Since the last book devoted exclusively to Philolaus was written by Boeckh in 1819, little apology seems necessary for presenting the scholarly world with a new commentary on his fragments and an interpretation of his philosophy. It is my hope that the present study will provide a basis on which Philolaus and early Pythagoreanism can enter the mainstream of scholarship both on the Presocratics and also on ancient philosophy as a whole. At present, despite the recent work of Schofield (KRS 1983), Barnes (1982), Nussbaum (1978), and Kahn (1974), it would appear that many scholars, at least tacitly, take the advice of Shorey which I print as an epigraph. They seem to feel that it is impossible to talk rigorously about the Pythagoreans in the way that we can about other Presocratics. “Pythagoreanism” seems to mean too much and to be hopelessly vague. The remedy for this problem is to focus detailed attention on the earliest Pythagorean texts we have, the fragments of Philolaus, and to use them as the foundation for our thinking about Pythagoreanism. It will be up to the reader to judge whether I have written any pages to which Shorey's dictum should not apply.

The giant on whose shoulders my work stands is Walter Burkert's magnificent Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism. Although I disagree with Burkert about the authenticity of a few fragments and although the interpretation of Philolaus' philosophy which I present is radically different from his, the reader will have a hard time finding a page on which I do not owe a debt to his work.

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.

A great deal of attention has been paid to Epicurus' views on freedom in various contexts, and also to his metaphysical views on mind and body. In this paper I shall consider a topic which, though it is bound to be of relevance to these, is distinct from them, and cuts across them: Epicurus' account of agency.

Any study of agency in Epicurus is bound to start from the fragments of Book xxv of On Nature, the understanding of which has been so greatly improved by David Sedley. In this paper I shall be concerned with a question which to some extent cuts across the metaphysical issues of determinism and physicalism which Sedley focusses on; nevertheless, philosophical disagreements on some points will be obvious, and I should like to open with an expression of gratitude for Sedley's pioneering studies, which have done so much to bring the important concerns of this book into the centre of Epicurean research. I am also very grateful to Simon Laursen, who is preparing a new text and edition of the whole book, for very generous help on various matters. I am sure that many blunders remain, but I hope that this paper will help to encourage more work on these difficult but fascinating texts.

Although much remains puzzling about Book xxv of On Nature, some general points are clear: the book as a whole prominently included a discussion of how we are responsible for what we do.

SENECA AND ORTHODOXY

Seneca's ‘philosophy of mind’ presents us with many puzzles, but in this it is no more than a faithful mirror of his philosophy as a whole. In this paper I am interested in how his views on the structure and operations of the human soul relate to those of so-called orthodox Stoics, and how one goes about assessing such an issue. That Seneca is not a slavish or unimaginative representative of Chrysippean Stoicism seems clear from the most casual reading of his work and the most cursory glance through the abundant secondary literature. But it is not clear just how his views on the soul differ from those of the early Stoics.

Seneca is sometimes described by the (traditionally pejorative) term ‘eclectic’. But as Pierluigi Donini and others have shown, we can no longer take for granted the usefulness of that simple description in the study of later ancient philosophy; indeed, it is not clear that we can readily agree about its meaning. I want at least to set aside the negative associations of the word: even if Seneca is in some sense an ‘eclectic’ it should not be assumed that he is for that reason a derivative, less powerful or less interesting thinker. Further, I want to argue that in one important area of the philosophy of mind, the theory of the passions, we should not be calling Seneca an eclectic at all. His approach is open, but not eclectic.

LE PROBLÈME

Les témoignages doxographiques transmis sous le nom d'un mouvement philosophique, et non sous celui d'un auteur particulier, soulèvent souvent de difficiles problèmes d'attribution, d'autant plus délicats à trancher que nous possédons moins de repères indépendants, dans l'histoire de l'école, par rapport auxquels les situer. Le cas des Cyrénaïques est à cet égard exemplaire. Les données sont le plus souvent présentées comme un bien commun; l'information relative aux positions spécifiques d'Aristippe l'Ancien, d'Aristippe le Jeune ou d'Annicéris est beaucoup plus rare, quand elle ne se réduit pas à un seul témoignage. La tâche de la critique est alors de faire la part entre le générique et le particulier, l'originaire et le remaniement, et de reconstruire les phases d'une éventuelle évolution. De ce point de vue, la tendance de l'nterprétation s'est considérablement modifiée depuis E. Zeller, qui, sur la base du résumé de la doctrine éthique génériquement attribuée aux ‘Cyrénaïques’ dans Diogène Laërce, II.86–93, avait fait d'Aristippe l'Ancien le créateur d'un véritable système éthique. Au terme d'un long mouvement de révision, qui débute avec la dissertation d'E. Antoniades (1916), G. Giannantoni n'a laissé à Aristippe l'Ancien que la pratique d'un mode de vie, réservant l'élaboration théorique de positions doctrinales à un stade plus tardif, qu'un témoignage transmis par Eusèbe permet d'associer au nom d'Aristippe le Jeune.

The puzzle that provoked this study lies in the apparent difference between Democritus and Epicurus about the value of sense-perception. Epicurus took over the atomic theory from Democritus; he gave the same account, in essence, of the mechanics of sense-perception. Yet Democritus is said by many sources to have been sceptical about the ability of the senses to reveal truth, whereas Epicurus is said to have declared that ‘all aisthēta are true’.

It happens that we have two lengthy criticisms of the Atomists' theory of qualities from the point of view of the Peripatos and the Academy: I mean the long fragment of Theophrastus' book On the Senses, and Plutarch's essay Against Colotes, with its sequel, On the Impossibility of a Pleasant Epicurean Life. What should give these two an exceptional value as historical documents is that the first was written before the author knew anything about the philosophy of Epicurus, or at least at a time when he could take notice only of Democritus among the Atomists, whereas Plutarch aims to criticize the Epicurean Colotes precisely for his misunderstandings and mistreatments of Democritus, as well as for the inadequacies of his own Epicurean theory. A study of the criticisms of Theophrastus and Plutarch might perhaps give us a better understanding of the differences between Democritus and Epicurus, and the reasons for the differences we find.

Both authors criticize the position of the Atomists from the stand-point of the theory they themselves subscribe to.