INTRODUCTION

The epistemological debate between the Greek philosophical schools of the third and second centuries B.C. – the Skeptics on the one hand and the Stoics and Epicureans on the other – can be described without undue simplification as a dispute over the question of the criterion of truth. Strictly speaking, there were two questions: first, whether a criterion of truth exists, and second, what it might be. These questions can also be formulated without the expression “criterion of truth”: the debate centered on the question of whether it is possible to distinguish with certainty between true and false opinions or assertions, and if so, by what means. The Stoics and Epicureans defended the view that it is possible to make such a distinction, but differed over how it might be made. The Skeptics, on the other hand – Academics as well as “Pyrrhonists” – claimed that there is no criterion of truth, and that it is therefore impossible to distinguish between true and false opinions. From this they drew the well-known conclusion that it is impossible to know anything with certainty and hence it is necessary to refrain from any definite assertions.

Even though the problems which were at issue can be formulated in different ways, it seems obvious that we cannot properly understand or evaluate the way in which the Hellenistic philosophers put the question and attempted to answer it without first clarifying the sense of the question of the criterion.

In reading the doxographical reports on Stoic philosophy, one gets the impression that the Stoics had a singular, and often irritating, predilection for identity-statements. The best known case is undoubtedly that of nature, which is at the same time reason, fatum, providence and Zeus himself (Plut Stoic, rep. 1050b). But in ethics, too, one finds such series of identifications, which do not always make understanding the texts any easier. The goal of life, for example, eudaimonia, is supposed to consist in a life in agreement with nature, which is ostensibly the same as a life in accordance with virtue. And this in turn seems to be a life which is determined by the rational selection of that which accords with nature. Virtue, for its part, is designated as a ‘consistent attitude’ (diathesis homologoumenē, D.L. VII 89), as ‘knowledge of what is good, bad and neither of these’ (S.E. M XI 170, 184), and finally as ‘the art of living’ (technē peri ton bion, ibid., 170, 181, 184). These claims are not at all self-evident, and hence obviously require justification. But the explanations are mosdy omitted, or merely hinted at by the doxographers, so that part of the task of interpretation, a part unfortunately sometimes neglected, consists in finding the justifications.

As long as one does not know how an identity-statement is justified, one can hardly judge arguments in which it appears.

In this paper I would like to examine a conception of happiness that seems to have become popular after the time of Plato and Aristotle: tranquillity or, as one might also say, peace of mind. This conception is interesting for two reasons: first, because it seems to come from outside the tradition that began with Plato or Socrates, second, because it is the only conception of eudaimonia in Greek ethics that identifies happiness with a state of mind and makes it depend entirely on a person's attitude or beliefs. In this way it may be closer to more recent ideas about happiness, notably those of utilitarians who treat “happiness” as a synonym of “pleasure,” than to the classical Greek conceptions of the good life. For Plato and Aristode (and in fact for the Hellenistic philosophers too, including the hedonist Epicurus) the happy life certainly had to be pleasant or enjoyable, but they did not think that happiness itself consisted in being pleased with one's life. As the (somewhat unorthodox) Stoic Seneca puts it, “it is not that virtue is chosen because it pleases, but that, if chosen, it also pleases.” I will argue that tranquillity was in fact not a serious contender for the position of ultimate good in ancient times. Greek theories of happiness from Plato to Epicurus were attempts to spell out what sort of a life one would have to lead in order to have good reasons for feeling tranquil or contented; they were not recipes for reaching a certain state of mind.

Of the three statements that often serve to epitomize Epicurean philosophy – at least for polemical purposes – two seem to be reasonably easy to understand: “The universe consists of bodies and void,” for physics; and “Pleasure is the highest good,” for ethics. The third, epistemological one, however, which is usually quoted in English as “All sensations are true,” has been the subject of some controversy and various interpretations by recent commentators.

In this paper I will try to do three things. First, I will try to make a suggestion as to what might have been Epicurus' own wording of his thesis.

Second, I will examine what seems to be becoming a standard interpretation in recent literature, namely the view that the word ἀληθἑς in this context must be taken to mean “real” rather than “true.” I shall try to show that this interpretation is not as firmly based as it might seem to be.

Third, I will propose a fresh interpretation, taking ἀληθές in the traditional sense of “true,” which places Epicurus' thesis in the epistemological debate of his day, but which avoids some objections raised against earlier versions of the traditional view.

Difficulties begin with the words themselves. We do not have Epicurus' own version of his famous dictum, but it is fairly obvious from the consensus of our sources that he must have said something to the effect either that αἰσθήσεις or that all ϕαντασίαι are true.

It is no novelty to say that the Stoics saw themselves as followers of Socrates. According to Diogenes Laertius (7.2), Zeno turned to philosophy after reading the second book of Xenophon's Memorabilia. The Socratic descent of the Stoics was canonized into a school genealogy by the Hellenistic historians, who constructed the “succession” Socrates – Antisthenes – Diogenes – Crates – Zeno. As far as this suggests that each of the older philosophers was in some formal sense a teacher of the next, this is probably an exaggeration. However, it is easy to find typically “Socratic” doctrines in Stoic ethics – such as, for example, the conception of virtue as a kind of knowledge with its corollary, the denial of akrasia; the thesis of the unity of the virtues, and also, at least on one common ancient interpretation of Socrates, the notorious thesis that virtue is identical with happiness. But the genealogy also seems to indicate that the Stoics' Socrates was not, or not primarily, Plato's Socrates, but rather the Socrates of Antisthenes and the Cynics, or possibly Xenophon's. And indeed the Stoic system looks at first sight so different from what we seem to find in Plato's early dialogues that one might be inclined to think that the Stoic version of Socratic doctrine had very little to do with the Socrates of those dialogues. This may be the reason why recent studies of Stoic philosophy have tended, in the absence of extant texts by the major Cynics, to concentrate on the influence of Aristotle rather than Plato as a philosophical predecessor of Stoicism.

Hedonism, like pleasure, can take many forms, and its fundamental tenet, ‘pleasure is the good,’ is notoriously open to different interpretations. Also, the advice, moral and otherwise, given to people who try to pursue this good may vary a great deal, depending on one's view of what pleasure is. To say that a certain philosopher is a hedonist, therefore, is not yet to say much about the content of his doctrine. Still, one would at least expect a hedonist's conception of happiness to be that of a recognizably pleasant life. Epicurus' form of hedonism has seemed paradoxical from the beginning because it does not seem to meet even this modest expectation. In his own time, the Cyrenaics maintained that what he held to be the greatest pleasure was in fact more like the state of someone asleep (Diogenes Laertius II.89) or even dead (Clemens Alexandrinus, Stromateis II.21; Us. fr. 451). Cicero was certainly not the first to argue that Epicurus' doctrine was incoherent and his prescriptions for a pleasant life inconsistent with his principles. Plutarch devoted an entire treatise to showing that one cannot even lead a pleasant life following Epicurus' doctrine.

The difficulty both ancient and modern critics have felt lies in seeing how Epicurus could present his claim that the highest good was a state of absence of pain and trouble from body and soul, as a version of hedonism.

Towards the end of the fourth century B.C., Greek epistemology appears to undergo some dramatic changes. New technical terms are introduced by Epicurus and the Stoic Zeno, indicating a shift of interest from the question ‘What is knowledge?’ – given that there is such a thing – to ‘Is there any knowledge?’. The appearance of novelty may be due to the fact that so much of the philosophical literature of the fourth century is lost. There must have been a sceptical undercurrent from the time of the sophists on, most notably perhaps in the Democritean school. But we have to turn mainly to Plato and Aristotle to recover some of the evidence, and it seems that they had little patience with doubts about the possibility of knowledge. Seeing impressive disciplines like mathematics, astronomy, medicine and other natural sciences develop, they may have found it unnecessary to worry about their very possibility, and more important to investigate the structure of scientific theories and the characteristics of scientific understanding. They may also have thought that their doctrines, which tied knowledge to the universal, were not liable to the difficulties arising from conflicting appearances.

But the fourth century also produced Pyrrho, later seen as the founder of scepticism, by whom Epicurus, who belonged to the Democritean tradition anyway, is said to have been much impressed (Diogenes Laertius (D.L.) IX. 64).

Before I begin an examination of sceptical arguments, I should perhaps say a few words about the term ‘scepticism’ itself. ‘Scepticism’, as I propose to use the word, may be characterized by two features: a thesis, viz. that nothing can be known, and a recommendation, viz. that one should suspend judgement on all matters. These two are logically independent of each other, since the thesis is not sufficient to justify the recommendation. Both are susceptible of different interpretations, so that they do not determine the details of a sceptical philosophy. I think it would be fair to say that in modern times the thesis has been the more prominent feature, while the ancients seem to have considered the recommendation as equally important. In this paper I will be mainly concerned with the recommendation, i.e. with epochē, though the thesis will also come up in the discussion of the sceptics' defence of their position. However, its credentials will not concern us here. I shall start with a problem of interpretation that arises out of the tradition about Carneades. Next, I will discuss the respective replies of Arcesilaus and Carneades to two (Stoic) arguments against scepticism, as examples of two different ways of defending the sceptic position. Finally, I will return to the first problem to see whether the investigation of Carneades' way of arguing can shed some light on it.

The Ten Tropes of Skepticism are, as histories of philosophy tell us, a systematic collection of all or the most important arguments against the possibility of knowledge used by the ancient Pyrrhonists. The list of eight, nine, or ten “tropes,” or modes of argument, presumably goes back to Aenesidemus, the reviver of the Pyrrhonist school in the first century B.C. Very little is known about Aenesidemus as a person. He seems to have lived in Alexandria (Aristocles ap. Eusebius, Praep. ev. XIV 18. 22). Photius tells us (Bibl. Cod. 212) that he dedicated a book to a “fellow Academic,” the Roman L. Tubero, and this may indicate that he started off as a student of the skeptical Academy, but later decided to argue for a different form of skepticism associated with the name of Pyrrho. From Photius's account it appears that he may have been dissatisfied with the dogmatic turn the Academy seemed to take during his lifetime, and hence decided to appeal to the more or less mythical founder of the skeptic movement. We do not know how he became acquainted with the Pyrrhonist tradition, nor whether his collection of arguments had any predecessor; but since later authors tend to associate the list of Tropes with his name, it seems likely that he was the first who tried to present a systematic repertoire of Pyrrhonist arguments.

This volume brings together papers and monographs on Hellenistic philosophy I have written over a period of almost twenty years. Some of them have been hard to find; two were published in German and appear here in translation. I hope that the collection will make it easier to see some of the connections between the different topics taken up in individual essays. With the exception of Chapter 2, my first venture into Hellenistic philosophy, each of the issues discussed here arose from a question left open in an earlier paper. The introductory chapter, previously unpublished, deals with the Sophists of the fifth century B.C., and hence a much earlier period. It started out, however, from a question about the predecessors of the Greek Skeptics: How is it that most of the arguments used by the Pyrrhonists seem to be available at the end of the fifth century, yet Skepticism – at least according to the ancient accounts – begins only with Pyrrho, at the end of the fourth century? I think that a look at the similarities and differences between the Sophists and Skeptics can help one better to understand the role of the skeptical movement in the larger framework of Greek epistemology in general.

A collection of this kind would hardly make sense were it not for the remarkable revival of interest in Hellenistic philosophy inaugurated by the two conferences at Chantilly (1976) and Oxford (1978).

The following rather lengthy piece is a revised version of the Nellie-Wallace lectures I give at Oxford University in the spring of 1984. My aim in this series of six talks was to put together an outline of Stoic ethics that would permit an audience of non-specialists to see some of the connections between the notorious bits of Stoic doctrine with which – or so I assumed – most of us are familiar. For example, most philosophers or classicists will have heard that the Stoics believed the universe was governed by a divine reason, identified with nature; that they defended the view that virtue is the only good, and that the virtuous person would be free from all emotion. But I thought that it was not so clear, given our fragmentary sources, how these doctrines hang together, and so I tried to offer a more or less historical sketch of the development of Stoic ethics as one way in which the pieces of the puzzle could be put together. The first five chapters can I think be read as a continuous account of Stoic theories about the goal of life and of morality; the last one deals with “freedom from emotion,” picking up what is perhaps the most strikingfeature of Stoicism.

I am aware of the fact that a lot has been written on all these topics since 1984, and that it is now much easier, thanks to the sourcebook of A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley (The Hellenistic Philosophers, Cambridge, 1987), to find one's way through the bewildering array of sources for Stoic doctrine.

The prospective student of Stoic ethics who tries, perhaps naïvely, to find out what the proper entrance might be to the apparent labyrinth the Stoics so proudly proclaimed as their system, will soon come across a topic called oikeiōsis. The Greek term is usually not translated, but transliterated; not because it is untranslatable, but because any translation would seem to be intolerably clumsy. What it means can perhaps be rendered as ‘recognition and appreciation of something as belonging to one’; the corresponding verb, which is actually more prominent in the earlier sources, oikeiousthai pros ti, as ‘coming to be (or being made to be) well-disposed towards something’. It will do no harm, I think, to keep the transliteration as a convenient label.

Oikeiōsis, then, appears as the first chapter of several ancient accounts of Stoic ethics. If one turns to the experts for some guidance as to its importance, one finds that some seem to place great weight on it – Pohlenz says it was the foundation of Stoic ethics, Pembroke even claims that ‘if there had been no oikeiōsis, there would have been no Stoa’ – while others tend to play it down, saying that it is just one way of arguing for the fundamental axiom of Stoic ethics, as Brink does, or that Zeno needed it to introduce some differentiation into the field of things declared to be totally indifferent by the Cynics (Rist).

The Sophists of the fifth century B.C. have had a spectacular comeback over the last few decades. One scholar after another, in philosophy as well as in history or in classical literature, has argued that we ought to get away from Plato's devastating campaign to ruin their reputation, and restore them to their rightful place in the history of Greek thought. Perhaps the most complete and balanced picture of their role in the intellectual history of Athens has come from Jacqueline de Romilly. More recendy still, Thomas Cole (1991) has argued, on the basis of what we can find out about their literary activities, that the tradition that makes the Sophists mere rhetoricians as opposed to philosophers is anachronistic in the sense that it imposes an Aristotelian distinction between (rhetorical) form and (argumentative) content upon a period in which such a distinction was not and arguably could not be made. The upshot of these reappraisals tends to be the judgment that the Sophists were both philosophers and rhetoricians, so that their contribution to both fields must be taken seriously. They have a place in both histories, and it is no use confusing the picture by pretending, as Plato does, that they were orators posing as philosophers.

Strictly speaking, though, we ought to say that the Sophists were neither philosophers nor rhetoricians, given that the establishment of philosophy and rhetoric as distinct disciplines came about only in the fourth century.

Skepticism seems of late to have had a kind of renaissance among philosophers. Apart from the usual chapters on skeptical doubt in general treatments of epistemology, there is now a whole series of books and articles, in which a position described as ‘skeptical’ is analyzed and either defended or attacked. Hence it is understandable that historians of philosophy too have turned with renewed enthusiasm to the interpretation of the ancient reports of the Greek skeptics. It seems to me that our picture of ancient skepticism has become more subde and precise through the scholarly studies of the past twelve years (since the appearance in 1969 of Charlotte Stough's book Greek Skepticism), so that it may be worthwhile to take up again the “old question, treated by many Greek authors” (Gellius XI v 6) of the difference between the two skeptical movements in antiquity. For anyone concerned to understand the grounds for skeptical doubt of the possibility of knowledge, it will certainly be of interest to ask whether there were different kinds of skepticism and how these might have looked.

The title of this article belongs to a treatise by Plutarch, which has unfortunately been lost. No doubt it dealt with the difference between the two skeptical schools, because though of course any philosopher from Plato's school could be called an Academic, still, in late antiquity, this label usually referred to the members of the New Academy, of whom the most famous were Arcesilaus in the third century B.C., and Carneades in the second.