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.

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).