Why so much has been lost

We know a good deal about Hellenistic philosophy, but by no means as much as we would like to know. The reason is that with very few exceptions no works written by the Hellenistic philosophers themselves survive. The situation is therefore quite different from that in which we find ourselves with regard to the great classical philosophers, Plato and Aristotle. Plato's complete works have been preserved. Much of Aristotle's vast output has perished, but the philosophically more important part of his writings is still available. The reason for the preservation of these Platonic and Aristotelian corpora is that these works continued to be taught and studied in the philosophical schools. Treatises of Aristotle were taught by the late Neoplatonists as a preparation for the study of a set of dialogues by Plato, and those of his works which were not part of the curricula have mostly perished. The professional teachers of philosophy themselves were required to have perfect knowledge of practically everything these great masters had written.

But by the end of the third century AD the schools (in the sense both of institutions and schools of thought) which had been founded in the early Hellenistic period had died out. The works of Epicurus and his immediate followers, or of the great early Stoics for example, were no longer taught, though a preliminary instruction in the views of the main schools could still be part of a decent pagan education in the fourth and to a much lesser extent in the fifth and sixth centuries AD.

A map of logic

The Stoics were the innovative logicians of the Hellenistic period; and the leading logician of the school was its third scholarch, Chrysippus. Most of this section of the History will therefore describe Stoic ideas and Stoic theories. Its hero will be Chrysippus.

Logic is the study of inference, and hence of the items upon which inference depends – of propositional structure (or ‘grammar’), of meaning and reference. That part of their subject which the Hellenistic philosophers called γoλiκη (logikē) was a larger discipline; for logikē was the science which studies γóλoς in all its manifestations, and logic is included in logikē as a part. Indeed as a part of a part. For the Stoics divided logikē into two subparts, rhetoric and dialectic; and logic is a part of dialectic.

The founder famously distinguished rhetoric from dialectic by a gesture:

The gesture is picturesque, and it caught the imagination; but the thought behind it was neither original nor enlightening.

[11] ATTICUS: I recognize that grove and the oak tree of the people of Arpinum:

I have read about them often in the Marius. If that oak tree survives, this is surely it; it's certainly old enough.

QUINTUS: It survives, Atticus, and it will always survive: its roots are in the imagination. No farmer's cultivation can preserve a tree as long as one sown in a poet's verse.

ATTICUS: How so, Quintus? What sort of thing do poets sow? In praising your brother, I suspect that you are looking for praise for yourself.

[2] QUINTUS: Be that as it may, as long as Latin literature has a voice, there will always be an oak at this spot called “Marius's,” and as Scaevola says about my brother's Marius, “it will grow old for countless generations.” But perhaps you think that your beloved Athens has been able to keep the olive tree on the Acropolis alive forever, or that the palm that they show today on Delos is the same as the tall and slender tree that Homer's Ulysses says that he saw there: many other things in many places last longer in recollection than they could in nature.

Fragments of the preface

1 [4.7f Ziegler]. Augustine, Epist. 91.3: Take a brief look at that book On the Commonwealth, from which you drank up that attitude of a patriotic citizen, that there is for good men no limit or end of looking out for one's country.

2 [fr. 1a]. Thus, since our country provides more benefits and is a parent prior to our biological parents, we have a greater obligation to it than to our parents. (+ Nonius 426.8)

3 [fr. 1d]. From which those people call <us> away. (+ Arusianus 7.457.14k).

4 [fr. 1b]. Pliny, Natural History, praef. 22: Cicero is honest: in On the Commonwealth he announces that he is Plato's companion.

5 [fr. 1c]. Pliny, Natural History, praef. 7: There is also a kind of public rejection of the learned. Even Cicero uses it, although his genius is beyond all doubt; more surprising is that he does so through a spokesman: “and not for the very learned: I don't want Persius to read this, I do want Iunius Congus to.” If Lucilius, the creator of verbal wit, thought that he had to speak this way, and Cicero thought that he had to borrow it, especially when writing about the commonwealth, how much more do I have a reason to defend myself from some judge?

Canonic

The two main issues of Epicurean epistemology may be put as follows: what is the foundation of knowledge; and how is knowledge built on this foundation? There is general agreement that Epicurus proposed to rely on sensory observations as a means of knowing what is unobserved. But there is much debate on the extent to which he proposed to rely on empirical observations, on what he took to be the basic objects of observation, and on how he proposed to proceed from sensory information to the discovery of what is not perceived by the senses.

It has been argued that Epicurus proposed to use empirical observation as the only means of determining the truth or falsity of beliefs. He set out two rules of investigation at the beginning of his physics requiring that the truth and falsity of beliefs rest entirely on sensory observations. The two rules consist of a demand for empirical concepts and a demand for empirical data. The latter consist of uninterpreted, or what may be called ‘raw’ or ‘incorrigible’, acts of perception. Epicurus proposed to infer all truths about the physical world and human happiness from this incorrigible foundation.

Against this interpretation, it has been held that Epicurus was not nearly as methodical in his use of empirical observations. Rather, he accepted many nonempirical claims, while proposing to support theories (much like Aristotle) by agreement with perception. Although he supposed that all perceptions are in a sense incorrigible, Epicurus singled out what are ordinarily called true perceptions as the basis for checking scientific theories.

The schools which dominated the philosophy of the Hellenistic age did not disintegrate or disappear with the end of the Hellenistic era, but for the most part continued to exist well into Imperial times. This certainly is true of the two schools which came into existence only at the beginning of the Hellenistic period, and which in their very origin have a distinctive Hellenistic character, the Stoa and Epicurus’ Garden. We can produce a long list of distinguished Stoic philosophers stretching well into the third century AD: a list that includes Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. The Epicureans are less conspicuous in Imperial times, but, again, the list is fairly long, including e.g. Diogenes of Oenoanda in the second century AD. The generalization is also true of the two older schools. Indeed the Peripatos, which had lost some of its prominence and influence in Hellenistic times, saw a revival in the Empire, largely by returning to Aristotle, but without entirely shedding the Hellenistic heritage.

More complicated is the case of Plato's Academy. The debate in philosophy in Hellenistic times was crucially shaped by the fact that the Academy under Arcesilaus turned sceptical, and by the dominance of scepticism in the school until the time of Philo of Larissa and Antiochus early in the first century BC, when Platonism re-emerged. So here there was a break of continuity at the end of the Hellenistic era. But it was not a complete break. There continued to be philosophers, like Favorinus of Arelate, who saw themselves as in the tradition of Arcesilaus and Carneades.

Introduction

Hellenistic political philosophy has had a bad press. In lectures published in 1983 the distinguished and influential ancient historian Moses Finley gave it as his view that Plato and Aristotle ‘were the first genuine political theorists of antiquity, and the last’. For only they attempted ‘a complete and coherent account’ of the ideal society ‘grounded in systematic metaphysics, epistemology, psychology and ethics’. Some thirty years earlier, in what remains an eminently serviceable general account of Greek political thought, T. A. Sinclair wrote as follows:

Finley and Sinclair are only echoing a long entrenched judgement which finds a classic formulation in the third volume of Zeller's great history of Greek philosophy, first published in 1852. For Zeller the Hellenistic period found the Greeks coping with a deterioration in their external circumstances, and particularly with loss of political self-determination as the monarchies of Alexander's successors eclipsed the city-state, by withdrawing into the inner world of self-consciousness.

Introduction: the fourth-century legacy

By the time of the death of Aristotle, there was some measure of agreement among educated Greeks about the nature of the cosmos. The word cosmos itself soon acquired a canonical meaning. Aristotle used it in its wider sense to mean ‘good order’ or ‘elegance’, but in the context of the study of the natural world he used it as a synonym for ouranos, thinking particularly of the heavens and their orderly movements. But the word was defined by the Stoic Chrysippus as a ‘system of heaven and earth and the natures contained in these’ (Ar. Did. fr. 31 ap. Stob. I.184.8–10), and this is a definition that reappears, sometimes with small variations, fairly frequently. It is repeated by the Peripatetic author of the treatise On the Cosmos attributed to Aristotle (391b9). The Epicurean definition was not significantly different (Ep. Epistula ad Pythoclem 88).

From the start this definition marks a difference between the classical use of the word and our own in the twentieth century. The ancient use of the word leaves open the possibility that the cosmos in which we live is only a part of the universe. A cosmos is a limited system, bounded on its periphery by the heavens: what lay beyond the heavens of our cosmos, if anything, was open to debate. This chapter will therefore be careful to preserve the distinction between the cosmos and the universe.

Aristotle had already provided arguments to show that the earth does not move and occupies a position at the centre of the cosmos (In Aristotelis De caelo commentaria II. 14).

Philosophy and mathematics

The relationship between philosophy and mathematics appears to be less close in the Hellenistic age than in previous centuries. The mathematicians proceeded with their work without any explicit adhesion to philosophical doctrines or any reply to the theoretical and epistemological problems raised by the Epicureans and the sceptics when dealing with mathematics. In the fifth century AD the Neo-platonist Proclus saw Euclid as a Platonist, because his Elements concluded with the construction of regular polyhedrons, the basis of the cosmic structure outlined by Plato in the Timaeus (Eucl. 68.20–3; 70.22–71.5). But there is no proof that Euclid meant to direct the whole of his writing towards the creation of a cosmology.

Another level on which Proclus tried to show Euclidean geometry's dependence on philosophy was the formal structure of the Elements. This was based on the distinction between a small number of principles, assumed at the outset without demonstration and listed in the first book as definitions, common notions and postulates, and a body of propositions reached deductively starting from the principles. Proclus highlighted a correspondence between this structure and the theory of science formulated by Aristotle, particularly in the Posterior Analytics, and also between Euclid's principles and those mentioned by Aristotle (Eucl. 76.6–77.2). It is in fact possible to make out some parallelism: for example, Aristotle includes among the principles used by mathematicians Euclid's third common notion, which is that if equals are subtracted from equals, the remainders will be equal (APo. 76a41).

[1] ATTICUS: Since we have already walked enough and you have to make a start on a new topic, why don't we move and sit down for the rest of the conversation on the island in the Fibrenus – I think that that is the name of the other river?

MARCUS: Certainly. I use that spot regularly with great pleasure, whether I am thinking something over or reading or writing something.

[2] ATTICUS: For my part, since I have just now come here, there are no bounds to my pleasure, and I have only contempt for grand villas and marble pavements and paneled ceilings. Those water channels that some people call “Nile” or “Euripus” can only arouse laughter when you have seen this spot. And just as you, in speaking of law and justice a little while ago, made nature the standard for everything, so too in seeking aids for mental relaxation and pleasure nature is best. I used to wonder – I thought that there was nothing here but rocks and mountains, basing my opinion on your own speeches and poetry – I wondered, as I said, why you took such pleasure in this place. Now I wonder why when you are away from Rome you ever go anywhere else.

[3] MARCUS: When I have enough free time, particularly at this season, I seek out the beauty and the healthfulness of this place – though that is not very often.

Foundations and first principles

Stoic ethics starts from foundations and first principles which are more explicit than those of most ancient ethical systems. Chrysippus announced in his Propositions in Physics that ‘there is no other or more fitting way to tackle the theory of good and bad things, the virtues, and happiness than on the basis of nature as a whole and the administration of the cosmos’ (Plu. De Stoicis In Platonis Rempublicam commentarii 1035c). This explicit statement about starting points puts the emphasis on nature in the cosmic sense, i.e. the nature of the entire providentially governed cosmos; but elsewhere Chrysippus turns to a more inclusive sense of nature: when he says ‘Where should I begin from and what should I take as the starting point for the appropriate and as the raw material for virtue, if I skip over nature and what accords with nature?’ (Plu. De communibus notitiis adversus Stoicos. 1069e), it is clear that the nature in question is not just cosmic. Crucial ethical concepts also find their roots in the nature of humans and in theories about what accords with human nature.

The central importance of human nature clearly goes back to the founder of the school. In the list of titles given by Diogenes Laertius (VII.4) we find a treatise On the life according to nature and one On impulse, also titled On human nature. But we have no record of an On goals or On virtue; indeed, the main evidence given for Zeno's views on the telos is the work On human nature (D.L. VII.87). Whatever the rôle of human as opposed to cosmic nature in Zeno's thinking, it is striking that the major ethical treatises (aside from the Republic) suggest a strong interest in the former.

The epistemological turn

It is generally agreed that the Hellenistic period is the great age of ancient epistemology. For a variety of reasons, many of which have nothing to do with the history of philosophy, the period is standardly deemed to start in 323 bc on the death of Alexander the Great. By a curious coincidence, two philosophers of signal and symbolic importance had connections with Alexander. The first is Aristotle, who had been tutor to the young Alexander and who died a year after his royal pupil, leaving a vast body of scientific and philosophical work which, after a period of mixed fortune, would for centuries be considered - in particular by the sceptics - as a model of dogmatic thought. The second is Pyrrho, some twenty years younger than Aristotle, who accompanied Alexander on his eastern campaign: he returned from Asia in his prime, and the words and deeds which filled the rest of his long life caused him, rightly or wrongly, to be regarded for centuries as the eponymous hero of scepticism.

It is tempting - and conventional - to assert that, on Aristotle's death, philosophy saw itself driven from a happy paradise of epistemological innocence, and that the poison of doubt, spat out by the serpent of Pyrrhonism, would oblige any future philosopher who failed to succumb to it to earn his neo-dogmatic bread by the sweat of his brow. And this picture makes a pleasing diptych with the picture which is painted, with equal facility, of the state of ethics: before the geopolitical earthquake provoked by Alexander, the moral existence of the Greeks had been firmly framed by the ethical and political structures of the city-state; after the earthquake, the new Hellenistic schools could offer the shaken citizenry nothing more than recipes for individual salvation.