about abandoning so grand a thing, if it is better to do so; it is impossible for both to proceed together, to campaign for a triumph and to speak freely on public affairs.

[1b] You are awaiting the complete foresight of this leader, which derives its name from seeing ahead. [+ Nonius 42.3]

[1c] Therefore this citizen must so prepare himself as always to be armed against things which disturb the stability of the state. [+ Nonius 256.27]

[1d] That discord of the citizens which is called sedition because people go apart in following different leaders. [+ Nonius 25.3]

[1e] And in fact in a civil discord, when the respectable citizens are more important than the majority, I believe that citizens should be weighed rather than counted. [+ Nonius 516.17]

[1f] The passions exercise powerful control over thoughts; they compel and command innumerable things, and since they can in no way be fulfilled and satiated, they drive to every sort of crime those whom they have inflamed with their enticements. [+ Nonius 424.31]

Introduction

As the previous chapter has shown, Epicurean psychology is physicalist in ways that have some affinity to contemporary use of that explanatory model. The Stoic theory is harder to characterize though no less intriguing so far as scientific and philosophical issues are concerned. Modern western thinkers are likely to find the Stoics to be considerably more sophisticated than the Epicureans in analysing the faculties and subjective content of the mind but less plausible than their rivals in accounting for the mind's ontological foundations. By way of introduction, we may note some striking similarities and differences between the two theories.

Like the Epicureans, the Stoics identify the principle of sentient life with a corporeal psuchē. In both theories the psuchē is distributed throughout the limbs and organs of the animal, whether human or non-human. Like the Epicureans again, they draw a sharp distinction between the human mind (which they call ‘thought’ or the ‘governing part’ of the psuchē), located in the heart, and the rest of the psuchē (the ‘spirit’ in Lucretius’ Epicurean terminology), situated in all the other parts of the body. Ignoring differences of detail concerning the relation between the mind and the rest of the psuchē, we have something broadly analogous in both theories to the modern allocation of functions to the brain and the central nervous system respectively.

The physical constituency of the Stoic psuchē, together with its functional division into governing and instrumental parts, differentiates it sharply from the psychology of Aristotle as well as Plato. However, the Stoics’ similarity in these respects to Epicurus should not be overemphasized.

Raymond Geuss originally encouraged me to undertake this translation; I owe him and Quentin Skinner thanks for publishing it in this series, and I am also grateful to Richard Fisher, Elizabeth Howard, Caroline Drake, and Jane Van Tassel of Cambridge University Press for their expert advice and assistance.

A preliminary draft of the translation of Book 1 of On the Laws was used by students in Contemporary Civilization CI101 in the core curriculum of Columbia College; I am grateful to David Johnston, the director of the course, for including it in the course reader, and to the students in my own section who offered useful corrections and suggestions. Susanna Zetzel has offered advice on numerous passages and has improved the introduction immeasurably. Robert Kaster and Gareth Williams generously read a draft of the entire book and have offered many corrections of my Latin, English, and logic. The remaining faults are my own.

This translation was begun during a sabbatical leave in 1993 and completed during a research leave in 1997–98 aided by a Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. I am grateful both to Columbia University and to the Guggenheim Foundation for their support. I received practical assistance of other kinds from my good friends Douglas Kilburn, Robert Phinney, and Scott Decker, who supplied water, heat, and light, without which the revision of this book would have taken far longer to complete.

Introduction

Early in the Hellenistic period the Academy went sceptic. Sceptic it remained until the two leading figures in the school at the beginning of the first century BC, Philo of Larissa and Antiochus of Ascalon, adopted more sanguine positions on the possibility of cognition – albeit mutually incompatible positions. The philosopher who effected this change of outlook in the Academy was Arcesilaus, scholarch from c. 265 BC until his death around twenty-five years later, and reputed as a dialectician whose employment of the Socratic method led him to suspend judgement about everything. He impressed the contemporary polymath Eratosthenes as one of the two leading philosophers of his time. And in his assaults on the Stoic theory of cognition he established the principal focus of argument between the Stoa and the Academy for the best part of the next two hundred years.

The most notable of Arcesilaus' sceptical successors was Carneades, the greatest philosopher of the second century BC. Although like Arcesilaus – and in similar emulation of Socrates – Carneades wrote nothing, his pupil Clitomachus published voluminous accounts of his arguments on issues across the whole range of philosophical inquiry; and it is principally to this source that – albeit indirectly – we owe our knowledge of a subtle system of thought. In the course of his engagement with both Stoicism and Epicureanism Carneades worked out for the first time in Greek philosophy an alternative non-foundationalist epistemology, sometimes misleadingly dubbed ‘probabilism’ in modern discussions of his views – although whether Arcesilaus or Carneades had any views of their own, or were simply dialecticians intent on undermining the positions of others, is a disputed question.

Philosophical theology

Though theology without some form of religion to prompt it would be an odd phenomenon, it is by no means the same thing as religion. Theology, or at least philosophical theology, is a rational enterprise or at any rate an attempt to rationalize the irrational. Rationalist forms of reflection concerning the gods, or the divine, are part of Greek philosophy from its very beginning. On the one hand, the primary principle or principles were often said to be divine or provided with divine attributes, while on the other traditional views of the gods were criticized and other proposals formulated. But the first philosopher to elevate theology (at least in principle) to the status of a part of philosophy was Aristotle, who at Metaph. E 1.1026a19 affirms that there are ‘three theoretical disciplines: mathematics, physics, theology’. Before Aristotle, Plato had argued that those who write about the gods should follow certain ‘models’ (Rep. 379a6). According to this prescription, a god is good and so not the cause of evil but only of what is good, and he does not change but always remains the same. The sharp contrast with the gods of traditional Greek religion, who assume different shapes at will and may not only favour human beings but also deceive and harm them, is very deliberate.

Divinities which conform to this ideal play a decisive part in Plato's and Aristotle's cosmologies. According to Plato's Timaeus we live in the best of all possible worlds because it has been constructed by a Divine Craftsman and his help-mates.

Background

Our principal topic will be the views of the Stoics and Epicureans, and the various sceptical attempts to undermine their pretensions to explanatory understanding. Much of this is the history of polemic and dispute; but we may at the outset identify certain points of contact shared by all or most of the adversaries.

Most importantly, the Hellenistic causal theorists were materialists. And whatever materialism may be taken to amount to, most of them agree that causing is essentially corporeal: causal power is transmitted by bodily contact. Sextus notes that ‘some [sc. of the Dogmatists] say that body is what can act and be acted upon’ (S.E. PH III. 38; cf. M IX. 366), thus defining corporeality in terms of causal efficacy. Congruently, the Hellenistic period sees the emergence of the notion that, properly so called, a cause is something active. Plato had defined aition (‘cause’) quite generally as ‘that because of which (δι' ο) something comes to be’ (Crat. 413a); and Aristotle's four ‘causes’ (aitia: Phys. II. 3) include the material from which something is made, its structure, and its purpose, as well as whatever it is which made it. By contrast, for Seneca a cause is id quod facit, ‘that which actually does or produces something’ (Ep. 65.4); he objects to the ‘crowd of causes’ associated with the Platonists and the Peripatetics; design, purpose, and goal drop out of the causal vocabulary. Not that they disappear altogether; but for something to be a cause, an aition, now implies more than merely that it is an irreducible feature of a complete account or explanation of something, as it was for Aristotle.

[1] <When he saw that everyone was> eager to hear him, SCIPIO began to speak as follows: I will tell you something that Cato said in his old age. As you know, I was deeply attached to him and admired him very greatly; following the judgment of both my fathers and my own desire, I devoted myself to him completely from an early age, and I could never get enough of what he said: he had so much experience of public affairs, in which he had taken part with great distinction for a very long time, both in civil and military matters; he was so measured in speaking, mixing wit with seriousness; and he was passionately fond of both learning and teaching. His life was in complete harmony with his speaking style. [2] Cato used to say that the organization of our state surpassed all others for this reason: in others there were generally single individuals who had set up the laws and institutions of their commonwealths – Minos in Crete, Lycurgus in Sparta, and in Athens, which frequently changed its government, first Theseus, then Draco, then Solon, then Clisthenes, then many others; finally, when Athens was drained of blood and prostrate, it was revived by the philosopher Demetrius of Phalerum. Our commonwealth, in contrast, was not shaped by one man's talent but by that of many; and not in one person's lifetime, but over many generations.

[1] MARCUS: Then I will continue to follow that divine man whom I perhaps praise more frequently than I need to because of the admiration for him which moves me.

ATTICUS: You mean Plato, I suppose.

MARCUS: Precisely, Atticus.

ATTICUS: You could never praise him too much or too often. Even my own people, who never want anyone except their own founder to be praised, permit me to esteem him at my own discretion.

MARCUS: A good decision on their part. What could be more worthy of your own refinement? Your life and language appear to me to have achieved that most difficult combination of seriousness and humaneness.

ATTICUS: I'm very glad to have interrupted you, since you have given me such a grand statement of your opinion. But go on.

MARCUS: Then shall we start by praising the law in accordance with the true praise appropriate to its kind?

ATTICUS: Yes, just as you did with the religious law.

[2] MARCUS: You see, then, that this is the power of the magistrate, that he be in charge and ordain behavior that is right and useful and in accordance with the laws. Just as the laws are in charge of the magistrates, so the magistrates are in charge of the people; it can truly be said that a magistrate is a law that speaks, and a law is a silent magistrate.

The origins of the question

The notion of universal causation was ubiquitous in later antiquity; to loosen those ties threatened the irruption of chaos. How could the evident continuity and regularity of the world survive the intervention of casual elements into its structure? Still, there is a clear distinction, one exploited by the Epicureans, between the assertion of a universal principle of causation and any determinism. It is one thing to accept that every event is caused, quite another to believe that the nature and sequence of all events is rigidly fixed for all eternity. The latter belief forms the core of any determinism – and it is its prima-facie implausibility, along with what are taken to be its unacceptable consequences (for human freedom, for the concept of responsibility), that lays it open to attack.

The origins of the problem in the Greek world were not, however, metaphysical. The Sophistic movement of the late fifth century BC was particularly interested in new forms of forensic argument, especially defence argument. Gorgias' Helen is a case in point: Helen of Troy is innocent of adultery, he argues, because she did what she did either under physical compulsion, or under the influence of love, or at the whim of some god, or persuaded by arguments. In none of these eventualities can she be held responsible for her actions, since in all of them she is compelled by some external force; the list is exhaustive; hence she is not responsible for what she did. Gorgia's rhetorical exercise is not serious philosophy, but it raises serious philosophical points. If our actions are indeed conditioned by factors that lie outside our control, how can we reasonably be held responsible for what we do? Society is, indeed, to blame: Gorgias is the Ur-progenitor of hard determinism.

Introduction

The Stoics are leading champions of the continuum, the Epicureans its leading opponents. Any such division of Hellenistic schools into continuists and discontinuists provides a useful skeleton, but one which needs careful fleshing out.

The Stoic world – like the Aristotelian world before it – is a continuum both materially and structurally: materially because it contains no void gaps, structurally because it is infinitely divisible, or divisible at any point. The Epicurean world is discontinuous in both ways: materially to the extent that it consists of bodies separated by void gaps, structurally both because those bodies are themselves unbreakable (‘atoms’) and because at a still lower level there is an absolute unit of magnitude not capable of analysis into parts (the ‘minimum’).

In case such a characterization should suggest that the material and structural continua are inseparably united, it is important to appreciate that this was by no means assumed by the contemporaries and immediate forerunners of Epicurus and Zeno. Strato of Lampsacus, head of the Peripatos during the later part of their careers, viewed the world as materially discontinuous, thanks to the existence of minute interstitial pockets of void, but as structurally continuous. If, as seems probable, he gave matter a particulate structure, this was in order to account for change, mixture and the like, and his particles were in no obvious sense indivisible. The same can probably be said of the puzzling theory of ‘dissoluble lumps’ (αναρμοι ογκοι) proposed by the Platonist Heraclides of Pontus in the mid or late fourth century BC.