One of the most original aspects of the Epicurean theory of justice, and one which has not yet been adequately explained, is the distinction which it introduces between the concept of justice and that of law. In the philosophical tradition before Epicurus law itself constituted one form of justice, namely legal justice (dikaion nomikon), sometimes contrasted with a superior form, natural justice (dikaion phusikon). Some rejected the idea of natural justice, and simply equated just conduct with conformity to law. ‘Justice is not to transgress the laws (nomima) of the city in which one lives as a citizen’, says Antiphon (On truth, fr. 44B, col. 1). And Thrasymachus (in Plato, Rep. 1 338c–339a) repeats that justice consists in promoting the interests of your ruler, in other words, in obeying the laws imposed by your ruler in his own interests. On the other hand, when Plato maintained that laws which do not deserve the name ‘just’ are not real laws (Laws 715b2–6) — that is, when he identified law with just law — he was confirming that same Sophistic equation of nomos and dikaion at the same time as turning its meaning upside down. And closer to the time of Epicurus, we still find Aristotle asserting that ‘justice is conformity to law’ (Nicomachean Ethics 1129a34), and defining universal justice (as distinct from particular justice) as observance of the law.

Oikonomikē technē, the art of household management, has not much been studied, so far as the Hellenistic period is concerned. Histories of economic thought, when they refer to ancient thought, usually pass directly from Aristotle or his immediate successors to medieval economic Aristotelianism; even the most recent and up-to-date of these are no exception. It would seem that ancient economic thought, having reached its zenith in Aristotle's Politics, disappeared, only to reappear as a catalyst for the reflections of medieval commentators. However, several post-Aristotelian texts on the topic of oikonomikē exist such as the Economics of Ps.-Aristotle and the so-called Economics of Philodemus of Gadara; from a later age there are the Economics of the Neopythagoreans Callicratides and Bryson, the Economics of Dio of Prusa, the Economics of Hierocles and various other documents which, though not called Economics, are concerned with subjects connected with oikonomikē technē.

As far as I know, a general overview of the subject matter with which I am concerned is not available. Only the products of some of the schools, especially Ps.-Aristotle's Economics, have stimulated a sufficiently wide debate. I would like here to make a comparably broad study of the whole subject, with a view to a comprehensive synthesis.

‘Live unknown’, said the Epicureans, enjoining abstinence from politics. The Stoics, by contrast, believed that the wise man should go into public life if the circumstances were right, but held notoriously utopian and in the end depoliticized conceptions of the good community. Neither school debated the merits of oligarchy and democracy or tried to work out detailed prescriptions for the best constitution. These intellectual postures have sometimes been seen as appropriate and indeed inevitable responses to the decline of the polis in the age of the Hellenistic kingdoms: no polis, no political philosophy.

There is of course a grain of truth in this conventional picture of political thought — or its absence — in the Hellenistic period. But the present volume tells a more nuanced and complex story. One reason is that it reflects theorizing undertaken from a Roman perspective. Rome was the greatest of the Mediterranean cities of the time, and Rome was not a monarchy but an independent republic governed according to a distinctive constitutional structure which invited analysis along broadly Aristotelian lines. The principal surviving analyses, albeit fragmentarily preserved, come from the pens of Polybius, writing in the mid-second century BC, and Cicero, a hundred years later. Chapters 1 and 2 discuss the way in which these two authors draw on a wide range of Greek intellectual models to devise accounts of constitutional development (ch. 1) and of the moral and intellectual requirements the statesman — conceived as the magistrate of a republic — must satisfy (ch. 2), which are then applied to the case of Rome.

What was the Cynic attitude towards politics? How did Cynics use the lexicon of politics? Was there a range of Cynic attitudes? Did Cynicism influence the political thought of others? Can one talk of Cynic political theory? My treatment of these questions will be chronological, to allow for development in Cynic thought, though Cynicism did not develop linearly (there were always Cynics who thought and behaved like Diogenes) and the notion of development is problematic (Cynicism was more a way of life than a system of thought). The treatment must also be selective: this essay presupposes the importance of the whole topic, and the more significance one attaches to Cynicism, the larger the topic will be, especially because in a fundamental sense, as we shall see, Cynic ‘politics’ are simply the Cynic way of life itself.

DIOGENES

Since Antisthenes did not found Cynicism, we begin with the problems of the ‘cosmopolitan’ sentiments anciently attributed to Diogenes. The two most important passages are in Diogenes Laertius. In VI.63 is recorded a saying: ‘Asked where he was from, he said: “[I am] a citizen of the universe”.’ The word kosmopolites is extremely rare and is first attested in Philo of Alexandria (De opif. mundi 3, Mos. 1.157).

THE TWO APPROACHES

In his response (Leg. 1.15) to Atticus' request that he discuss the ius civile — civil law, or (better) the system of justice in the state — Cicero asks whether what is wanted is an enquiry that will be aliquid uberius quam forensis usus desiderat: ‘something more expansive than the practice of the courts calls for’. He has already indicated that the minutiae of the civil law are beneath him; in any case, plenty of other writers have already dealt with the law of gutters and party walls, and with the drafting of contracts and of formulae for the courts. Atticus, and Quintus too, are all agog for a treatment along the lines Marcus proposes. ‘Quite right’, says Cicero (1.16):

CICERO AND ROMAN IDEOLOGY

Modern historians tend to be very severe in assessing Cicero's political acumen, especially the stance he adopted at the end of his life. ‘In the Rome of Antony and Octavian he was an obstructive anachronism’, a man who ‘never penetrated to an understanding of the basic economic and social issues that cried out for remedy, and which were bound to be a source of political instability until something was done about them’. These assessments, which I take from David Stockton, are fairly representative. From a Hegelian view of history, Cicero in 44–43 BC was not the man for the hour. His attempts in the Philippics to rally support for a Republican opposition to Antony show how little he understood the linkage between political effectiveness or insight and real influence over the sources of power. So, with hindsight, it may be said. Yet, on a longer view of history, Cicero's political thought grows in interest — less because of its practical relevance to his own times than as an attempt to diagnose what had gone wrong in Roman Republican ideology and what would be required to put it right.

The work I am referring to as the basis for this claim is De officiis. It is one of the ‘great books’, but no one today perhaps can read it with fresh eyes.

It is a cliché that, in the moral and political philosophy of the schools which formed in the Hellenistic period, the polis loses the central role which it has for Plato and Aristotle. Various explanations of this fact have been put forward, mostly in terms of the sociology and politics of the period. None of these seem to me convincing, but I shall not be concerned with them here, because my concern in this chapter is rather with one set of philosophical arguments which reflect this shift. My focus is further narrowed in that I shall not be concerned with the new Hellenistic schools themselves, but rather with the fate, in the Hellenistic period, of Aristotle's moral and political philosophy, one which in its original version clearly does make the polis, and the kind of relationships which are special to it, important in ethical thought, and which thus contains a robust ‘political philosophy’, one which focuses on questions of equality, justice and authority within a definite unit, the city-state.

Not only does the Aristotelian corpus include an extensive work of political philosophy: Aristotle's ethical theory gives it a specific place. Any ethical theory has to answer the question, ‘What are our obligations to others, and how do they differ with our different relations to others?’ Ancient theories, which are eudaimonistic in structure, pose the question in terms of the extent to which the interests of others have to be taken account of for the agent to achieve her own final end, happiness.

The sixth Symposium Hellenisticum returned to England for the first time since the initial meeting in Oxford in 1978. It took place in Cambridge between 17 and 23 August 1992. Accommodation and meals were provided in St John's College, and discussion sessions were held in the Faculty of Classics. The papers contained in this volume are revised versions of the drafts submitted to the conference: footnotes testify to the vigour and range of the criticisms they provoked during and after the proceedings. Hence as has been usual on these occasions the revisions are sometimes thoroughgoing.

The following scholars participated in the Symposium: Antonina Alberti, Keimpe Algra, Julia Annas, Margaret Atkins, Chris Bobonich, Jacques Brunschwig, Myles Burnyeat, Victor Caston, Andrew Erskine, Jean-Louis Ferrary, David Hahm, Brad Inwood, Anna Maria Ioppolo, André Laks, Tony Long, Jaap Mansfeld, Mario Mignucci, Phil Mitsis, John Moles, Carlo Natali, Martha Nussbaum, John Procopé, Malcolm Schofield, David Sedley, Richard Sorabji, Gisela Striker. Melissa Lane acted as graduate assistant.

Many participants received financial assistance from their home institutions, for which we offer thanks. We are particularly indebted to St John's College and the Faculty of Classics: each made substantial subventions towards costs. Without this generous help the Symposium could not have gone ahead.

THE DE RE PUBLICA AS A TREATISE DE OPTIMO STATU CIVITATIS AND DE OPTIMO CIVE

The De re publica and the De legibus, both to be dated to the second half of the 50s BC, were regarded by Cicero as complementary in the same way as the Republic and the Laws of Plato: ‘Since you have already written a treatise on the ideal constitution of the commonwealth (de optimo rei publicae statu)’, he makes Atticus say, ‘you should also write one on its laws. For I note that this was done by your beloved Plato’ (Leg. 1.15). The Ciceronian notion of the link between the two Platonic dialogues may seem strange to readers familiar with an evolutionary view of the Platonic corpus, in which the Laws do not complement the Republic, but replace it. But Aristotle already shows a tendency to regard the two Platonic dialogues as forming a whole (Pol. 11.6 1265a2–4); and the thesis of a real complementarity between them has recently been argued afresh. The relationship between the De re publica and the De legibus is none the less quite different from that between the Republic and the Laws. Moving from one Platonic dialogue to the other, one moves from the model of the city to ‘a second politeia’ (Laws v 739d–e), from an uncompromising ideal to a greater concern with the possible, while in Cicero the laws of the De legibus are indeed those of the optimus status of the De re publica (Leg. 11.23; 111.12).

The Chalcedonian Definition presents Christ as a union of two disparate natures, divine and human. We move now towards critical discussion, and identify three problems to be considered. First, are the two natures themselves compatible, or do they have to be considered as polar opposites, so that their union is in logic ruled out as self-contradictory? Secondly, what is the value of the terms and analogies in which their union has been conceived? Thirdly, what is meant by the claim that the Lord's humanity was ‘anhypostatic’ or impersonal? We shall try to deal with these problems in order; but it will not be possible to separate them completely.

(1) We may take the natures in turn. On the divine nature there is a large measure of agreement, inspired in the main by Platonic theology. God is incorporeal, good and wise. Gregory of Nyssa no doubt introduced a new factor by describing God as infinite; but this is a natural extension of the common belief in God's total transcendence of the created order. What concerns us now is the doctrine that God is strictly impassible and immutable (see pp. 128–30). How then can he relate himself to events in time? The difficulty is perhaps avoidable in the case of the Creation, since this can be viewed as the beginning of time; but the Incarnation implies that God took action at a moment in history. This raises two distinct problems: first the general problem, how can God act on the world at all without acquiring new, and therefore changed, perceptions and relationships? Secondly, the specific problem, how can a divine being enter human life without himself suffering a change?

During the first two Christian centuries Platonism gradually became the dominant philosophy. The Epicureans had lost their appeal by the end of this period, which witnessed a revival of religious interests, both good and bad. Second-century Stoicism is represented for us by the freed slave Epictetus and the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who were widely respected as moral teachers; but its theoretical side is unknown to us, though Cornutus, an associate of Seneca, commented on Aristotle's logic in works now lost. A general acquaintance with both Epicurean and Stoic doctrine of course persisted much longer, as part of a general philosophical education. Meanwhile, many Pythagoreans were closely allied to the Platonists, and only a minority considered themselves a distinct school. The Aristotelian Aspasius (c. 100–150) wrote a range of commentaries on Aristotle, of which that on the Nicomachean Ethics survives in part. More important are the extensive surviving works of Alexander of Aphrodisias, early third century, the last really distinguished member of the school. His De Fato especially, which deals with the problems of determinism and free will, retains an interest for the non-specialist today.

Opposition to the Platonists came chiefly from a revived scepticism, which claimed to be pursuing the tradition of Pyrrho of Elis, c. 365–275 bc, who himself may have been indirectly indebted to Socrates and more closely to Democritus. We have noted that the Academy went through a sceptical phase under Arcesilaus and Carneades (p. 44), which was perpetuated by Cicero.

The philosophy of Epicurus and that of the Stoics developed at Athens from about twenty years after Aristotle's death. Epicurus, born c. 341 BC, came to Athens in 307–6; Zeno of Citium, some seven years younger, began to teach there c. 301. They soon acquired, and for some centuries maintained, an influence that eclipsed that of all rival schools. Xenocrates' attempt to create a coherent system of Platonism had not won widespread acceptance; both Speusippus and Aristotle had been notable innovators. Aristotle was succeeded by his pupil Theophrastus, best known for his pioneering work in botany, and later by Strato, another scientist; while many later members of his school – the ‘Peripatetics’ – turned towards critical scholarship. Platonists such as Polemo gave much attention to the intricate problems raised by logicians such as Stilpo at Megara, and Diodorus Cronus; and a sceptical movement was emerging under Arcesilaus, head of the Academy from c. 273. Both Epicureans and Stoics offered a practical policy for ordering one's life which could appeal to the ordinary man. It has been argued that this was especially needed in the disorientation caused by the decline of the Greek city-states in the face of Alexander's empire.

Epicureanism was to an unusual extent the unaided work of its founder. It remained an intellectual influence for some five hundred years, during which time its teaching altered remarkably little. Christians accepted a few points of Epicurean doctrine, but rejected its basic assumptions for various reasons, both good and bad, which we shall soon understand.

The first century BC witnessed the emergence of a new movement in philosophy which, though it involved no really distinguished creative thinkers, was to prove an important influence on Christian thought. The philosophy of this period is sometimes called ‘syncretistic’, which implies a merging of previously distinct systems; but this suggestion is true only in part. Certainly there was no general merging of the older schools. Most of them retained a clearly marked individuality. Epicurean doctrines were expounded, for example, by the Latin poet Lucretius; scepticism was taught by Aenesidemus, and the sceptical, ‘academic’ brand of Platonism was expounded by Cicero; work on Aristotle continued, and a collected edition of his writings was produced by Andronicus of Rhodes, perhaps c. 65–40 BC. But as we have seen, there had already been contacts between Stoics, Platonists and Aristotelians. The new movement begun by Antiochus of Ascalon about 80 BC claimed to be a revival of genuine Platonism which rejected the sceptical tradition, and moreover claimed that there was substantial agreement in doctrine between Plato, Aristotle and Zeno (!), the founder of Stoicism. Clearly the conflict with scepticism was of prime importance. At the same time the Pythagorean number-theories which had attracted Plato and his immediate successors enjoyed a revival of interest.

Two basic issues called for philosophical treatment by Christian writers: the proof of God's existence and the question of his nature. It might seem that such debates were ruled out ab initio by the widely accepted principle that we can know that God is, or exists, but can ever know what he is; this appears to make the first exercise unnecessary and the second impossible. But the principle was not consistently followed, even where it was accepted in theory. In the first place, Christian writers appreciated the need to offer some rational justification of their faith; they had to reply to sceptics who denied the possibility of knowledge as such, to propagandists who accused the Christians of unreasoning credulity, and to atheists who denied the existence of any divinity. Secondly, the proposition that God cannot be known was rarely taken in the literal sense it might have for a modern reader; to do so, indeed, would disallow the positive teaching about God which is found in the Bible. It was usually taken to mean that direct or adequate knowledge of God was impossible for men, at least in this life; for the future there was St Paul's promise that we should see him ‘face to face’.

We can thus distinguish three philosophical problems:

1. The rational defence of the doctrines of faith, of belief in authority, and of the general possibility of acquiring knowledge at all.

2. Proofs of God's existence.

3. The nature of God.