Philosophy in the Roman Empire: Ethics, Politics and Society

Citation preview

Philosophy in the roman empire Drawing on unusually broad range of sources for this study of Imperial period philosophical thought, Michael Trapp examines the central issues of personal morality, political theory, and social organization: philosophy as the pursuit of selfimprovement and happiness; the conceptualization and management of emotion; attitudes and obligations to others; ideas of the self and personhood; constitutional theory and the ruler; the constituents and working of the good community. Texts and thinkers discussed range from Alexander of Aphrodisias, Aspasius and Alcinous, via Hierocles, Seneca, Musonius, Epictetus, Plutarch and Diogenes of Oenoanda, to Dio Chrysostom, Apuleius, Lucian, Maximus of Tyre, Pythagorean pseudepigrapha, and the Tablet of Cebes. The distinctive doctrines of the individual philosophical schools are outlined, but also the range of choice that collectively they presented to the potential philosophical ‘convert’, and the contexts in which that choice was encountered. Finally Trapp turns his attention to the status of philosophy itself as an element of the elite culture of the period, and to the ways in which philosophical values may have posed a threat to other prevalent schemes of value; Trapp argues that the idea of ‘philosophical opposition’, though useful, needs to be substantially modified and extended.

To NGD, SWBT and NWBT

Philosophy in the Roman Empire Ethics, Politics and Society

Michael Trapp Kings College London, UK

First published 2007 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2007 michael trapp michael trapp has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data trapp, michael B. Philosophy in the roman empire : ethics, politics and society. - (ashgate ancient philosophy series) 1. Philosophy, ancient 2. rome - intellectual life i. title 180.9'37 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data trapp, michael B. Philosophy in the roman empire : ethics, politics and society / michael trapp. p. cm.-- (ashgate ancient philosophy series) includes bibliographical references (p. ) and indexes. isBn-13: 978-0-7546-1618-4 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Philosophy, ancient. i. title. B505.t73 2007 180.937--dc22

isBn 9780754616184 (hbk) isBn 9781138270794 (pbk)

2006022224

Contents List of Abbreviations Preface

vii ix

1 ‘Ethics’, ‘Philosophy’ and Philosophia The history and internal geography of philosophia The point and balance of philosophia: Imperial-period perceptions The ‘dominance’ of ethics Authority and division Philosophia in the community Who qualifies?

1 1 5 10 13 18 23

2

Perfection and Progress Perfection: ideal states of the person  Lives and progress  Conclusion

28 29 42 62

3  4

The Passions Background Emotion and its control in the Imperial period Conclusion: continuity and change

63 63 71 96

Self, Person and Individual The soul and the real person  Programmes of self-discovery? The self in therapeutic advice The Self and the Will? Afterword

98 99 109 116 122 133

5

Self and Others The Stoics  Peripatetics, Platonists, Epicureans and Cynics Special issues  Conclusion

134 135 144 150 165

vi

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

6

Politics 1: Constitutions and the Ruler The political background to Imperial-period theorizing Constitutions

166 166 170

7

Politics 2: Good Communities Dio on the Black Sea  Harmony and order Collective moral character Sanctions: law, punishment and instruction Constituents of the community

185 185 190 195 199 200

8 Politics 3: Philosophia in Politics and the Community Entertainment, leisure and responsibility Philosophoi in formal politics  Conclusion 9

Philosophia and the Mainstream Politics A more general lack of alignment? The paradox of an educational setting An uncertain status?  Conclusion

Appendix: Bio-bibliographies Bibliography Index of Works and Passages General Index

211 211 215 225 226 226 233 243 245 256 258 263 273 279

List of Abbreviations ANRW CIL DPA E-K IG IGSK ILAlg NP IP L-S OCD3 RAC RE SVF Us. W.

Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques Posidonius, ed. L. Edelstein and I.G. Kidd Inscriptiones Graecae Inschriften griechischer Städte aus Kleinasien Inscriptions latines de l’Algérie Der Neue Pauly Xenocrates, ed. M. Isnardi Parente The Hellenistic Philosophers, ed. A.A. Long and D. Sedley Oxford Classical Dictionary, edn 3 Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum Paulys Realenzyklopädie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft (‘Pauly-Wissowa’) Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, ed. H. von Arnim Epicurea, ed. H. Usener Stobaeus, ed. C. Wachsmuth and O. Hense

This page intentionally left blank

Preface This is a book about the philosophical discussion of ethics, society and politics, and about the perceived place of philosophy in society, between the closing decades of the first century BCE and the opening decades of the third century CE. It does not, therefore, deal with the whole chronological period of the Roman Empire, down to the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476 CE, but rather with those parts of it conventionally marked off as the ‘Early’ and ‘High’ Empires, before the emergence of serious (and, as it turned out, eventually terminal) cracks in the imperial fabric with the Emperors from Macrinus (217–18) onwards. The individuals who will be discussed thus include, among others: the Stoics Seneca, Musonius Rufus, Epictetus, Dio Chrysostom, Hierocles and Marcus Aurelius; the Platonists Eudorus, Plutarch, Calvenus Taurus, Atticus, Alcinous, Albinus, Favorinus, Apuleius and Maximus of Tyre, along with the independent Platonist fellow travellers, Philo Judaeus and Galen; the pseudonymous Neopythagoreans ‘Archytas’, ‘Diotogenes’, ‘Ecphantus’, ‘Hippodamus’, and ‘Sthenidas’; the Peripatetics Aspasius and Alexander of Aphrodisias; the Cynics Demetrius and Oenomaus of Gadara; the Sceptic Sextus Empiricus; the compilers and handbook-writers Arius, Aulius Gellius and Diogenes Laertius; and the philosophical satirist Lucian. However heterogeneous a list this may seem from some points of view – more on this anon – its chronological outlines and the shared identity of its constituents (or most of them) as citizens or subjects of the Empire, are well marked. Although periodizations based on political events do not by any means always transfer satisfactorily into the domain of cultural and intellectual life, this one has perhaps something to be said for it, particularly in respect of its starting-point. The establishment of the Empire may have been a process achieved in stages rather than in one blinding flash, but it none the less brought about radical changes in the outlook of the elites of both the Latin- and the Greek-speaking areas of the Mediterranean world. It would be natural to expect the effects of those changes to have been felt in philosophical thinking as well as in political culture, and to set out to explore when and where (or at least if) such effects were indeed experienced. But in addition to this, the pattern of events within the history of philosophy, quite apart from events in the world of politics, might in any case lead one to treat the closing decades of the Brief bio-bibliographical details are given in the Appendix, on pp. 258–62 below. The question whether all these individuals legitimately count as philosophers – or rather, what the understanding of philosophy is under which (with only one or two exceptions) they count – is taken up below, in Chapter 1.

 



Philosophy in the Roman Empire

first century BCE as a significant period of transition, and thus a plausible startingpoint for a distinct chapter in the longer tale. Perhaps most obviously, these were the years which saw philosophy – philosophia, originally a Greek cultural artefact – consolidating its position as an element in Roman elite culture, following the pioneering efforts of such as Cicero, Varro and Lucretius in the preceding generation, and the still more uneasy and sporadic flirtations of the one or two generations before them. Although the relationship continued to be an intermittently stormy one, and although it is debatable how far it ever became accurate to speak of ‘Roman philosophy’, as opposed to ‘philosophy in Latin’, the point remains that, from the end of the first century BCE onwards, philosophia was accepted as part of the culture of the educated Roman in a way that had not been true a mere fifty years previously. But the annexation of Rome by philosophia is not the only development that marks these years as a period of significant change; at the same time the landscape of philosophy in Greek-speaking culture was shifting too. A hundred and fifty years before, in the first quarter of the second century BCE, the centre of the philosophical universe was still, as it had been for two hundred and fifty years, the city of Athens. Philosophers and philosophical teaching could of course be found in many other cities, from Alexandria and Pergamum to Pella; but the centres of authority, to which the best and most ambitious students went, and from which the best teachers came, were the great, original Athenian schools. And among these schools, at least in the eyes of modern scholars, it was three above all that made the philosophical running in the vigorous polemic of their mutual disagreements: Epicurus’ Garden, the Stoa of Zeno and Chrysippus, and Plato’s Academy, as re-oriented from dogmatic teaching to scepticism by Arcesilaus. By the closing decades of the first century, however, two central features of this picture had changed or were on the way to changing. First, Athens had lost her pre-eminent status, with the probable demise of the Academy, the Peripatos and the Stoa as teaching institutions with regular successions of heads (scholarchs) who ranked ex officio as the most authoritative representatives of their sects – all this, the evidence suggests, having been carried away by the disruptions and depredations of the Mithradatic Wars, or the Roman Civil Wars, or the combination of the two. With this loss of their institutional headquarters, the great sects, though already widely diffused over the Greek-speaking world, began to become still more clearly international in identity, cosmopolitan schools of thought rather than geographically centred organizations, united through time by bonds of spiritual rather than institutional succession; and it is with the closing decades of the century and onwards, given an understandable time-lag, that one might expect the consequences of this shift to have started to work themselves through. Cf. Frede 1999, who however argues that in some respects the real starting-point for ‘postHellenistic’ developments should be set at the end of the second century BCE or the very start of the first.  On this see Rutherford 1989, 66–76; Inwood 1995.  See Lynch 1972; Glucker 1978, 226–55; Frede 1999, 790.  Inwood 1995. 

Preface

xi

Secondly, in this same period, as the status of the schools collectively was changing, so also the character of one or two of the individual members of the group, and with it the overall balance of the philosophical landscape, underwent a notable modification. Both Plato and Aristotle came back into the reckoning as the sources of positive doctrine, and authors of full philosophical systems on a par with those of Epicurus and the Stoics, in a manner that had not been true of either of them for between one and two centuries. In the third and second centuries BCE Plato’s heritage, whatever it might have continued to mean to his general philosophical readers, had been interpreted by his institutional heirs as one of sceptical questioning rather than the propagation of positive doctrine. The story of the decline of Aristotle’s institutional heritage between around 250 and the end of the first century BCE may have been overdrawn in standard accounts; but it still appears that before Critolaus at least Peripatetics were not full participants in inter-school debate, and that even after him they were only fitfully so. It was with the first century that the quality of attention paid to both Plato and Aristotle began to change, and that both began to be reconstituted, in new editions of their collected works, in commentaries and in handbooks, as the authors of full, dogmatic systems. The first stirrings of this process may be diverse and untidy, and the whole may not appear to have been completed until the second century CE – the inclusion of Platonism and Peripateticism along with Stoicism and Epicureanism as beneficiaries of the four public chairs endowed in Athens by Marcus Aurelius in 176 is the definitive (if perhaps belated) terminus ante – but it is in the last decades of the Roman Republic and the first of the Empire that the momentum begins to build. So much for the second half of the first century BCE as a plausible starting-point. As regards the setting of an upper chronological limit to the period studied, a date in the first few decades of the third century is at least pragmatically comfortable. It allows the inclusion of all the authors of the major surviving philosophical texts of the Early and High Empires, from Philo Judaeus and Seneca, via Dio, Epictetus and Plutarch, to Alcinous, Albinus, Apuleius and Marcus Aurelius; but it stops short of the huge transformation of the philosophical landscape and agenda ushered in by Neoplatonism. This seems both a prudent and an intellectually justifiable place to call a halt. Were the founder of Neoplatonism, Plotinus (205–268/70), to be included, it would be strained not also to include his successors and systematizers of the fourth and fifth centuries, and that in turn would swell this volume to an unreasonable length. It would admittedly be idle to pretend that the early third century sees the end of any process in the history of philosophy begun in the time of the early Empire (or indeed before), so as to allow some kind of neat thematic closure; but there is at least enough of a pause, and an absence of obvious new developments, or significant texts, to justify breaking off hereabouts.

For evidence of greater vitality among the Hellenistic Peripatetics than standard accounts envisage, see White in Fortenbaugh and White 2004, 389–409, on Lyco and Hieronymus.  Cf. Frede 1999, 772–8. 

xii

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

Lack of a neat ending notwithstanding, enough has been said already to suggest that the period marked out ought to count as a fascinating one from the point of view of the ‘external’ or ‘institutional’ history of ancient philosophy. Even if it did not see anything like the start of the story of Roman culture’s grappling with philosophia – itself part of the larger story of Rome’s negotiation with Greek culture more generally – it saw the culmination of the process; and it saw the special strains imposed by the fact that this achievement of an unprecedented closeness coincided in the experience of the governing elite with the establishment of a new, untried and controversial form of political authority. At the same time, as Roman intellectuals, and the Roman upper classes in general, were perfecting their strategies for the naturalization of this Greek import, and/or working out the limits beyond which it was not to be assimilated, so on their side Greek intellectuals and the Greek elite at large were being challenged to react both to the Roman imitation and appropriation of one of their culture’s most exalted products, and to the political dominance of the appropriators. But in addition, even as these externally imposed developments were re-focusing the long-running issue of the whole status of philosophia in Hellenic culture and its importance to Hellenic identity, other questions were posed that depended, irrespective of Rome and Roman interest, on developments and perspectives within the Greek world. In particular, there were issues of tradition, thrown up by the lengthening history of philosophia as an institution and set of practices, the growing number of its distinguished practitioners over time, and the persistent, determined disunity of the sectarian landscape. Questions about the legitimacy of philosophical diversity and disagreement, and about the scope and means for variation and development in the foundational doctrines in any given school, may not have been new with the Imperial period, but the simple passage of time could only increase the felt urgency of the need to address them. It is a further, separate, question whether the intellectual quality of the thought of this period is of the same level. Not so long ago, the feeling that high expectations were not in order seemed widespread; with whatever regrets, the years from the late first century BCE to the mid-third CE could only be felt as a fallow interlude, a mere routine continuation of the developments of circa 300 BCE, marking time before the next significant forward step in the march of philosophy, as taken by Plotinus. So, in the first edition of his Hellenistic Philosophy, published in 1974, A.A. Long opined that ‘in intellectual vitality Hellenistic philosophy reached its zenith before the fall of the Roman Republic’ and that, with the possible exception of the (Pyrrhonist) Sceptic Aenesidemus, the sects founded in the Hellenistic period ‘had no representatives in the Roman empire who were outstanding for original contributions to philosophy’ (210). Not long after, John Dillon, in the first edition of The Middle Platonists, published in 1977, felt constrained to confess that Middle Platonism, of both the Hellenistic and the Imperial periods ‘must always be of interest chiefly as a prologue to Plotinus’ (xiv). Verdicts such as these now sound somewhat dated, with their exaggerated preoccupation with innovation (‘paradigm shifts’ at the expense of ‘normal philosophy’), and their implication that real philosophical virtue is only to be found in levels of originality that few thinkers in any age attain. As scholars such as Sorabji,

Preface

xiii

Frede, Inwood, and Long himself in his more recent guise as a student of Epictetus, have shown and continue to show, closer and more sympathetic examination of texts once dismissed as scholastic or merely expository, reveals many instances of much greater intelligence, independence and intellectual seriousness than was formerly credited. Real problems not solved, or even not formulated, by the great figures of the past came under discussion and found thoughtful answers that demonstrate that this era’s taste for philosophical argument was certainly not exhausted either in interschool polemic or in ‘mere’ moral exhortation. New ways were found of formulating central issues, or of making the answers to them offered by the various schools vivid and plausible. Proper substantiation of this more favourable assessment must obviously wait for the detail to follow in subsequent chapters; by way of foretaste and example, the reader is referred on to discussion of Hierocles’ account of selfperception, Seneca’s of the three movements involved in the generation of a passion, and Dio Chrysostom’s of the nature of the good community. But it needs also to be protested that both the old unfavourable verdicts, and indeed some of the recent exercises in rehabilitation for that matter, have rested in part on anachronistic notions of the kind of activity that these Imperial-period thinkers understood themselves to be engaged in. It may not be either particularly fair or particularly illuminating to judge practitioners of philosophia by the standards of ‘philosophy’. This too is an issue that will be explored more fully in what follows.10 In a study of this breadth, it is inevitable that some things will not have been taken into consideration as fully as might have been desirable. I am regretfully aware that, among individual thinkers and authors, I have been ungenerous in the attention I have given to Marcus Aurelius; and that I have not had much to say about the issue of Latin as a philosophical language, and the differences in tone and emphasis possibly introduced – or at least potentially made available – by the Latinization of philosophical discourse. And I have left the question of Christianity, and of its efforts to appropriate the territory of classical philosophy, almost entirely to one side. For all these large gaps a mixture of space constraints and personal incompetence is to blame; I can only hope that what I have managed to say on other matters may help to make these ones too more interestingly discussable in future. I have incurred many debts in researching and compiling this book, which it is a pleasure to be able to acknowledge now. It was Bob Sharples who first asked if I would like to write it, too many years ago for complete comfort. Since then, he has answered questions, read and commented on drafts, and written letters of support with unfailing patience, thoroughness and helpfulness. A Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust allowed me to research and complete (most of) a first draft in relative calm; a re-scheduled sabbatical term from my Department, with a matching award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, let me fret over revising and completing it in similar freedom. I’m grateful for various forms of support and advice to Rebecca Flemming, Chris Gill, Roland Mayer, John Moles, 

See 80–2, 110–14 and 185–90 below. See Ch.1 below.

10

xiv

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

Malcolm Schofield and Richard Sorabji; and to conference and seminar audiences (principally at the University of London’s Institute of Classical Studies) who have heard and responded to versions of material also appearing here. But I must look further back too, as some of the themes of the book are ones I have been brooding on for more than just the last few years: back to graduate work on Maximus with Donald Russell and Ewen Bowie; and further still, to the Mods Virgil class for which John Bramble set me to investigate the philosophical background to the Augustan settlement, and to make the acquaintance of Posidonius and Antiochus.

Chapter 1

‘Ethics’, ‘Philosophy’ and Philosophia The bulk of this book – Chapters 2 to 8 – will be concerned with specific topics and arguments in Imperial-period ethical and political theorizing, and with the question of how this theorizing fitted in – or failed to fit in – with other contemporary habits of thought and schemes of value. But first, the stage needs to be set with a discussion of the understanding of ethics – and of the larger institution of philosophy – within which the theorizing and the argument took place. This first chapter, therefore, will discuss a range of contextual issues: the scope of ‘ethics’, the place of ‘ethics’ in ‘philosophy’, the varieties of ‘philosophy’ between which choices could be made, and something of the place of ‘philosophy’ in culture and society in the first and second centuries CE. The history and internal geography of philosophia To get the necessary grip, however, we must begin by backtracking some three to four hundred years: to the fourth century BCE, which is when the kind of philosophy and ethics still current in the Imperial period was brought into existence – or rather, when the kind of philosophia still current was established. For, in ways which should become progressively clearer as this chapter develops, philosophia – what the individuals to be studied in this book took themselves to be practising – is not identical with the things that can be designated by the modern word ‘philosophy’ and its relatives. And this philosophia (like ‘philosophy’) was not some kind of natural phenomenon; it was a human construct that had the specific form it did in the first and second centuries CE because of a past history of ideological decisions and institutional development that began in the fourth century BCE. Things that can arguably be labelled ‘philosophy’ were certainly going on already in Greek-speaking communities in the sixth century, but the construction of the philosophia that this study is concerned with is essentially the work of thinkers operating in Athens between about 400 and about 300 BCE: from the first generation of the pupils of Socrates (above all Plato), via the pupils of these pupils (especially Aristotle), to the great systematizers and definers of rival, institutionalized sects at the end of the century (Xenocrates, Zeno, Epicurus). It was these thinkers who decided that the proper name for what they were doing was philosophia, and who set about formalizing its structure and procedures, mapping the intellectual territory over which it claimed rights, and defining its raison d’être. We should remind ourselves, then, first of the point of philosophia, as these

2

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

thinkers specified it, then of their idea of the internal structure in which ‘ethics’ took its place along with other objects of study and forms of attention. The point of the exercise, they proclaimed, was nothing more than (and nothing less than) human fulfilment, or happiness (eudaimonia). On the understanding, which they all shared, that there was indeed such a thing as an objectively right and satisfying style of life and state of being for humans, uniquely capable of fulfilling their essential nature and bringing them true happiness, then philosophia was the sole fully effective means of identifying that style of life and state of being.1 Philosophia, in other words, was not an academic study aimed at satisfying the over-developed curiosity of the idle few; it was an indispensable necessity for anyone with a properly informed desire to live well and be happy. It was a science (technê): something that turned essentially on the acquisition, retention, and reflection on a body of knowledge, but also, equally centrally, on the application of that body of knowledge to secure practical effects. Yet at the same time, it was no ordinary science: uniquely, the field in which those practical effects were realized was not the limited catchment area of some mundane skill, but the totality of an individual human existence. As a later practitioner was to sum it up: ‘Who can doubt that, though life is given to us by the immortal gods, the gift of living well is given by philosophia?’2 Structurally, a widely – though not, as we shall see, universally – endorsed perception held that this philosophia could be sub-divided into, and exhaustively mapped by the combination of, three sub-disciplines: ‘ethics’, naturally; but along with ‘ethics’, ‘logic’ and ‘physics’ as well. This trio could be described as the ‘areas’, ‘parts’ or ‘kinds’ of philosophia, or alternatively as the three ‘philosophies’ (‘logical’, ‘physical’, ‘ethical’).3 Each of them, like philosophia itself, corresponded less comfortably and familiarly with the equivalent modern pursuits than might at first be thought, if for no other reason than that the ranges of subjectmatter assigned to them were notably wider. Physikê, ‘physics’, embraced metaphysics, theology (which could be called ‘first physics’), and psychology as well as questions of the make-up and workings of the physical world. Logikê, ‘logic’, dealt with epistemology and linguistics as well as forms and procedures of reasoning and argument. And êthikê, ‘ethics’, the main concern of this book, covered politics and the proper organization of the household community, as well as questions to do with values, character and conduct in the individual. One obvious effect of this tripartite division of philosophia, surely welcomed and intended by its proponents, was to underline the sheer breadth of its concerns. When the specific subject-matters of ‘logic’, ‘physics’ and ‘ethics’ were put together, what came into view was nothing less than the whole field of worthwhile knowledge, indeed the whole field of what counted as knowledge tout court. On 1

A partial exception might have to be made for Epicurus, who was capable of declaring both that philosophia was indispensable, and that its necessity was not absolute, but dependent on contingent human fears. See Long and Sedley 1987, 154–7. 2 Seneca Ep. 90.1. 3 Topoi, merê (Lat. partes), eidê, genê; hê logikê / physikê / êthikê philosophia (Lat. philosophia rationalis / naturalis / moralis). Seneca Ep. 89.9–13 discusses the division.

‘Ethics’, ‘Philosophy’ and Philosophia

3

this analysis, no aspect of life or the world – no aspect of reality – lay beyond the competence of philosophia. It was this geography, and this mission statement, that were inherited by subsequent generations of philosophoi, down to the period with which this study is concerned. Rather than being a fully and finally agreed set of propositions, however, it came with a number of unresolved arguments. In particular, there was one which arose over the internal geography of the calling, and which has a special relevance to perceptions of the nature and standing of ethics. Although they had divided the field neatly into three, the founders of philosophia also experienced, and handed on to their successors, an uncertainty about what the most important objects of knowledge were in the philosophic quest, and what the ideally philosophic life would therefore consist of in practical detail. This uncertainty manifested itself both in arguments between thinkers, and in tensions within individual bodies of thought. One powerful current of thought, associated above all with the example of Socrates, as constructed by his firstgeneration pupils, held that, because the point of philosophia was its effect on human beings and their lives, it was on the human world – human nature and human interactions – that it should concentrate, to the partial or complete exclusion of other concerns.4 But against this pulled a contrasting thought that there were far grander things in reality than the merely human, which it might be important to know in order to put the human ethical quest into its proper context. The knowledge, already indelibly inscribed in definitions of wisdom, that beyond the realm of human beings there was a whole vast cosmos to be understood, along with the higher forms of intelligence and being that might populate it, could not simply be unthought. And this in turn generated a potentially destabilizing temptation. If the cosmos is grander and more divine than man, can its study be properly subordinated to ground-level ethics? Might it not in fact constitute an alternative, and more fulfilling object of attention? Moreover, there was a third current as well, pulling against both of the other two. If the point of philosophia is individual fulfilment, happiness, then is it an unchallengeable given that its path has to lie through elaborate thought of any kind, whether about the human world, or about its grander cosmic context? Might the practical aim in fact call any kind of commitment to theory into question? The tension between the rival claims of the human and the cosmic as the most compelling focus of attention is evident (notoriously so) in both Plato and Aristotle. In the Republic, Plato begins with a problem in human ethics, the value of just behaviour, which is initially confronted in terms of the structure and workings of the human soul; but the full and final solution offered moves away from the purely human plane into questions about the ultimate structure of reality (‘forms’ and the Good). Correspondingly, in its social and political argument, the Republic first offers a vision of a well-ordered human state, then a competing picture of a community of philosophers attempting as far as possible to distance 4

The foundational statements about Socrates are Plato Phaedo 96a–99d and Xenophon Memorabilia 1.1.11–16, followed by Cicero Tusculan Disputations 5.4.10 and Academics 1.4.15.

4

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

themselves from earthly concerns in favour of the contemplation of ultimate reality. On the level of personal choices and preferred lifestyles, Plato thus leaves it somewhat unclear whether the best option is to immerse oneself in higher contemplation for its own sake, to the exclusion of any conscious concern with morals and politics, if one is suitably gifted, or whether one ought always to turn one’s attention back to the human. In terms of the dialogue’s most celebrated image, should philosophoi go back into the Cave once they have seen the outside world and grasped it for what it is or should they not? Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, for his part, confronts the issue more directly, but again in such a way as to leave room for continuing argument. In Book 1, he discusses fulfilment (eudaimonia) as a matter of a life lived out in normal (virtuous) human interaction. By contrast, in Book 10, he directly contrasts the fulfilment achievable through a life devoted to the intellectual contemplation of higher truth (theôria) with the fulfilment of a life of virtuous action, and declares the former to be superior.5 And yet, this declaration is qualified by the (grudging) admission that a life of contemplation is not possible for a human being in its pure form (and presumably cannot therefore be made a sole aim).6 Other fourth-century thinkers were less sympathetic to the pull of contemplation and more-than-human subject-matter. The extreme case is that of Diogenes, with his impatient, aggressive rejection not simply of investigation of nature and the heavens, but of any kind of elaborate theorizing.7 But the attitude of Epicurus was also cool (from a Platonic-Aristotelian viewpoint, at least). For him, elaborate investigation of and theorizing about nature was only a conditional necessity: essential if the individual thinker had anxieties about divine involvement in natural phenomena, which only atomist truth could dispel, but dispensable for those not burdened with such anxieties in the first place.8 The most elaborate attempt to organize and rank philosophical subject-matter was made by the Stoics (perhaps in some kind of dialogue with the re-founder of Platonism, Xenocrates). Whoever it was who first articulated the tripartite division into physics, logic and ethics,9 it was they who seem to have played most assiduously with ways of expressing it, and of coming to terms with the need for a three- rather than two-place ranking. Diogenes Laertius and Sextus Empiricus both report a trio of images used by the Stoics in order simultaneously to acknowledge each of the three parts as indispensably and inextricably linked to the other two, and to identify one of them as ultimately taking priority: the garden with its walls, soil and fruits; the egg, with its shell, white and yolk; and the living creature, with 5

Nic. Eth. 10.6–8. Nic. Eth. 10.7.1177b26–1128a8. 7 Diog. Laert. 6.103 (cf. e.g. Apuleius Apol. 39, Lucian Lifestyle Auction 11). The idea that ethics was the only proper constituent of philosophia was also maintained by the rogue Stoic Aristo of Chios in the third century (Sen. Ep. 89.13). 8 See note 1 above. 9 Diogenes Laertius attributes it to Zeno (7.39–41), but the Stoic Posidonius (fr. 88E–K) collectively to Xenocrates, the Peripatetics and the Stoics, with the further observation that ‘in effect’ it goes back to Plato. 6

‘Ethics’, ‘Philosophy’ and Philosophia

5

its flesh, bone and soul.10 These were evidently normally turned so as to award central position to ethics – as the fruits of the garden, the yolk of the egg, and the soul of the living creature – while at the same time insisting that ethics would be incomplete and imperfectly supported without the addition of physical and logical doctrine too. Yet the record also seems to show at least some wavering and debate over the images. Sextus reports that the analogy of the living creature was not early Stoic, but introduced only later (in the first century BCE) by Posidonius, explicitly to improve on the other two. And Diogenes, though reporting ethics as the fruit of the garden, turns the other two analogies round, so as to make not ethics but physics the yolk of the Stoic egg and (more strikingly still) the soul of the living creature. Unless Diogenes is simply muddled (which is possible), this may mean that Stoics too, like Platonists and Peripatetics, felt conflicting pulls on their intellectual enthusiasm. The point and balance of philosophia: Imperial-period perceptions Thinkers of the Imperial period were heirs to this whole range of varying opinion, expressed as it was by authorities and in texts that had by their time become classics of the tradition. It is therefore not surprising that differences of opinion should have persisted both about the importance of ethics in relation to the other constituents of philosophia, and about the best way to articulate the range of concerns proper to ethics in itself. On the latter question – of just how the range of concerns proper to ethics itself should be specified – disagreement was arguably more over emphasis than real substance. Imperial-period Peripatetics and some Platonists, pursuing one kind of triadic pattern, tend to stress the importance of household and city as the objects of ethical attention alongside the individual. Thus Alcinous, in his Didaskalikos (Instruction Manual of Platonic Doctrine), divides ethics into ‘the care of morals (êthôn epimeleia), the administration of the household (hê tou oikou prostasia), and the state (polis) and its preservation’;11 Atticus (as quoted by Eusebius) specifies the proper aims of ho êthikos topos as ‘to render each one of us individually virtuous, to righten whole households towards perfection, and to adorn whole peoples with the best constitutions and the most finely tuned of laws’;12 and the summary of Peripatetic ethical teaching quoted by Stobaeus similarly moves on from ideas about the values and aims of the individual to ‘economics’ (the good organization and functioning of the oikos), and from ‘economics’ to political constitutions.13 Stoic definitions of the field, on the other hand, pursue a different 10

Diog. Laert. Lives 7.40; Sextus Against the Professors 7.17–19. Didask. 3.3; Alcinous’ idiosyncratic term for ethics is ‘practical philosophy’, hê praktikê. 12 Atticus fr. 1 des Places (from Eusebius Preparation 11.2.1). 13 Stobaeus Flor. 2.7.13–26, 2.116.19 – 152.25 W. Not all Platonists, however, follow this pattern. Eudorus (also reported by Stobaeus, Flor. 2.7.2, 2.42.7–24 W) sets out a version of the Stoic triad (evaluation – impulse – action); Apuleius omits any explicit mention of the household in his layout of Plato’s ethics in Book 2 of his On Plato (2.1.219–2.28.262). 11

6

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

kind of triadic pattern, centred more explicitly on the character and moral development of the individual. In this, the central topics are (i) the right evaluation of the world and its contents (goods, ills and indifferents); (ii) the right functioning of the soul (impulse, passions, virtue and vice); and (iii) and right action – presented either in the order just given, or with the positions of (i) and (ii) reversed.14 However, the gulf between the two camps in this regard is not as great as might appear. The Stoics include managerial and political issues in their third topic area, many of them under the sub-headings of ‘appropriate action’ (kathêkon/kathêkonta; officia) and ‘lifestyle’ (bios);15 and the concerns of all three Stoic topic areas are duly considered by Platonists as elements of ‘care for morals’.16 On any of these variant patterns of analysis, the êthikos topos includes social and political organization as well as the morality, conduct and values of the individual. Argument over the proper balance between ethical study and the other branches of philosophia, however, remained larger and more open. The conviction most frequently articulated, or simply assumed, among practitioners of the period is certainly still that the heart of philosophia lies in ethics: the point of philosophia is the pursuit of true human felicity, and true human felicity is to be found in the cultivation of virtuous character and action in ordinary life. Thus, Maximus of Tyre defines philosophia as ‘precise knowledge of matters human and divine, the source of virtue and noble thoughts and a harmonious style of life and propitious pursuits’;17 Lucian’s character Parrhesiades, searching in frustration for true philosophoi, describes them as ‘legislators for the best life, who stretch out their hands to help those who are striving towards it and proffer the best and most constructive advice, for all who ... shape and direct their lives in accordance with it’;18 and his Hermotimus, a late-comer to philosophia, progressing but painfully conscious of how far he still has to go, is made to list the gains his teacher promises him as the goal of his training as: Wisdom and bravery and ultimate beauty (to kalon auto) and justice and universal knowledge based on unshakeable conviction of the nature of each individual thing. Wealth and reputation and pleasure and all other such bodily phenomena he [the philosophos] lets fall away and shrugs off as he rises aloft, as they say Heracles was incinerated on Oeta and became a god. ... They too [philosophoi] have all these things stripped from them by philosophia as if by some fire, everything that other people in their error mistakenly believe to be marvellous; they reach the summit and there 14

See for instance Seneca Ep. 89.14; Diog. Laert. Lives 7.85–131; Stobaeus Flor. 2.7.5–12, 2.57.13–116.18 W. The case for putting evaluation first (as articulated by Seneca, loc. cit.) is that it is prior evaluation that determines the right or wrong orientation of impulse; the case for putting impulse first is that impulse precedes judgement in the development of the individual human being. See further Chs 2 and 3 below. 15 Diog. Laert. 7.129–31; Stobaeus Flor. 2.7.11, 2.95.9–23 W and 2.109.10–110.8 W. 16 Alcinous Didask. 27–33; Apuleius On Plato 2.1.219–2.23.255. 17 Maximus Or. 26.1; compare Seneca Ep. 90.3. 18 Lucian Fisherman 30.

‘Ethics’, ‘Philosophy’ and Philosophia

7

enjoy true happiness (eudaimonia), no longer even recalling wealth and reputation and pleasure, and laughing to scorn those who believe they have any real existence.19

It is no surprise, therefore, that when it comes to direct comparisons of ethics with the other sub-disciplines, logic at least regularly loses out. Maximus pours scorn on anyone so blinkered as to believe that philosophia is ‘simply a matter of nouns and verbs, skill with mere words, refutation and wrangling and sophistry, and time spent on that kind of accomplishment’.20 More strikingly, both Seneca and Arrian’s Epictetus21 can be found insisting with some vehemence that ethical issues must take precedence over logical minutiae. In Discourses 3.2.5–18, imagining himself confronted with a student who is keen to move on, Epictetus agrees that working on ‘arguments with equivocal or hypothetical premises, or those that conclude with a question, or involve fallacies, like the ‘Liar”, is a popular choice in modern philosophia, but he is bitingly sceptical of the student’s own readiness for it: So this is all you lack? Have you worked your way through the other material? Are you impossible to deceive about cash? If you see a pretty girl, can you hold out against the impression? ... [You have shown yourself to be] a worm, a moaner, a ... coward, ... Off with you then, read Archedamus; then if a mouse falls and makes a noise, you’re dead. You have the same kind of death in store for you as – what’s his name? – Crinis. He had a high opinion of himself too, because he’d read Archedamus. Can’t you bring yourself to relinquish these things that don’t concern you, you wretch? These things are appropriate for people who can study them free from upset ... 22

Seneca, in Epistle 45, similarly complains that important questions have in the past been neglected, and are still being neglected in favour of ‘quibbling debates that exercise the intellect to no good purpose’: We weave knots and with our words first bind up, then resolve ambiguities. Have we really so much spare time? Do we already know how to live, and how to die?23

Here too, the underlying position is that the real point of the exercise is ethical: philosophia is at heart about right living, not sophisticated reasoning. But the situation must not be over-simplified, either as regards logic, or as regards the over-arching question of the real heart of philosophia. As good Stoics, for whom the study of word, utterance, and reason (logos) was as much a study of

19

Lucian Hermotimus 7. Maximus Or. 1.8. 21 ‘Arrian’s Epictetus’ rather than simply ‘Epictetus’, because what we have is Arrian’s write-up of the teaching, not a work from Epictetus’ own hand: see the entries on Epictetus and Arrian in the bio-bibliographical Appendix. 22 Arrian Disc. of Epict. 3.2.8, 3.2.14–16; cf. 2.17.33. 23 Seneca Ep. 45.5; cf. 48.4ff.; 108.12. 20

8

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

reality and its divine ordering as were physics and ethics, Seneca and Epictetus ought not to downgrade logic as far as all that. And in fact, it is easy enough to understand their apparent disparagement as rhetorical rather than substantial, more to do with the perceived needs of their addressees of the moment than with a considered verdict on the standing of logic. Elsewhere, for instance in Epistle 65, Seneca can be found instructing his correspondent Lucilius in some fairly technical and analytical matter; and Epictetus makes it quite clear that some training in logic has been important in his own career and remains important to his pupils.24 The point is rather that both of these Stoics feel that the study of logic can easily become too absorbing and get out of proportion to its proper status in the pursuit of philosophical ends. No doubt the very fact that so much distinguished work had been done on logic in the past by Stoics (like the Archedamus and Crinis mentioned by Epictetus) intensified the sense of risk: it must have seemed that it would be all too easy for the learner in this school above all to get the impression that by immersing himself in the (highly challenging, difficult) subtleties of logic, he was making just the effort a good philosophos should. But part of the explanation for Epictetus’ and Seneca’s words (particularly Epictetus’) seems also to lie in the strong sense these later, ethically minded Stoics had of the need to legislate not for the achievement of ideal moral and intellectual perfection, but for their pupils as they actually were, travellers in mid-course towards virtue, but still a long way short of their goal.25 Addressees such as these had so much work still to do in ensuring that they sometimes acted and reacted correctly that the kind of logical fine-tuning required finally to perfect their moral selves could safely (and should sensibly) be postponed. But this did not mean that the whole discipline of logic was superfluous or dispensable. Over physics, too, careful analysis is needed. It is clear that the feeling that physical (including metaphysical and theological) speculation might constitute a higher object of attention then ethics persisted quite vividly in some quarters. It can be spied most clearly in Alcinous’ Platonist manual, the Didaskalikos. In the very first chapter of this work, philosophia is defined as a striving (orexis) for wisdom (sophia), or the freeing and turning around of the soul from the body, when we turn towards the intelligible and what truly is; and wisdom is the science (epistêmê) of things divine and human.26

And when Alcinous comes to specify the Platonic concept of the objective of human life, the ‘end for man’ (telos), it is on the formulation ‘likeness to God’ (homoiôsis theôi) that he fixes, with the gloss that this likeness can be attained

24

Arrian Disc. of Epict. 1.7.32, 2.25. On this, see 49–62 below. 26 Alcin. Didask. 1.1, echoing Phaedo 67d and Rep. 7.521c. The formula ‘science of things divine and human’, though apparently of Stoic origin (cf. SVF 2.35 = 26A L–S), was by this time a widely used commonplace (cf. Philo Congr. 79; Apuleius On Plato 2.6.228). 25

‘Ethics’, ‘Philosophy’ and Philosophia

9

first of all, if we are endowed with the appropriate nature, then if we benefit from proper habits, upbringing, and moral practice conforming to the law, and, most importantly, if we use reason, and education, and duly transmitted philosophical doctrine, in such a way as to distance ourselves from the majority of human concerns, and always directing ourselves towards intelligible reality.27

In similar vein, the Peripatetic Aspasius, in the introductory remarks to his commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, feels the need to acknowledge that the objects of theôrêtikê philosophia are higher and nobler, simply of more worth, than those of ethics and politics, even though the subject of present concern, ethics, is ‘more necessary’ for an embodied human being, and must be of ‘primary’ concern to such a being.28 And at a less technical level, it is noteworthy that Maximus of Tyre’s discussion of the competing merits of practical virtue and theoretical contemplation, though in the end it opts for a characteristically tame compromise, can nevertheless allow itself to dilate enthusiastically on the splendours of contemplation: But as for the sights (theamata) seen by the philosopher, to what can they ever be compared? To a dream, but a truthful dream that travels to every corner of the universe. His body does not move at all, but his soul advances over the whole earth, and from the earth to the heavens: crossing every sea, traversing the whole earth, flying up through every region of the air, accompanying the sun and the moon in their orbits, taking its fixed place in the choir of the other stars, and all but joining Zeus in the administration and disposition of reality. What a truly blessed journey! What a beautiful spectacle! What truthful dreams!29

Seneca too, when he is writing physics not ethics, can change his tune, as he does at the beginning of his Natural Questions: I hold, my good friend Lucilius, that, just as philosophia is superior to all other disciplines (artes), so within philosophia itself, the part which deals with the gods is similarly superior to that which deals with man. It is loftier and higher-minded; it has allowed itself great freedom – not content with what the eyes can show, it has divined that there is something greater and more beautiful which nature has located beyond the reach of vision. In short, there is the same difference between the two as between god and man: the one teaches what should be done on earth, the other what is done in the heavens; the one dispels our errors and brings light to enable us to settle the uncertainties of life, the other ranges far beyond this murk in which we wallow, wrenches us from the darkness and brings us to the very source of light. ... 27

Alcin. Didask. 28.4. On this, and other competing definitions of the ‘end of life’ (telos) within Platonism, see Dillon 1977, 43–4, 122, 192–3, 299. 28 Aspasius Comm. on Ar. Nic. Eth. 1.2–2.9 Heylbut; cf. Stobaeus’ summary of Peripatetic ethics, Flor. 2.7.24, 2.143.24–144.15 W. 29 Maximus Or. 16.6.

10

Philosophy in the Roman Empire Have you fought free of your soul’s flaws? You don’t have a hypocrite’s countenance, you don’t speak in accordance with a will not your own, your heart is not twisted, you don’t suffer from a greed that denies to itself whatever it has taken from everybody else, nor an extravagance that shamefully squanders what it has shamefully acquired, nor an ambition that cannot lead you to honours except through dishonour? You have achieved nothing yet: you may have escaped much, but you have not yet escaped from yourself. That virtue which we pursue is glorious not because it is a mark of felicity to be free from ill, but because it unchains the mind and prepares it for knowledge of things celestial, and makes it worthy to enter into association with God.30

But such localized outbursts of partisan enthusiasm should not be taken out of context, or given a greater scope than their authors intended. Just as occasional expressions of concern about over-concentration on logic do not indicate a settled desire to abandon it entirely, so praise for the sublimities of physics is not equivalent to a call for the abandonment of ethics. The fundamental conviction remains that the point of philosophia as a pursuit lies in humans – in you – rather than in the cosmos: philosophia is there to make individual human beings better, to fulfil them, not primarily to increase the sum of knowledge of the universe, or ensure its more even distribution. Where there is room for divergence, between thinkers, or within the same thinker’s thought on different occasions, is over the range of subject-matter that has to be attended to in order to achieve this goal. Should the focus be solely on the individual moral agent and his terrestrial surroundings, or (at least sometimes) on the larger cosmic context? In actual practice, all the major figures of this period clearly do conceive their ethics in the context of strong and important convictions about physical topics – which after all include the issue of the makeup of the individual human soul, as well as its place in the grander system of Nature, and the nature of the divine force or forces that regulate that system. But the inheritance from the fourth century BCE made it possible and tempting to articulate different stances on different occasions about how far, and in what spirit, such matters required separate attention. The ‘dominance’ of ethics It is in this light that we should view the suggestion that is sometimes made, that the Imperial period saw a notable narrowing in philosophical output and interests. Some scholars, perhaps over-influenced by the very vociferousness of the likes of Epictetus and Seneca, have concluded that philosophia under the Empire, at least in its Roman heart, tended positively to confine itself to ethics, to the exclusion or

30

Seneca Natural Questions 1, Preface 1–2 and 6–7.

‘Ethics’, ‘Philosophy’ and Philosophia

11

extreme downgrading of other dimensions of philosophical activity. So, for instance, Mark Morford, in his study The Roman Philosophers, envisages a process by which Roman thinkers of the late Republic, above all Cicero, building on the legacy of the ‘middle Stoics’ Panaetius and Posidonius, began to form a distinctively Roman style of philosophia ‘with a strong focus on ethics’. This tendency was reinforced by developments in Seneca’s generation, to produce an ‘obsessive concern ... with philosophy as a practical guide for daily life’, which only comes to an end in the later second century CE, with Marcus Aurelius as its last representative.31 This is a reading of the evidence that must be rejected. The first and second centuries CE do indeed provide us with a striking array of thinkers whose surviving or attested output is predominantly ethical, and firmly slanted towards the practical application of ethical principle: Seneca, Demetrius, Musonius Rufus, Arrian’s Epictetus, Dio Chrysostom, Hierocles, Marcus Aurelius.32 A good many of these were Roman rather than Greek in ethnic origin, or (if Greek) had connections with the centre of Imperial power, and slanted much or all of their work towards a Roman audience. But the idea that there was an extreme concentration on ethics in this period, even among a limited sub-set of philosophical writers, and that there was something peculiarly Roman about this concentration is, though interesting and discussible, a dubious one. And the proposition that philosophia quite generally in this period was unusually concerned with ethics, to the detriment of other modes of philosophical activity, is flatly contradicted by the evidence of both surviving texts, and works known only by fragment, summary or title. Even among the (supposed) ‘Roman ethicists’, concentration on ethics was not complete or exclusive. For all his warnings about the dangers of losing oneself in advanced logical subtleties, Arrian’s Epictetus, as already noted, clearly regards some logical study as essential for his pupils, and recalls his own teacher Musonius feeling the same way. Seneca’s surviving output includes the Natural Questions, as well as the ethical matter of his Dialogues and Epistles, and the Epistles themselves contain elements of (meta)physical doctrine, presented as continuous with and importantly supportive of ethics rather than antithetical to it. And when the field of view is widened to include other well-known figures of the first, second and early third centuries CE, it becomes clearer still that ethics was very far from being either an exclusive concern, or one insulated from other dimensions of philosophia. Plutarch’s surviving philosophical output, though grouped together under the overall title of Moralia (Ethika), includes studies of cosmology, theology, and natural history, in addition to the ethical works proper (for instance, On the Divine Sign of Socrates, On the Face seen in the Moon, On Primal Cold, Are Land or Sea Creatures More Intelligent?, On the Generation of Soul in Plato’s Timaeus). Maximus of Tyre, on his more simplified level, treats of cosmology, 31

Morford 2002, 4, 132, 238 (my italics). Note also the case of Euphrates, well analysed by Frede 1997, who seems to have concentrated on teaching by practical moral example, and to have refrained from publication. 32

12

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

demonology and psychology along with ethics;33 and Apuleius, similarly, expounds daimon-theory in his On the God of Socrates. Galen, like Plutarch, wrote an exposition of the Timaeus, perhaps in commentary form, and unlike Plutarch, Maximus or Apuleius, studies of logic as well.34 Aspects of physics were clearly of major concern throughout the period, as is shown above all by the activities of Platonists and platonizing Neo-Pythagoreans: Aulus Gellius’ mentor Calvenus Taurus and his Athenian near-contemporary Atticus both wrote commentaries on the Timaeus, with Taurus perhaps also composing a treatise On Corporeals and Incorporeals (according to the Suda).35 Moderatus of Gades published ten or eleven books of Lectures on Pythagoreanism, dealing inter alia with cosmological first principles and doctrines of the soul.36 Nicomachus of Gerasa wrote an Introduction to Arithemtic, a Manual of Harmonics, and a Theology of Arithmetic.37 And Numenius of Apamea wrote On the Good, On the Indestructibility of the Soul, On Numbers, and perhaps also yet another commentary on the Timaeus.38 The early commentators on Aristotle also contributed, with Aspasius perhaps writing on Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics, and Alexander of Aphrodisias certainly doing so, along with commentaries also on On the Heavens, On Generation and Corruption, On the Senses, Meteorology, and On the Soul.39 Interest in logic was maintained not only, as mentioned, by Galen, but also perhaps by Atticus, who is recorded as having opinions of Aristotle’s Categories, and again by the commentators on Aristotle: Aspasius, Andronicus, Alexander and Boethus all composed commentaries on the Categories, Aspasius one on the On Interpretation, and Alexander also on the On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, and Topics.40 Mention could also be made of the works of Favorinus on Academic Scepticism,41 and of course of Sextus Empiricus’ Pyrrhonist writings. All of which adds up to a broad panorama of philosophical interest and activity which makes talk of an unusual concentration on ethics seem strained. The most important point, however, is not that specialized physical treatises continued to be produced along with works of ethical focus. It is that – in the spirit of the Stoic images of garden, animal and egg – ethics and physics were in practice treated as quite inextricably intertwined, even in authors who treated the physics as a fixed background, and concentrated their imaginative and exegetic resources on the ethical payoff. When Apuleius or Maximus expound Platonist demonology and cosmology, they do so to bring home lessons about proper human aspirations, and 33

Orations 5, 8–11, 13, 21, 41. Galen On My Own Books 46–7. 35 Taurus: Philoponus Eternity of the World 6.8 (= T22 Gioè) and Suda s.v. ‘Tauros’. Atticus: frr. 12–39 Des Places. 36 Porphyry Life of Pythag. 48–9; Kahn 2001, 105–10. 37 Kahn 2001, 110–18. 38 Kahn 2001, 118–33; frr. ed. Des Places 1973 (Budé). 39 Sharples 1987, 1182–6. 40 Sharples 1987; Gottschalk 1987, esp. 1151–64. For Atticus, see frr. 40–4 Des Places. 41 Holford-Strevens 1988, 72–8. 34

‘Ethics’, ‘Philosophy’ and Philosophia

13

the aids made available by God and the Universe to individual humans. Epictetus’ exhortations to his pupils to straighten their view of reality, and to keep control of their moral choices, would be senseless without the constantly implied backing of belief in a providentially organized Stoic cosmos. But more of what this meant will emerge in subsequent chapters, as individual ethical debates are analysed in closer detail. Authority and division Whatever range of ideas may have been available about the proper ranking of the constituent parts of philosophia, there can be no mistaking the weight of the whole package taken together, in this period any more than in the later fourth century BCE. As already observed, philosophia and its exponents claimed unique and exclusive access to final truth about humanity, life, reality, the divine and the universe. This is, to put it mildly, a notably different status to that claimed by most of the activities picked out now by the word ‘philosophy’ and its cognates in other modern languages. One gets closer to it by imagining a combination of the kind of authority now commonly accorded to ‘Science’ (with a capital ‘S’), with that now more patchily granted to Religion: knowledge of reality, combined with authoritative instruction in how to think, feel, and live, combined with privileged access to the higher levels of the universal hierarchy. Correspondingly, the philosophos of the period – the guardian and dispenser of this conglomerate – can usefully be envisaged as a blend of the scientist, the theologian, and the priest. It is no accident that when, in the second century CE, Christianity reformulated itself so as to appeal to the educated classes of Greco-Roman society, it was above all as philosophia that it sought to present itself.42 Both strands in this comparison, the religious and the scientific, give a handy angle of approach to another central feature of the philosophy of the period, which has been taken for granted in the discussion up to this point, but not directly commented on: its dividedness into contrasting and competing schools of thought. Pursuit of the truths about the universe, reason and human life enshrined in logic, physics and ethics, and of the fulfilment that engagement with philosophia was promised to confer, was not in this era something to be carried out at the individual’s own whim, in the free play of creative originality. On the contrary, it was expected to defer – on pain of incomprehension and contempt – to an authoritative past history of philosophical endeavour and achievement, which was taken as defining the options for all subsequent participants. Thus, with only minor and peripheral exceptions (to be dealt with shortly), to declare for philosophia was necessarily to declare for a particular kind of philosophia, and to identify that kind not by reference to its subject-matter, but by reference to a great thinker, or group of thinkers, from the past. Of the Imperial-period voices already quoted, Seneca, Arrian’s Epictetus and Lucian’s Hermotimus speak as Stoics, seeking to learn and 42

E.g. Justin First Apology 2.1; Daniélou 1973, 7–73.

14

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

progress within the framework of ideas established in the late fourth and third centuries BCE by Zeno, Cleanthes and Chrysippus; Alcinous, Atticus and Maximus as Platonists, experts in (a heavily systematized version of) the thought of Plato. It was equally possible to enrol in the spiritual succession from Epicurus, Aristotle, Diogenes and Crates, Pyrrho of Elis, or Pythagoras, as an Epicurean, Peripatetic, Cynic, Sceptic or Pythagorean. To take up philosophia was therefore to make a double choice, in that the need was not just to opt for a philosophical as opposed to a non-philosophical outlook, but also (standardly if not inevitably) to select one from a range of competing alternatives, each with its own distinctive ideas, loyalties and tradition: in Greek, a hairesis, a position ‘chosen’ in preference to others, thus a school of thought both unified and marked off by its shared outlook; in Latin, a secta, the ‘following’ of one leader or line of thought rather than another.43 Like the definition and sub-division of philosophia, this other form of dividedness was a further part of the inheritance from the foundational days of the fourth century BCE, which bequeathed to Greco-Roman culture a map of the sectarian landscape that was to last for more than eight centuries. The processes by which relatively unstructured disagreement had congealed into competing systems of doctrine, and relatively casual groups of disputants into self-consciously separate schools, need not be examined now, and have in any case not yet been sufficiently problematized and investigated by historians of philosophy. Even if it was by no means inevitable that the fault-lines should have become established exactly as they did, it is not hugely surprising that some such process should have taken place, given the identity for philosophia which was developing over the same period. As the histories of religious and scientific sectarianism also show, although truth must be one, it is also something far too important to agree over. For present purposes, in this introduction to topics and controversies in Imperial period ethics and politics, it is more relevant to ask how the de facto dividedness of philosophia was experienced and reacted to by contemporaries. As the name hairesis itself underlines, variety creates an invitation to choose, and to take sides between the competing alternatives on offer. It is clear that this was an invitation that called forth more than a purely intellectual response – as would seem only reasonable when what was being chosen was a version of the ‘art of life’, rather than just a set of body of theory. Competing sectarian answers to what philosophia at least presented as the main questions about the world and human life – the nature of god, or the gods, and the relationship between him/them and the physical cosmos; the structure and workings of the human soul; the nature of the human good, and the means to its attainment – certainly bulked large. But other features too could evidently tip the scales of an individual seeker’s choice in one direction rather than the others. Lucian’s Hermotimus voices a satirically

43

Glucker 1978, 166–206; Lucian Hermotimus; Diog. Laert. 1. 17–21; Sextus Pyrrhonism 1.1–17. It must be stressed that in this period the haireseis were schools of thought independent of any institutional structure and physical plant, even though there were some institutional continuities. On the topic of philosophical allegiance, see also Sedley 1989.

‘Ethics’, ‘Philosophy’ and Philosophia

15

reductive account of how it might be conditioned, explaining that he opted for the Stoics because he ... saw the majority making for their philosophia, and so guessed that it was the best. ... But that was not the only reason. ... I also heard everyone saying that the Epicureans were sweet-tempered and hedonistic, the Peripatetics fond of money and argumentative, the Platonists puffed up and statushungry; but of the Stoics it was widely asserted that they were manly and omniscient, and that the man who trod this path was the only king, the only rich man, the only sage, and everything rolled up together.44

Doctrinal differences, flippantly paraphrased, underpin the contrasts made here, but the added suggestion of motives of personal taste is not mere satirical froth. The different schools had their own intellectual styles, varying for instance over the relative importance to be attached to theory and practice, or the authority and openness to revision of the work of their founders, and these too could influence choice. Plutarch remarks, in the preface to his lives of Dion and Brutus, that shared membership of a given school of thought can give individuals a perceptible kinship, just as it is evident to the experienced eye that two athletes have worked with the same trainer;45 this could reasonably be applied to the motives for the original choice, as well as to the effects of the teaching. It should not, however, be concluded that this dividedness, and the consequent invitation to choice and sectarian commitment, were regarded in the same way by all contemporary observers. Reactions seem to have varied, from the kind of enthusiastic acceptance just illustrated, to the search for means of circumvention or avoidance. For some (many), the diversity of prima facie appearance was significant and real: being philosophical for them was consequently a matter of selecting and committing to just one school of thought as uniquely (or at least overwhelmingly) right, and rejecting the rest as entirely (or at least essentially) wrong, and of defending the choice in polemical confrontation with the rejects. Lucian’s Hermotimus,46 striking out down just one road of the many their proponents tried to tempt him onto, provides a fictitious example; real-life instances of the attitude can be found in Platonist Plutarch, with his extensive attacks on Stoicism and Epicureanism, and Stoic Epictetus, with his assaults on Epicureanism and Scepticism.47 Others, while staying well within the sectarian frame of reference, showed greater readiness to acknowledge good thinking from outside their own sect: the judicious if limited generosity of Seneca’s references to Epicurus in his Moral Epistles is a case in point.48 44

Lucian Hermot. 16. Plutarch Dion 1. 46 Lucian Hermot. 14–16. 47 E.g. Plutarch’s Progress in Virtue, Stoic Self-contradictions, and A Pleasant Life is Impossible on Epicurean Principle; Arrian Disc. of Epict. 1.5, 1.27.15–21, 2.20, etc. Epicureanism was always the most embattled of the haireseis (and well aware of it). 48 Seneca: e.g. Epp. 12.11 and 16.7. Seneca had something of a taste for maintaining that Stoicism and Epicureanism were close on many issues, differing only verbally (Leisure 3 45

16

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

But there were also those who came to more strongly irenic conclusions, impressed by a deeper unity which they wished to see beneath the surface diversity. Already in the first century BCE Antiochus of Ascalon, speaking from within (his version of) the Academy, had made a determined effort to argue for the essential unity of Platonist, Peripatetic and Stoic thought.49 A similar spirit, though worked out in a much sketchier and more general manner, animates Maximus of Tyre in the second century CE, who argues in his Oration 1 that an essential unity of purpose underlies the surface variations in appearance and teaching-style between different philosophoi, in Oration 4 that a single tradition of theological wisdom unites the poetry of the past and the philosophia of more recent times, and in Orations 29–33 that the only sectarian choice it is essential to make is that to reject the pernicious hedonism of Epicurus.50 Yet others went to the opposite extreme, concluding not that everybody must be right and, despite first appearances, somehow in agreement, but that nobody could be right. This reaction could take the ‘common-sense’ form urged on Lucian’s Hermotimus by his interlocutor Lycinus, who exhorts him to abandon partisan allegiance to Stoicism, or any other philosophical sect, and instead to ‘live the life that is common to all ... free from bizarre and inflated ambitions’.51 Or it could take the intellectually tougher option of Scepticism, remaining within the formal structure of haireseis,52 but in such a way as to reject the dogmatism characteristic of the others, in favour of a principled (and sometimes aggressive) ‘suspension of judgement’ (epochê). This rejection could be shaped either into the Pyrrhonist conclusion that nothing is reliably proven, not even that nothing is reliably proven, or into the Academic Sceptical credo that it is certain that nothing is certain.53 In either case, the Sceptic saw it as his task not simply to seek the inner calm of suspended judgement on his own account, but to show by argued criticism of the claims and doctrines of the ‘dogmatic’ schools that others should do so too. One further possible response, eclecticism – the conscious and avowed mixing and matching of doctrines from a range of different schools – is harder to trace in practice than might have been expected. The long history of argument between the sects had indeed led to mutual influence and ‘borrowing’ – Stoicism in particular setting agendas and promulgating technical terms that were readily taken up by others – and for this reason eclecticism was once regarded as a defining

and 7, Constancy 16.3, Happy Life 13.1, Clemency 1.3.2) – though in Ben. 4.2 he admits that the gap cannot be closed over the issue of the summum bonum; cf. Griffin 1976, ch. 10. 49 See Dillon 1977, 52–106; Barnes 1989. 50 Maximus of Tyre Orr. 1, 4 and 29–33 (cf. also 27.5), with Trapp 1997a, xxii–xxx. 51 Lucian Hermot. 84; compare the ‘revelatory’ advice given by the prophet Tiresias to Menippus in Menippus 21. 52 The question whether Scepticism could claim to be a hairesis, given its lack of positive doctrines, was debated, but answered positively, at least by Sceptics themselves: Diog. Laert. 1.20, Sextus Pyrrhonism 1.16–17. 53 On the variant forms of Scepticism, see (e.g.) Long 1974, 75–106, Sharples 1996, 9–10 and 27–34.

‘Ethics’, ‘Philosophy’ and Philosophia

17

characteristic of Imperial-period philosophia in general.54 But this diagnosis has more recently, and rightly, come to seem inappropriate, for the simple reason that the philosophoi of this period themselves do not appear to have seen their approach to doctrine in this light. Many examples show that, for them, a Platonist crediting Plato with what seems to us Stoic or Peripatetic vocabulary, or even a distinctively Stoic doctrinal concern, was still expounding his Master’s thought, and showing that he could match that of his rivals point for point, rather than importing alien matter or creating a philosophical hybrid.55 The formal record – Diogenes Laertius supported by the Suda – in fact comes up with just one name, that of the Augustanperiod Potamo of Alexandria, who apparently attempted (in a way perhaps reminiscent of Antiochus of Ascalon) to mix together Platonist, Peripatetic and Stoic materials in an overtly eclectic mode.56 But he seems to have had no pupils and founded no school. Something like an eclectic response, however, can (with some qualification) be seen in the case of one further, highly individual figure of the Imperial period, Galen of Pergamum. Though a doctor, and taking Hippocrates as the great intellectual authority to whom he owed his primary loyalty, Galen was keen to claim philosophical competence too (indeed, to claim an identity between the two disciplines, when properly developed).57 Describing his own education, he records how he scrupulously followed advice from his father ‘not to declare myself hastily the adherent of any one sect, but to take a long time in order to learn about them and judge them’: These ... were the precepts I took from my father; and I keep them to this day. I do not declare allegiance to any sect (aph’ haireseôs tinos emauton anagoreusas), rather subjecting them all to a thorough examination (tên exetasin echôn).58

This careful cultivation of critical independence, and the habit of searching scrutiny – scepticism without the sceptical conclusion, almost – looks on the face of it to be opening the way to the construction of an eclectic philosophia, and this expectation is to some degree fulfilled in Galen’s oeuvre as a whole.59 Refusing sectarian commitment, and regarding philosophoi in general as thinkers who get some things right and some things wrong, Galen endorses this or that product of 54

E.g. MacMullen 1966, 48 (all the more telling because a summary by a historian of what is meant to be a consensus view): ‘ ... organized systems and derivations of thought were dissolved; all was open to choice, and hodge-podge handbooks encouraged everyone to be his own metaphysician’; the accompanying footnote (p. 305) refers to Düring 1951, Dudley 1937, Arnold 1958, and Oltramare 1926. 55 See Dillon 1977, xiv–xv, 265; Dillon 1993, xxx–xl; Dillon and Long 1988, 1–33. 56 Potamo: Diog. Laert. 1.21; Suda s.v. 57 That the Best Doctor is also a Philosophos. On Galen, see in the first instance Singer 1997, vii–lii; Nutton 2004, 216–47. 58 Affections and Errors of the Soul 1.8.42–3. 59 Sufficiently for Dillon in his brief treatment to style his doctrine ‘truly eclectic’ (1977: 339).

18

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

the different schools as it matches up to his own sense of the truth of the matter. However, what emerges falls short of being a complete philosophical system, for Galen is not interested in system building per se; and there is a general sense that Plato and (second-century, ‘Middle’) Platonism are more frequently embraced and endorsed than the competition.60 Galen’s firm refusal of partisan commitment, and his strong assertion that one can be a philosophos in the most respectable of senses without such commitment, remain remarkable, and an important indication of the range of stances open to an intellectual of his era; but he is not playing the same game as a Potamo. Philosophia in the community So far, this chapter has focused on the kind of authority claimed by philosophia in virtue of its aims and subject-matter, and on some of the issues raised by the scope and weight of the claim. But it is all very well to claim transcendent, life-changing authority. It has also to be exercised (and if need be bolstered and defended) from a particular concrete vantage-point, or set of vantage-points, in society. We therefore need to ask how philosophoi saw themselves and how they were seen by others as fitting in, in this social sense. Where did they choose to speak from? The most readily identifiable position appropriated by philosophoi of the Imperial period was that of educators of the young: not the very young, still also undergoing training in the basic skills of literacy and literate expression, but those in their mid-to-late teens, closer to the threshold of their adult careers. Philosophoi presented themselves as the providers of an especially advanced stage in the sequence that went to make up a full educational career: the logical and natural next step for the intelligently ambitious, after absorption of the basic instruction in literacy and literature offered by grammatistês and grammatikos, to be entered on either along with or after study with a rhêtôr.61 Though claiming to offer something crucially more than any of these other educational professionals, they were to be found inhabiting and operating in the same kind of space – the schoolroom – and with something of the same pedagogical techniques and educational aids. So it is that when Plutarch devotes a whole essay, On Listening, to the proper approach to attending lectures, it is principally philosophical lectures ‘in the classroom’ (en tais scholais) that he has in mind. And so it is that, at the beginning of the essay, he presents philosophia as the next onwards step to youngsters about to put their years of more basic schooling behind them: You have often heard that following God and obeying reason are one and the same thing. In the same way, I ask you to believe that in persons of good sense the passage from childhood to manhood is not a casting off of control, 60

Cf. Singer 1997, xxiv–xxvii; Nutton 2004, 222–3. On the structure of education under the Empire, see Marrou 1956, 242–91, with the more sophisticated gloss provided by Morgan 1998; on the place of philosophia within this structure, see also Clarke 1971, 55–99. 61

‘Ethics’, ‘Philosophy’ and Philosophia

19

but a recasting of the controlling agent, since instead of some hired person or slave purchased with money people now take as the divine guide of their life reason (logos), whose followers alone deserve to be considered free. ... And so you, who have been brought up for a long time in casual contact ... ought to feel like an old friend when you come to philosophia, which alone can array young men in the manly and truly perfect adornment that comes from reason.62

A further story, that neatly brings together the claims of philosophia to being a lifedirecting and life-changing commitment, with its gravitation towards a scholastic setting, is that of the ‘conversion’ of the young Polemo, transformed from young wastrel to sober thinker and seeker after virtue by the accident of his tipsy intrusion into a lecture by Xenocrates on self-control (sôphrosynê). Though set in the fourth century BCE, it was an episode that evidently remained a firm favourite with Imperial-period writers.63 As Plutarch’s words underline, this educational stance was one that fitted well with the heavy emphasis laid in philosophia on ethics and ideals of selfdevelopment, for which the transitional period between adolescence and entry into full citizenship was so clearly of special importance. And it helpfully assimilated philosophia to a familiar and valued class of professionals, with a widely accepted claim to civic usefulness. That the assimilation was not one sided, simply a piece of hopeful self-importance on the part of philosophoi, is shown by the fact that – for a period at least – it was formally acknowledged in Imperial legislation. Under a measure apparently first enacted by Vespasian, and extended by Trajan, philosophoi along with doctors, teachers of grammar and teachers of rhetoric (‘sophists’) qualified for ateleia, that is for exemption from the compulsory contributions of money or service on which city economies and administrations under the Empire depended to a large extent. In the words of a confirmation of this enactment, issued under Antoninus, but referring back to the reigns of Aurelius and his predecessor Hadrian: My most divine father, immediately upon accession to the throne, by decree confirmed all existing privileges and exemptions on all these professions alike, specifying that philosophoi, teachers of rhetoric, teachers of literature and doctors should be exempt from serving as gymnasiarchs, market-commissioners, priests, providers of billets, providers of corn, and providers of oil, and are not to act as judges or

62

Plutarch On Listening to Lectures 1–2 (Mor. 37d–38a); for the equation of philosophia with growing up, see also e.g. Seneca Ep. 4.2. 63 E.g. Horace Sat. 2.3.253–7, Val. Max. 6.9.ext.1, Arrian Disc. of Epict. 3.1.4 and 4.11.30 (with scholion), Plutarch Friend and Flatterer 32 (Mor. 71e), Lucian Double Indictment 13–19, Diog. Laert. 4.16. On the topic of ‘conversion’ to philosophia, see also Nock 1933, 164–86.

20

Philosophy in the Roman Empire ambassadors or be enrolled for military service against their will, nor be compelled to perform any other kind of provincial or other service.64

In this generous dispensation, philosophoi are counted together with doctors and teachers of the core curriculum of Greek paideia as communally valuable individuals, whose residence is to be encouraged, and who deserve to have their professional contribution to the public good acknowledged by a corresponding lightening of their other civic obligations. This may not quite have been the free meals for life so famously suggested by Plato’s Socrates (Apology 37a), but it was a move in the same direction. At the same time, however, this was a kind of status-claim that had its dangers and limitations. For all the advantages of assuming the mantle of educators of the young, philosophoi also felt they had good grounds for insisting that they and what they had to offer should not be assimilated too thoroughly, and thought of as just one among several forms of useful instruction. For one thing, as already observed, their subject-matter could be said to be of a quite different order of magnitude and depth from those treated by other educators of the young: the art of right living, rather than the art of getting your syllables right, or of constructing a speech to the city Council correctly.65 Secondly, philosophia and philosophical learning differed from the educational norm in their chronological extent, the nature of their demands over time. Philosophia was for life, not just for school and adolescence,66 and it was as much a practical as a theoretical subject. Hard and valuable lessons might indeed be learned in the classroom, but not to continue both the study and the practical effort at self-formation on into adult life would be a betrayal of philosophia’s true nature and potential. What philosophoi thus felt entitled to was the respect and standing due to educators, but educators of a very special kind, with a relevance to and an authority over the adult as well as the adolescent, stemming from the special nature of their subject-matter. It is clear that this claim to longer chronological reach was mirrored in actual practice. Although you would characteristically find that the majority of the gathering in a philosophos’ classroom was of late school age, there would often be a sprinkling also of older individuals, looking in for just one session. Thus, though Arrian’s Epictetus clearly phrases most of his teaching and exhortation specifically for the young, he also addresses himself from time to time to maturer individuals, with growing families and positions of adult responsibility.67 How exactly he organized the daily timetable of his teaching in Nicopolis cannot be reconstructed, but it seems as if there was some kind of division between classes for full-time students only, and open sessions to which others were welcomed as well.68 64

Digest 27.1.6.8. On the whole issue of ateleia, see Bowersock 1969, 33, with the review by M. Griffin in JRS 61 (1971) 279–80; Millar 1977, 491–506. 65 Maximus Or. 1.7. 66 E.g. Seneca Ep. 76.1–4. 67 E.g. Disc. of Epict. 1.11; cf. Long 2002, 43–4; Brunt 1977. 68 Long 2002, 44–5; Brunt 1977; Clarke 1971, 85–92.

‘Ethics’, ‘Philosophy’ and Philosophia

21

From the point of view of the individual consumer, formal instruction experienced in adolescence could find its continuation in other ways too, in addition to such occasional return visits to the classroom. The very rich could keep a philosophos (a ‘philosophical chaplain’) as part of their household, for consultation, instruction and performance as required: a position exemplified by the cases of the Younger Cato’s Athenodorus Cordylion, Cicero’s Diodotus, or Crassus’ Alexander, and exploited for its satirical mileage in Lucian’s On Salaried Posts.69 Others could reckon to encounter both philosophical professionals and philosophically minded lay-people in the normal course of social life, so as to be able to air problems and share insights both in informal conversation and in the somewhat more structured exchanges of the symposion.70 Relationships of instruction and mutual support could be set up perfectly well outside the context of formal classes, to be sustained both face-to-face and by letter: as for instance not only in the relationship with Lucilius depicted (with whatever degree of fictionalization) in Seneca’s Moral Epistles, but also in such papyrus letters as P.Oxy. 3069, between two otherwise unknown would-be philosophoi in provincial Egypt.71 Philosophical material could be heard in public oratorical performance, whether from professional teachers, or other fellow travellers.72 Both public and private libraries existed to sustain as extensive and detailed a reading of philosophical literature as the individual might desire.73 Here and there more unusual forms of contact and diffusion could be encountered, most notably the huge inscription – a kind of half-way stage between private reading-text and public performance – set up by the second-century Epicurean Diogenes in his home-town of Oenoanda. The model of the philosophos as a practitioner not confined to contexts of formal instruction, but ranging freely over all kinds of private and social situation, is developed in a number of Imperial-period texts. Plutarch, in his treatise on Old Men in Politics, takes a common line in articulating it with reference to the great precedent of Socrates:

69

Plutarch Cato the Younger 16; Cicero Brutus 309; Plutarch Crassus 3. See for example Pliny Ep. 1.10 (esp. 9–10) on Euphrates (noting what this tells us of Pliny’s own desire to be known as a regular consulter of philosophoi). Plutarch’s Table Talk (Quaestiones convivales) is evidence of the continuing habit of talking philosophy over wine at the symposion: the very first question raised (1.1.612e–615c) is ‘Whether philosophia is a fitting topic for conversation at a drinking party’. 71 Text, translation and brief commentary in Trapp 2003, no. 35. 72 Favorinus, Dio, Maximus, and Apuleius are the most frequently cited examples of philosophizing orators, but there were clearly many more about: professional instructors would on occasion leave the classroom for a more public arena; Strabo 14.5.15 mentions two travelling philosophical lecturers in Plutiades and Diogenes of Tarsus; and there are epigraphically attested cases like those of Ofellius Laetus (Bowersock 1982) and Julianus Eutecnius (Jones 1978b). 73 Accessibility of philosophical books in Memphis in the third century CE is attested by the library catalogue on P.Petersburg 13; and private circulation of philosophical books by letters like P.Mil.Vog 11 (Trapp 2003, no. 56); cf. also Keenan 1977. 70

22

Philosophy in the Roman Empire Most people of course think that philosophoi are people who sit in a teacher’s chair and converse (dialegesthai), and deliver lectures over books; but they fail to notice the continuous practice of ... philosophia, seen consistently, from day to day, in both words and deeds. Socrates at any rate was a philosophos, even if he did not set out benches or seat himself in an armchair or observe a fixed hour for conversing or promenading with his pupils, but joked with them, when the occasion came up, and drank with them, and served in the army and lounged in the agora with some of them, and right to the end continued to philosophize, even when in prison and drinking the poison. He was the first to show that life admits philosophia at all times and in all parts, and without qualification in all experiences and deeds.74

In the same vein, Maximus of Tyre in his Oration 1 argues that one should expect to find philosophoi holding forth in many different situations, styles and physical guises, rather than confined to a single physical stereotype and a narrowly circumscribed range of settings: Philosophical teaching has no single occasion set aside as its own. It is as inseparable from life as light is from the eye. ... Whoever refuses to allow the philosophos to seize every opportunity to speak seems to me to be doing the same as someone who selects a single station from the whole chancy, fluctuating, unstable business of war, and confines there a versatile soldier who knows how to fight both as hoplite and as archer, and can shoot as effectively on horseback as he can from a chariot.75

And an idealized portrayal of a contemporary philosophos putting this roving, universalist brief into practice can be seen in Lucian’s Demonax. All of this means that philosophoi were in fact angling for a very exalted, but also a very peculiar status, with no exact parallels in the society of their day. They wished to be acknowledged and valued as educators, but with a far wider scope than that exercised by those normally so described. They wished to be acknowledged as leaders of their communities, but without occupying any formal position of civic authority. More than that, they wished also to be accepted as leaders of humanity as a whole, without further reference to political and social structures and divisions.76 Philosophia and philosophoi were felt to deserve a hegemonic role, but it was one that characteristically had to be expressed in metaphor, or in evocations of (a construction of) the distant past, rather than in terms drawn from contemporary ranks and roles. Philosophoi should be seen as ‘legislators’, but in the mould of figures like Minos, Solon and Lycurgus, whose laws established ethical norms and practices rather than mere rules of procedure,

74

Plutarch Old Men 796de. Plutarch here bases himself on a reading of the Socrates of the Platonic dialogues, with specific allusion to Symposium, Crito and Phaedo. 75 Maximus Or. 1.3. 76 E.g. Seneca Ep. 89.13, generis humani paedagogus.

‘Ethics’, ‘Philosophy’ and Philosophia

23

and who formed the moral characters of whole communities.77 They should be seen as teachers, but after the pattern of the great poet-sages of antiquity, from Orpheus to Homer and Hesiod, who taught mankind in general in whatever way was required to make sense to their audience of the moment.78 Their relationship to their fellow men could be compared to that of a guide to a band of travellers, a general to an army, a steersman to a ship’s company, a herdsman to a flock, a chorus-leader to a choir, or – with special emphasis – that of a doctor to his patients.79 This last metaphor had particular resonance and significance as an expression of the kind of importance the philosophoi claimed, and is found again and again in the writing of the Imperial period.80 If philosophia rightly claimed special insight into the right way to be and live, and special effectiveness in the teaching of that right way, then philosophoi must be to the character (soul) and moral life what doctors are to the body and the undisputed good of health. Who qualifies? Something of the differences in scope and social sitedness between the philosophia of the Imperial period and contemporary understandings of ‘philosophy’ ought by now to be clear. It is in the light of these differences that the range of thinkers and texts brought under discussion in the remainder of this book, and in part already invoked in this chapter, should be understood. For many of them, it is true, no special comment would seem to be called for. Figures like Musonius, Epictetus, Hierocles, Alcinous, Atticus, Taurus, Aspasius and Alexander seem to belong quite uncontroversially in any history of the philosophy of the period; from their surviving work, and from what we know of their lives and careers, they are readily characterizable as professionals in the discipline. In the absence of biographical information, Hierocles, Alcinous, Atticus and Aspasius have to be assessed entirely on the tone and quality of their surviving work, but for Musonius, Epictetus, Taurus and Alexander, there is contextual information as well to clarify their status. Musonius (G. Musonius Rufus, c.25– c.100 CE) was a Roman eques of Etruscan ancestry; his three periods of exile seem to have had as much to do with political as with philosophical considerations, but he is remembered by Epictetus as a dedicated philosophical teacher, and counted Dio and Euphrates of Tyre among his pupils too.81 Though he began as a slave in the Imperial household, Epictetus (c.55–c.135 CE) ended up running a philosophical school at Nikopolis in Epirus, and it is this school that forms the 77

Philosophoi as lawmakers: Lucian Fisherman 30; Maximus Orr. 29.7, 37.2–3; cf. Seneca Ep. 90.1–6 and Philo Judaeus’ Moses. 78 Maximus Orr. 4 and 26; cf. Seneca Ep. 89.13, 90.1–6. 79 Maximus Orr. 1.2–3, 1.7–8, 3.7, 15.2, 20.6, 29.7, 30.2–3, 33.3. 80 E.g. Maximus Orr. 1.2, 3.6, 4.2–3, 4.6, 22.7, 28.1; Plutarch Late Vengeance 550a; Platonic Questions 999e; Dio Or. 27.7; Arrian Disc. of Epict. 3.21.20, 3.23.20; Aurelius Med. 3.13.1; Lucian Demonax 7; etc. 81 Arrian Disc. of Epict 1.7.32, 3.23.29; cf. Lutz 1947.

24

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

setting for the discourses recorded by Arrian.82 Calvenus Taurus (c.95–c.170 CE) is shown in Aulus Gellius’ reminiscences in his Attic Nights teaching in Athens, with a daily timetable that included both the study of philosophical texts and discussion sessions.83 Alexander of Aphrodisias (T. Aurelius Alexandros, fl. 198– 209 CE) has always been known from his own words as the holder of an Imperial chair in Peripatetic philosophy, and the recent discovery of the inscribed base of a statue he dedicated to his father seems to prove that this was the Athenian chair, not a local appointment in his home town.84 Other figures, though not professionals in quite the same sense, in that they did not teach formal courses as a regular activity, and had other important sides to their social and intellectual identities, are also normally counted in thanks to the volume and quality of their philosophical writing: Seneca (L. Annaeus Seneca, c.1 BCE– 65 CE), whose principal career was as a tutor and then a counsellor to the Emperor Nero;85 Plutarch (L. (?) Mestrius Ploutarchos, c.50–125 CE), who was active as a magistrate and council-member in his home town of Chaeronea and as a priest of Apollo at Delphi, and worked also as a historian; Diogenes of Oenoanda (d. c.120/130 CE), who speaks of his Epicurean inscription as a substitute for other kinds of didactic activity, rather than a continuation of it.86 There would seem to be no particular problem, either, about occasional references to non-philosophical writers who nevertheless transmit information about philosophical doctrine, or perceptions of the nature and standing of philosophy: the satirist Lucian (c.120– c.190),87 or the man of letters Aulus Gellius (c.126–c.200 CE).88 But there are others again, who have already been appealed to, and who will be regularly cited in what follows, who are not such familiar presences in histories of philosophy, and whose inclusion therefore calls for explanation: perhaps above all, the trio of Dio Chrysostom, Apuleius, and Maximus of Tyre.89 Practically nothing is known of the life and circumstances of Maximus, apart from the claim that he lectured in Rome ‘in the time of Commodus’ (i.e. 180–192 CE).90 Dio and Apuleius have more distinct identities. Cocceianus Dio (his full Roman name is unknown) was born into the local aristocracy of the town of Prusa in Bithynia in around 45 or 50 CE; after early literary success at the Imperial court and study of Stoic philosophy under Musonius Rufus, he was exiled under the Emperor Domitian, but restored with the accession of Nerva (a family friend) in 96/7 CE; his subsequent career saw him lecturing in cities around the eastern half of the 82

Brunt 1977; Dobbin 1998, xi–xiv; Long 2002, 10–12 and 34–5. Dillon 1977, 237–9; Holford-Strevens 1988, 66–71. 84 DPA I, 125–7 with Chaniotis 2004, 388–9 and Sharples 2005c; cf. 252–4. 85 Griffin 1976, 29–171. 86 Diog. Oen. fr. 2–3, with Smith 1993, 437–40. 87 Jones 1986, 6–23. 88 Holford-Strevens 1988, 9–19. 89 Similar worries might also be raised over the pseudo-Pythagorean treatises (‘Archytas’ and the rest), and the Tablet of Cebes, which are likewise in the business of bringing simplified versions of philosophical doctrine to a general readership. Their inclusion can, broadly speaking, be defended in the same way as that of Dio, Apuleius and Maximus. 90 Trapp 1997a, xi–xii; DPA 4, 324–7. 83

‘Ethics’, ‘Philosophy’ and Philosophia

25

Empire, but also active in local politics at home in Prusa until his death some time after 100 CE.91 Apuleius (again, his full Roman name is unknown) was born to a prosperous family, again eminent in local politics, in Madauros in Africa Proconsularis in the 120s CE. He studied literature, rhetoric and philosophy in Carthage and Athens, and it seems to have been in Carthage that he based himself for most of his subsequent professional career, up to his death some time after 170.92 It is a widespread perception that these three belong at least as firmly, if not more so, in the history of literature and oratorical entertainment: with Lucian and Gellius, rather than with Plutarch and Seneca (still less, Alcinous, Alexander, and the rest). Their preferred media of expression (with individual variations in each case) were the set speech, delivered to substantial audiences in public (or, at any rate, non-scholastic) venues, and the written-up text put into circulation for a wider readership. They may have made use of philosophical subject-matter, but they did so in a relatively exploitative, superficial way, without deep understanding, or any commitment to the further development or problematization of the thoughts they were so smoothly paraphrasing. They give a general impression of being at least as much concerned with the elegance and stylistic propriety with which they phrase what they have to say, as with the truth or the usefulness of its content. And philosophy was not their only subject: Dio dealt also in local politics (at a mundane rather than a high ideological level) and travel-romance; Apuleius made entertainment out of literary and antiquarian material, and is in any case best known for his scandalous novel, the Metamorphoses (though in the case of Maximus, it is only philosophical themes that are attested). From this point of view, the traditional opinion that such figures as this were at best ‘semiphilosophers’ (Halbphilosophen) seems entirely justified. In response to expressions of scepticism along these lines, it could be pointed out that, even if they are well-founded, Dio, Apuleius and Maximus would still be useful sources of information about the public profile of philosophy in their world, and might from time to time preserve records of ideas and arguments that happen not to have survived in more mainstream philosophical writing. But in fact this is too weak and passive a retort. What should be replied instead is that the urge to exclude figures of this kind springs from an inadequate grasp of the distinction between modern ‘philosophy’ and ancient philosophia, and a consequent, anachronistic, recourse to criteria of inclusion that depend on modern standards of what is ‘philosophically’ interesting, rather than on the contemporary sense of the nature of the activity. Dio, Apuleius and Maximus were, indeed, not profound thinkers. They were clearly much concerned with making the right stylistic impression, and winning praise and admiration for their mastery of literary and cultural tradition. Two of them at least – Dio and Maximus – have a tendency to play arch games with the name philosophos, treating it as something they wish to manoeuvre their audiences into applying to them, rather than forthrightly seizing it themselves (though 91 92

Jones 1978a; Russell 1992, 3–7. Harrison 2000, 1–14; cf. Harrison et al. 2001, 1–10.

26

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

Apuleius shows no such scruples).93 But even this coquettish show of modesty, from a certain point of view, assimilates them to the philosophical mainstream of the period rather than distancing them from it. This is a time in which philosophoi, as a class, tended to acknowledge themselves as minor figures relative to the giants of the past, and as expositors rather than originative sources in their own right.94 But, more importantly, Dio, Apuleius and Maximus were all explicitly in the business of bringing the truths of philosophia before an audience, and urging their life-changing force. For all the sly games, they speak as insiders, experts in the doctrines, history and personalities of philosophia, rather than as mere fellow travellers. One of the main pillars of Apuleius’ defence in his Apology, against a charge of the criminal use of magic, was that he was a philosophus misunderstood by his ignorant accusers.95 Dio, in expounding the doctrine of the cosmic city in his Borysthenitic Oration, describes it as belonging to ‘our school’ (hêmeteroi), i.e. the Stoics.96 Maximus’ pose of expertise is as unmistakable, though more difficult to illustrate in a single quotation or reference.97 Reservations about the hard-headedness, and sense of real challenge, with which these individuals purveyed philosophical doctrine – there might well be felt to be a distinction in this respect between Dio on the one hand and Apuleius and Maximus on the other – are beside the point, just like concerns about their profundity, originality, and fastidiousness over style. For the educated society of their time, what came from individuals of this stamp was as much philosophia as what could be read in Seneca’s letters or Alcinous’ Didaskalikos, or heard in the school of Epictetus. Apuleius was perhaps honoured in his own lifetime with a statue declaring him philosophus platonicus, and is certainly referred to thus by Augustine only a century and a half after his death.98 In the case of Dio, there was evidently argument over the best label for him, but also widespread agreement that philosophia had to feature: for Philostratus in the early third century, he was ‘a philosophos with a reputation for sophistic eloquence’, for Synesius in the late fifth, a sophist who converted to philosophy in mid-life.99 Maximus is proclaimed platônikos philosophos by the title to the principal manuscript of his work, and by the company he is allowed to keep there (Alcinous, Albinus) – arrangements which certainly reflect perceptions of the sixth century, and can very plausibly be taken as 93

E.g. Maximus Or. 1; Dio Orr. 13, 32 and 36; Apuleius Apol. 1–6. This is most obviously true of works composed in commentary form, which necessarily present themselves as in some degree subordinate: a characteristic example would be Aspasius’ words at the beginning of his commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics (p. 2.6–13 Heylbut, Comm. in Arist. Gr. 19.1). But note also such expressions of subordination and middle-man status as Maximus Orr. 1, 11.1–2 and 27.5, and the general pose of interpreters rather than originators adopted by Epictetus and Seneca. 95 Apuleius Apology 1–6, 10–13, etc. 96 Dio Or. 36.29. 97 Trapp 1997b, 1946–54. 98 ILAlg 1, 2115 (the name of the dedicatee is missing, though he is described as a native of Madaura); Augustine City of God 8.12, 8.14, 8.24, 9.3, 10.27. 99 Philostratus Lives of the Sophists 1.487–8 with 479 and 484; Synesius Dio 1. On the history of arguments over the proper classification for Dio, see Brancacci 1985. 94

‘Ethics’, ‘Philosophy’ and Philosophia

27

indicative of earlier reactions too.100 If our wish is to study the Imperial period phenomenon whole, these individuals demand to be included; something substantial would be missed if they were not.101 So much by way of preliminaries. The next chapter will turn to the substance of Imperial-period ethical and political theorizing, starting with competing ideas about the nature of the fulfilment (eudaimonia) at which philosophia and (according to philosophoi) life itself were aimed, and about the processes by which the individual human subject could advance towards it. This will be followed in Chapter 3 by discussion of thinking about the emotions and their control, which played such a central role not only in formulating conceptions of the aims of life and moral progress, but also in articulating disagreement between the rival haireseis. Both the emotions and their management, and discussion of paths of moral progress more generally, raise the question of what conceptions of selfhood and the person were in play in Imperial-period ethical theorizing and debate; this will be the topic of Chapter 4. Chapters 2 to 4 will therefore revolve around the central importance to ancient ethics of character and character formation. With Chapters 5 to 8, the focus will shift from ideas about the inner life and characterstructure of the individual, to thinking about the relations of the individual with others and the outside world. Chapter 5 will discuss leading themes and points of controversy in the area of inter-personal ethics and social relations; Chapters 6 to 8 will move on to relationships and structures at the level of substantial communities, i.e. to politics. Chapter 6 will deal with constitutional theory and the issue of monarchy; Chapter 7 with visions of the best society, and issues relating to specific groups within it; and Chapter 8 with the question of where and how philosophia was – according to the philosophoi – supposed to fit into the ideal community. Throughout Chapters 2 to 8, the aim will be to survey the range of thinking on the topics under consideration that was kept in circulation by philosophoi, and in the process to identify both what was new in the period, and where differences of opinion between the rival haireseis offered the most striking and clearly defined alternatives. They will thus all consider philosophical thinking ‘from within’. It will be left to the final chapter to raise the issue of how this system as a whole, with all its inner variants and controversies, should be related to other currents of thought and sentiment in the Imperial period: in particular, the question whether, and in what ways, philosophia can or should be seen as a non-aligned, oppositional force in the culture and thinking of the elite classes under the Empire.

100

Trapp 1997a, lv–lxi. There is more extensive discussion of Apuleius and Maximus from this point of view in Trapp (forthcoming), and of Maximus in Trapp 1997a, xvi–xlvii, and Trapp 1997b. 101

Chapter 2

Perfection and Progress In the moral allegory of the Tablet of Cebes, life is depicted as a journey by foot, in which it is possible to take both the right path and a multiplicity of wrong ones. The wrong paths, onto which the unwary can be seduced by such inner and outer forces as Opinions, Fortune and False Culture, lead to a variety of more or less destructive and disastrous dead ends. The right path leads onwards and upwards, away from Opinions, Fortune and False Culture, via Perseverance and SelfMastery, to the lofty citadel of True Culture, where the faithful pilgrim is at last admitted to the company of Virtue, Truth and Happiness. Here he is crowned victor over the mighty beasts of Ignorance, Deceit, Grief, Avarice, Vanity and Dissolution. He is truly blessed because now his entitlement to happiness rests entirely within himself, rather than depending on others. From this time on, he will be safe wherever he goes: the whole world will be for him like a place of asylum; he will be immune to further injury from pain, grief, avarice, poverty or any other form of ill, just as someone who has survived a snakebite cannot be poisoned a second time.1 But it has been a long and difficult road, in which he has had to struggle hard to remember and apply the instructions he received at the start of his journey and the instructions and encouragement that have been added along the way. Whatever its own specific sectarian commitment (which is disputed), this is an allegory that expresses some central ethical truths for all the Imperial-period sects. Philosophia was founded on a conviction that perfection, in the individual human subject and in a lived life was, if not ever easy to attain, at least an entirely conceivable ideal. At the heart of each of its competing brands stood a vision of human fulfilment, of the right kind of life to live and (above all) the right kind of person to be: a vision, in the terminology of the times, of eudaimonia, beatitudo, felicitas. For each hairesis – though they had their own varying ways of articulating the point – there was a condition in which it was, as a matter of objective fact, somehow or another proper and natural for humanity to be. For all of them, moreover, this condition was conceived primarily as an inner state, of the person or self, rather than in terms of external status or achievement: arriving at the summit, and receiving the victor’s crown, are images for what goes on within. Natural though it might be, however, it was also confidently assumed in philosophical thinking that this state, however it was conceived in detail, was a hard one to attain. Special alertness was needed to realize in the first place that this 1

On the Tablet – perhaps a product of the first century CE – see Hirsch-Luipold et al. 2005, Trapp 1997c, Fitzgerald and White 1983, and below, 53–4.

Perfection and Progress

29

was indeed the right target to aim at. Self-discipline and perseverance over the long term were required to translate realization into real progress towards it. And true success – rising high above the mass of ordinary, unenlightened and unsuccessful humanity – would be achieved by very few. And it was – of course – the task of philosophia, in its ethical dimension, to supervise the entire process: to inform humanity of the true nature of the goal in the first place; to awaken them to the need to pursue it; and to help and encourage those who had heeded the call on the long march towards their distant objective. In so doing, philosophia allied itself with (human and universal) nature, intervening so as to foster a process that might in theory happen of its own accord, but in practice almost never did. Within the allegory of the Tablet, full instructions on the route to take are given to each individual pilgrim as he is about to enter the enclosure of Life, only to be all but effaced the next instant by a draught of Forgetfulness; but the whole allegory is itself interpreted by a wise old man to a party of young enquirers, and by this means also to the reader. In this, the giving of instruction before birth symbolizes the perception that the pursuit of moral perfection is programmed into humanity by Nature (God, the Universe); while the old man – articulating the process in words, and turning it into an explicit set of truths and commands – fulfils the role of philosophia. The aim of this chapter is to examine Imperial-period ethical thinking as it relates to this nexus of ideas, concerning notions of an ideal state of the self, human moral development and mis-development, and the role of philosophical instruction and exercise in heading off the one and promoting the other. The focus will be both on shared patterns of analysis, and on the polarizing issues that distinguished one hairesis, or set of haireseis, from the rest. We will begin with ideas about the goal – the perfect human state towards which the individual ought to be advancing – and move on from there to analyses of the nature and the practicalities of moral progress. Perfection: ideal states of the person The conviction enshrined in the Tablet, that the ideal state for any human being was one of inner calm and stability and one of security, was widely accepted in Imperial-period ethics, as it had been already for centuries. The good and happy person was a person free from disturbed and conflicting emotions and desires, and invulnerable to the blows of external misfortune. In promoting its vision of the good life, philosophia offered peace and protection, both inner and outer: the calm of the harbour, away from the battering storms of the open seas; the safety of the walled citadel. But ideas about the frame of reference within which such tranquillity was to be achieved, and therefore also about the kind of tranquillity it was, varied considerably. And for all the shared ground, each hairesis remained fiercely critical of the versions of the ideal held out by its competitors.

30

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

Stoics, Platonists and Peripatetics: the primacy of reason Common ground. A central point of dispute was the importance attached to the intellect (nous, intellectus) and to the exercise of reason (logos, ratio). Reasoning and the capacity to reason had a place in all the ideals on offer, but it was not an equally central place. For some, a well-functioning intellect was important as a means only to the desired condition, not necessarily even the sole means; for others it was intrinsic, a constitutive part, even the sole constituent, of that condition. In Stoic, Platonic and Peripatetic thinking about the possibility of human perfection – enshrined in our period in the works of Seneca, Musonius, Epictetus, Dio, Hierocles, Marcus Aurelius, Eudorus, Philo, Plutarch, Atticus, Taurus, Alcinous, Apuleius, Maximus, Aspasius, Alexander, and the Neopythagorean writers – reason is crucial. Three quotations, from Stoic Seneca, Platonist Maximus, and Peripatetic Alexander, will begin to explain how and why. What is the best thing in man? Reason (ratio). In this he outstrips animals, but comes second to the gods. Thus perfected reason is his own proper good, while he shares his other characteristics with animals and plants. ... Rightly directed and brought to fullness (recta et consummata) it completes human happiness (felicitatem). Thus if any thing, when it has achieved its own good, is praiseworthy and has reached the proper end (finem) of its nature, and if moreover the proper good of man is reason, then if he has perfected this, he is praiseworthy and has attained the end of his nature. (Seneca Epistles 76.9–10) The gift humanity receives [from the gods] is intellect and reason (noun kai logon); but its life is a compound of mortal and immortal elements, as befits an animal stationed between two poles, having a body derived from mortal discord, but receiving its intelligence from an outflow of the divine. The function particular to the flesh is Pleasure, that particular to the intellect is Reason; mankind shares flesh with the beasts, but intellect is its own distinctive possession. You should therefore seek the human good where the distinctive function of man is to be found; and the distinctive function where the distinctive instrument is to be found; and the distinctive instrument where the factor that ensures its survival resides. Begin from that preserving factor. Which preserves which, body soul, or soul body? Soul body. You have your preserver. Now look for the instrument. What is the soul’s instrument? Intellect. Now look for the distinctive function. What is the proper function of intellect? The exercise of wisdom. You have your Good. (Maximus Oration 33.7) Hence, as we have already noted, there exists in the soul, along with and above the powers that have been discussed, a rational power, which also has a judicative function. And since this power is the unique possession of man, man is therefore both more precious and more perfect than other animals. (Alexander of Aphrodisias On the Soul 3.1)

But these passages give a starting-point only. The thinking that underpins them needs further unpacking.

Perfection and Progress

31

In the conception of humanity which Platonists, Stoics and Peripatetics shared, reason – the capacity to think and to apprehend truths – is central to human nature. It is thus central also to the achievement of happiness, which they take to be identical with human nature perfected. Perfected reason, in its turn, is conceived as a state of understanding: a secure grasp of truths about the world (in the widest and most comprehensive sense – ‘things human and divine’). These truths are, intrinsically, truths about value as well as fact: they record not only what each thing is, and where it is positioned in the larger scheme of reality, but also what it is worth, in the hierarchy of things and (particularly) to each individual human being.2 And they are reassuring truths: they bring with them, when apprehended, the assurance that the world and human nature are so organized as to make human happiness possible; for the world (reality) as a whole is a rational structure, working to the same principles as individual human reason. Human happiness, that is to say, is on this view natural in the strong sense not only that its possibility is built into the structure of reality, but also that its pursuit is a process of collaboration with nature and realization of natural potential. Pursuit of human fulfilment in rational happiness can thus be described as ‘living in accordance with nature’ (kata physin, secundum naturam),3 but it can equally well be styled ‘following God’, or ‘assimilating oneself to God’ (homoiôsis/homoiôthênai theôi).4 For in this nexus of ideas, Nature (reality) is as it is because formed by an all-powerful and unfailingly provident divine intelligence, which is cognate with, though far grander and more perfect than, those human intellects that are seeking to realise themselves. Thus, several times over, ethical thinking of this Platonic-Peripatetic-Stoic flavour can be seen to rest on an underlying grasp of truths of physics: the ideal of life can be, and must be, as it is because of the objective nature both of the human soul and of the divinely ordered cosmos. On this view, it is reason – truth and understanding – that brings both the inner calm and the security that are required for true happiness. For what disturb the individual internally, and so block his path to this kind of happiness, are his emotions and desires; and it is reason that is uniquely equipped to neutralize their potential to do so. For emotions and desires are understood as characteristically aroused by and directed towards the objects of everyday, vulgar, materialistic pursuit (physical health, food and drink, money and other material possessions, good status (honour), attractive bodies) and the objects of everyday aversion (disease, death, physical harm, and so on). But reason insists, on the basis of its grasp of true value and the true nature of things, that these everyday items do not in fact have the importance commonly attached to them; there is something else, something higher, for the attention and ambitions of the thinking person to be fixed on, and it is in that something higher that his true happiness is to be found. Common objects of pursuit and avoidance are thus deprived of most (or, on some 2

See further below, 32–6, 65–9. E.g. Philo Decalogue 81, Every Good Man 22.160; Cicero On Ends 5.26. 4 E.g. Alcinous Didask. 28; Philo Flight and Finding 63; Plutarch Late Vengeance 550d; Arrian Disc. of Epict. 2.14.12–13. 3

32

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

accounts, all) of their apparent value; and in being deprived of their value, they lose their capacity to arouse troubling emotion or desire.5 This same redistribution of value also brings security. Objects of everyday pursuit lie outside the self, and beyond the secure control of the individual; they belong instead to the realm of Chance (tychê, fortuna). The person who locates his happiness in their acquisition (and correspondingly also in the avoidance of everyday objects of aversion) is thus inescapably vulnerable to forces and factors beyond his control – unable to avoid anxiety at best and, at the worst, disaster. But those who have accepted the alternative valuation proffered by rational insight, and have located their good and their hopes of happiness in the development of that very rational insight, escape such vulnerability entirely, or nearly so. Their hopes of happiness rest on a capacity of the inner person, which is moreover fundamentally in tune with the nature and structure of reality; Chance can withhold or take back her so-called ‘goods’ without harming them in any important sense. Reason thus rescues the individual from external as well as internal disturbance.6 Next to Reason in this Platonist, Peripatetic and Stoic construction of human nature and human happiness stands the notion of Virtue (arete, virtus). The perfection of the rational faculty is held to bring with it (to be) the perfection of the whole person, as articulated in the traditional schema of the four virtues of wisdom (sophia, phronêsis; sapientia, prudentia), self-control (sôphrosynê; temperantia, continentia), courage (andreia; fortitudo), and justice (dikaiosynê; iustitia). The rationale of the connection of perfected reason with wisdom, self-control and courage is clear enough: as already explained, the perfectly rational person has an insight and knowledge that can be said to satisfy the criteria for wisdom, a grip on emotion and appetite that plausibly qualify him as self-controlled, and a knowledge of the unimportance of common objects of fear that might justify calling him brave. The link with the fourth virtue of justice is, notoriously, less clear, and the topic will require separate attention later; but within the schools of thought in question, it was an article of faith that justice was indeed inseparable from the perfection of reason. It was thus possible to speak more or less interchangeably of the path of Reason and the path of Virtue as the means to fulfilment and happiness, and of Virtue or of Reason as the essential loyalty of the thinking person.7 Points of controversy (1) The sufficiency of virtue. So much by way of common ground. But this basic schema, of the equation of happiness and the ideal state for man with the development of reason and rational insight, was differently articulated in detail, and presented with differing emphases, between the several haireseis that subscribed to it, and between different exponents of the same hairesis. A notorious polarizing issue was the question of the role that should be allowed to factors other than reason: to what were generally known as ‘goods of

5

The topic of the emotions and their control is discussed more fully in Chapter 3 below. E.g. Maximus Or. 1.5; Tablet of Cebes 20–1. 7 Seneca Ep. 76.8–11; Maximus Orr. 1 and 27; SVF 1.202 (Long 1974, 199). 6

Perfection and Progress

33

the body’ (such as health, strength and beauty) and ‘external goods’ (such as family, status and money).8 On the one side, Imperial-period Stoics continued to insist, as their school always had, that such factors had nothing at all to do with true fulfilment. The sole true good of rational virtue, and the sole true ill of defective reason (vice), had to be sternly and categorically distinguished from the mass of ‘indifferents’ (adiaphora, indifferentia) that included everything else that ordinary people might mistakenly value as good or bad: life and death; health and sickness; riches and poverty; and so on. Indifferents could be characterized as ‘preferred’ (proêgmena, producta: life, health, riches) or ‘dispreferred’ (apoproêgmena, reiecta: death, illness, poverty),9 and other things being equal, the Stoic was taught that it was perfectly rational for him to seek to gain the former and avoid the latter; but gaining the former and avoiding the latter would do nothing to make him happier, just as incurring the latter and missing out on the former would do nothing to make him more wretched. What counted was the state of mind (intellect) in which he made his choices and acted. If he did so in the reasoned conviction10 that indifferents indeed did not matter to him either way, and that his happiness did indeed rest solely on holding fast to the true, rational view of the world and events, then he would be happy, come what may in his bodily and external life.11 If that conviction slipped, then he would be wretched, however favoured in bodily vigour, wealth and status. Virtue, in other words, understood as the active exercise of a perfected intellect, was sufficient for happiness. We may judge the strength with which Stoics continued to assert this point of view, and infer the resistance and even incredulity which it consistently encountered from non-Stoics, from both Seneca and Arrian’s Epictetus. Seneca’s Epistle 92 is a straightforward sermon on the sufficiency of virtue, and the same point is made repeatedly in conciser form throughout his letters. Though Epictetus does not articulate the issue explicitly in the vocabulary of reason and virtue, his repeated stress on maintaining one’s grip on the distinction between bearers of true value and mere indifferents, and on looking for fulfilment solely in what belongs to the inner self, hammers home the same message. It is not the things themselves that disturb people, but their judgements about those things. Death, for instance, is nothing terrible (if so, it would have appeared terrible to Socrates too); the terror lies in our own judgement about death, that it is terrible. Whenever we are impeded, 8

The classification into those of the soul, those of the body, and ‘external goods’ goes back to Plato Euthyd. 279ab, Phileb. 48e, Laws 631 bc, 743e; it was canonized by Aristotle in Nic. Eth. 1.7, 1098b12–16. 9 Though the validity of this distinction was disputed by one rogue Stoic, Aristo: Sextus Against the Professors 11.64–7 = 58F L–S. 10 Based on his intellectual grasp of the perfectly rational, divine, providential structure of the Universe and the march of events through time. 11 Note that indifferents are still important to the good person, but as a material on which to exercise virtue, rather than in their own right: cf. Long 1974, 194–7.

34

Philosophy in the Roman Empire therefore, or disturbed, or upset, don’t let us blame anyone but ourselves, i.e. our own judgements. It is the doing of an uneducated person to blame others for his own bad experiences, of a learner to blame himself, and of a fully educated person to blame neither himself nor anyone else.12

Something of the reaction this conviction of the utter unimportance of externals was apt to encounter from non-Stoics can be gauged from texts like Plutarch’s Stoic Self-contradictions 17–18 (Moralia 1041e–1042e), or some generations earlier, Cicero’s On Ends 5.78–9, both of which argue loudly that externals cannot be left out of the account.13 At the opposite pole on the issue of sufficiency stood the Peripatetics, who following Aristotle’s lead in the Nicomachean Ethics14 maintained that, though rational virtue was indeed central, bodily and external goods as well were required for the most perfect conceivable felicity. In writing of the early Imperial period the point is made several times over in the summary of Peripatetic ethics preserved by Stobaeus,15 in the Platonist Eudorus’ criticism of ‘more recent Peripatetics’ for defining the aim (telos) of human life as ‘the sum total of all goods’,16 and in Aspasius’ commentary on the Ethics.17 At a less technical level, its reflection may be seen also in the popular image, reflected for instance in Lucian’s Hermotimus, of Peripatetics as the most well groomed, profit-oriented and personally elegant of contemporary philosophers.18 Imperial-period Platonists, for their part, could apparently take their pick according to taste between these two diverging interpretations of the Socratic tradition. Thus Eudorus and Alcinous are to be found taking the Stoic line and insisting that, in Alcinous’ words, ‘happiness is not to be found in human goods [sc. ‘health, beauty, strength, wealth and so on’], but in the divine and blessed ones’ and that he who enjoys divine goods will be happy ‘even if ... he is afflicted by all those things that are commonly called evils’;19 while Plutarch and (apparently) also Calvenus Taurus hold to the Peripatetic conviction that all three

12

Arrian Handbook of Epict. 5. But Cicero is inconsistent, defending the Stoic view enthusiastically and at length in Tusc. 5. See Long 1974, 195–7 for other attacks on the Stoic concept of preferred and dispreferred indifferents. 14 Nic. Eth. 1.9, 1099a31ff., 1.10, 1101a14–16; but see Kenny 1992, 38–42 for argument over the interpretation of Aristotle’s position. 15 Stob. Flor. 2.7.13, 2.122.7–10 W; 2.7.14, 2.124.18–125.13 W; 2.7.18, 2.130.15–134.6 W. 16 Eudorus in Stob. Flor. 2.7.3, 2.46.10–13 W; cf. Dillon 1977, 123–4. 17 Aspasius on Nic. Eth. 1.11, pp. 27.11–30.35 Heylbut (esp. 30.5–18), cautiously maintaining the Aristotelian line. Note also the attacks on the Peripatetic position by Seneca: Ben. 5.13.1–2, Epp. 88 and 92. 18 Lucian Hermot. 16, Fisherman 50. 19 Alcinous Didask. 27.2–3 and 5, tr. Dillon. 13

Perfection and Progress

35

classes of goods count in some degree towards happiness, and that the rationally virtuous individual is not eo ipso wholly enviable come what may.20 Points of controversy (2) The nature of inner calm. A second issue intervening between Peripatetics and Stoics, with Platonists this time siding more consistently with the former, was their sense of what precisely counted as the inner calm centrally constitutive of happiness. Stoic thinking on the topic revolved around a distinction between pathê (perturbationes, ‘passions’) and eupatheiai (constantiae, ‘equanimities’, or ‘good states of emotion’). The former were defined as excessive emotional states, reducible in analysis to one of four primary species, pleasure, desire, grief and fear (hêdonê, epithymia, lypê, phobos; laetitia, libido, aegritudo, formido/metus); the latter, as equable states falling into the categories of wish, joy and precaution (boulêsis, chara, eulabeia; voluntas, gaudium, cautio).21 On the basis of this analysis, the Stoic ideal for the inner state of the good and happy individual was articulated as apatheia, the complete absence of the passions from the inner life of the individual. Peripatetics, on the other hand, and almost all Platonists with them,22 in the tradition of analysis founded by Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics 2–4, insisted that the proper ideal was one of metriopatheia, the moderation rather than the extirpation of pathos.23 This crucial area of ethical theorizing will be the subject of Chapter 3 below. Points of controversy (3) The life of the mind? In the meantime, a third area of divergence, within the relevant schools as much as between them, should also be noted. It has already been observed that Platonists, Peripatetics and Stoics can all be seen grappling with the question of whether direct attention to the shaping of character, or immersion in the technicalities of logic and/or the wonders of physics, best corresponds to the central aims of philosophia.24 These may equally well be understood as arguments, or manifestations of room for debate, over the true nature of happiness, and over the mechanism by which reason strengthens itself and controls the emotions. For Platonists, the potential for tension between competing versions of the ideal is particularly acute. For them, the reality perceived by a well-functioning intellect, 20

E.g. Plutarch Common Notions 1060c ff. and 1063c-f; cf. Dillon 1977, 197, 240–2. Platonists divided into ‘Stoicizing’ and ‘Peripateticizing’ camps also over the question of rational control of emotion: see Dillon 1977, 44, 77, 151, 196, 301–2. 21 Cicero’s translation equivalents, from On Ends 3.35 and Tusc. 4.9–14. Explanations of how individual passions cluster under these generic headings are given in Stob. Flor. 2.90.19–91.9 W (65E L-S), Diog. Laert. 7.115 (65F L-S), and Cicero Tusc. 4.7.16–9.22. 22 Though the ‘Platonist fellow-traveller’ (Dillon 1993, 188) Philo Judaeus tries to combine metriopatheia and apatheia. 23 Plato in his dialogues says things that seem compatible now with one now with the other of the two competing ideals, which is to say that he did not conceive the problem in terms of an antithesis between the two; it is subsequent exegesis that settles on metriopatheia as the correct Platonist line, and reads it back into the dialogues. 24 See above, 5–10.

36

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

and that intellect itself, belong to a radically different order of being to the emotions and their everyday objects. Given this, it is clearly possible to formulate a version of the ideal in which the individual so identifies his interests (and himself) with the life of the mind that the clamour of the emotions is simply left behind as an irrelevance, burned off by the intensity of his concentration on higher things. But at the same time, Platonists have to concede that such a life cannot be lived continuously or exclusively by an embodied human being. For much of the time, reason must orient itself directly towards the emotions and appetites, and the less exalted furniture of the external world, exercising and strengthening itself in this practical dimension of human experience, rather than in higher contemplation. Peripatetics, and Stoics, though not envisaging a distinct, higher realm of reality as the ultimate object of reason’s attention, none the less show an awareness of an analogous tension, between direct concentration on the emotions and everyday objects of pursuit, and escape into the investigation of the grander or more abstract topics proper to physics and logic. Committing oneself to the ideal of pursuing happiness through the strengthening of the intellect could evidently mean a number of different things, in terms both of the life-pattern it might lead one to adopt, and of the inner experiences one might be lead to seek out and cultivate as indications of progress. Alternatives to rational virtue: Cynics, Sceptics and Epicureans Within the camp of those who believed in intellect as the highest human faculty, and the perfection of reason as the royal road to happiness, therefore, there was room for considerable argument over detail. Not all schools of thought, however, urged that Virtue should be equated with perfected reason, or placed it at the centre of their conception of the happy life and the ideal state of the person. In their different ways, Cynicism, Epicureanism and Pyrrhonism – represented in our period by Demetrius, Oenomaus of Gadara, Diogenes of Oenoanda and Sextus Empiricus – all had a different story to tell either about reason, or about virtue, or about both, and so also a different vision of the ideal state of the person to advance. Cynicism. With Cynicism in the Imperial period, it is admittedly hard to be sure how far we are dealing with a genuinely autonomous movement in thought and practice, and how far with a theoretical construct used by representatives of other schools (especially Stoicism) to articulate versions of their own positions.25 Either way, however, there is a sense of Cynicism as offering a kind of stripped down, deintellectualized and asceticized version of the ‘rational virtue’ tradition.26 What the Cynic position retains is the idea of an existence in accord with nature, realized through the exercise of the virtues. But the belief that this ideal is to be achieved

25

For the arguments, see Dudley 1937, 125–201; Griffin 1996; Trapp (forthcoming). In this, Cynicism claimed – with what justice cannot now be established – to uphold the original tradition (the true Socratic heritage) from which the more intellectually pretentious sects (Platonism, Peripateticism, Stoicism) had so perversely departed. 26

Perfection and Progress

37

through the high-level exercise of the intellect – indeed, the idea that the high-level exercise of the intellect can produce results of any value, or even any sense – is more or less ostentatiously set to one side, to be replaced by a demand for strenuous physical self-discipline – the celebrated Cynic askêsis and ponos (‘training’ and ‘toil’). Thus along with the rejection of technical sophistication and high-flown speculation goes a parallel rejection of the material sophistication of conventional ‘civilized’ existence. Whereas the Stoic urges an attitude of detachment that allows its possessor to live in the midst of material comforts without dependence, the Cynic seeks to make do with that basic set of material resources that he knows to be sufficient not only for his continued existence but also for his complete happiness. Thus, he who realizes the Cynic ideal is happy in that he is leading the kind of life designated by nature as right for human beings, is in a position and a condition to exercise all the virtues freely, and is serene and secure in the knowledge that neither his spiritual nor his (few and modest) material goods can be taken away from him. But this serenity and security are won and maintained by an effort that is felt as physical rather than intellectual. Scepticism. To first appearances, Pyrrhonism might seem to go to the opposite extreme in articulating its ideal of the good life and the best state of the person. Hostility to the intellect is the last charge one might think to bring against a hairesis that defines itself as ‘an ability to set out opposition among things which appear and are thought of in any way at all, ... by which, because of the equipollence in the opposed objects and accounts, we come first to suspension of judgement (epochê) and afterwards to tranquillity (ataraxia)’.27 But it is important to be clear what kind of ideal is here being articulated, and to precisely what sort of need it takes itself to speak. In the account given by Sextus Empiricus in Book 1 of his Outlines of Pyrrhonism, the ideal state for any human being has nothing to do with the perfection of any human faculty; it is defined instead as ‘tranquillity in matters of opinion and moderation of feeling (metriopatheia) in matters forced upon us’.28 What stands in the way of both of these desirable states, in the Pyrrhonist diagnosis, is not, as with Stoicism, the holding of false beliefs, but the holding of any positive (dogmatic) beliefs at all (including, but by no means confined to, beliefs about the goodness and badness of circumstances and experiences). These stand in the way of ‘moderated feeling’ because the conviction that it is (for example) a bad thing to be thirsty or to feel cold hugely increases the capacity of the experience of cold or thirst to disturb you.29 They stand in the way of ‘tranquillity in matters of opinion’ both for that same reason, and additionally because of the way holding positive opinions involves one in argument with those who subscribe to rival ideas on the same topic, and in consequent uncertainty.30 27

Sextus Empiricus Pyrrhonism 1.8, tr. Annas and Barnes. Sextus Pyrrh. 1.25 and 30. 29 Sextus Pyrrh. 1.29–30; the idea must be that such beliefs add emotional to simple physical upset. 30 Sextus Pyrrh. 1.26–9. 28

38

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

The Pyrrhonist remedy – said to have been discovered almost by accident by its pioneers31 – lies in epochê, ‘holding back’: a principled refusal to endorse as true and adopt as authoritative in one’s own life any ‘theoretical’ statement about the world and experience – any explanation, justification or evaluation that seeks to go beyond primary experience and to establish how things really are. For any such explanation or justification is contestable, and contested, with such plausibility in every case that firm decisions between the competing candidates for the status of the right answer can never be made. But how is the tranquil Pyrrhonist supposed to organize his life and his behaviour, in the absence of positive beliefs about good and bad, and what is and is not to be done? According to Sextus, all the guidance he needs is supplied by his physical perceptions and appetites (which he trusts as real even though entertaining no views about how they work), the laws and customs (ethê kai nomoi) of his community, and certain sorts of technical advice.32 The Pyrrhonist ideal thus shares the privileging of inner calm and emotional moderation with the dogmatic sects, and sees the exercise of reason as standardly the key to both. But the key does not turn in precisely the same way for them as it did for Stoics, Platonists and Peripatetics; and the picture of the inner nature of the realized, happy individual to which it opens the way is not the same either. The scope of the difference emerges if one asks whether or not it seems appropriate to call this an intellectual, or intellectualist, ideal. In several ways it seems as if it would be. Though officially presented as an ideal for all, it is articulated in detail in such a way as to seem most closely relevant to high thinkers: the kind of people who care, and worry, about conflicting arguments and explanations, who are attracted by philosophical argumentation and controversy.33 Moreover, it is an ideal that, if taken as one’s guide, seems to demand repeated recourse to argument: the Pyrrhonist surely cannot establish definitively that all speculative arguments, over all conceivable topics, cancel each other out, and settle happily back into ataraxia; he has to keep renewing the fight, as new topics are broached, and new considerations come to light (as Sextus himself gives the appearance of doing in his published work). Pyrrhonism is defined as the capacity to set out antitheses, which would make it strange if a point were reached where the capacity ceased to be required. And yet, for all this, the final suggestion is not that thinking, and the ability to think, are constitutive of human happiness and the best state of the person. There is no idea of fulfilling yourself in and through the exercise of the intellect, or through the acquisition of the virtues. The path leads – for most people, at least – through the strenuous exercise of intellect, but also past that to a state of much more passive and retiring calm beyond. Reasoning defends this calm, but is not part of it. Thus to the eye of the Stoic (or the dogmatic Platonist), the Pyrrhonist ideal, in which the resources of reasoning are used to deflect and

31

Sextus Pyrrh. 1.28–9. Sextus Pyrrh. 1.23–4. 33 Sextus Pyrrh. 1.12–13, 29. 32

Perfection and Progress

39

frustrate the drive to truth and knowledge, must appear as a perversion or a betrayal of the true task of reason.34 Epicureanism. The most radical alternative to the rational virtue tradition was, however, that propounded by the Epicureans, represented in our period by Diogenes of Oenoanda. For them, notoriously, human happiness resided not in the perfecting of the rational faculty, but in the achievement of a state of physical and mental pleasure (hêdonê; voluptas). An indication of the kind of defiance of the rational virtue fraternity that this constituted can be seen in the loud and disgusted abuse that was poured upon them in consequence. For instance, the passage from Oration 33 of Maximus of Tyre, quoted above, on the antithesis between reason and pleasure, continues as follows: If someone were to neglect the portion of man that exercises wisdom and is loved by the gods, and were eager to cherish the worthless part alone, I mean the flesh, the unbridled, extravagant part loved by Pleasure, what image, or what myth for that matter, could we find to illustrate this form of nurture? The poets tell us that there was once a race of men in Thessaly with strange bodies, having the rear quarters of horses, from the navel down. ... Well done, poets and sons of poets, progenitors of an ancient and noble poetry, what a clear allegory you have given us of the bond that binds us to the pleasures! When bestial desires overwhelm the soul, they do not alter the external human appearance, but in the actions he performs they reveal their victim as a beast not a man. This is what is meant by the Centaurs, the Gorgons, the Chimaeras, Geryon, and Cecrops. Remove the desires of the belly, and you have removed the beast from man; remove the desires of the privy parts, and you have cut the beast in two! But as long as these desires live in a man and are nourished in him, and he defers to them and tends them, it is inevitable that it should be their impulses that dominate, and that his soul should speak with their accents.35

To this Platonist way of thinking, the Epicureans seemed, outrageously, to be locating happiness and the ideal life not in what was highest in human nature, but in what was lowest and most dangerous; for pleasure, in their view, was the objective and inflamer of the passions, and its pursuit could bring only turmoil to the inner life of the individual, and fatal exposure to circumstance and fortune in his dealings with the outside world. It was all the more scandalous that this embracing of hedonism rested not on the careless sensualism of the man in the street, but on the considered thought of individuals who claimed to be philosophoi.36 Orations 29–33 of Maximus of Tyre show the rationalists’ case against the Epicurean concept of the good life in a relatively crude and populist

34 In our period, the Stoic perception is most forcefully articulated by Arrian’s Epictetus: e.g. Disc. 1.5.6–9, 1.27.17–19, 2.20.1–5, 4.1.136–8 (with discussion in Long 2002, 104–7). 35 Max. Or. 33.7–8. 36 Max. Or. 33.3.

40

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

form; more sophisticated attacks survive from Plutarch and Epictetus, and are attested also for Galen.37 Such outraged, scornful attacks contained more than a small element of wilful misunderstanding. For, by ‘pleasure’ the Epicureans did not mean purely physical pleasure, nor did they advocate its pursuit in the crassly sensual manner suggested by their opponents. In their founder’s careful analysis, the pursuit of pleasure was identified as natural and fundamental,38 on the basis of the instinctive behaviour of infants and animals. He sub-categorized pleasure itself, in both its physical and its mental manifestations, as either ‘kinetic’ – the experience of having some lack or want made good – or ‘katastematic’ (‘static’) – the settled state that ensues on the completion of that process;39 and he declared that the pleasure that constitutes the end of human life should be identified with the latter: an absence of pain from the body and anxiety from the mind.40 To this he added several very important further stipulations. First, that mental pleasure was notably more important for the achievement of the good life than physical, to the extent that the presence of even very substantial levels of physical pain could be compensated for and cancelled out by a carefully nurtured stock of mental pleasure – such as the pleasure of friendship, both present and recollected, or the pleasure of being released (by Epicurean teaching about the true nature and workings of the world) from the normal human fears of death and the gods.41 Secondly, that only very modest material resources were needed to achieve the state of comfort constituting physical pleasure.42 And thirdly, that the interests of both mental tranquillity and physical comfort were best served by an existence that was as modest politically and socially as it was materially,43 the model for this being Epicurus’ own retreat to his garden outside the walls of the city of Athens. In a number of respects, therefore, the Epicurean conception of the good life and the best state of the person matches those put forward by the other haireseis. It privileges the ideas of tranquillity, here expanded so as to embrace bodily as 37

Plutarch A Pleasant Life Impossible on Epicurean Principle (Mor. 1086c–1107c); Arrian Disc. of Epict. 1.20, 1.23, 2.20 (cf. Diog. Laert. 10.6). Seneca, more even-handedly, makes a point of quoting selected Epicurean maxims with some approval in the early part of his Epistles (but abandons the practice as he and his correspondent Lucilius advance further down the path to Stoic virtue). The other element in the unpopularity of Epicureanism with thinkers in the Socratic tradition is of course its ‘atheistic’ doctrines relating to the gods. The two together were economically castigated in Hierocles’ dismissal (quoted in Gellius Attic Nights 9.5.8, as a favourite saying of Calvenus Taurus) ‘Pleasure is the end of life (telos) – a creed fit for a harlot! There is no such thing as providence – a creed not even fit for a harlot!’. 38 Cf. Diogenes of Oenoanda fr. 29. 39 Texts in Long and Sedley 1987, §21. 40 Some aspects of the Epicurean analysis of pleasure are touched on in Diog. Oen. frr. 33– 51. 41 Cf. Diog. Oen. frr. 3.vi and 44 (compensation); frr. 6–20 (the gods); fr. 73 (death); frr. 62 and 122 (friends). 42 Cf. Diog. Oen. fr. 2 43 Cf. Diog. Oen. fr. 29.

Perfection and Progress

41

well as mental calm, and security. It centres its claims and its promises on an understanding of what is natural to humans. And it presents clear-sighted reasoning, and the grasp of a true understanding of the nature of the world, as an important key. But, especially after what has just been said about the Pyrrhonist ideal, the differences are obvious too. Epicurean tranquillity, though easily defensible against hasty accusations of vulgar hedonism, nevertheless appears as a state of relaxed, rather passive calm, in contrast to the active vigilance that seems to be built into, say, the Stoic and Platonic ideals.44 The Epicurean insistence that the claiming of true happiness is so simple, if only people would realize it, besides accounting for the tone of bemusement and exasperation that accompanies so much of their protreptic writing,45 serves also to suggest that effortful exertion, either to maintain a clear view of the facts of the world, or to tame and subjugate a wayward lower nature, is not part of the recipe. Still more significant, though, is the fact that, as with Pyrrhonism, the exercise of reason is not built into the Epicurean ideal as an intrinsic, constitutive element of the ideal life. It is an instrumental means to happiness only, not part of it. 46 This is the real point of conflict with upholders of the Socratic tradition, and the grounds for their venom. For leaving out the perfection of reason was not only, in their eyes, equivalent to discarding the best and most central aspect of human nature. It was also to remove virtue from the ideal.47 Though the good Epicurean might in practice turn out to behave in the same conventionally virtuous ways as the devotee of reason,48 this virtuous behaviour rested on different motives and played a different role in his inner life. Above all, unlike the Stoic, the Peripatetic or the Platonist, the Epicurean was not engaged in a struggle to mould and shape his character, against the resistance and seductions of intellectual error or a lower nature; his task was instead more like the clearing away of obstacles and accretions so as to allow free play to the nature with which he had been born, and which had no need of any further development.

44 Cf. Hadot 1995, 221–30 contrasting the Epicurean and Stoic styles of enjoying the moment. The contrast is perhaps not absolute: some mental exertion is presumably required when (e.g.) a gravely and painfully ill Epicurean determinedly counts his blessings. But Stoics (and some Platonists) of this period do give the impression of going out of their way to look for difficulties to confront, and of admiring struggle above all: e.g. Seneca Ep. 121.12–13, Taurus in Gellius Attic Nights 12.5.3 and 8–9. 45 E.g. Diog. Oen. frr. 2–3; Lucretius Nature of Things 2.14–19 (o miseras hominum mentes, o pectora caeca, etc.). 46 Epicurus Key Doctrine 11: physics is only contingently necessary, because as a matter of fact we humans are wrongly frightened by celestial phenomena. 47 Stoic outrage at this approach was expressed, for instance, in Cleanthes’ scandalized image of Pleasure enthroned over Virtue: Cic. On Ends 2.21.69 (21O L-S). 48 Epicurus himself insisted that the virtues were in practice an essential instrumental means to happiness: Letter to Menoeceus 132. Cf. Diog. Oen. fr. 32.

42

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

Lives and progress Concepts of progress For all the shared elements in their thinking about the good life and the ideal, fulfilling state of the self, therefore, the different haireseis offered the Imperialperiod inquirer a real choice of options. At stake between them were not only different formulae for happiness and fulfilment, but different underlying analyses of human nature, and different senses of what leading the good life and achieving an optimum state of the self would feel like from within. Connected to their competing visions of ends and the fully realized self were stories of development – of how individual human beings can both progress and fail to progress towards happiness as they defined it. Such stories served both, intellectually, to fill out their accounts of man and, pragmatically, to articulate and reinforce their outreach to an unconverted lay public. Stoicism. By a long way the most detailed, complex and thought-through account is that of the Stoics. Articulated in terms of the key concepts of impulse (hormê; appetitio, conatus, impetus), appropriation (oikeiôsis; conciliatio), and proper functions (kathêkonta, officia), it dovetails elegantly with their doctrines concerning preferred and dispreferred indifferents, and the unique value of a rationally virtuous state of the self. It is, naturally, a story of the growth and strengthening of reason in the individual, and of how that process brings with it (or at least should bring with it) a progressively deeper and more enlightened view on the part of the individual of what sort of being he is, and how it is appropriate (right by nature) for him to be and act. The Imperial-period text that comes closest to giving an outline of the whole story is Seneca’s Epistle 121,49 but for the full account Seneca’s exposition needs to be supplemented with Diogenes Laertius’ summary (7.85–8; essentially going back to Chrysippus), and Cicero’s treatment in On Ends 3.16–22 and 33–4 (which reflects Diogenes of Babylon’s version of the ideas).50 Like animals, human beings, according to the Stoics, are born without reason, but with a basic, inarticulate sense of their own natures (both in themselves and in relation to other items in the world), and an attachment to themselves:51 in 49

Cf. also 120 and 124. Also Hierocles’ Elements (Bastianini and Long 1992): this texts seems originally to have expounded the whole picture, but the usable surviving portions deal more narrowly with the question of self-perception as a precondition of oikeiôsis. See Pembroke 1971, Inwood 1984, Long 1993; the question of Hierocles’ originality is still under debate. Some other ‘para-Stoic’ accounts of moral development are discussed on 45–6 and 111–12 below; the question of the relevance of this area of theorizing to ideas of the self is taken up in Ch. 4. 51 It was apparently (to judge from our sources) a question for debate within Stoicism whether the basic self-awareness was a matter of (self-)perception (Hierocles) or of some other form of (sub-rational) awareness; and a question for debate between Stoicism and other sects whether self-perception was a precondition of primary oikeiôsis or not. See further below. 50

Perfection and Progress

43

technical terms, their ‘primary appropriation’ is to themselves and to the maintenance of their constitutions. This sense of what they are and what is ‘home territory’ (oikeion) to them channels their innate impulse to action (hormê) to selfpreservation, and leads them into the habit of selecting what tends to preserve them and promote their flourishing, and avoiding what threatens to harm and impair them. The class of items that they thus (rightly) pursue as valuable – all at this stage on the basic physical level of such things as nourishment and shelter – are their ‘primary natural advantages’ (prôta kata physin). Animals (and severely damaged human beings) remain in this condition for the whole of their lives. But human beings are naturally programmed to change as they grow up, by developing reason. The balance of Stoic opinion seems to have placed the decisive point at around the age of fourteen years, but with some acknowledgement that a gradual process was in question, and (apparently) the occasional specification of seven years as another significant staging-post.52 As the nature of the growing individual thus changes, so too does his sense of his own nature; in becoming progressively more rational, he also becomes aware of himself as an (increasingly) rational being. And with this change of self-awareness comes an altered sense of what is oikeion, and a widening and re-prioritizing of the objects of his hormê and aphormê (aversion). First, the individual’s sense of valuable goals, to be pursued because right for his nature, expands from the basic set of prôta kata physin to include such things as the fostering of familial and social relationships; in this, in Stoic terminology, he acquires an appreciation of kathêkonta (officia), ‘appropriate actions’ or ‘proper functions’ for a being of his kind and (increasingly) external status.53 But along with this goes (or should go) a second, much profounder shift, in the nature of the value attached to all the goals the individual has so far pursued. Coming to see himself as naturally a rational being, the individual comes to grasp that what is most in tune with that rational nature, and promotes its flourishing in the truest sense, is not the pursuit and acquisition of natural advantages for themselves, but rather the cultivation of a certain mode in their pursuit (selection, choice): namely the mode that accords with the Virtues. In so doing, he comes to 52

Fourteen: SVF 1. 149 (Zeno in the scholia to [Plato] Alc. 1); 2.764 (‘the Stoics’, Ps.-Plut. Doctrines); 2.835 (Iamblichus quoted by Stobaeus); cf. SVF 3 Diogenes 17 (Diog. Laert.). Seven: SVF 2.83 (‘the Stoics’, Aetius – possibly a corrupt reading). The issue of seven versus fourteen seems to be bound up with views of the development of language-capacity (the most publicly available indicator of rational capacity, and inextricable from reason in Stoic theory). Diogenes of Babylon is on record (loc. cit.) as having declared explicitly that the fully human utterance of sounds (i.e. ‘articulately and from the mind’) is only acquired around the age of fourteen, which fits with the higher threshold. But there is also a tradition (not however marked as Stoic in our sources in so many words) that either full or substantial powers of speech are possessed by the age of seven: Philo Alleg. Laws 1.4.10 (substantial), Macrobius Comm. on Somn. Scip. 1.6.70 (full). Chrysippus’ opinion, reported by Varro in Latin Language 6.56 (SVF 2.143), that young children are capable of only quasi-speech, is compatible with either threshold. See further Inwood 1985, 73–5; Pembroke 1971, 117 with n. 13; Lachenaud 1993, 311 n. 2. 53 The question of oikeiôsis and social relationships is taken up in Ch. 5.

44

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

realize what it is that above all (indeed uniquely) has value, and thus also that the things he previously pursed as ends, though still pursuit-worthy for him, are really valuable only as the material on which to exercise rationally virtuous choice. Thus he grasps the distinction between positive value and indifference, and, transferring his allegiance and aspirations from lower to higher, can reclassify his previous goals into their proper subordinate status as ‘preferred indifferents’. Enlightened though his condition may now be, however, the long haul towards true virtue – the condition of the ‘Sage’ (sapiens, sophos) – is by no means over. Exercising choice in a way that accords with one’s proper functions as a rational creature of a given social status is not enough, if the exercise is only partial (occurring on some occasions but not on others, or in some areas of activity and not others) and if it is made without an over-arching awareness of the place of human action in the universe as a whole. In Cicero’s phrasing (in On Ends 3.20), proper selection must be ‘continuous’ (or ‘unbroken’ – perpetua), and it must be ‘coherent and in agreement with Nature’ (constans consentaneaque naturae). The fully virtuous sage thus not only never makes a mistake in selecting his goals and actions; he also acts in full consciousness of the place of his choices in the unfolding of God’s (= Nature’s = supreme Reason’s) providential plan for the fated march of events in the Universe, with which as a rational being he is bound to collaborate.54 Notoriously, however, the Stoics themselves doubted how many individuals ever in fact completed this process of development.55 Though it begins as a descriptive account, claiming to be securely rooted in empirical fact, their story of moral and intellectual growth ends starkly normative, its finishing-point an inspiring theoretical extreme rather than an everyday reality. The majority of mankind, even the majority of those consciously attempting to see the process through, fall far short, characteristically failing the tests of continuity and consistency, to say nothing of the requirement for the perfect harmonization of the individual will with Fate.56 The relatively enlightened appreciate the distinction between indifferents and the true good of Virtue, and have grasped the need to privilege their mode of choice rather than its objects, but without total clarity, so that they are unable coherently and consistently to act on their awareness. What is it that holds them back? The two key factors are specified in Diogenes Laertius’ summary of Stoic ethics as ‘sometimes ... the plausibility of external matters, sometimes ... the instruction of our companions’.57 Both the way the world 54

Seneca Ep. 120.10–14 gives a portrait of the Sage in this spirit. Alexander of Aphrodisias On Fate 199.14–22 (SVF 3.658, 61N L-S), Sen. Ep. 42.1–2. See further below, 49–51. 56 In thus falling short, they must count as ‘fools’, and vicious. The difficulty is compounded by the Stoic doctrine of the equality of all degrees of folly: a miss is as good as a mile; you are still drowning, even if you do so a foot rather than a fathom below the surface. See SVF 3.539 (Plutarch Common Notions 1063ab = 61S L-S; Progress in Virtue 75c = 61R L-S). 57 Diastrephesthai de to logikon zôon, pote men dia tas tôn exôthen pragmateiôn pithanotêtas, pote de dia tên katêchêsin tôn sunontôn (with katêchêsis capable of bearing the sense ‘drowning out’ as well as ‘instruction’). 55

Perfection and Progress

45

continues to seem to them, and the values and attitudes of their unenlightened associates, pull against the drawing and application of the crucial distinction, between what has real value to a reasoning being and what does not. Neither of these difficulties is one that the individual could reasonably hope to avoid. The sense of ordinary items in the outside world as good or bad, which has to be renounced in the process of gaining moral maturity, is something we are born with, and is indeed natural for us for a certain phase of our development; it is bound to linger on, lending continuing ‘plausibility’ to irrational appearances. Man is an innately social creature, who is bound to have associates, and those associates are bound to be rationally and morally imperfect. But it is precisely these obstacles that need to be overcome. The individual must grow up, both in his own evaluation of the world, and in his ability to resist interference and contamination from the misguided views of those among whom he lives. Both points are firmly made by Epictetus, who thus confirms that the diagnosis reported by Diogenes was general among Stoics, and still central to their teaching in the second century CE. The need to resist contamination from one’s fellows – as he puts it, to avoid having their soot wipe off on you too – is the subject of Discourses 3.16.58 Still more prominently, the need to evaluate the world correctly, by making ‘right use of one’s impressions (phantasiai)’, not allowing oneself thoughtlessly to assent to impressions assigning value to indifferents,59 is one of the most central and consistent emphases of his teaching throughout the Discourses.60 Stoicism expects of its adherents a stern intellectual effort to see the world with clear eyes, to get its value right, and an equally stern effort not to be seduced by popular opinion.61 Other stories: Platonists and Peripatetics. Elements of the Stoic analysis were found useful and attractive by thinkers in other schools too, particularly (for obvious reasons) Platonists and Peripatetics. Thus we find both the vocabulary of oikeiôsis and the idea of beginning an account of moral development with identification of the ‘primary object of appropriation’ (prôton oikeion) in such Imperial-period (or near Imperial-period) texts as Cicero On Ends 5 (reporting Antiochus),62 Eudorus’ exposition of philosophical doctrine anthologized by Stobaeus (reporting Plato),63 Apuleius’ On Plato 2.2, and Alexander of Aphrodisias’ Supplement On the Soul 150–3 (reporting Aristotle).64 Of these Stoicizing, or ‘para-Stoic’65 accounts, Antiochus’ stands out for the way it takes 58 See also Seneca Ep. 94.52ff., on the need to resist ‘the precepts of everyday life’ (populi praecepta), even as one strives to adhere to those of philosophia. 59 For the details of Stoic theorizing about impressions and assent, see the texts collected in Long and Sedley 1987, 236–8, with discussion on 239–41. 60 1.1.7–13, 1.20.7, 1.27 (nb the phrase ‘the plausibility of things’, tas tôn pragmatôn pithanotêtes, in 1.27.6), 1.28, 2.18.24; cf. Dobbin 1998, 73. 61 See also below, 127–9. This makes the Stoic stand out: Arrian Handbook of Epict. 22, 48. 62 See esp. On Ends 5.24ff., 41ff.; cf. 2.33, 4.16ff., with Inwood 1984, 169–71. 63 Stob. Flor. 2.7.2, 2.42.7–45.6 W. 64 Inwood 1984, 167–71. 65 Inwood’s term.

46

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

over not only the terminology but also the full scope of the developmental story it was originally enmeshed in. But Antiochus was, notoriously, a very curious kind of Academic, with an idiosyncratic project of using Stoicism to recover dogmatic Platonism, and his handling of oikeiôsis and ideas of mental and moral development is correspondingly unrepresentative. The norm, represented by the other authors just cited, is a much more modest exploitation of Stoic material.66 Hospitality to oikeiôsis as a useful concept was not universal among Platonists, however. It is simply ignored in Alcinous’ summary of Platonic teaching on moral development in the Didaskalikos (27–30), and explicitly contested by the anonymous Theaetetus commentator.67 Too warm or comprehensive an acceptance would after all have resulted in problems over the doctrine of the sufficiency of Virtue for happiness and the indifference of external goods,68 which all Peripatetics and many Platonists were deeply opposed to, but which was so tightly woven into the Stoic handling of the idea. As a result of these problems and reservations, Platonist and Peripatetic thinkers could seldom if ever offer anything like as detailed and comprehensive a theoretical account of the process by which they supposed an individual to grow to intellectual and moral maturity, and of the obstacles that most threatened to impede it.69 Characteristically, what we encounter is something sketchier and more impressionistic, as in Plutarch’s essay on How One May Become Aware of One’s Progress in Virtue, with its (pointedly anti-Stoic) insistence on the real moral gain represented by each stage of the slow, cumulative process;70 or Chapters 27 and 30 of Alcinous’ Didaskalikos, which limit themselves to the briefest of summaries of the upward path to enlightenment represented in the allegory of the Cave (27.4), and the distinction between non-perfect and (subsequent) perfect virtues (30.1–2). This is not to say, however, that on this lower level of complexity they lacked distinctive emphases of their own. For both Platonists and Peripatetics, belief in the existence of a distinct, irrational division of the soul71 necessarily brought with it different ways of conceptualizing the kind of difficulty liable to be encountered, and the kind of effort required to overcome it. In Stoicism, as we have seen, a progressively increasing intellectual grasp squeezes out the passions by the sheer clarity and correctness of the view of the world it yields; the great enemy is intellectual error, provoked by a failure of attention or excessive deference to others. In 66

The case of Taurus in Gellius Attic Nights 12.5, where a more elaborate exposition of oikeiôsis, more on Antiochus’ scale, is given, is not an exception to this generalization. Taurus here explains what his invalid Stoic friend would say, if able to do so, not what he himself as a Platonist believes. 67 Anon. Tht. Comm. 5.18–6.31 = 57H L-S. 68 See above, 32–5. 69 Note, e.g., how Alexander of Aphrodisias in his On the Soul (3.3–7) concentrates on the question of growth to intellectual maturity (development of the higher, ‘theoretical’ form of intellect), with almost no interest in the details of the acquisition of practical intellect and virtue. 70 For the anti-Stoic tendency, see esp. Progress in Virtue 75b–76b. 71 See below, 99–109.

Perfection and Progress

47

Peripateticism and, especially, Platonism the enemy is entrenched within, in the blind, unthinking appetitiveness of the lower divisions of our souls, which are depicted, in concepts and imagery inherited and elaborated from Plato, as inherently unstable and destabilizing forces.72 Correspondingly, upward progress is most illuminatingly characterized not as a series of stages revealing ever truer and more comprehensive understanding, but as a continuum manifesting a steadily increasing docility in the lower nature, and a reduction in its propensity to interfere with rational decision-making.73 Also distinctive in the case of Platonism is the sense that the intellectual dimension of moral progress is a question not of discovering the truth about one’s own nature and the world, but of re-discovering it within oneself. By the doctrine of recollection (anamnêsis), re-expounded in our period by Alcinous in Didaskalikos 25.3 and Maximus in Orations 10 and 21.7, each individual soul knew before birth the truths that will, among other effects, strengthen and consolidate the virtuous control of its intellect over its appetites, but lost sight of them in the process of embodiment. Recovery of these truths is not easy, as the embodied soul is necessarily born into a condition of confusion, in which the bodily senses, which ally with its appetitive rather than its rational aspect, insist mendaciously that the physical world is the sole and ultimate reality. But the feat can be managed. The intellect has the power, rightly handled, to ‘see through’ the screen of the physical world to the immaterial realities (the Forms) that underlie it and take priority over it in the ultimate order of things. In Maximus Or. 21.7 (though not in Or. 10 or in the Didaskalikos), in the spirit of the Symposium and the Phaedrus, a special importance is attached to the experience of beauty as a privileged catalyst to this process: it is in beautiful objects, above all in beautiful people, that an immaterial form is least imperfectly and misleadingly reflected, and accordingly the best chance offered of transferring the individual’s attention and allegiance from the lower to the higher dimension of reality.74 Thus, not only does moral development in Platonism have two sides to Stoicism’s one (taming of a distinct lower nature as well as strengthening of the intellect); it is also the case that the intellectual aspect is felt to proceed in a different manner. There may indeed be a community of spirit, and a kind of parallelism, between Stoic and Platonic accounts. Both envisage moments of enlightenment, or the enlargement of understanding: for the Stoic, the first intimation of the existence of something incomparably more valuable than the natural advantages he initially pursues; for the Platonist, the first partial reawakening of a forgotten awareness of a deeper order of reality than the physical. Both depict the arrival of such a moment as natural in a deep sense, built into the human blueprint, yet difficult to bring about. But the language and the concepts in terms of which these emphases are developed constitute different ways of 72

Plato Rep. 571c–572b, 573e, 588b–589d; Phdr. 253d–256e. Compare (e.g.) Maximus Orr. 20.5, 27.5, 27.9, 33.8. 73 This is the principal emphasis in Plutarch’s Progress in Virtue: see e.g. 82f–84b. 74 But note that in Alcin. Didask. 28.4, in the spirit of the Republic rather than that of Smp. and Phdr., it is mathematical study that prepares the intellect for enlightenment.

48

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

understanding the experiences in themselves, and of locating them in the larger pattern of things. Other stories: Epicureans. For a radical alternative to Stoicism, however, we must again turn elsewhere. Like the Stoics, the Epicureans begin their story of humanity with what they claim to be the basic facts of nature; but with that the similarity ends, since their sense of what precisely it is that is natural to humanity differs sharply from the Stoics’, as also does their view of how that natural basis should be built on. What is basic and natural to human beings, in the Epicurean account, is not the urge to self-preservation, but the pursuit of pleasure (hêdonê; voluptas);75 by which, as already established, they mean not positive sensory stimulation but a state of satisfied comfort. And, equally in contrast to the Stoics, they do not see this initial condition of the human individual as one to be transcended and left behind as he or she matures; pleasure remains the proper goal lifelong. There is necessarily some development, some process of increasing awareness to be gone through, as the individual grows up (though this seems to be implicit in Epicurean accounts rather than directly discussed). The individual has to come to appreciate mental pleasure, and indeed come to see it as a weightier contributor to happiness than the physical pleasure to which his or her horizons were initially confined.76 He or she has to learn to categorize pleasures (as natural or unnatural, necessary or unnecessary), and to discriminate between them on this basis.77 He or she has to come to appreciate that the pursuit of pleasure must be restrained and prudent: that once basic satisfaction has been achieved, even the most intense sensory input can vary it but not increase it; and that short-term gains must be balanced against long-term losses.78 He or she must come to see that the securing of pleasure of both sorts depends heavily on the cultivation of conventionally virtuous behaviour.79 Moreover, there are exercises that can be deliberately performed, so as to cultivate and ingrain the right sorts of attitude and reaction: memorization of catchily formulated truths, mutual criticism and confession, purposeful recollection of past pleasures.80 But none of this involves the kind of fundamental change in human nature, or altered sense of goals, that is so prominent in Stoicism. Nor, indeed, is there the same sense of a need for effort. For the Epicurean, it seems to be more a question of opening one’s eyes to simple truths that seem glaringly obvious once they have been absorbed. Quite as much as their rivals the Epicureans had to confess that their ideal blueprint for human development was not followed by the majority of mankind. Most people, though they may keep some grasp of the right goal, misconceive both its true nature, and the best means to its realization. Failing to distinguish between the natural and the unnatural, and the necessary and the unnecessary, in desires and 75

Cicero On Ends 1.29–39 (21A L-S); Diog. Oen. fr. 32.ii, cf. 29.ii. Cicero Tusc. 5.95; On Ends 1.55; Diog. Oen. fr. 44 (21T-V L-S). 77 Epicurus Letter to Menoeceus 127. 78 Ibid. 129–30. 79 Ibid. 132. 80 Sorabji 2000, 216–18, 233–4. 76

Perfection and Progress

49

pleasures; failing to realize that intense stimuli vary pleasure without increasing it; they misguidedly seek happiness in the kind of pleasures they do not need, and which characteristically lead to degrees of physical and mental pain that cancel out their notional benefits.81 On top of this, to make matters worse, they acquire beliefs about the way the world works and about their own long-term destinies (to do with capricious or punitive gods and the prospect of suffering in a life after death) that are bound to cause them great mental pain;82 and they involve themselves in social and political structures and relationships that will only tend to the same effect.83 The overall picture is one of a sorry mess, in which what ought to be so simple has been made needlessly and counter-productively complicated. To blame are both age-old traditions of thought and organization – wrong ideas and institutions that consecrate hurtfully erroneous goals, established at an early point in human history and now inveterate84 – and continuing failures in individual insight, which are made all the easier by their contagious prevalence among the population at large.85 Other philosophoi, who ought to be part of the solution, are in fact in a still worse condition themselves, and can encourage the general public only in further error. Instead of simply following tradition and slipping unthinkingly into error, they articulate it with catastrophic explicitness, giving it the extra respectability and persuasiveness of a reasoned defence. They characteristically reject any kind of pleasure as a respectable goal, flying in the face of nature itself; and their stories of the primacy of reason, and its relationship with the divine, for all their inspiring sound, can only lead to misery. In short, the charge of betraying the fair name of philosophy, so readily hurled at the Epicureans by Stoics and Platonists,86 was hurled back at Stoics and Platonists with equal outrage and exasperation by the Epicureans. Education, progress and the middle way An achievable target? There was thus near universal agreement among Imperial-period philosophoi that human beings needed philosophia to start them on the road to betterment. But opinion was again divided on the question whether and how regularly processes of self-improvement and intellectual-moral advance, once started, could be carried through all the way to their proper conclusions. For Epicureans, Pyrrhonists and Cynics, there seems to have been no difficulty in assuming that they could. Epicurus was held up by his disciples as an example of one who had lived the most perfectly happy life, even in unpromising

81

Lucretius Nature of Things 2.1–19. Epic. Letter to Herodotus 81–2. 83 Above all, the pursuit of political power and erotic satisfaction: Lucretius Nature 2.11–13, 4.1037–1287. 84 Lucr. Nature 5.1161–1240 (religion). 85 Diog. Oen. fr. 3.iv: false opinions, which people catch from each other ‘like sheep’. 86 See above, 39–41. 82

50

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

circumstances;87 Diogenes of Oenoanda, aware that his own death is near, speaks in his inscription as one who wishes to pass on the formula for happiness achieved to as many of his fellow men as possible, rather than one who is himself still short of his goal.88 For the Pyrrhonists, Sextus similarly speaks of the founders of the hairesis discovering a recipe for ataraxia and metriopatheia in their own personal experience;89 and he clearly implies in the same breath that it is a recipe that can in principle be repeated by anyone at any time with equal success. In the case of Cynicism, we lack explicit evidence, but since the whole thrust of Cynic moral teaching was to simplify and to bring the best life within easy reach, their certainty too that full happiness and an ideal state of the person could be achieved, cannot be doubted. Stoics and Platonists, for their part, were certain that the basis for a good start existed. Even though not all would make the necessary effort, all had the potential as their birthright. Philosophia knows no distinctions of class, insists Seneca; ‘right reason (bona mens) is available to all, in this we are all nobility’.90 The gods (i.e. Nature) gave finished knowledge of philosophia to none, but the opportunity to acquire it to all.91 We are born for Virtue, even though without it.92 Apuleius speaks of human beings as coming into the world neither absolutely good nor absolutely bad, but having within them the ‘seeds’ of both virtue and vice for subsequent nurturing.93 And Maximus of Tyre can assure his audience that, in contrast to athletic ability, which only a very few bring with them into the world, almost no-one is born without the natural endowment necessary for philosophia and virtue.94 But the full realization of this potential was another matter. The Stoics, as already noted, traditionally doubted whether a totally perfect Sage had ever existed. Seneca, re-iterating the point in Epistle 42.1–2, suggests a true Sage might be born, phoenix-like, once every five hundred years at best, and that even a ‘second-rank’ Sage is rare and hard to identify.95 Platonists may not have expressed their doubts so directly, but something like them is none the less implicit in the way their favoured formulation of the telos as ‘likeness to God’ (homoiôsis theôi) combined with their doctrines of knowledge, reality and the soul. For in Platonist thinking the individual would only truly approach godlike perfection, in knowledge of transcendent, non-perceptible reality, when the soul separated from the body.96 This could happen only fleetingly and intermittently during life, in philosophical contemplation, and properly only at death;97 and the perfection that was thereby 87

Epicurus fr. 138 Us, cited by Seneca Ep. 66.47 and 92.25–6. Diog. Oen. fr. 3. 89 Sextus Pyrrhonism 1.26–9. 90 Ep. 44.1–2. 91 Ep. 90.1. 92 Ep. 90.46. 93 Apul. On Plato 2.3.222. 94 Or. 1.5. 95 Cf. n.55 above. 96 Alcin. Didask. 23, 25, 28; Apul. On Plato 2.20.247–9 (esp. 249); Max. Orr. 10.9 and 9.6. 97 E.g. Max. Orr. 10 and 16. 88

Perfection and Progress

51

gained was that of pure soul, not a compound human being capable of the ethical virtues. The fact that the goal was a distant one, and full success in attaining it anything but guaranteed, was not however taken as grounds for giving up. Indeed, it was Imperial-period Stoics and Platonists, who rated the chances of full success lowest, who had the most to say about the techniques and practicalities of selfimprovement. Within Stoicism, in particular, this had in fact been a major focus of teaching and writing for a considerable time. As already noted, the Old Stoa of the late fourth and third centuries BCE had deliberately courted paradox by insisting simultaneously on the virtual non-existence of a true sage, the equality (equal viciousness) of all kinds of imperfection, and the instantaneous nature of the (hypothetical) transition from vice to virtue.98 Polemicists were still happily attacking this implausibly all-or-nothing picture, with its apparent denial of any interesting notion of progress, in the first two centuries CE: so Plutarch in his Progress in Virtue (e.g. 75c) and Common Notions (1063a-b, protesting against Chrysippus’ comparison of more and less imperfect individuals with swimmers drowning fathoms down or just below the surface).99 But in fact a substantially different emphasis had been introduced already into Stoic thinking by Panaetius in the second half of the second century BCE, focusing precisely on progress and intermediate moral states and leaving the impossibly perfect sage more to one side.100 It is this Panaetian focus that prevails in the bulk of the Stoic writing that now survives from the Imperial period, with Platonists (polemics notwithstanding) largely following suit. It generates not just theoretical acknowledgements of the reality and interest of moral progress, but detailed practical advice; and the giving of that practical advice often dramatizes and embodies moral progress rather than simply legislating for it. Practicalities: the literature of instruction. Seneca’s Epistles are perhaps the most complete example of both the theory and the practice. In Epistle 116 Seneca quotes approvingly the response supposedly made by Panaetius to a young man who asked him whether the Sage would fall in love – ‘We will see about the Sage later; you and I, who are a long way from being Sages ourselves, should not make the mistake of tumbling into a condition that is disordered and uncontrolled, puts us into another’s power, and degrades us in our own eyes’101 – and he makes it clear as he does so that he places himself and his addressee Lucilius in the same category of the imperfect, who are none the less well worth helping on their way.102 In Epistle 75, he asserts not only that those making moral progress (the

98

See nn. 55–6 above. Cited by Dobbin 1998, 89; the Chrysippean dictum is SVF 3.539. Contemporary discussion of this range of issues is also testified to by Max. Orr. 39–40, which give considerations for and against supposing that there are gradations of goodness. 100 General accounts of Panaetius: Long 1974, 211–16; Sandbach 1975, 123–9. 101 Sen. Ep. 116.5 = Panaetius fr. 114. 102 Ep. 116.4, contrasting nos with the sapiens in the management of emotion. 99

52

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

proficientes) can be distinguished from the mass of fools among whom they are formally categorized, but also that they can themselves be subdivided into three distinct classes: those on the verge of wisdom, who yet lack full consciousness of and confidence in their own goodness; those who have shed the greatest intellectual defects, but may yet relapse; and those who have freed themselves from many vices, but still remain prey to some. He and Lucilius may hope to graduate to the highest of these categories, but should be happy enough to qualify for admission to any of them.103 More generally, the Epistles as a whole repeatedly characterize themselves as the day-by-day and week-by-week advice of one, only slightly more advanced proficiens to another. And by repeated reference to the past performance, current status, and future hopes of both, they become a hortatory record of progress achieved as well as a series of lessons in how to bring it about.104 Besides the Epistles, the Dialogues too both analyse different aspects of moral experience and self-formation, and advise on the practicalities, though without the element of enactment possible in a collection of letters: On the Constancy of the Sage, On Anger, On the Happy Life, On Leisure, On Peace of Mind, On the Brevity of Life, and the three Consolations. Other contemporary texts share some or all of this agenda. Arrian’s recreation of episodes from Epictetus’ classroom105 discusses moral progress as a topic at a programmatically early point in the work (Discourses 1.4, peri prokopês), refers to it, and its signs and markers, at regular intervals, and generally assumes its reality and importance as the basis for all that the sharp-tongued ex-slave has to say.106 Epictetus’ Handbook (Encheiridion), also compiled by Arrian, boils down his teaching into a set of concise, practical precepts, shorn of the dramatic settings and dialectic of the Discourses. Marcus Aurelius’ so-called Meditations are a private record of self-exhortation, in which the Emperor, who acknowledges Epictetus’ discourses as a formative influence,107 reminds himself of Stoic principles and seeks to articulate their detailed, practical application to his day-to-day experience.108 On the Platonist side, some texts, such as Alcinous’ Didaskalikos and Apuleius’ On Plato, as befits the handbooks that they are, acknowledge moral progress as an element of doctrine, without being concerned to discuss its mechanics. Nor is it a major topic in the Orations of Maximus, perhaps because of his preference for the easy uplift of the more theological aspects of ethics, and the 103

Ep. 75.8–10, 13–16. E.g. Epp. 1.4 (Seneca’s progress; cf. 8.3, 27.1), 4.1–2 (enjoyment of one’s own progress), 6.1–2 (signs of progress, cf. 20), 13.3 (Lucilius’ progress, cf. 16.2, 21.1, 22.1, 31.1, 34.1); and so on. 105 As indicated above, I do not share the confidence of some recent discussions (Dobbin 1998, xx–xxiii; Long 2002, 38–43) that what we read is largely pure Epictetus, with minimal (re)creative input from Arrian. 106 E.g. Disc. 1.10.9, 2.10.30, 2.21.13, 3.6.4, 3.8.4, 3.19.3, 4.2.4, Handbook 48 (signs), 51.2. Note also the schema of the three topoi, laying out stages of moral and intellectual progress (with the strong suggestion that most will never get beyond the second): Disc. 3.2, cf. 1.17.20–6, 2.17.14–18, 3.9.18, 3.12.7–17, 4.4.13–18, with discussion in Long 2002, 112–18. 107 Med. 1.7.8; cf. 4.41, 7.19.2, 11.34–8. 108 Hadot 1988, Rutherford 1989. 104

Perfection and Progress

53

castigation of vice, and a corresponding anxiety not to make the business of philosophia seem too demanding or too beset by petty detail.109 With the Moralia of Plutarch, on the other hand, we encounter an engagement with the practicalities of moral progress and self-formation that by some measures exceeds anything to be found even in Seneca, Epictetus and Aurelius. In addition to the generalizing discussion in How One May Become Aware of One’s Progress in Virtue (Mor. 75a–86a), the collection also embraces treatments at differing length of deriving moral benefit from philosophical lectures and from one’s enemies, having too many friends, anger, peace of mind, love of family, talkativeness, inquisitiveness, bashful compliance, avarice, envy and self-praise.110 At a somewhat lower level of sophistication and engagement with practical detail, moral progress is the topic of the (probably) Imperial-period Tablet of Cebes (Kebêtos Pinax, Tabula Cebetis), the ‘ancient Pilgrim’s Progress’ that was cited at the beginning of this chapter. Sometimes styled Cynic, for inadequate reasons (its concentration on ethics, with no reference to physics; the call it issues to moral effort; its gaudy imagery), this allegorical text is better understood as a piece of moralizing in a broader Socratic tradition, seeking common ground between Platonists, Stoics and Cynics on the one hand, and non-philosophical moralities of restraint on the other.111 As already described, it depicts the career of the individual, from birth to either moral ruin or the achievement of inalienable Virtue, as a journey on foot through a landscape populated by figures and locations symbolizing the elements of moral experience (Fortune, Luxury, Repentance, Perseverance, Education, and so on). All at birth (entry into the enclosure of Life) are given the instructions they need in order to achieve Virtue and Happiness, but then immediately made to drink a draught of forgetfulness.112 Thereafter we follow the careers of those who, in their oblivion, fall prey to erroneous opinions about the worth of the ‘gifts’ of Fortune, and thus into careers of dissolution, crime and punishment.113 If Repentance then supervenes, the individual can then start off afresh, via the deceptive but necessary staging-post of False (conventional, 109

For this characterization of the Orations, cf. Trapp 1997a, xvi–xx and 1997b, 1954–60. On Listening (Mor. 37b–48d), How to Benefit from your Enemies (86b–92f), On Having Many Friends (93a–97b), On Restraining Wrath (452e–64d), On Peace of Mind (464e–77f), On Fraternal Love (478a–92d), On Parental Love (493a–97e), On Talkativeness (502b– 15a), On Inquisitiveness (515b–23b), On the Desire for Wealth (523c–528b), On Harmful Scrupulousness (528c–36d), On Jealousy and Hate (536e–38e), How to Praise Oneself Inoffensively (539a–47f). 111 Trapp 1997c, 168–71. The great enemies are materialism (attachment to the ‘goods’ of Fortune), hedonism, and pedantic higher learning divorced from the concerns of morality – all anathemas to which Stoics and Platonists would subscribe as readily as Cynics; see esp. Tablet 8 and 12–13. 112 This sequence can be taken as expressing either the Platonic doctrine of ante-natal knowledge and reminiscence, or the Stoic insistence that all are born with the potential for Virtue, or (best?) the sentiment common to both. 113 Gombrich 1952 points out how this section of the narrative of the Tablet, via Lucian’s adaptation of it in his On Salaried Posts (42), provided the base text for Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress. 110

54

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

academic) Education, to True Education, up the steep and rocky slope, aided by Self-Mastery and Perseverance, to Knowledge, the Virtues and Happiness. The teaching here, such as it is, has an undemanding generality, and no challengingly specific advice is given; but it is a text which, like Seneca’s, Arrian’s, Plutarch’s and Aurelius’, urges the reader to understand his experience as an organized, or organizable, progression towards a particular goal. Finally, lest it be thought that moral progress was a topic only for high literature and society in the Imperial period, we have the evidence of at least two papyrus letters from provincial Egypt to show that it was a more general concern, flourishing as well among those unknown to grand history.114 Writing to his friend Sarapion ‘the philosophos’ some time in the third or fourth century CE, one Aquila congratulates him for keeping up his ‘ascetic discipline’ (askêsis) even in times of trouble, and urges him not to succumb to the seductions of beauty or wealth, which he should know to be worthless without Virtue. And from the second century comes a letter of one Theon, to Heraclides, also ‘the philosophos’, accompanying a consignment of philosophical books. Sending Heraclides copies of Boethus On Ascetic Discipline, Diogenes (of Babylon) On Marriage and On Freedom from Pain, Chrysippus On the Treatment of Parents, Antipater On the Treatment of Slaves, and Posidonius On Moral Exhortation, Theon exhorts him to read them carefully, so as to be sure of deriving the benefit he craves. This second letter is of special value in reminding us not only that concern for practical moral improvement, and aids towards it, was widespread, but also, thanks to the titles cited, that this kind of philosophical writing goes back well before the beginning of the Imperial period. Practicalities: exercises and techniques. What then is commitment to selfimprovement and the pursuit of rational virtue taken to mean in practical terms, in the Stoic-Platonic tradition? What general dispositions and specific techniques do the texts just surveyed recommend or assume? The first step, they insist, is for the beginner to recognize the need to make a start. Before anything else can happen, he has to accept that he is, in some fundamental sense, in a bad way, and that there is such a thing as a naturally better state that he as yet falls short of, but has the possibility of developing towards. The call to make this move, to wake up to what philosophia claims to be your true condition, and to put an end to the passive, aimless drift through an ever-shortening life that you are condemned to without it, is the proper territory of protreptic discourse, identified as a distinct kind of philosophical communication, and a distinct phase of engagement with philosophia.115 By the Imperial period, there were many distinguished protreptic texts on the record;116 but the most celebrated

114

P.Oxy. 3069 and P.Mil.Vogliano 11; text, translation and commentary in Trapp 2003, nos 35 and 56. 115 Philo of Larissa in Stobaeus (Flor. 2.7.2, 2.39.20–41.25 W). On protreptic as a form of philosophical discourse, see Hartlich 1889, Slings 1999, 59–93. 116 Slings 1999, 67–76.

Perfection and Progress

55

brief formulation of the call remained that put into the mouth of Socrates in the pseudo-Platonic Clitopho: Whither so fast, you people? Do you not know that you are doing nothing of what you ought? You devote all your energies to money and making sure you’ll have it, but have no concern for ensuring that your children, to whom you’ll bequeath it, know how to make just use of it, nor do you find them teachers of justice ... 117

This version of the cry continues to echo in Dio Chrysostom’s account of how (he says) he attempted to discharge his new-found responsibilities as a philosophos in the cities of the Eastern empire, and eventually in Rome itself, in his Oration 13.118 And it is repeated also by Arrian’s Epictetus in Discourses 3.22.26, in his description of how the true Cynic will preach to the mass of mankind. But the message can bear any amount of reiteration and reformulation. Epictetus memorably demands in the Encheiridion, ‘How long are you going to delay claiming what is best for your own and contravening in nothing the commands of discriminating reason?’, and insists, using the imagery of athletic exertion that runs through all his teaching, that ‘The contest is now, you are already at the Olympic Games, you cannot delay any longer; in a single day or a single act moral progress (prokopê) is wrecked or preserved’.119 Equally emphatically, Seneca places his reminder that the time for action is now at the very beginning of his course in philosophia for Lucilius and the reader, in his Epistles: ‘Assert your rights in yourself, gather up and preserve the time that up till now was swept away or filched or slipped from you ... the most shameful loss of all is that which happens through negligence ... while we delay, life runs its course.’120 Once eyes have been opened, and the desire for improvement aroused, that desire must be channelled. There was general agreement on the fairly straightforward point, first articulated by Aristotle,121 that both propositional learning and some sort of habituation were needed in order to develop the natural potential that all, or nearly all, possessed. Thus the summary of Peripatetic ethics reported by Stobaeus, speaks of the triad physis, ethos, logos, Philo Judaeus of physis, mathêsis, askêsis, pseudo-Archytas of physis, askêsis, eidêsis, and Alcinous, more elaborately, of physis, ethos and agôgê and askêsis, and logos and didaskalia.122 All these references derive from a Platonic-Peripatetic milieu, in which the distinction between learning and habituation can be straightforwardly 117

Clitopho 407b2–6 (the whole utterance runs from 407b2 to 407e2). The Clitopho perhaps dates from the last quarter of the fourth century BCE: Slings 1999, 215–27. 118 Dio 13.16; see Brancacci 2000, Trapp 2000, Moles 2005. 119 Handbook 51, quoted by Long 2002, 272, as an epilogue to his whole study of Epictetus. 120 Ep. 1.1–3. 121 Nic. Eth. 10.9.1179b20–34, cf. Eud. Eth. 1214a16–21. 122 Stob. Flor. 2.7.13, 2.118.5ff. W, 2.7.19, 2.136.16–21 W; Philo Life of Abraham 52–4; ‘Archytas’ On Moral Education 3 (with Giani 1993, 138–9); Alcinous Didask. 28.4 (with Dillon 1993, 174–5). Cf. also Diog. Laert. 5.19; Max. Orr. 10.4, 27.9, 38.6; ps.-Plutarch On the Education of Children 2a-b.

56

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

related to the two divisions of the soul, rational and irrational, but an analogous point was also available to a Stoic. Taking issue with the unorthodox Aristo in Epistle 94, Seneca none the less accepts his division of philosophia into scientia and habitus animi, the learning of the essential truths and their application in the moulding of character.123 Potentially more controversial was the question of just what kind of instruction served best to advance the learner on his way. One talking point was the value, if any, for self-formation and moral advance of a conventional, ‘liberal’ education: the training in some or all of the disciplines of grammar, rhetoric, music and the mathematical disciplines normally taken to define the cultured individual.124 This is the topic of Philo Judaeus’ On Congress, Seneca’s Epistle 88, Maximus’ Oration 37, Plutarch’s How the Young Should Study Poetry (Moralia 14d–37b) and a number of other briefer discussions.125 Cynics might be happy to declare conventional learning, like all the trappings of sophisticated life, wholly superfluous, but both a general respect for intellectual activity, and certain specific attractions of individual arts, made such dismissiveness difficult for adherents of the other Socratic haireseis. Philo, Seneca, Plutarch and Maximus are at one in insisting that the liberal arts in general or (in Plutarch’s case) the study of poetry that is central to grammar, perform a useful propaedeutic function;126 they harmonize the soul (or mind),127 develop the distinctively human and reasonrelated capacity of speech,128 teach respect for the anti-materialist attitudes and sense of justice on which philosophia will build,129 and (for Platonists) prepare the pupil for contact with higher reality.130 At the same time, these studies must be treated as a stage in a developing process rather than an end in themselves; they offer only a partial view of the world, as opposed to the integrated, synoptic understanding offered by philosophia,131 and become positively dangerous and counter-productive if taken too seriously in their own right.132 Only Seneca, however, is prepared to take the further step of declaring that they may in some cases be totally unnecessary, that it is possible to become virtuous entirely without them; Philo, Plutarch and Maximus are silent on this point, while the author of the Tablet of Cebes explicitly asserts the contrary.133

123

Ep. 94.48, cf. 45–7. Marrou 1938; 1956, 95–101. See also below, 243–57. 125 Among which note esp. Tablet of Cebes 13 and Max. Or. 22. Cf. Fuchs, RAC 5.365–98; Hadot 1984; Trapp 1997a, 290–7. 126 Philo Congr. 9–10, Seneca Ep. 88.1, 20; Plutarch How the Young Should Study Poetry 15f, 36d–37b; Max. Or. 37 passim. 127 Philo Congr. 16, Max. Or. 37.4–7 – an emphasis especially important to Platonists, with their concerns over the potential disorderliness of the irrational soul. 128 Philo Congr. 17. 129 Philo Congr. 15–16; Plutarch How the Young 36d–37a. 130 Max. Or. 37.7–8. 131 Philo Congr. 144–50, Seneca Ep. 88.28. 132 Philo Congr. 77–80, Seneca Ep. 88.36–41, Plutarch How the Young 15d. 133 Seneca Ep. 88.31–2; Tablet 12. 124

Perfection and Progress

57

Thus philosophia seeks to acknowledge conventional education and the pieties attaching to it, while at the same time controlling and subordinating it to its own project. Children should continue to be put through the standard curriculum, adult converts to philosophia need not regret or disown their earlier educational experience, or the tastes and loyalties it has left them with; but with the onset of philosophical commitment, they should see it with different eyes, as a constructive experience, but not one of self-sufficient value. Within the field of the properly philosophical training that ought to pick up where conventional education leaves off, room was again found for argument about what kind of teaching was most constructive. As we have already seen, philosophoi could disagree about the relevance and usefulness of the study of logic and physics.134 But even within ethics itself, there was still scope for disagreement and the different weighting of contributing factors. In particular, there was an issue between the conveying and absorption of doctrine (analysis and theory) and the formulation of specific precepts.135 Was it more valuable, more useful for the actual, personal cultivation of a virtuous character, to have hold of a theoretical analysis of the nature and conditions of virtue and good action, or a stock of precise, practical instructions? Or were the two so closely interconnected and mutually supportive that the teacher should aim to provide, and the student learn, both? Precepts (hypothêkai, praecepta) have the advantage of seeming to tell you exactly what to do, but, as Arrian’s Epictetus points out in Discourses 2.2.21–6, they can so easily fail to match the exact situation, and you will be left helpless if you lack the capacity to understand that situation and what it needs for yourself. But doctrinal understanding (decreta) in its turn is not guaranteed always to produce recipes for specific action. The longest and most balanced discussion is Seneca’s, in Epistles 94 and 95. In 94, he sets the issue up as a debate between the conviction of ‘certain people’ (quidam – not further identified) that specific precepts, phrased in terms of particular social functions and roles,136 are the only element in philosophia that really counts, and the counter assertion of the Stoic Aristo that they are entirely trivial and superfluous (1–2). Chapters 4 to 17 give Seneca’s version of Aristo’s case. Precepts will not work if the agent’s thinking is clouded by false beliefs about fundamentals, which only a grasp of basic principle will dispel; but if that grasp is present, then no further precepts are needed to guide him to right action. Precepts are thus either unpersuasive (even unintelligible), or preaching to the converted. They are useless because they can never be formulated so as to cover all cases; they lack the definition and completeness proper to philosophical truths. Chapters 18 and following give Seneca’s reply, defending the pedagogic value of precepts, and their joint effectiveness when combined with the teaching of basic principle, in overcoming the normal obstacles to virtuous action. Epistle 95 picks up the question, raised but postponed in 94.52, of whether precepts, besides being necessary for moral progress, can also be sufficient, and restates more forcefully 134

See above, 6–10; note also Seneca Ep. 58 (metaphysics as mental gymnastics), 65.16. Cf Sorabji 2000, 161; Inwood 1999. 136 The Panaetian concept of personae (prosôpa) is in play here: see below, 120–1. 135

58

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

the conviction already assumed in Epistle 94 that they cannot; what is always needed, for Seneca, is a combination of detailed precept with a theoretical grasp of the nature and conditions of virtue.137 Much of Seneca’s reasoning in these two letters rests on his sense of the importance of having a kind of philosophical teaching suitable for mere proficientes, and the corresponding need for a battery of complementary resources to help bring out the potential for virtue naturally present in all, but occluded.138 In Seneca’s account, however, the list of desirable and available aids to progress does not end with doctrine and precept. Precepts define and give commands for right action in specified circumstances, but this remains a fairly abstract vehicle of instruction. A lesson is delivered still more vividly, immediately and memorably when the learner can be presented with an actual instance of the right action in question, from history or myth – in other words with an ‘example’ (paradeigma, exemplum). In Epistle 95 (65–73) Seneca rather creeps up on this point via Posidonius’ recommendation of ‘ethology’ (êthologia, charactêrismos), the technique of sketching the distinguishing features of the virtues in individuals, which naturally leads on to the identification of real individuals who had those traits. Elsewhere, he delivers it more directly: ‘the path is long by way of precepts, but short and efficacious by way of examples.’139 But it is not only embodiments of virtue from the past, commemorated in verbal form, that can concretize and reinforce instruction by precept. A complementary effect can be achieved by association with the virtuous living (bonorum virorum conversatio), which Seneca explains in Epistle 94.40–1 as exercising a real, if often imperceptible, influence for the good. Seneca’s enthusiasm for personal example, and the seeking out of helpful company in the quest for virtue, is no isolated eccentricity, but rather an indication of some central features in the thinking of the times. The urge to exemplify, to find improving lessons in specific instances of virtuous character and action, runs through all moralizing writing of the Imperial period, Plutarch, Epictetus, Maximus and Aurelius, quite as much as Seneca.140 The idea that self-improvement, though personal, should not be solitary, is also widespread, even if it is not universally emphasized. It has, of course, a particular resonance and importance in Seneca’s Epistles, which use epistolary form to highlight the workings and benefits of a oneto-one relationship between a ‘spiritual director’ and his pupil; but comparable senses of shared effort and mutual encouragement can be found in Plutarch and 137

See esp. Ep. 95.38, 54, 64. For a similar appreciation of the value of precepts for ‘those in an intermediate state’ (mesôs diakeimenoi), see again Philo of Larissa’s classification of philosophical logos, as reported in Stobaeus Flor. 2.7.2, 2.39.20–41.25 W. 138 See esp. Ep. 94.29 and 50–1. 139 Ep. 6.5 (cf. 6.6). 140 Mayer 1991 on Seneca; Trapp 1997a, xxxvii–xxxix on Maximus; Rutherford 1989, 55–9, on Aurelius. Plutarch’s Lives are a complex limiting case: see Duff 1999. Exemplarity can be negative as well as positive: witness Plutarch’s repeated citation of Plato’s ‘May I be like that?’, in How to Listen, How to Benefit, Advice on Health and On Restraining Wrath (Mor. 40d, 88e, 129d, 463de); see also Duff 1999, 52–79, esp. 53–65.

Perfection and Progress

59

Epictetus too. Very often, the ideas of exemplarity and beneficial relationships intertwine. The learner can be encouraged to take a specific exemplary individual as his personal model, using him as a yardstick, or a mirror, by reference to which to gauge his own progress.141 He may keep himself up to the mark by imagining that some admired figure is watching him, and regulating his conduct accordingly – a technique apparently originating with Epicurus, but heartily endorsed by Seneca.142 And, as he goes on, he may come to think of himself as a potential example to others, so combining self-formation with the creation of further relationships of benefit.143 The enemy in the quest for self-improvement, we should remind ourselves, is ingrained wrong thinking: the disposition habitually to misevaluate things in the surrounding world as they present themselves for identification, assessment, and constitution as objects of pursuit or avoidance. In the Stoic analysis, the crucial point of breakdown is understood as erroneous ‘assent’ (synkatathesis) to an externally generated ‘appearance’ or ‘presentation’ or ‘impression’ (phantasia) that this or that item, which is in truth indifferent, has positive or negative value, which in turn either is identical with, or produces, an (equally mistaken, indeed vicious) impulse away from it or towards it (aphormê, hormê). In Platonist thinking, the crucial error is understood (with rather less sharpness of analytical focus) as a failure of the rational faculty to ensure that its correct understanding of all that is ‘out there’ controls the blindly appetitive or evasive urges of the irrational soul. It is acknowledged on all sides that this is a tall order.144 The natural seductiveness of things and the corrupting influence of the (misguided, appetitive) mass of surrounding humanity inspire repeated error, and repeated errors build up into settled dispositions. In response, the Stoic and Platonic literature of moral improvement explicitly and implicitly accepts – indeed insists – that the process of self-transformation will inevitably be extended and gradual, a slow wearing down of one set of habits and their replacement by another. The need for sustained attentiveness, repetition, and the accumulation of individually small gains and successes is both articulated directly, and mirrored indirectly in the repetitiveness with which the writers, in their didactic role, return again and again to the central slogans of their teaching. Interrogate your impressions; remind yourself constantly of the distinction between what is and what is not within your control, and concentrate on the former (some Epictetan favourites);145 remember the distinction between what has value and what has none, that the sole good in life is Virtue (Seneca);146 tame and control

141

Plutarch Progress 84b–85d; Aemilius 1.1–4. Epicurus fr. 210 Us.; Sen. Ep. 11.8–9, 25.4–5. Cf. Rutherford 1989, 58–9. 143 Sen. Ep. 83.13, Arrian Disc. of Epict. 1.29.57–8. 144 E.g. Seneca Ep. 82.13, on the sheer difficulty of seeing death as the indifferens that Stoic teaching insists it is. 145 E.g. Arrian Disc. of Epict. 1.22.9–11; Handbook 1.1 and 48. 146 E.g. Ep. 71.32, 76.7. 142

60

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

your irrational lower nature with the voice of reason (Plutarch, Maximus);147 resist the siren voices of Pleasure (Maximus).148 The serious cultivator of virtue should be constantly testing and training himself in day-to-day experience, continually alert to each new episode as a challenge, fully aware of its significance as a trial and a stage in his progress.149 He should start early,150 and also modestly, content to build up gradually from small and easy instances of right understanding and reaction to larger and more difficult,151 confronting each carefully and deliberately, refusing to be rushed or swayed in his judgement by others’ error.152 To help him acquire the habit of seeing each item that presents itself to him for what it really is, specific techniques are recommended. Probably the most curious, even objectionable, to modern sensibilities, is that of redescription: a conscious effort to characterize whatever it is in words other, and juster, than those ordinary people (or oneself in casual moments) would use, or to summon up (morally) relevant characteristics that do not normally come to the front of the mind.153 Two famously uneasy examples are provided by Epictetus’ injunction to remind oneself of the mortality of one’s friends and children even as one kisses them,154 and Aurelius’ characterization of sexual intercourse as ‘the rubbing of a piece of gut and the spasmodic expulsion of a sort of snot’,155 But the technique is capable of happier inflections too. Epictetus can console himself for the loss of one of his possessions (a lamp) by redescribing the theft as the ‘purchase’ by the thief of a lamp at the cost of his own honesty;156 or encourage his pupils to think of a potentially irritating crowd as a festival,157 and Plutarch can recommend picturing the world to oneself as a temple, and life as a religious celebration, in order to promote one’s own serenity and cheerfulness.158 147

E.g. Peace of Mind 465b. E.g. Max. Or. 27. The topic of techniques and advice for the control – or extirpation – of emotion is taken up in more detail in Chapter 3 below (82–91). 149 E.g. Arrian Disc. of Epict. 2.18, 3.12; Sen. Ep. 16.1, 59.7–8, Anger 2.18ff.; Plutarch Progress 76f–78a, Peace of Mind 476d. 150 E.g. Sen. Anger 2.18ff. 151 Plutarch Restraining Wrath 459b ff., 461c; Peace of Mind 476c, Talkativeness 511e ff.; Inquisitiveness 515cd, 520d. Arrian Disc. of Epict. 4.1.111–13. Perhaps the most absorbing instance of this kind of build-up in action is the treatment of death, specifically death by suicide, in Seneca’s Epistles; it has seemed to many readers that they see in this Seneca building up his moral muscles for his own eventual suicide. 152 Sen. Ep. 2.1–2, 13.6ff. 153 Cf. Sorabji 2000, 222–3. 154 Arrian Disc. of Epict. 3.24.60, 84–5; Handbook 3. 155 Med. 6.13.1 (cf. 4.48.3, man is ‘snot yesterday, tomorrow a mummy or ash’); compare also Lucretius’ similarly reductive (and supposedly illuminating) description of sex in Nature of Things 4.1037–58. 156 Arrian Disc. of Epict. 1.29.21, compare and contrast 1.18.15. 157 Ibid. 4.4.24–6. 158 Peace of Mind 477cd; this is an idea exploited also by Dio Chrysostom in his Charidemus (Or. 30) 28ff. 148

Perfection and Progress

61

Less startling, though perhaps still too calculating for modern tastes, is the technique of anticipation (praemeditatio), also in question in Epictetus’ injunction on kissing. In order to prevent oneself being surprised into mistaken dismay by the occurrence of ‘ills’, which are in truth not real ills at all, they should be conceived in advance, and a true evaluation firmly attached to them before they are encountered.159 Plutarch refers repeatedly, with admiration, to Anaxagoras’ supposed reaction on being informed of the death of his son – ‘I knew it was a mortal that I sired’160 – and characterizes the technique as a whole as being like the laying in of provisions for a siege.161 Seneca both recommends and exemplifies it throughout his Epistles, 162 enunciating the guiding principle in Ep. 77.34 as ‘when an “evil” is thought through in advance, its blow is light when it arrives’.163 All this learning should be, in modern terminology, ‘reflective’. The individual should constantly monitor his or her progress, or lack of it, regularly checking his or her own reactions to encounters and events, and comparing her- or himself both to others and to her or his own past selves. Seneca speaks of ‘keeping watch’ on yourself for consistency, and ‘putting yourself on trial’,164 ‘conversing with oneself’ in seclusion, so as to identify one’s imperfections (‘sores’, ulcera) and isolate them for treatment;165 in particular, one should form the habit of looking back over each day at its end, honestly assessing one’s own moral performance, as Seneca himself has learned to do from Sextius: ‘What imperfection (malum) of yours have you healed today? What vice have you stood up to? In what aspect have you improved?’166 Plutarch urges constant alertness to the possibility of testing and assessing oneself in everyday situations,167 and a constant readiness to resolve to ‘do better next time’.168 He attaches special importance, in Platonic vein, to monitoring the intensity of one’s emotional reactions: they should be regularly compared, both diachronically with past episodes, and synchronically with each other;169 dreams can provide valuable supplementary information about the current

159

It seems always to be a question of the anticipation of ‘ills’, rather than of a more general technique of anticipation, involving arming oneself against the experience of future ‘goods’ as well. 160 Consol. to Ap. 118de, Restraining Wrath 463de, Peace of Mind 474d (cf. Cicero, Tusc. 3.14.30, 3.24.58; Valerius Maximus 5.10, ext. 3; Galen Doctrines of Hippoc. and Plato 4.7.10–11; Aelian Historical Miscellany 3.2). 161 Restraining Wrath 454a; see also Peace of Mind 476cd. 162 E.g. Ep. 107. Note, however, that Seneca holds back from exposing Lucilius to the full force of the idea early on in the sequence of letters; in Ep. 13.10, he is content to urge, not that anticipated misfortunes will not really be misfortunes, but that they may not actually happen. 163 Praecogitati mali mollis ictus venit; cf. 78.29 and Arrian Handbook Of Epict. 4. 164 Epp. 20.3, 29.10. 165 Ep. 68.6–8. 166 Anger 3.36, cf. Ep. 83.1–2. 167 Progress 79b–80e. 168 Progress 85e–86a. 169 Progress 83f.

62

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

state of one’s irrational faculty.170 Yet he also admits that it can be hard to achieve the same critical distance on oneself as one can on others.171 For this reason, recourse to others, both for direct criticism, and as mirrors in which to assess one’s own state, is helpful. Like Epictetus also, he recommends copying Plato’s habit of asking ‘May I be like that too?’, when confronted with other people’s bad behaviour.172 Conclusion Thus the individual is encouraged to conceive of himself or herself as advancing, step by careful step, over years and decades rather than weeks and months, to a more orderly and better adjusted inner condition, one that at least begins to deserve the labels ‘virtuous’ and ‘happy’. The elaboration and intensity of this process, and of the kind of scrupulous attention to oneself and one’s state(s) of mind and emotion, is remarkable and fully deserves the attention it has received in recent scholarship.173 The disciplines recommended are fascinating in themselves as a programme still worth taking seriously and assessing as something potentially practicable in real life.174 They invite contrast and comparison with Christian techniques and expectations of self-discipline, so prominent in Late Antiquity and the Medieval period. And they offer an important (though by no means sole) point of entry into a discussion of ancient concepts of the self. This is a topic that will be taken up in Chapter 4, after the further discussion of the issue of emotion promised above. As we have seen, the emotions were centrally involved in thinking about philosophical self-formation; but it is also true that reflection on the conceptualization of emotion is apt to lead back, from another angle, to questions of the personality and the self. Chapter 4, that is to say, will pick up issues both from this chapter and from its sequel. But there are other questions too, besides those of the self, are posed by consideration of the philosophical pursuit of perfection. In particular, the question of how it may be related to – or in some kind of tension with – other contemporary ideas about life-paths and aims. This will form part of the subject matter of Chapter 9.

170

Progress 82f–83e, citing Zeno. Restraining Wrath 452f–53a. 172 Restraining Wrath 463e; Arrian Disc. of Epict. 2.21.8–9. 173 Inspired particularly by the work of Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault: see Hadot 1995 and Foucault 1990. 174 Sorabji 2000. 171

Chapter 3

The Passions Human susceptibility to emotion, and the possibilities of pain and damage that it opens up, was never not a topic for serious public reflection in the ancient world. Wrath, grief and ambition are the leading themes of the Iliad; the Odyssey too turns heavily on grief, longing, greed, lust and anger, before reaching its resolution in joy. The archaic lyric of Archilochus, Alcaeus, and Sappho expresses and explores the intense emotions of its authors, or at least those of the personae they choose to portray. Fifth-century Athenian tragedy (whatever one thinks of the meaning and usefulness of Aristotelian katharsis as a critical tool) both depicted strong emotions at play in and with its stage characters, and was assumed to arouse them in its audiences. But the whole issue of the emotions took on a new complexion and a new orientation in the context of the idea of philosophia as the reasoned and reasonable pursuit of the good life, and of the good life as centrally characterized by a state of inner poise. In this, the emotions and human propensity to them came to be seen as an obstacle in a newly precise way; and the hitherto unthinkable thought that there might be such a thing as a systematic project for their understanding and control came to be seen as both realistic, and urgent. A new need arose to analyse, describe and map the passions, and to establish their aetiology. The main lines of philosophical discussion had, as always, been laid down long before the start of the Imperial period, essentially in the second half of the fourth century BCE and the first half of the third. Before we examine the contribution of Imperial-period thinkers and writers, therefore, it will be helpful to set out the range of positions made available to them by their individual haireseis, and something of the ongoing debates that they inherited. Background Plato and Aristotle The largest single argument, and the clearest polarization of competing positions, was that between Stoicism on the one hand, and the rival Platonic-Aristotelian version of the Socratic tradition on the other. Both Plato and Aristotle, in the midfourth century, had propounded variants of a model of the person in which the emotions were to be understood as springing from just some parts or aspects of a

64

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

more diverse and complex soul (psychê).1 In his most celebrated analysis, that in the Republic, Plato had distinguished three faculties or aspects of the soul, the ‘reasoning’ element (logistikon, logos), the ‘spirit-form’ or ‘spirited’ element (thyomeides, thymos), and the ‘desiring’ element (epithymêtikon, epithymia), and treated both the wholly irrational epithymêtikon and the partly rational thymoeides as the sources of emotion.2 Elsewhere in Plato, the suggestion of a basically bipartite rather than tripartite psychology, there but submerged in the Republic, is more clearly articulated: in the Phaedrus, with its primary distinction between the human charioteer (reason) and the two (black and white) horses of spirit and desire; and still more in the Timaeus, with its story of the creation of the soul by the compounding of a perishable and an eternal component.3 Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics also opted for a tripartite psychology, but with different constituent elements: one wholly rational, one wholly irrational, and the third in between, not rational in its own nature, but yet responsive to reason’s control. In this scheme the ability to experience emotion depends not, as in Plato, on both of the two ‘lower’ faculties of soul, but solely on the intermediate one (the lower being concerned with the functions of nutrition and growth).4 On both Plato’s and Aristotle’s understandings (though Aristotle has a more precise and elaborate account to offer than Plato), reason and the emotions compete with each other for control of action in the imperfect (vicious) individual, but collaborate benignly in the virtuous person, under reason’s overall control. Although of unequal worth in the scale of things (lower and higher, more and less close to the divine), reason and emotion are on this understanding both equally natural, in that both are rooted in inescapable, persisting aspects of human nature. The emotions, and the aspect(s) of the soul from which they flow, can be transcended securely only by a higher order of being, the gods. Human beings can escape them only partially and fleetingly during life, in moments of philosophical contemplation, and perhaps never completely, even after death. Correspondingly, the prime duty of the philosophic (virtuous) individual towards the emotions is to channel and control them – to make them docile and conformable to reason – rather than to suppress and remove them entirely. Plato expresses the point in characteristically evocative, but also imprecise imagery, comparing the project of controlling the desires and spirit to the taming of a savage beast, and to the reduction to order of a plot of land by a careful programme of weeding, pruning and watering.5 Aristotle offers the sharper analytical focus of his doctrine of the Mean, according to which a good state of character depends on habitually experiencing the right amount of the right kind of emotional response in any given situation (i.e. that which is commensurate with the right action to take in that situation), where what constitutes the right amount, the right emotion and the right action is to be determined by the (rationally guided) ‘man of practical reason’ 1

For a first orientation, see (e.g.) Everson 1991, 35–83. Rep. 435b–441c and 588b–589b. 3 Phaedr. 246ad, 253c–256e; Tim. 41de, looking back to 35a. 4 Nic. Eth. 1.13, 1102a5–1103a10. 5 Rep. 588e–589b. 2

The Passions

65

(phronimos).6 In the process of expounding this doctrine, Aristotle gives a much more precise list than Plato of specific emotional registers, and of the proper names for their virtuous manifestations, and for their vicious extremes of excess and deficiency; he is also more straightforwardly informative when it comes to the practicalities of how they are to be brought under control.7 It is a question of training in the sense of habit formation, rather than technical instruction. For both Plato and Aristotle, therefore, though they do not make the point directly, the emotions are something useful; under proper control, human beings need them in order to function properly as the creatures they are, even if the emotions do not represent the highest aspect of their natures. It is even implicit in their exegesis – though again the point is not really brought to the surface, let alone underlined – that control of the emotions does not necessarily mean reducing them all to a low level of intensity. Some circumstances may positively demand a strong emotional response – an extreme of righteous indignation, for instance – in which case getting the emotions right is not the same thing as, indeed takes priority over, the cultivation of inner calm. The Stoics In sharp contrast to which stands the competing doctrine elaborated by the Stoics, in the later fourth century and after.8 For them, an account of the emotions was (almost?) exclusively an account of error, and of divergence from the norms dictated by Nature for human beings. Which makes it all the more paradoxical that this account of theirs was hugely more detailed and sophisticated than anything that had gone before. Not only was it more detailed both about the nature of the emotions generically, and about the typology of the individual emotions; it was also embedded in a far more complicated and circumstantial theory of human nature and the aetiology of action. Like all animals, human beings, according to the Stoics, have an innate disposition to experience impulses (a hexis hormêtikê). In an irrational animal, and a pre-rational (immature) human being,9 this potential is realized every time the creature experiences an impression (‘appearance’, ‘presentation’ – phantasia) from the outside world, to which it reacts with unthinking instinct. In a grown-up, rational human being, however, the reaction is not automatic, but passes through the hêgemonikon, the reasoning command-centre of the soul. The incoming impression is not merely a sensory stimulus; it has a propositional content, assigning a value (good, bad, indifferent) to whatever it is an impression of. The receiving hêgemonikon must react either by assenting to (sunkatatithenai,

6

Nic. Eth. 2.6–9, 1106b36–1109b26. Nic. Eth. 2.9, 1109a20–1109b26. 8 For a first orientation, see Long 1974, 170–8; Long and Sedley 1987, 313–23; Everson 1991, 102–20 (= Long 1996, 264–85). 9 See above, 43–4, for Stoic ideas on the development of rationality in humans, and the crucial ages. 7

66

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

sunkatathesis) or declining to assent to the proposition it embodies (and thus at the same time assenting to or dissenting from the impression); and it is assent to an impression that activates the appropriate impulse, ‘towards’ or ‘away from’ the source of the impression.10 The right reaction – the reaction of the virtuous person – consists in assenting to any impression that assigns the correct value to its source (= making a correct judgement about that source), and in experiencing the correct impulse. Wrong reaction consists in the opposite: assent to an incorrect evaluation (passing an incorrect judgement on the source of the impression), and the accompanying experience of a misguided impulse. Impulses can belong to any of three categories, each comprising pro- and anti-versions (inner ‘movements’ towards and away from whatever it is): ‘selection’ and ‘deselection’ (eklogê, apeklogê); the eupatheiai (‘good feelings’); and the pathê (passions). Of these categories, the first two are entirely legitimate in the right circumstances, but the third is wholly and categorically illegitimate: on the right view of the world, according to the Stoics, it is never right in any circumstances to react with a determination of one of the passions. This brings the Stoics very close to saying that emotions tout court are always instances of wrong rather than right reaction. For the vast majority of what we (moderns) would classify as emotion falls into the vicious category of passion, not the virtuous category of eupatheia (or, indeed, the emotionally null category of selection and deselection). To understand this, we have to recall that, according to Stoic theory, there is only one truly good thing in the world, namely Virtue, and only one truly bad thing, namely Vice. Absolutely everything else is indifferent, of no real value, even though things in general can (indeed, for our survival and flourishing, must) be sub-divided into ‘preferred indifferents’ (things which tend in general to promote human flourishing on any level) and ‘dispreferred indifferents’ (things which tend in general to obstruct human thriving). The ideal person (the ‘Sage’) therefore reacts positively within only to instances and forms of Virtue, and negatively within only to instances and forms of Vice; with the further restriction that whereas both actually present and anticipated future Virtue can legitimately excite a positive (eupathic) reaction in him, it is only prospective Vice, and not present Vice as well, that can make properly him react negatively within. This is because of the Stoics’ overarching confidence in the perfect rationality and goodness of the Universe, perfectly directed by supreme cosmic reason (Zeus, Fate). What is present and actual, even Vice, must – precisely because Fate has allowed it to come about – be right and good on the largest view.11 The good person, accordingly, must not judge its presence to be something bad, and experience any

10

Physiologically, impulses are alterations in the tension of the pneuma, the vivifying ‘breath’ that pervades and structures the body. The Stoics’ description of positive impulses as ‘expansions’ and negative impulses as ‘contractions’ (SVF 3.378–9, 391; 65A–B L-S) seems designed (among other things) to catch the inner experiential quality, the simple feel, of what it is like to be attracted or repelled by something. 11 Cleanthes Hymn to Zeus (SVF 1.537; 54I L-S).

The Passions

67

corresponding negative impulse, on pain of sacrificing his own title to rationality and rational obedience to God and Destiny.12 The inner reactions permitted to the truly good person, the eupatheiai, were divided by the Stoics into three categories: forms of ‘wishing’ (boulêsis – reasonable wishing for prospective moral good);13 forms of ‘joy’ (chara – rational gladness at present moral good);14 and forms of ‘caution’ (eulabeia – rational aversion to anticipated moral ill).15 If these are emotions at all, they are emotions of the coolest and gentlest, involving no deleterious ruffling of the rational calm of the good person. In the face of everything else apart from Virtue and Vice, i.e. in the face of the vast mass of ‘indifferents’ with which the world of everyday experience is filled, the only impulses felt by the good person will be those of ‘selection’ and ‘deselection’. These entirely unemotional reactions are what s/he will experience in anticipation towards the prospect of riches, poverty, health, disease, death, births, bereavement: everything which to the ordinary world count as goods and ills, but which s/he knows for what they are, merely ‘preferred’ and ‘dispreferred indifferents’; things which it is entirely rational to aim at or to seek to avoid (even strenuously so) as future prospects, but to accept entirely dispassionately when they arrive, whichever way they happen to turn out. To react otherwise to ‘indifferents’ is to make a crucial mistake about their value – to treat them as if they were really good or bad – and it is this mistake that is or leads to the pathê, the occurrence of which correspondingly shows up the person experiencing them as an imperfect (imperfectly rational, faultily insightful) specimen of humanity. Like the eupatheiai, the pathê were categorized as referring to both present circumstances and future prospects, but unlike the eupatheiai, the basic forms of pathos in terms of which the whole gallery could be analysed, were four not three. To look forward to something indifferent as if it were positively bad is to fall into the pathos of ‘fear’ (phobos – of which such feelings as hesitancy, shame, dread and terror are specific determinations); to look forward to something indifferent as if it were positively good is to fall into one of the determinations making up the pathos of ‘desire’ (epithymia – embracing such feelings as lust, craving, ambition – and anger). Reaction to the presence (actuality) of an indifferent as if it were a good is an instance of the pathos of ‘enjoyment’ (hêdonê – e.g. self-congratulation, or Schadenfreude); reaction to its presence as if it were really bad is an instance of ‘grief’ (lypê – e.g. pity, worry, sorrow, envy).16 12

See Sorabji 2000, 49–50 for further thoughts on the absence of any legitimate negative reaction to present Vice. 13 It is disputable whether this is restricted to moral good in others, or can apply also to moral good in oneself: Sorabji 2000, 51. 14 It is stated explicitly in our sources that the moral good enjoyed in chara can be our own as well as that of others. 15 Listed in Ps.-Andronicus On the Emotions 6 (SVF 3.432), with definitions. Listed but not defined in Diog. Laert. 7.116. Cf. Cic. Tusc. 4.12–13; and see Sorabji 2000, 47–51. 16 The passions are defined in the extract from the summary of Stoicism anthologized by Stobaeus at Flor. 2.7.10, 2.90.19–91.9 W = SVF 3.394 = 65E L–S. Following the lead of the same summary (Stob. 2.7.10, 2.88.8–89.3 W), it is often said that the Stoics treated fear and desire as the ‘primary’ passions, and grief and enjoyment as ‘secondary’. It is not beyond

68

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

It is thus clear that the category of pathos (conventionally translated ‘passion’ in English, perturbatio or affectus in Latin)17 embraces the vast majority (at least) of the experience referred to by the modern English term ‘emotion’. Pathê are in the Stoic understanding a complete aberration, either identical to or consequent on mistaken understandings of the world; they involve assenting to false impressions of, wrong evaluative propositions about, what is out there, and wrong judgements about how it is appropriate to react to this.18 They are stigmatized as ‘excessive’,19 prone to damaging and uncontrollable escalation,20 as symptoms of a diseased personality, and as ‘irrational’ or ‘contrary to reason’.21 In contrast to the Platonic and Peripatetic view, however, the divergence of the pathê from reason was understood in Stoicism as a distortion of reason itself, rather than as the result of the operation of a separate faculty or aspect of the soul. Though erroneous, they nevertheless are or arise from judgements, not from some well of blind, unthinking reactive energy;22 their opposition to reason lies not in their point of origin, but in their divergence from ‘right’, normative reason – how the supreme, strategic rationality of Zeus/Fate/the universe has organized things, and how they appear to the individual human reason that conforms itself to the divine.23 But this different relationship to reason puts the pathê in a worse rather than in a better position than that accorded to them in the Platonic-Aristotelian picture. It makes of them something doubly unnatural, both in contravening the deliverances of a Reason which is itself identical with universal Nature, and in lacking any autonomous basis of their own in the nature of the individual human being. They are a perversion, an aberration. The task of the reasoning individual is thus not to tame, channel and moderate the pathê, but to abolish them entirely, by correcting the erroneous judgements from which they flow. Apatheia, not metriopatheia, is the Stoic ideal. And if the pathê embrace all, or almost all, of what we would count as emotion, then it

doubt that the terminology used in the summary bears this implication (it may only be establishing a distinction in chronological priority); and even if it does, it needs to be argued, not simply assumed, that we are dealing with real, first-hand Stoic thinking rather than a handbook-writer’s schematization. 17 For the infelicity of the Latin perturbatio as a rendition of pathos, see Sorabji 2000, 208. 18 Note the specification that two judgements are involved, not just one: not just that something good or bad is present or in prospect, but also that it is appropriate for me to react to this good or bad thing: see Sorabji 2000, 29–33, relying on (among other texts) Cic. Tusc. 4.14. This has important consequences when it comes to devising practical means to cope with the passions: see below, 82–4. But the attribution of a ‘two judgement’ analysis to Chrysippus is disputed: see (e.g.) Brown 2003. 19 There is room for argument over how this excessiveness is to be understood: contrast Inwood 1985, 165ff. with Brennan 2000. 20 Seneca Anger 2.3–4; Inwood 1997. 21 There seems to have been a divergence in emphasis between Zeno and Chrysippus on this last point, which had consequences for subsequent Stoic discussion: see below, 80–3. 22 They were perhaps not seen exactly like this by Zeno: see previous note, and below, 80–3. 23 See Inwood 1985, 156–7.

The Passions

69

follows that their blueprint for humanity sees little or no positive role in human life for emotion – certainly not for emotion of any noticeable degree of intensity. Stoics, Peripatetics and Platonists: a real divide? The extent of the divergence between the Stoic and the Peripatetic/Platonist approaches to emotion is however sometimes questioned. If the Stoic eupatheiai, however gentle they may be, none the less can be argued to qualify as emotions in the modern sense of the term, then the Stoic advocacy of apatheia is not in fact after all a doctrine of the suppression of all emotion, only that of emotion intense and disruptive enough to count as pathos; and the distinction between this and Platonic-Peripatetic ideals is correspondingly reduced. The Stoics, indeed, might be seen as advocating metriopatheia in the Aristotelian sense, even if the same thing might count as apatheia in theirs. Against this a number of considerations may be urged.24 Although it may be true that, in practical terms, the inner lives envisaged for the good Stoic and the good Peripatetic would not look (or better, feel) so very different, it remains a very substantial difference indeed that the Stoics regard any degree of emotion more intense than a eupatheia as an error, and the sign and symptom of a diseased state of the soul, whereas for the Platonist or Peripatetic even an unwantedly strong access of emotion still springs from a standing constituent of his inner nature. Moreover, it needs also to be remembered that, by the strict letter of Stoic doctrine, the eupatheiai are in fact not accessible to ordinary people, but are instead restricted to the Sage. And if the Sage is, as some Stoics put it, rarer that the phoenix,25 then it follows that no emotions actually experienced by (just about) anyone are legitimate in Stoicism, since (almost) all of them have to be counted as pathê. Thus, even if eupatheiai were allowed to qualify as emotions, they would exist more as part of an inspiring ideal, than as an everyday reality; all actually experienced emotion would still have to be counted as bad and marked down for eradication. And if, as is arguable, eupatheiai do not in fact qualify – how are we to tell for sure, if no-one has yet experienced one? – then emotion gets no foothold in Stoicism at all. The question of the Stoic-Peripatetic divide is, however, interestingly complicated by the fact that we have indications of argument and uncertainty within the Stoic camp over precisely the analysis and evaluation of emotion. First, there is some evidence for a divergence among the early Stoics, with Chrysippus taking a more rigorously intellectualist view of the pathê, while Zeno and Cleanthes allowed them a non-rational component, such that they could be said to ‘oppose’ reason rather than being a distortion of it.26 Second, there is the rather clearer evidence of (principally) Galen that, at a later stage, the unorthodox Stoic Posidonius took up the issue again, arguing, against Chrysippean intellectualism,

24

Cf. Sorabji 2000, 206–10. Seneca Ep. 42.1–2; Alex. Aphrod. Fate 199.14–22. 26 Sorabji 2000, 55–65, looking back to and correcting Pohlenz. 25

70

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

that mistaken judgement was neither necessary nor sufficient for the occurrence of a passion, and that the passions had accordingly to be understood partly in terms of the operations of a distinct, non-rational component of the soul.27 Part of the difficulty in assessing this evidence stems from the fact that (as so often with the philosophy of the period) it comes not from neutral summaries but from contexts of active controversy. Galen, reporting Posidonius, is using him as a lever against a Stoicizing and in favour of a more Platonizing (or, as he would have it, more Hippocratizing) picture of the soul. Posidonius, in his turn, seems to have claimed the authority of Zeno and Cleanthes for his attack on Chrysippean intellectualism. But though the details may be difficult, the overall point is clear that the analysis of emotion and its relation to the structure of the soul – and thus, potentially, to ideas of how it should be treated – was consistently controversial territory, and the lines between the positions of the different haireseis correspondingly unstable. Other approaches: Sceptics and Epicureans Stoic, Platonic and peripatetic theorizing about the emotions did not by any means exhaust the field, but the contributions of the other haireseis were notably less richly detailed and systematic.28 Both Sceptics and Epicureans shared an ideal of the maximum achievable inner calm (ataraxia, aochlêsia), which might seem to align them in broad terms with the Stoics, but they combined this with an acknowledgement of the inescapability of some emotion, and of its rootedness in permanent aspects of human nature, that is more reminiscent of Platonists or Peripatetics. Thus, in Sextus Empiricus’ account, it is conceded that complete ataraxia is only achievable in areas of experience that are wholly under the individual’s control; there are other dimensions of experience over which control cannot be exercised, in which the only realistic aim is metriopatheia, ‘moderation of feeling’, instead.29 But where the emotions fall in this scheme is not entirely clear. The examples actually given by Sextus of unavoidable pathê are physical experiences such as cold and thirst. What by contrast he says can be avoided are positive (‘dogmatic’) opinions – including the counter-productive, disturbing opinion that feeling cold and thirsty is something bad. Both Stoics and Peripatetics could claim to see elements of kindred thinking in this. It is clear at least that the Sceptic, though he may be resigned to some degree of emotional disturbance, aims to minimize it to the best of his ability. In broad terms, much the same is true of the Epicureans, who also seem to occupy something of the middle ground, while still (inevitably) sharing the general sentiment in favour of calm. On the one hand, in recognizing explicitly that there is such a thing a natural and necessary desire, and in propounding mental along with

27

Posidonius frr. 151–67 E-K; 65I-Q L-S; cf. Sorabji 2000, 93–132. Lack of interest in theory of action, and in the issue of responsibility – both large preoccupations with the Stoics, and ones that helped them to theorize in such detail about the passions – may have been a factor here. 29 Sextus Pyrrhonism 1.28–30. 28

The Passions

71

physical pleasure as the goal of human life, they set emotions at the heart of their ideal, acknowledging their worth in the pursuit of the good life far more directly than any other sect. In the same vein, they had a materialist psychology that emphasized the rootedness of emotion in permanent (and wholly ‘natural’) features of the human condition.30 But they too, like their philosophical rivals, set a high value on the careful control, even the stern moderation, of this dimension of human experience. The highest pleasure, both of body and of mind, was to be achieved by the state of calm consequent on the satisfaction of (natural and necessary) desire: physical pleasure by the restoration of a steady state after the pain of physical need, mental pleasure by the calm following on the abolition of anxiety. The model is that of the tranquil, pain-free, carefree gods. The question of the proper Epicurean approach to a specific case, that of the emotion of anger (on which more below), is taken up by Philodemus in the first century BCE, in such a way as to suggest that Epicurus’ own teaching on the topic was not definitive, but left room for further discussion and development.31 In a line of thought evidently indebted to the Epicurean typology of desires (natural and necessary; natural but non-necessary; empty = neither natural nor necessary),32 Philodemus (whether originally or not is not clear) distinguishes between pointless and counter-productive ‘empty’ anger on the one hand, and legitimate and (on balance) constructive ‘natural’ anger on the other. Natural anger emerges as a relatively gentle perturbation of the soul, but a perturbation none the less – a painful experience, justified on the larger view by its overall tendency to save more pain than it causes.33 The specific instance helps to show how, in general, Epicureans could maintain a position on the emotions not comfortably assimilable to one side or the other in the central dispute between Stoics and Peripatetics. Emotion and its control in the Imperial period The analysis of emotion Discussion of the emotions in the Imperial period was heir to this whole complex of traditions, and reflects its diversity and points of pressure. Unsurprisingly, as in other areas of debate, some convergence between the sects can be observed (at least on the level of terminology), but there remains a lively sense of disagreement

30

Lucretius Nature of Things Books 3 (death) and 4 (sex). Philodemus On Anger (ed. Indelli, 1988). Philodemus defines his own position in polemical argument with two other Epicureans who had already written on the same subject, Timasagoras (third or second century BCE?) and Nicasicrates (first century BCE?). For discussion, see Annas 1989, Procopé 1993. 32 Epicurus Letter to Menoeceus 127 (21B L-S). 33 Natural anger is realistic, true to the facts of the world; the readiness to manifest it (which may involve making yourself look more angry than you in fact feel) is an aid to personal security, and to the correction of error. 31

72

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

and reciprocal polemic and of continued efforts to resolve points of difficulty and uncertainty. Epicureans and Sceptics. There is little enough that can be said about the topic in Sceptic and Epicurean thought of the period, thanks to a combination of the conservatism of both schools, and the scarcity of the surviving sources. What has already been reported above of the Sceptics’ view of the emotions, though presumably originating in the first century BCE, and simply repeated by Sextus in the second or third CE, is all that we have for either period. For the Epicureans, our direct evidence is confined to a few scattered remarks from the inscription of Diogenes of Oenoanda, which contain few surprises. Fr. 34 (juxtaposed on the original inscription with Epicurus’ Key Doctrines 10, on the pleasures of the profligate and the banishment of anxiety) speaks of the need to ‘extirpate’ (hypexairein) the ‘troubling passions’ (ochlounta pathê); fr. 44 comments on the difficulty of properly comparing the pathê of body and soul. Otherwise, we have the assurance of Galen’s reference to a treatise On the Control of the Individual Affections (Peri tês epi tois idiois pathesin ephedreias) by one Antonius (otherwise unknown) that Epicureans were at least still writing on the topic at some level of specialization,34 but nothing else. Platonists. For the Platonists, we are fortunate in having by contrast a number of fully extant texts to refer to, which moreover reflect a variety of different forms and levels of philosophical communication. Chapter 32 of Alcinous’ Didaskalikos exemplifies the handbook approach: concise summary, setting out what are claimed as the Platonic answers to the central questions (but are often constructed with much help from non-Platonic sources), and avoiding overt argument with rival positions (though necessarily tacitly contesting them at a number of points). Alcinous begins with a definition: a pathos is ‘an irrational motion of the soul, in response either to something good or to something bad’;35 it is neither a judgement nor an opinion, but a motion of the irrational part of the soul, which can come about without our wishing for or welcoming it. The stimulus of good and bad things is essential. Emotions are not experienced in the face of something indifferent: pleasure follows from the supposition (hypolabômen) of the presence of something good, desire from its imminence; distress flows from the supposition of the presence of something bad, fear from its imminence (32.1). It is straight away clear how this opening combines an acceptance of Stoic vocabulary and forms of analysis with a strongly (though not explicitly) anti-Stoic stance: Alcinous uses pathos as his central term, and divides the pathê into four, but he assigns the emotions to a separate, irrational dimension of the soul, and denies that they can be classified as judgements or treated as voluntary. Further important contradiction of the Stoic position follows: the primary emotions, we are told, are not four, but only two, pleasure and distress. Fear and desire cannot be primary, as each contains a

34 35

Galen Affections and Errors 1.1. Tr. Dillon.

The Passions

73

mixture (in different proportions) of pleasure and pain (32.2–3).36 The next paragraph distinguishes between ‘tame’ emotions, which are natural, necessary and proper to human beings, provided they are kept in a state of moderation, and ‘savage’ emotions, which are contrary to nature, counter-productive, and wrong whatever degree of intensity they are experienced in. Anger is necessary for warding off enemies, shame for avoiding wrong action; but Schadenfreude and misanthropic feeling are never in order and admit of no virtuous ‘mean’ (32.4). Here it is to Aristotlelian terminology and analysis, rather than Stoic, that Alcinous turns in order to articulate the Platonic line. The next two paragraphs explain the connection of pleasure and distress with inner motions in conformity and in conflict with nature; the doctrine that a human being’s natural state is one of neither pleasure nor pain; and the various means of classifying pleasures in terms of their location, purity and moral value (32.6). Once again, a distinctively Platonist position is staked out, but without fanfare: the talk of inner motions echoes but corrects Stoic ideas, that of a human’s natural state takes issue with the Epicureans. Alcinous ends (32.7) with the assertion that, though pleasure can follow from the exercise of virtue, it cannot itself be counted among the absolute goods, for it contains ‘nothing proper to true being’ (ouden ousiôdes). The primary contrast implied is once again with Epicureanism; though, once again, we might also catch an invitation to reflect on how differently the elements of the analysis are being ordered from the pattern favoured by the Stoics. It is clear that what strike the eye of the modern scholar in this neat and confident summary as importations from Aristotle and the Stoics are not felt by Alcinous as involving any kind of eclecticism. In his own eyes, he is expounding Plato’s moral psychology, as displayed in the Republic, the Phaedrus and the Philebus,37 with the aid of some useful terminology that just happened to have been invented by the Stoics, and some sensible but basically unoriginal reformulations of Plato’s thinking by his star pupil, Aristotle. His purposes as a handbook-writer, however, seem to have made any open discussion of doctrinal affinities, or divergences, inappropriate. A rather different impression is given by the author of the short treatise preserved in Plutarch’s Moralia (440a–452d), under the title On Moral Virtue.38 Like the Didaskalikos, this text too follows the standard Middle Platonic practice of assimilating the doctrine of the mean (and some other pieces of Aristotle) as if it were a mere restatement of Plato’s own thinking. But unlike the Didaskalikos, it combines this with not implicit but quite overt polemic against the Stoics. The author (Plutarch, or whoever it is) begins by declaring that his strategy will be to summarize the views of the philosophers he disagrees with, in order to throw the doctrines he himself endorses into sharper relief (Moral Virtue 1. 440de). Stoics, whatever variation there may have been in their views of the strict unity of 36

This contradicts not only the Stoic insistence on a basic quartet, but also the suggestion (see above, 69–8) that of those four it is fear and desire that are prior. 37 Republic Books 4–9; Phaedrus 245c–256e; Philebus 31–5, esp. 31d–33a and 45d ff. 38 On the issue of the authenticity of this work, see the introduction to the Loeb edition (Moralia vol. 6, 16–17), and Becchi 1990, 9.

74

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

virtue (2.440e–441b), are at one in understanding it as a matter of the workings of reason, and in viewing vice as a malfunctioning of that same rational faculty (3.41b-d). This is a grave error, stemming from a failure to realize a fundamental truth about human nature: the division of the soul into rational and irrational components, as intuited by Pythagoras, fully discovered and expounded by Plato, and endorsed with minor variation by Aristotle.39 Moral virtue is to be understood in terms of the control of the one element over the other (3.441b–4.443c). There follows a heavily Aristotelianizing exegesis of the basis of moral virtue (êthos) in the formation of habit (ethos), the distinction between contemplative and practical reason and their respective objects and functions, and the doctrine of the Mean (4.443c–6.445a). This in turn provides the jumping-off point for a series of attacks on the Stoics that occupies most of the rest of the treatise. The Stoics are faulted first for making it impossible by their theorizing to draw the (real and important) distinction between moral weakness (akrasia) and licentiousness (akolasia – 6.445a–446e), then for neglecting the clear evidence of experience and introspection that two faculties not one are at work within us – both when we have to struggle to contain our emotions, and when contrastingly we find our rational decisions consolidated by emotion (6.446e–8.449a). Their acceptance that there are such things as eupatheiai is alleged as evidence that they too, for all their terminological smokescreen, believe in a faculty of emotion separate from reason (for what can a eupatheia be but pathos moderated by reason?), as also is their (allegedly) explicit acknowledgement that not every judgement is an emotion (9.449a-d). If every emotion is an error, and (by another piece of Stoic doctrine) all errors are equal,40 then how can different grades of emotion be differentiated, as experience clearly shows that they must be, and as the Stoics themselves clearly wish to do (10.449d–450d)? For the final phase of the treatise, criticism gives way once more to exposition of the advantages of the rival Platonic view, which is argued to explain a whole range of phenomena better and to fit better with a whole range of larger patterns. It explains and justifies the common phrase ‘being master of oneself’, and the familiar experience that underlies it (10.450d–11.450e); it is consistent with the distinction between body and soul that runs through the whole of Nature (11.450e); it offers a satisfactory means of explaining both the difference in the strength of the emotions typically experienced by the young and the old, and the occurrence of the passions in animals (11.450e–451b). It fits the universal patterns under which (i) a variety of factors compete to condition the march of events in the world, and (ii) taming and control are more profitable strategies than eradication (12.451b–452c). The emotions, properly controlled, are not something to deplore, but an essential motive force in human experience – not least (the concluding flourish) in the process of moral education (12.452b-d). Much of this confident tirade misses its mark, as it trades on propositions which the Stoics explicitly rejected (for instance, the concession of real emotion to 39

This seems to have been the conventional intellectual genealogy for the doctrine of the bipartite soul: compare Maximus Or. 27.5. 40 SVF 3.657–70, cf. 61N L-S.

The Passions

75

animals). None of it is new or original: the main points had surfaced centuries before, in the attack on Stoic moral psychology mounted from within by Posidonius. But it is interesting to see that the issue between the two schools remained a live one, worth re-fighting once more, even now.41 And a number of the individual emphases and turns in the argument help us to appreciate better both where a Platonist of this period felt on the strongest ground (and consequently most indignant at the perversity of his opponents), and where his own argument became most interestingly problematic. The evidence of introspection, specifically the experience of inner conflict, is still clearly felt as a strong card (as it was, originally, by Plato in the Republic):42 this just feels like the tussle between two separately based sides to one’s makeup, rather than the rapid oscillation between two conflicting judgements (ptoia) that Stoicism claims it to be.43 So too the argument for the conformity of the emotions to a wider pattern in Nature, and the accompanying perception of their usefulness: what does a constructive job is natural, and vice versa. And the tricky Stoic distinction between pathê and eupatheiai remains as vulnerable as ever to attack, and to the suggestion of an attempt to avoid the obvious with a smokescreen of quibbling terminology. But at the same time, the confidence of the Platonist author carries him breezily over what ought to have seemed a rather more troublesome difficulty for his own position. Chapter 4 acknowledges that not everyone can immediately see how it is that reason can control the irrational, but suggests in response that a whole range of common experiences not only attest the fact that it can, but also render that control quite unmysterious. Specifically, the experiences appealed to are: (i) the co-ordinated obedience of the (irrational) body to reason’s decision to take this or that physical action (normally, when you want to move, you move – you do not have to fight your body in the process); (ii) physical reactions to being informed that what you have just eaten is impure, or that the woman you lust after is a blood relative (vomiting and instant detumescence, respectively, it appears); and (iii) the capacity of music made by inanimate instruments to reproduce not only human emotions but also elements of intellectual character. Such cases certainly establish that there are experiences that could be understood in terms of the control of reason over an irrational element (though the last of them does so in a somewhat indirect way); but they do nothing at all to answer the hard question, of what exactly the mechanics of the interplay between the two faculties might be. This is in fact just one specific version of a more widespread problem for Platonists (of this or any other period) of explaining how interaction between the different levels of existence posited by their general theory of reality is possible. It surfaces again, for instance, in Plutarch’s equally confident, but equally unsatisfactory account of the interaction of soul and body in On the Divine Sign of Socrates (Mor. 588f–589b).44

41

As also for Galen in his Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato. Rep. 435e ff. 43 SVF 3.378, 459, 462 (65A, G, J L-S). 44 Cf. Dillon 1977, 221–3. 42

76

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

Side by side with these two relatively technical discussions by ‘Plutarch’ and Alcinous, the Orations of Maximus of Tyre show how the Platonist picture of the emotions could be played in a rather less sophisticated way, which looked more to its potential for rhetorical elaboration than to precise analysis. In Maximus’ simplified Platonism, the human soul is seen as essentially bipartite, with the division between reason and the irrational (or ‘emotion’, pathos) blandly assimilated to that between soul and body.45 Within this model, the emotions are understood as forms of desire, characteristically dedicated to the blind, and thus excessive and chaotic, pursuit of physical gratification. Or rather, there is no properly articulated account of emotion, simply a concentration on the alleged dangers of the quest of the irrational for physical pleasure. The need for the control of the desires, in pursuit of a virtuous life, and the terrible penalties which attach to failure to do so, are urged through a gallery of lurid images, in which the desires are depicted as wild beasts, runaway horses, boiling liquids, flooding streams and galloping disease.46 It is evidently a project of Aristotelianizing moderation rather than one of Stoic extirpation that Maximus has in mind, but he neither tackles the detail of the doctrine of the Mean, nor so much as suggests even in passing that there might be an issue between a more and a less drastic project (or, come to that, between two different ways of reading the relation of the emotions to reason). The only distinction he acknowledges is that between the pursuit of virtue (by rational restraint of desire) and the pursuit of pleasure (by the refusal so to restrain it): the former is the path of all sound philosophy, while the latter is that of the only philosophical sect he rules explicitly to be beyond the pale, Epicureanism.47 Peripatetics. With so much Aristotelian doctrine on the emotions appropriated as their own by Platonists, it might seem that it would have been difficult for the Peripatetics to maintain a distinct and distinctive position in this area. The evidence of one of the principal documents, Aspasius’ commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, tends to confirm this impression; but at the same time it shows by its very existence, and by its references to earlier Peripatetic thinkers, that some intellectuals continued to prefer to organize a discussion of the analysis of emotion around Aristotle as an independent thinker rather than simply acquiescing in the assimilation of his thought to Plato’s. Aspasius’ main thoughts on the issue of emotion come in his comments on Ethics 2.2, 1104b7ff. (pp. 42.13ff. Heylbut). In terms of doctrinal affinities and polemic, his principal target is the Stoics, with whom he takes issue both over the definition of pathos as necessarily intense and contrary to right reason, and over their typology of the four basic kinds. On the first point, he urges (44.12 f.) that a pathos, to be a pathos, need be neither intense (excessive) nor contrary to right reason, as some of them are ‘appropriated to the good’ (oikeia tôi agathôi), and the 45

Orr. 20.4, 27.5, 41.5; tripartition comes in once only, in Or. 16.4, where it is needed for a discussion of the city-soul analogy. 46 E.g. Orr. 7.6–7, 20.5, 27.5, 34.8, 41.5; on Maximus’ imagery in general, see Trapp 1997a, xxxix and index, s.v.; 1997b, 1966–7. 47 See esp. Orr. 29–33, but also 15.8 and 19.3.

The Passions

77

absence of all emotion from an individual’s character can be proper cause for blame. On the second (45.13ff., concluding a discussion begun at 42.27), he argues (in a manner reminiscent of Alcinous) that correct analysis of the nature of pathos, as ‘a movement of the irrational part of the soul under the stimulus of the pleasant or the painful’ (45.13–14) shows that the basic division must be bipartite, into pleasure and pain, with desire and fear representing sub-categories of these basic two, rather than primary pathê in their own right. At the same time, Aspasius is also concerned to settle issues and mark out a distinct position within the Peripatetic tradition.48 Of those Peripatetics who sought to make good the lack of a formal definition of pathos in Aristotle’s writing, he reports that Andronicus (c.1 BCE) identified it as ‘an irrational movement of the soul (i.e. a movement of the soul’s irrational part) coming about through the supposition (hypolêpsis) of good or ill’, Boethus (c.1 BCE–c.1 CE) as ‘an irrational movement of the soul possessing a certain magnitude’ (44.20–8). Aspasius wishes to contest both. In answer to Boethus, he leans on the neutral sense of pathos, as any instance of being acted upon: any perceived movement of the irrational section of the soul is a pathos, he insists, whether it has magnitude or not. As for Andronicus, Aspasius retorts that ‘supposition’ and/or assent (sunkatathesis) are not necessary for the occurrence of a pathos. Perceived appearance alone (phantasia, aesthêsis), working directly on the irrational soul, without any reaction having to pass through the intellect, is quite enough. Although these comments are aimed overtly at fellow Peripatetics, they clearly serve at the same time to distance Aspasius still more firmly from the Stoics he also criticizes. The insistence that appearance/perception suffices to trigger pathos implicitly rejects the Stoic analysis in terms of rational assent; the claim that any movement of the irrational soul must be acknowledged as a pathos rejects their distinction (or at least, one understanding of their distinction) between the calm movements constituting the eupatheiai, and the excessive movements for which they wished to reserve the term pathos. As will have been obvious, much that Aspasius has to say in articulating his version of the Peripatetic understanding of the emotions chimes closely with what Alcinous in Chapter 32 of the Didaskalikos had identified equally confidently as the Platonic line: in particular their shared insistences that the causal route to the occurrence of an emotion passes solely through the irrational aspect of the soul, that emotion is something entirely natural and often constructive, and that the primary categories of emotion are two not four. Although either or both might have welcomed the close agreement of the other against a common (and popular) adversary, there is an unresolved argument here over ownership of the ideas in question. The Platonist, who urgently needs extra material to flesh out the rather sketchy account of emotion overtly recoverable from Plato’s dialogues, helps himself to the idea that, as Plato’s pupil, Aristotle could only have been drawing out implications embedded in his master’s work from the start. The Peripatetic 48

Among other things, this is a way of establishing by implication that his is a serious and considerable tradition of thought, solid enough to have room for internal debate, and the coexistence of more than one strand of analysis within it.

78

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

shows by his very decision to cast his discussion as a commentary on the pupil not the master, that he feels the true point of origin to lie with the former. Stoics. The Stoics’ view of the emotions thus attracted lively and sustained criticism from the exponents of some well-developed and confidently urged alternative perspectives. In addition to the texts just surveyed, we may note also Galen’s discussion in Book 5 of his Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato, where he revives and augments Posidonius’ criticism of the older Stoic (Chrysippean) account, and (though here the attack is implicit rather than openly articulated) the first part of his Affections and Errors of the Soul. Though Galen prides himself on writing from a position of critical independence rather than subservience to the party line of any one hairesis,49 the positive picture of the soul and the emotions that he endorses has more in common with Platonism than with any other position, and his coolness towards Stoicism in particular is clear. But it is also clear that this volume of criticism did not disconcert Stoics and Stoicizing thinkers in the least, though it may have done something to move them away from the temptations of a more Posidonian line on emotion and the structure of the soul, and back towards the more rigorously intellectualist Chrysippean position, out of sheer defiance. Certainly both Seneca and Epictetus, though neither of them has to confront the issues of the structure of the soul and the analysis of the passions directly, show themselves entirely solid on the basic assumption that passion is a matter of mistaken judgement, rather than any upsurge of an autonomous irrational element within. So, for instance, Arrian’s Epictetus, in Discourses 1.11.28–33 and 3.3.17–19, insists hard on the point that grief, anger, and all other passionate reactions to the world around us are within the agent’s power to escape precisely because they are judgements, therefore voluntary and changeable by our own efforts. And Seneca in his analysis of anger at the beginning of On Anger book 2, having formulated the crucial issue as whether anger occurs with or without the rational consent of the mind, is equally insistent that the latter is the case: anger simply is an agitation of the mind (concitatio animi, 2.3.5) consequent on an act of intellectual assent (adprobavit, 2.3.5). Nor was the Stoics’ defiance purely passive. Very marked in Seneca’s presentation (though less evident in Arrian’s of Epictetus) is a desire to strike back at Peripatetic criticism, and to discredit them in return, with attacks on the doctrine of the moderation of the passions, and of the usefulness of at least some passions when thus moderated. The point comes up twice in On Anger at 1.9 and 3.3, and at greater length in two of the Epistles, both well on into the more technical phase of Seneca’s course, numbers 85 and 116.50 For Seneca, advocacy of the moderation of the passions is as misguided as advocacy of being only moderately ill sooner than truly healthy (non est valetudo mediocritas morbi, 85.4; cf. 85.9, eodem loco habenda quo si quis diceret … modice aegrotandum). Given the inherently chaotic character of passion, such a recipe leaves the individual in a radically unstable position, perpetually liable to lapse from moderated into immoderate emotion, and 49 50

Affections and Errors 1.8.41–3 (and see above, 17–18). Cf. also 99.15ff.

The Passions

79

a slave to rather than master of his circumstances.51 Epictetus for his part is made to argue for the obstructiveness and unprofitability of emotional indulgence in a number of specific cases (e.g. Discourses 3.3.12–19, 3.24.84–8, 3.24.17–19; 1.11), but without ever explicitly developing the underlying proposition. At the same time, however, both Seneca and Epictetus also manifest some concern to draw the sting of the Peripatetic criticism that rigorous application of the doctrine of apatheia would lead to a chilling lack of humanity.52 Classic Stoicism, in disallowing all passion, leaves the individual to be legitimately motivated by one or both of two categories of impulse: (if a Sage) by the eupatheiai of attraction to and shrinking from true good and ill (manifestations of virtue and vice); and/or (for anyone) by the unemotional reactions of selection and deselection, in exercising which the individuals is licensed to strain extremely hard to gain or avoid the indifferents that vulgar error treats as really good and ill, until such time as the divinely ordained march of events shows irrefutably what is truly for the best. The ways that Seneca and Epictetus seek to colour this picture in their presentation certainly aim to minimize its harshness, and may even to some degree modify its substance. Writing to Lucilius in Epistle 116, Seneca is full of reassurances that the interdict on passion still leaves in place everything that is important and cherishable: Do not be afraid: I am not snatching from you anything that you don’t want to be denied you. I shall show myself easy and indulgent towards the things you are making for, and which you hold to be either essential to life or useful or pleasant: it is the element of vice I shall remove. For when I forbid you to desire (cupere), I shall allow you to want (velle), with the result that you will continue to do the selfsame things, but without fear and on a surer plan (certiore consilio), and that you will experience your pleasures more intensely: why shouldn’t they come home to you more strongly if you are in command of them than if you are their slave?

And in On the Constancy of the Sage (10.4) he denies directly that the sage is wholly impervious to the shocks of the world: There are other things which strike the Sage, even if they do not deflect him, like physical pain and weakness, or the loss of friends or children, and the disaster of his country ablaze in civil war. I do not deny that the Sage feels this; we do not impute to him the hardness of stone or iron.

When Arrian’s Epictetus, in similar vein, declares in Discourses 3.2.4 that ‘one should not be apathês like a statue’, his point in the immediate context may be only that the struggle to free oneself from the passions is no excuse for failing to discharge the conventional obligations of family and civic attachments. But there is none the less, throughout his work, a streak of optimistic benevolence that has led 51 52

See further below. A complaint echoed by modern scholars too: e.g. Long 2002, 248.

80

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

A.A. Long in his recent study to comment that he ‘strongly endorses a wide range of what we today would call positive emotions or affects: family affection, gratitude, cheerfulness, joy, and enthusiasm,’ and that it is easy to ‘form the impression that cheerfulness and family affection are central to the outlook that Epictetus hopes to encourage in his students’53 – rather as if Epictetus were trying almost consciously to open up the eupatheiai to morally imperfect but aspiring prokoptontes as well as to the perfected Sage. This perhaps goes too far, as much – maybe all – of what Epictetus has to say about cheerfulness relates to the individual’s acceptance of destiny rather than to his dealings with other human beings; and much – maybe all – of what he has to say about affection and benevolence can be understood as recommending a dispassionate good will rather than something that we would acknowledge as more emotionally engaged.54 Nevertheless, the point still stands that Epictetus too, like Seneca, is aware of what he sees as a misconception of Stoic austerity, and is keen to dispel it both by precept and by his own personal example. It is not just a question of the mood music, however. Imperial-period Stoic texts also give evidence of discussion and development of the fine details of the analysis of the nature and causation of the passions. This is particularly noticeable in the case of Seneca, and the analysis he offers of the aetiology and typical development of a pathos, and his accompanying attempt to fix the right position for the dividing line between a pathos proper and its non-passionate preliminaries. In On Anger 2.2–4, he distinguishes three stages in the development of the pathos of anger (or, by extension, any other pathos):55 first, the passive agitation of the mind by the impression of a wrong done to you, arriving from the outside world; second, the mind’s ‘approval’ or ‘endorsement’ (adprobavit) of the impression, involving a judgement that it is appropriate (oportet) for me to take revenge for a wrong that has genuinely been inflicted, and for the other person to be punished for a wrong really offered;56 and thirdly, a now uncontrolled (impotens) urge to take revenge at any cost, regardless of considerations of appropriateness, which is quite irrational (rationem evicit). The first of these is quite involuntary, and because it thus has nothing to do with the active acceptance of the mind, its unavoidable occurrence (seen in such phenomena as pallor and tears and trembling in the face of danger, or the leaping of a general’s heart before battle) is not to be counted as a true instance of passion (adfectus).57 It is the second movement, because it involves the active 53

Long 2002, 245. And it seems misleading to claim as categorically as Long (2002: 244) does that the Stoics counted affection and cheerfulness among the eupatheiai, without also making reference to their restriction to reaction to what is truly good and ill, namely forms of virtue and vice. 55 Cf. Sorabji 2000, 73–5. 56 Seneca does not here contradict the idea that there are two judgements being made, (a) that something genuinely bad has happened, and (b) that it is appropriate for me to react to it, but it is not to his purpose to emphasize it in this context. 57 It is interesting to see how Seneca has to some degree lost sight of the etymology of the Greek terminology he is translating; he can say that it is not a case of adfectus when the mind is the passive victim rather than active instigator of a feeling, patitur … magis quam 54

The Passions

81

collaboration of reason (iudicium), that can be controlled (avoided) – and indeed must be, for once a false step has been taken there, it is too late: the second movement once made leads seamlessly on to the third. Exactly how much of this tripartite analysis is original to Seneca is debatable; it may well be that all of it is derived from earlier Stoic thinkers. But it does in several ways seem to reflect an ongoing discussion within Stoicism, and attempts to extend and defend the ideas of the first Stoics in the light of emerging criticism. The idea of pre-passionate, passive ‘first movements’ looks very like an attempt to maintain the Chrysippean analysis of passions as distorted judgements in the face of the criticism of Posidonius, and his desire to demonstrate that passion can be experienced even in the absence of a judgement. The doctrine of ‘first movements’ accepts the reality of the phenomena Posidonius pointed to in support of his case, but denies that it makes sense to classify them as passions proper, and so leaves it possible still to maintain that the passing of a judgement is necessary for the experience of a passion.58 It may also be – if Richard Sorabji’s reading of the data is right – that the doctrine of ‘third movements’, too, owes its origin to the desire to interpret and harmonize apparently discordant elements within the Stoic tradition. For the distinction between the moment of mistaken judgement (the second movement), and the slide into a reason-defying determination to get even at all costs, can be seen as attempting to endorse both Chrysippus’ insistence on mistaken judgement, and Zeno’s apparently incompatible notion of positive opposition to reason, within the same overall model of passion.59 From this point of view, the schema set out by Seneca remains interesting evidence for the continued discussion and refinement of doctrine within Stoicism, in the late Hellenistic period, or even the first centuries BCE and CE, even if it is not his own original work. How successful it is in drawing an intelligible and defensible line between what is to count and what is not to count as passion may be more debatable. The examples Seneca gives of permissible, non-passionate, involuntary reaction are all of physical symptoms (described as corporis pulsus in 2.3.2; cf. the symptoms prefiguring grief described in Epistle 99.15ff.). Yet Seneca also says that they involve agitation of the mind (agitatio animi) as well; what marks them off from passion is not the complete absence of a mental dimension, but the fact that the role of the animus in them is that of passive reaction not active endorsement and collaboration (moveri vs. prosequi; patitur vs. facit). Furthermore, in 2.3.4 he seems to maintain that a conscious belief that one has been injured, and an equally conscious wish to get revenge, need not count as the facit – yet it is precisely the idea of passive reception (patitur = paschei; paschein > pathos) that is built into the Greek word pathos. 58 Sorabji 2000, 55–75; but, as he himself confesses, it is by no means common ground among scholars that ‘first movements’ play such an important role in the development of Stoic thinking. It remains possible to assume, as some scholars do, that far from being a defensive innovation, they were part of Chrysippus’ thinking from the start, but not at any point a crucial element. 59 Sorabji 2000, 55–65.

82

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

passion of anger if they die down immediately thanks to the rational acceptance of some good reason against them (dissuadente aliqua causa; motum animi rationi parentem). The admission that even a passive movement of the soul is present in a pre-passion might seem to bring Seneca up against Aspasius’ insistence, aimed at a fellow Peripatetic, that any kind of movement of the soul should be accounted a pathos.60 The apparent further admission that even after a judgement – albeit a provisional and temporary one – a passion is not necessarily present in its full form, seems to stretch the category of pre- or non-passions implausibly far. Seneca might well be suspected of wanting to have a doctrine of metriopatheia, but to be able to call it one of apatheia. At all events, it appears that Seneca’s interest in ‘first movements’, and the distinction between them and real (culpable) emotion, is not an isolated eccentricity, but rather an instance of a more widespread concern. The same phenomena come up for discussion and comment also in the On Moral Virtue and in an episode recorded by Aulus Gellius. On Moral Virtue 9 (449ab) cites the characteristic terminology of ‘first movements’ – ‘bites’, ‘perplexities’, ‘inclinations’ (dêgmoi, synthroêseis, prothumiai) as another example, alongside that of the eupatheiai, of the Stoics’ tendency (as it appears from a Platonist standpoint) of concealing obvious facts about the emotions behind a terminological smokescreen: even the best Stoics, he suggests, feel real emotional shocks, but because their philosophy does not allow them to admit it, they have to stipulate that such shocks are not really emotions after all. Gellius in Attic Nights 19.1 tells what he claims as a first-hand story of a Stoic caught with the rest of his ship’s company in a severe storm at sea. In the heat of the moment he was observed turning pale and grimacing; taxed with infidelity to his principles, he eventually responded with a passage from the (now lost) fifth book of Arrian’s Discourses of Epictetus, expounding the doctrine of first movements, of which Gellius gives an extended Latin paraphrase. Both passages suggest that argument over the right interpretation of first movements provided a particularly useful focus for sceptical criticism of Stoic absolutism over the emotions. Gellius’ in addition sets us thinking once more about the intensity of the gaze that could be turned on philosophers in everyday life, and of the not uniformly friendly interest that was taken in the question of whether they would live up in practice to their theoretical principles. Therapeutics Analysis and understanding of the nature of the emotions was not an end in itself. At least from Plato and Aristotle onwards, it had been taken for granted that right analysis was the prelude and precondition to the actual establishment in one’s own and other people’s characters of what had thus emerged as their proper state. Use of the imagery of sickness to characterize the soul and person in whom the propensity to emotion was not under proper control, again in evidence from Plato onwards, went hand in hand with a complementary sense of philosophia as a 60

See above, 76–8.

The Passions

83

source of treatment, and a route to inner health. Advice on how to use philosophical understanding of the emotions to tame (or abolish) them is accordingly a large and important element in the literature of moral instruction surveyed in the preceding chapter, and repays further attention. From one point of view, the philosophical literature of the Imperial period offers nothing radically novel in this regard. What it does provide, however, is a volume of writing and a richness of detail that simply cannot be matched from earlier on. We can be confident, from the evidence of book titles and references in later writing, that the therapeutic strain was well represented from at least the beginning of the third century BCE onwards. Witness for instance Cicero’s accounts of the difference of opinion between Chrysippus and Cleanthes over the best means of assuaging grief (Tusculans 3.76–9), or of Epicurus’ advocacy of distraction and recollection as therapeutic resources (Tusculans 3.33 and 76). But we lack any secure sense of the overall style and fineness (or otherwise) of detail with which these earlier thinkers developed their recommendations. In our period, by contrast, there is almost an embarras de richesse, with strong therapeutic strains in Seneca, Epictetus, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius, Galen and (even allowing for his fragmentary preservation) Diogenes of Oenoanda. The kind of ‘therapy’ that is in question in this body of writing is, of course, not that of modern psychotherapy, in spite of the fact that its object is, precisely, the psychê or soul.61 Rather than an exploration, disentangling and reconfiguration of the complexities of unique individual experiences, what is envisaged is a much more strongly normative and universalizing project, acknowledging only limited possibilities of variation between individuals and aimed at establishing a single, objectively right state of the person. Its object is the passions, or more precisely, the condition(s) of which their occurrence is the symptom: those many states of the person (soul), whether conceived in terms of a wayward irrational component or an imperfectly functioning reason, or both, which lay her or him open to disturbing, disruptive, and misdirecting emotion. Whatever the precise view taken of the structure of the soul and the aetiology of the passions, the strategies recommended by Imperial-period philosophoi for dealing with them are predominantly (though not absolutely exclusively) cognitive. The key is held to lie in the conscious grasping of truths about both the outside world and one’s own inner nature, which are not simply to be learned off and acknowledged on a purely theoretical plane, but so ingrained into one’s outlook and habitual patterns of response that their application in all situations becomes (ideally) smooth and automatic. Like the moral quest as a whole, this is naturally seen as a long-term commitment, requiring constant self-scrutiny and selfadmonition, and constant testing and practice in day-to-day life. Although it is, at its heart, a solo project for each individual concerned, the assistance of others, either sporadically and opportunistically, or in a more sustained and systematic manner, is allowed for and indeed welcomed. The advice to take carefully selected others as advisers and candid critics is explicitly 61 This point is clarified in the exchange between Sorabji and Williams in Sorabji 1997, 197–213, and in Sorabji 2000, 211–12.

84

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

articulated by Plutarch and Galen,62 and it is built into the very structure and miseen-scène of Arrian’s Discourses of Epictetus and Seneca’s Moral Epistles, both of which portray a drama of collaborative self-improvement (between Seneca and Lucilius, and between Epictetus and his assorted pupils), as well as attempting to establish a relationship between text reader. A closer examination of a few of the central texts will show something of the range of both content and presentation: Arrian’s account of Stoic Epictetus’ Discourses, Platonist Plutarch’s On Restraining Wrath and On Inquisitiveness,63 and independent Galen’s Affections and Errors of the Soul. Epictetus. Control of the passions may not be explicitly at the top of the agenda in the Discourses and Handbook (freedom and autonomy seem in the long run to be Epictetus’ most insistent catchwords),64 but it is still firmly among the objectives Epictetus is shown setting for himself and his pupils. And since he is a good Stoic, it is abolition rather than moderation that he establishes as the goal. For all that (as we have seen) he wishes to stress that apatheia does not involve stony indifference to normal human ties, it is none the less ‘dispassion, freedom and absence of turmoil’ (apatheia, eleutheria, ataraxia) that he lists in Handbook 29.7 as the results of philosophy that ordinary ambitions threaten to deprive us of. He is equally emphatic that the route to this goal is wholly under our control and lies through the exercise of judgement. Again and again, in both texts, Epictetus insists that it is the individual, not external circumstances, who is to blame for any emotional upset that may be experienced, for s/he is free, if only s/he would realize it, to assess the outside world as s/he sees fit, and as it really deserves, rather than tamely accepting it as it presents itself.65 Appearances, to be operative in us, have first to be assented to, and that assent can be bestowed or withheld. If we get the decision over this wrong, that is our fault, the fault of our erroneous beliefs, and the emotional upset that results is the consequence of those beliefs.66 But what we get wrong we can also get right, by acquiring and ingraining the right beliefs (about what is and is not truly valuable), and applying them scrupulously as each new impression comes in. The crucial feat is thus to have the strength of mind not weakly to accept first appearances, but to pause and screen them, judging them by the criterion of right reason. So Epictetus in Discourses 2.18.25 imagines someone saying ‘Wait for me a little, impression (phantasia). Give me leave to see what you are and what you are about, give me leave to review you (dokimasô)’; and in Handbook 1.5 he urges, ‘Get into the habit of intoning over every harsh impression that “You are an impression and not in every way [not at all?] the thing you are an impression of.”

62

Galen Affections and Errors 55–6; Plutarch Progress in Virtue 82a. Cf. also the Progress in Virtue discussed above, 46–7 and 50–2. 64 See below, 127–30. 65 E.g. Disc. 1.1.33–8. 66 Handbook 5: tarassei tous anthrôpous ou ta pragmata, alla ta peri tôn pragmatôn dogmata. 63

The Passions

85

Then scrutinize it and review it according to the criteria (kanones) you have hold of … ’. The criterion Epictetus has in mind are specified in both Handbook 1.5 and Discourses 3.3.14–15: is this thing of which I have an impression something that it is within my power to control or not (prohaireton/aprohaireton, Disc. 3.3.14; eph’hêmin/ouk eph’hêmin, Ench. 1.5)? Asking this is equivalent to drawing the crucial Stoic distinction between Virtue and the spurious ‘goods’ and ‘ills’ that in fact belong to the category of indifferents, for it is also a mark of the latter that they are not under our power, while it is distinctive of the former that it is the only thing that we can – or need – control in order to be happy. Failure to carry through such a review, and apply its results, lays us open to being ‘carried away’ by our impressions – a process that Epictetus repeats again and again it is vital to resist.67 For, of course, what impressions will carry us away into are the passions. So it is that Epictetus’ principal therapeutic slogan is ‘the (right) use of impressions’, (orthê) chêsis tôn phantasiôn. Making this right use, as is already apparent from Handbook 1.5 and Discourses 2.18.25, requires a constant, sentrylike vigilance, which is at the same time an intense self-scrutiny; as Epictetus puts it in Handbook 48, one must ‘keep watch on oneself as an enemy and a plotter’ (hôs echthron heauton paraphylassei kai epiboulon). It is also not something that can be expected to come all at once. Deliberate exercise is needed to get one into the right habits of response, so as to lessen the power of each successive impression to seduce, and so excite a passionate reaction. In a celebrated passage (and one which has seemed to many to epitomize what they find difficult – even repellent – in Epictetus and Stoicism), Epictetus describes the kind of training (askêsis) he has in mind: What, then is the proper training for this? Firstly, the highest and principal form of training – the one that stands, so to speak, right at the entrance – is that when you become attached to something, you don’t do so as if to something that can’t be taken away from you, but rather as if to something like an earthenware pot or a drinking-glass, so that if ever it gets broken, you’ll remember what it was and not be distressed. So too in this case, when you kiss your child, or your brother, or your friend, don’t ever surrender entirely to your impression, or allow your elation (diachysin) to advance as far as it desires; but rein it in, restrain it, like those who stand behind generals when they ride in triumph and remind them that they are men … Henceforth, when you take delight in anything, bring to mind the contrary impression. What harm is there while you are kissing your child to whisper, ‘Tomorrow you will die’; and likewise to your friend, ‘Tomorrow you or I will go away, and we shall never see each other again’?68

We have, however, already seen that the same technique of consciously redescribing things to oneself, in order the better to reflect their true value, and to 67 68

E.g. Disc. 2.18.32; Handbook 10, 16, 19, 20, 34. Disc. 3.24.84–8.

86

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

lessen their power to seduce one into passion, can present a sunnier aspect: as, for instance, in Discourses 4.4.23–6, where Epictetus suggests relabelling an oppressive crowd a ‘festival’ even as he renews his exhortation to ‘Talk to yourself, put your impressions into training (gymnazou), craft your perceptions to perfection (exergazou)’.69 Both by the content of his advice, and by the regular rhythm of its repetition through the whole of his work, Epictetus underlines the fact that its application is a long-term project, and a continual struggle, against one’s own laziness and gullibility, and the inherent ‘seductiveness of things’.70 On a number of occasions, he can be seen offering not general advice but precepts aimed at the treatment of specific individual passions. In Discourses 1.18 (esp. 11–16) he tackles anger, as experienced against a thief or an adulterer, pointing out that if you can cease to think of what they take from you (your material property, your wife’s beauty), then you will also cease to feel angry with them. As long as you value mere externals, you have little cause for annoyance if others value them too, and take them from you when they can. If you should be angry with anyone, it is yourself, for your cretinous attachment to objects that do not deserve it. In another hugely celebrated and admired passage (Discourses 1.11),71 he confronts a man who was filled with such grief and fear at the sickness of his daughter that he ran away from home until news came of her recovery, and convinces him that his behaviour sprang not, as he claimed, from a natural impulse, but from a mistake about the proper way to manifest truly fatherly affection. In this passage (which is about duties (kathêkonta) and responsibility for judgement, as well as control of passion), we witness not only the content of Epictetus’ therapeutic teaching, but also the skilful (dialectical, Socratic) manner in which it is administered to a particular individual.72 Grief and fear, indeed, seem to be the emotions about which Epictetus has most to say, and over which he seems to expect his audience to be most in need of help; phobos, phoboumai and phoberos loom much larger in his vocabulary than orgê and orgizomai. This is not unconnected to another of his (and Stoicism’s) principal emphases, on freedom,73 for it is often the figure of the (tormenting, fearinspiring) tyrant whom he chooses to illustrate the powerlessness of externals to hurt and frighten once the central truths about value and autonomy have been grasped.74 Plutarch. Epictetus’ therapeutics are marked by a somewhat urgent and impatient tone; he is ready to hector and confront, and to employ verbal shocktactics in order to jolt his pupils out of the mental ruts in which conventional

69 Cf. Sorabji 2000, 222–3. Or is Epictetus here in fact talking not of a particular crowd, but of the oppressive hurly-burly of life in general, as in 4.1.103–6 (cf. Long 2002, 234–5)? 70 E.g. Disc. 1.11.40. 71 Cf. Long 2002, 77–9. 72 Cf. again Long’s analysis. 73 See below, 127–33, 209–10. 74 E.g. Disc. 1.1.18–25, 1.9.17, 1.19; with Dobbin 1998, 173–82.

The Passions

87

thinking and the ‘seductiveness of things’ have confined them.75 Plutarch’s therapeutic tone is characteristically quieter and more urbane, being both less truculent and more self-consciously literary – reflecting perhaps the different social and educational level of his addressees.76 The underlying message is however no less serious and potentially demanding, and in spite of their doctrinal differences, its underlying substance has much in common with Epictetus’. True to his Platonist affinities, Plutarch assumes throughout that the passions spring from a distinct, irrational dimension of the soul, and that the work of managing them is in general one of training and control rather than of outright excision,77 though like Alcinous (Didaskalikos 32.4) he recognizes that some specific pathê, as conventionally identified and named, are irredeemable and accordingly to be abolished wholesale, not moderated.78 But, as we have already seen in the case of the author of On Moral Virtue (with whom he may be identical), he has little to say, other than in the suggestive terms of metaphor, about just how – by what psychological mechanisms and processes – the moderating influence of reason is exercised. Unlike Epictetus (or Seneca) he has no developed theory of action or model of moral decision-making, to underpin his practical prescriptions. He must be assuming that something other than what Epictetus has in mind is going on when the passions come under treatment, but that something lacks the clarity and precision of the Stoic account – perhaps a quite general problem for Platonists of this period. Whatever it is that is assumed to be going on within, on the level of overt practice Plutarch’s advice has much in common with Epictetus’. Freeing oneself from unwanted emotion is not an instantaneous process but a long haul, involving the kind of self-scrutiny many would rather avoid;79 it requires sustained and conscientious exercise, building up from small and easy acts of resistance or avoidance to large, as if one were provisioning a city for a siege.80 It is fostered by a proper grasp of right value – of the relative unimportance of material externals (the goods of Fortune), and of the truth that your happiness and peace of mind

75 Long 2002, 67–96 comments on the way Epictetus seems self-consciously to play the Socratic gadfly; is the credit really Arrian’s, for playing up this perception of Epictetus in his presentation? 76 Epictetus’ audience was variegated (cf. Brunt 1977), but with a centre of gravity in the equestrian and lower-ranking administrative classes; Plutarch directs his treatises in the first instance to members of his aristocratic, senatorial social circle (for which see Jones 1971, 48–64). 77 E.g. Progress in Virtue 82f–83e, Restraining Wrath 453bc, Peace of Mind 465ac, 475a, 475c. 78 See below on curiosity (polypragmosynê). Once or twice Plutarch speaks of his ideal as one of apatheia rather than metriopatheia: Progress 83b and 83e. Either he is here using the word in its looser sense of an absence of vicious emotion, or he is using it ad homines, against the Stoics whose denial of the reality of moral progress is his principal target in this treatise. 79 Peace of Mind 476c, Inquisitiveness 516d. 80 Restraining Wrath 454a, 464b–d; Inquisitiveness 520d, 521e–522b.

88

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

depend not on these but on your attitude to them.81 Relabelling and diversion are often useful tactics to calm and defuse vicious inner disturbance.82 One gets the feeling that, if only in a large general sense, Plutarch is working to an agenda set as much by Stoics as by Platonists, even if he keeps to a level of practicality that allows potentially awkward problems of doctrinal and terminological divergence (the issues of strict indifference, impressions, assent and impulse, and so on) to stay comfortably out of sight. This is not, however, to say that he lacks his own distinctive emphases. He has more to say, explicitly, than Epictetus about habituation, which probably reflects a specifically Platonist (Peripatetic) awareness of a distinct lower nature that responds to iterative training rather than the one-off enlightenment of rational instruction.83 He has (again as a Platonist) a different sense of death as a source of confidence, and so as a resource for calming inner disturbance.84 The situations of self-testing, and for the display of achieved control over emotion, are characteristically less spikily extreme than those normally envisaged by Epictetus (and, for that matter, Seneca too): he speaks more of everyday social and domestic encounters, and less of tyrants and persecutors. And, in the range of aids to emotional control that he surveys, he finds much more room than Epictetus for the resources of educated culture (paideia). Famous cases of exemplary behaviour from history and myth, and aptly turned quotations from the classics, besides being part of the literary texture of his exposition, are also recommended as therapeutic tools in their own right: exemplary individuals provide both inspiration and models emulation, apt quotations can operate as charms to keep essential principles in mind at moments of stress.85 Plutarch here taps into the contemporary ‘culture of reference’ from an unexpected angle, giving an unusually practical and committed twist to the vague general assumption that polite culture and sound morality go together (though also, at the same time, further endorsing the sense of literary learning as a superior attainment). Of the relevant treatises two place the issue of passion control in a broader context, as one part (albeit a central one) of the overall project of philosophia and the pursuit of happiness. Progress in Virtue, discussed in Chapter 2 above, sets out a road map for a typical advance towards serenity and virtue, and the pitfalls that may beset it; On Peace of Mind – the Greek subject of which is euthumia, which includes notions of cheerfulness and contentment as well as serenity – concentrates on the state of soul to which the passions are a bar, rather than on the passions in themselves. Of those devoted to specific issues, On Restraining Wrath (Peri aorgêsias, De cohibenda ira) will be discussed below. On Inquisitiveness (Peri polypragmosynês, De curiositate) takes as its subject not all forms of inquisitiveness, but specifically that malign inquisitiveness that fastens unhealthily 81

Peace of Mind 475de, 476d–477e. Peace of Mind 477c–f (relabelling); Inquisitiveness 517c–f (diversion – of malicious inquisitiveness into the reading of history!). 83 Progress 83ab; Restraining Wrath 453c, 459b; Inquisitiveness 520d. 84 Peace of Mind 475a–476c. 85 Exempla: Progress in Virtue 84b–15.85b. Quotations: Peace of Mind 475bc. 82

The Passions

89

on other people’s ills (philomathia tis … allotriôn kakôn, 1.515d) – thus not an emotion (a scale of emotion) capable of virtuous adjustment, but a particular extreme on the scale of desire that can never be legitimized.86 Others of Plutarch’s treatises of self-improvement, though touching on relevant areas of experience (On Fraternal Love, On Talkativeness), are not slanted in the same way towards the issue of the passions. Galen. Although Plutarch speaks much about habituation, it is above all – as also with Epictetus – intellectual habituation (the ingraining of certain key ideas, so that they automatically condition conscious responses), and the formation of practical habits, that he has in mind. He recognizes the existence of an irrational lower nature, and its importance to the generation and control of emotion, but he does not seem to feel that there are therapeutic manoeuvres that can be brought to bear on it directly. If the rational faculty is exercised and fed with good logoi (both ‘words’ and ‘thoughts’), then it will find its own way of taming its unruly yokefellow. For an alternative – or rather, supplementary – approach, we must turn to Galen. In one of his therapeutic treatises, the Affections and Errors of the Soul, Galen takes a line broadly comparable to Plutarch’s (and definitely closer in its overall orientation to his than to Epictetus’). He distinguishes in Platonic vein between two different levels in the irrational soul, the one responsible for feelings of anger and indignation (the Platonic thymoeides) and the other for appetite (the epithymêtikon),87 and (in a distinction not matched in Plutarch) between the different ways in which they are to be brought under control. Whereas the former responds to a process of rational ‘taming’ (hêmerôsai, praunai) and habituation, the latter is impervious to all but starvation tactics, for which Galen’s word is ‘discipline’ (kolasis).88 But this distinction (implicitly relying on the sense of the thymos as in some way intermediate between reason and wholly irrational desire) is not really put to work, and the practical advice which Galen issues in the rest of this part of the treatise, dealing with anger and forms of greed and lust, is unremarkable. In the other two treatises, however, the (cumbersomely titled) That the Capacities of the Mind follow the Blends of the Body (Quod Animi Mores, QAM) and the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato (Placita Hippocratis et Platonis, PHP), there is a further element. Here, Galen’s interests and ambitions as a doctor, an expert in the physiology of the human body, lead him to fasten on a strain of thought previously developed by Plato and Posidonius, and to turn it to his own professional advantage. Both Plato and Posidonius, besides being convinced of the reality of a separate, irrational dimension of the soul, had been much interested in the factors that could work directly upon it from the outside world, without mediation through the channels of reason; and both saw in these a resource by 86

Cf. Alcinous on the ‘wild’ passions, Didask. 32.4, and behind him, Aristotle Nic. Eth. 2.6, 1107a8–27. 87 Affections 1.6.28–9. 88 1.28.

90

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

which, if carefully handled, the soul could be benignly moulded.89 Posidonius, moreover, had drawn a close connection between the makeup and workings of the irrational faculty and the physical makeup of the body, arguing that variations in emotional character were the product of different physical temperaments, or blends of bodily constituents.90 In the PHP, Galen simply reports the Posidonian endorsement and expansion of Plato’s thinking on these points, in the context of an overall exegesis of those aspects of Platonic thinking which he saw as converging both with the truth and with the pronouncements of his own principal authority, Hipppocrates. In the QAM, however, he also revives the therapeutic possibilities of this line of thought. As he does so, he is manifestly conscious of striking out in an unusual direction, and of gaining an edge on behalf of medicine over the approach of the philosophers. On the one hand, he complains, failure to appreciate the physical factors conditioning the makeup of the irrational soul leads ‘some philosophoi’ into an unrealistic absolutism about humanity’s natural relationship to virtue.91 Moreover, far from creating problems over the usefulness of philosophy to character-formation, it actually opens up fresh – and generally neglected – possibilities. A doctor like Galen, who has a proper physiologist’s grasp of the facts of the situation, can offer advice – on diet, but also on what climates and physical environments to seek and avoid – that will aid not only physical health, but also development of the moral character through control of the irrational soul (i.e. of the passions): So now at least let those come to their senses who are displeased that food can make people more sensible or more licentious, more in command or less in command of themselves, bold or cowardly, mild and gentle or contentious and competitive. Let them come to me to learn what they should eat and what they should drink. For they will be greatly helped towards ethical philosophy and in addition they will progress towards excellence in the capacities of the rational part, by improving their intelligence and memory. Besides food and drink, I shall also teach about winds and the blends of the environment, and about what locations one should choose and avoid.92

The kind of physiological, non-cognitive therapy that Galen here sketches is indeed distinctive, unparalleled in the other main therapeutic texts of the period. That this is so is remarkable, given its Platonic-Posidonian pedigree (others than Galen could surely have been capable of picking up on it as he does), and the fact 89

Plato Rep. 398c–403c (but with famous concerns about corresponding dangers, Rep. 376e–398b, 595a–608b). Posidonius was perhaps most interested in these phenomena not as the basis for practical therapy but as a source of arguments for his Platonizing view of the soul and against the intellectualism of Chrysippus; but he does endorse Plato’s suggestions about their therapeutic possibilities: PHP 5.5.29–35, 5.6.19–20. 90 PHP 5.5.22–9. 91 QAM 73.3. 92 QAM 67.2–16, tr. Sorabji; see Sorabji 2000, 253–60 for further discussion.

The Passions

91

that an interest in dietetics and physical regimens is widespread at the time – as witness texts like Plutarch’s Advice on Health (Moralia 122b–137e), let alone the extremes of Aelius Aristides’ Sacred Tales. It may be that considerations of professional self-definition and rivalry over territory are relevant here. The physiological dimension, so welcomed by Galen as promoting the importance of his own professional expertise, may have struck those who reckoned themselves philosophoi rather than iatroi as beneath their dignity, and the dignity of true philosophia, and so to be belittled and as far as possible ignored.93 Special cases: anger and erotic desire Anger. Among the passions, two perhaps stand out as exercising a special fascination, and giving rise to special problems. The first of these, as has already become evident in the course of the discussion so far, is anger. Besides the two extensive treatises devoted to it that survive from our period – Seneca’s On Anger and Plutarch’s On Restraining Wrath – there are the smaller-scale but still substantial treatments of Galen (in his Affections and Errors) and Epictetus (Arrian Discourses 1.18, 1.28),94 and it is clear that all these writers could look back on a long and rich tradition of earlier theorizing on the topic.95 Much of the basic analyses of anger proposed, and of the main therapeutic tricks and techniques brought to bear in this writing is unremarkable, in the sense that it is comfortably in line with the analysis and therapeutic advice given for all the passions. Yet at the same time there are tensions and ambiguities over this particular pathos which do not seem to arise – or not so readily – in other cases. Plutarch speaks of anger (using the word thymos, not orgê) as the most hated and despised of all pathê,96 and this opinion is widely endorsed – not only by Seneca, but also by Galen in the Affections and Errors, where the rhetorical pressure to single out just one passion as deserving of especially concentrated attention is perhaps less. One plausible reason for this special status may be found in the perception that the passion of anger has a particularly distorting effect on the individual’s composure, and so brings with it a particularly visible unseemliness, which is regularly articulated in the ancient sources.97 Another must be (though it is less directly acknowledged) the equally visible disturbance that anger, more than other pathê, was apt to cause in social and political contexts, as it gripped either the powerful (male) individuals in the commanding positions in households, cities,

93

See further Sharples 2000a. Cf. Harris 2001, 116–18, 383. 95 Harris 2001, 128, with table. Besides discussions of anger in the course of works on the passions as a set (Peri pathôn), specific treatises on anger (Peri orgês) are attested for Hieronymus of Rhodes, Bion of Borysthenes, Antipater of Tarsus, Posidonius, Philodemus, and perhaps Q. Sextius and Seneca’s teacher Sotion as well. 96 Restraining Wrath 5.445e. 97 Galen Affections and Errors 1.16–20; Seneca, On Anger 2.35.3–36.3. 94

92

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

kingdoms and empires,98 or the (equally male) urban mob.99 But besides these fairly practical considerations, there would seem also to have been reasons of a more ideological and theoretical nature operating to make anger an especially prickly topic. Though acknowledged as damaging and potentially destructive, anger had at the same time a special relation to ideas of manhood, through its obvious kinship with (unequivocally admired) martial spirit, and with the (equally prized) feelings and dispositions needed to keep face and maintain status as a man among men. This duality was a major preoccupation of some of the central works of reflective literature in both Greek and Roman culture.100 And from reflective literature, the topic of anger passed also into philosophical theory, where its slippery ambiguity was reflected in the ideological divide between Stoicism on the one hand and Platonic/Peripatetic approaches on the other – the former (in its purest form) assuming the complete eradication of anger as the sensible ideal, the other distinguishing perilously between legitimate and illegitimate forms and, in the case of Platonism at least, even affirming the value of one kind of anger by basing it in a distinct division of the tripartite soul. In the writing of our period, it is remarkable how so many of the authors involved seem in fact to waver between the poles of toleration and revulsion, as if consciously or unconsciously trying in this case in particular to find some kind of common ground between the two theoretical extremes. Arrian’s Epictetus is perhaps an exception, in his apparent keenness to eradicate even feelings of irritation (chalepotês) as well as blazing wrath.101 But Seneca, although he starts off On Anger with an elaborately argued rejection of the Peripatetic stance,102 seems in the second book to be looking for ways in which some angry reactions can be deemed permissible.103 And both Galen and Plutarch, though officially subscribing to a Platonic tripartite psychology, with the seat of thymos as one of the soul’s three divisions, speak in terms that sometimes leave it unclear whether it is moderation or the outright abolition of anger that they have in mind. So Galen near the beginning of his Affections and Errors, declares: I reckoned that one should first free oneself from the pathê ... there are pathê of the soul that are universally acknowledged as such: spirit (thymos), anger (orgê), fear, envy, excessive desire; and I would add excessive haste in conceiving love or hatred for anything as another 98 Cf. Harris 2001, 229–63 (rulers); 285–336 (household and family, esp. masters and slaves). 99 See for instance the castigations of destructive anger in the addresses of Dio Chrysostom (Or. 32.25–8) and the Emperor Julian (Ep. 21 Wright = 10 Bidez) to the people of Alexandria, or in Plutarch’s Political Precepts (824d–825f). 100 The Iliad and the Aeneid are the obvious examples, but note also the prominence of (manly) anger as theme and problem in tragedy, in such works as Sophocles’ Ajax and (from an eccentric angle) Euripides’ Medea. 101 Disc. 1.28; cf. Harris 2001, 116–17. 102 On Anger 1.5–21. 103 See above, 80–2.

The Passions

93

pathos. I think that ‘moderation is best’ is a good saying ... So, how should one rid oneself (ekkopseie) of these pathê, ... 104

– words which combine the vocabulary of moderation with that of eradication (ekkopseie) in such a way as to leave it unclear whether Galen is recommending either course in its standard form.105 For his part, Plutarch, in his principal surviving discussion, on the one hand speaks of metriopatheia and of the need to get rid of an excess of anger,106 yet on the other hand uses the word aorgêsia (with a positive not, as in Aristotle,107 a negative sense) to express his preferred ideal, and criticizes Peripatetic and Platonic tendencies to defend some version of anger as natural and beneficial.108 Of Plutarch, it has been suggested that his apparent flirtations with the Stoic line on anger are the result of the generic pressure of the tradition of writing on the subject in which he is working, which had overall a Cynic-Stoic (‘diatribe’) colour; and that his real, stable view is that of the proper Platonist who can be seen advocating moderation not extirpation in one of the surviving fragments of his lost On Anger.109 A similar claim might in theory be made equally well about Galen. But it might be more interesting110 instead to allow Plutarch and Galen (and Seneca too, come to that) more actively mixed feelings and a more genuine theoretical uncertainty over the issue. For we would then be able to see in the passion of anger a case where philosophical analysis, with its neat set of alternative positions, in the event proved inadequate to disentangle the conflicting perceptions that these thinkers were brought up with as members of the educated elite of their culture. Erotic desire. Erotic desire (erôs) too was an issue for every philosophical persuasion. Like anger, it had a long history of discussion in reflective literature, and had been subjected to a range of conflicting analyses in philosophical debate.111 On the level of philosophical discussion, the principal divide to have been established was that between the reduction of erôs to the same status of any other appetite (the Epicurean and Cynic line) and the attempt by one means or another to harness it (uniquely among the emotions) to ‘higher’, non-erotic 104

Affections 1.3. Harris 2001, 121–2 disagrees, reading Galen as an unambiguous eradicationist. Galen is here talking of all the pathê, but as the quotation makes clear, he takes anger as the central, paradigm case. 106 Restraining Wrath 10.458c, 16.463b. 107 Nic. Eth. 2.7, 1108a8. 108 Restraining Wrath 8.456e–457e. 109 Dillon 1977, 189; fr. 148 Sandbach. 110 And more accurate, if ‘Cynic-Stoic diatribe’ is, as many would now accept, a modern scholarly construct, and as such incapable of exerting generic pressure on any ancient author. 111 Plato Symposium, Phaedrus; Aristotle Dialogue on Love (Erôtikos: Diog. Laert. 5.22, frr. 96–8 Rose); Aristo Lectures on Love (Erôtikai diatribai: Diog. Laert. 7.163); Cleanthes On Love (Diog. Laert. 7.175); Sphaerus Dialogues on Love (Diog. Laert. 7.178); Chrysippus On Love (Diog. Laert. 7.130); Epicurus On Love (Diog. Laert. 10.27); etc. 105

94

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

purposes (the Stoic and Platonist approach). In both cases a distinction was being drawn between erôs as generally experienced and reacted to by ordinary, unregenerate humanity, and a more enlightened approach. The social dimension of ancient thinking about erôs will occupy us in a subsequent chapter.112 Here it is its analysis as emotion and the psychological mechanisms in which it was held to be enmeshed that are in question. From this point of view, although correct erotics were indeed an issue for all, the topic had a particular and distinctive aspect for Platonists, for whom erotic desire held a special place in their psychology and theory of knowledge, as well as in their account of positive and negative moral experience. It is thus not so very surprising that the main surviving philosophical discussions of erôs from the early-to-middle Imperial period should come from Platonists, in the form of Plutarch’s Dialogue on Love (Erôtikos, Amatorius) and Orations 18–21 of Maximus of Tyre.113 The analysis offered by Maximus is characteristic of his work in general, both in the simplified level of its thought, and in its high degree of literary elaboration.114 His whole discussion, spread over the four lectures, is cast as a ‘defence’ of Socrates against the imputation of scandalous and unphilosophical behaviour in his taste for the company of attractive young men.115 He starts with the purely unphilosophical defence that, in being as open about his erotic feelings as Plato and Xenophon show him, Socrates was doing nothing that had not already been done by the admired greats of Hellenic literary culture, from Homer to Anacreon.116 He then moves on to draw the crucial, exculpatory distinction between higher and lower forms of erotic attraction, distinguished by their divergent, virtuous and vicious aims: moral improvement versus physical gratification (Socrates of course being a champion of the former). This is done at considerable length (Orr. 19.1–21.6), but at the kind of low level of conceptual sophistication on which Platonists, Stoics, and upholders of the kind of conventional morality embodied in the Xenophontic Socrates can happily meet. The distinctively Platonic note is struck only at the very end, when as the climactic and clinching element of his defence, Maximus explains that for Socrates the higher version of erôs that he practised was in fact a reaction not to physical beauty per se, but to a higher dimension of reality reflected in the physical – to transcendent, essential Beauty.117 Instantiated in a human body, as opposed to an inanimate object (e.g. a statue), beauty has a unique capacity to inspire in the perceiver’s soul a reaction that is at the same time an emotional surge, and a form of intellectual insight into the true nature of reality. And that is what the higher, purer form of erotic desire, as practised and described by Socrates, really was:

112

See below, 155–65. Foucault 1990, 193–232; Rist 2001; Trapp 1997a, 156–86 and 1990, 155–64. 114 In which there may be a purposive element. 115 Or. 18.1–7. 116 Or. 18.7–9. 117 Or. 21.7–8. 113

The Passions

95

Just as the great rivers of the world, as they discharge into the sea, keep their currents free from the contamination of the saltier waters around them in their first outflow, and furnish fresh drinking-water to sailors at sea who sail into them, but as they advance further and flow into the open sea and their currents become exposed to wind and waves and swell and current, they become contaminated and lose their original character; in just the same way, immortal and ineffable Beauty, as it begins its descent with the heavens and the heavenly bodies, manages to preserve itself pure and unmixed and uncontaminated, but when it comes to descend beneath the heavens to our region of the cosmos, it becomes dull and faint, and our sea-born sailor, who knows his river and remembers its character, can scarcely detect its inflow when he sees it meandering over the earth and combining with foreign matter. But when he does encounter it, and recognizes even so much as a trace of it before his gaze, then like Odysseus catching sight of the rising smoke, he leaps and burns and beams and falls in love. Some portion of this Beauty may find its way into a particularly fairflowing river or a plant of particularly splendid growth or a specially noble horse, but only in the dullest and inertest form. If there is any of its purer self abroad on this earth, you will find it nowhere but in man – man who boasts the most beautiful and intelligent of mortal bodies, and is endowed with a soul from the same stock as Beauty itself. This is why the rational man, when he sees a statue, praises it for its workmanship, but does not fall in love with the statue itself; when he sees a plant, he praises it for its fruits, but does not fall in love with the plant itself; he praises a river for its placidity, but does not fall in love with the river itself – but when he catches sight of a human being, whose living and rational beauty gives promise of virtue to come, his recollection is stirred and he falls in love – in love ostensibly with the visible form, in actual fact with a far truer kind of Beauty.118

It is essentially the same conception that is presented by Plutarch in his Dialogue on Love, though set in a different context of narrative and argument, and infinitely more subtly delivered. The work takes the form of a dialogue in which an erotic episode in the city of Thespiae in Boeotia – the snatching of an eligible young man from his male admirers by an older woman – provides the stimulus for discussion of a range of erotic topics, from the relative merits of heterosexual and homosexual attachment to the claims of erotic passion to ennoble the character. The central revelation of the higher nature, and epistemological importance, of erôs is delivered by Plutarch himself (as reported by his son, Autobulus), in the central portion of the dialogue (19.764a–20.766b). Here erôs is once more said to be a force by which (an experience in which) the attention is directed away from the sensible (physical) world and towards transcendent, intelligible reality. Plutarch describes this experience (as Maximus had done, in his more jejeune way) in terms of a figurative ‘warming’ and ‘illumination’ of the soul (stilbonta, anaphlegomenên, 765b; augê, phôs, thermotêtos, 765b–c), the flow of vivifying sap through a plant (765c), an ecstasy of pleasure and 118

Or. 21.8.

96

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

wonder (hyph’ hêdonês kai thaumatos enthousiazontes, 765d), and the refraction of light by moist air in the production of a rainbow (765e). There is nothing new or original about the doctrines Maximus and Plutarch here unfold, nor about the vocabulary and style of imagery in which they express them. It all comes from a conflation of the ideas and the images of Plato’s Phaedrus, Symposium, Republic and Phaedo.119 But it remains remarkable that this particular strand in Platonism should have retained the vigour and interest that it evidently did. Plausible explanations are not far to seek. Quite apart from the intrinsic attractiveness of the ideas themselves – which seem to take the strength and depth of erotic feelings with a proper seriousness and sympathy – it was no doubt very welcome to Platonists to have such a clearly distinctive element to their thinking, that so firmly differentiated them from their philosophical rivals.120 But however that may be, the imaginative energy which Plutarch especially puts into re-presenting Platonic erotics for a contemporary audience means that it is – perhaps unexpectedly – in the case of erotic desire that we find the most concentrated effort in all of the philosophical writing of the era to catch the inner, experiential quality of an emotion. Conclusion: continuity and change Overall, it is clear that philosophical writing and thinking about the passions in the period of the early and high Empire went on within relatively narrow limits. The main lines of the debate were those already long since fixed by the founders and classic exponents of the major haireseis, which left little room for further manoeuvre. A number of what might seem to be perfectly accessible approaches and lines of questioning are, for whatever reason, simply not developed: for instance, examination of the experiential quality of emotion (with the partial exception of erôs, as noted above), or of the issue of the voluntariness of the emotions, and their connection with issues of responsibility (which was arguably more of an issue for Stoics of the Hellenistic period).121 The focus is heavily on the issue of control, and of the means by which this is to be achieved in patterns of self-management and day-to-day living. But although the scope of discussion is restricted in this way, and although the period sees no huge innovations, there is nevertheless a sense that the disagreements between the different sects still matter, and are still worth continuing to articulate and argue over. And in the course of this continuing process of restatement and continued argument, some shifts of emphasis and at least modestly significant reformulations seem to emerge: a small instance might be Epictetus’ treatment of chalepotês; a larger one might be Seneca’s distinction of three movements in the formation of a full passion. It is

119

Trapp 1990, 155–64. Though also an element of risk, as Maximus’ initially defensive tone, and Lucian’s jokes about Socrates’ sexual proclivities in Lifestyle Auction and True History may suggest? 121 Inwood 1985, 136–7. 120

The Passions

97

always hard to be sure whether what strikes us as innovation is genuinely the work of the authors in whom we find it, or whether they are in fact indebted to some now anonymous predecessor; but even if the precise timing and credit cannot be determined, the overall impression of continued thought and readiness to innovate cannot be entirely an illusion.

Chapter 4

Self, Person and Individual Chapters 2 and 3 have examined the range of philosophical thinking available in the Imperial period on the question of human moral development. Chapter 3 concentrated on rival views of the inner geography and dynamics of the soul, with special reference to the central issue of the generation and management of emotion. Chapter 2 examined concepts of moral progress, and the exercises reckoned to promote it. Both have thus, in some sense, turned on concepts of the self – the ‘essential person’ whose inner workings, and whose progress towards perfection, have been under discussion. This is a line of analysis that deserves further development. If we wish to know what kind of thinking about personhood and the self was available in the Imperial period, the material surveyed in these two chapters does indeed seem to offer a promising body of evidence, both for thirdperson accounts of what it is to be a person, and also for signs of efforts to articulate first-person perspectives. Probing the presuppositions and implications of this material will, at the very least, give us some sense of the range of answers that could be offered, and of the possibilities for divergence between the different schools. But it is not only a matter of answers. Examination of this material will also challenge us to reflect on how the questions were asked. The self has been such a large and compelling topic for European philosophy since the eighteenth century,1 that it is doubly important not to assume too readily that Imperial-period thinkers saw in it the same interest and the same problems as moderns do. As a number of distinguished recent studies have insisted,2 it can lead to serious misunderstanding to assume that it must have been in terms of such now familiar problems as the Freedom of the Will, or Personal Identity, that the philosophoi of the first and second centuries must have understood their task of analysis and explanation. Later formulations of the point(s) at issue may provide a useful first way in, and a reminder of what may be interesting and important about this part of the philosophical landscape, but they should not be allowed to shape expectations about what will emerge from the ancient material in any strong sense. From one point of view, then, this chapter will have a negative connecting thread, in that it will try to demonstrate at some length that Imperial-period thinking about self and person does indeed fail to conform to later ideas about what the most central and interesting questions are. The various areas of discussion surveyed will not turn out to cohere around just one or two compelling questions, 1 2

Taylor 1989, 3–24 and passim. E.g. Bobzien 1998, 1–15; Sorabji 2000, 319–40.

Self, Person and Individual

99

let alone exactly those which have monopolized philosophical attention over the last couple of centuries. Moreover, it will emerge at several points that one concept much prized in modern discussion of the self and personhood, individuality, was not a deep concern in the first and second centuries. But these negative threads will have their positive complement. It will be seen that, for all the apparent thinness of the ancient self to modern eyes, Imperial-period philosophia provided a number of intelligent and stimulating ways of approaching what we would call the issue of what it is to be a person, and to be or have a self – of answering questions like ‘who am I?’, ‘what am I?’, ‘what is it like to be a person/the person I am?’, and even ‘what may it be like to be me in some alternative future state?’. Both the ideas themselves, and the sometimes unexpected paths that must be taken to get at them, are well worth the effort of a review. The soul and the real person The obvious place to start is with doctrines of the soul. As we have already reminded ourselves, it was common philosophical ground – to all but the Pyrrhonists – that human beings were in some sense not simple entities, but compounds of a body and a soul, and that, of these two constituents, it was the soul not the body that constituted the real person. This in itself already provides a first proposition about the self in Imperial-period thinking: precisely that it was widely conceived in terms of an opposition between merely physical identity and something else. But it was also generally held that the soul itself was not a unitary, undifferentiated entity; it had instead to be analysed into various faculties, which even if not physically separable in the manner of constituent parts were still conceptually separable. Among these faculties a distinction could be drawn between higher and lower, of which the former were more central to the individual’s identity than the latter. Ideas about the detail of the inner geography of the soul were various; and the distinction between soul and body, and their standing relative to each other, were not understood in the same way by all either. Ideas of what followed from the assertion that the soul was the real person consequently differed too from one sect to another. Who (what) you thought you were, that is to say, depended on your philosophical allegiance. The polarizing issues On the question of the constituent elements of the soul, Epicureans distinguished between the rational ‘mind’ (logikon meros; animus), that was responsible for thought and emotion, and the irrational ‘spirit’ (alogon meros; anima), that was responsible for sensation and the transmission of impulses to the body;3 Stoics

3

Epicurus Letter to Herodotus 63–4 (14A L-S); Lucretius Nature of Things 3.136–60 (14B L-S); cf. Diog. Oen. fr. 37.

100

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

separated the ‘command centre’ (hêgemonikon, principale) from its seven subordinate faculties (the five senses, utterance and reproduction).4 For both sets of thinkers, the soul was as physical an entity as the body.5 In this, they contrasted strongly with Platonists and Peripatetics, for whom soul and body definitely did not belong on the same ontological level. But Platonists and Peripatetics in their turn differed from each other over what kind of non-material entity the soul might be. For Peripatetics, the soul was not a substance in its own right but the ‘form’ of a natural, living body – the immaterial blueprint instantiated in the body, conformity to which makes the living (sentient, emotional, reasoning) body what it is, separable from that body only conceptually.6 It could be subdivided according to the hierarchy of vital functions for which it was responsible, into a wholly irrational element (nutrition, growth, reproduction), a partly rational element (sensation, desire, appetite, imagination), and a wholly rational part (deliberation, judgement, knowledge, rational insight).7 Platonists, for their part, treating the lower vital functions as no business of the soul, distinguished as we have seen between faculties of irrational appetite, partly rational ‘spiritedness’ and reason. But this Platonist soul, unlike the Peripatetic, was actually as well as conceptually separable from the body, inhabiting rather than informing it; some or all of it (the question will recur later) belonged to an entirely different dimension of reality to the body, standing to it in the human microcosm as God and the transcendent, immortal, imperceptible Forms did to the physical cosmos on the level of universal reality.8 The negative point, that each individual human being is not really, or not most importantly, his or her body, is made with differing degrees of force and in different terms by the various haireseis, more tentatively by the Epicureans and more aggressively, in contrasting ways, by Platonists and Stoics. For the Epicureans, as for all the rest, soul can be said to be naturally suited to ‘rule’ or ‘dominate’ the body;9 in the well-balanced life, pleasures of the mind are used by the accomplished Epicurean to compensate for and outweigh inevitable bodily pain.10 Yet the satisfaction of bodily desire (the attainment of bodily as well as mental pleasure) still forms part, if only a subordinate part, of the overall ideal of happiness; and, for all its controlling function, soul is destined not to survive the

4

53H-K L-S. Epicurus Letter to Herodotus 65–7; Lucretius Nature of Things 3.161–76; cf. Diog. Oen. fr. 38; Hierocles Elements 1.5–33 and 4.38–53 (53B L-S). 6 Ar. On the Soul; Alex. Aphrod. On the Soul 1.15–52. 7 Alex. Aphrod. On the Soul 1.61–9. This later Peripatetic approach loses sight of Aristotle’s own reservations in On the Soul 3.9 about the legitimacy of speaking of any neat division of the soul into parts, following instead the deliberately less problematizing approach taken in Nic. Eth. 1.13. 8 Alcinous Didask. 23–4 (contrast 17–19, on the lower functions). Stoics, too, saw an analogy between human soul in the body and God in the universe, but differed crucially in regarding God, soul, body and cosmos as all equally material. 9 Diog. Oen. fr. 37. 10 Epicurus fr. 138 Us. (Diog. Laert. 10.22 = 24D L-S). 5

Self, Person and Individual

101

physical dissolution of the body at death.11 Attending to the claims of the body on this view is something more than just making the best of a bad job; though definitely the junior partner in the human compound, it remains none the less a partner, not an embarrassment or a hindrance. Accordingly, no very strong antithesis between mere body and the real person is open to an Epicurean. In Stoicism and Platonism, by contrast, the sense of partnership is much weaker, and that of the body as potentially obstructive and embarrassing is stronger. Remarkably, this shared sense of the alienness of the body is not affected by the disagreement between the two parties over the soul’s corporeality. Stoic physical theory certainly continued to insist that the combination of soul and body was a perfect and total blend (a krasis di’ holou), to such an extent that (for instance) perception of the latter necessarily involved perception of the former as well.12 Considered in the abstract, this might suggest a principled refusal to identify the real self with one element or the other, as opposed to the organic fusion of the two. In actual practice, however, this possibility is not followed up in any surviving Imperial-period Stoic text. What mattered instead, to Stoics and Platonists alike, were the inter-connected perceptions (i) that the body had an automatic tendency to clog and divert the proper workings of reason (the function of the highest aspect of soul), on which the attainment of virtue and true happiness depended; and (ii) that, whether material or immaterial, the soul’s most important (rational) affinities related it to a higher level of existence, at which also the final truths about the universe and reality were to be found. Having no tendency to forward the development of the highest, most valuable aspect of the person, but instead offering a constant threat to pull it down, the body could in principle have no sensible claim to be the real person. Stoics Epictetus. In Arrian’s Discourses of Epictetus, the point is made mainly in terms of the day to day struggle for right thinking. The attainment of virtue depends for him, as we have seen, on ‘the right use of impressions’, that is correct assignments of value to anything and everything experienced in the world around us, on the part of our rational governing faculty, and the consequent occurrence in us of the right kinds of impulse. And what is correct, in Epictetus’ Stoic view, is the assignment of zero value (indifference) to everything except virtue and vice. What is wrong with the body on this frame of reference is that its very obvious presence creates a standing temptation to forget these crucial truths about virtue, and to fall instead into assigning real value to those things in the world out there that promote or damage its own physical flourishing – to see and judge the world from the body’s point of view. Natural as such an attitude might seem, it is in fact a disaster, plunging us into the turmoil of the passions and rendering it impossible

11

Cf. Diog. Oen. fr. 35. Hierocles Elements 4.3–22; Alexander On Mixture 216.14–218.6 = SVF 2.473 = LS 48C (esp. §10); cf. Inwood 1984, 163–4. 12

102

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

for us to enjoy the calm and happiness that our real nature, rightly developed, entitles us to.13 So Epictetus is to be found insisting time and again on the need to draw and cling to a sharp dividing line between the faculty of rational judgement (prohairesis), which is crucial to our virtue and happiness, and the body, which in spite of all appearances to the unenlightened, has nothing at all to do with them. And he does so, regularly, in terms of claims about what is and is not centrally and inalienably yours and you: ‘What are the things that are not one’s own?’ Everything that is not up to us to have and not to have, or to have thus and so qualified, and thus and so disposed. Therefore the body is not one’s own, nor its members, nor property. If, then, you attach yourself to any of these things as if it were your own, you will pay the appropriate penalty of one who seeks after things that are not one’s own.14 ‘But the tyrant will chain ... ’ What? Your leg. ‘But he will chop off ... ’ What? Your head. What then will he not chain or chop off? Your rational judgement (prohairesis). Hence the advice of the men of old, ‘Know Thyself.’15

Seneca. Seneca, for his part, shares Epictetus’ concentration on mind and purpose (mens, voluntas) as central to Stoic fulfilment and happiness,16 but chooses not to express it in terms of a contrast with the body, or of what is and is not truly ‘mine’. Instead, he tends to convey his sense of the alienness and low value of the body in terms of the imagery of confinement (as opposed to that of possession and alienation). So most notably in Epistle 65, where he defends the usefulness of some kinds of rarefied intellectual contemplation in terms, precisely, of their capacity to remind human beings of their true nature and affinities, and so to strengthen their moral resolve: This body is a burden and a punishment to the mind; as a result of its oppression the mind is hounded and chained, unless philosophia supervenes and orders it to refresh itself from the spectacle of Universal Nature, and frees it from earthly things in favour of the divine ... The Sage and the seeker after Wisdom may indeed remain held fast in the body, but in their best aspect they are elsewhere and direct their thoughts towards things on high ... They feel neither love nor hatred for life, and endure mortality even though they know that there are greater things beyond ... I am too great a being and born for too high a destiny to be the chattel of my body, which I regard as nothing other than some kind of fetter cast round my liberty; 13

On the Stoic view, the viewpoint of the body was natural to each one of us as a prerational being; but it ceased to be natural to us when our natures changed (at the age of seven or fourteen) with the development of reason; cf. 42–5 above. 14 Disc. 4.1.129–30 (tr. Long); cf. 4.1.77–80 and 111–12. 15 Disc. 1.18.17. 16 E.g. Epp. 16 and 17; On the Happy Life 5.3.

Self, Person and Individual

103

therefore it is this body that I thrust in Fortune’s way, so that she may be halted there, and I allow no wound to penetrate through it to me. This is all that there is of me that can suffer injury; within this subservient dwelling the soul lives free. Never will that dead flesh compel me to fear, or to pretence unworthy of the good man; never will I lie to do this miserable body honour. When I see fit, I will part company with it. Even now that we are joined together, we will not be equal partners: mind claims all rights for itself. Disdain for one’s own body is certain freedom.17

In Seneca’s case, it is clear that his sense that the real person has nothing essentially to do with the body is intensified by a belief apparently not shared with Epictetus, in the soul’s ability to survive the death of the body. Elsewhere in Epistle 65, he mentions the question of ‘the place awaiting the soul once freed from the jurisdiction of human servitude’ as one of those that elevates the soul to a proper sense of its own worth;18 and the same idea is enthusiastically and elaborately developed at the end of his Consolation to Marcia, where he endorses the doctrine – available but not mandatory for a Stoic – that the souls of the good survive after death up until the universal conflagration that ends the current cycle of the cosmos. 19 Platonists But it is of course Platonism, with its interest in the discarnate existence of the soul before embodiment, as well as its survival after the episode of incarnation, that conveys the strongest sense of the separateness of the body from the real person, and the corresponding conviction that the person is the soul. At the same time, however, the combination of Platonists’ beliefs about the long-term durability of the soul with their own particular way of distinguishing its constituent faculties, raises pressing questions about what kind of person or self this can be that is represented so definitely by soul rather than body. Maximus. For some Platonist authors, there is no problem. When expounding the doctrine of recollection, or of the flight of the intellect in contemplation, or of the triviality of mere bodily infirmity, Maximus of Tyre finds the simplest of body-

17

Ep. 65.16–22. Ep. 65.20; the apparent retreat into doubt at the end of the letter (death is ‘either an end or a crossing over’, aut finis aut transitus) can perhaps be taken as a Socratizing rhetorical flourish (cf. Plato Apol. 40c) rather than a considered statement of Seneca’s own final position on the matter. 19 Cons. to Marc. 25–6. For variations in earlier Stoic views on the survival of the soul, see SVF 2.1102 = Diog. Laert. 7.151; SVF 2.809 = Eusebius Preparation 15.20.6. With their view of the soul of the adult human being as a unitary and wholly rational entity (the ‘lower’ functions are modes of the operation of the rational hêgemonikon, not separate faculties), the Stoics at least did not have the Platonists’ problem of deciding just how much of a compound soul could survive in its own right, once no longer attached to a body. 18

104

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

soul antitheses appropriate to his enthusiastic preacher’s tone. The body and the physical world in general enfold the soul like mist and darkness, or infect it with a kind of drunkenness, preventing it from making contact with the higher realities it is naturally constituted to perceive;20 the body is a crumbling prison cell, or a set of ragged clothes, or a burrow in the ground, from which the enlightened soul is only too glad to fight free, temporarily in rational contemplation and more lastingly at death;21 contemplation and death are escape into the freedom, light and clarity of a higher level of reality.22 Though elsewhere he shows himself perfectly capable of explaining the compound (bipartite or tripartite) nature of the Platonist soul,23 he does not have occasion to bring this analysis together with the idea of the soul’s alienation and flight from the body. Thus he never has occasion, either, to raise a question that was both an issue for more thoughtful Platonists in antiquity, and of continuing interest to anyone concerned with ancient concepts of the self: whether it is all or only some of the divided soul that is to be so firmly contrasted with the body, and is to be allowed its own superior discarnate existence. Alcinous. The importance and delicacy of this question for Platonists emerges more clearly in Chapter 25 of the Didaskalikos. Having reviewed the standard basic proofs of the soul’s immortality in paragraphs one to four of the chapter, Alcinous continues: That rational souls are immortal in Plato’s view is something that we may confidently assert; whether irrational ones are as well, is matter for dispute. For it is plausible that irrational souls, driven as they are by mere representations, and having the use of neither reason nor judgement, nor theorems ... and having no conception at all of intelligible reality either, should not be of the same essence as rational souls, but should be mortal and perishable.24

Strictly speaking, these words rule out immortality only for the souls of animals (for even an ‘irrational’ human being, dominated by his appetites, still possesses a reasoning faculty, and uses it even if in a perverse way). But they none the less imply a problem: if souls consisting only of an irrational element cannot survive the body, can the similarly constituted segment of a rational soul do so either? Alcinous’ words here suggest strongly that he agrees that it cannot, for all that he admits, as a conscientious summarizer of doctrine, that the issue is disputed.25 Yet this in turn creates a further problem of its own: if what survives the death of the body is the rational faculty alone, but that rational faculty is destined for eventual reincarnation, how is it to re-acquire the lower, irrational component that it will 20

Or. 10.9. Orr. 7.5, 10.9, 16.6. 22 Orr. 7.5, 9.6, 10.9, 11.10, 16.6. 23 Orr. 16.4, 20.4, 27.5, 41.5. 24 Didask. 25.5. 25 See Dillon 1993, 154 on the problem of different currents of thought in the Platonic sources on which Alcinous and others must draw. 21

Self, Person and Individual

105

need in order effectively to inhabit (and animate) a body once again? The final paragraph of the chapter shows Alcinous’ awareness of the issue, and his answer. Discarnate souls, whether those of the gods or those of past and prospective humans, though they have no irrational component, possess instead a kind of counterpart to it within the rational faculty: The souls of the gods too possess both a critical element, which might also be called cognitive, and furthermore an appetitive element, which one might also term dispositional, and an appropriative element. These exist also as faculties in human souls, but after embodiment suffer alteration, the appropriative faculty into the libidinous, and the appetitive into the spirited.26

On this account, the escaped soul possesses the potential again to experience appetite and anger, without the present actuality. Daimones and myths as media for thought about personhood. References to discussions now lost show that Alcinous’ position on the survival of the rational soul alone was widely shared among Imperial-period Platonists (by Atticus and Albinus, for instance),27 but also that not all agreed. Numenius, following in the footsteps of Speusippus and Xenocrates, seems to have held that the irrational dimension could survive as well.28 And indeed, the competing possibility, that something more than reason could survive separation from the body was widely assumed in an offshoot or cousin of Platonist theorizing about the soul, the theory of daimones. This colourful element in their thinking deserves further consideration, as dealing with the issue of the extent of the self and the nature of the real person from what is perhaps, to modern eyes, an unexpected angle. In the Platonist cosmos, what it was felt would otherwise have been an objectionable gap in the order of Nature between the higher gods (the planetary gods, the World Soul, and the transcendent supreme rational God) and mankind, was filled by this class of intermediate and intermediary beings, ranking below the gods and above (embodied) humanity.29 These daimones are sometimes presented as an entirely fixed and self-contained order of beings, admitting of no increase or diminution in number, sometimes as the souls of the once-embodied now escaped and (perhaps) on their way to yet higher things, sometimes as an aggregation of the two. But in most cases, their intermediate status – and particularly their subordination to the higher gods – is articulated in terms of their susceptibility to emotion. In the words of Apuleius, in his On the God of Socrates:

26

Didask 25.7. Proclus Comm. on Tim. 3.234.8ff. 28 Olympiodorus Comm. on Phd. 124.13–18 Norvin, citing Numenius fr. 46a Des Places, Speusippus fr. 55 Tarán, and Xenocrates fr. 211 IP. 29 The key foundational texts are Plato Symposium 202e–203e and [Plato], Epinomis 984bd. The main Imperial-period discussions are Plutarch On the Divine Sign of Socrates and On the Face Seen in the Moon; Maximus Orr. 8–9; and Apuleius On the God of Socrates. 27

106

Philosophy in the Roman Empire So, to catch them with a definition, daimones are in species animate, rational in nature, susceptible to emotion (passiva) in soul, airy of body, an everlasting in time. Of the five features I have enumerated, the first three are in common with us humans, the fourth unique to them, and the fifth shared with the immortal gods, from whom however they differ in their susceptibility to emotion (passio). And if it is not absurd, as I believe it not to be, to style them susceptible to emotion, this is because they are liable to the same perturbations of mind as we are.30

In similar vein, Maximus, organizing the hierarchy of nature in terms of the antitheses animate/inanimate, perceiving/impercipient, emotional/impassive and mortal/immortal, categorizes plants as animate but impassive, animals as animate and perceiving, humans as emotional and mortal, daimones as emotional and immortal, and god as immortal and impassive.31 Furthermore, besides thus helping them to secure their own unique place in the natural order, susceptibility to emotion is also central to the daimones’ role as ministers to divine providence, exercising the kind of day-to-day care and supervision of human destinies that is incompatible with the dignity and serenity of the higher gods.32 For it is precisely their openness to emotion that motivates daimones to engagement and action in this or that area of human experience.33 It thus appears that daimones, whether exhuman beings or an order of souls permanently separate from humanity, must possess at least a spirited faculty in addition to their rational aspect, and perhaps an appetitive faculty as well; possession simply of the rational ‘shadows’ of spirit and appetite envisaged by Alcinous would not seem to be enough to enable them to fulfil the functions attributed to them, either as agents of providence, or as constituents of the cosmic hierarchy. Of the writers brought into play so far, Apuleius and Maximus evidently operate on a longer rein of imaginative and rhetorical freedom than the handbookwriting Alcinous. But the most exploratory and evocative writing of all on the topic of the soul and orders of being is that of Plutarch. Writing dialogues that platonize in structure and verbal style as well as in content, Plutarch has the space and the conceptual resources at his disposal not simply to reproduce orthodox doctrine and its controversies, but to indulge in exploratory and imaginative play around it. In three dialogues above all, On the Divine Sign of Socrates (Mor. 575b–598f), On the Face Seen in the Moon (Mor. 920b–945d) and On the Late Vengeance of the Gods (Mor. 548a–568a), he uses the vocabulary and mise-enscène of Plato’s eschatological myths as the basis for a series of evocations of what the experiences of the (temporarily or permanently) discarnate soul might 30

God of Soc. 13.148. Or. 9.1–2. 32 Or. 9.7–8; God of Soc. 7. 33 Maximus Or. 9.7, Apuleius God of Soc. 12–14; Plutarch Divine Sign 593d–94a, Obsolescence of Oracles 416c. This side of daimonic nature can also be used to explain why religious rituals for different divinities are of different character: the primary objects of such observances are daimones, not higher gods, and daimones have differing tastes (Plutarch, Isis and Osiris 361b, following Xenocrates). 31

Self, Person and Individual

107

look and feel like to the supernaturally privileged observer, contemplating experiences that he too can one day expect to undergo. In the myth of the Divine Sign (589f–592f), the observer is one Timarchus, whose soul, temporarily released from his body into the upper reaches of the cosmos, is granted a vision of what seem at first to him to be stars, descending and disappearing into a darkness below, ascending up out of it, or alternatively moving about with either a calm and regular or an agitated and chaotic motion up above. A mysterious presence (apparently a daimon, 591a) enlightens him. The stars descending into and appearing up out of the lower dark are souls that, upon embodiment, sink entirely into the body, thus allowing themselves to be wholly taken over and corrupted by the bodily passions for the duration, and only shaking off the ‘darkness’ and ‘mud’ at death. In the process, their basically rational nature is temporarily diverted through pleasures and pains towards the irrational. Better souls are those that, while descending in part into the body, and suffering the same conversion, leave part of themselves unimmersed and ‘floating’ above, like the cork floats attached to a net sunk in the sea. These are the higher stars seen by Timarchus, the calmer ones being those souls whose bodies and submerged portions are docile and receptive to the steering of the unsubmerged, still rational portion, while those which twist and bob are the ones that have to deal with a wayward and unruly lower nature, which is only reduced to order slowly and after much effort. A subordinate element in this myth is the role assigned to the Moon, as the point in the cosmos, on the junction of the divine and human realms, to which ascending souls escape, and from which they descend again to incarnation. A similar idea, but more elaborately developed, is central to the myth of On the Face, in which both Moon and Sun feature as staging-posts in the upward progress of the soul freed from the body at death (942c–945d). Man in this myth is a compound not of two elements but of three, body, soul and mind, of which mind derives from the Sun, soul from the Moon, and body from the Earth. Thus death is not a single but a double process: the first stage, which happens on Earth, frees soul and mind from the body, while the second, taking place on the Moon, frees mind from soul, as mind is drawn up and on by its love for the image of transcendent goodness embodied in the Sun. In this process, just as the discarded body is left behind on Earth to rot away, so the discarded husk of the soul (shaped by its contact both with mind and with body) is left on the Moon; here temperate souls are quickly resolved back into the lunar substance, but the souls of the passionate take longer, and have to be restrained in the meantime from returning to Earth and there animating monsters. The myth pays most attention to the nature and experiences of the disembodied combination of soul and mind, which though temporary, has none the less a certain durability. We hear both of the longer or shorter period spent between earth and the moon, where inferior (passion-dominated) soul-minds are punished and purified, and of their activities during their lunar period, as daimones supervising the affairs of mortals. And we are treated to visual descriptions: as they gain their foothold on the Moon, the mind-souls are said to resemble rays of light, buoyed up by the aithêr around the Moon, which makes them bright and

108

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

stable by tightening and firming up their structure; at the moment of its abandonment by mind, soul is configured in the likeness of the body it once itself gave shape to. But, though so carefully described, the soul-mind combination is treated as a compromise state that ought eventually to be transcended; for ‘the self of each one of us is not spiritedness or fear or desire, any more than it is flesh and fluids, but that with which we reason and understand’. The third Plutarchan myth, that of the Late Vengeance (563b–68a), concentrates on the business of posthumous punishment. In a dreamlike (occasionally nightmarish) manner, Plutarch’s account of the vision of one Thespesius depicts disembodied souls as human in appearance, but less substantial, and able to leap and dart through the air. In virtue of this uncanny nature, they are able both to perform human actions such as conversing and carousing, and to move and be moved like non-human substances, twisting themselves inside-out like sea-creatures (567b), changing colour (565cd), and being heated, chilled and worked like chunks of metal (567cd). They are compounded of a rational and an irrational ‘bodiform’ (sômatoeides) component, and can by their discarnate behaviour weaken and dissolve the former and fatten up the latter, thus causing themselves to recall their former bodily existence and feel desire for a new incarnation. Weirdest of all is the horrid vision of the soul of one who by his crimes in life brought down punishment on his descendants as well as himself: now in the afterlife the gibbering, resentful souls of those descendants, also dead, cling round him like a swarm of bees or bats (567de). Collectively, these texts show how exotic mythological discourse about the soul could be used as, among other things, a way of exploring notions of the self and the true identity of the individual, displaced from direct and literal analysis in the here and now into a remoter realm and evocative metaphor. But the particular possibilities and difficulties which they feel around, based on the assumption of a discarnate, immaterial and divided soul, are specific to the Platonist frame of reference. For a Stoic, the same problems did not arise, for the Stoic soul was unitary, and fundamentally rational even when encased in the (adult) body; there was thus no difficulty in imagining it as a purely rational entity on its release, enjoying the delights of pure intellection, as Seneca conceives it in his Consolation to Marcia.34 For a Peripatetic, though the soul is divided, it is not immortal, and can never exist in a discarnate state; the question of what is essential to it, and what transitory and peripheral, does not come up in the same form. Yet it does come up. For, though a withdrawal of self from the lower vital functions and a concentration in the intellect is not open to the Peripatetic soul after death, it can happen (as also for a Platonist) in moments of intellectual contemplation during life. At such moments, according to the account given by Alexander of Aphrodisias, the individual human intellect ‘becomes in some way’ the supreme, divine, immaterial ‘productive’ intellect, that is the cause of all other intellects and intellectual activity.35 In such moments of temporary divinity (answering Aristotle’s call in his 34 35

Cf. fn. 19 above. On the Soul 3.28.

Self, Person and Individual

109

discussion of theôria in Ethics 10 to ‘play the immortal to the best of our ability’)36 the Peripatetic soul realizes its highest potential, and does so by – however briefly – abandoning its non-intellectual dimension. Conclusions. Analysis of the structure and experiences of the soul thus provides Platonists, Peripatetics and Stoics – though not Epicureans to anything like the same extent – with a rich language and a set of powerfully connected concepts for exploring at least some of the territory which we label the question of the self. The most notable trend, very obviously, is towards an aspirational identification of what is most fully, valuably and interestingly you with what is perceived as highest in a scale of functions of living beings, and of that highest point with the exercise of an emotion-free intellect. For the modern observer this brings with it a notorious problem. Intellectual activity, as envisaged in this kind of theorizing, whether engaged in during incarnate life, or after the separation of soul/intellect from body, is an essentially impersonal business, which seems to allow no room for individual variation. Truth is truth, and can be contemplated in one way only; there can be no variations of taste, for taste depends on variations in desire, which belong to the dimension of the soul (or of the soul’s activity) left behind in contemplation. Nor is there even much room for individuality in the sense of consciously separate existence: the contemplating intellect seems to come as close as it can to the realities contemplated, and even to merge its individual identity into theirs. Personality in the sense of distinct individual characteristics is something not for the successful human, whose soul concentrates itself into its intellectual aspect, but for those who fail to rise to the highest status open to them, and remain mired in the second- or third-best. So in Plutarch’s myths, all good souls (or intellects) apparently look the same (usually like stars – bright light with no internal variegation); it is bad souls, still infected by the taint of the body, bearing the different colours of scar incised on them by their subjection to physical appetite, that can readily be distinguished the one from the other. Individuality, it seems, is for losers; it is of interest to the philosophos as part of his analysis of the errors from which he seeks to deter, not of his positive recommendations for fulfilment and happiness.37 Programmes of self-discovery? Doctrines of the soul offer a view of the person that, in ancient terms, comes from an intersection of ethical with physical enquiry, and seeks to answer questions in both. But it is equally possible to find what looks like thinking about personhood and the self in more purely ethical areas of thought. As we have already seen in examining ideas of moral progress, most schools – but Stoics and Platonists most 36

‘Eph’ hoson endechetai athanatizein’, Nic. Eth. 10.7, 1177b33. Compare Plotinus’ apparent anxiety over the individualism of rational souls, and his suggestion that they are individual in a manner analogous to mathematical theorems: Enn. 4.3[27].2 (49–58). 37

110

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

prominently and remarkably – had their own, ideologically loaded stories to tell about the intellectual and moral development of the human individual from infancy to (full or qualified) maturity.38 Centred as they are on notions of human nature – what human beings are, and/or could be if they were to realize their full natural potential – these accounts would seem to have an immediate relevance. In their concentration on development, the processes and stages by which individuals become (or fail to become) what they are naturally fitted to be, they invite reading as ideal narratives of self-discovery, perhaps even self-creation. We need therefore to re-examine them from this further point of view, to see whether, and to what extent, self-discovery and self-creation are indeed useful concepts to apply to them. Stoicism The most detailed and nuanced such account, and much the most carefully integrated into a larger system of ethical doctrine, was the Stoic story of how the dawning and progressive strengthening of reason in the individual is accompanied by a changing sense of what ‘belongs’ and is ‘appropriate’ (oikeion) to him or her. In this story, an initial, primary appropriation (oikeiôsis; conciliatio) of each creature to its own constitution (sustasis; constitutio) produces also an appropriation to those factors tending to promote its physical survival and flourishing, and directs the individual’s innate impulse (hormê; appetitio, conatus, impetus) towards them. In the developing human creature, the subsequent arrival of reason brings with it the sense of a higher set of goods and goals than mere physical flourishing, and a correspondingly enlarged and relocated sense of what belongs and is appropriate; this culminates in the realization that what is most fully appropriate and most fully belongs to one as a human being is the perfection of rational virtue. The narrative of progressively more ambitious oikeiôseis provided the Stoics with the standard starting-point for the exposition of their entire ethical system; it allowed them to present it, for all its eventual idealism, as grounded in basic, reliably observable facts of nature. It is in this role that it features in Diogenes Laertius’ summary of the doctrines of Chrysippus, and in Cicero’s presentation of Stoic ethics to a (republican) Roman audience in his On Ends.39 So too in the Imperial period, in which our two principal pieces of evidence for thinking about oikeiôsis are the remains of Hierocles’ Elements of Ethics (Ethikê stoicheiôsis), an account of the basics of Stoic ethical thinking, and Seneca’s Epistle 121. Gaps in the papyrus preserving Hierocles’ text make the detailed reconstruction of his line of exposition problematic, but it is clear that his overall strategy remains that of using the narrative of growth and of a progressive elevating of the moral sights as the connecting thread, and a large part of the validation, for a synopsis of Stoic ethical theory in its entirety.40 In Seneca’s Epistle 121, oikeiôsis does not have the same expository role, but this is because

38

See above, 42–9. Diog. Laert. 7.85–6, Cic. On Ends 3.167–22 and 33–4. 40 On Hierocles, see especially Bastianini and Long 1992, Inwood 1984, Long 1993. 39

Self, Person and Individual

111

the Epistles overall are not concerned with systematic doctrinal exposition, rather than because of any doubts about the value and importance of this particular piece of doctrine. Seneca does indeed refer urbanely to his discussion as ‘the little issue for today’ (hodiernam quaestiunculam), but it is an exaggeration to say that he regards it as ‘a mere detail’ and ‘a peripheral dogma’;41 on the contrary, his introductory remarks insist that this kind of theoretical analysis is indeed relevant to morality, even if in a different way to direct exhortation and castigation.42 Seneca’s care in this respect is well placed, however. At first sight it might indeed seem obscure what his and Hierocles’ main topic of discussion has to do with the central truths of Stoic ethical teaching. For what both authors address themselves to directly is an issue concerning not human beings but animals: the question whether or not they are born with the ability to perceive their own distinctive natures. They argue, on similar but not identical grounds (with a much greater weight of illustrative material in the case of Hierocles), that animals do have this capacity. Even the simplest of creatures perceive themselves, and are automatically aware of what kinds of being they are in relation to those around them; they know, without having to experiment, what their distinctive bodily parts are for, and how to exploit them. However, given the Stoics’ view of the taxonomy of living beings, this is not a point about animals alone. It holds also for young humans, who begin their lives, psychologically speaking, in the same condition as irrational beasts. Infant humans too start off with a basic – though not necessarily fully articulate – sense of what they are. And this is vital to the story of their development as moral beings: it is because they have this automatic self-perception that they are able to identify what is ‘their own’ (oikeion) and what is not, and thus seek out the former and shun the latter, both initially, and later as their natures change, and make new targets appropriate to them. Thus for Seneca and Hierocles, following what seems to have been the standard line in Stoic thought from Chrysippus onwards, self-perception is a vital ingredient, as the precondition without which the process of oikeiôsis could not get going in the first place, or rise subsequently to higher levels. But the point was evidently controversial. Seneca structures his account around a series of objections from an unidentified interlocutor, whose presence may perhaps be a purely expository device; but Hierocles’ frequent and vehement sallies against the thickheaded stupidity of those who resist his view are harder to dismiss as rhetorical fiction. Who the opponents were, and over how long a period of time they were to be encountered, are questions which cannot be answered with certainty. In theory they could include anyone, from the third century BCE onwards, with an interest in making problems for Stoic arguments in general, quite apart from any specific interest in the true account of human moral development. But an especially attractive suggestion (that of Brad Inwood) points in particular to those non-Stoic thinkers who wished nevertheless to use adapted versions of the oikeiôsis-story, 41

Inwood 1984, 156. Ep. 121.1–4. See above, 51–62, for the attitude(s) Seneca displays in the Epistles to the issue of theoretical discussion and practice in ethics. 42

112

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

severed from its strictly Stoic ramifications, for their own ends. Evidence for such thinkers, as we have seen in a previous chapter, stretches from the first century BCE to the second and third CE: from Antiochus, as reflected in Cicero’s On Ends, via Eudorus, Stobaeus’ Peripatetics, and Calvenus Taurus, to Alexander of Aphrodisias.43 The ‘para-Stoic’ stories produced by these thinkers are a mixed bag, differing considerably among themselves in their ideas about the primary objectives and motivating forces at work in new-born (human and non-human) animals. One of them, indeed, Eudorus, gives self-perception almost exactly the same importance as Hierocles and Seneca do. The majority, however, do not, either leaving it out as a factor entirely, or (as with Antiochus) treating it as a secondary phenomenon in the tale to be told. It is from these quarters, Inwood has suggested, that we should see the sceptical criticisms countered by Hierocles and Seneca (and perhaps Archidemus and Posidonius before them) as being launched, motivated both by a general desire to score points off Stoics, and by the particular need to justify their adaptation of a key element in the Stoic doctrine they have purloined. If this is right, then we have evidence in our texts not only that there had been a long-running argument between Stoics and others over the role and importance of self-perception, but also that this argument continued with some vigour well into the second century CE. The key issue dividing the parties seems to have been that addressed by Seneca in Epistle 121.10–13: ‘You maintain,’ says the objector, ‘that the human constitution is the leading element of the soul (principale animi = hêgemonikon) disposed in a certain way in relation to the body. How on earth can an infant understand such a complex and rarefied idea, which you yourselves can scarcely articulate? All creatures would have to be born with expertise in dialectic in order to understand that definition, which baffles the majority of the citizens of Rome.’

How can the infant human truly be said to perceive its own nature, when that nature is already so complex, and moreover due to become more so with the subsequent arrival of reason? The Stoics, as Seneca goes on to suggest, felt that they were not in fact positing anything so ludicrous as the objectors supposed. The new-born human could be held to have a sense of self, enough to count as a perception of its nature and to ground its first appropriation to itself, without being able to articulate and conceptualize that grasp in the manner of a mature philosopher; the necessary sharpening up could be left for later. For the critics, however, it was not sharpening up, but the achievement of any kind of selfperception worthy of the name, that had to wait for later; more was involved than could be expected of a pre-rational infant. In Cicero’s words from On Ends 5.41, 43 See above, 45–6; cf. Inwood 1984, 167–71. The texts are: Cic. On Ends 5. 21ff., 41ff.; Eudorus in Stob. Flor. 2.7.2, 2.42.7–45.6 W; ‘the Peripatetics’ in Stob. Flor. 2.7.13–26, 2.116.19–152.25 W; Taurus in Gellius Attic Nights 12.5 (with the caution noted above); Alexander Supplement (Mantissa) 118–19.

Self, Person and Individual

113

reflecting the views of Antiochus, ‘our nature is initially concealed in a remarkable manner and can neither be perceived nor known; but as we advance through the stages of life, we gradually – or rather belatedly – so to speak make our own acquaintance’. The question of how self-awareness develops in human beings was thus on the agenda for both Stoics and their adversaries, but differently conceived, and differently placed in the larger story of moral maturation: right at the start of the whole account, as its essential precondition in the one case; a later, and secondary development in the other. It is also possible to argue (the suggestion is again Brad Inwood’s) that this disagreement over the place of self-perception goes along with another, over self-realization. In the standard Stoic account, nature has ensured that animate creatures perceive themselves, and so grasp what kinds of creature they are, at any given stage of their existence, including the very first. On the basis of this perception, they come to see their own constitutions (selves) as belonging to them, and have their innate capacity for appetition (hormê) steered towards those things that will sustain them as the beings they currently are. If they are human creatures, their constitution will change over time (with the emergence of reason); when it changes, they will perceive this development in themselves, and their sense of what is oikeion (and with it, the direction of their appetition) will change to match it. But in this process, it seems that self-perception must always follow on from the establishment of a given state of the individual, rather than coming before it and providing the motive force towards it. Creatures apparently do not see, obscurely, what they might be as well as what they currently are, so as to be moved to try to realize the dimly apprehended potential. Self-perception provides no drive towards self-development. However, in the rival account summarized by Cicero from Antiochus, the picture seems different. Here, what comes first is a drive to self-preservation, which is simply gifted to living creatures by provident nature, without any need for prior self-perception. When they do start subsequently to reflect on what kinds of being they are, the results of that reflection look forward to the potential for future development as well as to current reality. And because the urge to selfpreservation is not, as in mainstream Stoicism, tied to perception of the present state of the self, it can attach itself as well to that sense of future possibility. Appropriation to self, the impulse to preserve one’s own nature, is thus modified into a drive to self-development – to attain and sustain what one has the potential to turn into (a progressively more fully rational being) as well as to maintain what one has already become. It can thus be seen how, paradoxically, denial of the kind of self-perception insisted on by Hierocles and Seneca might open the way to an account of human maturing in which self-development is a more active factor. Two cautionary points must however be emphasized. The first is that this clash of perspectives has to be analysed out of our source material, rather than lying on its surface; it is not entirely clear that it was consciously articulated by the participants themselves. The second is that, even if we allow that some such divergence was consciously developed by Antiochus, and appreciated by Cicero in the first century CE, it can

114

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

only be a conjecture that it continued to be a live factor in debate into the first and second centuries CE. It may have been part of the background to which both Seneca and Hierocles were reacting, but direct indications that this was indeed the case are lacking both from them and from their supposed opponents. Platonist self-discovery As we have seen, the parties to the discussion of self-awareness in the context of ideas of oikeiôsis may well have included Platonists and Peripatetics as well as Stoics. But there was at least one other, separate, area of doctrine in which the issue of changing knowledge of self could also have come up. Besides whatever adaptation(s) of oikeiôsis-theory may have been current in Imperial-period Platonism, Platonists also had their own home-grown account of developing awareness, in the theory of recollection (anamnêsis). This too deserves to be examined as, potentially, a tale of self-discovery. The evidence that recollection remained a live element of Platonic doctrine into our period is provided by three documents: Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, Alcinous’ Didaskalikos, and the Orations of Maximus of Tyre.44 This is, admittedly, a somewhat meagre haul, and the suggestion that, though live, recollection was not seen as a major issue for Platonists is perhaps strengthened by its complete absence from the other main second-century handbook of Platonism, Apuleius’ On Plato. As far as Alcinous is concerned, moreover, recollection matters as an element in epistemology (as an anti-Stoic and antiEpicurean explanation of the human ability to form general concepts) and as one of several proofs of the immortality of the soul, rather than as part of any story of progress and moral development. It is really only in Maximus’ (characteristically enthusiastic and rhetorical) presentation that the phenomenon is dwelt on with any attention to its experiential quality and place in the course of an individual life. Oration 10 uses the stories of the revelatory dreams of Epimenides, Pythagoras’ recall of his life as a Trojan hero, and the out-of-body experiences of Aristeas of Proconnesus to introduce the distinctively Platonist tenet that true knowledge (contact with fundamental reality) is only attainable through the use of the intellect divorced from the bodily senses (1–3). Maximus then names and explains the nature of the process, anamnêsis, by which progress towards this direct contact can be made: how all human souls have within them on embodiment the potential to recognize abstract reality, but rendered dormant and obstructed by the very fact of incarnation; how reason and education can stir this potential, like coaxing seeds to germination or rousing a sleeping army; and how, once a first start has been made, the process of recollection has a natural momentum towards further advance (3–8). A final summary (9) sets this process explicitly in the larger frame already hinted at. Recollection starts during embodied life; the good person (the person of strong intellect) begins to clarify and strengthen his or her grasp on 44

Cic. Tusc. 1.24.57–8; Alcin. Didask. 4.6 and 25.3; Maximus Orr. 10 and 21.7–8.

Self, Person and Individual

115

truth already at this stage. But full clarity and an unobstructed view of reality have to wait for the parting of soul and body at death, when the individual becomes again what s/he had been before birth: When the soul escapes from this lower realm to the higher, as if abandoning the land of the Cimmerians for the brightness of the upper air, freed from flesh and desires, diseases and disasters, then at last reality becomes accessible to its sight and understanding, as it joins the gods and their offspring beyond the outermost vault of the heavens, pursuing its circling course as a member of the divine host led and commanded by Zeus.

The final paragraphs of Oration 21, coming at the end of a whole sequence of lectures on the nature of erôs,45 presents a similar vision of the obfuscating effect of embodiment and of the (real but limited) possibility of partial escape even during embodied life. Here, however, as not in Oration 10, special importance is given to physical beauty, as the embodied quality most apt to arouse the groggy intellect to (partial) recollection of a reality beyond the bodily. In both lectures, Maximus’ principal focus is on a proposition about contact with reality, rather than about the self and self-awareness. Both times, however, making that contact with reality is explained as involving an initially undreamed-of distinction between higher and lower elements in one’s own nature, and the identification of one’s best interests with one rather than the other; both times, care is taken to catch something of what this experience must feel like, from inside, to the individual concerned; and in both cases it is implied that such moments of illumination or revelation are won as the individual grows up to intellectual maturity. That is to say, these invocations of the doctrine of recollection in Maximus teeter on the brink of becoming stories of self-discovery, as well as stories of the discovery of external reality. But they do not quite make the connection. The extra element could very easily have been added, and could equally easily have featured in other Imperial-period Platonist texts now lost to us; but it is in fact not added by Maximus, and lost texts cannot be interpreted. In the absence of hard evidence, therefore, it must remain only a possibility that this was indeed another locus in which Imperialperiod thinkers could touch on the drama of the discovery of the self. The results of this first search for ideas about self and selfhood in Imperial-period writing about the maturing of the intellect are therefore somewhat meagre and disjointed. Thinking about awareness of self in some sense is clearly going on, but not so slanted as to respond very closely to modern expectation; conclusions tempting to the modern eye seem to be near to the surface, but are not directly confronted. Moreover, even when questions about self-discovery are fully in view, the concept of self involved is liable to strike us as disappointingly thin and impersonal. For, in all cases, what is being discovered is emphatically not self in the sense of individuality. The truths to be grasped as self is discovered concern

45

See above, 94–6.

116

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

one’s membership of a class, the class of humans, articulate rational beings, not any propositions about uniqueness, or intriguing differentiation from other members of that class. The self in therapeutic advice A definite tendency has thus emerged, in philosophical discussion both of the soul and of human development, to think less in terms of a distinguishable individual personality than of an impersonal intellect. But there was another set of answers to the questions ‘who am I?’ and ‘what am I?’ that might seem to have turned attention much more towards individual traits and individual variation, namely those produced in the course of giving advice for the here and now: for the management of the embodied soul, and the struggle to shape and discipline it in the daily round of practical decision-making and action. In this context, the particular emotional failings and weaknesses of the individual that marked him off as differently imperfect to his fellows cease to be something simply to be transcended and forgotten in the strengthening of the impersonal intellect, and become – if only temporarily – a focus of attention in their own right; and ideas of consistency and appropriateness, in both inner reactions and externally observable behaviour, force consideration of the different positions from which individuals inevitably have to seek for what is consistent and appropriate for them. Individuality It is widely taken for granted in therapeutic writing that an honest sense of individual imperfections, one’s own or those of others, is also a sense of differences. People are assumed to come to the healing of philosophia with a whole range of internal states, whether these are a question of the natural endowment with which they were born, wished onto them by their physical constitution, or acquired states formed by (bad) habitual practice over time. Galen makes the point of children in his Affections and Errors, observing that there are ‘great individual differences in nature’ which can be ‘clearly observed in the children we see about us’, and listing sullenness, acquisitiveness, irascibility, shamelessness, forgetfulness and laziness as examples of specific natural failings.46 Arrian’s Epictetus considers the matter from the point of view of an adult audience exposed to philosophical therapy: The school of a philosopher is a surgery. You should not have felt pleasure by the time you leave it, but pain, for you are not healthy when you come in: one of you has a dislocated shoulder, another an abscess, another a fistula, another a headache. Am I really to come up with pretty thoughts and reflections, so that each of you will go away praising me, but with the same

46

Affections 1.7.37–9.

Self, Person and Individual

117

dislocated shoulder, the same aching head, the same fistula, and the same abscess that you brought in.47

And in the same vein, Epictetus’ teacher Musonius asserts that philosophical teaching has missed its mark unless its audience as it listens experiences ‘revulsion, shame, remorse, joy and wonder, and adopts changing expressions and differing states of mind in proportion as the philosopher’s palpation of both the sound and the diseased parts of his soul has affected them and their consciences’.48 Change over time The proper response, on the part of the ‘patient’, is to acknowledge his or her own individual combination of failings, and their specific degrees of severity. Knowing yourself in this sense means not only performing the difficult feat of acknowledging that you have faults, but realizing how they both associate you with your fellow human beings and mark you off from them. The classes of failing are general, the particular combination and/or degree of severity specific to the individual.49 Once this starting situation has been acknowledged, and a sufficiently strong desire to change it summoned up, the process of selfreformation can begin. As we have seen in previous chapters,50 this is not an instantaneous or shortterm, but a long drawn-out process. Accordingly, it becomes an important question how progress can be made over such an extended period, and how it is to be assessed and measured. There is general agreement – seen in Stoic Seneca and non-aligned Galen as much as in Platonist Plutarch – that the older Stoic insistence on the equality of all degrees of imperfection, and the accompanying aspiration to an eventual conversion from fool to Sage that will be instantaneous (and perhaps even imperceptible),51 is (to say the least) unhelpful. Staged progress away from imperfect alignment of beliefs and desires towards something truer to the reality of things, more conducive to virtuous action, and more internally tranquil and harmonious, is visible and measurable over time, as Seneca measures his own and Lucilius’ progress in the Epistles, or as Plutarch makes his Sulla comment on the strides made by Fundanus in On Restraining Wrath.52 Here therefore a different sense of oneself comes into play, relative not to others, but to the past, and different states of one’s own. Progress is measurable in 47

Arrian Disc. of Epict. 3.23.30–1. Musonius fr. 49 Hense, quoted by Gellius Attic Nights 5.1.3–4. 49 Compare Galen Affections 2.3–7 on this kind of self-knowledge and its difficulty, expressed by reference to the Aesopic fable of the knapsack of faults we all carry on our backs, where others can see it more readily than we can ourselves (also alluded to by Catullus, 2.18–21). 50 See above, 42–62 and 82–9. 51 For the doctrine, see Plutarch, Progress in Virtue 75c (61S L-S), Comm. Not. 1063ab (61T L-S), Comm. Not. 1062b (61U L-S); and cf. 42–5 and 49–51 above. 52 Compare also, naturally, the more direct assertions of the reality of cumulative progress in Plutarch’s Progress in Virtue and Galen’s Affections and Errors. 48

118

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

so far as you are no longer exactly what you were before, and are something that you previously were not. This may involve measuring simply how your propensity to one particular affective failing – most prominently anger, as highlighted by Galen as well as Plutarch and the Seneca of the On Anger – has altered, or a more complex comparison of how several different strands of your affective life at present match up: We must compare our present pathê with their former selves and with one another, and thus determine the difference. We must compare them with their former selves, to see whether the desires and fears and spurts of anger we experience now are less intense than they used to be ... and we must compare them with one another, to see whether we are more inclined to feel shame than fear, to be emulous rather than envious, more eager for a good reputation than for money ... 53

The kind of awareness of oneself solicited by such therapeutic advice has thus both a synchronic and a diachronic aspect. Further thoughts about both – about how awareness of one’s career through time, and awareness of the co-ordination of one’s current experience, bear on virtue and happiness – are easy to find in this form of philosophical reflection and writing. On the question of careers over time, it is intriguing that the advice on offer recommends both cultivating a sense of continuity, and being aware of discontinuity, according to context. When offering strengthening thoughts about mortality and the prospect of death, both Seneca and Plutarch have recourse to the idea, which Seneca describes as a commonplace,54 that human beings are in a sense constantly dying and being reborn, because of the dominance of change in the world they inhabit as physical beings (which means in turn that death is not the unique and uniquely terrifying event it is often supposed to be).55 But this flirtation with the idea of a discontinuous self, which suggests a similarity with some Indian philosophical thought, as well as with twentieth-century work on personal identity, is strictly limited in scope and context. Elsewhere, Seneca both tacitly assumes and explicitly asserts the continuity of the self through a life-span: most notably in his discussion of oikeiôsis in Epistle 121, where he insists that, though each period of life has its own distinct constitution, ‘there is one and the same appropriation (conciliatio) of one’s own constitution. It is not the child or the young man or the old man that nature commends to me, but me.’56 And Plutarch, ruminating on how to use thoughts about one’s own past career most effectively in pursuit of cheerful equanimity (euthumia), advocates a policy of ‘weaving’ the past events of one’s life into a pattern that gives prominence to what is positive and cheery, and hides and suppresses the dark and gloomy. Not to do this, but instead to let memories of one’s past slip away, 53

Plutarch Progress 83ef. Ep. 24.19. 55 Seneca Epp. 24.19–20, 58.22–3; Plutarch On the E 392c-e; cf. Sorabji 2000, 246–8. 56 Ep. 121.16: cf. Sorabji 2000, 248, who adds that Seneca can also ‘assure Marcia [in Cons. to Marc. 26.6–7] that her dead son will live on until the next conflagration of the universe’. 54

Self, Person and Individual

119

is to be like the man in Hades (Ocnus, as depicted in the painting by Polygnotus at Delphi),57 who allows a donkey to consume the rope he is making as fast as he can plait it.58 There is nothing especially deep about the psychological advice here, and Plutarch is certainly not making any point about memory or continuity being essential for personal identity or selfhood – failing to retain a narrative of one’s past is the waste of a valuable resource, not a form of suicide. He simply assumes that there is a continuous self, but one that may have a deeper or shallower sense of its past, and may or may not manipulate that sense to its psychological advantage. There is something broadly comparable in the Epicurean self-consolatory techniques of avocatio and revocatio, ‘calling one’s attention away’ from present ills and ‘recalling’ past good, as described by Cicero.59 However, at least as described in our sources, these lack the element of co-ordination and overall pattern-making envisaged by Plutarch, and do not seem in the same way to hint at the issue of the constitution of a self. Consistency When it comes to thinking about one’s self not only over time, but also as a set of experiences and reactions in the present, perhaps the most significant idea in therapeutic writing is that of consistency, which was important for all, but played an especially prominent role in Stoic thought.60 The virtuous character, for the Stoics, was that in which all reactions ‘stood together’, both outwardly and inwardly: outwardly, with the divinely ordained nature of things and march of events;61 inwardly, with each other, in a virtuous harmony of right understanding. But whereas the first sort of consistency could be attained sporadically by just about anybody, the latter – in which all one’s reactions, with perfect consistency, were brought up to the level of one’s fitful best – was the mark of true Virtue and the perfected Sage alone. For Seneca, ‘consistency which holds fast to good judgement,’ attained only if ‘all of the truth has been seen [and] orderliness, moderation and seemliness are preserved in actions, and a will which is guiltless and kindly, focused upon reason’ is the mark of the god-like mind of the Sage.62 In Epictetus’ division of the tasks of the learner into three fields,63 consistency and ‘security’ come in only with the third stage, the one he regularly urges his pupils not to be too quick to assume they are ready for.64 Anyone who buys into the specifically Stoic programme for self-improvement is thus strongly encouraged to monitor the relationship between different facets of his inner experience, and to see 57

Pausanias 10.29.1–2. Plutarch Peace of Mind 473b–474a, cf. Arrian Disc. Of Epict. 2.5.21–2; Sorabji 2000, 231–3, 248. 59 Cicero Tusc. 3.33, 3.76, 5.74; cf. Plutarch Pleasant Life 1099e, Diog. Laert. 10.22. 60 E.g. Cicero On Ends 3.6.21, Seneca Epp. 34.4, 35.4. 61 E.g. Diog. Laert. 7.88 (63C L-S). 62 Seneca Ep. 92.3 (63F L-S). 63 Arrian Disc. of Epict. 3.2; Long 2002, 112–18. 64 Arrian Disc. of Epict. 3.2.5–9, 1.4.11. 58

120

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

his task very substantially as one of the adjustment of this initially untidy and disunited plurality into an ever closer harmony. As Plutarch’s words in Progress in Virtue 83ef, quoted above, suggest, the pupil of a Platonist or a Peripatetic mentor might well share a general sense of his project as one of comparative introspection and the cultivation of an inner harmony; but it is not clear that he would have been given quite the same feeling of the mechanism of adjustment by which this was to be brought about or the same perception of the elements to be adjusted. Truth to oneself? In modern moral thinking the ideal of consistency is easy to associate with that of ‘truth to oneself.’ To what extent this was a connection already drawn in Stoic theory is an interesting question. The incentive to suppose that it was lies in the refinement of Stoic thinking about appropriate actions (‘duties’, kathêkonta, officia) known as the theory of personae (prosôpa). According to this line of thought, originated (probably) by Panaetius in the second century BCE, known to us from Cicero, and acknowledged in our period by Epictetus,65 assessment of what is and is not the appropriate course of action should be sensitive to the different ‘roles’ in which one is cast as an agent: as not just (i) an instance of the species ‘human being’, but also as (ii) the possessor of a particular physical and mental make-up, (iii) the occupier of a particular social standing and formal rank, and (iv) the pursuer of a particular career and path to distinction. The interesting clause is clearly the second, which Cicero explains with a combination of mythological and historical examples. In one and the same situation, it was appropriate for the long-suffering Ulysses to put up patiently with insults offered him, and for the hot-headed Ajax to react with martial fury; or – more tellingly still – it was appropriate for everyone else to surrender to Julius Caesar in North Africa in 46 BCE, but for Cato, uniquely, to commit suicide instead. Simply asking, ‘what is it appropriate for a rational human being, progressing towards virtue, to do?’ may leave open a range of equally respectable alternatives; in such circumstances, the right choice for you is dictated by considerations of consistency with your natural endowment, and your (quite possibly unique) past record of choices and actions. But the conclusion that we have here located a strong idea of truth to self must be tempered by a number of further considerations. In the first place, the theory of personae, though it is alluded to a number of times by Epictetus, is not expounded at length, or applied interestingly to individual cases, in any Stoic text of the Imperial period. Secondly, even in its Ciceronian (and presumed Panaetian) form, it seems somehow, from a modern vantage-point, to sell the idea short. It allows for individuality – a diversity of selves for different individuals to be true to – but without individualism. It rests on an ideal of consistency – of careful attention to what you know yourself to have been born with, and to how you have behaved in

65 Cicero On Duties 1.107–15; Arrian Disc. of Epict. 2.10, 1.2, 3.23; Long 2002, 238–41 and 256–7; Sorabji 2000, 249–50; see further below, 135–6.

Self, Person and Individual

121

the past – rather than of self-discovery and self-expression. And it shows no interest at all in idiosyncratic individuality. Suicide in the circumstances was uniquely appropriate to Cato; but Cato differed from everybody else in degree, the austerity of his devotion to principle, not in kind. Self-scrutiny It would, however, be a mistake to allow ourselves to be too disappointed by the absence of a strong articulation of individuality, and of ideas of truth to self in a modern sense. For, in their own way, the kinds of exercise recommended to Imperial-period seekers after moral improvement can still be seen as presupposing and encouraging what is nevertheless an interesting and noteworthy sense of selfhood. The potential for this sense may have existed in ancient moral philosophy since Plato and Aristotle; but it is only with the writing of first and second centuries CE that it is realized with any consistency and depth. This is in itself a significant shift in the style of ethical discourse. As we have seen, at the heart of therapeutic advice, and of any practical programme of self-improvement that it gives rise to, lies sustained and active self-observation. The aspiring philosophos must establish his current state of imperfection by assessing his inner reactions to stimuli from the world outside, and must be constantly sensitive to how those reactions vary from one area of experience to another, and alter over time for better or worse; he must be ready to praise and condemn himself for episodes of right and wrong judgement and appropriate and inappropriate desire; and he must direct towards his own inner self a constant stream of commands and exhortations, in which the general precepts of philosophia are related to the specifics of his experience in the here and now. That is to say, the aspirant is called upon to perform a whole range of second-order psychological operations, in which his own everyday inner life – the psychological processes of judging, experiencing impulses of attraction and aversion, feeling desire, fear, pleasure and grief – itself becomes the subject of a further layer of observation, assessment, exhortation and attempts at alteration.66 A particularly vivid, emblematic instance might be Epictetus’ picture of the individual halting his own impressions for inspection, and holding himself back from giving them assent until their accuracy or lack of it can be judged.67 Impressions are yours in so far as they happen in and to you;68 but in the interests of moral improvement they are to be treated as if they were wholly alien incomers, under suspicion of making an illegitimate claim to asylum in your mind. It is thus assumed that each individual can and should find within enough space both for self as the issuer of such second-order evaluations, commands and exhortations, directed towards first-order experience, and for self as their object 66

Cf. Inwood 2000, to which I am indebted here. See above, 84–5. 68 Though they are not your responsibility, since they happen to you, rather than being chosen actions of yours: Arrian Disc. of Epict. 1.1, 1.20, 1.27, with Dobbin 1998, 65–74. 67

122

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

and recipient. The distinction of the two, not simply assumed as a background fact, but constantly re-asserted with each new operation, gives to the self a corresponding depth and three-dimensionality, of a kind not really (or not nearly so vividly) envisaged in earlier philosophical writing. It is anticipated to some extent in the Platonist analysis of the divided soul (as also taken up by Posidonius), which appeals for its plausibility to introspective awareness of different orders of inner impulse.69 But it seems that the depth-creating potential of this view of the soul was not much dwelt on. What makes the difference in Imperial-period writing is the much more detailed articulation of the role and operations of the assessing, judging and exhorting self, and the consistency and repetition with which the need for its application is asserted. Therapeutic discussion and teaching can to this extent be thrown into the other pan of the scales. It is more concerned with variation between individuals than the discourse of the soul, and works more with the dimensions of experience where we moderns might be most inclined to ground an understanding of character and individuality. But just as the space allowed for interiority and individuality should not be under-estimated, so it should not be exaggerated either. Interest in it, even in therapeutic writing, is still of a very circumscribed kind. Here too, in the end, variation and diversity are not prized; they are facts of human nature that demand attention, but as wrinkles to be smoothed out, not as keys to the proper understanding and appreciation of what it is to be a worthwhile human being. The self and the will? Variation and idiosyncrasy need not however be taken to be the whole story. Examination of doctrines of the soul, ideas about human moral development, and prescriptions for self-scrutiny may have produced results of only limited interest to anyone searching for anticipations of the modern Self. But there is yet another track that can be followed through our material which needs also to be taken into account. It turns not on the idea of diversity, but on that of independence. Therapeutic writing – particularly, though not exclusively, that of a Stoic cast – is characterized by the pervasive encouragement of what might be called a spirit of resistance: a spirit which may be conceived either as the resistance of a higher aspect of the self to a lower (reason to appetite or spirit), or of a noncompound self to the seduction of things in the world around, and to everyday, unphilosophical evaluations. Such defiance, a readiness to assert the viewpoint that goes with one’s own individual aspiration to virtue, against the calls of the world and/or one’s lower nature, is a sign of promise and progress. This is an aspect of philosophical preaching which, especially as developed in its Stoic mode by Seneca and Epictetus, has attracted considerable attention recently from scholars, interested above all by the possibility that we can see in it the emergence – or at least the stirrings – of important new ideas about the 69

Plato Rep. 437b–440b; Posidonius fr. 162 E-K (65Q L-S).

Self, Person and Individual

123

understanding of selfhood, motivation and action. The work of Seneca and Epictetus, it has been suggested, marks a definite stage in the development of the medieval and early modern concept of the Will: a concept certainly alien to philosophy of the classical and Hellenistic periods, but which was for so long central to western understanding of the self, from its full emergence with (more or less) the work of St Augustine.70 For the purposes of this discussion, the crucial point about ‘will’ is that it is a concept for explaining (human, voluntary) action, and that it is manifestly not identical with any of the explanatory factors envisaged by Plato, Aristotle, or the early Stoics. It is not intellect, desire, spirit or wish, but something separate from all these, and able to control them.71 It is, roughly, a kind of compound of intellect and desire. As such, it might at first glance seem after all to have something in common with the Platonic concept of ‘spirit’ (thymos), which though irrational (horse rather than driver in the image of the soul-chariot)72 none the less never sides with desire against reason; but, unlike spirit, will is supposed to be a factor in the causation of all human action, not just some of it.73 It might also seem to have something in common with Aristotelian prohairesis, which Aristotle can call ‘either desireful reason or reasonable desire’;74 but whereas prohairesis is an outcome of the interplay between the basic faculties of the soul, will is itself one of those basic faculties; and in other ways too ‘will’ and prohairesis behave differently as terms in the explanation of action.75 The question therefore is, if nothing like ‘will’ as an explanatory concept is to be found in Plato and Aristotle, when and where something like it first starts to be visible. The most elaborate and confident recent attempt at an answer is that of Charles Kahn, who distinguishes a series of stages, in which the enabling conditions for the full Augustinian concept of the will are realized one by one.76 Stage one is the emergence with Stoic theory of the concept of assent (synkatathesis), which, though expressing a purely intellectualist idea of the causation of action, none the less innovates by identifying a clear point in the causal sequence leading to attempted action that is entirely up to the agent (thus clearing the conceptual space in the pattern of explanation into which ‘acts of will’ or ‘volitions’ can later be fitted). Stage two is the arrival, with the translation of Greek philosophy into Latin in the first century BCE, of the terms voluntas and its adjective voluntarius, bringing no shift in themselves from an intellectualist to a voluntarist model of action, but paving the way for its articulation in due course. But the most substantial development, on Kahn’s schema, is the third, which

70

Kahn 1988, Sorabji 2000, 319–40, both with further bibliography. Kahn 1988, 245. 72 Phaedrus 246a, 253c ff. 73 Sorabji 2000, 323–5. 74 Aristotle Nic. Eth. 6.2, 1139b4–5. 75 Sorabji 2000, 325–7. 76 Kahn 1988, building on but seeking to modify earlier work, esp. Dihle 1982, all looking back to Pohlenz 1948–9. 71

124

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

comes about a century later through Seneca and Epictetus, with whom a ‘momentous’ shift can be seen. Classic Stoicism (and Plato and Aristotle previously) had identified the person with an essentially impersonal intellect, thus offering ‘no basis for a metaphysics of the self in any individual sense’.77 Seneca and Epictetus, by contrast, identify their selves and those of their addressees ‘with something essentially personal and individualized: not with reason as such but with the practical application of reason in selecting ... commitments, in keeping ... emotional balance;’ together they thus testify ‘to the development of introspective consciousness and its articulation in volitional terms in the last half of the first century A.D’.78 In Seneca, this new perception emerges in the stress he places on the importance of wanting or wishing in the cultivation of moral virtue (in the shaping of the self), and the accompanying frequency of the words voluntas and (especially) velle in his Epistles and Dialogues. So, for instance, in Epistle 80: The body needs many things for its health; the mind grows from itself, nourishes itself, exercises itself ... Whatever has the power to make you good, you have with you. What do you need in order to be good? The will to be (velle). And what better thing can you wish for (velle) than to tear yourself away from this servitude which oppresses all, and which even slaves of the lowest condition and born in this mire try by every means to throw off.79

Or again, in Epistle 71: So let us press on and persevere; more remains than we have yet overcome, but the greater part of success is the wish (velle) to succeed. I know this about myself: I wish it (volo) and wish it with all my mind.80

And in a more analytical, less hortatory moment, he can distinguish the first two movements in the genesis of a passion as (i) ‘non-voluntary’ (motus non voluntarius) and (ii) ‘accompanied by an un-stubborn willing’ (cum voluntate non contumaci) – in contrast to the blinkered will to strike back at all costs that constitutes the full passion of anger.81 In Epictetus, the new perception of self and action emerges not in talk of wanting, but in talk of ‘choice’. As we have already seen, the centre of Epictetus’ moral teaching is insistence on the possibility, and necessity, of the ‘right use of impressions’. Impressions of the value (and hence desirability, fearfulness, etc.) of things in the world around us are not automatically to be accepted as they stand, but halted on their way in and tested. All those that assign value to indifferents are 77

Kahn 1988, 253. Kahn 1988, 253. 79 Seneca Ep. 80.3–4. 80 Seneca Ep. 71.36. Both passages are highlighted in this connection also by Inwood 2000, along with Epp. 34.3, 37.5 and 81.13. 81 Seneca On Anger 2.4.1; cf. 80–2 above. 78

Self, Person and Individual

125

to be rejected; only those that get the evaluation right are to be assented to. In the classic language of Stoicism, this would be described in terms of the operations of the hêgemonikon (the ‘command centre’ of the rational soul) and of synkatathesis (assent). Epictetus, however, makes his point again and again with the word prohairesis, apparently borrowed from Aristotle, but re-applied in an altered sense, to refer now not to the outcome of the interplay of faculties of the soul, but to the soul itself, as the source of rational evaluations and the activity of making them: If any of you, distancing himself from external things, has turned to concentrate on his prohairesis, working and toiling at it, to make it harmonious with nature, elevated, free, unhindered, unimpeded, trustworthy, and respectful ... this is the one who is making genuine progress.82 ‘Tell me also about good things: which did you take them to be?’ ‘Prohairesis of the necessary kind, and use of impressions as it ought to be.’83

But to talk thus of prohairesis rather than of the hêgemonikon and synkatathesis seems to be to shift the emphasis from an understanding of moral decisionmaking, and the self that indulges in it, in purely intellectual terms to, in Kahn’s words, a sense that the ‘relevant centre of the person’ is ‘located in moral character and personal commitment, active in everyday action’. Once again, a shift away from intellectualist language can be seen as a move towards a concept of will, and to an understanding of action in predominantly voluntarist terms. Kahn is careful to present his story as one of gradual edging in the direction of the Augustinian and subsequent concept of Will, rather than of its full realization, even with Seneca and Epictetus. This is well advised, but it remains questionable even so whether as much can be attributed to these two as he wants. As Richard Sorabji has re-asserted, there is no single, tidy concept of ‘the Will’, but rather a cluster of ideas, since the word ‘will’ has been implicated since the fifth century CE in too many different religious and philosophical problems to be easily definable.84 And if that is so, then there cannot either be any tidy single story of ‘development’ towards it. In addition, the attribution of any strongly voluntarist account of action to either Epictetus or Seneca has been persuasively questioned in studies subsequent to Kahn’s. Writing of Epictetus, Anthony Long points out that, though his choice of the word prohairesis is undoubtedly a loaded one, intended to emphasize a specific view of distinctively human duties and possibilities, it does not mark a shift away from an essentially intellectualist account of human reactions to the world.85 Having your prohairesis as it ought to be means judging impressions correctly, 82

Arrian Disc. of Epict. 1.4.18–21. Arrian Disc. of Epict. 1.30.4. 84 Sorabji 2000, 319–40, esp. 321, 335–7. 85 Long 2002, 210–20. 83

126

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

which is an operation of the rational mind, not of some other, non-intellectual faculty; it is also (against the spirit of Kahn’s configuration of the data) much more to do with mental reaction (how the individual sees the world) than with any story of the causation of action. Of Seneca, Brad Inwood makes the parallel point that, when carefully examined, his prominent uses of the words voluntas, voluntarius and velle, however much they may have contributed to the later terminology of voluntarism in Latin philosophy, do not in fact show any such shift in his own thinking. None of the contexts in which the words occur demands that Seneca should be thinking of ‘wanting’ in any other than cognitive, intellectualist terms. To want to be good is to set your mind on it: to judge it (correctly) to be good, and appropriate to pursue, without any reservations or wavering. To speak of voluntas as marking the second stage in the development of a passion is to say that it is ushered in by a mistaken, but none the less rational decision; and to say that the first stage is not voluntarius is to say that it precedes and is unconditioned by any such decision, correct or incorrect, of the rational judgement. For all its virtuous caution, therefore, Kahn’s story does not hold together. There is no single line of development towards the Augustinian concept of Will to be traced. And even if there were, Seneca and Epictetus would not be able to play the role in it for which he casts them; neither of them departs from an intellectualist account of the cultivation of virtue, and consequently, neither of them has room for ‘will’ as a factor in their understanding of human motivation and conduct. What can be argued, however (and this is perhaps more of an adjustment of Kahn’s position than an outright rejection of it), is that, in various ways, the shifts of emphasis and terminology which they undoubtedly introduce pave the way for the subsequent emergence of the Will in a number of its modern guises. Both of them, from their different angles, stress the individual’s ownership of and responsibility for his or her own mental reactions, through their insistence on the necessity for self-scrutiny and their advice for its implementation. In Epictetus’ case this is reinforced by the terminological shift from hêgemonikon and synkatathesis to prohairesis, and by his insistence, via the sharp separation of true identity from the body, that it is indeed only the mental over which we have control and for which we are responsible. For it is likewise an important component of later conceptions of the Will that assertions of will, or volitions, should be understood as self-caused events for which the originator takes responsibility in a particularly full, even unique sense. In addition, in his repeated uses of the words velle, voluntas and voluntarius, Seneca beds into Latin philosophical writing what is to become the standard terminology for the concept of Will, and does so in broad contexts which are just those in which it will flourish, even if the precise application differs. Autonomy Any attempt to read Stoic writing on the cultivation of virtue in terms of assertions of will is thus misguided, for there is no concept in it of a will to assert. What there is, however – and this may in part be responsible for critics’ desire to see an

Self, Person and Individual

127

idea of Will at work – is strong assertions of an ideal of autonomy: of the possibility and desirability, achievable only through the right use of reason, of being one’s own master, unsubjected to the power and influence of other people and the outside world. Success in the philosophical quest for self-improvement means that the real you achieves both a security and a freedom denied to those who perversely cling to worldly values, and are thus condemned to an existence of insecurity and servitude. Achieving this happy state both requires and confirms an attitude of calm defiance, against the worst that adverse circumstances (fortuna, peristaseis) and human threat or seduction can throw at you. Autonomy and freedom This set of emphases – which has contributed so much to the modern world’s sense of the meaning of Stoicism86 – is a recurrent element in Seneca’s letters, with a particular twist in his special identification of the possibility of suicide as the ultimate assertion of freedom, defiance of fortune, and immunity to external coercion;87 but it is most fully and directly expounded by Arrian’s Epictetus in one of the longest and most carefully structured of his discourses, 4.1 (already quoted above, à propos his alienation of the body from the true self). Epictetus begins with his definition of freedom: ‘That man is free who lives as he wishes; who can neither be compelled, nor hindered, nor constrained; whose impulses are unimpeded, who attains his desires and does not fall into what he wants to avoid.’88 All may desire this state, but all fall short of it; they are the slaves of their passions (‘sorrow, fear, envy, pity’), constantly failing to secure their desires or avoid the objects of their aversion. Chapters six to sixty-one of the discourse elaborate and justify the negative criticism: no matter how ‘free’ and powerful in normal social terms people may be, they are none the less all ‘enslaved’ to external objects of desire and aversion, and thus constantly hindered and constrained. The gaining of supposed external ‘goods’ and the avoidance of supposed external ‘ills’ is not within the individual’s power to control; desires to secure the former and avoid the latter will thus inevitably be frustrated with some regularity, and the individual will inevitably suffer. To escape into true freedom, Epictetus continues (62–88), it is necessary to find some field which is wholly under your own control, and so not liable to the obstruction and frustration that constitute enslavement. This is not to be found in externals, nor yet in the actions of one’s own body, over which others (in the extreme case, the tormenting tyrant) can have complete control, but solely – and completely – in the management of one’s own impulses. No-one but yourself can control your capacity to assent to or to withhold assent from impressions, thus conditioning the directions in which your impulses will run. If you take this truth to heart, and restrict your ambitions

86

‘I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul’ (W.E. Henley, Invictus, 15–16). Seneca Ep. 70 (esp. 14, 16 and 17 for libertas); cf. Epp. 17.6, 85.28, and more generally 16.3, 45.9, 80.3. 88 Arrian Disc. of Epict. 4.1.1. 87

128

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

thus to the formation of your desires and aversions, nothing in the outside world can have any hold over you; the inner citadel established by tyrannical forces to control you is sacked and neutralized (86–8). Freeing yourself thus, Epictetus continues in chapters 89 to 110, is equivalent to conforming your wishes to the wishes of God, and bringing yourself into harmony with Nature – becoming what God and Nature intended you all along to be (a point he makes elsewhere with the declaration that one’s faculty of assent and control of impulse (one’s prohairesis) is ‘by nature unimpeded and unconstrained’, Discourses 1.17.21). The remainder of the discourse adds no new substantial points, but instead seeks ways of further reinforcing those already made: chapters 111 to 131 exhort the reader to make every effort to cultivate the outlook and attitudes just described, citing Diogenes and Socrates as inspiring examples; 132 to 149 challenge the soi-disant philosophos and the complacent plutocrat to realize their own particular deficiencies in this regard and to reform; 150 to 169 disclaim any special success on Epictetus’ own part, and recur in greater detail than before to the good examples of Diogenes and Socrates; and 170 to 177 issue a final exhortation, with a characteristic mixture of ingratiation and challenge: ‘At any rate, try it at least. There is no shame in trying.’89 The advice contained in this discourse shows that Epictetus’ insistence on the centrality of prohairesis, as the only reality on the near side of the boundary between you and not-you, has a more complicated relationship to the issue of the self than may at first have appeared. On the one hand, restriction of the self to the exercise of reason in assenting to or rejecting impressions is an extreme form of curtailment; it might seem to involve an equally drastic bleaching out of individuality, at least from the state of the self aspired to. The operations of prohairesis in the imperfect may indeed show wide individual variations depending on habits – traits of character – acquired in the course of a hitherto misspent life; but these are seen as obstacles to the proper working of the person, rather than aspects to be treasured and fostered. But, against this, the idea of freedom as the natural state of the assessing, judging mind, and one that has to be won and jealously guarded against enemies outside the self, introduces a counterbalancing note of self-assertion. The philosophically enlightened mind may be aiming to shrug off its individual failings, and achieve a state in which it is largely indistinguishable from those of all other Sages. But its starting-point is one in which its independence is under threat from every quarter, and in which it must begin – and indeed continue for a large part of the way – with a firm assertion of individualism, affirming its unique rights over itself, and its difference from the general mass of ‘slaves’. Epictetus puts himself in the paradoxical position of enabling this assertion by drawing back, to what, come what may, no-one else but you can possibly control; we are to win the citadel from which as individuals we may defy the world outside only at the cost of surrendering the outworks in which so much of personality and individuality is generally supposed to be located.

89 Arrian Disc. of Epict. 4.1.177; cf. Long 2002, 129–41 for Epictetus’ (or Arrian’s?) manipulation of tone and didactic style.

Self, Person and Individual

129

Autonomy and Fate This is perhaps a problem more troublesome to modern than to ancient sensibilities. But there was another that might be thought to beset Seneca’s and Epictetus’ thinking from either point of view. Are they not as Stoics committed to belief in an all-controlling Fate?90 And does not such a belief seriously compromise the freedom which, we have seen, they wish to attribute to the virtuous individual? In practice, they themselves seem blithely unconcerned by any such worry. Indeed, they more or less directly deny that such a Fate, even though it lays down in advance a complete and unbreakable plan for the course of each individual’s life, places any undesirable restriction at all on his or her autonomy. The road that leads to freedom, and the only release from enslavement, is to be able to say wholeheartedly: Lead me, Zeus and you, Fate, wherever you have ordained for me,

says Epictetus in Discourses 4.1.131, quoting lines from Cleanthes’ celebrated Hymn to Zeus, and making Fate a condition of freedom rather than a diminution.91 Seneca similarly in the On Providence links Fate and freedom rather than opposing them: I am under no compulsion, I suffer nothing against my will. I do not serve God as a slave but agree with him, all the more since I know that everything proceeds from a law that is fixed and pronounced for all time. The Fates lead us; it was settled at each person’s hour of birth what length of time remains to him. Cause is linked to cause, and a long sequence of things draws public and private affairs alike with it ... 92

From a Stoic vantage-point, this easy combination of Fate and freedom is entirely logical, for Fate is the expression of divine, cosmic reason, just as individual freedom is found in the purification and fulfilment of human reason. In virtue of their shared nature as reason, the two cannot conflict. Non-Stoics, on the other hand, lacking this ideological background, were free to dissent. It is clear from our sources that they did indeed find in the doctrine of Fate a worrying encroachment on individual autonomy, and that they expressed their concern frequently and forcefully. The modern reader might be tempted to assume that worries focused principally on what we would call the issue of the Freedom of the Will: on the perception that a Fate or Destiny in the Stoic sense made it impossible for an individual to act or choose to act otherwise than he or she actually does, and that this was in objectionable conflict with people’s sense of themselves as free agents, who could always have chosen to act and acted differently. But though such 90

55A-S and 62A-K L-S. SVF 1.527. 92 Seneca Providence 5.6–8; cf. Nat. Quest. 2.35–6, Ep. 107.10–12. 91

130

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

thoughts – obviously – are not wholly alien to the debate that developed around Stoic ideas of Fate in the first two centuries CE, they do not catch its main general emphases accurately.93 The freedom which Stoic ethical teachers like Seneca and Epictetus proclaim is not a freedom of the Will, a freedom of choice and action, but as we have seen, a freedom of rational judgement from the interference of the passions and the ‘seduction of things’. Equally, what non-Stoics most prominently denounce the lack of in the Stoic picture is not ‘freedom’, but responsibility. The most frequently expressed concern is that the Stoic doctrine of Fate, by locating the causal responsibility for our actions not essentially in our choices, but in the unfolding of a pre-ordained rational destiny, removes also our moral responsibility. If good and bad actions are thus not really ours (if we have no ultimate power or authority over them), we cannot properly be praised or blamed for them, and the whole business of moral evaluation, not to mention of morality as a personal project, is threatened with collapse. The concern thus embraces both the moral order as a whole, and our individual authority and integrity as moral agents, owning our own actions, within it. The pervasiveness and familiarity of such worries is brought out by the fact that Lucian can make sport with them in one of his satirical dialogues, the Zeus Refuted, in which a cheeky ‘little Cynic’ (Kyniskos), happily exposes Zeus’ furious inability to give a coherent account of either morality’s relationship to Fate, or his own: KYNISKOS: In that case, Zeus, he [sc. Minos, the judge of the dead] has no business to reward or punish anyone at all. ZEUS: Whyever not? KYNISKOS: Because we human beings don’t do anything voluntarily (hekontes). If what you admitted before is true, that Fate (Moira) is responsible for everything, then we do everything under orders from an inescapable compulsion ... so that if Minos were going to deliver his verdicts justly, he would punish Fate in place of Sisyphus and Destiny instead of Tantalus. What wrong did they do? They were just obeying orders.94

Characteristically, in such discussions, concern over the issue of responsibility is intertwined with another worry, also broadly related to the business of autonomy and integrity, over the use made by Stoics of divination (mantikê) as evidence for Fate and predetermination. This is so not only in Lucian’s sketch, but also in such more philosophically serious discussions as those of the Cynic Oenomaus of Gadara, and the (?) Peripatetic Diogenianus, both quoted by Eusebius in his Preparation for the Gospel, and both apparently dating from the second century CE.95 Diogenianus attacks both the reliance on divination as evidence,96 and the suggestion that humans do not have full authority over their actions – that I do not 93

Bobzien 1998, 314–412. Lucian Zeus Refuted 18. 95 Eusebius Prep. 6.7–8 and 4.3. 96 Prep. 4.3.1–13 = fr. 4 Gercke. 94

Self, Person and Individual

131

act ‘from my own authority’ (apo tês exousias tês emês) and that ‘our wishing and not’ (to hêmas boulêthênai kai mê) is not ‘within our authority’ (autexousion).97 Oenomaus concentrates more single-mindedly on the divination issue.98 But it was not only ownership of one’s own actions that could be felt as threatened by the Stoic approach to destiny and divination. Maximus of Tyre Oration 13 addresses a perceived concern that the possibility of prophecy (resting on the predetermination of future events by destiny) might make the exercise of human foresight (gnômê) superfluous, thus in a different way reducing the effectiveness and worth of the individual human being.99 Given the generally derivative nature of Maximus’ exegeses, this is unlikely to have been a worry confined solely to him. The Stoics acknowledged these concerns, particularly that concerning moral responsibility, but responded that they were groundless. Properly understood, Fate – the ‘chain of causes’ extending backwards and forwards in time from any given event – did not remove the individual’s ownership of, and thus responsibility for, his or her own actions. The classic statement of this ‘compatibilist’ position was that of Chrysippus, who appealed to the analogy of a cylinder rolling down a slope as a result of having been pushed. The reason the cylinder moves is because it has been pushed, but the reason that it rolls (as opposed to moving with some other kind of motion) is that it is a cylinder rather than, say, a cube; that is, its specific motion depends on its own internal structure. Similarly, all human actions are ‘pushed’ by Fate (an antecedent chain of causes), but come out in precisely the way they do because of the particular inner structure of the agent (as a more or less perfectly rational being, acting as a result of his or her assent to an impression, given in accordance with his or her more or less perfect rationality). The chain of causes passes through the individual’s specific constitution, and is thus firmly enough his or hers to be legitimately open to praise or blame.100 This answer of Chrysippus’ was a durable one. It was reported by Cicero in the first century BCE, and was still being repeated by Aulus Gellius in the second CE – evidence both of the continuing life of this topic of concern, and of the sense that Chrysippus continued to provide the best case that could be made in defence of the Stoic position on Fate and responsibility. But it is also clear that the argument did not stand still at every level. Continued criticism among professional philosophoi both sharpened the edge of anti-Stoic attack on Chrysippean compatibilism, and refined its reassertion by successive generations of Stoic defenders. A particularly revealing document in this respect is Alexander of Aphrodisias’ On Fate, composed perhaps in the early years of the third century CE, which shows both Peripatetics and Stoics, while still remaining broadly within the traditional terms of reference of the debate, altering some of the emphases and clarifying certain key concepts, in ways which bring it at least a little closer to modern formulations

97

Prep. 6.8.25–38 = fr. 2 Gercke. Prep. 6.7.1–42 = fr. 16 Hammerstaedt. 99 Trapp 1997a, 115–24; Soury 1942, 39–56. 100 Gellius Attic Nights 7.2.6–13 and Cicero Fate 39–43 (SVF 2.1000 and 974, 62C-D L-S); discussion by Bobzien 1998, 234–329 and Sharples 1996, 73–8. 98

132

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

of the issue of freedom and determinism. Alexander is to be found reformulating a Peripatetic, libertarian notion of ‘what depends on us’ (to eph’ hêmin) and of the power of choice to act or not to act, independently of the causation of Fate. His Stoic opponents, among whom the first/second-century CE Philopator may have been particularly prominent, for their part refine their own rival concept of the eph’ hêmin, and of the proper way to assert the causal responsibility of Fate for all events.101 The issue under debate is still not that of Free Will and determinism in the modern sense; but just as we have seen that in the first and second centuries CE shifts in the terms of the discussion opened the way for the subsequent articulation of the Augustinian concept of Will, so the continuing discussion between Stoics and others is gradually creating the enabling conditions for the emergence of Free Will as the key focal point for debate. Those who found the Stoic compatibilist defence unconvincing had of course to adopt some alternative model of the operations of Fate, and of human causal responsibility for actions. The most complex response – and also that most prominent in our period – was that of the Platonists, who wished to assign what they felt to be a more solidly respectable role to human causal agency, while at the same time retaining divinely ordained, rational Fate as a dominant force in the cosmos as a whole. The various different ways in which they sought to do this on the basis of what they could extract from (read into) Plato’s dialogues, may be seen in chapter 26 of Alcinous’ Didaskalikos, Book 1 chapter 12 of Apuleius’ On Plato, the pseudo-Plutarchan On Fate (Moralia 568b–574f), and Orations 5, 13 and 41 of Maximus of Tyre.102 What these accounts have in common, for all the (quite large) divergences in detail between them, is the conviction that the human soul is an autonomous originator of action in a much stronger sense than that envisaged by the Stoics. For them, unfated choice is exercised repeatedly throughout an embodied life,103 and in an especially weighty form in that antenatal moment, remembered from the myth of Plato’s Republic, at which the soul chooses its next life.104 Epicureans, of course, could simply reject the postulate of a provident, controlling divine intelligence, thus removing at a stroke the main source of the problem. But this notoriously carried away too much for Platonist, Peripatetic, or conventional religious sentiment, let alone for the Stoics; and, equally notoriously, problems over ownership of human action arose for them in a different form. Atomism threatened to dissolve autonomy and responsibility not into the working out of Fate but into the blindly and rigidly mechanistic motions of the atoms, and this threat had to be countered by the much derided doctrine of the atomic swerve,

101

Bobzien 1998, 358–412; for critical comments on some aspects of her presentation, see Sharples 2005b. 102 See Dillon 1977, 208–11, 294–8, 320–6 and 1993, 160–4; Soury 1942, esp. 39–56; Trapp 1997a, 115–24. 103 Ps.-Plutarch On Fate 571c-e, Apuleius On Plato 1.12.206, Maximus Orr. 41.4, 13.2, 13.8–9, Alcinous Didask. 26.2. 104 Alcinous Didask. 26.1, echoing Plato Rep. 617e (as also Maximus Or. 41.5).

Self, Person and Individual

133

however precisely it is to be understood.105 This is not, however, an area of doctrine discussed in our surviving Imperial-period sources. We may assume, but not prove, that the Epicurean approach both in the criticism of rival views, and in the assertion of their own doctrines of responsibility and human action, continued to be what it had been in the days of Cicero, Lucretius and Philodemus. If so, then it was only Cynics and Pyrrhonists who could enjoy the luxury of deriding everyone else’s high-flown fantasies without having to worry about intellectual difficulties of their own in the same area. For present purposes, the variation of ideas about the nature and scope of human autonomy, and the reasons for dissatisfaction with this or that doctrinal position, are less important than the simple existence of the debate. The issue of autonomy, of ensuring that you had a concept of action and its circumstances that preserved the individual’s ownership of his or her own acts, clearly mattered deeply to thinking people of whatever doctrinal persuasion. In this way, if not in others, independence and individualism were philosophical values of the age. Afterword As promised at the beginning of the chapter, no simple picture of Imperial-period theories of the self emerges from this discussion. Many questions relevant from one angle or another to selfhood and identity were evidently on the agenda for thinkers of the time, and they had a range of languages and frames of reference with which to approach them: the issue of who or what each one of us really is, in the context of larger ideas about the structure of reality, and about the constitutions and hierarchy of living beings; the question of what is implicated in the process of discovering one’s own true identity, and following through the personal consequences of that discovery; the problem of the degree of causal and moral effectiveness that can be accorded to the individual as an actor in the world. None of these were new topics of concern; all were inherited from the fourth century and the Hellenistic period. But it is evident that they still continued to be the subject of vigorous debate. In the course of the continuing discussion, the terms of reference can be seen here and there to shift, in ways that point suggestively forward to still later developments, some of which have come to be seen as very important indeed to the intellectual history of the West. As already suggested, there was no single central core of concern, no ‘problematics of the Self’ in a modern sense, to pull all the various strands of thought together in the early centuries CE. Equally, approaches to the question of the real person, the being within the visible casing, have turned out to be remarkably indifferent to the modern urge to set individuality, in the sense of unique variation, at the centre of the story. But this might well be thought to make Imperial-period discussion more rather than less interesting.

105

Sharples 1996, 64–5, with further references.

Chapter 5

Self and Others So far in this study, the focus has been on the individual seeker after virtue and happiness, whether from the point of view of his inner constitution, or that of the exercises and processes he was required to undergo in pursuit of his goal. This is an emphasis that arises directly from the subject matter. The aim of philosophia was, after all, formulated time and again in the Imperial period in terms of individual fulfilment (eudaimonia), whether by the strengthening and perfection of reason, or via the direct cultivation of the highest attainable degree of physical and mental calm. But from a modern viewpoint, it is an emphasis that raises an urgent question. It goes without saying that the individual ethical quest is not one that can be pursued in splendid isolation. Even if it is, at heart, a personal project, it has to be conducted in the midst of a social setting, and in interaction with other people. Modern systems of ethical thought, indeed, take this as the central datum. Yet the ancient emphasis on the cultivation of character and the pursuit of personal fulfilment, while not denying the social context of philosophical aspiration, seems in danger of giving it too little weight. It thus becomes all the more important to ask where other people and their interests fitted into the ethical schemes of the Imperial period. Were they taken to be secondary and peripheral, as the emphasis on the individual quest for fulfilment might suggest? Or were they in fact accorded greater weight than first impressions and a selective concentration on what is distinctive of the ethical thinking of the period make visible? At least for systems based on the cultivation of reason, it might at first glance seem that there is a quick and simple answer to these worries. The virtue that comes with perfected reason, and constitutes happiness, can be analysed into four constituent ‘parts’, wisdom (phronêsis, sapientia), self-control (sophrosynê, continentia), courage (andreia, fortitudo) and justice (dikaiosynê, iustitia). Of these, two or perhaps three – certainly wisdom and self-control, perhaps also courage – may be personal, internal matters; but does not the fourth, justice, clearly refer outwards to the proper treatment by the individual of those around? If, then, individual fulfilment requires the cultivation of justice, and justice requires respectful consideration of the interests of others, then the interests of others are clearly accounted for and valued in this style of ethical thinking. But this is too neat and quick an answer, for several reasons. Not of course a new question for the Imperial period. It was brought on by the decisive ‘turn within’ executed by Plato and confirmed by Aristotle in the fourth century BCE, which made virtue and happiness the key terms in ethical discourse and defined them primarily in terms of states of character rather than externally observable conduct.



Self and Others

135

In the first place, it was not agreed on all sides that justice was primarily a matter of externals. Platonists had inherited their founder’s famously revisionary definition, according to which justice was in the first instance a question of the internal structure and balance of the soul. This definition is repeated straight, with no reference to conduct, by Alcinous in the Didaskalikos, even if his fellow Platonist Apuleius, in his On Plato, gives equal weight to the internal and external aspects of the virtue. Secondly, even if justice is defined primarily in terms of behaviour towards others, the value that is thus conferred on others’ interests may still seem distant and derivative. Are others in fact only important as the raw material on which the personal virtue of justice is to be exercised, that is to say a mere means by which the individual can strengthen his or her own hold on virtue and happiness, or have they some independent value and claim to consideration? And if some independent value is to be attributed to them, is it to attach universally, irrespective of particular relationships? Or are the interests of just some categories of other (family, friends, fellow citizens – or fellow philosophoi) legitimately to be privileged? This is not, moreover, an issue solely for reason-centred systems. The same questions arise, with even greater force, over Epicureanism, in which virtue itself has an instrumental rather than a constitutive relation to happiness, and concern for the interests of others might consequently seem even more incidental to the main aims of ethics and philosophia. A more detailed and wider-ranging examination is called for. The Stoics Appropriation and benevolence The most substantial and discussable body of thinking in this area is provided – as so often – by the Stoics, who treated the question of relations to others both on the level of basic principle, and on that of detailed practical precept. At the practical level, dealings with others are extensively and meticulously legislated for in Stoicism in the doctrine of kathêkonta: the ‘proper functions’ or ‘appropriate actions’ that are objectively right for a human being in virtue of his or her identity as a rational creature, and of the other capacities and roles with which she or he is born, or which are acquired in the course of growth into participation in the structures and institutions of adult society. Though they are by no means confined to other-regarding action, these ‘proper functions’ are nevertheless very largely composed of them: honouring parents, brothers and country, for instance, spending time with friends and treating them sympathetically, or returning a deposit. Plato Rep. 432a–444a; cf. e.g. Annas 1981, 153–61. Alcin. Didask. 29.3; Apul. On Plato 2.7.229 (foras spectat et est fida speculatrix utilitatis alienae).  Seneca scornfully characterizes the Epicureans in On Clemency 1.3.2 as illos ... quorum omnia dicta factaque ad utilitates suas spectant – ‘those whose every word and deed looks to their own interest’.  See above, 42–5; and 59A-Q L-S.  Diog. Laert. 7.108, Cic. On Ends 3.59.  

136

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

The principal surviving source for this aspect of Stoic thinking is a pre-Imperial text, Cicero’s On Duties, based (though just how closely is a matter for dispute) on the Peri kathêkontôn of Panaetius. Other works under the same title are attested for Zeno, Cleanthes, Sphaerus, Chrysippus, Hecato, Posidonius, Antipater of Tyre, and Marcus Brutus in the Hellenistic period, and (perhaps) Nicostratus and Hierocles in the first two centuries CE. In our period, none of the texts now surviving expounds the theory as a whole, or directly problematizes any of its aspects. Arrian’s Epictetus, however, clearly assumes knowledge of it and relies on it as the background to a number of his declarations. His most direct approach comes in Discourses 2.10, under the title ‘How appropriate actions can be discovered from names’, in which he briskly surveys the proper functions that attach to anyone in virtue of his identities as a human being, a citizen and part of the Universe, a son, a brother, a town-councillor, a young man, an old man and a father,10 and how these proper functions are infringed by various failings (ranging from taking the passive role in same-sex intercourse, via adultery, to subjection to the passions of anger and fear). But it is also notable how casually he can throw in the term kathêkon as he defines the scope of the second of his three topoi (subject areas) of ethics in Discourses 3.2.2, as ‘about impulse and aversion and in a word (haplôs) about the kathêkon’. Seneca, for his part, explores corners of the territory of kathêkonta in both On Benefits and On Clemency, though without in either case explicitly relating his topic of the moment to the full theory.11 Both texts deal, very obviously, with right behaviour towards others, and On Benefits in particular does so in painstakingly practical detail.12 At the very least, it is clear that whatever the underlying understanding of the importance of behaviour towards others, it remained very much the philosopher’s proper task to analyse and legislate for it in the Stoicism of the Imperial period.

 See Dyck 1996, 17–29 for a recent brief discussion of the relationship; at greater length, Lefèvre 2001, with rev. by Powell, BMCR 2002.08.40.  SVF 1.41 = Diog. Laert. 7.4; SVF 1.481 = D.L. 7.174; SVF 1.620 = D.L. 7.177; (e.g.) SVF 3.752 = Sextus Against the Professors 11.194; Cic. On Duties 2.63 etc; Posidonius frr. 39–40 E-K = D.L. 7.124 and 129; Cic. On Duties 2.86 (by inference); Sen. Ep. 95.45.  Hierocles, if the fragments quoted by Stobaeus (in Flor. 4.22, 24 and 25) come from a work Peri kathêkontos, rather than from the Elements of Ethics, or from several small treatises with the same titles as Stobaeus’ lemmata: On Marriage, On Children, How to Treat Parents, etc. Nicostratus (Flor. 2.22–3) with the same proviso, and if he is the second-century Platonist (Dillon 1977, 233–6) rather than another individual of the same name. 10 The relation of this to persona theory, as reported by Cicero in On Duties, is not wholly clear. E. begins with roles that any male human must sustain, simply in virtue of his existence (human being, citizen of the universe, son), and moves on to those he may or may not have, depending on chance and choice (brother, councillor, old man), but without explicitly categorizing them into sets, or using the terminology of personae. 11 Clem. relates to the proper functions of a particular class of person, the ruler, and survives only in truncated form. 12 Cf. the characterization in OCD3: ‘often dry, but informative about the Roman social code’. For more detailed discussion of the contents, see Griffin 2000, 545–51.

Self and Others

137

But the very meticulousness of Seneca’s and Epictetus’ discussions of proper behaviour towards others encourages reflection also on the spirit in which they suggest such behaviour should be undertaken, and the larger context that makes sense of it. It is immediately striking how very firmly both of them insist that the proper treatment of others is necessarily beneficent, and should be grounded in an attitude of benevolence on the part of the agent; and how easily they move from talking of proper functions to propositions about human solidarity. When Epictetus is made in Discourses 2.10 to specify just what it is that is damaged or lost when proper functions are not observed, it is not only personal dignity (katastolê) and self-mastery (enkrateia) that he claims will be in jeopardy, but also gentleness (hêmerotês) and one’s status as ‘a human, a tame and sociable creature’ (anthrôpou, hêmerou zôou kai koinônikou).13 Seneca in On Benefits defines a beneficium as ‘a benevolent action that both confers and derives joy from conferring it, inclined to what it does and ready for it of its own accord’, and praises beneficia collectively as ‘the thing which more than any other binds human society together’.14 In On Clemency, while admitting that the merits of clemency are acknowledged even by self-centred, hedonistic Epicureans, he maintains that they are especially dear to the Stoics, with their belief that man is ‘a sociable animal born for the common good’ (sociale animal communi bono genitum) and their claim to be ‘the most benign, gentle and philanthropic of all the philosophical sects, and the most attentive to the common good’ (nulla secta benignior leniorque est, nulla amantior hominum et communis boni attentior).15 Comments such as these reveal a crucial underlying truth. Stoic thinking about the treatment of others, whether seen from the point of view of proper functions, or that of benevolence and human solidarity, is intimately bound up with their ideas about Nature – both human and universal. For them, there is something not only about how human beings are (or should be, if they develop as they are naturally equipped to), but also about the larger world-order of which they are part, that makes not only a particular way of structuring their own inner lives, but also a particular way of feeling and acting towards others, objectively right for them. And the key, as always with the Stoics, is Reason. We have already seen how the Stoics envisaged the moral and intellectual development of the individual in terms of changing ‘appropriations’ (oikeiôseis), in which the initial, animal-like sense that what ‘belongs’ to you is yourself, and your material survival and flourishing, is replaced, with the onset of reason in adolescence, with more enlightened awareness. What comes to seem ‘home ground’ for the rational individual is precisely the development of her or himself as a rational being, in the continued choice of natural advantages, but with real value now attaching to the making of the choices and the psychology of the chooser, not to the objects chosen (which come correspondingly to be seen not as goods but as ‘preferred indifferents’). What now needs to be added is that this is not the only change of focus involved in Disc. of Epict. 2.10.14, 2.10.18, 2.10.15. Ben. 1.6.1, 1.4.2. 15 Clem. 1.3.2, 2.5.3. See also On Leisure 1.4, for the Stoic insistence that active beneficence is a lifelong human commitment: usque ad ultimam vitae finem in actu erimus, non desinemus communi bono operam dare, adiuvare singulos, opem ferre etiam inimicis senili manu. 13 14

138

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

the development of reason and the growth to maturity. Besides turning inwards to the increasingly more conscientious, aware and consistent selection of advantages (or, from another point of view, the more consistent and fully contextualized performance of kathêkonta), developing oikeiôsis continues to look outwards as well; but it looks now not to material objects, but to people – other beings of the same kind. In this aspect, increasingly secure rationality is shown in coming to see that the relevant sameness of kind embraces not just particular groups of humans (those conventionally regarded as close, such as family or household), but the whole order of fellow reasoning beings. So it is that the account of oikeiôsis given by the second-century Stoic Hierocles, in his Elements of Ethics,16 though it may begin with the individualistic ‘appropriation’ of every creature to its own constitution, founded on basic self-perception, also includes two further forms: an acquisitive appropriation to external objects, and a social appropriation to other people, based on family affection.17 Damage to the papyrus on which the Elements is preserved prevents us from seeing exactly how Hierocles defines the relationship between the three, but it is evident that he moves quickly from individualistic to social oikeiôsis. The same impression of a seamless progression from concern with self to concern with society at large is also given by a celebrated passage preserved in Stobaeus’ Florilegium, which seems to come from another of Hierocles’ works. Beginning with the individual’s concern for his own body and material needs, Hierocles ends up with the appropriation of the individual to the whole of the rest of humanity: Each one of us is as it were entirely surrounded by many circles, some smaller, others larger, some enclosing and some enclosed, according to their different and unequal conditions relative to each other. The first and nearest circle is the one which a person has drawn around his own mind as, so to speak, its centre. This circle contains the body and anything taken on for the sake of the body; it is roughly speaking the smallest circle, and almost touches the centre itself. The second one after this, further removed from the centre, but enclosing the first circle has parents, siblings, wife, and children assigned to it. The third one has in it uncles and aunts, grandparents, nephews, nieces and cousins. After that comes the one containing his remaining relatives, and this is followed by the circle of members of the same deme, then the circle of members of the same tribe (phylê), next that of fellow citizens, and then in the same way the circle of people from neighbouring towns, and the circle of fellow-countrymen. The outermost and largest circle, which encompasses all the rest, is that of the whole human race. Once these have all been surveyed, it is the task of the well strung individual,18 in his proper treatment of each group, to draw the circles together somehow as if towards the centre, and to keep zealously transferring those from the enclosing circles into the enclosed ones ... It is incumbent on us to respect people from the third circle as if they were those from the second, and again to respect our other relatives as if they were those from the third circle. The greater distance in blood will remove something from our good See above, 42 and 110–14. Labelled by Hierocles as eunoêtikê, hairetikê and sterktikê/sungenikê: Elements, col. 9.4–10. 18 Entetamenon, with his soul in a good state of pneumatic tension; cf. 47J-M and 61C L-S. 16 17

Self and Others

139

will, but we must nevertheless try hard to assimilate them. The point of proper balance will be reached if, through our own purposeful effort, we cut down the distance of our relationship with each category of person. The main procedure for this has been stated. But we should do more, calling cousins brothers, and uncles and aunts, fathers and mothers ... For this mode of address would be no weak indication of our existing dedication to each group of them, and at the same time it would also stimulate us to greater efforts in our project of (so to speak) drawing the circles together.19

Both in his choice of imagery, and in the way he associates his analysis with immediate practical advice, Hierocles makes his point in a particularly striking way. But this social dimension to oikeiôsis, and to Stoic thinking more generally, is not an innovation of the Imperial period, though it may perhaps have gained extra prominence then. When Cicero expounds Stoic ethics through the mouth of Cato in Book 3 of On Ends, summarizing the whole Hellenistic heritage from the vantage-point of firstcentury Rome, the same emphasis is present. Cato begins (3.16) with the appropriation of every living creature to itself. But in 3.62ff., with the air of one expounding an equally fundamental aspect of the Stoic view of humanity, he continues: They (sc. the Stoics)20 think it is relevant that the love of parents for their offspring should be understood as natural; and parental affection is the source to which we trace the origin of the association of the human race into communities ... From this it comes about that the mutual attraction which unites human beings among themselves is also a fact of nature. In accordance with this, it is right that, precisely because he is human, one human being should not regard another as foreign to him ... We are naturally suited to form unions, societies and states.

But this was a side to Stoic thinking that had been under attack for a long time too. Sceptical critics doubted that the egotism of a primary appropriation of each creature to itself, and the altruism of a social appropriation to humanity at large, could be as easily and harmoniously combined as the Stoics seemed to think. Surely, they urged, the demands of the two could come into conflict in suitable circumstances; and if they should, it was far from clear that Stoic theory provided any means to resolve the conflict in a satisfactory manner. A notorious test case, in circulation already by the end of the second century BCE, asked what Stoicism dictated was the right course of action if, after a shipwreck, two Sages should be left clinging to a piece of wreckage incapable of supporting more than one of them. Should appropriation to self and self-preservation, or appropriation to a (high-grade, worthy) fellow human being prevail?21 Hierocles, quoted in Stobaeus Flor. 4.27.23, 4.671.3–673.18 W (= 57G L-S). ‘Those whose system of thought (ratio) I endorse’, 3.16. 21 Cic. Duties 3.89–91, referring to Book 6 of Hecato’s Peri kathêkontôn. Hecato’s answer on behalf of Stoic theory – that one Sage will give way to the other, if it is more important to that other, or to the state, that he should stay alive – fails to provide a watertight solution (cf. Inwood 1984, 182). The shipwreck question is wittily taken up by Michael Frayn in his 1965 novel The Tin Men, with experimental ethical computers (on life-rafts in a laboratory pool) substituted for Sages. 19 20

140

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

The same line of criticism, but this time directly related to the concept of oikeiôsis, crops up also in the Anonymous Theaetetus Commentary, which may date from the late first century BCE or the early first century CE.22 Social oikeiôsis, the commentator observes, is crucially important, because it is the basis on which the Stoics found their account of justice.23 But it can only provide that foundation if appropriation to all other humans, even the most distant, is as strong as appropriation to yourself (otherwise, there would be a tendency to favour oneself and those close to you, which would be incompatible with the impartiality needed for justice). A whole range of observations, from our feelings about different parts of our bodies to the behaviour of shipwrecked mariners on flotsam (again), shows that appropriation in fact varies unavoidably in intensity between nearer and further objects. And this in turn means that Stoic theory cannot give a sufficiently strong account of justice.24 A number of modern scholars have endorsed these criticisms, arguing that the Stoics never really sorted out the relationship between their two forms of oikeiôsis, and so never resolved the tension between egotism and altruism in their ethical thinking.25 From this vantage-point, Hierocles’ bland progress through the concentric circles from one’s own body to the most distant member of humanity, and Seneca’s and Epictetus’ confidence in the naturalness of benevolence and sociability may do credit to their optimism and good nature, but they betray a lamentable failure to acknowledge and respond to a serious problem for Stoic thinking, of which they really ought to have been aware. If so, this is a very striking blind spot indeed in our Imperial-period Stoics, given the emphasis that some of them lay on the claim that consulting your own interests by developing your nature towards perfection is inescapably bound up with consulting the interests of others. The point is most confidently made by Epictetus in Discourses 1.19.11–15: This is not selfishness, this is the nature of the animal: he does everything for his own sake. For even the sun does everything for its own sake, and so, for that matter, does Zeus. But when Zeus wishes to be ‘Giver of rain’, and ‘Giver of fruits’, and ‘Father of gods and men’, you can see that he cannot accomplish these acts or earn these epithets except by consulting the common interest. And, in general, Zeus has so constituted the nature of the rational animal that he can attain none of his proper goods without contributing to the common interest. And so it ceases to be anti-social to do everything for one’s own sake. Well, what did you expect? And how can there any longer be one and the same principle for all beings: namely, appropriation to themselves?26

22 For this dating range, see Tarrant 1983 and Sedley 1997, 116–18. The papyrus on which the text is preserved dates from around 150 CE. 23 Compare SVF 1.197 = Porph. Abstinence 3.19, ‘Zeno’s school posit oikeiôsis as the origin (archê) of justice.’ 24 Anon. Tht. Comm. 5.18–6.31 (57H L-S) and 7.14–20; cf. Inwood 1984, 182–3. 25 Esp. Inwood 1984, 179–83. 26 Tr. Dobbin (adapted); see also Epictetus’ equally emphatic words in Disc. 2.22.15–21.

Self and Others

141

Must we really conclude that this confident assertion not of the mere possibility but the selfish necessity of altruism, for self-development, rests on wilful blindness to problems long exposed by Stoicism’s critics? It is true that no surviving Stoic source of any period takes the issue on directly, explaining just how and why social feeling in the long run logically can over-ride (or collaborate benignly) with the primary appropriation to self. However, it may not be impossible to construct a plausible account on their behalf, from attested materials; one which, indeed, it may be plausible to suppose they had in mind themselves, and perhaps even articulated in works now lost. Admittedly, such an account will have to lean hard on the Stoic concept of Nature, and of the moral development of human beings; but if this is a weakness, it is at least a weakness for the Stoic system as a whole, not just for their theory of justice and altruism.27 A crucial starting-point for this suggested rationale is the proposition that – contrary to first appearances – it is not the case that, for the Stoics, appropriation to others begins only with the onset of reason, that is, substantially after appropriation to oneself; it is only an accident of exposition that makes it seem that this was the Stoic view. As both Chrysippus and (carefully read) Cicero’s Cato make clear, there is another sub- or pre-rational appropriation, which is quite as basic as that of the individual to self and body, but is other-related.28 Awkwardly, this is actually described as the appropriation of parents to their offspring, which (although shared with non-rational animals) seems an unlikely candidate for presence in new-born and pre-rational children (a problem that Plutarch duly has fun with in his Stoic Self-contradictions).29 But suppose that this appropriation really can be said to be present already in the very young, as a potential presaged by their rapidly manifested reciprocal closeness to parents and siblings.30 In that case, there would be an observable natural basis for consideration for others, going back all but as far in the individual’s life-history as self-concern; it would be this basis that the developing familial and social sense of children builds on, and that supervening reason can subsequently transform into a progressively more and more comprehensive and even-handed concern for fellow humans. Then, once reason is in play, other aspects of Stoic thinking can be brought into operation. The widening of sympathies could be said to advance as it does not just because reason shows the individual that others (eventually, all others) are similar to herself and to those she has instinctively cared for from the start. For reason also reveals, with growing clarity and detail of articulation, the grand structure of the For this line of thought, see especially Reydams-Schils 2002, following in the footsteps of Annas 1993. 28 Chrysippus SVF 3.179 = 57E L-S = Plut. Stoic Self-contrad. 1038b; Cic. On Ends 3.62 = 57F L-S. 29 Loc. cit. n. 28. 30 This is close to what Cicero in Book 5 of On Ends makes Piso give as the thinking of Antiochus (esp. 5.42–3), and what is given as Peripatetic doctrine in the summary of Peripatetic ethics in Book 2 of Stobaeus’ (Flor. 2.7.13–26, 2.116.19–152.25 W). But why should not this Antiochan line be something he had taken over from one or another existing Stoic source, or something that was subsequently taken into Stoicism from him? 27

142

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

Universe, as itself an essentially rational structure (and process), filled with other rational beings, and directed by a supreme divine Reason identical with its organizing principle. In this structure, the relation of all subordinate reasoning beings to the controlling Reason comes to be appreciated as the same, and so also their relation to each other. In terms of one image, they come to be seen as fellow-citizens of the same state, or fellow-subjects of the same provident and beneficent monarch. But an alternative image makes the connection with the doctrine of appropriation more neatly. The whole Universe is a common household (oikos) of reasoning beings, so all are appropriated (oikeioi) to each other.31 In this account, as we have already seen with the Stoic story of the individual’s developing sense of his own proper goals, the endpoint may seem idealistic in the extreme, but the starting-point lies with instinctive behaviour manifestly shared between young humans and animals; and start and finish are linked by a human nature that does not stand still, but develops over time. Striking examples of what the Stoics’ sense of obligation to other human beings might involve in practice can be found, perhaps above all, in the discourses of Epictetus. Arrian’s description in Discourses 1.11 of how he was visited by an official who admitted to having been unable to stay in his own house, from distress and grief, when his young daughter was dangerously ill, has already been mentioned. In a gentle but firm dialectical exchange (rightly characterized by Long as Socratic),32 Epictetus is shown bringing the man to agree that such a way of behaving was neither natural nor in accord with family affection (to philostorgon), and setting him to work to achieve a firmer and more constructive control over his wayward impressions in future.33 Or again, in Discourses 1.18, he is to be found arguing, once more in Socratic vein, that rather than being angry with those who commit criminal acts against us, we should instruct them in the error of their ways, or at least not make it easy for them to continue in error by flaunting valuable and easily purloined possessions, and so putting temptations in their way.34 One sees here something of the force behind Seneca’s claim that the Stoics are the most benign and gentle of all the philosophical haireseis.35 For in cases such as these Epictetus combines exegesis of the Stoic theory behind beneficent action with its practical application in his own behaviour. Benevolence qualified? Yet Seneca’s remark in fact comes in the course of a rejection of the opinion – which he admits to be widespread, even if ill-informed – that Stoicism is really a harsh and unfeeling creed, ill-suited to the creation of any sympathetic human community.36 This is a perspective that demands consideration, all the more so as it is one that is often articulated by modern commentators too. SVF 2.528–9, 638; cf. Max. Tyr. Or. 13.6. Long 2002, 77–9. 33 See above, 84–6, for the topic of control of impressions. 34 Arrian, Disc. of Epict. 1.18.1–4, 13–16. 35 Clem. 2.5.3. 36 Clem. 2.5.1–5; see also Epp. 99.26 and 117.7. 31 32

Self and Others

143

The particular issue that Seneca is discussing in the passage in question is pity (misericordia; eleos), which is indeed a good one for bringing out just what it is that has so often made non-Stoics uneasy. For, though generally regarded as a laudable quality, and a central constituent of a sympathetic and philanthropic character, pity was sternly forbidden to the good Stoic. In the Stoic perspective, pity is a passion (a sub-form of grief), a sickness of mind that both disturbs the individual’s inner tranquillity and clouds his judgement, making it more difficult for him to plan and act effectively in the outside world. In practical terms, the good Stoic will, as Seneca insists, do everything for others that someone feeling pity for them will (help shipwrecked sailors, give to the poor, bury the dead), but he will do it ‘with calm mind, and a countenance under his own control’ (tranquilla mente, voltu suo).37 Epictetus too urges the elimination of such judgements on others as ‘He is done for’ or ‘Poor man, he has no way of getting food’, and the mental disturbance that goes with them, even as he urges the continuation of practically benevolent action.38 Such dispassion is apt to make the outside observer feel that something is missing, or even that something has been taken away from the considerateness of the action performed by one person for another. But the problem of Stoic coolness (even coldness) spreads beyond the single case of pity, to any and every dealing with others. As already noted, Epictetus notoriously recommends an exercise in mental reservation in which, at the moment of kissing those dearest to us, we should remind ourselves that they may (will) soon die, and at the moment of meeting a friend, we should reflect that this may be the last time of seeing him.39 Seneca allows tears over the death of a son, but only if they fall without conscious consent (nolentibus nobis).40 From the Stoic point of view, such attitudes and forms of self-control make perfect sense, given their doctrines of virtue, value and providence.41 The individual must resist the pernicious slide into the passions, in the interests of his own happiness, and does not expect anyone else to risk their tranquillity in this way for his sake either. The misfortunes others lament, and expect sympathy on the strength of, he knows (and feels) not to be ills at all, merely experiences of ‘dispreferred indifferents’, which (should) have no real impact on anyone’s happiness. External events, such as the location or the very existence of other people (even the closest) are beyond the individual’s control, so irrelevant to his happiness. But they are determined by a supremely provident divine reason, so however they fall out must have been for the best, and is to be gladly accepted. In being thus cool or cold to others, the Stoic applies to them the same thinking as he applies to himself, and as he expects them to apply to him; he points the way by example to a happier form of existence for all.42 But, because Stoicism allows the distinction Clem. 2.6.2. Disc. 3.317–19. 39 Disc. 3.24.84. 40 Ep. 99.15–21. Tears are permissible as a purely physical ‘first movement’, not assented to by the mind: see above, 80–2. 41 See above, 30–6, 65–70 and 129–33. 42 Cf. Cicero’s Cato in On Ends 3.65: ‘We are naturally impelled to want to benefit as many as possible, especially by teaching and handing on the principles of wisdom’ (impellimur natura ut prodesse velimus quam plurimis in primisque docendo rationibusque prudentiae tradendo). 37 38

144

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

between preferred and dispreferred indifferents some life- and conduct-guiding force; and because it emphasizes the kinship and inter-connectedness of reasoning beings; in terms of practical action, rather than the thoughts underlying it, there will be no difference to be seen between a Stoic and the warmest-hearted philanthropist. The issue of the adequacy of the Stoics’ feelings towards and valuing of others is thus a trickier one than might at first appear. Two levels to it can be distinguished, one practical and the other to do with underlying attitudes. The first yields a question that is probably unanswerable; the second one that can only be answered subjectively. On the practical level, the question is whether the Stoics’ acceptance of the pursuit of preferred indifferents and the avoidance of dispreferred indifferents, both by each individual for him or herself and on behalf of others, is in fact enough to ground benevolent action indistinguishable from that of well-intentioned non-Stoics. Can it be guaranteed that the underlying reservation, that none of these ‘goods’ and ‘ills’ in fact has any real value, would not in practice, at least in some circumstances, make a difference, and detract from the effectiveness of Stoic action? One would have to identify a Stoic sage, and watch her or him in action over a long period, to have even the beginnings of an answer. The other question, to which only a subjective answer is possible, is this. Is it or is it not enough to be on the receiving end of a Stoic’s (even strenuously) beneficent behaviour, when one knows that he thinks as he does? Does one really feel loved (valued, rescued, helped) if one is loved (etc.) on his mental terms, not any other? The answer ‘no’ may spring rapidly to mind. Is there real human warmth if the Stoic, as he should, accepts one’s humiliation, pain, or death once it has happened as not only not a real ill, but positively for the best (even if he takes all possible practical steps to alleviate one’s condition)? Is there love if the Stoic, as he should, regards your view of your condition as an error he must do all he can to avoid being infected by himself (even if he earnestly wants you to see the world his way, and so, like him, be happy)? But how reasonable a rejection is this? Does in fact either general human solidarity, or warmth in particular relationships, demand more than a Stoic can offer, or not? Peripatetics, Platonists, Epicureans and Cynics Whatever problems there may have been – in antiquity or more recently – with the consistency and theoretical or emotional adequacy of Stoic ideas about right attitudes and behaviour towards others, they undoubtedly constituted the most detailed, ambitious and coherent set of thoughts available. In this area, as in others, Stoic thinking, as developed in the first couple of centuries of the sect’s existence, set an agenda to which all other dogmatic schools of thought had to react, either by rejection (as with the Epicureans) or by assimilation of at least some of its elements (as with Platonists, Peripatetics and Cynics, who were all in various ways reconfiguring older traditions in the light of the new steps taken by the Stoics). In spite of Seneca’s (very obviously partisan) claim that the Stoics take the lead in benevolence and gentleness, there is in fact (not so very surprisingly) a general agreement on the desirability of considerate treatment of others, and a further consensus in favour of relating it

Self and Others

145

both to the demands of justice and to a more diffuse sense of sympathy and kinship. Where the other sects differ is in the degrees of their concern to make a major issue of this question of the relationship between self and others, or to give it a prominent place in the exposition of their ideas about virtue, value and human nature. Peripatetics Next after the Stoics, it is the Peripatetics who have most to say on the subject, and what they have is an interesting blend of assimilation to and divergence from the Stoic position. On the one hand, their founder’s famous insistence that man is a ‘political creature’ and ‘naturally inclined to life in poleis’43 opened the way to an appropriation of the language and at least some of the substance of oikeiôsis-theory, which could be seen as a useful restatement and drawing out of the implications of Aristotelian doctrine rather than a genuinely new development. But on the other side, Aristotle’s equally famous insistence that virtue alone was not fully sufficient for happiness, and bodily and external goods not completely irrelevant to it,44 gave them an emphasis which, while in its own way drawing attention to the importance and value of others, also involved opposition to a central Stoic tenet. Alexander of Aphrodisias, in §19 of his Supplement (Mantissa: 156–9 Bruns), develops the case for supposing that human beings are innately sociable, as part of a series of arguments to establish that justice, too, is something natural.45 But for the combination of this insistence on sociability with the issue of goals and happiness, we have to look to another section of the Supplement, and to Aspasius’ Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics.46 Commenting on Ethics 1.7.1097b6ff., Aspasius is at pains to point out that, when Aristotle speaks of happiness as ‘self-sufficient’ (autarkes), he emphatically does not mean that it can therefore be realized in a solitary life: man is a ‘political and communal creature’ (politikon zôon…kai koinônikon) and cannot isolate himself from regard for parents, children, city and friends; and his happiness cannot be complete if theirs is impaired by misfortune.47 This is more than the simple paraphrase of Aristotle that it might at first seem. By adding the adjective ‘communal’ (‘sociable’, ‘sharing’) to ‘political’, and by looking not just to the good or ill fortune of a man’s relations but to his concern for their fortunes, Aspasius adds important new emphases, touching on just the questions of attitude and connection that are at stake in theories of oikeiôsis, but with a markedly anti-Stoic turn. In the same vein, Alexander in Supplement §20 (159–68 Bruns) tackles the proposition that virtue is not sufficient for happiness directly. Especially relevant is the argument he advances in 162.16–24:

Physei politikon, Nic. Eth. 1.7, 1097b11; zôon physei politikon, Pol. 1.2, 1253a3; but note also the qualification at Nic. Eth. 8.12, 1162a17–18. 44 NE 1.9.1100a4–10.1101a14. 45 This section is discussed in Sharples 2005a. 46 On Aspasius, see Sharples and Alberti 1999; on the Supplement, Sharples 2004a and 2004b. 47 Comm. 16.9–22 Heylbut. 43

146

Philosophy in the Roman Empire Again, if Virtue desires that those things to which man is naturally appropriated (oikeiôtai) should be in a good state, and does not wish them not to be in a good state; and if man is naturally appropriated, just as he is to himself and his limbs and their capacities and their extremes of development, so also to those close to him, his parents, friends, associates and fellow citizens (for he is a social and political creature); then it is clear that the good condition and preservation of these would have some contribution to make to his own proper good and end, as would the good condition and preservation of all that he needs in order secure the preservation of himself and of everything to which he is naturally appropriated.

Like Aspasius, Alexander deploys the idea of man as sociable as well as political to urge the importance of other people, along with inanimate bodily and external goods, to full happiness; but this time, the reference to oikeiôsis, and the concomitant sense of a correction to Stoicism is overt.48 The most argumentatively complex example of this kind of Peripatetic thinking comes, however, in the account of Peripatetic ethics preserved in Book 2 of Stobaeus’ Florilegium, and conventionally attributed to Arius Didymus. In the first section of this summary (2.7.13, 2.228.4–124.3 W), the author undertakes to derive ‘the whole contour (hypographê) of the school’ from their ideas about ‘the selection of things according to nature and the rejection of things contrary to nature’. As rapidly emerges, what he has in view in particular as his explanandum is the distinctively Peripatetic acceptance of the value of bodily and external goods as well as goods of the soul; and his route to his result lies through a Peripateticized version of oikeiôsis doctrine.49 The Peripatetics maintain (he says) that strongly altruistic behaviour on the part of parents demonstrates that among the things choiceworthy (haireta) for their own sake as well as for their usefulness are children. But love of children is inseparably connected with love of ‘parents, siblings, sexual partner, relatives, associates and fellow citizens’, to whom we are naturally appropriated, as ‘man is a sociable creature characterized by mutual affection’ (philallêlon gar einai kai koinônikon zôon ton anthrôpon). And if love of fellow citizens is choiceworthy for itself, so also must love for members of the same race, i.e. for the whole of humanity. The naturalness of this generalized affection is demonstrated by the obvious rightness and attractiveness to all of such altruistic actions as rescuing strangers from mauling by wild animals, or leaving signs to show future travellers along the same parched road where water is to be found.50 Now, if affection for others is choiceworthy for itself, so also is good-will from others, both those one lives with and mankind more generally; and if good-will is choiceworthy, so is praise (as we have an appropriation to those who For further discussion of Supplement §20, see Sharples 2000b. Flor. 2.7.13, 2.118.11–120.20 W. He has already by this time established that, for the Peripatetics, a primary appropriation to self embraces not only soul but also body, and the ‘parts, capacities and exercise’ of both (2.119.1–2); he does not attempt to explain how personal and social oikeiôsis fit together in Peripatetic thinking. 50 The same point about the naturalness of general affection, with similar illustrations, is made by Aspasius in his commentary on Ethics 8.1–2, 1155a3–1156a3, p. 159.27–160.3 Heylbut. 48 49

Self and Others

147

praise us) and good reputation. But praise and good reputation are external goods. Ergo external goods are choiceworthy for themselves. And if external goods are thus choiceworthy, so also a fortiori must those of body and soul be.51 It would be fascinating to know whose thinking lies behind this presentation of Peripatetic thinking: a Stoic, trying to make the sect sound as close as possible to his own, while still respecting its most distinctive ethical tenet; a Peripatetic, borrowing selectively from Stoicism; or someone seeking to harmonize the two positions as far as possible?52 For present purposes, however, the main point is that this passage (dating perhaps from the late first century BCE) joins up with those from Aspasius and Alexander (in the second to third centuries CE) to show the existence throughout the early and high Imperial period of a confident Peripatetic alternative to Stoicism, uniting a strong assertion of the naturalness of human solidarity and the importance of others, with a rejection of Stoic high-mindedness about material goods. It is a combination which escapes at least some part of the unease which arose over the question of Stoic coldness, for the good Peripatetic will secure material goods for others in the conviction that they really are good, and a constituent of happiness. What is less clear, however, is whether this warmer Peripatetic position is in fact, for all its warmth, any less self-regarding in the end than that of the Stoics. The good of others, including their material flourishing, is indeed important to the Peripatetic, but it is important to him as a means to his own happiness rather than theirs, or as an end in itself. Platonists It is rather more difficult to find evidence of a firm and distinctive Platonist position in this area. It is almost as if Stoic and Peripatetic thinking was felt to have exhausted the field, leaving Platonists to reflect and endorse aspects of what the others had to say, without the need to put up any comparably detailed alternative picture of their own. Alcinous in the Didaskalikos is quite remarkably reticent on the topic. In discussing the emotions, he commends pity in passing as a proper and natural ‘tame’ emotion, and an aspect of philanthropia, and condemns ‘joy at the misfortunes of others and hatred of one’s fellow men’ (epicharekakia kai misanthrôpia) as ‘wild’ emotions incapable of existing in an acceptable form.53 But in his treatment of the virtues, justice is defined solely in terms of the internal balance of the soul, with no reference to external action and the treatment of others.54 And, although friendship and the state are of course discussed, there is no general theoretical account of The author goes on to give further arguments bearing on goods of body and soul, in 2.7.13, 2.122.11–124.13 W. 52 In connection with this last possibility, the name of Antiochus naturally springs to mind. There are indeed some close similarities between ‘Stobaeus’’ summary and Cicero’s Piso’s account of Antiochus in Book 5 of On Ends; moreover, a little later in Flor. Book 2, in a passage that may or may not be by the same hand as 2.7.13, there is an echo of Antiochus’ habit of referring to the older Stoics, Platonists and Peripatetics collectively as ‘the ancients’ (tois archaiois, 2.7.15, 2.129.4 W). 53 Didask. 32.4. See above, 72–3, for Alcinous’ analysis of the emotions. 54 Didask. 29.3. 51

148

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

relations with others, or of the weight to be given to their interests in the pursuit of virtue and happiness.55 Apuleius in the On Plato has somewhat more to say, asserting the appropriation of the seeker after the Good not only to himself but to all fellow humans (non modo sibimet intimatum, sed omnibus etiam hominibus) in varying degrees,56 and defining justice not only in terms of the inner balance of the soul but also as ‘the trusty guardian of the interest of others’ and ‘the remedy and medicine that ensures the society and concord of men’.57 But he too offers no general discussion, and makes no issue of the relationship between the individual quest for inner perfection and consideration for the good of others. The general impression is thus that Platonists endorse sociability and benevolence as natural dispositions for human beings, but have no very large place to give such matters in the construction and display of their versions of Platonic theory. This may be because the texts on which they base themselves – Plato’s dialogues – do not offer an obvious basis for development in this direction. That is not to say, however, that there was a complete lack of relevant material in Plato, or that aspects of it were never taken up in later Platonist writing. Maximus of Tyre, who in his programmatic first lecture describes humanity as ‘a herd naturally tame, but made recalcitrant by bad rearing’,58 also devotes a whole discourse to the proposition that reprisal, the returning of one act of injustice by another, is fundamentally misguided. His discussion, though not innocent of Stoicizing elements,59 is firmly based on the Platonic Socrates, above all the Socrates of the Gorgias, Crito and Apology, who both taught and exemplified the lesson that Maximus commends.60 Like Socrates, the good man will not return a wrong for a whole series of reasons: because he knows that the ‘wrongs’ committed against him cannot really harm him; because in doing wrong in return, he would inevitably harm himself most (by worsening his own moral character); and because one act of reprisal will necessarily call forth another, and yet another in return, to everybody’s detriment. Such sentiments are not uniquely characteristic of Platonists; Epictetus (another devoted Socratizer)61 is made to argue a similar position in Discourses 4.5, again taking Socrates as his paradigm.62 But Platonists could claim a special stake in them, and so find here their own particular way of contributing to the stock of arguments in favour of sociability.

See below, 151–2 and 170–1. On Plato 2.2.222: nec pari aut simili modo, verum < ... > unumquemque acceptum esse, dehinc proximis et mox ceteris, qui familiari usu vel notitia iunguntur. 57 On Plato 2.7.229, fida speculatrix utilitatis alienae ... hominum societatis et concordiae remedium atque medicina. 58 Or. 1.3: agelên hêmeron men tên physin, dyspeithê de hypo ponêras trophês; cf. also Or. 35.2. 59 For instance, an insistence on the inalienability of virtue, and the inability of the wicked to inflict real harm on the good; cf. Trapp 1997a, 109–10 with nn. 6 and 10–11. 60 Max. Or. 12, drawing on Crito 49b-d, Gorgias 469b (etc.) and 521 e ff., Apol. 30c. 61 See Long 2002, 67–96. 62 Cf. also Disc. 1.18 and 1.28, and Musonius fr. 10. 55 56

Self and Others

149

Epicureans The Epicureans were, as usual, in a special position of their own, approving as much as anyone (they would claim) of sociability and the benevolent treatment of others, but doing so for their instrumental usefulness in securing and protecting bodily comfort and peace of mind, rather than as the realization of an aspect of human nature – for which of course they were duly excoriated by Platonists, Peripatetics and, especially, Stoics.63 But this position had always been compatible with an earnest desire to benefit humanity at large by opening its eyes to the gospel of Epicurus, which more than any other philosophical programme emphasized the sheer simplicity of becoming truly happy (if only a few perverse prejudices could be seen for what they were).64 The healthy survival of this attitude into the second century CE is amply demonstrated by the case of Diogenes of Oenoanda, who so strikingly converted a standard gesture of civic benefaction (the provision of a public building) into the demonstration of a much warmer and more intimate benevolence. The programmatic introduction to his inscription makes frequent reference to philanthropy and concern for others (including future generations) as unambiguous goods: Seeing these people, therefore, (to take up the point once again) living in this condition, I lamented over their way of life and wept at the waste of their time, and considered that it was the action of a good (chrêstou) man, as far as lies in my power, to those among them endowed with good sense ... Following this course of action rather than engaging in public life, I deliver this message through my inscription as if I were present in person, trying to demonstrate that what is naturally advantageous – pleasure – is the same for one and all. ... Standing now through old age at the sunset of my life, and on the point of casting off from living with a fair song of celebration ... I wanted to aid (boêthein) those of good sense now, before I could be cut off short. If only one or two or three or four or five or six – or as many more than this as you might wish, sir, short of a great many – were in a bad way, I should call on them individually and do all in my power to give them the best advice. But since, as I have already said, the majority are all alike prey to the disease of false opinions, as if in a plague, and their numbers are increasing – one catches the disease from another like sheep because they imitate each other; and because it is right (dikaion) to aid future generations too – they too are ours even if they have not yet come into being – and a philanthropic act (philanthrôpon) to assist strangers in our midst – since, then, the help my treatise can give extends to a larger number of people, I have decided to use this portico to make its saving medicine publicly available ... 65

The languages of civic and philosophical benefaction overlap in Diogenes’ words (philanthrôpia is a marked term in both), but his Epicurean generosity is impressively general as well as reassuringly down to earth. In this introductory discourse, he Seneca Clem. 1.3.2, quoted above, 137; cf. also Ep. 9.8; Arrian Disc. of Epict. 2.20.6–7. On Epicurean propagandizing, see Frischer 1982, Clay 1983, 54–81. 65 Diog. Oen. fr. 2, col. II.5–13 and fr. 3, col. I.1–VI.2; cf. Warren 2000. 63

64

150

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

naturally does not confront the objection that an Epicurean’s benevolence must always be vitiated in principle (and perhaps impaired in practice) by the fact that, however kindly, he is always using other people as a means to his own security and peace of mind. He may or may not have done so in some portion of his ethical treatise, now lost. Either way, he could have answered with the (plausible, if not decisive) claim that this sort of selfishness in fact provides a very strong guarantee of continued good treatment of others: the need for security and resources to fall back on is infinite, so there is never not a good motive to be kind – and extensively kind – to others (inter alia, by making them innocuous Epicureans in their own right). 66 Cynics Warm feelings towards other human beings, and an active desire to assist them, thus emerge as shared possessions of the period, as much part of the ideology of philosophia in general as a distinctive feature of this or that hairesis. What differs is the underlying rationale, the sense of how exactly the relationship between other people’s interests and one’s own was to be understood. The pattern finds yet another variant in Cynicism. Our sources portray Cynic philosophers too, from Diogenes and Crates in the fourth century BCE to Demonax and Peregrinus in the second CE, as motivated by a philanthropic missionary zeal, whether displayed in a tough and acerbic form by a Diogenes or a softer and more jocular mode by a Crates.67 By aggressive shock tactics or by humour, Cynics were presented as aiming to shake ordinary people out of their unthinking acceptance of conventional ways and values, and to show them how simply a virtuous and happy life could be led. Even more than was the case with the other sects, Cynic philanthropy seems in general to have been thought of as fulfilling itself in thus passing on the secret of happiness, rather than also in helping actively to satisfy more everyday needs. Concrete acts of generous assistance were not, however, ruled out, provided that there was a striking lesson to be taught by them: as with Crates’ (alleged) donation of his wealth to the poor,68 and (on one interpretation, at least) the decision of Seneca’s mentor Demetrius to defend the Stoic P. Egnatius Celer in court in 70 CE, in spite of the latter’s manifest villainy.69 Special issues Friendship The philosophers’ shared endorsement of general benevolence as a natural human characteristic did not, however, mean that they were not interested also in more 66 Cf. Epic. Vatican Sayings 21: ‘every friendship is choiceworthy for its own sake, though it originates in the benefits it can confer on us’. See further 150–5, 164–5 below. 67 E.g. Arrian Disc. of Epict. 3.24.64, Diog. Laert. 6.87–8, Julian Or. 6.201bc, Lucian Demonax 21; see Moles 1983b, 111–16. 68 Diog. Laert. loc. cit. n. 67. 69 Tacitus Hist. 4.10 and 40, as interpreted by Moles 1983b.

Self and Others

151

specific kinds of relationship and affection. Three such kinds of relationship above all stand out as objects of particular philosophical attention in this period: that between friends, that between lovers, and that between marriage-partners. Traditions of debate.  In the case of friendship, a shared framework for all discussion was provided by Aristotle’s definition, in the Nicomachean Ethics, of friendship as a situation of mutual goodwill between two parties, each of whom is aware of the other’s feelings;70 and his classification of it into three forms, aiming respectively at pleasure, utility, and the good, of which only the third should count as friendship in the full sense of the word.71 Carefully annotated by Aspasius in his commentary,72 this discussion is echoed also by Alcinous (Didaskalikos 33) and Apuleius (On Plato 2.13–14, 238–9), as well as in the summaries of Stoic and of Peripatetic ethics preserved in Stobaeus.73 But the centuries since Aristotle had seen influential contributions to the topic and its problematics also from Speusippus, Xenocrates, Theophrastus, Clearchus, Cleanthes and Chrysippus,74 with the result that the emphases and debates that we find in our Imperial-period sources have moved on some way from the Aristotelian starting-point. The central tendency, adumbrated but not fully developed by Aristotle, is the urge not simply to downgrade utilitarian and hedonistic ‘friendship’ by comparison with true friendship, based on and aiming at the good, but to assimilate this true form of friendship to the pursuit of philosophia. Aristotle had gone as far as specifying that true (‘perfect’) friendship, could only subsist between two morally good people, bearing each other good will precisely because they are good, and that as such it was necessarily rare and required a long time for its establishment;75 but he had concentrated on the perfect reciprocity and durability of such a relationship, rather than on its aims as a joint project, or on the detail of kind of life that such a pair of friends might be expected to live. But once the idea developed that the good life, and the cultivation of a good state of the soul, should be understood as belonging to a distinct technê (ars), which one must consciously chose to learn and exercise, then Aristotle’s thought on friendship leads easily to the conclusion that it is only those who have set themselves to this technê – i.e. philosophoi – who can claim to be friends in the full sense.

Ar. Nic. Eth. 8.2, 1155b27–56a5. Ar. Nic. Eth. 8.3–4, 1156a6–57b5. 72 Aspas. Comm. on Ar. Nic. Eth. 158.1–186.29 Heylbut; tr. and comm. Konstan (2001). 73 Alcinous Didask. 33, with Dillon 1993, 198–200; Apuleius On Plato 2.13–14, 238–9, with Beaujeu 1973, 295–6; Stob. Flor. 2.7.5, 2.74.5–14 W. (Stoics) and 2.7.22, 2.143.1–16 W. (Peripatetics). 74 Diog. Laert. 4.4, 4.12, 5.45 (cf. Gellius Attic Nights 1.3); Athenaeus Deipn. 8.348f. and 12.535e = Clearchus frr. 17–18 Wehrli; Diog. Laert. 7.157; Plut. Stoic Self-contrad. 1039b. Cf. Powell 1990, 2–3; OCD3 s.v. ‘Love and friendship’ (A.W. Price). Also Epicurus (see fn. 90 below), but this is reflected in our period in rejections of the Epicurean position by others, not in expositions by practising Epicureans – for instance, friendship is not covered in the surviving portions of Diog. Oen.’s inscription. 75 Ar. Nic. Eth. 8.3–4, 1156b6–35. 70 71

152

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

An extreme in this direction would be reached if the demand for moral goodness were combined with the early Stoic insistence on the imperfection of all but the (possibly nonexistent) Sage; this would yield the stern conclusion that true friendship was even rarer than Aristotle had suggested. The Stoics had certainly developed an aspect of this line of thinking, painting a picture of the relations of friendship among the Wise that was as rosily idealistic about them as it was implicitly damning of all ordinary ‘friendships’.76 Imperial-period thinkers preserve some echoes of the rigorous position. But in general, as we have already seen in another context, they took their cue instead from the more relaxed strain of thinking that developed in the Stoicism of the second century BCE, which allowed interest and value to the efforts of ‘progressives’ (prokoptontes) as well as to the achievements of perfected sages.77 In this perspective, friendships can exist truly and valuably among those only striving for moral improvement, even if relations between the fully good remain the ultimate standard of judgement. Thus Stoic Seneca can in one place acknowledge and defend the proposition that ‘Only the Sage knows how to love, only the Sage is a friend’,78 while in another writing that ‘I should not care to advise you [sc. in the choice of friends] to follow or draw to yourself no-one but a Sage. For where might you be able to find the one we have all been seeking for so many centuries? Let the least bad serve in place of the best.’79 And Platonist Apuleius can, in separate passages of the On Plato, credit his subject both with a definition of friendship in terms of similarity and good will, with no overt reference to moral goodness at all, and with the sentiment that ‘All good people [= Sages] should be friends among themselves ... from which it is agreed that faithful friendship exists only amongst the good.’80 Threats to true friendship.  The net result of this negotiation with accumulated philosophical tradition is that friendship has by the Imperial period come to be viewed as part of the story of moral progress.81 In so far as this is envisaged as something other than a purely solitary project, in which the individual is to rely on his or her own inner resources, it is in friends that the most significant external aid is felt to be found. It is they above all who have the motivation and the means to supply the kind of encouragement, exhortation, monitoring, and candid criticism that keep the progressive on the right track, and help him through times of difficulty. Perhaps the central embodiment of this way of viewing friendship in our period is Seneca’s Epistles, in which moral instruction and the reciprocal encouragement of a shared quest pass between a teacher and a pupil who are simultaneously friends, working in what was seen as the quintessentially friendly form of the letter.82 But it also pervades such texts as Plutarch’s How to Distinguish a Friend from a Flatterer, with its emphasis on the Stob. Flor. 2.7.11, 2.101.21–102.3 W; Plutarch Comm. Not. 1068d–1069a; cf. Schofield 1991, 22–56 and 97–101. 77 See above, 49–51. 78 Sen. Ep. 81.12. 79 Sen. Peace of Mind 7.4. 80 Apul. On Plato 2.13.238, 2.22.251. 81 Above, 51–62. 82 On letters and friendship, see Trapp 2003, 40–1, with further references. 76

Self and Others

153

need for tactful and timely frankness on the part of the true friend, and its importance in puncturing and making good the illusions of misplaced self-satisfaction.83 Correspondingly, the topic of dangers to and perversions of friendship has also, by the Imperial period, acquired a new prominence, as these are now understood also as dangers and obstacles to moral progress and the cultivation of good character. Maximus of Tyre, lamenting in his Oration 35 over what he portrays as the devastating scarcity of true friendship – he affects to find only one or two instances in myth, and none in either classical or more recent history – assigns the blame to rampant hedonistic greed, itself the product of the inner disorder of the soul, and calls on philosophy to heal both the inner and the outer conflict: ‘As long as the war in the soul is waged bitterly and implacably, the soul will remain a stranger to friendship, hostile and sullen ... Let us pursue a truce, let us call on philosophy to aid us! Let her come, let her make peace, let her proclaim it!’84 With rather more analytical bite, and speaking from a distinctively Stoic rather than hazily Platonist position, Arrian’s Epictetus argues in Discourses 3.22 that friendship will inevitably be in constant danger of losing out to material self-interest, until such time as all mistaken judgements (incorrect assent to false appearances of value) are rooted out from the soul: Don’t you often see little dogs fawning on one another and playing, and exclaim, ‘Nothing could be more friendly’? But, to see what this friendship is, throw a bit of meat between them, and then you will know. ... So if any of you is anxious to be or to or to gain a friend, let him root out those judgements, despise them, drive them right out of his soul. And then he will, in the first place, be secure from self-reproach and inner conflict ... And, secondly, in his relationships with others, he will be wholly frank and open to one who is like himself, while to one who is unlike, he will be patient, mild, gentle and forgiving ... Without all this you may, in many respects, live as friends do ... ; and so may snakes too. But they can never be friends, and nor can you, so long as you hold these brutish and contemptible judgements.85

The specific point about friendship made here dovetails perfectly with Epictetus’ more general insistence, already noted,86 that in the development of the good Stoic, perfection of one’s own human nature is not a wholly self-regarding process, but necessarily entails the development of good attitudes and behaviour to others. Dangers to friendship however come from without as well as from within. In one of the most remarkable turns of thought of the period, the general proposition that other people by parading their own distorted values can seduce the moral progressive from his path87 is particularized in the confrontation between the friend Plut. Friend and Flatterer 48e–49b, 55b, 56b ff., 61d-f, 65ef, 67ef, 69e–72e. Note also passages like Max. Or. 1.2, where philosophia is described in terms once reserved for friendship (‘offering consolation in sad times and enhancing the celebrations in times of joy’ - cf. e.g. Xen. Mem. 2.4.6). 84 Max. Or. 35.8; cf. Trapp 1997a, 274–81. 85 Arrian Disc of Epict. 3.22.9 and 34–7. 86 Above, 140. 87 Above, 44–5. 83

154

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

with his malign anti-type, the flatterer (kolax). The virtuous, altruistic friend seeks out and assists a similarly virtuous other, in a relationship of mutual and real benefit. The corrupt flatterer, on the other hand, only counterfeits similarity to any other, including the seeker after virtue, whom he can exploit for his own selfish end of sensual pleasure, caring nothing if the association corrupts his victim too by feeding those very tendencies of which he should be seeking to free himself. In his own way, the flatterer is a dedicated professional, working with application and ingenuity to avoid or to divert attention from the signs that would give away his true nature and purposes. It is thus vital, but also extremely difficult, for the serious progressive to identify such individuals and weed them out from his acquaintance. Both Plutarch and Maximus devote essays to the theme. Maximus’, his Oration 14, is characteristically brief and breezy, beginning with a mannered allegory of the Friend and the Flatterer, based on Prodicus’ allegorical confrontation of Virtue and Vice in his choice of Heracles,88 and ending with instances of the broader phenomenon of ‘flattery’ in politics and the arts.89 Plutarch’s treatise on How to Distinguish a Friend, addressed to his socially eminent patron C. Iulius Antiochus Philopappus, is a much more careful and measured affair, exploring the detail of the social manners and situations in which the flatterer can work as well as the underlying principles, and linking its condemnation of flattery to the corresponding praise for well-controlled frankness already commented on. Behind both treatments we seem to see a confluence of practical anxiety about contemporary society with philosophical ideology. The concept of flattery and the figure of the flatterer, as negative models, had first been brought into philosophical discussion by Plato in the Gorgias, as a means of simultaneously criticizing contemporary structures and values, and emphasizing what was so right about the Platonic alternatives. This function persists in Maximus and Plutarch. Just as, in Plato, what was so objectionable about kolakes – the confectioner, the cosmeticist, the sophist and the orator – was their brazen but wholly incompetent usurpation of the functions belonging to true technai (those of the gymnastic trainer, doctor, legislator and dialectician); so in Plutarch’s and Maximus’ accounts, what is meant to alarm and appal is the way the flatterer twists what ought to be a powerful aid to the shared cultivation of virtue into exploitation and corruption. The phenomenon is relocated from civic and political life to private social experience, but the sense of waste and of outrageous distortion remains constant. Yet, for all the energy devoted to castigating false friendship, the question of the value of friends in the first place remained a sensitive one, especially for Stoics. The point is confronted in Seneca’s Epistle 9, interestingly the first letter in the sequence in which specifically Stoic doctrine starts to bite. Seneca rejects the Epicurean position, which he characterizes as treating friendship from the point of view of purely selfish utility (cultivating friends so that they can help you in times of trouble).90 Attraction Max. Or. 14.1–2, cf. Xen. Mem. 2.1.21–34. Max. Or. 14.7–8. 90 Ep. 9.8, quoting Epicurus fr. 175 Us. See Schofield in Rowe & Schofield 2000, 442 for Epicurus on friendship more generally (note that Epicurus himself apparently held that 88 89

Self and Others

155

to friends is based on a natural stimulus (irritatio) akin to the oikeiôsis of one human being for another, not on calculation of utility.91 Friendships are sought ‘for their own sake’, to give you the opportunity of behaving especially virtuously towards specific others.92 But although the good person thus welcomes friendships, and looks to acquire new ones as old ones succumb to mortality, he does not need them, and bears their loss unperturbed.93 His happiness lies entirely within himself, and cannot depend on externals; friends are needed (in one sense of the word) for life, but they are not needed (in another) for the good life.94 The paradigm remains Zeno’s Megarian teacher Stilpo, who after the death of his wife and children and the conquest of his homeland, could say ‘I have lost nothing’.95 This is the same balancing-act (allowing much and yet ultimately nothing, or nothing and yet a great deal, to something commonly perceived as a great good) as we have already seen in the Stoic attitude to external and bodily ‘goods’, and other people in general. For all Seneca’s confident scorn towards Epicurus, he himself leaves the same room for disagreement as before about whether a Stoic really does answer the definition of a true friend. Lovers and spouses In Imperial-period theorizing, erotic attraction (erôs, amor) is standardly taken to belong in the same general category as friendship, and to be closely related to it. It stands on the same axis of experience (attraction towards specific other human beings), but at a higher pitch of intensity: Alcinous and Apuleius, epitomizing Platonist doctrine, pass directly from one to the other; Seneca, speaking for the Stoics, can characterize amor as insana amicitia, ‘friendship gone mad’.96 But as Seneca’s formulation indicates, the greater extremity of erotic attraction compared to friendly feeling also makes it problematic in a different way. In some of its versions, it is (notoriously) excessive, a passion, and thus in need of more or less drastic and attentive regulation. Much of the effort of ancient theorizing about it, in the Imperial period as previously, correspondingly goes into distinguishing legitimate and illegitimate forms and applications of this particularly sensitive form of attraction. There were indeed those who understood sociable and socializing movement towards others as universal, natural and reasonable for humans, but even for these thinkers erotic attraction tested the limits of its reasonableness. Contrasting approaches.  One option was to take a rigorously reductive approach. Erôs could be construed as the experience of a purely physical lack analogous to hunger utilitarian interest in sustaining friendships may prompt one to individual pieces of distinctly un-utilitarian behaviour: Vatican Sayings 28, Plut. Mor. 1111b, Diog. Laert. 10.121). 91 Ep. 9. 17. 92 Ep. 9.9–10; cf. Diog. Laert. 7.124 (Stoic stress on disinterestedness of friendship). 93 Ep. 9.5. 94 Ep. 9.5, 13–15. This is equivalent to saying that friendship is a natural advantage, and a preferred indifferent. 95 Ep. 9.18–19. 96 Ep. 9.11.

156

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

or thirst; and the difference between good and bad forms could thus be established as that between sensibly making good the lack by the least troublesome available means, and stupidly acting on the perverse belief that only more elaborate, resource-wasting and mentally disturbing means will do. This was the course taken by Epicurean theory, best known now from the bitingly indignant and satirical presentation in Book 4 of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things,97 dating from the first century BCE. The continuation of this attitude into the centuries CE can be inferred from its inclusion in Diogenes Laertius’ survey of Epicurean doctrine, though it is hard to document directly.98 It was also the approach preached by the Cynics, or at least particularly associated with the founding fathers of Cynicism by those concerned to use them as emblems of the power of philosophia to liberate from the tyranny of mistaken beliefs about true value. Antisthenes is remembered in Diogenes Laertius’ Life for satisfying his sexual needs with ill-favoured women rejected by others, and so all the more glad of his attentions.99 Diogenes’ public masturbation was held up not only as an emblematic flouting of the pointless, artificial conventions of a society mired in false perceptions of what really matters, but also more specifically as a demonstration of the sheer ease with which the enlightened cope with erôs: ‘if only you could cure your hunger too by just rubbing the organ concerned with your hand’.100 By this strategy, the capacity of erôs to disrupt and obstruct the pursuit of the good life is neutralized, but there is a very clear and very large cost, in the breaking of the link between erôs and sociability, of which so much could be made in other traditions of thought. If erôs is merely a kind of hunger, it can have no interesting or useful connection with positive attitudes towards others, whether individual friends or humanity at large. Cynicizing and Epicurean thinking de-eroticizes friendship in preference to remoulding erôs into conformity with other forms of human communion. The main alternative tradition, inherited from Plato and the early Stoics, was more positive, organizing thinking about erotic attraction around the antithesis between a lower, physical kind, and a form that aimed at higher, spiritual or moral ends. Of these, the lower kind was dismissed as a kind of aberration, worthy at best of a kind of resigned toleration; the higher was assimilated to philosophically enlightened, virtue-pursuing friendship. Thus Plato in Symposium and Phaedrus diagnoses erotic arousal as an excitation of the soul, a kind of benign madness, occasioned not most truly by a beautiful individual, but by the intimation he gives of a higher, transcendent beauty, glimpsed through and beyond him.101 To react to this feeling by cultivating Lucretius Nature of Things 4.1037–287, with Brown 1987. The declaration that intercourse (synousia) never did any good, and that one should be content if it avoided doing positive harm, was remembered by Diogenes Laertius (10.118 = fr. 62 Us.) as an emphasis of the Epicureans collectively, not solely of Epicurus himself. Erôs however does not come up as a topic for Diogenes of Oenoanda, or as the object of criticism in Plutarch’s anti-Epicurean treatises. 99 Diog Laet. 6.3, from Xen. Smp. 4.38; but note also Diog. Laert. 6.11, where Antisthenes is said to have held that the wise man would marry, and would associate for this purpose with women who were euphyestatai (‘most beautiful’ or ‘in the best physical condition’?). 100 Diog. Laert. 6.46; cf. Dio Or. 6.17–20. 101 Smp. 207a–212a; Phdr. 249d–256e. 97 98

Self and Others

157

the individual, and by attempting physical intimacy, is to waste and abuse an impulse designed in fact to lead one on to intellectual contact with a higher plane of reality – the realm of the Forms. However, though the final end lies in private experience – the contact of one’s own solitary soul with ultimate reality and truth – the early stages of the route still lie in partnership, a collaboration with the individual who struck the first spark with you, in a joint quest after moral and intellectual enlightenment. The same idea of a higher, morally informed erotics, though stripped of its Platonic metaphysics and relocated in a more communal, political context, was developed by Zeno and Chrysippus, for whom ‘the wise man will feel erôs for those young persons who by their appearance manifest a natural endowment for virtue’.102 Erôs in this context was defined, in two alternative formulations, as ‘a sort of chase after a youngster who is undeveloped but naturally endowed for virtue’ and ‘an attempt to make friends, on account of beauty apparent, with young persons in bloom’.103 Zeno seems to have been happier than Plato to allow for physical intercourse as part of such a relationship,104 but subsequent Stoics felt the need to insist that the real aim was friendship not sex.105 In this framework, there was a marked tendency to regard erotic attraction between men as the most interesting kind, and the most worth discussion. In the context of the traditional city-state, to which both Plato’s and early Stoic thinking was tailored, it was friendships between men, and the male pursuit of virtue and enlightenment that really counted; and ‘educational’ or ‘initiatory’ sexual relationships between older and younger male citizens were widely institutionalized.106 However, the picture is not entirely clearcut. Although Plato in Symposium and Phaedrus effectively treated erôs between males as the only kind worth discussing, in the Republic he envisages an equal participation of females and males in the pursuit of wisdom and virtue (there are women Guardians as well as men),107 thus at least in principle opening the way to virtue-oriented erotic relations between the sexes as well as within just one of them. And Zeno in his Republic seems to have seen himself as legislating for friendship-producing erôs between men and women as well as between men and men, even if the latter constituted his primary focus.108 What was more clearly marginalized, on the other hand, was the connection between erotic attraction and procreation. It was of course acknowledged, but as a subordinate phenomenon, several times over not the real point of erôs, and so deserving of only the most fleeting and distant of mentions.

Diog. Laert. 7.129, citing Zeno’s Republic (Politeia) and Chrysippus On Lives Book 1. The first (quoted by Plutarch, Comm. Not. 1073b) seems to have been Zeno’s formulation, the second (‘Didymus’ in Stob. Flor. 2.7.11, 2.115.1–2 W, etc) the later ‘official’ Stoic formula: see Schofield 1991, 28–9. 104 Schofield 1991, 44–5. 105 Diog. Laert. 7.130; cf. Schofield 1991, 34–5. 106 Schofield 1991, 35–46, drawing on earlier studies, esp. Dover 1978. 107 Rep. 451b–457b (cf. Annas 1981, 181–5 for a discussion of the ‘feminism’ of Plato’s political proposals). 108 Zeno in Sext. Emp. Pyrrhonism 3.245 = Against the Professors 11.90, cited by Schofield 1991, 44–5. 102

103

158

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

Platonist approaches: Alcinous, Apuleius and Maximus.  It is a schematization and development of this tradition of thought that is principally reflected in the tidy handbook formulations produced by Alcinous and Apuleius in the Didaskalikos and the On Plato. Following what seems by the second century CE to have become a wellworn formula, both distinguish not two but three forms of erôs: the divine, spiritual kind, concerned with souls not bodies, and aimed at moral and intellectual betterment; the base, bestial, hedonistic kind that is solely concerned with bodies and physical gratification; and a third, intermediate kind, which combines the characteristics of the other two, and is thus neither wholly vicious nor wholly virtuous.109 To this Alcinous but not Apuleius adds a brief discussion of the art (technê) which the virtuous lover will apply in identifying a worthy object of his affection, convincing him of his need for instruction and moral improvement, actively promoting his growth to virtue, and converting him from lover into friend.110 The paradigm of the virtuous lover for Platonists – he is closer to the surface of the discussion in Alcinous than in Apuleius – is of course Socrates; and it is as an exegesis of Socrates’ motivation in his dealings with the beautiful young that the rather more elaborate discussion in Orations 18–21 of Maximus of Tyre is cast. The doctrinal basis is much the same, though Maximus tends to substitute a simpler antithesis of good and bad forms of erôs for the tripartition of Alcinous and Apuleius. Virtuous love is initially defined by reference to its preoccupation with beautiful souls and development towards virtue, in terms that weave together reminiscences of both Symposium and Phaedrus and the Stoic definition: The grace of a young body is nothing other than a bloom of virtue yet to be ... brilliance of soul sends out a preliminary glow over the surface of the body, and philosophers welcome the sight because of their expectation of what is yet to be. ... The philanthropic lover tends his beloved with a view to their joint cultivation of virtue; he picks out the most suitable candidates for his attentions; and it is the most beautiful who are best suited to expectations of virtue.111 Alcin. Didask. 33.3, Apul. On Plato 2.14. A similar tripartition is already to be seen in the summary of Peripatetic ethics in Stobaeus (Flor. 2.7.21, 2.142.24–6 W). As Dillon (1993: 201) points out, it is in broad terms derivable from the analysis of lovers’ behaviour in the Phaedrus, but may be more directly inspired by Laws 8.837a-d. The distinction of a third kind of erôs, besides exemplifying the love of triads in Platonist-Peripatetic thinking, seems designed to find room for ordinary human experience (rather in the spirit of later Stoicism’s legislation for ‘progressives’, as a class genuinely intermediate between Sages and Fools). 110 Alcin. Didask. 33.4. See Dillon 1993, 202–4 for discussion of what is at stake in this definition of erôs as a technê. His suggestion that Alcinous’ words hint at a Platonic counterblast to less enlightened artes amatoriae in the style of Ovid is interesting (though it may be a mistake to assume that Ovid’s is exactly typical of the genre). But it may be more to the point to observe how Alcinous here once again suggests a collapsing of erôs (and friendship) into philosophia. For the text Alcinous clearly has in mind, the pseudo-Platonic First Alcibiades, is by this stage in the Platonic tradition as much a model of how to introduce a pupil to philosophy as it is a discourse on love (Albinus, Introduction to Plato’s Dialogues 5, p. 149 Hermann, Platonis dialogi 6). 111 Max. Or. 19.2–3, cf. Trapp 1997a, 171–2. 109

Self and Others

159

But at the very end of the sequence of lectures – in a passage already quoted in an earlier chapter112 – it is made clear that there is a crucial extra element: the perception of transcendent, essential beauty – the achieving of a closer contact with reality and truth – that the sight of the beloved makes possible for the lover. Virtuous erôs is thus presented as concerned for the betterment of both the object of love and the lover, but it is the latter emphasis that provides the climactic conclusion, and thus that remains uppermost in the reader’s mind at the end.113 Vicious erôs, for its part, is condemned with great vehemence not only as hedonistic, but also as selfish and exploitative, taking no thought for the interests of the ‘beloved’;114 it is finally dismissed with the suggestion that it does not deserve the noble name of erôs, and would more fittingly be called mere ‘desire’ (epithymia).115 Platonist authors thus by and large maintain the tendency to restrict their ideas about what is interesting in erôs to an idealized erotic attraction between males. Correspondingly, they have little time or interest for the question of the physical, sexual expression of erotic attraction, or a fortiori for erôs as an impulse towards procreation. Alcinous and Apuleius, in so far as they specify at all, mention only malemale attraction; they glance only briefly at physical sex, granting a preoccupation with bodies as characteristic of ‘intermediate’ (everyday?) erôs as well as of the depraved, bestial kind; and they make no mention of procreation, which features for Apuleius as an aspect of politics rather than of erôs, and for Alcinous not at all.116 Maximus, with more space at his disposal, is somewhat more forthcoming, exemplifying vicious ‘erôs’ with heterosexual as well as homosexual instances (Paris’ lust for Helen, Xerxes’ for Amestris), and acknowledging generative erôs – ‘the ordinance of the gods of Marriage, Clan and Birth’117 – as an aspect of the virtuous kind. But here too the acknowledgement is only fleeting and rapidly lost sight of; located as it is at the level of the first, provisional distinction between good and bad erôs, it is left behind in the final movement to define the good form in terms of contact with higher reality. Maximus also looks more directly at the physical aspect of erôs, but only in connection with the same-sex version, and only to issue a condemnation of it – owing more to the Plato of the Laws than the Plato of Symposium and Phaedrus – as an unnatural ‘sowing on rocks’ and ‘ploughing of the sand’, comparable to necrophilia.118

Max. Or. 21.7–8, 95 above. If Maximus were in general a more sectarian and polemical writer, one might be tempted to see here a deliberate trumping of the Stoic theory of erôs (good as far as it goes, but incomplete) with the Platonic; but his generally irenic approach (cf. Trapp 1997a, xxii–xxx) makes it more likely that this impression is an unintended accident of his strategy (imitated from Plato) of defending Socrates with progressively more and more powerful revelations. 114 Max. Or. 19.4, 20.2–5 and 7–9. 115 Max. Or. 21.1–7. 116 Apul. On Plato 2.25.257–8. 117 Max. Or. 20.6. 118 Max. Or. 20.9, cf. Plato Laws 838e. 112 113

160

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

Platonist approaches: Plutarch.  It was not, however, an entirely foregone conclusion that Platonist sympathies should lead only to this kind of restatement of old positions. Plutarch’s Dialogue on Love may, as we have seen,119 devote considerable efforts to hymning erôs as a unique route to moral and intellectual enlightenment. But, thanks to an inter-connected set of movements, this ennobling experience is explicitly opened up to male-female as well as (or even in preference to) male-male partnerships, allowed to have a legitimate and constructive physical dimension, and connected with considerable emphasis to the institution of marriage. Plutarch’s challenge to traditional Platonism in the Dialogue is deliberate and pointed. To begin with, the dramatic situation which sparks off the discussion commemorated in the dialogue – of an intelligent and virtuous older woman falling in love with a younger man and pursuing him to the point of abduction – is an appropriation of the central Platonic scenario of the erotic, educative interest of an older in a younger man. But equally strikingly, the progress of the discussion – an initial debate over the rival merits of women and boys as objects of a man’s erotic attention, followed by the departure of its protagonists, and disquisitions on the true nature of both erôs and marriage from Plutarch himself – seems itself to dramatize the leaving behind of a whole turn of thought. First, the account of erôs, while impeccably Platonic in its metaphysical aspect, explicitly allows it to women and to heterosexual couples as well as to male-male partnerships;120 then, the encomium of marriage which follows makes of it not just one possible, but the privileged locus for the experience of erôs, in comparison to which an erotic relationship between an older and a younger man can only appear as a distant second best.121 What distinguishes erôs between spouses from all other, inferior variants, Plutarch proposes, is the solidarity and the wholly reciprocal good will that characterizes it. Marriage partners are affectionate, trusting friends, unforcedly faithful to each other; they cease to think of themselves as separate beings, and are unified in the manner of a ‘total blend’ (di’ holôn krasis) – as contrasted to those who merely live together like Epicurean atoms, grappled into their temporary combinations.122 There is an ease, a spontaneity and a grace (charis) to this relationship that cannot be found in any other. But Plutarch does not thereby seek to pry loose married erôs from its physical basis. On the contrary, he insists that the whole relationship of mutual good will, respect and trust, is initiated and sustained by sex. Homer was quite right when he used the word philotês (‘friendship’) for the act of love, and Solon’s prescription that a married man should have intercourse with his wife at least three times a month demonstrates his superior wisdom as a legislator.123 See above, 95–6. Plut. Dial. on Love 756a–766d; note the strategic placing of the cases of Sappho (762f) and Gorgo (766cd), on either side of the central account of erôs as the path to moral and intellectual enlightenment. 121 Plut. Dial. on Love 766e–771c; the dismissal of paiderastic erôs from this vantage point comes at 768e and 770b. 122 Plut. Dial. on Love 767c–769f. On all this, see in particular Foucault 1990, 204–10. 123 Plut. Dial. on Love 769ab; Solon’s legislation is also mentioned in Plutarch’s Life of Solon 20.89c. 119

120

Self and Others

161

Plutarch’s sense of the importance and particular character of the marriage relationship stands out in the context of Platonist writing both about erôs, and about the question of relationships with others more generally. But it is certainly not an isolated eccentricity in the broader perspective of the period. Something very similar, as Plutarch himself must have been well aware, is to be found in contemporary Stoic writing. The similarity, however, is more one of surface detail than of deep structure and of position in a larger scheme of thought. For the Stoics characteristically come to the topic of marriage not via theorizing about erôs and the soul, but once again in the context of their thinking about human sociability and the structure and workings of human community. Stoic discussion.  The biggest collection of relevant Stoic material is a set of texts assembled in Book 4, chapter 22 of Stobaeus’ Florilegium: four passages from the On Marriage of Hierocles, and one from the Discourses of Musonius, accompanied by a further extract from an On Marriage by the second-century BCE Stoic, Antipater of Tarsus.124 To these may be added three more short extracts from Musonius’ Discourses, preserved elsewhere in Stobaeus (Frr. 12–13b Hense), and a scatter of remarks by Epictetus and Dio. Like Plutarch, Hierocles and Musonius both identify warmth, closeness and mutual goodwill as the distinguishing features of the relationship between spouses: for Musonius, it is the closest of all, exceeding even those between siblings and parents and children;125 Hierocles illustrates its ‘kinsmanly assistance’ (sungenikê epikouria) and ‘benevolent fellow-feeling’ (sympathês eunoia) with a series of vignettes from domestic life (the wifely welcome as the husband returns after a hard day in town, and so on).126 Several centuries before them, Antipater had used (perhaps originated) the image of the total blend (di’ holôn krasis) also encountered in Plutarch.127 But there are further elements that are not so directly matched in Plutarch’s account. A strong association, which both Hierocles and Musonius underline, between marriage and sociability (or community – koinônia), locates their view of marriage firmly within the broader Stoic understanding of society, and the relationships of the individual to others, and indeed gives it a privileged position in that framework. Marriage, in their presentation, is the prime medium for the expression of human beings’ natural impulse towards association and community with those around us. In Hierocles’ words, ‘Our whole species (genos) is naturally inclined to (ephy pros) sociability, and the first and most elementary (stoicheiôdestatê) form of community is that instantiated in marriage.’128 In Musonius’ version, ‘If anything is manifestly in accordance with Nature, marriage is’, given that a provident creator God has distinguished the sexes, endowed them with differing genital apparatus, and implanted in them ‘a mighty desire for association and communion’.129 It is in marriage above 124 Stob. Flor. 4.22.20, 4.497.19–501.29 W. (Musonius = fr. 14 Hense), 4.22.21–4, 4.502.1– 507.5 (Hierocles), 4.22.25, 4.507.6–512.7 (Antipater). 125 Musonius fr. 14, p. 73.15–75.5 Hense. 126 Hierocles in Stob. Flor. 4.22.24, 4.505.4–507.5 W. 127 Antipater in Stob. Flor. 4.33.25, 4.508.11–19 W. 128 Hierocles in Stob. Flor. 4.22.21, 4.502.2–4 W. 129 Musonius fr. 14, p. 71.10–11 Hense.

162

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

all that the altruism that goes with urges to community finds expression.130 And it is thus marriage that provides the crucial first building block for the construction of larger human communities. There can be no state (polis) without households (oikoi), and a household without a marriage at its heart is only half complete (or even ‘imperfect’ – hêmitelês).131 Concern for the state is mediated through concern for the household, and the foundation of the household is marriage; any threat to marriage is a threat to the household, the state, and indeed to the survival and flourishing of the human race as a whole.132 When Epictetus attacks an Epicurean on the grounds that Epicureanism rules out meaningful community, it is on the stigmatization of marriage that he fastens first: ‘“I won’t marry.” “Nor I, because one oughtn’t to.” But then one oughtn’t to have children, or participate in the life of the state. But what would happen then? Where will citizens come from? Who will bring them up?’133 This Stoic stress on the naturalness, immediacy, and fundamental structural importance of marriage as a mode of association also brings with it the possibility of a newly stringent tone when it comes to sexual behaviour. Epictetus condemns adultery as corrosive both of the moral character of the adulterer himself, and of the community he shares with neighbours, friends and fellow-citizens: But if we throw away this trustworthiness for which we are naturally suited, and plot to seduce our neighbour’s wife, what are we doing? What else than bringing destruction and annulment? On what? On our character as people of trust, respect and piety. Is that all? Are we not also doing away with neighbourliness, with friendship, with the state?134

He also condemns adoption of the passive role in intercourse (ta tou kinaidos) as a breach of proper function (kathêkon) for a man.135 Musonius goes still further in this direction, presenting marriage as the only legitimate context for sexual activity, in a manner that rules out not only adultery, but also same-sex intercourse, and furthermore any kind of sex not aimed at procreation: Those who are not depraved (tryphontas) or vicious must acknowledge as right (dikaia) only that kind of sexual activity (aphrodisia) which takes place within marriage for the production of children, because that is the legitimate form. Those kinds of sex that have simple pleasure as their quarry are wrong and illegitimate (adika kai paranoma), even if they take place within marriage. Of other forms of sexual embrace (symplokai), those occasioned by an adulterous liaison are illegitimate in the extreme; and those which happen between men and men are not the slightest bit more acceptable, because they are an outrage and contravene nature.136 Musonius frr. 13a, p. 68.13–14 and 14, pp. 72.3–73.3 Hense. Hierocles in Stob. Flor. 4.22.21, 4.502.5–7 W. 132 Musonius fr. 14, p. 73.3–15 Hense; cf. also Dio Chrysostom Or. 7.134–5. 133 Arrian Disc. of Epict. 3.7.19; cf. Epicurus, fr. 525 Us. 134 Arrian Disc. of Epict. 2.4.2–3, cf. 3.7.21; cf. also Dio Chrysostom Or. 7.138–48. 135 Arrian Disc. of Epict. 2.10.17. 136 Muson. fr. 12, pp. 63.17–64.7 Hense. 130 131

Self and Others

163

In addition, Musonius also condemns the sexual exploitation of female slaves by their male masters, demanding that the latter should show the same self-control and sense of shame as is expected of free females towards male slaves, if not more.137 However, at least in the vehemence of his rejection of same-sex intercourse, Musonius seems to be offering an individual interpretation of the demands of Stoic theory, rather than a position mandatory for all Stoics. At any rate, Epictetus can speak elsewhere of resisting the lure of male and of female beauty indifferently, as showing the same virtuous strength of mind, just as Marcus Aurelius can thank the gods that as a young man he ‘touched neither Benedicta nor Theodotus’, without any suggestion that the latter represented a more vicious form of temptation (though he does also praise his adopted father Antoninus for ‘putting a stop to the erotic pursuit of boys’).138 In broad terms, Hierocles’, Musonius’ and Epictetus’ Stoic alternative to Platonic erotics can be seen to be following through from a line of thinking established in the first instance by Aristotle, both in their concern to establish the hierarchy of structures that go to make up a developed human community, and in their sense of the pair as the most basic and automatic form of human association. Hierocles’ comment that nature makes humans not only creatures that gather together in herds (synagelastikoi), but creatures inclined to form couples (syndyastikoi) repeats Aristotle’s that ‘man is by nature a creature inclined to form couples rather than creature inclined to form cities (syndyastikon mallon ê politikon)’.139 But the use they make of this line of thinking is transformed, relative to Aristotle’s, by the framework of theorizing about nature, impulse and sociability developed after Aristotle’s day by their Stoic forebears. Above all, in making marriage natural, and a prime expression of an innate human impulse, they bind it in to their sect’s distinctive account of human development and functions. Marriage becomes a ‘duty’ or an ‘appropriate action’, a kathêkon. Already in his celebrated and long influential Republic, Zeno had declared that the Sage would marry, and beget children, ‘should nothing impede’;140 Hierocles simply expands on this, and makes its relation to broader Stoic theory more explicit when he states that a life with marriage is ‘preferred’ (proêgoumenos), whereas a life without is ‘dictated by circumstance’ (kata peristasin), and that marrying is accordingly ‘appropriate’ (kathêkon), unless specific circumstances prevent it.141

Muson. fr 12, pp. 66.2–67.2 Hense. Arrian Disc. of Epict. 3.7.21 and 2.18.15; Aurelius Med. 1.17.13, 1.16.7. In Epictetus’ case, it looks as if active homosexual desire (the desire of the prospectively active partner in intercourse) is being looked on at least a shade more tolerantly than desire on the part of the passive partner – which would be in line with generally established sentiment. Dio Chrysostom, for his part, can present paiderastic activity as an extreme point on a scale of communal depravity that begins with the collective toleration of prostitution and adultery (Or. 7.148–52, with 133–8 preceding; cf. also his depiction of homosexual practice in Olbia as a regrettable import from Ionia, in Or. 36.8) – though Houser 1998 makes an interesting attempt to discover more positive aspects to Dio’s treatment of same-sex relations. 139 Hierocles in Stob. Flor. 4.22.22, 4.502.15–20 W; Aristotle Nic. Eth. 8.12, 1162a17–18. 140 Diog. Laert. 7.121. 141 Hierocles in Stob. Flor. 4.22.22, 5.502.9–14 W. 137 138

164

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

But this in turn reminds us that, just as we have seen in the case of friendship, so also with marriage, Stoic enthusiasm and praise and exhortation co-exist, in the context of their larger theory of value and moral development, with a strict limit. What is natural, and to be chosen ‘if nothing prevents’, does not for this reason have real positive value; and equally, what is unnatural, and to be avoided in the same manner, does not have real disvalue. In the end, in the view of developed reason, marriage, fidelity and heterosexuality – or equally, fornication, adultery and homosexual intercourse – are matters of indifference. What matters – uniquely – is the attitude of mind with which they are chosen or avoided; and circumstance may always bring it about that what normally is unnatural and wrong is, in a specific context, the wise and virtuous choice. The older Stoics, in particular Zeno and Chrysippus, had urged the point forcefully, insisting on the strict indifference of both homosexual intercourse and incest.142 Our second-century Stoics give the impression, if not of having left this central plank of school doctrine behind, at least of being less disposed to foreground it. Epictetus seems relatively the most disposed to keep it in view, given his central focus on the individual and the ‘right use of (necessarily individual) impressions’; Musonius and Hierocles, whose surviving fragments have them holding forth primarily about communal issues, have the greater incentive to leave it to one side, and happily do so. But it may well be that there was no huge discrepancy of approach, as opposed to a difference in emphasis. For one of the distinctive features of the Stoic position on true worth and preferred (natural) indifferents – a central strength, or a central perversity, according to point of view – was precisely that it allowed certain goals to be both branded worthless and recommended with great urgency. Even the strongest, most vehement assertion of the one perspective (à la Musonius) did not have to imply the denial of the other. Epicureans and Cynics.  By way of a coda, a briefer glance at the contrasting approach to marriage in Epicurean and Cynicizing thought is in order. The Epicurean line – admittedly only thinly attested at this period – is that, like other forms of social or political participation, marriage should be avoided if possible, and only contracted under pressure of circumstances (an exact reversal of the Stoic position, as articulated by Hierocles);143 the realistic aim is to prevent it causing you trouble, rather than deriving any particular benefit for the good life.144 In Cynicizing thinking too, marriage is presented as belonging with those elements of conventional existence that the individual Cynic – though not necessarily mankind at large – is better off without. Maximus and Epictetus, in their appropriations of Diogenes for Platonism and Stoicism, both comment approvingly on his deliberately wifeless state (‘he declined to try the experience of marriage, because he had heard of 142 Sext. Emp. Pyrrhonism 1.160 (Chrysippus allowing incest with sister or mother); 3.200 (homosexuality indifferent in Stoicism); Origen Against Celsus 4.45 (Stoics declare intercourse with his own daughter the legitimate choice for a Sage, if the alternative is to let the human race die out). 143 Above, 163. 144 Lucretius Nature of Things 4.1278–87; Epicurus (Problems and On Nature) cited by Diog. Laert. 10.119.

Self and Others

165

Xanthippe’), which not only liberated him personally, but also made him the better able to pursue his mission of enlightening others.145 An apparent counter-example, the celebrated marriage of Crates to Hipparchia was not an endorsement, but a unique, and uniquely instructive, transformation of the institution, an anti-marriage which, by stripping away all the normal conventions and associations, only revealed the mistakes it normally embodied the more sharply.146 But what is seen here need not be understood as an absolute and general devaluation of marriage. It is meant rather as a pedagogically striking expression of, on the one hand, the ideal of the philosophos as an individual apart, and on the other, the ultimate indifference of marriage, as opposed to the virtuous (or vicious) attitude with which it is engaged in. Depicting a philosophical hero as rejecting marriage is a deliberately exaggerated dramatization of the truth that it does not matter in itself. Epicureans and Cynicizers thus break the link between gamos and sociability, just as they do that between erôs and sociability. But we should remind ourselves that they do not do so in order to cut free from sociable entanglement entirely, or from the need actively to foster it. The Epicurean, after all, still needs the protection afforded by the existence of society, and has reason to contribute to its continuation in his own interest. Even more so the Cynic. A large part of the point of his freedom is that it enables him to exercise more effectively his philanthropic concern for anyone and everyone around him, without it being compromised or diminished by private claims on it by special favourites. Conclusion The case of marriage has provided one more example of what has been a recurring theme of this chapter: the paradoxical positioning of Stoicism as the Imperial-period sect with the strongest theory of community and human solidarity – the most detailed, the most systematic, and the one that claimed to give the greatest value to sociability – but at the same time with the most curious way of limiting and curtailing that value. These Stoics were duly criticized by their contemporaries, on these and other grounds, and alternative theoretical approaches were available – in particular those of the Peripatetics and the Epicureans, with the Platonists swinging into line with either Peripatetics or Stoics, rather than offering a further option of their own – but none could plausibly claim the same scope, power, or coherence. Yet, on another level, we once again see a strong measure of agreement. On the far side of sectarian divergences, and irrespective of problems with the theoretical basis, philosophia in general stood firmly, on the one hand, for the values of solidarity, community and benevolence, and on the other, for the high-minded shaping of all specific relationships into conformity with the pursuit of the good life (however that might be conceived in detail). The question of how this shared high-mindedness related to mainstream attitudes will be taken up in the final chapter.

Maximus Or. 32.9 and 36.5–6; Arrian Disc. of Epict. 3.22. Diog. Laert. 6.96–8; Epistles of Diogenes 3; Epistles of Crates 1 and 28–33 (tr. in Malherbe 1977). Note also Antisthenes’ position, as reported in Diog. Laert. 6.11. 145 146

Chapter 6

Politics 1: Constitutions and the Ruler The political background to Imperial-period theorizing The foundational classics of Greek political philosophy, dating from the fourth century BCE – Plato’s Gorgias, Republic, Politicus and Laws, and Aristotle’s Politics – took the polis (city-state) as the fundamental unit in terms of which the central issues were to be formulated and debated – the small, self-governing community embracing an urban centre and its surrounding cultivated and uncultivated territory, and their inhabitants. The existence of larger units – the former kingdom of Egypt, and above all the multi-national, multi-ethnic Empire of Persia – was acknowledged, but largely disregarded for the purpose of philosophical theorizing, as it did not represent the reality of the world in which the principal theorists and their audiences had grown up. That reality, however, changed dramatically towards the end of the fourth century with the constitution of the Empire of Macedon by Philip and Alexander, which saw what had been an alien, oriental model superimposed on the old Greek world of the city-states. Previously independent communities now found themselves mere subordinate parts of a hugely larger political structure, then – with the break-up of the Empire, and the establishment of the kingdoms of the Successors – subjects of royal control in smaller, but still substantial kingdoms. Kings and the problems of monarchy accordingly came to feature largely in the political thinking of the Hellenistic schools, though without displacing the city as a crucial point of reference and conceptual frame.1 With the arrival of the Romans, and their piecemeal appropriation of power over the Greek-speaking world between 241 and 31 BCE, the political reality changed yet again. The city to a great extent remained – as it had been throughout – the focus of first resort for political activity and ambition. Greek cities continued to have their deliberative Councils and popular Assemblies, to appoint or elect their own magistrates and priests, and through them to manage their finances, plan building-programmes, organize trade and commerce, administer public festivals, and deal with their neighbours. But they did so under the shade of an over-arching political structure which set firm boundaries to the scope of their decision-making, imposed extra obligations, and constituted both a superior and a more attention1 Witness the Republics (Politeiai) of Zeno and Chrysippus, and Crates’ parodic ‘polis of Pera’ (Diog. Laert. 6.85).

Constitutions and the Ruler

167

worthy locus of authority, and (in due course) an alternative magnet to political ambition. Each city was part of a province, ruled by a governor, with his financeofficer, staff, advisors and troops, who received and checked locally collected imperial taxes, oversaw all legal proceedings with special responsibility for those involving Roman citizens, and could intervene, invited or uninvited, in a whole range of local issues, above all when a threat to public order was perceived.2 Provincial governors and their staff, in their turn, owed their powers and were responsible to the central authority in Rome. In theory, this central authority was wielded jointly, by the Emperor and by the senior ruling council, the Senate, with the Emperor being no more than a particularly able and prominent member of the governing class, powerful only in virtue of the particular offices he held at any one time. In practice, the final say in all matters rested with the Emperor alone. The Senate represented a body of opinion and advice that needed normally to be taken account of, but only along with those of the Emperor’s other advisers (above all his personally assembled council of ‘friends’, the amici principis); it was also administratively essential, in the appointment and supervision of governors and other magistrates for the city of Rome as well as for its dominions; and the relationship between Emperor and Senate was to some extent a tentative one, under negotiation, for the first century of the Empire. But there was no way in which the Senate could seriously cross the Emperor, or hope to enforce its will over his in a direct clash. Beneath the apex of the pyramid of power, however, there was a rich array of subordinate positions of responsibility, which were both essential to the smooth running of the city of Rome and the central functions of empire, and coveted objects of aspiration and competition for the politically active elite: not only the old system of magistracies, inherited from the Republic, from aedile to consul, but also the new positions invented or reconceived for the new world of the Imperial court, from secretary (ab epistulis, one each for Greek and Latin correspondence) to Prefect of the Praetorian Guard. In this new environment, the political sights of the individual from one of the provinces of the Empire could be set either at the local or at the Imperial level. Local attachment and the desire for honour and position accorded by fellowcitizens of the same polis, or the same region, remained strong; but the attractions of rank and power within the wider-ranging and higher-reaching structure of the Empire came increasingly to be felt, as much by the Greeks on whom Roman power had been imposed as by native Romans themselves, for whom that structure was an expansion of what had always constituted the stages and options of a political career. There very soon ceased to be any strong divide between Romans and Greek (or any other) provincials in this respect, with Greeks admitted to minor administrative responsibility in the imperial structure in the earlier first century BCE, to the Senate by the end of the century, and to the full spectrum of a Roman political career, up to and including the consulship, by the second century CE. Rather than a series of vertical national or ethnic divisions, what came to be established under Roman political control was a single Empire-wide horizontal 2

Plutarch Political Precepts is the locus classicus, but note also (e.g.) Dio Or. 32.

168

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

division between the privileged, politically active elite on the one hand, and the mass of the politically passive, the governed, on the other – the distinction eventually formalized in Roman law as that between the honestiores and the humiliores.3 The politically active class, marked out for its role by converging advantages of wealth and good family, was not by any means entirely homogeneous and devoid of internal structure. There was both a formal and an informal hierarchy of wealth, in addition to discriminations based on rank attained, and on the local or international scope of an individual’s activity and honours. But the members of the class shared a common ideology of worth and achievement, in which political distinction, the attainment of formal rank in the administrative structure of the community and of the signs of recognition and admiration (honour) that went with it, counted as the highest, worthiest target of human aspiration.4 Such prizes and such success had of course to be competed for – their value indeed depended heavily on their competitive nature, the fact that many others had to lose what the successful competitor won – but the right to enter the competition was jealously restricted to those whose breeding or money or (preferably) both was held to entitle them to it. A sense of obligation and of the worth of public service was not absent; the official rhetoric of Imperial-period political life is full of the language of burdens, labour, magnanimity, generosity and philanthropy.5 But this too tended to restrict the right of admission to political life to the privileged few, and to reinforce that elite’s sense of its own entitlement. Benevolence and effective strength, on the scale needed for the successful tenure of an office, deserved the high honours paid to anyone who possessed them; but they were only likely to be found in the first place in the already privileged few. Political activity in the Imperial period thus embraced a wide range of possible roles and arenas, from that of supreme sole ruler at one end of the scale, to that of a town-councillor or magistrate or public benefactor in a small provincial community at the other, with everything from the Imperial court to a governor’s entourage in between. It covered both the holding of formal positions of responsibility, and a spectrum of less formalized actions and interactions that to a modern view might not all immediately qualify as political, from conversations between Emperor and members of his inner circle at the apex of the system, to the administration of religious festivals and public celebrations at its base. The range of phenomena potentially available for theoretical analysis and discussion was thus very wide indeed – as wide as at any previous stage in philosophical history, if not wider. For it embraced not only the questions of civic organization and conduct that had been the focus for Plato and Aristotle, and those of monarchy and the rulership of a more extended territory and population brought in by Hellenistic thinkers, but in addition issues specific to the existence of an Empire of unprecedented scope and degree of organization, as perceived both from the ruler’s vantage-point and from those of his subordinates at different positions in the 3

Alföldy 1988, 106–56 (esp. 146–56); Hope 2000, 135–8. Lendon 1997; Schmitz 1997, 97–135. 5 Veyne 1990, 10–13, 131–52; Nutton 1978; Schmitz 1997, 94–6, 100–6. 4

Constitutions and the Ruler

169

hierarchy. As we turn to the detail of Imperial-period political philosophizing, therefore, one important question to be kept in mind is how far and how imaginatively the theorists of the period reacted to the novelty of their situation, compared to those of their philosophical forebears and models. Granted that both civic and monarchic politics had to some degree been analysed and legislated for in fourth-century and Hellenistic thought, were Imperial-period thinkers content to stay largely within the frame of reference thus established, assuming it to be adequate with minor adaptation to the problems of cities, citizens, authorities and ruler in an Empire? Or did they perceive a need for development, and innovate in ways specific to the new circumstances? The question is all the more intriguing because of what we know of the lives and careers – and specifically the political engagements – of so many of the figures involved. Not only is the spectrum of political life broader and more complex at this than at any earlier period of classical antiquity. It is also the case that no earlier period can so clearly show us philosophoi engaged in so many different ways, in such a variety of capacities, with the political structures and capacities of their time. Starting – famously – from the very highest available position, we may count an Emperor in Marcus Aurelius; a tutor and advisor to the Emperor, who was also a senior Senator and held the consulship, in Seneca; engaged and participatory members of both the Greek-speaking and the Latin-speaking provincial civic elite in Plutarch, Apuleius, Philo Judaeus, Alexander of Aphrodisias and Dio Chrysostom (the first and last of whom could also lay claim to the status of friends and advisers to Emperors); a native Italian member of the equestrian order, who brought at least one high-profile court case at Rome, in Musonius Rufus; a Greek immigrant to Rome who departed from his normal position of disengagement to plead for the defence in the same court case, in Demetrius; and a politically disenfranchised Greek freedman, who had nevertheless lived in and observed the Imperial court at close quarters, in Epictetus.6 What was the thinking that lay behind these various styles and degrees of participation in the political processes of the day? This chapter and the following two will look first at Imperial-period constitutional theory – ideas about the possible range of different constitutional forms and their relative merits and problems – then at ideas of the structure and components of the good community, and lastly at the issue of political participation itself, and opinions on its legitimacy for the philosophically committed.

6

Among those whose works survive in any quantity, practically our only examples of figures not known to have had interesting political connections are Alcinous, Aspasius, Maximus of Tyre and Diogenes of Oenoanda. In the cases of the first three, it may be a simple accident of preservation that we have no positive indication; only the last, Diogenes, can be held up as a probable case of abstention from political involvement on (Epicurean) principle.

170

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

Constitutions Mapping and ranking the possible forms In some doctrinal perspectives, the issue of good, bad and possible constitutions, and of the mechanisms of government, had no importance at all. Sceptics could simply dismiss it as not a site of knowledge; Cynics could sneer at it as something trivial and irrelevant to the real business of good living, which for them had to be conceived on a severely individual basis. For Epicureans, it had a real, but limited interest, as part of their account of how human society had come to be organized as it is. They had to be able to prove that political forms came into existence for determinate, utilitarian purposes, rather than through any divine contrivance, and to show that their usefulness to the good life was of a purely instrumental, not constitutive kind; but beyond that, the finer classification and analysis of alternative constitutions had little point.7 For Platonists, Peripatetics and Stoics, however – as also for others broadly of their persuasion like Philo and the authors of the so-called ‘Pythagorean’ political treatises (‘Archytas’, ‘Hippodamus’, ‘Ecphantus’, and the rest)8 – the issue was a more substantial one, and duly receives more sustained and respectful attention in our surviving sources. Discussion can, it is true, be brief and schematic at times. Both Alcinous and Apuleius in their Platonic handbooks simply summarize what they understand as Platonic doctrine with no further comment. In Alcinous’ account in Didaskalikos 34, the difference between the political theory of Republic and that of Laws is characterized as that between analysis of ‘non-hypothetical’ states (i.e those conceived entirely freely, without any factors to constrain the scope of the invention, as in Republic), and states ‘based on the presence of certain conditions’, as in Laws, where the starting-point is an existing constitution, which is modified to suit the ideals of the philosophical reformer. This is an analysis which has more to do with harmonizing apparent discrepancies in Plato than with propounding a revealing account of constitutions in themselves. Alcinous summarizes the structure of the tripartite state of Republic, and the analysis of degenerate kinds of constitution from the same dialogue, but gives no parallel summary of the contents of Laws; he concludes instead with the observation that, in Plato’s view, the object of all politics is to make the state ‘good, happy, harmonious and concordant’ and that it is a directive activity, concerned among many other things with the waging of war. Apuleius similarly in his On Plato9 distinguishes between the approaches of Republic and Laws as exercises in theoretical state-building ‘without manifest existence’ (sine evidentia) and ‘based on some prior substance’ (cum aliqua 7

The principal document for Epicurean political doctrine and historiography is Hermarchus’ Against Empedocles, quoted by Porphyry On Abstinence 1.7–12; cf. also Colotes in Plutarch’s Against Colotes, 1124d. Further discussion by Schofield in Rowe and Schofield 2000, 437–41. 8 On these texts, see Thesleff 1961, Centrone 2000. 9 Apul. On Plato 2.24–8.

Constitutions and the Ruler

171

substantia) respectively, and gives details of the tripartite state of Republic. Unlike Alcinous, however, he provides a more extended account of the differences between the two approaches, especially as concerns marriage and property arrangements, and of the procedures to be adopted in the state of Laws in order to ensure that the reformer will get his way. He ends with a return to the territory of Republic and its doctrine of degenerate constitutions. The gap between what he describes as Plato’s thinking and actual contemporary circumstances is strikingly underlined when he credits Plato with the belief that, in the over-riding interests of concord and unanimity, no state should be so large that its inhabitants cannot be known personally both to each other and to their ruler.10 Both Apuleius and Alcinous leave their readers in no doubt that Plato’s preference was for a constitution directed by a small, but still plural, class of philosophically enlightened rulers, but make no comment on how near or far this ideal is to being realized in the modern world.11 Other contemporary representatives of the Platonic, Peripatetic and Stoic tradition are more forthcoming, and move beyond taxonomy to positive endorsement of one or another kind of political arrangement. The spectrum of possibilities within which they make and defend their choices in general follows not the Plato of Republic or Laws, but the schema established in Politicus 297c– 303b (to which Alcinous and Apuleius make no reference) and Aristotle Politics 3.7. This distinguishes the three major forms as rule by a single individual, rule by the few, and rule by the mass of the population, with each of the three possibilities capable of being found in a better and a worse version (kingship or tyranny; aristocracy or oligarchy; law-bound or lawless democracy). The ‘mixed’ constitution. Against the background of this schema, the ideal of the ‘mixed’ constitution, combining elements of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy in a single system, receives only occasional support. A heavily watered-down version is commended by ‘Hippodamus’,12 who opines that monarchy is the best form of government, and aristocracy the second best, but concedes that elements of aristocracy and even democracy must be included for the sake of security and of fairness to all participants in the state. He combines this with a heavily Platonizing division of the state into three constituent classes, each of which can itself be subdivided into a further three. ‘Archytas’ is more wholehearted, declaring roundly in the principal surviving fragment of his On Law and Justice that the mixed constitution itself is best, and offering Sparta as an example of its successful instantiation – though in another fragment, he is also to be found setting out his demands for the character of the (sole?) ruler.13 Given the 10 Apul. On Plat. 2.24.256 – a doctrine deriving in fact as much from Aristotle Politics 7.4 as from anything in Plato (though cf. Plato Laws 5.737de and 738de). 11 There is no sign of any tendency to infer the supreme desirability of monarchy from the singleness of the Form of the Good in the structure of reality, or from the supremacy of the (single) sun in the visible cosmos. 12 Stob. Flor. 4.1.93–5 (esp. 95) = 98.12–102.20 Thesleff (esp. 100.24–102.20). 13 Stob. Flor. 4.1.135–138 = 33.2–35.30 Thesleff; 4.5.61 = 36.2–11 Thesleff.

172

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

popularity and longevity of ideas of a mixed constitution in other kinds of ancient writing, this relative scarcity of endorsement in Imperial-period philosophizing texts is perhaps remarkable.14 Democracy and aristocracy. Of the three possible ‘pure’ forms, rule by the many is simply not contemplated as a sole ideal, any more than it had been in earlier philosophical treatments. The word ‘democracy’ is indeed quite frequently used, but when it is, the reference is standardly either to a subordinate element within a mixed ideal, or to the principle of the regular rotation of high office among members of the ruling elite.15 Praise of democracy as a political form is thus in effect praise of aristocracy, which receives a rather better press all round. The idea that this – rule by the select few – is the very highest form of government seems admittedly to be confined to summaries of Plato (Alcinous and Apuleius), and to unsuccessful pleas safely confined in a vanished past (‘Agrippa’s’ speech in Dio Cassius, Histories 51.1–13); but it is very nearly universally accepted, implicitly at least, as the right form at a subordinate level of political management – that of the cities, as distinct from provinces, nations and Empires. The clearest endorsement can be found in Plutarch’s two treatises, Old Men in Politics and Political Precepts, which acknowledge the over-arching reality of the Roman provincial and imperial structure, but simply take it for grated that political power at civic level will remain in the hands of a restricted elite; they will share out and take turns at the positions of formal office, but certainly not share them with the population at large.16 But a similar sense emerges also from the city orations of Dio Chrysostom. Monarchy (prologue). For Platonists, Stoics, and their fellow travellers, therefore, the highest form of government – the only one conceivable as the ideal for the largest political units – is generally agreed to be monarchy. Explicit recommendation and praise for the monarch and monarchic rule comes among the ‘Pythagorean’ writers from the treatises On Kingship by ‘Diotogenes’, ‘Ecphantus’ and ‘Sthenidas’,17 and from Philo Judaeus in his account of Moses.18 Plutarch, as just noted, accepts the reality of imperial rule in his civic treatises without demur; in another work, To an Uneducated Ruler, he upholds an ideal of enlightened authority that includes kings (and, by implication, Emperors), even 14

Von Fritz 1954, Nippel 1980. So Plutarch, Precepts 816f, ‘Agrippa’ in Dio Cassius Hist. 52.2–14 (with a further twist by ‘Maecenas’ in 52.14, making ‘democracy’ derivative from autocracy), Philo Special Laws 4.231 and (with a cosmic dimension, reflecting Philo’s sense of the subordination of all human constitutions to the divine order of nature) Immut. 176. 16 Ei presbuterôi politeuteon, An seni respublica gerenda sit, and Politika parangelmata, Praecepta gerendae reipublicae: Moralia 783a–797f, 798a–825f. 17 Stob. Flor. 4.7.61–2 = 71.18–75.16 Thesleff (Diotogenes), 4.7.63 = 187.10–188.13 Thesleff (Sthenidas), 4.7.64–6 = 79.9–84.8 Thesleff (Ecphantus). 18 Philo, Moses 1.60–2, 148–62, 2.1–7; cf. also the portrayal of Joseph the politikos in Joseph as subordinate to a supreme monarch. 15

Constitutions and the Ruler

173

though it speaks throughout of ‘rulers’ (archontes, plural) rather than a sole ruler.19 Dio Chrysostom’s four Kingship Orations, addressed to the Emperor Trajan, and Seneca’s On Clemency, to the newly installed Nero, are based on the assumption that sole rule, though it may be beset by intense dangers, also offers unique opportunities for good, both for the holder of that position and for his subjects. The importance of law. The details of these discussions of monarchy and of the proper attributes of the good monarch will be the subject of the next part of this chapter. Before that, however, it needs also to be pointed out that, side by side with their endorsement of this or that specific constitution, theorists of the Imperial period are also at pains to underline the importance of law. Any community, and any constitution, it is maintained, must be law-bound in order to be good and successful; and this is generally understood to mean, not only that it should have and observe a code of positive law, but also – more importantly still – that this code should itself conform to larger principles of organization and excellence in the cosmos and nature. As ‘Archytas’ puts it in his On Law and Justice, law is to the human soul and human life as harmony is to the sense of hearing and the voice. It ‘educates the soul and stabilizes life’, and in its truest sense, fully to be law, it must be beneficial to the political community, practicable, and in accord with nature.20 This truth holds, as for all others, so also for the monarchic constitution and community, in which the monarch should not only be the supreme legislator, but also a kind of living embodiment of the law. The ideal of the sole ruler as living law – found not only in the ‘Pythagorean’ treatises, but also in Philo, Musonius and Plutarch21 – thus reminds us – if reminder were needed – of the extent to which all political theorizing in this period is regarded as subordinate and answerable to higher structures and principles. Political communities are small-scale and temporary human contrivances within the larger, and more fully organized structure of the cosmos; what virtue they have depends absolutely on their ability to respect, promote and reproduce in themselves the principles and workings of the larger whole.22 Similarly, the demands of political life, on both rulers and subordinates, are not independent of but answerable to larger principles of morality and the pursuit of the good life. The most important formative factor behind this view of the importance of law and law-abidingness was clearly the Stoic concept of law as right reason – as 19

See also Old Men in Politics 790b, where Plutarch refers to kingship as ‘the most complete and the greatest political rank’ (though in context this is a statement about positions of authority an individual might hope to hold, rather than a straightforward endorsement of monarchy as the best constitution). 20 ‘Archytas’ in Stob. Flor. 4.1.135–7 = 33.2–34.14 Thesleff. 21 ‘Archytas’ in Stob. Flor. 4.1.135 = 33.2–18 Thesleff; Philo Moses 2.4, 2.12–13, 2.17–19, Worse Ambushes Better 141; Musonius fr. 8, p. 37.2 Hense; Plutarch Philosophers and Princes 779b, Uneducated Ruler 780c; cf. Maximus Or. 11.12; the idea is, however, noticeably absent from Dio’s Kingship Orations. 22 E.g. Philo Jos. 28–31.

174

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

embodied both in the individual moral agent, and in the divine structure of the universe as a whole, and so providing a community-making link between men and gods. In this line of thought, reason has a strong social reference – for right reason in humans is right reason in beings made by nature for social existence – but its essential character and operations are noticeably different to those of a formal code of positive law.23 As an incentive nevertheless to link positive with natural law, it must have been important to many Imperial-period thinkers that the most detailed and practical-looking of Plato’s political dialogues revolved around the construction and explanation of a code of laws. Monarchy (continued) If then there is one political form accorded more attention than any other in the Imperial period, it is monarchy. Reflections on the virtues of kingship and the good king – normally prescriptive rather than neutrally descriptive – are to be found in a number of different works with different specific orientations, the names of many of which have already come up for discussion in this chapter. The three ‘Pythagorean’ treatises On Kingship excerpted by Stobaeus, by ‘Diotogenes’, ‘Ecphantus’ and ‘Sthenidas’ (which, it must be remembered, may or may not all belong to the Imperial period) contain entirely general, contextless recommendations. Philo Judaeus’ portrayal of Moses in his Life of Moses projects an ideal of kingship back into a distant past, clearly envisaged as superior to the fractured present depicted in his Embassy to Gaius (Caligula). Seneca’s On Clemency and Dio Chrysostom’s Kingship Orations (Orr. 1–4) channel theory into enlightening advice and exhortation to a current Emperor (Nero, Trajan), while Musonius Fragment 8 does the same on a smaller scale for an unnamed Syrian client king. Dio’s Borysthenitic Oration (Or. 36) and the Latin translation (perhaps by Apuleius) of the pseudo-Aristotelian On the Cosmos issue implicit endorsements of monarchy in the pursuit of other projects: exposition of the structure and workings of the Universe in the case of the latter, exploration of ideas of Hellenism and statehood in the former. These texts make a fairly unified group all the same. There is much common ground between them individually, and as a group they also have much in common with earlier writing and thinking on kingship from the fourth century BCE onwards – the so-called tradition of Hellenistic kingship theory.24 We are clearly dealing not with an exclusively philosophical analysis of kingship, but with

23

See Schofield 1991, 64–72, citing Cicero Nature of the Gods 2.154 and Laws 2.23; Didymus as cited by Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel 15.15; Aurelius Med. 4.4. 24 The key sources are conveniently listed and briefly analysed by Griffin 1976, 144–5. The category includes, besides the ‘Pythagorean’ treatises listed above (which may be late Hellenistic rather than Imperial in date), Xenophon’s Cyropedaea, the To Nicocles and Nicocles of Isocrates, pseudo-Aristotle On Kingship, and passages from various speeches and philosophical treatises by Cicero.

Constitutions and the Ruler

175

a broader current of comment and reflection, in which many others than philosophoi have participated. However, our Imperial-period authors do nevertheless speak explicitly as philosophers, whether through their own mouths or under assumed identities; and they present even widely shared ideas in a philosophized version, giving them at least some extra coloration from a context of more distinctively philosophical theorizing. The most striking instances of this philosophization of more generally diffused patterns of thought are also, as it happens, the two dominant themes in all kingship literature: the ideas of a special relationship between monarchs and gods, and of the need for the monarch to display a special degree of moral virtue. Both of these are clearly open to being given a distinctive inflection, in the light of philosophical physics and cosmology on the one hand, and philosophical ethics on the other. Theories of the structure of the cosmos, and of the natural grounds for the absolute and relative status of human beings and divinities within it, can give a special clarity to the philosopher’s version of the king’s relation to the divine; and theories of the soul, self-formation and moral progress can similarly sharpen and colour propositions about the monarch’s superior virtue. As will be seen, these possibilities are realized to differing degrees in the works now under consideration. ‘Pythagoreans’. Of the excerpts from the ‘Pythagorean’ treatises, those from ‘Diotogenes’ and ‘Sthenidas’ give comparatively brief and superficial accounts. ‘Sthenidas’ asserts that the monarch ought to be an imitator of the ‘first God’ and possess both intellectual and ethical virtues (including a paternal affection for his subjects); he sees the legitimation of monarchy in the general principle that everything needs authority (archê) and a king in order to be good.25 The specification of the first God as the pattern for the monarch implies a framework of philosophical rather than everyday theology, but neither this nor any other complication is pursued. ‘Diotogenes’ too asserts the need for the monarch to possess ethical virtue, but does so in more detail, and with a more explicit insistence that he must possess it to a particularly high degree. It is in this, rather than in wealth, physical strength, or force of arms that he should show his superiority to his subjects; and it is their admiration for this, together with his magnificent aspect and behaviour, that should compel them too to virtue. By the cultivation of a virtuous inner harmony, a king can bring external harmony and community (koinônia) to the state as well, and in pursuit of this end he should be reasonable (epieikês), clement (eugnômôn) and unoppressive (abarês). It is in the combination of all these factors, not just in some favoured one, that ‘Diotogenes’ declares the king’s likeness to the supreme God, this time just named as Zeus, to lie.26 The most elaborate account of all, however, is that of ‘Ecphantus’, who particularly stresses the cosmic aspect of kingship: its place in a larger cosmic hierarchy, and its role in promoting the universal value of harmony. ‘Ecphantus’ is also more definite and explicit than either ‘Diotogenes’ or ‘Sthenidas’ that the 25 26

‘Sthenidas’ in Stob. Flor. 4.7.63 = 187.10–188.13 Thesleff. ‘Diotogenes’ in Stob. Flor. 4.7.61 = 71.18–75.16 Thesleff.

176

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

king is to be regarded as a special, superior form of human being. The grand hierarchy of Nature descends from a supreme God via planetary deities and the sublunary zone, to the earth. On earth itself, man is the highest creature, but kings are the highest kind of men, closest to divinity in nature as well as fulfilling an analogous role among humans to that performed by God for the cosmos as a whole. As near-divine beings, kings possess an especially pure and splendid nature, metaphorically inhabiting a pinnacle of light, to be gazed at directly only by the pure and true (gnêsioi). Imitating God themselves, they pass on models of virtue to their subjects, in particular instantiating in human states, in the form of friendship (philia) and community (koinônia), the harmony of the cosmos. The manner in which this is done, likewise, should ideally imitate the divine modus operandi. As God administers the cosmos without recourse to subordinates or a system of rewards, punishments and prohibitions, but by presenting himself as a self-sufficient model for imitation, so the king should work on his human subjects by inspiration, not compulsion: to such an extent, indeed, that ‘Ecphantus’ even suggests that recourse to persuasion (peithô) should count as falling short of the ideal, as an inferior substitute for true, spontaneous imitation of the ruler by his subjects (even if, in practice, it may be needed as an unavoidable concession to human frailty). The king’s supreme virtue is wisdom (phronêsis), from which derive his self-control (enkrateia), self-sufficiency (autarkeia), and his concern for justice, community and equality (dikaiosunê, koinônia, isotês). Of all the ‘Pythagorean’ authors, ‘Ecphantus’ speaks most like the courtier, flattering royal vanity with an extravagant account of the almost superhuman splendour of the monarch’s status and inner nature. But, as also with Dio and Seneca, we are at liberty to understand such flattery as the sugar on the surface of the pill, sweetening the underlying message that the monarch ought to be ready to live up to some very stringent moral standards.27 Philo Judaeus. Much of Philo Judaeus’ thinking about kingship is of a very standard kind, paralleled many times over from our other surviving texts. The good king is a benevolent shepherd, distinguished by his philanthrôpia; he holds his rank thanks not to force of arms but to his naturally virtuous character, in which he comes close to divinity; he is an object of imitation to his subjects.28 He is also, crucially, a source of law, not simply as a drafter of good laws, but as their living embodiment.29 Philo’s choice of Moses as the model of the good king not surprisingly leads him to lay special stress on this last characteristic, in a way that goes beyond what we find in our other sources. In Book 1 of the Life of Moses, he deals with Moses’ birth, upbringing, and achievements a leader (‘king’ in a conventional sense); in Book 2, he explains how, in this privileged case, the role of conventional monarch combined with those of law-giver, high-priest and prophet, to create a style of leadership and authority otherwise unknown.30 Moses’ 27

‘Ecphantus’ in Stob. Flor. 4.7.64–6 = 79.9–84.8 Thesleff. Philo Mos. 1.150–1, 1.160–1, 2.9; Virt. 70. 29 Philo Mos. 2.4. 30 Philo Mos. 2.1–7. 28

Constitutions and the Ruler

177

unparalleled closeness to divinity gave to his laws a unique conformity to the organizing principles of the universe (in Philo’s terms, to the divine logos, present also in Moses’ own soul), and so a unique stability and validity.31 In this way, Greek philosophical theory is co-opted by Philo to show that the quest for ideal kingship is not to be pursued among Emperors or within the Roman political system. The goal has already been achieved, once for all, outside the Greco-Roman ambit, with the great codifier of Judaism, which in Philo’s eyes more closely satisfies the agreed requirements of philosophia, at every level from personal ethics to the administration of the state, than any of the Hellenic haireseis. When a Roman Emperor does feature in Philo’s work, it is not as paragon but as villain, defining not kingship but its dark perversion, tyranny. Caligula is depicted in the Embassy to Gaius as devious, savagely cruel and mentally deranged, destroying and enslaving his subjects like a master not a ruler;32 in a malign perversion of the Mosaic ideal, he believes himself to be naturally suited to rule, possessed of all the virtues, an embodiment of law, and deserving of divine honour.33 Seneca. Philo’s Embassy is an exercise in settling scores after the event with a vicious Emperor now safely dead. Seneca’s On Clemency, addressed to the young and newly elevated Nero, is an attempt (futile, as hindsight shows) to keep him from going the same way (while at the same time demonstrating the practical usefulness of Stoicism in the forming and advising of a good ruler).34 But just as Philo turns Greek traditions of kingship theorizing in a distinctively Jewish direction, so Seneca in this treatise gives them a particularly Roman twist, to take account of a feature of Latin political culture not shared in the cities of the East. Rather than giving a generalizing account of kingship and proper kingly conduct, Seneca focuses on just one attribute, perceived as particularly relevant in current circumstances.35 The shift of emphasis seems to be a novel one, and throws a strong emphasis on the quality chosen for special attention. But it also helps Seneca to avoid the serious offence to Roman sensibilities that too direct and blunt an application of kingship theory might have delivered. He cannot entirely conceal his debt to the accumulated tradition – indeed, he needs to acknowledge it, in order to establish the validity of his own discussion; but at the same time, he needs also to defer to the long-standing Roman distaste for the name of king, which had 31

Philo Mos. 2.12–20, 2.49–51. For Philo’s doctrine of God’s logos, see Dillon 1977, 158– 61. 32 E.g. Philo Emb. 89–90, 93, 107, 119. 33 Philo Emb. 54–6, 64, 119, 75–80. The extravagant praise heaped in the same text on Augustus and Tiberius (141–51) must be read in context: Augustus and Tiberius score so highly because they are not Caligula, and because unlike him they respected the religious freedom of the Jews, not because they fulfilled the ideal of kingship in their own right. 34 For discussion and analysis, see Griffin 1976, 146–71 and 2000, 535–43. 35 Specifically, the need to restore confidence in the essential fairness and benevolence of imperial rule after the arbitrary abuses of the judicial system perpetrated under Nero’s predecessor, Claudius.

178

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

been a persistent element in the political ideology of the Republic, and a continuing point of delicacy for the Emperors. His solution combines concentration on a single regal virtue (with the institution of kingship relegated to the background), with a tactful choice and deployment of terminology. The word ‘king’ (rex) is made to alternate with ‘leader’ or ‘leading citizen’ (princeps) – the term deliberately favoured by Augustus and his successors to sustain the fiction that the Emperor of Rome was not constitutionally an absolute ruler. In his introduction (Clemency 1.3.1), Seneca announces a three-part study. The third part, dealing with ‘how the mind is brought to this virtue, how it consolidates it, and makes it its own through usage’ is now lost; the second, on ‘the nature of clemency as a settled state of character (habitum)’ survives in truncated form, as Book 2; the first part, Seneca’s own description of which has been made unintelligible by corruption in the manuscripts, is a defence and commendation of clemency in the framework of a broader view of the special responsibilities of rulers. Book 2, heavily technical and dominated by definitions, is interestingly problematic in its own right. By carefully distinguishing clemency from cruelty (crudelitas) in one direction and pardon (venia, ignoscere) and pity (misericordia) in the other, Seneca aims to show two things: that the cultivation of clemency is an important element in the Stoics’ claim to have a humane and constructive attachment to the common good; and at the same time that being clement does not jeopardize the equally important Stoic devotion to reason and the avoidance of the passions.36 What makes the problem is the way Seneca’s definitions relate clemency to the imposition of punishment, and thus to formal justice and law. A strong tradition in earlier Stoicism defined justice in terms of the distribution of what is deserved,37 and equated law (which specifies deserts) with right reason.38 Seneca apparently endorses this tradition by condemning pardon as ‘remission of deserved punishment’. Yet at the same time he is also prepared to use very similar terms in commending clemency, as ‘moderation that remits something of a deserved and owed punishment’ and ‘that reins back on the near side of what could deservedly be imposed’.39 The distinction between viciously remitting a punishment (venia) and virtuously remitting ‘something’ of it (clementia) might well seem dangerously slim, and the proposed definitions of clemency thus to fall foul of the orthodox Stoic sense of legally constituted penalties as expressions of right reason. Miriam Griffin plausibly suggests that Seneca has tailored his definitions to a specific Roman judicial procedure, new to his era, that of cognitio (‘judicial enquiry’) in which judges were not bound by pre-set penalties,40 but this cannot be the whole story on its own. It should be noted that Seneca himself does 36

Cruelty: 2.4.1–3; pity: 2.4.4; pardon: 2.7.1–3; Stoic humanity 2.5.2–2.7.5. Aristo SVF 1.374; Chrysippus SVF 2.289; Musonius fr. 8. 38 SVF 2.1003 (Alex. Aphrod. Fate 35); 3.317 (Cic. Laws 1.12.33); 3.332 (Clem. Strom. 2); 3.360 (Philo Every Good Man 2); 3.613 (Stob. Flor. 2.7.10, 2.96.10 W); 3.614 (Stob. Flor. 2.7.11, 2.102.4–6 W). 39 Clem. 2.3.2. 40 Griffin 1976, 153–71. 37

Constitutions and the Ruler

179

not court trouble by explicitly connecting the process of assessing and inflicting punishment with law understood as right reason, or by endorsing the current state of Roman law as ideally rational. He could thus perfectly well distinguish ideal laws, penalties under which could not be varied without vicious irrationality, and the approximations of actual legislation, which did leave legitimate scope for reasonable variation. Book 1 of On Clemency is both more rhetorical and expansive than Book 2, and raises fewer problems. The background sense of the role and responsibilities of the ruler against which Seneca recommends his chosen virtue is clear, and in many respects familiar from the texts already surveyed. Kingship is a natural institution, seen also in the animal realm (for instance, among bees, with their significantly stingless ‘kings’).41 It is part of a wider pattern of relationships between superiors and subordinates in the world of men, also embracing masters and slaves, officers and soldiers, teachers and pupils, and parents and children – in all of which gentle and benevolent handling best serves the interests of all concerned.42 Equally, the relationship between ruler and ruled should resemble that of soul to body, in which the superior element in each case provides both rational guidance for the whole, and a unifying bond.43 And, by the same token, it resembles also the relationship between God, or the gods, and the physical cosmos.44 Monarchs are intermediate between ordinary humanity and the gods, imitating the latter to an unusual degree, which is itself exemplary to their human subordinates;45 this means above all attempting to reproduce not just the power and authority but also the reasoned benevolence of the divine.46 Although much of the essay is going to concentrate on clemency in a judicial context, Seneca does not have anything very ambitious to say about the relationship of the ruler to law and constitutional form. His choice of words in 1.19.1 – ‘by whatever means and with whatever legal right he [the ruler] is set in authority over others’ – suggests a relatively relaxed approach to the question of legitimacy, as less important than the moral character of the ruler. Proposing that Nero should say to himself ‘I keep watch on myself as if I were in due course to give account to the laws, which I have recalled to the light of day from the shadows of neglect’, in 1.1.4, places the ruler above the law, but on the understanding that he and they share the same aims and purposes – which is similar to the idea of the monarch as living law without explicitly endorsing it. Rather more energy, however, is given to defining the king in terms of the contrast with his vicious anti-type, the tyrant, in which clemency can be given a leading role. The distinction is said to depend not on the presence or absence of harshness towards subjects in itself, but rather in its frequency and motivation: kings treat 41

Clem. 1.19. Clem. 1.14–18. 43 Clem. 1.3.5–1.4.3. As Seneca observes, this makes the monarch’s clemency a selfregarding virtue, exercised by one part of a complex whole towards another. 44 Clem. 1.1.2; 1.7. 45 Clem. 1.7. 46 Clem. 1.5.7. 42

180

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

their subjects harshly only for good reason, and when there is no alternative; tyrants do so because they enjoy it (in voluptatem). Kings thus can and tyrants cannot equally well show clemency too. As a result, tyrants rule by fear, and are correspondingly insecure in their position; clement kingly rule rests on the solider foundation of reciprocal affection.47 Dio Chrysostom. The contrast between kingship and tyranny, displayed for its educative effect on an actual ruler, who might be swayed in either direction, is also a major topic in the Kingship Orations of Dio. These four pieces present themselves as the texts of speeches delivered by Dio before the Emperor Trajan himself, though it cannot be taken as absolutely certain that the events implied actually happened. It may be that we have to do instead with items intended from the start for a Greek city audience, in which Dio dramatizes scenes that never took place.48 But the possibility of some degree of fictionalizing does not affect the thematic content. Either way, what we find in these speeches is philosophical protreptic designed to hold up models of good kingship and, as with Seneca’s On Clemency, to draw an instructive contrast with the vices of an earlier incumbent (Domitian/Claudius). Whether originally conceived as a co-ordinated group or not, the four speeches adopt a lively variety of structures, stage-settings and hortatory strategies. Orations 1 and 3 take the form of direct addresses to the Emperor; but within this framework, Or. 1 crowns and reinforces its direct exposition with a myth about the young Heracles, which itself encloses an allegory of good and bad kingship, while Or. 3 presents itself as a systematic account of the ideas on monarchy of Socrates and his principal disciples. Orations 2 and 4 take the form of narrated dialogues, between Alexander and Philip in the one case, and Alexander and Diogenes in the other. Or. 2 builds the conversation round an exegesis of Homer, and the suitability of his poetry to educate and guide the king. Or. 4 is an encounter in the style of the pseudo-Platonic First Alcibiades, in which the aspiring leader is brought down to earth by being shown how badly he needs first to sort out the state of his own soul; like Or. 1, it ends in an ornate allegory, this time describing rival aims and lifestyles in terms of their supervising spirits (daimones).49 Most of the central emphases of Dio’s message to Trajan will sound thoroughly familiar by now; the king as moral paragon, enjoying a special resemblance to and closeness to the supreme God; kingship as a natural, cosmically sanctioned form of authority; the deterrent contrast between king and tyrant. All four orations dwell on the need for the good monarch to be morally superior to his subjects, with this moral superiority manifesting itself both in his inner serenity and self-control, and in the actively benevolent care he shows for 47

Clem.1.11.1–1.13.5. Moles 1983a and 1990 are thorough and detailed attempts to read the Kingship Orations as devised for Trajan and delivered directly to him; but they concede the possibility that the encounters may be fiction. 49 Moles 1983a and 1990 for analysis; on Or. 4 see also Brancacci 2000, 254–6, Trapp 2000, 225–7. 48

Constitutions and the Ruler

181

their wellbeing.50 Or. 4 adds the suggestion that this requires suitability for kingship to be an innate, not an acquired quality;51 Or. 3 stresses that, in addition to his general benevolence to all under him, the king should take special care to cultivate his relations with friends and family.52 The cosmic standing of kingship, and the closeness of the good king to Zeus is a topic in Orations 1, 3 and 4,53 with Or. 3 adding the further idea (in which Platonic reminiscence blends with the basically Stoic doctrine that Dio presents) that the ruler is also closely comparable to the all-powerful, untiring sun.54 The contrast between king and tyrant is especially prominent in the allegory with which Or. 1 concludes, but comes up also in the allegorical interpretation of Homer’s image of the good leader as the bull of the herd in Or. 2, and in the context of friendship (the tyrant is utterly friendless) in Or. 3.55 But Dio also has two notable emphases of his own. Orations 1 and 3 both underline the need for unremitting toil on the part of the good king, as symbolized by the figure of Heracles in the former, and the untiring sun in the latter.56 Orations 2 and 4 tackle the question of the proper education for the monarch, urging with slightly differing emphases that virtuous natural endowment is more significant than conventional (literary) culture: in Or. 2 this comes out as the proposition that other forms of poetry besides Homer need not detain the aspiring monarch (though he does also need at least some exposure to philosophia);57 Or. 4 stresses how the ‘true education’ (or ‘culture’ – paideia) of Zeus, which is equivalent to a strong natural predisposition to moral virtue, makes the acquisition of everyday learning both less important and much easier.58 In both of these extra elements, it is plausible to see a neat convergence of motives. Stressing toil and the (comparative) unimportance of conventional, sophisticated education both allows Dio to give a lightly Cynicizing colour to the basic Stoicism of his exhortation, thus distinguishing him as a performer and adviser; and at the same time it brings his advice into line with some well-known traits of Roman imperial thinking in general, and his addressee of the moment in particular.59 Other texts. A number of other texts, though not dealing principally with kingship, nonetheless reinforce the sense of it as a – perhaps the only – cosmically correct form of government. Dio’s own Borysthenitic Oration (Or. 36) is (among other things) a reflection on civilization, the city and Hellenic identity, addressed to an audience in Prusa, but set on the semi-barbarian edges of the Greek world, 50

Dio Orr. 1.12–14, 1.17–20, 2.65–78, 3.9–11, 3.39–57, 4.25, 4.39–74. Dio Or. 4.27–35. 52 Dio Or. 3.86–118. 53 Dio Orr. 1.37–48, 3.62–81, 4.27–45. 54 Dio Or. 3.73–8. 55 Dio Orr. 1.12–14, 1.49–84, 2.65–78 (esp. 73–7), 3.116–18. 56 Dio Orr. 1.21–3, 3.82–5. 57 Dio Or. 2.1–35. 58 Dio Or. 4.27–35. 59 Moles 1990, 323–6, and 1983a and 1990 in general. 51

182

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

and drawing showily on the exotic learning of the Magi of Persia.60 Reflection on the true nature of the human city61 leads Dio on to talk about the cosmic ‘city’ and its cycle of transformations, and this in turn (Dio’s account is once more fundamentally Stoic, for all its gaudy Zoroastrian robes) throws heavy emphasis on the controlling influence of a single Father and King, in Zeus.62 Of particular interest here is Dio’s apparently idiosyncratic attempt to suggest that it is only monarchic rule that can ensure the friendship and concord on which the harmony, and thus the goodness, of a good state depends.63 The same general tendency (minus the explicit emphasis on harmony) is furthered in some other works by the use of the image of the court of the Great King of Persia for the hierarchy of divine powers in the cosmos, and the mode of the supreme God’s control over the whole. First elaborated in the pseudoAristotelian On the Cosmos, which may be either late Hellenistic or early Imperial in date,64 the conceit is reproduced in the Latin translation of the work, which must belong to the Imperial era, whether or not it is by Apuleius as the manuscripts claim;65 and it also appears, in condensed form, at the end of Maximus’ account of Platonic theology in his Oration 11.66 In no case is anything said directly about current monarchs or about monarchy as a human political system, but the implicit endorsement is evident. Conclusions. What emerges very clearly from all these kingship texts is that Stoics, Platonists, and their various fellow travellers do not only agree in endorsing monarchy as a uniquely appropriate constitutional form. They also share much of the detail of their sense of the nature and duties of the good monarch. A particularly interesting feature is the care they take to limit monarchic status even as they exalt it, as if they felt their task was as much to establish reasoned restraints as to justify the existence of the institution in the first place. Kings in their presentation are special among human beings in virtue of their unusual rank – their position is occupied by few at any given time, and deserved by fewer – but that rank itself is not of a wholly unparalleled kind: a king is a head of household, or general, or ship’s captain, or shepherd writ large, or God writ small. Moreover, the inner virtues and patterns of outward behaviour that he is expected to embody are not specific to his particular rank either. They are those of any and every good person, or to put it another way, those of any and every subscriber to philosophia 60

See Desideri 1978, 318–27; Schofield 1991, 57–92, Nesselrath et al. 2003; Trapp 1990 and 1995; and see further below, 185–90. 61 Schofield 1991, 57–92, and see also below 185–6. 62 Dio Or. 36.35–40; see also 31–2 for an explicit endorsement of kingship as the only proper constitutional form at the human level as well. 63 Dio Or. 36.31–2, on which see Schofield’s critical comments (1991: 84–8). 64 Ps.-Aristotle On the Cosmos 6.397b9–398b22. 65 Apuleius (?) On the Cosmos 26.346–28.353. On the attribution of this work to Apul., see Harrison 2000, 174–80. 66 Maximus Or. 11.12. Elsewhere, Maximus explicitly endorses monarchy as the best constitution in Or. 16.4, but does so (rather confusingly) in the context of an encomium of the life of contemplation.

Constitutions and the Ruler

183

as a programme of self-formation and conduct, in its Stoic and Platonist understanding: inner control of desire and emotion, outward benevolence and beneficence to others. It is particularly important that monarchs should have these characteristics, as their role ensures that their characters and actions have an impact on a far wider range of others than those of ordinary people. They need to be closer to perfection of soul than many, which in turn means that they need to have been born with a special propensity to virtue. But this does not make them beings of a fundamentally different kind. The overall effect is more to impress the monarch with the need to live up to more widely prevailing standards, than to flatter him with a sense of his own superiority. It might also be asked what relationship this approach to the philosophical taming of monarchy has to older ideas of the philosopher-king. Plato, most notoriously, had called for a complete convergence of the two roles, urging that ‘there can be no end to political troubles ... or even to human troubles in general’, unless ‘communities have philosophers for kings ... or the people who are currently called kings and rulers practise philosophy’.67 The Stoics, for their part, had turned the idea rather differently. Their declaration that the wise man was the only true king (with its implication that most actual rulers are not properly so called) was as much a way of insisting on the superiority of the individual quest for reason and happiness, as of calling for actual political reform.68 Among our authors, the handbook writers Alcinous and Apuleius happily report Plato’s call, as they are bound to do. Of the others, it is Philo Judaeus who comes closest to endorsing it as something more than a merely theoretical ideal; but, as already observed, he projects it back into an idealized Jewish past, onto the heroic founding figure of Moses, rather than treating it as a possible project for modern times. Those who speak explicitly for the present, however – the ‘Pythagoreans’, and especially Seneca and Dio – are not so attracted, and seem indeed rather to shy away from anything that might bring reminiscences of the Platonic notion too embarrassingly into focus. Though they emphasize the high moral virtue of the good monarch, they have much less to say about his superior rationality; kings are not brought into connection with the prime philosophical business of the formation of the soul, and of progress towards reason and happiness (although the education of the monarch is a topic); nor is there any suggestion that monarchs are, like philosophoi, uniquely happy and fulfilled. Dio indeed even at one point directly plays down the extent to which a king in the making needs to be exposed to philosophia.69 All this suggests a healthy realism; but it does also perhaps leave an element of (deliberate?) uncertainty about just how close the parallel between monarchs and philosophoi is supposed to be.70

67

Plato Rep. 473d. Diog. Laert. 7.122; Schofield in Rowe and Schofield 2000, 447. 69 Dio Or. 2.26: the monarch should listen to philosophoi without pursuing philosophical investigation on his own account. 70 Similarly, the tyrant is not presented, as he once was by Plato (Rep. 562a–592b) as the worst conceivable type of humanity in general. What he is made to show is specifically how 68

184

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

The only text that might seem to break this pattern of reticence is Musonius fr.8. Here Musonius is to be found exhorting his Syrian kinglet to embrace philosophia as something indispensable and uniquely appropriate to the good monarch. The good king needs all the virtues, which only philosophia can bestow in their full form, including (an unusual emphasis) the ability in reasoning required to win arguments and distinguish truth from falsehood.71 A closer look at Musonius’ argumentation, however, shows that he is not advancing an ideal of philosophical kingship in any strong form. For he also insists that, just as (true) kingship is something philosophical, so philosophia is something kingly, even if it is exercised only within a household, or even in an individual’s ‘rule’ over himself;72 and philosophia for Musonius, as he repeats here and in many other places, is wholly a matter of the practical cultivation of virtue.73 In other words, Musonius’ point is that the pursuit of virtue through philosophia is essential for all, irrespective of their social or political standing. His stress on the particular appropriateness to kings is a rhetorical turn tailored to his addressee of the moment, not the articulation of a bit of political theory.

not to behave as a ruler – how to twist all the features of the good monarch, in his inner state and his outward behaviour towards others, disastrously to the bad. 71 Muson. fr 8, p. 36.1–22 Hense. 72 Muson. fr. 8, pp. 38.8–39.18 Hense. 73 Muson. fr. 8, p. 38.2–4 Hense; cf. e.g. fr. 3, p. 9.14–15 Hense.

Chapter 7

Politics 2: Good Communities Dio on the Black Sea Dio Chrysostom’s Borysthenitic Oration (Or. 36) featured fleetingly in the last chapter as a supplementary text on kingship. Its full scope – as already suggested there – is wider, embracing the question of the nature and definition of the good community as a whole, not just the location of supreme authority within it. What Dio has to say on this broader topic comes in the form of a speech within a speech. The enclosing oration is a bravura, epideictic report – according to the title, one delivered to the citizens of Dio’s home town of Prusa – of what he encountered and what he said when he visited the remote Greek settlement of Borysthenes (Olbia) on the north shores of the Black Sea.1 The form of this report, a narrated dialogue, is heavily Platonic, with sustained evocation of the Phaedrus and (to a lesser extent, but still significantly) the Republic and the Timaeus. But the doctrinal content – the conceptual armature that allows the cosmological mythmaking of Phaedrus and Timaeus to be woven together with the political interests of Republic – is Stoic, with its emphases on the centrality of law (equated with reason and order), and the need to locate any human community in the larger structure and community of the cosmos as a whole.2 The opening paragraphs, describing the physical position and condition of Borysthenes, and a preliminary exchange between Dio and one of its young inhabitants, set the scene thematically as well as topographically, with their emphasis on the tenuous hold of this community on both Hellenic identity, and the physical status of a polis.3 The question of what the minimum conditions are for being a good and proper city is thus already in the air when Dio introduces it directly (to his audiences both inside and outside the narrative) by quoting the dictum of the gnomic poet Phocylides that ‘a city in a rocky place, though small, is greater than crazy Nineveh, if orderly in its doings (kata kosmon oikousa)’.4 From 1

Intro, ed. and comm. Russell 1992, 19–33, 89–107, 211–47; ed., German transl., notes and essays Nesselrath et al. 2003; see also Trapp 1995, 165–6, and the works cited in n. 2 below. 2 For the blending of Stoic and Platonic elements, see Schofield 1991, 57–92, with Trapp 1990, 148–55, and 2000, 214–19, and Forschner in Nesselrath et al. 2003, 128–56. Dio’s position in the oration is not wholly in line with earlier Stoic thinking, and is affected by Plato on a conceptual as well as a literary level, but Forschner’s attempt to argue that he is really a Platonist rather than a Stoic is unconvincing. 3 36.1–6: physical position and condition; 7–16: opening dialogue between Dio and Callistratus. 4 36.13.

186

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

this gentle beginning – tailored to the limited horizons of his Borysthenite audience – Dio moves on in the first of his set speeches to something more precise (and more fully Stoic).5 The word ‘city’ (polis), he explains, designates ‘a plurality of human beings dwelling in the same place, governed by law (plêthos anthrôpôn en tautôi katoikountôn hypo nomou dioikoumenôn)’.6 Since, he continues, adherence to law in the required sense is not compatible with disorder or with folly, it follows that disorderly cities, and cities not under the firm control of reason (like Phocylides’ Nineveh), are not cities at all in the true sense of the word.7 But this in turn raises the worry that no human city may fully satisfy the criteria, since none is law-abiding and self-controlled in the sense of consisting of nothing but law-abiding and self-controlled elements.8 Dio mentions, but does not directly endorse, the suggestion (Plato’s) that cities might still be called ‘law-abiding’ and ‘self-controlled’ (and thus be fully cities) in virtue of the possession of these qualities in full by its governing class alone.9 He falls back instead, for the time being at least, on the reflection that, even if no human city is perfect, degrees of closeness to or distance from perfection can still meaningfully be distinguished.10 A fully perfect community, then, cannot be found among human beings; if it is to be located anywhere, it is among the gods in the heavens – not in the metaphorical sense in which Plato could say that the plan of his ideal state ‘is perhaps laid up in the heavens’,11 but in the literal sense that it subsists among the stars and planets, with their perfectly and harmoniously co-ordinated movements and functions. But the impossibility of perfection on the purely human level, and its removal far aloft, does not leave human beings alone and dispossessed. This reassurance is briefly sketched by Dio at the end of his first speech, then elaborated at greater length, on the request of his Borysthenite audience, in his second.12 The community of gods, he explains, is a community based on the shared possession of rationality, which is in its turn the sole basis of partnership (koinônia) and justice (dikaiosynê). Though not perfectly rational, human beings nevertheless share in the possession of reason, and can thus be counted as part of this same community, in the sense that children can be called citizens of a polis even though they lack a full intellectual grasp of the law under which they live and

5

36.18–23. 36.20 (cf. 36.29); for the Stoic credentials of this definition, see Clement Strom. 4.26. 7 Another Stoic note: cf. Clement Strom. 4.26, with Schofield 1991, 61–2. 8 Cf. Seneca’s concern about the corruption of all actual states in On Leisure: see 220–2 below. 9 Plato Rep. 427e ff., esp. 428e–429a. 10 36.23. There is an implicit rejection here of the absolutism of the early Stoics, with their insistence on the equality of all degrees of imperfection, in favour of a more relaxed, ‘Panaetian’ approach, parallel to that favoured in ethics by Seneca and Epictetus: cf. 49–53 above. 11 Rep. 592b, though Dio’s evocation and correction of this declaration is indirect and implicit, not overt. 12 36.22–3 and 36.29–31 (esp. 29–38). 6

Good Communities

187

which gives them that status.13 But to what extent does this mean that it is justifiable to call the whole structure to which both gods and men belong – the cosmos – a city? Dio begins by admitting that, by the strict letter of the Stoic definition on which he has based his discussion, the cosmos can only be said to be like a city.14 But it is entirely appropriate and constructive to draw an analogy between the two. It is not simply that the cosmos is an orderly structure (taxis) with well regulated workings (eukosmia tês dioikêseôs) and a multiplicity of temporary inhabitants passing through it. Because it is ultimately under the control of a single, supremely rational divinity, who pervades its orderly structure and workings, and (in some degree) shares his rationality with all other living beings, the cosmos as a whole can be called a monarchy, a structure governed by law, and one suffused with concord (homonoia) and friendship (philia). This in turn makes it hugely appropriate to call it a city.15 Dio continues, once more in good Stoic vein,16 with an appeal to the evidence of mythological poetry, in which the idea of Zeus as king, and of the cosmos as his polis, can be found in a less clear-sighted and well-articulated form,17 before turning to the exalted set piece with which he will end. This is the ‘myth sung in secret rites by the Magi’ in which Dio, switching attention away from the human world entirely, and away too from the idea of a community of rational beings, looks instead to the physical transformations of the cosmos on the grandest scale.18 The cyclical process by which a differentiated and structured cosmos is produced out of the four elements, with periodic suffusions of the whole with fire or water, and moments at which the creation becomes a single undifferentiated, fiery whole, before beginning anew all over again – i.e. the Stoic cosmic cycle, with its moments of ekpyrôsis and apokatastasis – is represented, in a self-confessedly bizarre and strained analogy, in terms of the behaviour of a four-horse chariot of Zeus. This is a deliberately exotic conclusion, and much scholarly effort has been expended on discussion of the degree of Dio’s debt to genuine Persian religious sources.19 It is also a very carefully contrived piece of work on a literary level: a Platonizing myth blending material from Phaedrus, Timaeus and other dialogues,20 which also repeatedly challenges its audience to reflect on its outlandishness, and even awkwardness.21 For present purposes, however, what matters is to ask how it, 13

36.23. Schofield (1991: 74–8) here detects a Heraclitean echo, probably inherited from Chrysippus. 14 36.29–30, looking back to 20. 15 36.30–1. Schofield (1991: 84ff.) argues that this is not wholly orthodox (Zenonian or Chrysippean) Stoicism, but an extension by Dio, seeking to blend Stoic ideas with non-Stoic kingship theory and an element of Platonizing political thought. 16 SVF 1.539, 2.1077 (Cic. Nature of the Gods 1.15.39–41), 2.178; cf. Boys-Stones 2001, Chs 1–2, and 2003. 17 36.33–7. 18 36.39–61. 19 Lucidly summed up by de Jong in Nesselrath et al. 2003, 157–78. 20 Trapp 1990, 148–9 and 2000, 216–17, for part but not all of this. 21 36.42, 43, 51, 54, 61.

188

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

and the whole oration that it brings to an end, might be thought to work as a piece of political theorizing. A first impression, just from a summary of the oration, might well be that it ends by taking attention entirely away from politics into the sublimities of cosmology and physics; and that, if there is a message in this, it is that questions of human politics are ultimately insignificant in comparison with investigation of the grander, allembracing whole of which we are such a minor part. Some such relativizing of terrestrial politics may well be part of Dio’s purpose (as of Stoic political theorizing more generally). But this is not the same thing as declaring problems of everyday political organization to be wholly trivial. And the very end of Dio’s peroration seems to make a deliberate attempt to remind his audience(s) that these more immediate issues deserve thought too. If, he says in mock apology, the form of his speech has been exalted almost to the point of disappearing from view, like a bird flying too high for augurs to take a valid omen from it, then the fault lies with his Borysthenite audience, who asked him to expound the cosmic rather than the terrestrial dimension of his words to them on that now distant occasion.22 The concluding comment puts the grandeur of the account of the cosmic chariot of Zeus back into perspective, with its reminder that the audience itself, like the frustrated augurs, is down at ground level. Some accounts of the cosmos may be just too grand to be straightforwardly useful in merely human politics; correspondingly, what had been said earlier to the Borysthenites about orderliness, reason, concord, justice and friendship among humans, and between humans and gods, retains its interest and its importance even after the grander account has been produced. At the same time, mention of the Borysthenites reminds Dio’s Prusan audience of the curious, semi-Hellenic, semi-polis setting of the whole episode, and of the issues of citihood and the minimum conditions for a good community which that in itself raises. (And, as a further layer, any subsequent audience, reading or hearing the speech after its first performance, can catch an invitation to contemplate the spectacle of the highly cultivated, purely Hellenic citizens of the full polis of Prusa contemplating the frontiersmen of Borysthenes, their Scythian neighbours, and the wise, but stylistically wilful Magi of Persia.) The combination of these lines of thought seems to point towards a relatively simple and, it must be admitted, none too startling message. Namely, that the goodness of a political community depends not on geographical location, nor on the physical grandeur (or state of repair) of its public buildings, nor on the security of its grasp on genteel cultivation, but on the foundation of the relationships between its inhabitants on right reason, which yields at least a version at this level of the perfect unity and collaboration found in the stars and planets, and the interaction of the physical constituents more generally in the divinely governed cosmos. Community (koinônia), concord (homonoia), friendship (philia) and justice (dikaiosynê), and a stable division of functions between rulers and ruled – all aspects of the orderliness created by reason – are what count. In addition, it is

22

36.61.

Good Communities

189

gently implied, a community will be greatly helped towards these ends if it offers a place and a receptive ear to the instructive (and often inspiring) discourses of philosophical teachers like Dio. But does the oration seek to convey more than this, some more sharply focused message about specific, contemporary issues and problems? Scholars have been understandably keen to find such an extra, more immediately relevant element, and have fixed on the issue of the Empire.23 Does not the juxtaposition of the frontier town of Borysthenes (and, implicitly, Prusa too) with the grander city (or ‘city’) of the cosmos hint also at the importance of their belonging to another political structure, intermediate between individual cities and the universe, and at the virtues of orderly structure, concord, and benevolent monarchic rule which that structure too so eminently possesses? And may not the picture of the planets leading the harmonious dance of the ‘remaining mass’ (loipon plêthos) of the lesser heavenly bodies, under the overall supervision of Zeus, be meant as a normative picture of the role of the governing elite of the Greek cities in mediating between Roman rule and the ordinary citizen?24 Some such message would certainly be in keeping with things Dio has to say in others of his orations (and with some more general trends in political writing of the period).25 And it would be quite pointless to deny that an account of the cosmos as a city governed by an all-powerful single divinity would always be likely at this period to put some readers and listeners in mind of Empire and Emperor. But what is not at all evident is that Dio is particularly concerned to exploit the association on this occasion, or to build any explicit or explicit arguments around it.26 Indeed, a number of considerations seem to pull quite hard in the opposite direction. The only overt reference to Rome in the oration comes in the form of a scornful remark about one of the Borysthenites who, in order to curry favour with the Romans, goes clean-shaven, instead of letting his beard grow long in the local – impeccably Hellenic and Homeric – manner, and consequently is an object of general opprobrium.27 In terms of values, as has already been stressed, the emphasis is firmly on Hellenism; when we are taken outside that frame, it is to the wisdom of the East, which suggests a universalizing rather than a Roman imperial reference. It might therefore seem better, if we want to find some element of contemporary challenge in Dio’s speech, to return to the message suggested about the conditions for a good polis, but with the reflection that what may seem to us to be an entirely standard and conventional set of ideas could for a particular audience have come 23

Most recently, Forschner in Nesselrath et al. 2003, 79 (n.132) and 155. 36.22, as read by Forschner, 146–7. 25 E.g. Dio’s reminder to the Alexandrians of the presence of Roman military power in Or. 32.71–3, or Plutarch’s to aspiring politicians in his Political Precepts 813df and 814ac; or (less philosophically) Aristides To Rome (Or. 26) 28–39 or 59–64. 26 Contrast Dio Or. 40.35–9, where the application of the cosmic comparison to relationships between individual poleis does seem to hint at the Empire as the essential wider context into which an understanding of city politics is to be fitted. 27 36.17 – or is this an example of an attitude that Dio’s Prusan audience is being invited to reflect on critically, rather than to endorse? 24

190

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

across as fresh and challenging. If so, this will to a great extent have been due to Dio’s choice of a suggestive and indirect rather than an overtly didactic approach. Instead of lecturing his Prusan audience, in the manner of some of his other city speeches, he invites them to reflect in a more open-ended way: on the Borysthenites, geographically just across the Black Sea, culturally apparently a world apart, yet still in some stubborn sense a polis, and curious (if selectively) about what ought really to matter to them as a community; and on what is at stake in the choice between asserting straightforwardly that the cosmos is a polis, and conceding that it is only in some ways like one. In the latter respect in particular, Dio’s presentation, in which he first admits that the Stoic definition of a polis does not fit the cosmos directly, then seems to work himself into asserting that it does after all, before turning his attention to the cosmos as a monarchy, seems calculated to provoke his audience into trying to think through the apparent inconsistency for themselves: and thus (perhaps) to make the questions ‘what is a good polis?’ and ‘should we be asking about the polis rather than something else in the first place?’ their own. Harmony and order The Borysthenitic Oration presents us with a particularly rich and accomplished weaving together of elements, both of substance and of setting, in a performance which overall manages an exotic blend of protreptic and entertainment. But though the blend is individual, the major elements are familiar themes in the thought of the period. Above all, Dio’s over-riding concern with harmony and order as prime political goods, and his interest in communal standards and the risks they run of damage and degeneration (seen in his presentation of the only just still Hellenic Borysthenites, and also of the corruption of Greek values by the neighbouring Scythians),28 are features that recur not only in other Imperial-period Stoic writing, but more generally. The centrality of orderliness, unity and solidarity – the kosmos, koinônia, homonoia and philia of which we have seen Dio speaking – to the goodness of the good political community is a fixed point in Imperial-period theorizing in the Platonic-Stoic tradition. The theoretical context into which these characteristics are set – the account given of how and why they matter, and what broader phenomena they may relate to – varies, however, from text to text and author to author. In Dio’s adaptation of traditional Stoic lines of thought, virtuous political order, embracing both structure (the maintenance of the proper functional difference between rulers and ruled) and attitude (reciprocal benevolent feelings, shared outlook and purposes), flows from right reason. The shared possession of reason, which unites men and gods in the good city of the cosmos, is also in any state the sole secure basis of community (koinônia) and justice.29 This centrality of reason is importantly connected (though this is less explicitly articulated by Dio) with the 28

36.5–7, 9, 24–7 (harmony and order); 36.8 (Scythian distortion of respectable Greek pederasty). 29 Dio Or. 36.31.

Good Communities

191

notion of law: for law, besides being constitutive of the polis, is also associated by Dio with ‘good sense’ (phronêsis), which implies, even if it does not directly assert, the Stoic identification of law with right reason, applied to the prescription and prohibition of actions.30 Right reason in its turn is pre-eminently a possession of the gods, among whom alone it is found in its pure form, and allowed to govern their behaviour unimpeded; compared to them, humans are as uncomprehending children and their obedience to law correspondingly of a less internalized, frictionless kind.31 Nevertheless, the divine order of the cosmos, secured by its supreme divine controller Zeus, is anything but irrelevant to humans. Zeus is Father and King of a whole system (household, constitution, state) that includes them as well, even if in a distinctly subordinate role; and his ordering of the higher level can serve as a model (paradeigma) for smaller structures too.32 Good order and togetherness in this account is thus presented as something that feeds down to human communities from a higher level. It is something natural and right, but it is in the grandest, largest division of nature that it is primarily seen; and it is from this grand dimension that its propriety for human cities also derives. The complementary thought, that states need to (and can) form themselves so as to be in tune with inner human nature – with the right structuring and right management of the impulses of the soul – which Stoicism and Platonism also made available, is not called on. The same kind of ‘top-down’ approach to the idea of political unity and harmony is found also in the ‘Pythagorean’ treatises, which like Dio in the Borysthenitikos tend to present it as a matter of human political structures and processes living up to the standards of the cosmos as a whole. This is most obvious in ‘Ecphantus’’ On Kingship, where the qualities that the good king imitates from the divine realm and represents in turn for imitation by his human subjects include the homonoia of the cosmos, which when replicated on the human level, produces the philia and homonoia on which unity depends: the unity not only of ruler and ruled within the state, but that of the state as a whole with God.33 But other 30

Dio Or. 36.20–1; see also above, 173–4. In respect of law, Dio can also be found contrasting its superior clarity and stability as an articulation of standards of conduct with the weaker and more changeable norms of mere custom (Or. 31.140–2). 31 Forschner (2003: 146) notes how Dio passes over the possibility that at least some few humans might achieve perfected reason on earth, and so approach the state of the gods, as incompatible with the main contrast he wishes to draw between the divine and the human world. It is less clear that Forschner is right to see here a deliberate rejection of the Zenonian ideal of the city of the wise (Forschner 143; cf. Schofield 1991, 22–56). 32 Dio Or. 36.32. Forschner (2003: 139–53, esp. 142–3, 145–6) sees here a strongly Platonic as opposed to Stoic use of the idea of the cosmic city, such as to justify calling Dio a Stoicizing Platonist rather than a Platonizing Stoic. This seems to go too far. Dio is indeed attempting a synthesis of Stoic and Platonic elements (cf. Schofield 1991, 57–63, 84–92), but his basis is Stoic not Platonic: as witness his use of ‘our people’ and ‘we’ when expounding Stoic doctrine, and his adherence to a ‘one-storey’ model of the cosmos and an immanent supreme divinity, rather than that of a ‘two-storey’ cosmos, with a transcendent supreme god. 33 ‘Ecphantus’ On Kingship, fr. 2 (Stob. 4.7.64), esp. p. 81.2ff. Thesleff.

192

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

connections are drawn too, which do not make such overt reference to the cosmic dimension. ‘Diotogenes’ represents koinônia as the product of justice, which is in its turn the responsibility of the king to secure.34 ‘Archytas’ emphasizes that justice (equated with proportionality and the giving to each of his due) must be enshrined in law, and that the proper state of the laws is as important as the relationship between ruler and ruled in producing a true political community (politikê koinônia).35 ‘Hippodamus’ compares the securing of unity and concord in the state, to be done with a combination of teaching, the practice of good shared customs, and laws (logoi, epitêdeumata ethôn, nomoi), with the tuning of a lyre.36 Whether or not the cosmos is directly implicated, a common element remains the sense that political concord is a virtuous and necessary reflection of a wider principle, to be seen at work in other complex structures too. The ordered city, in which all the different parts are willingly directed towards a single end, that properly expresses the true nature and purpose of the whole, thus lines up not only with the sublime order of the universe, but also with the well-disciplined army, the tight ship, the well-drilled chariot team, the prize-winning choir,37 and the healthy body. In all these cases, good order and the absence of internal strife not only make the complex in question more efficient in realizing its proper goals, but also align it with a universal, god-given pattern: As for disease, what else is it but a disordering and confusing of the truce within the body that comes about when the elements that were previously in harmony fall on each other, fighting and sowing confusion and harming the body as it is pounded and torn and rocked by them. ... So too a chorus, when unified, is one in the harmony of its voices, but when not unified, it splits and disperses and scatters and becomes a crowd. So too a trireme, when it is rowed in time to a pipe (aulos), brings the many hands of its crew together as they pull in unison; but if you take the pipe away, then you reduce their handiwork to disorder. So too, when a chariot is steered by a driver, it runs straight on a single course with a single impetus; but if you take away the charioteer, you split the team apart. So too an army is unified in its ranks by a single watchword, but if you remove that watchword, then you have dissolved the legion into a fleeing rabble.38

Though the city (best when unified and harmonious, not truly a city when split by internal strife and resentment) is not here explicitly made part of the same pattern as army, chariot and the rest, it could perfectly well have been. In other places, Maximus uses the body, the ship’s crew and the choir as analogies or images for 34

‘Diotogenes’ On Kingship, fr. 2 (Stob. 4.7.62), p. 74.21ff. Thesleff. ‘Archytas’ On Law and Justice, frr. 1 and 2 (Stob. 4.1.135–6), p. 33.3–18 and 20–8 Thesleff. 36 ‘Hippodamus’ On the State, fr. 3 (Stob. 4.1.94), pp. 99.18–100.8 Thesleff. 37 Choros, strictly a dancing as well as a singing choir, so the more effective as an image of complex co-ordination. 38 Maximus Or. 39.2. 35

Good Communities

193

the well- or ill-functioning state,39 and in one instance lines up ship, household, army, city and cosmos as entities all with the same need for a providential governing hand (in helmsman, paterfamilias, general, lawgiver, and God).40 But it is by no means inevitable for the question of harmony and unity to be approached from the point of view of abstract generalizing principle, or from that of the cosmopolis. In others of his city speeches, Dio can speak of civic concord in much more concrete and practical terms; and when he does so, it is not upwards to the state of the cosmos that he tends to relate it, but inwards to states of the human soul. In his Second Tarsian Oration (Or. 34), he urges on the people of Tarsus the need to secure civic peace and prosperity by putting an end to squabbling between the various administrative bodies (dêmos, boulê and gerontes), and also by admitting to full citizenship a hitherto marginalized class.41 The great good is once again concord (homonoia – 34.20), the great ill to be avoided or set right strife and disagreement (stasis, diaphora), as imaged in the contrast between health and disease (34.20), a well- and an ill-crewed ship (34.16), and a harmonious and a discordant orchestra (34.18). But for a remedy, Dio points the Tarsians to the states of their own characters: to the need to get free of ‘the ills that excite and disturb them, envy, greed, contentiousness, the striving of each to aggrandize himself to the neglect of homeland and the common good’ and that make those prone to them ‘be unstable, and come into conflict and be rowdy for slight cause, as when contrary winds prevail at sea’.42 Outer disorder and disunity is depicted as the reflection and the effect of a disordered inner state; good civic order follows from the recovery of inner poise on the part of each individual citizen. In similar vein, Dio’s Alexandrian Oration (Or. 32), in a beautifully controlled display of provocative wit,43 warns the people of Alexandria that their volatility, far from being a matter of a harmless and amiable freedom from puritan seriousness, is potentially disastrous: volatility leads to riots, riots to the punitive intervention of the Roman governor and his troops.44 In the list he gives of the civic virtues on which the Alexandrians have such a dangerously shaky hold (32.37), Dio again singles out concord (homonoia), which this time he associates with discipline, equanimity and constitutional order (eutaxia, praotês, kosmos politeias). As in the address to Tarsus, it is through openness to philosophical advice and the organizing effect of this advice on the individual characters of the inhabitants that these good states are to be achieved (32.7), though here Dio adds that law and a system of punishment has its role to play too, as the harsher remedy on which authority can fall back if the gentler instruction

39

Maximus Orr. 15.4 (ship, body), 16.2 (choir). Maximus Or. 4.9. 41 Dio Or. 34.16–23. 42 Dio Or. 34.19. 43 For an attempt at an analysis of Dio’s rhetorical and persuasive strategy in this oration, see Trapp 1995. 44 Dio Or. 32.72–4. 40

194

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

and persuasion of the philosophos does not work.45 No deeper specific analysis of the nature of the soul to be thus worked on is offered, but as in the case of the Tarsian Oration, there is a clear implication that it too is a site of the same conflict between orderly and disorderly tendencies as affect the political community: most evidently in 32.27–8, where Dio’s apotropaic depiction of the disorderly dêmos as ‘a multifarious and dreadful beast’, like the ‘Centaurs and Sphinxes and Chimaeras that poets create’ irresistibly recalls Plato’s similar characterization in the Republic of both the lowest dimension of the compound soul, and the lowest of the three classes of the ideal state.46 The same sense that civic concord and order flow from the individual characters of the citizenry, and that it is correspondingly on a form of moral education that the statesman should concentrate, animates Plutarch’s Political Precepts and Old Men in Public Life. Friendship (philia) and concord (homonoia) are firmly identified by Plutarch, at the end of the Precepts, as the only goods that remain within the scope of the modern Greek statesman, in a world in which the other traditional goals of statecraft – peace, liberty, and plenty in both human and material resources – are now under the control of Roman overlords.47 In pursuit of these goals, the good statesman must lead by example. Dedicated himself to the pursuit of the good life, in both his inner state of orderly calm and his selection of objectively good outer goals,48 he seeks to work on the characters and attitudes of his fellow citizens, with whom like a political Socrates he associates constantly in both formal and informal situations, his influence seeping gradually into them over time like a vintage wine suffusing the body of a drinker.49 Interestingly (and unlike Dio), Plutarch distinguishes two separate levels on which this influence should operate. On the one hand, the statesman seeks to bring calm, order and concord to the mass of the citizen body, who are portrayed once more in Platonizing vein as a potentially unruly and violent animal, requiring both to be soothed and to be held firmly by external as well as internal means.50 But at the same time, he must strive to educate and to harmonize the members of the politically active elite, convincing them of the superiority of enlightened, philosophical values, and in a practical sense ensuring that they pull together for the common good.51 Plutarch’s double focus, on the dêmos and on the ruling elite, prompts a general reflection on all this theorizing about unity and concord, from all our surviving sources. Although carefully – and to some degree plausibly – framed in terms of the common good of the whole political community, it is also heavily paternalist in tone, and whatever else it may or may not have in view, clearly includes the aim of securing and perpetuating the position of the existing governing class of the Greek 45 Dio Or. 32.17–19, comparing the alternatives of legal punishment and instruction in the civic sphere with the contrast between diet or drugs and surgery in medicine (an analogy that goes all the way back to Plato’s Gorgias, 464b–466a). 46 Plato Rep. 588cd, imitated also by Maximus Orr. 34.8 and 16.4. 47 Precepts 824c–825f; on the need to remember Roman overlordship, cf. 813df and 814ac. 48 See above, 45–6, 59–62, 87–9, and below, 223–4; cf. Trapp 2004. 49 Old Men 796c–797a; Precepts 799bc. 50 Precepts 800c, 802d, 814ab. 51 Precepts 809e, cf. e.g. 808b-e.

Good Communities

195

cities of the Empire. Maintenance of harmony and concord may indeed have been calculated to avoid the unwelcome attentions of the Roman governor and his military resources, and so to clear away at least one potential source of damage to the flourishing of the dêmos. But it would also be naïve to neglect the degree to which the elite too stood to gain from the happy and peaceful maintenance of the status quo. A placid, accepting populace would mean the absence of any threat to their position, privileges, and material security either from within the city or from external Roman intervention.52 From this point of view, philosophical argumentation linking political concord either with the order of the cosmos, or with good states of the individual character, could be seen not as pure high-minded idealism, but as an example of complicity with the values and interests of the socially and politically dominant class (to which, of course, most philosophoi themselves belonged).53 Collective moral character As has already started to become clear, the proper interests of the philosophically enlightened politikos were held to extend beyond the central concern for harmony and concord, to the moral character(s) of the citizen body more generally. Just as constant watchfulness over oneself is necessary in the construction of an individual moral career, so too the moral character and tone of the citizen body as a collective is precarious and at constant risk of degeneration, and so must be carefully watched. The point is made in abstract, theoretical mode by ‘Hippodamus’, who distinguishes internal and external sources of corruption (hedonism and an excessive desire to avoid pain on the one hand, morally corrupt neighbours or a morally corrupt immigrant population on the other);54 and also, as we have seen, in Plutarch’s portrayal in the Political Precepts of a philosophical statesman who seeks to mould the characters of his fellow citizens by the slow drip of constant advice, association and example.55 Local watchfulness will, however, sometimes fail, creating the need for a candid external adviser to intervene, both to open the eyes of a given body of citizens to their condition and to offer advice for its rectification. This is the role into which Dio Chrysostom steps, adopting something of the aura of the cleareyed, sharp-tongued itinerant Cynic adviser, but combining it with a decidedly unCynic concern for the city as an institution. His Alexandrian and Tarsian Orations, already considered for their stress on the over-riding need for public order and concord, also illustrate this further point very vividly. For in both the Alexandrian and the First Tarsian, the prescription for order and concord is offered as the 52

Plutarch Precepts 813c–815b is the classic demonstration of a lively sense of the need to maintain a careful balance in dealings with the Roman authorities, neither too independent nor too subserviently close. 53 Cf. Forschner 2003, 129; Salmeri 2000, 55f., 74f. 54 ‘Hippodamus’ in Stobaeus Flor. 4.1.95 = 100.25–102.20 Thesleff. 55 Plutarch Precepts 800c, 802d, 814ab (as above, n. 50).

196

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

antidote to a collective failing in character and behaviour, which Dio diagnoses and characterizes at length. In the Alexandrian Oration, the failing is the long-ingrained refusal of seriousness, which (Dio suggests) the Alexandrians themselves may see as smart and endearing, but which he undertakes to show them is in fact both inconsistent with their city’s status and reputation, and dangerous. In a tour de force of public therapeutics, Dio sets out to reveal the Alexandrians to themselves by opposing a responsible, targeted wit and frivolity of his own to their aimless and irresponsible version, entering into the local spirit only so as to be able to pull it down from within, with a mixture of direct criticism (delivered at unexpected moments) and mocking exaggeration.56 Standing before his audience in the city’s theatre, Dio evokes their characteristic boisterousness in this and other forms of mass gathering, but simultaneously challenges them to show that they are also capable of restraint and receptive attention, when there is something truly important to attend to. Along the way, in order to underline the necessity for his own, outsider’s, intervention, he criticizes the ineffectiveness of the local advisers who might have been expected to see and respond to the public need: academic philosophers have ducked the responsibility by staying within the safe confines of their schools, without speaking the necessary words to the public at large; the local Cynics, though preaching in public, have made matters worse by aggravating rather than curtailing their audience’s anarchic and disrespectful tendencies.57 Perhaps still more strikingly to modern eyes, the First Tarsian takes the people of Tarsus to task for what may not at first sight seem to be a moral failing at all. Indeed, quite what Dio is criticizing here has been the object of much puzzled discussion by scholars.58 On the face of it, the complaint is that a particular kind of nasty noise, for which Dio’s (somewhat tentative) name is ‘snorting’ (regkein), has become distressingly prevalent in the city.59 This noise is not only unnecessary (perittos, 33.57), but positively shameful not only to individuals but to the city collectively, in a way comparable to extreme sexual depravity.60 What matters for present purposes, however, is not the precise nature of the failing specified, but the fact that it is presented as collective, as raising the alarming prospect of further communal degeneration,61 and so as ripe for philosophical intervention. Dio prefaces his analysis of the specifics of the situation with an insistence on the over-riding need for good public mores, and the corresponding importance of philosophical therapists (like himself, or Socrates, Archilochus and the comic poets of old) who will fearlessly carry out the necessary surgery, however painful:

56

Trapp 1995. Dio Or. 32.8–9. 58 See Desideri 1978, 122–9; Jones 1978a, 71–82; Gleason 1995, 82–4. 59 Dio Or. 33.33 and 55. 60 Dio Or. 33.33–4, 35, 50, 60. It is unclear whether the noise is only comparably shameful, or actually connected with sexual depravity (as sign, symptom, or even metaphor). 61 Dio Or. 33.29. 57

Good Communities

197

I understand perfectly that this makes unpleasant listening, and I told you in advance that you would not enjoy my words when you heard them. Perhaps you expected I was going to talk about the heavenly bodies and the earth. Some of you, indeed, are getting angry and saying that I am insulting your city, without putting the blame on the perpetrators of these actions; while others may be laughing at me for not finding anything better to talk about. For my part, though, I see that doctors too sometimes handle things they would rather not, parts of the body that are definitely not its prettiest, and I know that many a patient is indignant when his physician touches the bit that hurts. Yet he scarifies this and lances it in spite of the patient’s howls. So I will not give up talking about this topic either until the pain is intense. Though in fact it is a very mild medicine you are getting in this speech of mine, and much less than you really deserve.62

And he insists that it is only when this kind of surgery is carried out that a community can truly hold up its head among its neighbours: So do not rely on these speakers of yours, and do not accept their words of congratulation and praise, or their cleverness as encomiasts. They are deceiving you and exciting you in vain as if you were silly children. Listen instead to the man who will reveal to you something of your failings and above all, if he can, will enable you to reflect that happiness (eudaimonia) does not come from such things as I have named, not even if the Nile should turn clearer than Castalia and flow through your city ... For if these are the things that can make men happy – rivers and climate and geographical situation and sea-harbours and temples and fortifications – it is impossible to say how far down the list you come. ... No, it is not a river or a plain or a harbour that makes a city happy, nor strong finances nor a mass of buildings nor treasuries of the gods (to which divinity is indifferent) ... ; it is sobriety (sôphrosynê) and intelligence (nous) that bring salvation.63

These quotations – the sentiments of which are identical to those expressed in the Alexandrian Oration, and can be paralleled to some extent in the Borysthenitic too – make clear how easily Dio can transfer the vocabulary and concepts of individual moral formation to the citizen body as a collective. At the same time, they also prompt renewed reflection on the relationship of this kind of philosophically informed commentary to other forms of public discourse in the city. For they also show Dio making purposeful play of the topics and frame of reference of conventional civic encomium. It was a standard expectation of civic life in the Imperial period that, other things being equal, public discourse about one’s city would be celebratory and encomiastic. Ambassadors, arriving and departing officials, visiting sophists, speakers at festivals and inaugurations, all were expected to find complimentary things to say about the 62 63

Dio Or. 33.44. For the imagery, compare Arrian Disc. of Epict. 3.23.29–32. Dio Or. 33.23–8; cf. 32.37.

198

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

communities in which they were called upon to speak. A set of prescriptions, surely reflecting normal expectations, can be found in the first of the two third-century rhetorical treatises attributed to Menander Rhetor.64 According to these, cities should be praised under the generic headings of ‘position’ (thesis) and ‘origins, actions and accomplishments’, of which the former embraces the city’s climate, produce, adjacence to the sea and/or agricultural plains, and water-supply, while the latter covers its history and the special technical talents and moral virtues of its inhabitants. A worked example of the prescriptions in action, on a hugely inflated scale, can be seen in Aelius Aristides’ To Rome.65 What Dio does in his city orations is to evoke these standard categories of praise, but only so as to subvert them and to deny their relevance from the philosophical (morally responsible) point of view. The quotation of Or. 33.23–8 given above shows the strategy in action in the First Tarsian, but it is still more thoroughly and mercilessly pursued in the Alexandrian, where Dio takes on the history, cultural reputation and current status in the Empire of Alexandria as well as its geographical advantages and man-made facilities, and does so with real bite. No one passage can convey the care with which Dio returns again and again from the different – irrelevant – sources of conventional pride to his central insistence on the cultivation of a better, more orderly collective character, but the following will serve as a characteristic example: Perhaps you are pleased to hear this, and think that you are being praised when I say it, just as you are by the others who are always flattering you. But what I was praising was water and land and harbours and locations – anything rather than you yourselves. Where did I say that you are sensible (phronimoi) and self-controlled (sôphrones) and just? Didn’t I say exactly the opposite? What should be praised in human beings is orderliness (eutaxia), placidity (praotês), concord (homonoia), civic order (kosmos politeias), attentiveness to right speech, and a refusal to go looking for pleasures on every possible occasion. Arrivals and departures, and massive size of population, goods, and the merchant fleet are grounds for praising a festival gathering, a harbour, or a marketplace, not a city. If someone praises the water, this is praise not of human beings but of wells; if he speaks of a good climate, it isn’t human beings he is saying are good, but the land; if of fish, he isn’t praising the city – how could he be? – but the sea, or a lake, or a river. Yet, if someone eulogizes the Nile, you are as puffed-up as if you yourselves flowed from Ethiopia!66

Cumulatively, therefore, the Alexandrian paints a double portrait of the collective character of the local citizen body: as it is in all its misplaced self-satisfaction, and as it would be if philosophical advice and advisers could take a proper hold. A lesson is thus offered not only to the original audience, but also to any subsequent reader, in any city of the Empire, who can draw the consequences for his own 64

[Menander] Treatise I, 346.26–367.8 Spengel; text, translation and notes in Russell and Wilson 1981, 33–75. 65 Aristides Or. 26; see Oliver 1953 and Pernot 1997. 66 Or. 32.37–8.

Good Communities

199

community of the contrast Dio presents. It is a curious consequence of the effort and skill that Dio has put into the construction of the negative side of the picture – aimed initially at convincing the Alexandrians that he speaks from a real, sensitive appreciation of local conditions – that the modern reader is liable to find it rather more interesting and appealing than his positive recommendations.67 Sanctions: law, punishment and instruction Overall, it is striking how much space is given in our sources to discussion of the capacity of moral instruction and exhortation (formal or informal, systematic or opportunistic as the case may be) to preserve or restore the standards of orderliness, restraint and reciprocal benevolence ideally enshrined in the good city’s laws. Relatively little interest is shown by comparison in other factors. Their existence and significance is not denied, but there seems little readiness to discuss them at length or find any interesting complexity in them. The importance of positive law itself as a clearly visible and persuasive articulation of key (rational, cosmic) standards is acknowledged in several ‘Pythagorean’ texts,68 though often bound up with the ideal of a monarch who himself embodies the law in living form, and thus exercises a more powerful influence than any merely written kind of legislation. With a rather different emphasis, Dio in his Rhodian Oratian contrasts the explicitness and fixity of formal (written) legislation with the softer and more changeable standards of mere custom (ethos); but this is in the context of an opportunistic argument that bad behaviour is less culpable if perpetrated in obedience to a law than if done under the banner of custom, not any theoretical consideration of the general status and influence of law.69 In any author of the period, words denoting conformity to legally enshrined standards – nomimos, eunomia and so on – are strong positives, but apparently regarded as entirely uncontroversial and unproblematic. Slightly more attention, but still not much, is given to the question of sanctions – the punitive measures that authority may impose on the governed when either a specific law, or lawful order more generally, is infringed or threatened. Dio and Plutarch both famously warn their addressees on different occasions of the constant risk in Greek civic life of the intervention of the Roman governor and his troops, and clearly regard the threat of such intervention as itself a powerful factor for order.70 If it is regrettable, that is because notionally reasonable human beings ought not to need such crudely external measures to keep them on the right track, not because there is any problem of justification or legitimacy. 67 For a discussion of Dio’s portrayal in the context of Alexandria’s ancient image and reputation more generally, see Trapp 2004. 68 ‘Ecphantus’ On Kingship 79.8–84.8 Thesleff (Stob. Flor. 4.7.64 and 66), ‘Hippodamus’ On the State 98.23–100.23 Thesleff (Stob. Flor. 4.1.94), ‘Archytas’ On Law and Justice 33.1–28 and 34.15–35.30 Thesleff (Stob. Flor. 4.1.135 and 138); cf. above, 173–4. 69 Or. 31.140–2. 70 Dio Or. 32.71–2; Plutarch Precepts 813e–814c.

200

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

A similar sense of embarrassment and of a second best hangs over discussions of judicial punishment too. Dio directly contrasts legal justice and sanctions with philosophical instruction, suggesting that the preventive character of the latter makes it far preferable, because of truer benefit to the community.71 ‘Archytas’ highmindedly proposes that legal punishment ought standardly to consist of the infliction of shame and disgrace on guilty parties, rather than any financial penalty, on the grounds that fining propagates the false idea that money is a good.72 And both Dio and Seneca insist in different contexts that clemency and restraint will achieve better results than adherence to a strict punitive logic. In Seneca’s hands, the argument is that all three of the generally accepted aims of punishment – reform of the offender, improvement of everybody else, and the enhancement of public security – are better served by clemency than by severity; for by creating dangerous resentment, and setting a bad standard for general imitation, severity lessens the very security it sets out to increase.73 For Dio, the point is that, in a well co-ordinated community, mildness and restraint on the part of judicial authority can and must be complimented by an unsparing severity on the part of its moral instructors.74 Overall, there seems to be a strong impulse to subordinate questions of judicial sanctions, and the punitive resources of authority more generally, to the logic and aims of moral education. The position and ambitions of the authors concerned, typically themselves in a position to advise, exhort and instruct, but not to pass laws or play a part in the formal administration of justice, presumably has a lot to do with this. A Plutarch, a Dio and a Seneca had understandable reasons, on their own behalf and on that of their calling as philosophoi, for playing up what fell within their competence and playing down what did not. But in the process, the opportunity to subject a large aspect of political life to philosophical scrutiny went begging. Constituents of the community Equally lacking from the scene is any apparent impulse to analyse the constituent parts of the state in any new or more detailed manner than had been done long since. High talk of concord, virtue and conformity to cosmic principle apparently made close consideration of the elements to be harmonized seem beside the point. What little can be scraped together comes almost exclusively from Platonizing writers. Alcinous in the Didaskalikos faithfully repeats the old Platonic tripartition with only minor modifications in the terminology: phrouroi (‘sentinels’) for Plato’s phylakes (‘guards’), and demiourgoi (‘artisans’) for the lowest class, for which 71

Dio Or. 32.17–19. ‘Archytas’ On Law and Justice 34.15–35.30 Thesleff (Stob. Flor. 4.1.138). 73 Seneca On Clemency 1.22–4. 74 Dio Or. 32.17–19 again. Dio in fact gets himself into something of a tangle over this point: his contrast between the ideals of mildness on the part of judicial authority and severity on the part of moral instructors sits awkwardly with his Platonizing comparison of the former to (restorative) cautery and surgery and the latter to (preventive) diet and drugs. 72

Good Communities

201

Plato provided no single name (and epikouroi (‘auxiliaries’) as before for the military class).75 Apuleius in On Plato does much the same, speaking of a pars optima (‘best part’), the youth (iuventus) who should fulfil the duties of ‘sentinels’ (excubitores), and at the base of the pyramid, the ‘common people and farmers’ (plebs et agricolae).76 He does however combine this with a still simpler analysis, into ‘rulers’ and subordinates’ (regentes, inferiores).77 Much the same is also true of Maximus of Tyre, who in Oration 16.4–5 reproduces the Platonic tripartition, but in 27.6–7 opts for the simpler distinction between a better and a worse class. In both cases, like Alcinous and Apuleius, he underlines the analogy with the divisions of the human soul, and in both cases he clearly takes himself to be following faithfully in Plato’s footsteps. Since by this stage, it was accepted that Plato’s psychology could equally well be described as bipartite and as tripartite,78 so too could his analysis of the state. The only place where Maximus suggests a more detailed analysis of constituents is in Oration 15, in the context of an argument that all elements in the state must make their contribution if the whole is to flourish, just as a building depends on the interlocking and mutual support of all its constituent stones, and the body on the active collaboration of all its limbs and parts.79 For these purposes, however, it is of professional groups that he chooses to speak, rather than of the overall political structure of the state: architects, weavers, carpenters, smiths, painters, sculptors, perfumers, chefs, entertainers and (his real interest) philosophers.80 Among the ‘Pythagorean’ treatises, a specific interest in kingship often limits analysis to the simplest of distinctions between ruler and subjects, with no further formal differentiation among the latter. ‘Hippodamus’, however, writing On the State, has scope for something more elaborate. He too bases himself on the Platonic tripartition, but glosses and expands it in a new way. The basic three classes are explained as being concerned, respectively, with the cultivation of virtue (aretê), the exercise of power (dynamis) and ‘the production and supply of necessities’ (ekpherôsis kai chorêgia tôn anagkaiôn), and schematized as two extremes and a median term: the top class rules, the bottom class is ruled, and the middle class both rules and is ruled.81 Furthermore, each of the three classes can itself be subdivided into three, according to the different specific functions its overall area of responsibility embraces. The ruling class contains a presiding element, a set of office holders, and a general council (proedron, archontikon, koinobouleutikon); the military class subdivides into commanders, elite troops, and the mass of the army (archontikon, promachêtikon, agelaion); workers subdivide into workers of the soil, craftsmen, and merchants (geôponon, technatikon,

75

Alcinous Didaskalikos 34. Apuleius On Plato 2.24.256–7. 77 Apuleius On Plato 2.24.255. 78 See Rees 1957, and above, 104. 79 Maximus Or. 15.4–5. 80 Maximus Or. 15.3–4. For something similar, cf. Dio’s Or 7, discussed below, 203–4. 81 ‘Hippodamus’ On the State 98.11–22 Thesleff (Stob. Flor. 4.1.93). 76

202

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

metabatikon kai emporikon).82 It is all very obvious and schematic, but shows at least some urge to connect the initial tripartition with real political functions and activities. Special interests: the old, the poor, women, slaves Lack of interest in elaborating a full formal typology of the constituents of the state does not however mean that determinate groups within it are never singled out as interestingly problematic, or otherwise deserving of special attention. Issues of the status and entitlements of slaves and of women – to the modern eye the most notoriously marginalized and disenfranchised groups in the classical polity – make the most obvious examples. But the poor and the elderly too could be made into objects of at least some systematic political reflection.83 The old. On the score of the elderly, the principal text from our period is Plutarch’s Old Men in Public Life. Speaking himself as one elderly politikos to another, Plutarch certainly places some weight on the state’s interest in making the best use of its human resources, pointing out in his conclusion that moral qualities – which are more relevant than physical to good governance – improve rather than decline with age, and it is an absurd waste if their fullest development is devoted only to the management of private households and estates.84 But this argument surfaces explicitly only in the peroration. For the majority of the essay, Plutarch argues instead on the grounds of the ageing politician’s own personal interest. Political participation, as he presents it, is ‘not a specific community service (leitourgia) with utilitarian ends, but the proper way of life for a tame, polis-dwelling and sociable creature, suited by nature to live out its allotted time as participant in a polis, devoted to the pursuit of what is noble and the benefit of mankind (politikos kai philokalos kai philanthrôpos)’.85 In this perspective, retirement comes close to becoming an unnatural act, a wanton departure from the best and most suitable course, comparable in the distress and damage caused to both the individual and his community to the tearing-up of a still healthy and deeply-rooted tree.86 The vigour with which Plutarch argues his case, with a rich variety of suitable historical exempla and careful adaptation of the full range of conventional imagery for the management of the state, suggests that he anticipates scepticism, and does not regard the issue as easy or uncontroversial. Quite apart from entirely nonphilosophical considerations (reluctance to take on public burdens on the part of the elite in general, not only the old; impatience with the old on the part of the 82

‘Hippodamus’ On the State 98.23–100.23 Thesleff (Stob. Flor. 4.1.94). There is no substantial surviving theorizing about children, unless one counts texts on education, like Plutarch On Listening to Lectures, ps.-Plut On the Education of Children, and Musonius Fr. 15. But even if these texts are allowed to count, they contain nothing very startling; and there seems to be nothing about children that considers them as a category from other than an educational viewpoint. 84 Plutarch Old Men 797ef. 85 Plutarch Old Men 14.791a. 86 Plutarch Old Men 7.787f. 83

Good Communities

203

thrusting young), it might be suggested that he had at the back of his mind the existence of another well-established theoretical paradigm. On one construction at least of the contrast of the active and the contemplative lives – seen for instance in Maximus Oration 16.5–6 – active participation in front-line political life should indeed be seen as the preserve of the vigorous young; the elderly should quite properly retire into philosophical seclusion, from where their influence will work only indirectly (if still powerfully) on the life of the community.87 We seem therefore to see diverging strands of thought over the political value and status of the old, and to that extent a problem and the potential for argument, rather than the site of an entirely inert orthodoxy. The poor. The poor too, in their turn, seem to have been the object of divergent and potentially conflicting strands in political thinking. On the one hand, they were necessarily implicated (even if not solely, and not usually explicitly) in the anxious stereotype of the lower orders as a feckless anarchic mob, requiring attentive control by their more reflective rulers, just as the passions, or the passionate dimensions of the soul, demand the close control of reason.88 But against this, ideas of the indifference of material goods, and the virtues of the simple life and of contentment with modest provision, created a context in which they could be viewed in a much more positive (if not necessarily less patronizing) light. It is in the latter spirit that the most explicit surviving problematization of the poor as an issue for political thinking is conceived. Dio Chrysostom’s Euboean Oration (Or. 7) is best known for its long and detailed (‘novelistic’) portrayal of an isolated household of simple country folk, and the welcome they supposedly extended to Dio when he was shipwrecked on the coast of Euboea (7.1–80).89 However, as Dio is careful to explain (7.81), the charming tale has a serious reflective purpose. It is there to exemplify the important moral truth that poverty is no barrier to the leading of a ‘seemly and natural life’ (to zên euschêmonôs kai kata physin), but even an advantage (dilated on in 7.82–102). But Dio has a more precise topic in view, within this large and fairly unexciting commonplace. His account of the rustics has involved a confrontation between their honest simplicity and the manipulative cunning of the inhabitants of the nearest town. This too was purposefully planted, for Dio goes on in the last third of the oration (7.103–52) to raise the question of what occupations, if any, the virtuous poor can set themselves to in the city without compromising their virtue, even when deprived of the friendlier environment of the countryside. It must be admitted that the ensuing discussion is clearer and more detailed on what must be ruled out than on what might prove viable. Dio asserts his confidence that acceptable occupations can indeed be found to keep body and soul 87

Cf. Maximus Or. 16.2–3. Easily exemplified from many of the texts already discussed: Dio’s Alexandrian Oration (e.g. 32.9, 32.16–18, 32.27–9), Plutarch’s Precepts (e.g. 800c, 802de), Maximus’ Orations 16 and 27. 89 On the Euboean Oration, see Russell 1992; Brunt 1973; Jones 1978a, 56–61; Trapp 2000, 219–23. 88

204

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

together at a low but respectable level (7.108). But he then proceeds to a long, and increasingly denunciatory catalogue of what must be prohibited: first, banausic professions that physically spoil the body (7.110), then those that corrupt the moral character because resting on false, hedonistic aims and values – couture, perfumery, hairdressing (7.117–18); acting, mime and dance (7.119–22); auctioneering, town-crying, legal draughtsmanship, and advocacy (7.123); finally, and with the greatest length and vehemence, pimping and brothel-keeping in both their heterosexual and homosexual versions (7.133–52). Although, half way through this catalogue (7.124–32), Dio disclaims any intention to construct a general model of the good community in the style of Plato’s Republic,90 he nevertheless drifts in that direction, abandoning the specific case of the poor and their possibilities for long stretches. His words sketch by negation what begins to seem a remarkably austere, deliberately unsophisticated kind of community (no luxury arts, no theatre, no developed legal system) – even a kind of return to the simple rustic household community with which the oration began.91 But the sketch remains implicit, rather than put forward for consideration in its own right, and incomplete. The emphasis falls increasingly on indignant castigation of contemporary degeneracy, and as such the speech assumes a somewhat stereotyped tone and standpoint – as Russell observes, strongly reminiscent of the near-contemporary moralizing satire of Juvenal.92 The oration as we have it is incomplete, so its ending may originally have involved a return to the official topic of occupations for the urban poor; but it is hard to see how this could entirely have restored the balance. The Euboean Oration is thus, thematically, a somewhat wayward performance,93 contributing as much to discussion of community constituents and shared morality as to that of the specific issue of the poor. Yet it does, even if with a flickering focus, make a problem of the poor as a class in the context of philosophical reflection on the overall management of a political community, in a way matched by no other contemporary text. The closest approach, otherwise, is Musonius Rufus’ essay On Appropriate Ways for a Philosopher to Make a Living, from which the surviving extract (Fr. 11) endorses the farmer’s life of simple toil, and his abundance of nothing but the bare necessities, as ideally convergent with the ideals of the true philosopher.94 But this is more to do with farming and with Musonius’ austere, practically oriented (‘Cynicizing’) version of Stoicism, than with any sense of the poor as a political issue. Similarly, though details redolent of 90

See esp. 7.130–2 for the – urbanely allusive but unmistakable – Platonic reference. Pursuing the parallel with Plato’s Republic, a return from the ‘inflamed city’ (Rep. 372e– 373c) to the primitive sufficiency of what Glaucon impatiently dismissed as a ‘city of pigs’ (372ac). 92 Russell 1992, 12. 93 Something which (on the evidence of 7.127–32) Dio may positively have welcomed and played up, as proper to his carefully cultivated, mock modest image as an amateur and a ‘mere chatterer’ (adoleschês) without professional standing: cf. Russell 1992, 12 and 132 (on 7.81). 94 Musonius fr. 11 Hense (Stob. Flor. 4.15.18, 4.380.1–384.6 W). 91

Good Communities

205

modest (though not necessarily poverty-stricken) urban living are liberally scattered through Arrian’s Discourses of Epictetus (stolen lamps, cooking pots),95 this reads more like a preacher’s device – a calculated stripping away of charisma from material things and attachment to them – than an attempt to engage directly with the world of the poor. Other contemporary authors – Seneca, for instance, or Plutarch – do not engage at all. Dio’s Euboean, for all its own conventional elements, remains an intriguing – and creditable – oddity. Women. Philosophical reflections on women have already been considered in connection with erotic attraction and the passions, and with the conceptualization of marriage as a central building-block of human sociability.96 Here, the question is that of the place and standing of women, relative to men, in the structure of the good community. First indications can easily seem positive. There is a heartening general agreement among our surviving sources97 that in at least one important respect, men and women must be regarded as absolutely equal. Though differing in body (in point of physical strength more importantly than of specific bodily organs), they are the same in soul, and so equally well equipped for the development and exercise of the virtues. The point is made at length by Musonius in the extracts quoted from Stobaeus, on the themes ‘Whether daughters should be educated in the same way as sons’ and ‘Whether women too should philosophize’,98 and also by the ‘Pythagorean’ ‘Phintys’ in her essay On Female Temperance,99 and it is cited, assumed, or illustrated in such further texts as Seneca’s Consolation to Marcia,100 and Plutarch’s Dialogue on Love and Female Heroism.101 All the virtues are included, bravery, intelligence (phronêsis) and justice as well as the more obviously feminine virtue of self-restraint (sôphrosynê). When we add to this the fact – already discussed – that early Imperial-period authors show a special appreciation of marriage as an essential mediator between the lone individual and the city, and a natural expression of innate human sociability, it might seem that a good deal is being conceded. This impression is not wholly unfounded. It is not nothing that philosophical prioritizing of the psychological (‘spiritual’) over the physical, and insistence on a notion of human nature that strongly transcends gender differences, have created a climate in which it can be asserted as a truth of reason that females are not inferior to 95

The stolen lamp, Disc. 1.18.15, 1.29.21; cooking pots, 2.20.29. Note however that at 4.10.34 it seems to be assumed that there will be a servant to go out to buy a replacement for a broken pot; and at 4.1.111 pots are put into a sequence with drinking-cups, tunics, dogs, houses and estates, as examples of dispensable material possessions. This is not life on the bread-line. 96 See above, 93–6 and 155–65. 97 Stoic and Platonist authors (and fellow-travellers) only; we have no Epicurean views from this period. 98 Stob. Flor. 2.31.123, 2.235.23–239.29 W (Fr. 4), 2.31.126, 2.244.6–247.2 W (Fr. 3). 99 Stob. Flor. 4.23.61 = 151.18–153.7 Thesleff. 100 Seneca Cons. to Marc. 1.1 and 16.2–4. 101 Plutarch Female Heroism 242e–243d and passim; Dialogue on Love 769b-d.

206

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

males, and that strong value is attached to an institution in which women are, necessarily, numerically equal partners with men. To set against this, however, it is also very striking how the same thinkers can combine acceptance of female equality in the pursuit of moral virtue with an equally firm assertion of their subordination in social power and authority. As participants in the notional community of moral progressives, women may be equal partners, but there is no disposition to grant them the same status in the households and cities of the everyday world. At best, there is only a limited readiness to admit the very occasional and partial exception. Musonius, speaking of the education of female children, concedes that circumstances may sometimes make it appropriate for men to perform women’s tasks and vice versa.102 But the norm for him is separate functions and responsibilities: wool-working and the management of the household for women, interaction with the outside world and physical exertion (i.e. politics and fighting) for men.103 Plutarch seems happy enough with the idea that, occasionally, it may be suitable for an older woman not only to take the initiative in a love-affair, but also to take temporary responsibility for the moral education of her younger partner. But this is in the heightened circumstances depicted in the Dialogue on Love.104 The normal situation, which provides the context for his Advice to a Married Couple, assumes male moral guidance of the female, just as it assumes male command of the city; and, in yet another appeal to natural structures, it assimilates this relationship of benevolent (but unchallengeable) command to that of the soul over the body.105 The desire to keep women away from what is seen as masculine territory in fact extends even to philosophy. When Musonius argues that women just as much as men should philosophize, he does so on the strict understanding that philosophia means the practical cultivation of moral virtue, rather than anything that might involve following a course of instruction outside the household, or argumentative engagement with an audience or a discussion-partner. He agrees that the idea of women ‘abandoning their supervision of the household in favour of mixing with men in public, declaiming and constructing subtle arguments (sophizôntai) and resolving syllogisms’ is offensive, adding that he does not think that men either should indulge in such activity, divorced from any practical application.106 In similar vein, Plutarch warmly urges a young husband to beautify his character directly through the study of philosophy, but leaves his wife to enjoy the same benefit at one remove. As Andromache found in Hector ‘father, lady mother and brother’, so it is up to the husband to be ‘tutor (kathêgêtês), philosopher and teacher’ to his wife, bringing back the assembled nectar of what he has learned outside, like a bee to the hive, and passing it on to her in easily assimilable form (as antidote to the frivolous activity and ignorant superstitions 102

Musonius fr.4, p. 17.7–12 Hense (Stob. Flor. 2.31.123, 2.238.11–16 W). Musonius fr. 4, p. 16.19–17.7 Hense (Stob. Flor. 2.31.123, 2.238.3–11 W), fr. 3, p. 10.2– 9 Hense (Stob. Flor. 2.31.126, 2.244.27–245.6 W). 104 Plutarch Dialogue on Love 754d. 105 Plutarch Advice 142de. 106 Musonius fr. 3, p. 12.5–15 Hense (Stob. Flor. 2.31.126, 2.246.13–22 W). 103

Good Communities

207

she might otherwise be prey to).107 Equality of moral potential emphatically does not in these texts admit women to the formal institutions of philosophia. Finally, moreover, in this period as in many before it, acknowledgement of female moral capacity stands in some tension with traditional negative stereotypes of the feminine, which had long since seeped into philosophical vocabulary and imagery. In a standard male perception, richly documented from Homer onwards, women are different and dangerous because of their greater susceptibility to emotion and their consequently lesser ability to resist the seductions of pleasure. In everyday thinking, this belief operates to licence various sorts of social control and regimentation, supposedly necessary to protect the stability of households and marriages. In philosophical thinking, the mischief starts when it is overlaid on a psychology, like that of Platonists, Peripatetics, and Stoics, that gives a central place to the distinction between right reason and emotion/desire, and identifies the realization of human excellence with the close control of the latter by the former. Femininity becomes aligned with what is lowest in human nature, and with the forces that tend against the cultivation of virtue and the pursuit of the good life, and ‘womanish’ (gynaikôdês, muliebris) acquires an extra, conceptually harder edged charge as a term of condemnation. Thus Maximus of Tyre, contrasting virtuous erôs with vicious, hedonistic lust, can characterize the former as ‘Hellenic’, ‘stable’ and ‘virile’ and the latter as ‘barbarian’, ‘flighty’ and ‘feminine’, and he can condemn the Epicurean attempt to make the pursuit of pleasure rather than the cultivation of moral virtue the proper end of life as ‘transferring command from the men’s to the women’s quarters’ (andrônitis, gynaikônitis).108 Seneca, for his part, is apparently incapable of using the word muliebris in his philosophical writings in other than a negative sense.109 Theoretical acknowledgement of a certain degree of equality, based on a larger model of human nature, thus co-exists with straightforward acceptance of traditional social and political inequality, and to some extent also of traditional prejudices about female nature. There is no sense that a community organized more wholeheartedly on philosophically enlightened lines would give women a noticeably different place to the one they actually occupy. Slaves. The case is broadly similar with thinking about slaves and slavery. Philosophoi and philosophi certainly feel that there is something to be corrected in everyday, unphilosophical attitudes to slaves and assumptions about them, but in general they stop well short of any kind of condemnation of the institution as a whole or any call for corresponding social change. 107

Plutarch Advice 145b-d. In context, this may count as an enlightened and realistic suggestion: a woman’s education would probably not normally have equipped her to make sense of philosophical lectures for herself; and learning from an intermediary is not necessarily a second-best course in any case. The real problem is the context: a world in which women were systematically shut out of a whole range of high-status institutions and activities. 108 Orr. 19.4, 33.2. 109 Manning 1973.

208

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

An inevitable fixed point in any discussion of the topic for this period is Seneca’s celebrated Epistle 47, which does indeed neatly reveal the limits within which the issue was conceived. The letter opens by congratulating Seneca’s correspondent and trainee Lucilius for ‘living on amicable terms (familiariter) with his slaves’, and proceeds to unfold the reasons why this is the right policy for the seeker after moral progress. The aim, obviously, is to reinforce and encourage enlightened practice (in both Lucilius and subsequent readers) by setting it on a firmer basis of reasoned justification. Using a version of the technique of ‘relabelling’110 Seneca follows up his opening words with the insistence that slaves should not be thought of and described as ‘slaves’, but rather as ‘human beings’, ‘messmates’, ‘lowly friends’ and ‘fellow slaves’ (homines, contubernales, humiles amici, conservi),111 then goes on to explain at greater length why this is so. Slaves are the equals of their masters in their shared humanity: they ‘sprang from the same seeds, live under the same heavens, and draw breath, live and die to the same degree’.112 They are ‘fellow slaves’ because their masters are every bit as exposed to the blows of fortune as they are; as history so abundantly shows, free men can become slaves and slaves free with sobering ease.113 With this in mind – the fact that neither is a permanent, secure role – the enlightened master should ‘live with his subordinate as he would wish his superior to live with him’, and thus converse with his slaves, consult them for advice, and share meals with them.114 Conventionally minded protests that this effaces an important social dividing-line are beside the point. The only distinction that matters is that between good and bad moral character, and it is on this criterion that slaves (like anyone else) should be socialized with or avoided, not on the basis of the (everyday) distinction between slave and free.115 Seneca’s case thus rests principally on a version of the Stoic argument for human sociability and solidarity more generally.116 The larger context of Nature, in which the only relevant distinction is that between the virtuous and the vicious, takes priority over the purely human framework within which humans can be designated slaves or free.117 To refuse to give that distinction too much weight is thus to show a higher kind of good sense. Seneca does, however, also add prudential considerations for good measure. To insist too hard on the divide between slave and master, and to use it as grounds for oppressive treatment, is dangerous; ill-used slaves can turn on their master and put his prosperity and life at risk in turn.118 And he cannot resist an incidental swipe at the hedonism that

110

See above, 60. Ep. 47.1 112 Ep. 47.10. 113 Ep. 47.1 and 10. 114 Ep. 47.11–13. 115 Ep. 47.13–17. 116 See above, 135–42. 117 For which sentiment, cf. Dio Or. 7.138. 118 Ep. 47.3–5, 18–20. 111

Good Communities

209

demands large teams of slaves, each trained in a different degrading task, merely to serve their master’s sybaritic tastes.119 What we do not find in the letter is any direct condemnation of the institution. The ideas that Seneca brings into play might have been developed in this direction (with the claim that a distinction not grounded in nature is unnatural, and that what is unnatural is wrong), but this does not happen. Seneca instead accepts the institution, and seeks to modify the attitudes attaching to it, by arguing that the lines it draws do not have the weight commonly assigned them. The result is humane, but disappointing to the abolitionist. It has been suggested that a sharper critical edge can be found in Dio Chrysostom, in the three dialogues which he devotes to the topic of slavery. Oration 10, Diogenes or On Servants, tells of a conversation between Diogenes and an acquaintance on the road outside Corinth. The acquaintance reports that he was on his way to consult the Delphic oracle, when his slave ran away, so he is now heading for Corinth instead in the hopes of finding him again. Diogenes responds by convincing him, first, that he should not chase after the absconded slave but let him go, and second that he should not go and consult the oracle either. Orations 14 and 15, both entitled On Slavery and Freedom, are devoted to showing that the distinction between slavery and freedom is a slipperier one than is often thought, and generally misconceived by ordinary people: the former in an exchange between (apparently) Dio himself and an unnamed interlocutor who does little more than provide prompts to the next stage of the argument; the latter in an argument between two anonymous contemporaries, as reported by Dio with a minimal narrative frame. In his analysis of Oration 15, published in 1973, Peter Brunt recorded the impression that in it ‘Dio goes further than any other writer of Roman times ... in subverting the legal institution of slavery; his argument ... tends to show that there are no natural slaves and no just way, i.e. no way according with natural law, of acquiring title to another human being.’120 More recently, in an as yet unpublished paper, John Moles has endorsed and extended this conclusion, and insisted on the importance of Cynic inspiration to the position he believes Dio to be taking up. For Moles, both Or. 15 and Or. 10 make a rare (moral) case against slavery: the later in direct Cynic mode; the former within a more Stoic framework, but with Cynic influence required to release the potential of Stoic thinking to arrive at such a position. This reflects well on Dio, but even better on Cynicism.121 It is by no means clear, however, that any of the three pieces in question is in fact concerned – principally or even incidentally – with slavery as institution, let alone with constructing a categorical condemnation. Oration 10, when considered in its entirety, with proper attention to Dio’s own emphases and statements of theme, turns out to be a Socratizing sermon on the need for wisdom (phronêsis), equated with

119

Ep. 47.5–9. Brunt 1973, as quoted in Moles (unpublished). 121 Moles (unpublished). In Moles’s view, Cynicism thus emerges as both morally and intellectually superior to the more pretentious schools of thought – Stoicism and Peripateticism – that failed ‘to stagger as far as disapproval of slavery’. 120

210

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

self-knowledge, as the essential (but universally neglected) precondition for effective interaction with the outside world: Are you not going to make efforts first to acquire that thing which will permit you to derive benefit from everything else and handle all your own affairs well, but will you instead chase after money or land or slaves or ships or houses in preference to wisdom?122

In this argument, the projects of recapturing a runaway slave and of consulting the oracle are just two instances of things it is senseless to pursue, and will inevitably do one no good, if undertaken in the absence of knowledge of one’s own human nature. The question of whether or not it is wrong in principle to have slaves – to own another human being as a piece of property – is simply not formulated, still less answered. As for Orations 14 and 15, a strong pointer to their focus and interests is given by the first sentence of the former and the closing sentence of the latter: Men desire to be free above all things and they say that that freedom is the greatest of goods, while slavery is the most shameful and wretched, yet they have no knowledge of the essence of what it is to be free and what it is to be a slave; ... ... In this way, then, the argument proves that it is not philosophoi who are transferring the meanings of the terms (sc. ‘noble’, ‘well-born’ and ‘free’), but the common herd of thoughtless humanity, because of their lack of experience in such matters.123

Dio’s argument in both dialogues (more elaborately in Or. 15 than in Or. 14) is that the ordinary use of the terms ‘slave/slavery’ and ‘free/freedom’ is radically misguided, as emerges when one attends properly to the difficulty of defining them (14), and establishing reliable criteria for their application (15). Good sense and unproblematic applicability are only restored when they are defined in moral terms, with ‘freedom’, ‘nobility’ and ‘good birth’ equated with wisdom and moral virtue, and ‘slavery’ with ignorance and vice. In other words, these two orations are defences and explanations of the old Stoic paradox that ‘only the good man is free’, comparable to, though more oblique than, Philo’s Every Good Man is Free and, rather earlier, item 5 in Cicero’s Stoic Paradoxes. Slavery and attitudes to slavery do indeed stand condemned in them, but there is no social, institutional dimension to the condemnation, any more than there was in Seneca’s Epistle 47. Here, as so often in ancient philosophical writing, slavery matters most as moral metaphor – as a particularly effective way of characterizing the opposite of that autonomy and selfmastery that stood at the heart of the concept of virtue.

122

Or. 10.15; cf. 10.28 and 10.31–2. Dio here echoes the Socrates of Plato Apology 29de and (more distantly) Clitopho 407a-e. 123 Orr. 14.1 and 15.32.

Chapter 8

Politics 3: Philosophia in Politics and the Community The two preceding chapters have surveyed Imperial-period philosophical thinking on forms of government, and on the shape, constituents and ethos of the good community. It remains to ask about ideas of where philosophia itself was meant to fit into the social and political structures thus analysed. Discussion of this question will resume a line of argument begun in Chapter 1 of this study (about the claims of philosophia to educational status, and their consequences); and it will prepare the ground for its final chapter (on the overall relationship of philosophia to mainstream culture of the Imperial period). We shall look first at the question of the place of philosophia as performance in public space; then – returning closer to the territory of Chapter 6 – at the issue of formal political participation on the part of the philosophos. Entertainment, leisure and responsibility We have seen what a deep concern texts such as Dio’s city speeches and Plutarch’s Political Precepts manifest for the public behaviour of the citizenry en masse, and for the way this behaviour both indicates and influences their underlying moral character.1 This is something that both the resident statesman and the visiting philosophical consultant need to understand on a theoretical level; and where necessary they must be ready and able to take practical steps to alter what they perceive to be undesirable behaviour and a corrupt collective disposition. Just as the reflective individual must keep a constant watch on his reactions and conduct in sensitive situations, and where necessary accept the judgements of informed outside observers about what needs to change, so too the reflective dêmos needs to be able to look detachedly at how it conducts itself, and be ready to accept correction from authoritative critics. But this is an analogy that can be taken further. Just as in the case of the individual, behaviour and reactions in leisure activity and informal situations can be every bit as telling as those manifested when on duty, so in the city at large, leisure and entertainment can be taken as hugely important indicators of collective moral health, and deserve as careful 1

See above, 195–9.

212

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

scrutiny as the more formal and structured elements in public life, in courts, assembly, council chamber and agora. And, by the same token, it can be seen as hugely important, not only how a community behaves in its leisure time, but also what forms of leisure activity it prizes and fosters within itself. This too was matter for philosophical comment, and guidance. The text in which concern for the right handling of entertainment and leisure is most obviously foregrounded is Dio’s Alexandrian Oration, where behaviour in the theatre while listening to musical recitals and in the hippodrome at chariotraces provides the main focus of Dio’s attempt to persuade his audience (itself listening to him in a theatre) that they urgently need to cultivate greater collective gravitas.2 His criticism is particularly pointed, and (he would say) particularly necessary because it is so heavily on their city’s credentials as a place of culture and entertainment that the Alexandrians rest their claim to distinction in the Greek (and Roman) world.3 They need to be shown that it is precisely where they think they score most highly that the greatest threat to their continued happiness in fact lies. But along the way, Dio also hits at a range of other kinds of performance and entertainment – acrobatic display, dance, sophistic declamation4 – so as to create a broader picture of a community systematically in error in this dimension of its shared life. In the Alexandrian Oration, however, Dio is careful not to strike too austere a tone, and thus risk alienating what he represents as an extremely touchy, impatient audience. His strategy is instead to match its tastes for the lively and entertaining closely enough to convince it of his benevolence and empathy, but not so closely as to compromise his critical stance. Thus, though Alexandrian behaviour in theatre and hippodrome is wittily castigated, the performances that arouse it – though not praised – are not declared vicious in themselves. In the Euboean Oration, by contrast, his approach is more puritanical. The review of possible activities for the respectable poor rules out, with minimum apology, tragedy, comedy, mime, dance, choral performance and instrumental music – except as represented in some categories of religious observance – as firmly as it does luxury trades and brothel-keeping.5 And though it is explicitly only as occupations for the poor that they are condemned, the whole tone of the oration – notwithstanding Dio’s disavowal of the intention to do a new Republic – is to suggest that they should have no place in any truly well-constructed community. As banausic trades distort the body from its natural state, so these all – from the austere vantage point adopted in this oration – encourage an ugly, slavish character.6 A similarly puritanical attitude, though notably less closely engaged with practical detail, animates those lectures of Maximus of Tyre where the subject of right (morally responsible) entertainment comes up. Oration 22, taking off from a 2

Dio Oration 32.47–74 (at musical recitals), 74–85 (in the hippodrome; cf. 41–2); for the theatre setting of Dio’s speech (implied rather than directly stated), 1–2, 7 and 20–1. 3 See further Trapp 1995. 4 Or. 32.7, 10, 55, 68. 5 Or. 7.119–22; cf. 203–4 above. 6 Or. 7.110–13.

Philosophia in Politics and the Community

213

celebrated ‘definition’ of good cheer (euphrosynê) offered by Odysseus among the Phaeacians,7 argues that instrumental music, sophistic declamation and the reading/recital of historical narrative all fail to measure up to the highest standards, and should not be valued by serious people.8 Oration 25, posing an analogous question about the nature of true eloquence (‘beauty of speech’ – euglôttia, to en logois kalon), offers a longer and more developed critique of sophistic declamation, in the context of a condemnation of hedonistic modes of listening more generally.9 And Oration 1 obliquely dismisses drama, music and athletics as spectacles worthy of a serious audience’s time.10 In all of this, the stress falls not on the structural or institutional issue – what activities should or should not be permitted as elements in one’s community – but on the question of their reception and moral effect. What Dio and Maximus are concerned with is the ill that misplaced enthusiasm for the pursuits they list can cause to the moral health of their audiences, and the good that they are incapable of conferring. In their (ultimately Platonizing)11 vision, sustained exposure – to theatre, declamation, dance, horse-racing or whatever – either positively feeds the passions, disturbing inner balance and encouraging false evaluation and the selection of false goals, or at the very least fails to do anything to strengthen the saving grasp of reason on the person and the outside world. It is the same angle of concern that underlies another expression of philosophical disquiet at a popular form of entertainment, Seneca’s celebrated criticism of mortal combat between condemned criminals in the arena in his Epistle 7. In paragraphs 3 to 6 of the letter, Seneca records his dismay, on visiting the arena in the hopes of finding something relaxing, witty and entertaining, in the interval between bouts of killing, to encounter instead ‘unadulterated murder’ (mera homicidia): contestants deliberately deprived of all defensive armour in the interests of bloodshed, and forced to fight until all were dead. In his introductory remarks, he condemns the spectacle as cruel and inhumane, and the vocabulary he uses to describe it in detail reinforces the judgement. But his main interest, what ties the specific episode to the overall argument of the letter, is the effect that he believes witnessing the sight is liable to have on the spectator. He himself has come back from it crueller and less humane, and this bears out – in an unusually intense manner – the quite general truth that association with the public at large has a corrupting effect: ‘Mixing with the masses is inimical: each and every one introduces us to some vice or stamps it on us or smears it onto us without our being aware.’12 The tender moral progressive must avoid such company as far as possible, associating only with those who can improve his character, or whom he

7

Odyssey 9.2–11, on which see Trapp 1997a, 187 (fn. 2). Maximus Or. 22.2–3 (instrumental music), 3–4 (declamation), 5–6 (history). 9 Or. 25.4–6. 10 Or. 1.1–2 and 10 (drama and music), 4–6 (athletics). 11 In the spirit of Plato Republic 377b–400c and 595a–608b. 12 Seneca Ep. 7.2. For the Stoic credentials of this point, cf. Arrian Disc. of Epict. 3.16, and see above, 44–5. 8

214

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

can himself assist in their own progress.13 Seneca thus ends up by cancelling out the horrid vision of reciprocal slaughter in the arena with one of reciprocal help between fellow progressives, in particular between himself and Lucilius, in the very exchange of letters he is now carrying forward. His purposes are predominantly private and individual, rather than public and social. Society – the mass of fools – is branded as insidiously dangerous to the few in pursuit of true enlightenment, but the very generality of this condemnation means that special, discriminatory disapproval for one or another of its mistaken enthusiasms is beside the point. For all these thinkers, Dio, Maximus and Plutarch as well as Seneca, what society needs more than, or in place of, its traditional modes of leisure is of course philosophia. For Seneca, as essayist and philosophical letter-writer, this need may be best satisfied in private, in one-to-one contact between him and his solitary addressee. But for Dio, Maximus and Plutarch, it is a more public and collective experience. At the heart of Plutarch’s Precepts and Old Men in Public Life, as we have seen,14 there is a vision of the good, philosophical statesman (the politeuomenos or politikos) working on his fellow citizens by both precept and example, and in both individual contacts and mass gatherings, but always as part of his commitment to public life and the shared good.15 For Maximus and Dio, in keeping with their commitment to the delivery of philosophical messages in oratorical mode, the sense of delivery to and reception by a collective audience, representing the community at large, is still stronger. When Maximus disparages athletics and drama, it is by contrast with his own performance to an audience of (he hopes) the expectant young.16 When Dio diagnoses the faults of his Alexandrian audience, disparages their excessive enthusiasm for concerts and chariot-races, and swipes in passing at Cynics, pedants, sophists dancers and acrobats, he does so in order to shame, challenge, tease and provoke them into paying attention instead, all together, to the truly beneficial kind of spectacle that he has to offer them. But you do not have any such chorus or poet [sc. as those of Old Comedy], or anyone else at all to reproach you good-naturedly and make the city’s failings plain. So whenever it is that such a thing shows up, you should welcome it and, instead of being irritated, you should treat it as a celebration (heortê); and even if you are irritated, you should be shy of shouting out ‘When’s he going to stop?’ and ‘When’s the juggler coming on?’, or ‘Rubbish!’, or something else of the kind. As I said, you have that kind of entertainment on tap all the time, and there’s no danger it’ll ever give out. But the sort of words that enable men to grow happier and stronger and more self-controlled, and better able to administer their cities – those you haven’t often heard (because I don’t want to say that you never have). 13

Ep. 7.6–9. See 194–5 above. 15 See in particular Old Men 796c–797a and Precepts 799bc, 822f–823e and 824d–825f. 16 Maximus Or. 1, esp. 5–8. 14

Philosophia in Politics and the Community

215

So, to which category shall we assign the populace of Alexandria, the ‘innumerable multitude’ as they call it? I for my part offered myself to you on the understanding that you belonged to the better one. ... Certainly, you could present no finer and more striking (paradoxoteron) spectacle than yourselves, being sober and paying attention. The countenance of a whole people (assembly) calm and composed, not convulsed with violent and unrestrained laughter nor distorted with continuous disorderly clamour, but listening as one even though so many, is a truly divine and solemn and magnificent sight.17

Philosophoi in formal politics It was a firm conviction, therefore, that philosophical discourse – and so also its providers – belonged in public space, and indeed were sorely needed there. A responsible society owed them and it a secure and privileged place in the range of performers and performances that it attended to and guaranteed to provide with suitable locales and audiences. Philosophoi for their part must be correspondingly firm in claiming their rightful position, and insisting on a respectful and responsive hearing, for this was a very important means of living up to their self-image, touched on already in Chapter 1, as the shepherds, steersmen and unofficial legislators of mankind.18 It went naturally together with their assumption of a central role in education, as one possible way of keeping them visible and useful in adult social life to the pupils they had trained in adolescence (or, indeed, those who had missed out on philosophia in the course of their formal education and needed to catch up later). But to have concentrated exclusively on education and on performance in space shared with such products as drama, poetry, music and epideictic oratory would have been to restrict the engagement of philosophia and philosophoi with the surrounding world to a marked degree. If moral leadership was at the heart of what philosophia had to offer society, could it be truly effectively exercised solely from the position of the pedagogue and the public performer, however deeply respected by his audience? Surely there was room for the thought that the full benefits could only be conferred if philosophoi could engage with formal politics, holding positions of power, or influencing those who did from close at hand: that, as Plato’s Socrates had long since declared, the world would inevitably remain a mess until kings became philosophoi and philosophoi kings.19 The classical and Hellenistic background The question of the proper relationship between philosophia and active engagement in political processes had in fact been under continuous discussion

17

Dio Or. 32.7 and 29. Above, 18–23. 19 Plato Rep. 473cd. 18

216

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

since the fourth century BCE, beginning with Plato and Aristotle and moving on through successive generations of Platonists, Peripatetics, Cynics, Epicureans and Stoics.20 By the first century, its status as an issue of general cultural interest, even something of a cliché, had been acknowledged by its co-option into the core curriculum of rhetoric too: ‘Should the wise man (i.e. the devotee of philosophia) enter politics?’ is one of the prime examples Cicero gives of an appropriate topic for the exercise of quaestio (‘theoretical debate’), in which the trainee was supposed to develop his powers of argumentation on a large and demanding intellectual theme.21 The accumulated body of thinking and writing to which Imperial-period philosophoi were thus the heirs provided them once more with not a single orthodoxy on the claims and virtues of political engagement, but a range of sectarian options, embracing not only alternative arguments for similar practical conclusions, but also some wide disagreements on basic principle. At first sight, there was a very marked divergence between positions fundamentally supportive of political participation and positions fundamentally sceptical towards it. The works of Plato and the Platonists, Aristotle and the Peripatetics, and the Stoics, urged a strong commitment to participate, and to work through political structures and functions, as representing something more than just contingent, peripheral features of human organization. To this line of thinking, political action expressed and developed an aspect of human nature, and the route to human fulfilment had therefore to lie through it, not round it. Epicureans, Sceptics, and Cynics, by contrast, saw no such intrinsic value in political activity, and urged equally strongly against any such investment of personal capital. This broad distinction, however, masks some very considerable differences of thinking within each of the two camps; and it is certainly not equivalent to a simple divide between a categorical injunction to participate in active politics on the one hand, and an absolute prohibition against doing so on the other. Within both Platonism and Peripateticism there was a tension between the call to political action and the competing claims of the life of the contemplative as opposed to the practical intellect. In the foundational texts, this manifests itself in a number of places: in the discrepancy between Plato’s accounts of higher dialectic and of the political role of the Guardians in the Republic, and the consequent worry over why a fully trained Guardian should ever want to go back down from the bright light of intelligible reality into the shadows of the Cave;22 in Aristotle’s uncertainty over the possibility of a life of pure contemplation in Book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics;23 and in the Peripatetic (supposedly originally Pythagorean) 20 E.g. Plato Apology, Gorgias, Crito and Theaetetus as well, of course, as Republic and Laws; Aristotle Nic. Eth. 1.5 and 10.7–8, Protrep. fr. 12 Ross = 58 Rose; Heraclides Ponticus fr. 88 Wehrli; Zeno’s Republic; Chrysippus On Lives (SVF 3.690–704, esp. 690– 700); Epicurus On Lives (fr. 10 Arrighetti = 8–15 Us.) and On Kingship (fr. 9 Arrighetti = 5 Us.). 21 Cicero, Topics 82; Part. Or. 62 and 66; On the Orator 3.112; followed by Quintilian 3.5.6. On quaestio (infinita) = Greek thesis, see Kennedy 1963, 305–6. 22 Rep. 347cd, 499b, 519c–520e, 540ae. 23 Nic. Eth. 10.7–8.

Philosophia in Politics and the Community

217

image of the Games and the Choice of Lives.24 In this perspective, politics, though it provides the highest and amplest arena for the development and exercise of one level of human intelligence, cannot nourish the whole; the way is thus opened for the construction of philosophos and politeuomenos as proponents of rival rather than converging careers. In addition, both in Plato and in classic Stoic texts, there was a further tension between the acceptance of existing political forms, as already suitable for the participation of a philosophos, and the demand for radical reform as the precondition for his involvement. Plato’s legacy famously included both the extreme revisionism of Gorgias and Republic, in which radically new political structures were called for in order to make a state suitable for philosophical participation, and the contrasting readiness of the Laws to work within a much more lightly revised version of conventional political forms. In Stoicism, there was room for argument whether the Republics of Zeno and Chrysippus should be regarded as blueprints for actual change (as radical as Plato’s), or as expositions of a notional ideal, by reference to which political ambitions in the real world of conventional states should be guided.25 Beneath the level of high principle, moreover, this tradition of a basically positive approach to politics offered not one but a variety of models for the form political engagement might legitimately take in practice. Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics put forward no clearly formed view of where the philosophos should insert himself into the life of the polis, thus leaving it possible to assume that any of the roles and positions conventionally open to a leading citizen of the day was legitimate. Plato, more radically and decisively, proposed a range of less assimilationist options: the philosophos as executive ruler (the Guardians of the Republic); as law-giver and supervisor in the background (the interlocutors and the Nocturnal Council of the Laws); and as roving freelance, ensuring the political health of the state from a position other than that of formal authority (Socrates the gadfly of the Apology, and the ‘only true politikos’ of the Gorgias). The idea of the philosophos as supreme ruler and/or as lawgiver and framer of constitutions was kept alive after Plato not only in Stoicism, but also in some of the ‘Pythagorean’ treatises on politics – for instance, On Kingship by ‘Ecphantus’, ‘Diotogenes’ and ‘Sthenidas’, On the State by ‘Archytas’ and ‘Hippodamus’, and the Prefaces of ‘Zaleucus’ and ‘Charondas’. These could attach the idea of the philosopher-ruler to the remembered image of Pythagoras and his immediate pupils as founders of a practical way of life and organizers of political communities, as well as practitioners of philosophical contemplation.26 The ideal of the disengaged critic, doing a truer form of politics by non-political means, lived on in Cynicism as well as in reminiscence of the Platonic Socrates.

24

Heraclides Ponticus (fr. 88 Wehrli), quoted in Cicero Tusc. 5.3.8–9; cf. Diog. Laert. 8.8. Schofield 1991. 26 Burkert 1972, 97–120; Kahn 2001, 5–9, 68–70. 25

218

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

Plato himself, thanks to the involvement in Sicilian politics commemorated in the Seventh Letter,27 was remembered also in yet another role, that of the visiting adviser, seeking to reform politics through his personal contacts with men of power, actual or potential rulers. The Stoics also recommended this mode of politics, Chrysippus famously declaring that acting as adviser to a king at court or on campaign was the next best thing to being king oneself.28 Yet at the same time their account of natural human integration into societies and the adoption of social roles continued to present a lower level of political activity too as natural and appropriate: as the wise man will marry and have children, so he will hold office, if qualified by his persona, among the wider group of human beings into which he has been born.29 On the other side of the divide, Epicureans, Sceptics and Cynics all grounded their recommendations of a cooler and more detached attitude to practical politics in different ways, and differed too in the kind of activity they were prepared to regard as legitimate. In allowing the ‘tradition of customs and conventions’ (paradosis ethôn kai nomôn) as a guide to the practical living of a life,30 Scepticism implicitly allowed indulgence in any and every conventional form of political activity. But this activity, like any other for the Sceptic, had to be indulged in adoxastôs, without dogmatic conviction; it was entirely illegitimate to assume the real value of any of the ‘goods’ aimed at in political action (whether personal or collective), or the real disvalue of any of the ‘ills’. Cynicism preached a general disengagement from political rank and processes, as part of an all-embracing rejection of the artificial elaborations of conventional culture; and the founding heroes, Diogenes and Crates, were standardly depicted as individuals blessedly free from the pointless burdens and constraints of political life. But the Cynic’s continuing presence in the public spaces of the city (he was not following his calling to admonish the unenlightened if he was not constantly visible to the population at large) meant that intermittent interaction with politically important figures in the execution of their official functions remained possible and, indeed, desirable. Even the Epicureans had a more nuanced attitude to political participation than might at first appear. The basic rule for them was to avoid any behaviour that might threaten either peace of mind or comfort of body, and this in turn was standardly and perfectly plausibly taken to dictate disengagement from any mode or level of political activity. Politics, as an arena of ambition, competition and enmity, could not but inspire the mental pains of anxiety, apprehension and jealousy, grief at defeat and false joy at victory; it might well demand painful physical exertion, even in normal circumstances and times of political stability; and the potential of ancient political life for violence, from fellow-citizens or from 27

In this connection, it does not matter whether the Letter is accepted as genuinely by Plato or not. 28 SVF 3.691 (Plut. Sto. Self-contrad. 1043bc). 29 E.g. SVF 3.686, 698; Cicero On Duties 1.107–17; Cicero On Ends 3.68 (57F, 66B, 66E, 67W L-S). 30 Sextus Pyrrhonism 1.23.

Philosophia in Politics and the Community

219

external intervention, meant that there was a constant risk of more extreme physical damage and suffering too. Total abstention, involving physical withdrawal from political space as well as political activity, was an obvious remedy.31 And yet Epicurus himself was prepared to grant that it was not one that would work in all cases. Just as for the Stoic, circumstances might on occasion dictate that the normal policy of political engagement had to be flouted (‘the wise man will enter public life, unless something should intervene’), so too for the Epicurean, circumstances might be such that the normal policy of abstention and withdrawal should be suspended (‘the wise man will not enter politics, unless something should intervene’).32 Nor need the special factor in question be solely external; in a kind of Epicurean version of the doctrine of personae, quirks of individual character could count as well. Anyone constitutionally devoted to the pursuit of status and reputation (philotimos kai philodoxos) should not abstain, but instead plunge himself into active politics, on the grounds that the frustration of native impulse consequent on not doing so would pain him more severely than any reverse he might suffer in action.33 Imperial-period contributions It was on this unresolved debate and this inter- and intra-sectarian variety of opinions that thinkers of the Imperial period could look back. Their own writings seem to have continued the argument, even though the full range is not now directly attested. Sceptics, Epicureans and Cynics. Our one Sceptical source, Sextus Empiricus, has nothing explicit to say on the issue; his conditional tolerance of political activity, like that of pre-Imperial Sceptics, has to be inferred from his endorsement of custom and usage as guides to practical action in general. Nor does the major Epicurean source, Diogenes of Oenoanda, comment directly. The fact that, when he considers alternative modes of positive interaction with his fellow citizens, the only two possibilities he thinks worth mentioning are encounters with small groups on the one hand (‘ ... or five or six, or as many more than that as you may wish, short of a crowd’), and the wider outreach allowed him by his publicly sited inscription on the other, suggests at least that he did not see political engagement as a personal necessity; but it is unclear whether or not he would have endorsed it for selected others. Arrian’s account of Epictetus’ hearers, however, supplies us with an instance of an individual who is presented as both an Epicurean and the holder of an imperial appointment (as ‘Commissioner of the Free Cities’ diorthôtês tôn eleutherôn poleôn). Epictetus upbraids him in Discourses 3.7 for subscribing to a doctrine that promotes rather

31 Apparently set out in Epicurus’ On Lives, Book 1: Diog. Laert. 10.119; cf. Schofield in Rowe and Schofield 2000, 437, 441–2. 32 Seneca On Leisure 3.2. 33 Epicurus, Fr. 555 Us. = Plutarch Peace of Mind 465f–466a.

220

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

than restrains immorality, but does not explicitly tax him with inconsistency in holding public office. In the case of Cynicism, we have no unmediated Cynic voice to refer to, as opposed to appropriations of Cynic ideas and figures by other (usually Stoic) authors. These tend, in traditional fashion, to stress the freedom of the Cynic from any kind of formal politics, in favour of informal modes of educational interaction with the population at large.34 To set alongside them, however, there is at least one recorded case from the period of what may have been a calculated piece of episodic, opportunistic political involvement in pursuit of the same educational effect: the appearance of the Cynic Demetrius in a court of law in 70 CE, to defend the manifestly corrupt Egnatius Celer.35 On one reading at least,36 this was meant as a spectacular demonstration of the Cynic obligation to bracing philanthrôpia, for which a temporary compromise with normal political action was required. Stoics and Platonists. The great majority of the surviving texts and authors, then, speak from a Stoic or a Platonic vantage point: Seneca, Epictetus, Dio Chrysostom and Marcus Aurelius representing Stoicism, Plutarch, Alcinous and Maximus of Tyre the Platonists. Collectively, the overwhelming impression they give is of a desire for compromise. The balance struck between the two poles of philosophical commitment and political status and engagement may be different in individual cases, and reflect the varying personal circumstances of the thinkers concerned. But all of them wish to stress the special status and claims of philosophia as a life-guiding allegiance without dismissing all forms of political activity out of hand, and to allow some legitimacy to politics without threatening the transcendent authority of philosophia. Seneca. Among the Stoics, much the most interesting and nuanced case is that of Seneca, who argues for a range of not wholly compatible positions according to his topic and addressee of the moment, and his own personal circumstances at the time of writing.37 In On the Shortness of Life, he suggests that all other kinds of life, including the political, are to be rejected in favour of the pursuit of sapientia, which is in the highest sense the appropriate pursuit (officium, kathêkon) for a human being, and the only proper use of the short human life-span. And yet, in deference to his distinguished addressee, Paulinus, he accepts by implication that good can be done, and virtue exercised, in the holding of high office too.38 In On Peace of Mind, again addressed to a distinguished politician, he is more explicitly welcoming to political activity, which he acknowledges as a legitimate means of satisfying natural feelings of benevolence towards fellow human beings,39 and an appropriate course for individuals of a particular character (a particular persona) to 34

E.g. Maximus Orr. 32.9, 36.5–6; Arrian Disc. of Epict. 3.22.47, 3.22.67–9. Tacitus Hist. 4.40.3. 36 Moles 1983b. 37 Griffin 1976, 315–66, on which I draw heavily in what follows. 38 Shortness of Life 18. 39 Peace of Mind 1.10–12, 3.1. 35

Philosophia in Politics and the Community

221

follow;40 what matters is the (tranquil) state of mind in which any activity is pursued, not the specific nature of the activity itself. And yet, just as the demands of a specific persona can urge one individual into politics, so they can also make it right (appropriate) for another to foreswear such a career from the very outset.41 In On Leisure, in which he confronts the question of politics and Stoic orthodoxy most directly and explicitly, the balance is once again slightly different. Writing to defend inaction (otium) as fully compatible with Stoic principle, Seneca concedes that classic Stoicism urges active participation as the norm (in contrast to Epicureanism, which sees it as the exception); but he insists that this also means that Stoicism, just as much as Epicureanism, legitimates inaction in the appropriate circumstances.42 The over-riding duty for the Stoic is to benefit his fellow men and to serve the general interest. If circumstances permit, this may be done by political action; but it may also be done by the cultivation of virtue and the study of nature in private retirement – that is to say, by a life of contemplation rather than action.43 What might make the latter the more appropriate choice is the corruption of contemporary political life, creating an environment in which the wise and virtuous man cannot operate. As the (now incomplete) text of the treatise gives out, Seneca is flirting with the suggestion that, in fact, all actual states are and have been so corrupt that political life is never safe for the Sage, and that withdrawal into a life of philosophical contemplation is and always has been the only legitimate course. This in turn would make problems for the basic Stoic injunction to participate; but the fact that the text breaks off prevents us from seeing how Seneca himself – as opposed to imagined critics of Stoicism – wished to bring this line of thought to a conclusion. Seneca’s dominant emphasis, therefore, falls on the desirability of withdrawal from political life,44 and on the conformity of such a choice to good Stoic principle. Yet he stops a good way short of condemning the pursuit of the alternative course by others. And in one treatise at least, the On Clemency (already discussed above), he speaks himself as still an engaged politician, advising the Emperor on the cultivation of a specifically regal virtue. The combination, with its tensions and inconsistencies, directly mirrors Seneca’s own position as a former holder of high office and active participant in Imperial politics, still bound by ties of friendship to many members of the governing elite, but towards the end of his life seeking an honourable – and safe – retirement. In pursuit of this end, he makes full use of the freedom of manoeuvre that Stoic (and to some extent also Platonic and Peripatetic) theory made available to him. Appeal to an idea of the contemplative life, as one in which the individual can benefit humanity at large through education and the longterm effects of written works,45 allows him to argue that it is fully as natural and as

40

Peace of Mind 2.9. Peace of Mind 6–7.2. 42 Leisure 3.1–3. 43 Leisure 3.5, 4–6. 44 See also (e.g.) Epp. 19, 22, 55, 68. 45 Leisure 6.4–5. 41

222

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

appropriate to (benevolent) human nature as a life of practical engagement.46 Appeal to the external conditions of political life, and to the doctrine of personae, permits him to endorse either choice, for different individuals in different contexts. Other Stoics. Of the remaining Stoics, Dio Chrysostom speaks as one who himself holds no formal position – indeed, he flirts with the persona of a Socrates or a Diogenes, professionally dedicated to the avoidance of formal politics – but is nevertheless entitled to address crucial philosophical advice to both individual political leaders (up to and including the Emperor himself) and whole communities (whether his own home town of Prusa, where his family was heavily involved in civic politics, or other cities he came to as a distinguished visitor from abroad).47 Epictetus, though himself still more firmly disengaged from formal political processes than Dio, is nevertheless seen in Arrian’s presentation of his discourses advising present and prospective office-holders in both central Roman and local politics, without suggesting that his addressees are engaged in a fundamentally misguided pursuit. What matters is the way they play the roles Providence has assigned to them, not the degree of political commitment.48 He does indeed argue in Discourses 1.10 that the life of philosophy is as much an active (practical) life as that of politics, but not in such a way as to suggest that the latter is wholly valueless by comparison. Musonius Rufus is to be found in one of the surviving fragments of Lucius’ account of his teaching addressing a (minor, client) king, whom he exhorts to the study of philosophia as uniquely well suited to one of his rank.49 Marcus Aurelius reflects and exhorts himself from the highest political position of all, without betraying any sense that being a good Stoic and being a good Emperor are in any way incompatible ambitions. When he tells himself ‘not to become Caesarified, nor to take on the coloration’,50 he means that he should not allow the influence of bad Imperial role models to loosen his grip on sound principle, not that there is anything wrong in itself with occupying such a position. Alcinous and Maximus. Among Platonists, there is a more marked general tendency to insist on the inferiority of the life of practical political action as 46

Leisure 5.1. Seneca is also concerned to defend the founders of Stoicism against accusations of inconsistency, in advocating political engagement by others while avoiding it themselves: Peace of Mind 1.10, responding to criticism like that of Plutarch, Stoic Selfcontrad. 1033e–1034a. 47 See Dio’s Kingship Orations (Orr. 1–4), addressed to Trajan (cf. Moles 1990, and above, 184–6), contrasting with (e.g.) Orr. 36 and 42 (to his home town), 31 (to the Rhodians), 32 (to the Alexandrians), and 33–4 (to the Tarsians). 48 E.g. Disc. 2.23.38–44. For Epictetus’ audience and its status, see Brunt 1977: examples are 1.11.1 (a magistrate), 1.10.1–6 (a praefectus annonae); 3.4.1 (the Procurator of Ephesus); 3.5.1–4 (an individual looking forward to a public career); Epictetus also regularly refers to ambitions on the part of his addressees to attain social position and formal office in the future: 1.19.24, 1.24.12, 1.25.26, 4.1.39–40, 4.3.9, 4.4.2. 49 Musonius fr. 8 Hense; but see 184 above for the version of philosophia that Musonius has in mind. 50 Medit. 6.30.1.

Philosophia in Politics and the Community

223

compared to the (more truly philosophic) life of contemplation, but here too participation is not dismissed absolutely; it may be only a regrettable necessity in some circumstances, but virtue can be found in it provided its ultimately subordinate status is properly acknowledged. Alcinous in the Didaskalikos makes the point in terms that (as so often with the Platonism of the period) blend the doctrines of Republic with the analytical language of Stoicism. He envisages a neat hierarchy, with pure contemplation at the top, practical day-to-day political business at the bottom, and the activities of law-giving, framing constitutions and education – reflective politics, as it were, or applied contemplation – in the middle. For the good man will enter into public life whenever he sees it being conducted badly by some, considering as necessitated by circumstances serving as a general, a juror, or an ambassador, while reckoning best and primary in the sphere of action such activities as law-giving, or the establishment of constitutions, and the education of the young. It is proper, then, on the basis of what we have said, for the philosophos by no means to abandon contemplation, but always to foster and develop it, taking the practical life only as something secondary.51

Maximus of Tyre, in a characteristic manoeuvre, displays the issue in a pair of contrasting speeches (Orr. 15–16). The first argues with assumed vehemence for the superior worth of the practical life, suggesting that the withdrawn contemplative is both a useless drone, and pointlessly endangers both himself and others by his refusal to pull his weight in the management of public affairs. The second, antithetical speech, built round an imaginary prosecution of the philosopher Anaxagoras on charges of non-contribution, concedes that practical political engagement may be appropriate as a temporary occupation for the young and vigorous, and produce some useful results, but ends by asserting decisively that, in the scale of ultimate value, the contemplative life is infinitely the more valuable, quite apart from the real contribution that it too can make to the wellbeing of a civic community.52 Plutarch. However, the Platonist camp also presents us with at least one instance of a much more positive attitude towards practical political commitment. Plutarch, who himself participated loyally in the public life of his home town of Chaeronea, and of near-by Delphi,53 uses the Political Precepts and the Old Men in Public Life to argue that, far from being an inferior distraction from the highest aims of philosophia and the leading of a good life, a career of political action, continued deep into old age, in fact fulfils them in a particularly complete and effective manner.54 The concept of political engagement, and of the duties that go 51

Alcin. Didask. 2.3; cf. Plato Rep. 347cd and 520a–521b; the Stoic borrowing is the use of the term peristatikos, ‘conditioned by circumstances’. 52 Max. Or. 16.6 and 16.3; cf. Trapp 1997a, 132–49. 53 Jones 1971, 13–38. 54 Cf. Trapp 2004, in which the similar analysis of Centrone 2000 should have been acknowledged; and see 194 and 202–3 above.

224

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

with the role of a leading citizen, that Plutarch here works with, certainly extends more widely than the holding of formal office: just as Socrates showed that philosophia should be practised in every situation and encounter of everyday life, not just in the classroom, so – Plutarch affirms – political engagement means being constantly on the look-out for informal as well as formal means to promote the harmony of one’s community and improve the moral character of one’s fellow citizens.55 But office-holding and formal political action are clearly envisaged too as part of the whole package that Plutarch presents as a uniquely satisfying choice for anyone dedicated to the highest human goals.56 But this is not all. In another treatise again, on the proposition that Philosophers Should Converse Especially with Leaders, Plutarch is to be found arguing for the appropriateness of a further form of political intervention as well, that of the philosophos seeking to mould the character and policy of prince or emperor, in the manner of Seneca’s On Clemency or Dio’s Kingship Orations.57 Philo. Philo Judaeus, finally, drawing on both Stoic and Platonic tradition, but writing from a position that involves straightforward endorsement of neither in itself, also develops a version of the compromise position. Best of all for him (to a degree not found, for instance, in Plutarch, though more comparable to Alcinous and Maximus) is undoubtedly the contemplative life, which he praises at length in his account of the Therapeutae,58 and explicitly declares to be superior to the life of political engagement in his On Flight and Finding: ... enter now ... on your migration to a different and more excellent way of life. For it is good to have fought through the practical life before the contemplative, as a kind of preliminary to a more advanced (perfect) contest.59

Yet, as this same passage makes clear, Philo’s aim is to subordinate the practical (political) life to the contemplative rather than to drain it of all value. Immediately before the words quoted, he has been vitriolic about those who shun the public arena entirely, in favour of an ostentatious and pretentious asceticism.60 But Philo, like Alcinous, also distinguishes different grades of political activity, to which different importance should be attached. Everyday, administrative politics is the preserve of the politikos, represented allegorically in the Bible by the figure of Joseph, who graduates from the management of a household to that of a whole

55

Plutarch Old Men 796c–97a. Plutarch’s line of thought parallels the Stoic suggestion that political action appropriately satisfies the natural human urge to sociability and benefaction, but he does not resort overtly to Stoic terminology or concepts, and seems not to feel that he is diverging at all from sound Platonist territory. 57 Plutarch Mor. 776b–779c; note esp. 776c–777b for a rejection of philosophical withdrawal. 58 Philo On the Contemplative Life. 59 Philo Flight and Finding 36. 60 Philo Flight and Finding 35, generally taken as a reference to Cynics. 56

Philosophia in Politics and the Community

225

kingdom.61 Such a politikos may embody real virtues (of self-control, and of superior insight into real value),62 but he is ultimately limited by the necessity to adapt himself to the varied circumstances and confrontations of political life (a trait symbolized by Joseph’s coat of many colours),63 rather than being able to maintain a position of virtuous immutability. Above him in worth stand the king and the law-giver, whose proper style of activity keeps them above the compromises of day-to-day politics. Ideally, these two functions (along with those of prophet and priest) are combined in a single individual, for whom Philo’s ideal type is Moses.64 Philo’s thinking thus parallels both the distinction made by Alcinous between higher and lower grades of political activity, and the suggestion by Maximus that the active political life should be regarded as a preparation and prelude to the contemplative. But in both cases, he gives his own distinctive flavour and emphases to the ideas.65 Conclusion All the main traditions of thought, therefore, were capable of being turned either so as to emphasize the superiority of the life of the mind and detachment from the rumpus of practical politics, or so as to insist that good philosophical ends could be realized by active participation as well, whether at a relatively low or a relatively high point in the political hierarchy. Cynics came closest to outright rejection, flaunting their virtuous separation from conventional political forms even as they lived and taught in the midst of the physical venues for political action; but even they were occasionally to be found temporarily adopting political roles and functions for particular tactical ends. The overall situation seems once again to show up the uncertain and ambiguous status of philosophia with respect to everyday values and institutions, caught between the urge to constitute itself as a set of radical alternatives and the desire to claim a central position in the established system. Philosophoi could neither concede the validity of the elite’s belief in political action as the locus of the highest worth and the truest forms of success, nor entirely shake free of it. The question of the friction and tension that may have been created by this ambivalent attitude, and of how it related to the predicament of philosophia more generally will be the subject of the final chapter of this study.

61

Philo Joseph, or On the Political Life. Philo Jos. 11.54ff. and 22.125ff. 63 Philo Jos. 7.32–6. 64 Philo Moses 2.1.1–8. 65 On Philo’s political thinking, see further Goodenough 1938, Dillon 1977, 153–5, Centrone 2000, 561–7. 62

Chapter 9

Philosophia and the Mainstream The question of the location and integration of philosophia in the culture of the Imperial period more generally was raised in Chapter 1, but discussion there was confined to the claims of philosophoi to educational status, and a sketch of the evidence for their positive reception. As has been suggested more or less obtrusively in most of the intervening chapters – in connection with anything from individual moral progress to the rights and wrongs of political participation – there is rather more to be said in this regard. It is therefore to this territory that we return for a concluding chapter. The thesis I wish to argue is that the relationship between philosophia and mainstream culture and values in this period was in fact an interestingly uneasy one, on both sides. The nature and grounds of the unease – as they will be identified here – have not been much discussed in recent scholarship, but their investigation has valuable things to tell us both about philosophia and about contemporary high culture.1 Politics ‘Philosophical opposition’ to the Principate? This is not to say that there have been no attempts at all to identify and analyse points of friction between philosophia and the surrounding world. A notable exception is the attention that has been given to the possibility of a particular kind of political tension. It has frequently been suggested that philosophical teaching and values were a significant factor in motivating criticism of and active opposition to the established order of the times – to the Emperor and to the imperial system, as foreshadowed by Julius Caesar, initiated by Augustus, and consolidated by his Julio-Claudian and Flavian successors. That philosophi as a class were from time to time seen by Emperors as a nuisance or a threat requiring punitive or precautionary action is simple fact. Formal edicts expelling them from the capital and Italy were passed under

1 Hahn 1989 is a wide-ranging treatment of the position of the philosophos in Imperialperiod society, but needs to be supplemented and qualified in the light of more recent work, on both philosophia and ancient society. I have been particularly helped by Schmitz 1997, Zanker 1995, Brown 1992, Lendon 1997, and Korenjak 2000.

Philosophia and the Mainstream

227

Vespasian in 71, and Domitian in 93.2 In addition, there are several well-known cases of orders of banishment passed against named individuals over the same period: Musonius Rufus and Cornutus under Nero, Dio Chrysostom under Domitian.3 The interesting question, however, and the difficult one, is what role strictly philosophical considerations played in either the individual or the generic expulsions. Individuals are always at risk of being banished not because of their own qualities, but because of an association with some other figure, disliked for more purely political reasons – this certainly seems to have been the case with Dio. In the case of the generic actions, the identity of the victims as philosophoi must undeniably play some role, but it remains to be investigated whether the punitive measures were based on only a general perception of them as awkward, nonaligned and potential encouragers of disorder, or on something more specific; and, equally, it remains to be asked whether or not this perception from the vantage point of the Imperial throne was matched by a critical attitude on the part of philosophoi and their pupils that really was founded on philosophical principle. Discussion of these issues has focussed on several cases, where a number of scholars over the past half century or so – usually ancient historians – have felt there is a particularly promising possibility of establishing a real, causal connection between political opposition and philosophical principle. Arnaldo Momigliano’s suggestion, made in 1941, that Epicurean principle was actively important in motivating Cassius’ participation in the assassination of Julius Caesar, and in rallying support for the tyrannicides, may not have found general favour.4 But the idea of a principled Stoic opposition, active from the 40s BCE to the 90s CE, has proved much more popular. The first manifestation would come with M. Porcius Cato the Younger and M. Junius Brutus. Cato was famous already in his lifetime for the ostentatious rigor of his adherence to severe Stoic principle.5 His suicide at Utica in 46, to avoid the humiliation of capture by an increasingly dominant Julius Caesar, was commemorated by contemporary and subsequent admirers as a thoroughly philosophic act: an assertion of the true (Stoic) freedom of the good man in the face of intolerable circumstances, incompatible with his persona (the prospect of having to accept clemency from a foe opposed on philosophical principle), determined after consultation and debate with both professional philosophical advisers and lay friends, and after intensive reading of the classic text on philosophic (self-) martyrdom, Plato’s Phaedo.6 It was also a thoroughly political act. Cato died because he saw the failure of his personal opposition, and of 2 Vespasian: Suetonius Vespas. 13, Dio Cassius 66.12–13; Domitian: Aulus Gellius Attic Nights 15.11.3. 3 Musonius: Tac. Ann. 15.71; Cornutus: Dio Cassius 62.29; Dio: Or. 13.1–2, cf. Jones 1978a, 45–6. 4 Momigliano 1941/1960, discussed by Griffin 1989, 29–32. 5 Cicero For Murena 29–31, Plutarch Younger Cato 4, 10, 21.5. 6 Cf. the account in Plutarch Younger Cato 65–70, itself based on a line of Latin biographies and commemorations going back to the immediate aftermath of Cato’s suicide; see Geiger 1979, and above, 120.

228

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

opposition more generally, to the destruction of the Republic by Caesar, and the latter’s move towards the assumption of royal, or tyrannical, power. Brutus, for his part, was a pupil of Antiochus of Ascalon, thus officially an Academic (Platonist), but subscribing to that version of Platonism that assimilated it as far as possible to both Peripateticism and Stoicism. His participation in the eventual assassination of Caesar in 44, like Cato’s suicide, was remembered for ever after as a marriage of philosophical principle with political engagement, provoked by principled abhorrence for the monarchic rule apparently being consolidated by the Dictator. In Plutarch’s words, in his Life of Brutus, he undertook the assassination not as a hater of Caesar (misokaisar) but as a hater of tyranny (misotyrannos).7 Cato’s example in its turn became the inspiration, over the first century of the Principate, for other members of the Senatorial elite at Rome, who saw their defiance of the Emperor of the day as comparable to his of Caesar.8 Like him, they were known as Stoics, and like him they too were commemorated in writing by enthusiastic contemporaries as martyrs to their principles. Most prominent among them were two under Nero: P. Clodius Thrasea Paetus, who wrote one of the later laudatory biographies of Cato, was forced to commit suicide for his opposition, and himself was commemorated in a biography by Q. Junius Arulenus Rusticus; and his son-in-law and political ally C. Helvidius Priscus, who was banished both by Nero and by Vespasian, eventually executed by the latter, and had his life written by Herennius Senecio.9 Both of the eulogists, Arulenus Rusticus and Herennius Senecio, were in their turn put to death by the Emperor Domitian, the supposed proof of their guilt and subversive tendency being precisely their praise for the earlier ‘philosophic martyrs’.10 There is thus at the very least a good prima facie case for envisaging a strong, self-conscious tradition of resistance to Emperors as tyrants, founded on (Stoic) philosophical principle, on the part of politically active non-professionals. Moreover, it is very tempting to associate this with the frequency and prominence with which first- and second-century Stoic writing of a more purely professional kind dwells on the ability of philosophia to fortify the individual against persecution by a tyrannical ruler. In particular, when Arrian’s Epictetus explains how right philosophical convictions can allow one to resist threats of restraint, imprisonment and execution aimed at getting you to ‘reveal your secrets’, or delivers a whole discourse on ‘How to behave towards Tyrants’, it is very easy to understand him as giving positive encouragement to just the kind of principled political opposition that is being looked for.11 7

Plutarch Brutus 8.3. MacMullen 1966, 70–94; Rutherford 1989, 59–64. 9 Tacitus Histories 4.5–8, 4.43. 10 Rusticus: Suetonius Domitian 10.3, Tacitus Agricola 2.1, cf. Pliny Letters 1.5.2. Senecio: Tacitus Agricola 2.1, Pliny Letters 3.11.3. 11 Arrian Disc. of Epict. 1.1.21–5 (where mention shortly before of the Pisonian conspirator Plautius Lateranus makes a connection with real politics all the more tempting); 1.19; cf. 1.29.1–15, 4.1.132–4, 4.5.34. In Seneca, note especially his repeated and insistent references to the defiance and suicide of Cato in the Epistles (e.g. 104.29–33). 8

Philosophia and the Mainstream

229

The most enthusiastic statement of the case for seeing positive philosophical motivation and intent in all this is Ramsay MacMullen’s, in his wide-ranging study of Enemies of the Roman Order, but his discussion is built on a fuzzy and now severely outdated idea of the nature of philosophia in the period, and is in the end more interesting for its analysis of the conventions and family traits of martyr- and protest-literature.12 A more careful, but still positive, presentation of the case was made by Peter Brunt, seeking to answer the scepticism of older heavyweights such as Wirszubski and Syme, for whom the suggestion of philosophical, as opposed to realpolitisch, motivation was at best a side-issue.13 More recent contributions have sought balance in a broader view, whether chronological or methodological. Richard Rutherford, while conceding a limited period in which philosophical motives did indeed contribute to political unrest,14 makes the important point that this limited period was none the less embedded in a wider and longer-running pattern not of opposition, but of the integration of philosophia, along with Greek learning more generally, into Roman elite culture.15 Miriam Griffin, somewhat more sceptically, has urged the question of motivation is trickier and more opaque than is often acknowledged. Rather than definite signs that a Cato or a Thrasea Paetus would not have acted as they did without philosophical input, and that philosophy therefore constituted a definitely oppositional force, she favours a milder, but still significant proposition: that they would not have understood their situation and options for action as they did without philosophical input, and that philosophy thus – like Christianity later – provided ‘the moral vocabulary for weighing alternatives and justifying decisions’.16 This compromise position – that philosophia provided a detached, independent vantage point on real-life choices and decisions, and could thus furnish some of the preconditions for active opposition without being in itself necessarily and essentially oppositional – seems right. On any view, the tradition of ‘philosophical opposition’ was limited to the inner circles of the Roman elite; it shows at most how aspects of philosophia could be used by a particular group in particular circumstances, not how those aspects had to be used anywhere and at any time. Secondly, the tradition is almost exclusively confined to Stoics, the one Academic involved, Brutus, also having in effect strong Stoic sympathies; it is not general across all the sects. If Momigliano’s arguments are set aside, on the grounds urged by Griffin, we hear nothing of rebellious Peripatetics, Sceptics or Epicureans. Thirdly, it does not seem, on calm consideration, that it was philosophical principle on its own that motivated the stances taken by the principal actors, or even constituted the leading factor. Cato, Brutus, Paetus, Rusticus and the rest were members of the governing elite before they were adherents to Stoic or any other philosophical principle, and 12

MacMullen 1966, 46–94; cf. the quotation in Ch. 1, n. 54 above. Brunt 1975; Wirszubski 1950, 136–71; Syme 1958, ch. 41. 14 The point about chronological limitation is also made by MacMullen 1966, 67. 15 Rutherford 1989, 59–80; the point of the exercise is to show that being both a Stoic and Emperor did not put Marcus Aurelius in such a paradoxical position as all that. 16 Griffin 1989; quotation from p. 36. 13

230

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

it was at least as much as members of that elite that they opposed Caesar and the Emperors. What irked above all was the deadly combination of a monarchic system, curtailing the rest of the elite’s traditional access to power and status, with a series of individual incumbents who pushed at the boundaries of the new arrangement; it was not the infringement of any strictly political principle of good government. Philosophical theory certainly provided these individuals with a powerful additional means of articulating their stance of defiance, and a further reassurance of the validity of their discontent; but it did not take the lead, and it is highly unlikely to have been adequate on its own to generate the behaviour in question. Similarly, the sensitivity to philosophical opposition shown from their side of the fence by the Emperors need not be taken as the reflection of a constant and settled view of the political orientation of philosophia and philosoph(o)i, but rather a series of intermittent, opportunistic reactions to moments of crisis. Emperors did not maintain a posture of constant wariness towards philosoph(o)i, or pursue any systematic policy of containment or persecution; they reacted at moments of particular difficulty for their position, when special justification was needed for unusually severe measures, of a kind particularly likely to antagonize the political class as a whole. Nero’s expulsions followed the detection of the Pisonian conspiracy; Vespasian’s came at a time of anxiety over the Imperial succession; Domitian’s too happened at a point when he too felt more than usually insecure in his position. In addition, it has to be remembered that the target of Stoicizing philosophical opposition was bad emperors, not emperors or the imperial system more generally. As members of the now partly dispossessed elite, the opponents may indeed have had a distaste for the system in itself, but as good Stoics their theoretical concern had to be with the character of the individual emperor, not his status as a sole ruler. Stoicism, as we have seen, not only had no problem with monarchy, but indeed regarded it as the most cosmically proper system of them all. Its fire had to be directed against the perceived tyrant, the man who perverted virtuous monarchic form into its malign counterpart. As Seneca can be found insisting in his Epistle 73, there is certainly no general antipathy on the part of Stoicism to properly constituted authority; on the contrary, Stoicism enjoins happy gratitude to those who take on the burden of the maintenance of the state: It seems to me to be an error to believe that those who have dedicated themselves loyally to philosophia are defiant and refractory, and scorn magistrates or kings and those responsible for the discharge of public business. On the contrary, none are more grateful to them, and deservedly so; their greatest service is to those who are thus enabled to enjoy their leisure in peace. Thus those who find that their aim of living well gains greatly from general security must necessarily honour the provider of this good like a parent ... 17

17

Seneca Ep. 73.1–2.

Philosophia and the Mainstream

231

A non-aligned view of contemporary politics? And yet it is also clear that a principled conformism – which in any case was more immediately available to some haireseis than to others – is not the same thing as an identity of outlook, even when attention is confined to specifically political reflection. For all that philosophical theorizing under the Empire seemed in some ways to chime with general sentiment, in others it can be observed striking out in more idiosyncratic directions. But these do not coincide particularly closely with older ideas of a ‘philosophical opposition’. We have seen that philosophical reflection privileged monarchy as the most discussed and most widely endorsed constitutional form, and at the same time insisted on the need for conformity to universal law. This may indeed match the actual circumstances of an Empire with both a single supreme head, and an ever more rigorously codified – and self-consciously universalist – structure of laws. Similarly, the favour that we have seen was shown in philosophical discussion to oligarchic rule (and the accompanying redefinition of ‘democracy’) matches the situation in the cities of the Empire, with their division into a politically active elite and an almost entirely passive dêmos. It could also fairly be claimed that theoretical discussion decently reflects the range of available political roles. Some texts may confine their attention to holders of the highest positions, but Seneca, Plutarch, and Epictetus, in their different ways, speak to holders of many lesser imperial and civic posts; and Plutarch in particular develops a model of active citizenship intended for civic politics. But at the same time, there are also some basic and pervasive features of the overall philosophical approach to political topics that do not square so neatly with contemporary conditions and attitudes. Care must certainly be taken in identifying which features exactly qualify for this category. At first sight, the way the polis is retained as an essential unit of political analysis, in spite of the development of larger enclosing structures in the Hellenistic and Imperial periods, might seem to be a prime case. Not only do the standard terms for ‘constitution’ and for political activity on any level (politeia, politeuesthai) continue to imply the centrality of the city (however gently); even texts on kingship can talk about the monarch’s domain as a city rather than a country or an empire.18 In fact, there may not be a real divergence here. Since the polis had always been understood to include a surrounding territory as well as its central city, it could easily enough be taken by extension to stand for entities in which the ratio of surrounding space to administrative centre was very different, up to and including a kingdom or an empire. Nevertheless, the relative absence of explicit terms for these larger structures, and of direct acknowledgement of their centrality to modern politics creates something of a gap between theory and reality, and might be argued to have made the development of new theoretical models and modes of analysis more difficult. However that may be, the sense of detachment and distance is definitely made more acute by another factor: the fact that, when a larger unit, enclosing the polis 18

E.g. ‘Diotogenes’ On Kingship 71.17–72.23 Thesleff (Stob. Flor. 4.7.61, 4.265.6–12 W).

232

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

and giving it a controlling context, was brought into play in philosophical politics, that larger unit was characteristically the cosmos, not any human administrative entity. This tendency to move directly from polis to cosmos does not only increase the ease with which province, kingdom and empire as units of political analysis can be elided and concealed. At the same time, more fundamentally, it also tends to diminish the importance of politics overall as an autonomous field for the discussion of substantial issues. If the real questions of order, authority, and the dynamics of human society are to be sorted out at the level of the cosmos, and the answers arrived at fed down from there to the domain of terrestrial politics, then politics ceases to be a centre of live interest in its own right. Indeed, when considered in this kind of way, the political theorizing of the time turns out to be under pressure not just from one direction, but from two. Questions of order and structure must be referred upward, to the level of the cosmos. But, equally, questions of political conduct – the behaviour of human beings within political systems – must, as we have seen in the case of the ruler, be referred downwards, to the level of individual morality and moral character. In this way, too, the autonomy of politics as an area for debate, with its own problems, procedures and modes of analysis, comes under threat of elision. This is, admittedly, not a new development of the period. The pattern had been set way back in the fourth century BCE, by the Plato of Gorgias and Republic, in both of which politics had been deliberately collapsed into individual morality on the one hand, and cosmology and metaphysics on the other; and the tendency had been reinforced by the early Stoics, with their stress on the cosmic rather than the common or garden ‘city’ as the proper context for the structuring of human social relations. But its persistence through a period in which a durable world empire (not just a transient one in the style of Alexander’s) had become established, and the problems of making such a structure work had become the subject of other kinds of theoretical reflection (above all, legal) is noteworthy all the same. Missing out on the possibility of expanding inherited theory in new directions is not, however, the same thing as being completely out of touch. It seems as reasonable to say that this feature of Imperial-period thinking shows us how philosophia sought to maintain some detachment from the conventional values and terms of reference that informed normal, real-world politics, giving itself a distinctive voice by assessing political life and projects by reference to personal standards on the one hand, and the grand cosmic frame on the other. It is true that normal political discourse could also on occasion make both kinds of reference for itself – to the (claimed) personal virtues of the administrator or ruler, and to the conformity of this or that aspect of rule with principles at work in the grand structure of the world;19 the difference was that philosophia did so more consistently, with a more plausible claim to expert knowledge of both areas appealed to, and characteristically in a critical or admonitory rather than a celebratory tone.

19 E.g. Pliny Panegyricus 1.3 (moral character, likeness to the gods); 1.5 (chosen by Jupiter); 19 (comparison with the sun); 88 (title ‘Optimus’ shared with Jupiter).

Philosophia and the Mainstream

233

To this extent, then, philosophia in its political dimension could be said to have constituted a non-aligned voice, at least in ambition holding politics and politicians to account by reference to higher standards. But it should be repeated that it is not in general – some Cynics perhaps excepted – a hostile or categorically adversarial voice. Philosophoi by and large do not call for revolution, for the wholesale rejection of contemporary political forms, or the invention of radically new ones; what they urge, rather, is the adjustment of existing and familiar forms so as to satisfy unfamiliar – and difficult – standards, and their relativization to yet higher schemes of value. A more general lack of alignment? So far this chapter has concentrated on political theorizing, and the possibility of conflict, friction or misadjustment between philosophia and mainstream attitudes in political life. But the idea that philosophia should be seen as offering a detached vantage point is of course much more widely applicable; so too is the suggestion that this detachment could be expected to have led to various sorts of trouble. We should accordingly now look beyond politics, to the larger picture of contemporary practice and attitudes, within which philosophical thinking and behaviour were embedded, and potentially at variance. As we have already seen – perhaps most clearly in Chapters 1, 2 and 7 – it was central to the ideology of philosophia, and to the call it issued to the wider world, that it sought to make a difference to its adepts on every level and in every context. To embrace philosophia – at least as philosophoi presented it – was to turn to a set of values distinct from those of habit, tradition and the everyday world; those embarked on the philosophic quest were different from the mass of ordinary humanity around them, and had to be on constant guard against being seduced anew by its mistaken view of things. 20 In other words, philosophia sought to inculcate a principled mistrust of the ordinary. But simply to acknowledge the consequent likelihood of tension is no great interpretative step; the real challenge and the real interest lies in identifying the areas in which the wished-for divergence in basic orientation might be expected to have produced the most striking – and thus also, potentially, the most worrying – points of specific conflict, friction, or oddity. Life-paths, aims and concepts of success A sensible starting-point would be to look again at the ideas of aims and progress considered in Chapter 2, both in their primary application to the individual moral quest, and in their political application. After that, attitudes to the emotions – the matter of Chapter 3 – can be considered; and finally, ideas about social solidarity

20

See Chs 2–3 passim, esp. 31–2, 42–8, 54–6, 59–62, but also, in Ch. 7, 193–9.

234

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

and inter-personal relations, as surveyed in Chapter 4. The argument will be that in all cases we can see both an element of contact with contemporary elite notions of proper life-paths and worthwhile achievement, and sufficient divergences to make thoughts of unease and tension between outlooks entirely realistic. To begin, then, with conceptions of aims and progress. The invitation to see the central narrative of one’s life as the tracing of an upward path, through successively more advanced stages, towards summits of achievement, is an obvious initial element of contact between philosophia and the prevailing elite norm. Not only did standard elite expectations operate with some clearly marked and widely diffused ideas of what counted as a normatively good life path (subservient childhood, boisterous and assertive late adolescence, calming down into the start of a formal career and marriage in the mid-twenties, and so on);21 still more markedly, for members of the elite belonging to the senatorial and equestrian orders, public careers followed definite sequences of stages (the cursus [pl.] honorum), each with its higher and lower points of achievement and its ultimate pinnacle reached only by the very favoured few.22 And outside the formal structure of the senatorial and equestrian cursus, the arena of local city politics, too, allowed good scope for a sense of progression, from fewer and lower to higher and more numerous achievements, responsibilities and honours.23 The habit of rehearsing these patterns of progress was, moreover, ingrained and institutionalized. The ambitious young might look forward to their future careers in free imagination alone;24 their seniors had them catalogued, for their own and others’ edification, in honorific proclamations and inscriptions in stone and metal, spelling out their rising curve of achievement both from mid-course, and retrospectively, in the definitive version of the funeral monument.25 Also in common, to some degree, was the notion that processes of preparation for such a career could demand close and critical attention to oneself, and a demanding effort of self-fashioning. Recent studies of the standard rhetorical curriculum of late Republican and Imperial times, and of the normative texts in which it is discussed (by Cicero, the author of the Ad Herennium, Seneca Rhetor and Quintilian) have given prominence to the close (but often also edgy) attention that is paid in them to issues of deportment, gesture and voice production.26 The trainee speaker (i.e. the trainee for a public career of any but a purely military kind) must learn how to stand and move in appropriate fashion, and must be ready to monitor and modify his own initial personal style as far as this requires; and he must, by the performance of prescribed and graded exercises, develop the right strength, tonal range and flexibility of voice for effective delivery. In so doing, he absorbs not only technical capacities, but also a normative sense of seemliness and

21

Harlow and Laurence 2002, chs 3, 5, 8. Harlow and Laurence 2002, ch. 8; Alföldy 1985/88, 120–2, 125–6. 23 Alföldy 1985/88, 126–31; Jones 1940, 170–91. 24 As described, for instance, in Lucian’s Dream (though without formal career stages). 25 Some examples in Lewis and Reinhold 1955, 122–8; König 2005, 1–6, 124–6 (an athlete). 26 Esp. Gleason 1995. 22

Philosophia and the Mainstream

235

(so it has been argued) masculinity.27 The normative drive seems more marked in the Roman texts just mentioned than in our surviving Greek sources, some of which (for example, Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists) are celebratory rather than didactic in flavour. Greek pupils may have acquired technique, and a sense of the range of expressive possibilities inherent in deportment, gesture and delivery, without quite the same emphasis on distinctions between approved and disapproved forms.28 But in either case, the important point is that the average consumer of the standard elite educational curriculum will in these respects have been expected to work consciously and hard at making himself appear a certain kind of person, in order to open the way to career success.29 Thirdly, it may be observed that there is at least some modest convergence between philosophical ideas of a good state of the person and those of elite society more generally. Both philosophia and elite society prized forms of dignity and restraint, from avoidance of either over-vigorous or over-delicate (‘feminine’) physical movement,30 to resistance to excessive displays of anger, grief, fear, or physical desire. Romans, with the concept of gravitas deeply entrenched in their language and political culture, and multiply exemplified in their national mythology, might be disposed to contrast themselves, in this respect as in so many others, with the flightier, more histrionic and demonstrative Greeks.31 But Roman gravitas is matched semantically to some degree by Greek semnotês and kosmiotês; and that the Greeks had their standards too in this area is indicated, for instance, by records of the general reaction to what was seen as the immoderately ostentatious grief of Herodes Atticus over his wife, children and favourites,32 or by Dio Chrysostom’s addresses on decorum to the people of Alexandria and Tarsus.33 Yet none of these rapprochements need be taken – or would have been taken by the philosophoi of the period – as significantly closing the gap between standard elite values and practices and those endorsed by philosophia. A huge difference can still be felt between normal educational (rhetorical) self-formation and that required and legislated for in philosophical texts, both as regards the aspects of the person that were put under examination, and as regards the continuity and intensity of the processes that were supposed to be applied to them. Rhetorical education directed attention to the external surface of the physical self, what others perceived of one visually and aurally, and to the self as public performance. It treated the process of formation as something circumscribed; a relatively brief period of 27

Gleason 1995, xxvi–xxix, and passim; Gunderson 2000. Gleason 1995, 121–30. 29 This career-relatedness makes educational (rhetorical) self-fashioning and attentiveness to self a closer parallel to philosophical self-fashioning than the kind of attention to self urged in medical texts. Medical texts are relevant too, as part of the background of ideas and practices against which the recipes of philosophia can interestingly be placed, but the relevance is looser and more general. 30 On the latter, Gleason 1995. 31 Cicero For Flaccus 9, 24, 31, 36–8, 57; For Sestius 141; Juvenal Satires 3.60–125; cf. Balsdon 1979, 30–58, esp. 32–3 and 38–40. 32 Lucian Demonax 24–5, Philostratus Lives of the Sophists 1.2.556–7. 33 Dio Orr. 32 and 33 (see above, 195–9). 28

236

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

training, concentrating on a few key aspects of performance, requiring to be refreshed in the course of a career by similarly limited and occasional sustaining exercises. Philosophical self-formation, in obvious contrast, was inward, aiming indeed to have an impact on what is publicly observable, but via what is inner and hidden, directly available only to the individual concerned. And it was comprehensive, both in its requirement that the whole of the morally relevant part of the soul be monitored and trained, and in the expectation that the exercise of monitoring and training would occupy a lifetime. In this training, the cultivation of tendencies that would yield external conformity to the norms of gravitas or semnotês was only one small part of a much larger and more pervasive pattern, understood in terms that went far beyond those norms in depth and analytical bite. Equally clearly, ideas of what was to count as success and happiness varied hugely between philosophia and unphilosophized elite culture. The careers celebrated and held up as models of achievement in honorific and funerary inscriptions, or praised in encomia, were careers in public space. The models of success they so proudly proclaimed centred on the ostentatious acquisition of the very ‘goods’ that philosophia (especially in its Platonist and Stoic inflections) insisted were irrelevant: status, positions of political honour and social authority, wealth that enabled lavish benefaction to a gratefully subservient fellow citizenry, family and heirs to enable the preservation of property and status into a subsequent generation. The attribution of admired traits of character is part of the picture – generosity, philanthropy, courage, clemency – but these were virtues that were inseparable from their public manifestations, made praiseworthy by their tangible effects rather than by what they said about the inner person. Success in this scheme of values had to be manifest and public; ostentation – gloria, doxa – is central to its reality. And – again in stark contrast to the alternative model propounded by philosophia – its pursuit was inextricably comparative and competitive. Honours and positions matter because not everyone, even from the privileged few, can have them, either absolutely or not in the same value or geographical spread; and this too was to be proclaimed and asserted. Nor can anything much closer to philosophical ideals be found if we look to models of success from outside the elite mainstream. In so far as these existed, they tended still to be based on the pattern provide by public life. Career success as an epideictic orator, as articulated by an Aelius Aristides or a Philostratus, as well as on the inscriptional record,34 is similarly (and wholly unsurprisingly) a matter of fame, material recognition, and the achievement of acknowledged superiority over the competition. But success as a poet too, as presented by a Horace or an Ovid though less tightly bound up with material reward, is also understood as fame and status: a recognition not only widespread in the present, but expected to last through time, and admission to the privileged canon of elite authors.35

34 Guarducci 1929; there is no similar study for the Imperial period, but cf. e.g. Bowersock 1982. 35 Horace Odes 1.1.35–6 (quodsi me lyricis vatibus inseres ... ), 3.30; Ovid Metamorphoses 15.871–9.

Philosophia and the Mainstream

237

In short, for all the linking elements, it remained (and remains) easy to argue that there was something utterly distinctive about the way philosophia exhorted the individual to conceptualize his life-course, goals, ambitions and criteria of success. Moreover, given that contemporary elite ideals of fulfilment and success gave such weight to the achievement of public, civic and administrative, distinction and influence, this was not a distinctiveness that could be counted on to show itself only in private life. As we have already seen in an earlier chapter, philosophical principle did not inevitably rule out engagement with a political cursus, indeed could easily be taken as encouraging it. What it did rule out – again, as already observed – was any plea that a responsibly philosophical political life required the application of values and precepts different to those needed for a philosophically responsible private life. Just as the subscriber to philosophia was to formulate his personal aims differently to the mass, and therefore place a different value on everyday objects and targets, so too in political life, he was bound to conceive the objects of political action differently to the ordinary, unphilosophic statesman. The message is present by implication in Seneca’s advice to Lucilius, and in the advice given by Arrian’s Epictetus to sundry members of his audience, whether currently engaged in an active political career or not; but the place where it is propounded at greatest length, and in the way that best draws attention to the potential for conflict with more conventional thinking, is Plutarch’s essays Old Men in Public Life and Political Precepts.36 As noted in Chapter 6, the view Plutarch propounds in these two essays insists that active participation in civic politics, maintained over a lifetime and into ripe old age, is a natural and right course for the responsible individual to set himself to. But more than that – and this was not underlined in the earlier reference – he describes political engagement in ways that make it converge with the aims and prescribed life-quest of philosophia: the life of active politics is a life ‘in accordance with nature’ (kata physin); it is equivalent to pursuit of the good life (to kalôs zên); and the truly successful politician, in realizing his aims, shares the pleasures of the gods themselves.37 The responsible politueomenos, in this view, is also, necessarily, a philosophical politeuomenos. But how will such a one see his duties and aims visà-vis his fellow citizens? It is here that the divergence in values – and the potential extreme oddity of a truly philosophical politician – starts to become apparent. Plutarch’s statesman may indeed aim, just like his normal counterpart, to foster civic concord (homonoia), yet he does so not by material measures, but by the progressively stronger influence of his moral character on theirs over a long period of association.38 This may be good Platonism – compare the Socrates of the Gorgias39 – but it would make for odd practice. More strikingly still, though Plutarch uses the standard political language of benefaction (‘euergetism’ – 36

For a more extended discussion of these two treatises from this point of view, see Trapp 2004; see also above, 194–5, 223–4. 37 Old Men 783c, 786b, 786d, 787f, 791c; Precepts 813c. 38 Precepts 799bc, 800ab; cf. 824c–825d on homonoia. 39 Esp. Grg. 521d.

238

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

philotimia, epimeleia, philanthropia), he combines it with a high-minded insistence that true benefaction does not hang on material resources. Paying for theatrical shows, or gladiatorial contests, or distributions of food, he maintains, is to enter a corrupt relationship, like that between a prostitute and her client (821f), and will only inflame the people’s lower nature (822c). If money is to be spent on treats, rather than to relieve genuine want, it should be spent on religious events, which at least bolster popular respect for the divine (822b). Equally striking, and equally odd, is what he says about the expressions of civic gratitude that the politician should look for in return. Just as gladiatorial shows and the like win only a harlot’s compliments (821f), so true honour comes in the form of the people’s grateful awareness of the politician’s goodwill and benevolence (820f, 823d); and as such, it does not need to be embodied in elaborate physical manifestations. At most, says Plutarch, the politikos should accept an inscription, a decree, or a green branch (820d), never a statue (820b); for the honour that is given in return for benefaction ‘is a symbol, not a payment’ (820e). The gap between all this and normal civic attitudes is striking and obvious. One only needs to ask how the average citizen body would have reacted to the substitution of a diet of religious festivals for their gladiatorial shows and chariot-races; or how the average local politician would have taken to the proposition that no-one really needs an honorific statue.40 Managing the emotions The question of the proper management of the emotions, briefly touched on in the preceding section, looks like another promising area for gauging the relationship between philosophical and mainstream outlooks. As already observed, there were indeed some widespread and warmly embraced notions of restraint and manly decorum (frowning, for instance, on ‘womanly’ surrender to extremes of grief or fear – or pleasure) that might seem to tend broadly in the same direction as philosophical teaching. But the kind of restraint that was envisaged, and the way the line was articulated between legitimate and illegitimate experience or display, was by no means identical, and it is clear that philosophers as a class – not just the extremist Stoics – were generally reckoned to be recommending something stranger and less unquestionably desirable. Gellius’ story, noted earlier, of the ship’s passengers baiting a Stoic for his apparent failure in apatheia may in itself be sect-specific,41 but Lucian’s gleeful satire against philosophers who succumb not only to fear, but also (more prominently) to anger and (gastronomic and sexual) desire is quite general, and indicates a sense of a class apart, different and even threatening in their alternative standards over the passions, and so all the more mercilessly to be mocked.42

40

Lendon 1997, 198–9, and index s.v. ‘honour’ and ‘statues’. Attic Nights 19.1. 42 E.g. Fisherman 29–37, 41–52, Symposium. Cf. Harris 2001, 387–8. 41

Philosophia and the Mainstream

239

The public and social life of the cities of the Empire provided many occasions on which the experience and display of emotion was not only tolerated but sanctioned and expected, from funerals to public gatherings to welcome, congratulate, or say farewell to a prominent local dignitary or distinguished visitor from elsewhere.43 Courts, theatres, and lecture-halls were all venues where it was expected that emotion in performance would arouse answering emotions in an audience – where indeed failure to do so would mean the overall failure of the play, lecture or plea.44 Encouragement of emotional experience and emotional display, that is to say, was part of the structure of civic life, built into some of its most central practices. A hugely important factor, not only in forming this aspect of practice in the courts, council-chambers, and lecture theatres, but also (still more significantly) in shaping thought about it, providing a theoretical handle on it, must have been the study of rhetoric – which, as has already been pointed out, was absolutely fundamental to the educational formation of the elite. For in rhetoric, too, pathos (Latin affectus) was a key term and concept. But here it stood not for a dangerous and distasteful aberration to be minimized or abolished, but rather for a powerful resource to be manipulated to advantage. Strong emotion was understood in rhetorical theory as a major persuasive force, the control of which can be codified, studied, learned and practised with expertise; and it was with this understanding that the successive generations of the upper classes passed out of education and into the adult world.45 It is a startling and hugely informative experience to pass directly from Seneca’s or Plutarch’s or Galen’s discussion of the passions, to Quintilian’s treatment of rhetorical pathos/affectus in Book 6 of the Education of the Orator.46 Quintilian shows not the slightest trace of embarrassment in insisting that the ability to ‘sweep a juror away and induce in him whatever state of mind he wishes’ is the mark of a supreme orator.47 It is crucially important for him to study the means to arouse ‘anger, favour, hatred, pity’, so as to be able carry his hearers with him as if on a flood-tide or a river in spate.48 As if almost deliberately thumbing his nose at the philosophers, Quintilian goes on to define affectus in so many words as a matter of turmoil and violent inner motions (vehementes motus, perturbatio),49 and to make a special point from his own experience of the need for the orator in some degree to experience himself the emotions he seeks to arouse in others, on pain of failing to do so effectively. The orator must use his power of imagination (his natural human ability to form phantasiai, visiones) to summon up artificially 43 Cf. e.g. Menander Rhetor Treatise II, 377.31–388.15 (‘The Speech of Arrival’), 395.1– 399.10 (‘The Propemptic Talk’). 44 For reactions to oratorical performance, see Korenjak 2000, 96-114; for the courts, see below on Quintilian; for the theatre, e.g. Plutarch On Meat-Eating 998e. 45 See for instance Aristotle Rhet. 2.1–12, Cicero On the Orator 2.44.185–71.290. 46 Educ. 6.2, esp. 6.2.1–12 and 20–36. 47 Educ. 6.2.3–4. 48 Educ. 6.2.6–7. 49 Educ. 6.2.8–9.

240

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

induced but really experienced feelings of anger, grief, or whatever; he himself, he boasts in conclusion, has managed this so effectively that on occasion he has not only wept in court, but also turned pale.50 Quintilian is of course not a neutral and detached commentator. As a professional teacher and practitioner of oratory, he has a vested interest in presenting mastery of emotional manipulation in a positive light. But given the popularity and respectability of rhetoric both as a mode of instruction and as a practical medium of communication, he can safely be taken as representative of widespread attitudes. Which means in turn that those mainstream attitudes were not merely loosely divergent from the thinking of philosophoi on the passions, but in sharp contrast; they embodied an equally clearly formulated but incompatible view of what pathos is and how it is to be managed in pursuit of worthwhile goals. Moreover, that alternative view both supported and was supported by those public displays and experiences of emotion in both utilitarian and leisure activity already mentioned. How far this tension was felt, and how it was negotiated, by the members of the educated elite, is an obvious but difficult question. Many of them must have been exposed to both approaches, and aware on some level of the conflict. On the one side, Quintilian’s handling of the topic of rhetorical pathos, and praise for those skilled in arousing emotion, is anything but an isolated eccentricity.51 On the other, the direct allegation of irresponsible handling of the emotions by rhetoric is prominent in such central, and still intensively read philosophical classics as Plato’s Gorgias and Republic 3 and 10.52 Yet it is remarkably difficult to find anyone making an overt issue of the conflict in perspectives.53 This ought to be a surprise. Admittedly, it is not impossible to find ways of narrowing the divide, that might have lessened the feeling of conflict. Some accommodation might in theory have been made between a ‘responsible’ approach to rhetorical pathos, and a philosophical ideal of the moderation rather than the removal of emotional perturbation. But it is not automatically clear that the realities of rhetorical teaching and practice could so easily have been felt to match up to Platonic or Peripatetic criteria of moderation; and in any case, the suggestion ought to be of no help to the eradicationist Stoics. On the Stoics’ account, it has been pointed out that they might consistently have seen some purely temporary, educational benefit in the experience of certain passions; but this too seems too slight a concession on which to base a wholesale reconciliation with rhetorical pathos.

50

Educ. 6.2.29–30, 36. Cf. e.g. Aristides Or. 51.32ff.; Philostratus Lives of the Sophists 1.21.520, 2.4.569, 2.5.574, 2.27.617; Korenjak 2000, 96–100; Webb 1997. 52 E.g. Gellius Attic Nights 7.14.5–9 (quoting and advertising Taurus’ commentary on Gorg.); cf. Dodds 1959, 62–4 (use of the dialogue by Plutarch and Aelius Aristides). 53 Though more generalized attacks on irresponsible oratory, at least implicitly including disapproval of its emotionalism, are frequent enough: Maximus Or. 25.5–6, Plutarch Precepts 814bc, etc. 51

Philosophia and the Mainstream

241

Why then is there so little readiness to pick the fight? On the side of the rhetoricians, one might suspect a nervousness about seeming, in attacking philosophical doctrines of the passions, also to be pouring scorn on the notion of moral virtue. But the main reason on both sides may have been that rhetoric was simply too well entrenched in contemporary culture to be seriously vulnerable. For practical purposes, rhetoricians did not have to take potential philosophical criticism too seriously, or rebut it directly, and philosophers knew it. This would not have ruled out all attempts at reciprocal criticism – which indeed are found54 – but it would have meant that anything like dangerous or embarrassing ground could safely be avoided, as not worth the risk. If the foregoing analysis is along the right lines, then the tension between philosophical and rhetorical thinking on the pathê seems to have been one that remained substantially latent, side-stepped in an act of culturally advantageous doublethink. In the absence of any pressure to chose directly between approaches, the educated member of the politically dominant elite could both endorse something like the standards of emotional control built into philosophical teaching, and at the same time learn, admire, and practice techniques of emotional manipulation in the civic arenas in which his status was displayed and refreshed. And this was surely an advantage. Any forcing of the issue would have risked making one or the other of these ways of being a superior person unavailable; and that, though not irreparably damaging to the image of the elite, would still have been a loss. Solidarity and relationships There is one more area of thinking, from those surveyed in the central chapters of this study, where the suggestion of a telling divergence between philosophia and mainstream elite values seems appropriate: that bearing on right attitudes to others, whether at the collective or the individual level. As seen in Chapter 4, philosophia in general stood firmly for the values of solidarity, community and benevolence at the collective level, and at the level of the individual, for the high-minded shaping of all specific relationships into conformity with the pursuit of the good life (however that might be conceived in detail); a particularly striking instance of the later was constituted by philosophical legislation for marriage. On both of these levels, it can be suggested that philosophoi can once again be seen positioning themselves and their shared calling at an interesting angle to mainstream, non-philosophical currents of thought and sentiment, partly coinciding, and partly at variance. In broad terms, at least, their emphasis on the natural worth of human solidarity and community could be seen as endorsing and providing a theoretical base for both the local, civic value of concord (homonoia), and the wider Imperial ideal of a

54

Maximus and Plutarch, as cited above; Calvenus Taurus in Gellius Attic Nights 17.20.4; Aelius Aristides’ orations In Defence of Oratory and Against Plato in Defence of the Four (Orr. 2 and 3).

242

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

myriad different communities and races united by loyalty to a single head under a single framework of law – both of which were discussed in Chapters 6 and 7. Equally, their celebration of matrimony as fundamental to both communal flourishing and the realization of individual human potential is easily assimilated to prominent trends in contemporary social thinking and practice: from Imperial legislation relating to marriage from Augustus on, via the representation of spouses and the commemoration of their shared life on funerary monuments, to the idealization of the faithful couple and of marriage as personal and narrative consummation in the novel.55 Yet it is not difficult either to find the potential for strain and divergence. The universalist emphasis of at least some thinking about social oikeiôsis, requiring the acknowledgement of an equally strong bond with the most distant specimen of humanity as with the closest kin, cut against a whole series of differential loyalties important in normal elite thinking: to those within as opposed to outside the boundaries of the Empire, to those of Greek (or Latin) as opposed to foreign speech, to citizens of one’s own as opposed to a neighbouring polis, to family as opposed to outsiders. To be philosophical in full Stoic mode, in the manner expounded by Hierocles, was to adopt a standard manifestly – some would presumably have said unreasonably, even crazily – more high-minded than anything operative in the everyday world of social exchange, civic administration and Imperial government. Though here it has also to be recognized that we have to deal with something more complicated than just a straight tension between philosophical and worldly values. The proper scope of oikeiôsis was disputed within philosophia too, with some (like the Anonymous Theatetus Commentator and Apuleius) explicitly or implicitly criticizing the extreme position, and edging closer to ‘common sense’ in their recognition of varying degrees of appropriation.56 Over erôs, too, the position is interestingly complicated. As just observed, philosophical endorsement of marriage as the privileged locus for the realization and control of erotic impulse matches an important trend in contemporary thinking and practice. But this trend itself was just one strand in a much larger and untidier pattern. Philosophical thinking turns out to be at odds with as much in this larger picture as it is in convergence with. Far from aiming at the stern control and channelling of erôs, much in Imperial-period culture was more concerned to exploit it for pleasure and play. The point is well made in one area by Simon Goldhill, who suggests that the Greek novel (his favoured case is Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe) can be as disposed to tease and problematize the reader’s own erotic impulses and sense of self-control as it is to celebrate ideals of monogamous fidelity.57 More straightforward exercises in titillation – texts that can be read as easily in that mode as in any other, at any rate – were abundant too, from episodes

55

Veyne 1987, 36–41; Foucault 1990, 147–85; Swain 1996, 118–31. Anon. Tht. Comm. 5.18–6.31 and 7.14–20; Apuleius On Plato 2.2.222. 57 Goldhill 1995, 1–45; the other novel to which this kind of appreciation seems particularly appropriate is Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon – see Morales 2004, 152–226. 56

Philosophia and the Mainstream

243

in novels58 to books of Milesian tales and what purported to be expert instruction in sexual technique from celebrated prostitutes.59 The visual arts of the period – from precious-metal and ceramic tableware to mosaics, wall-paintings and works of sculpture – testify to the diffusion of erotic images in (selected portions of) domestic space.60 Even moralizing literature, for all its overt tone of censure, could dwell on sexual indulgence in ways which only consolidated a climate in which the fine physical details of sexual activity could be the matter for open discussion. Seneca’s lovingly outraged account of the proclivities of Hostius Quadra in the Natural Questions – for which the excuse is provided by, of all things, a problem in optics – is a spectacular example;61 but one might think also of the commentary on the sexual tastes of Emperors obligingly provided by Suetonius in his Lives.62 Against this background, the philosophical understanding of erôs and its correct management in a well-ordered life, whether in its Stoicizing or its Platonizing form, must once again have appeared as something of a curiosity, intriguing and inspiring perhaps to some, but for many others well outside the boundaries of good sense and everyday practicability. The paradox of an educational setting Philosophia, then, may not have been directly rebellious or politically subversive; but in terms of the values it embodied and taught, it manifests a clear potential to set its adherents at an angle to the norms and expectations of the class which it sought principally to address – the honestiores of the cities of the Empire. When this conclusion is put together with what was established in Chapter 1 about the institutional and functional position most commonly sought by philosophoi in that same society, a paradox looms: the paradox of a set of ideas that directly and indirectly challenged a society’s normal, mainstream values and expectations embedded in the educational system of that society – and this, moreover, in what is generally thought of as a fairly strongly ‘traditional’ culture, not one that obviously privileged innovation and independence. Even stated thus baldly, this is already strange enough. But it can easily be made to seem more intriguing still, by 58

For instance, the Photis episode from the Lucianic Ass (8–10; cf. Poliakoff 1982, 101–25 for the resourcefully risqué use of athletic imagery); the Photis episode, and sexual episodes witnessed, heard of or participated in by Lucius in asinine form, in Apuleius’ Ass 2.16–17, 9.5–28, 10.19–34; Petronius Satyrikon 25–6, 111–12, 124–33; the surreal sexual encounters in Lucian’s True History 1.8 and 2.46. This widespread enjoyment of transgressing the boundaries of normal respectability is in some ways reminiscent of libertine literature of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. 59 Milesian tales: OCD3 s.v. ‘Aristides’; NP s.v. ‘Melisische Geschichten’. ‘Philaenis’’ Erotic Technique: POxy 2891 (vol. 39), with commentary ad loc.; Lucian Sham Sophist 24. 60 On Imperial-period erotic art, see Clarke 1998; Skinner 2005, 240–82; it is naturally difficult to establish with any confidence how these images were perceived and used by their ‘consumers’. 61 Seneca Natural Questions 1.16. 62 Suetonius Tiberius 43–4; Caligula 24–5, 36; Nero 27–9, Domitian 22.

244

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

reflection on two further elements of the situation, to do both with the strength of the claims of philosophia, and with the importance of education to elite society of the period more generally. The point about the claims of philosophia can be quickly made. In inserting itself into the educational system, philosophia did not do so in a quiet and modest way. On the contrary, it tried to muscle its way to the front. On its own account, it represented not just one element among others, or an adjunct to the main programme, but the very heart and pinnacle of the whole system, to which all other elements ought rightfully to be subordinate. The ‘art of living’, if it really is what it says it is, must surely trump all other claimants. The point about the wider importance of education needs more development. It begins with the observation that schools and educational professionals under the Empire did not simply train the young under their care in the utilitarian skills that they would need for successful adult careers, any more than nineteenth-century English public schools did only this for the sons of the well-to-do. They prepared them in a much more wide-ranging way to take their places as acceptable participants and good competitors in the tasks, contests and leisure activities of the upper class. Something of this has already been seen in the discussion, earlier in this chapter, of the role of rhetorical training in forming manners and inculcating modes of deportment, as well as passing on a practical tool of political and social life. What needs to be underlined now, however, is the huge importance to adult society not of any particular aspect of the training, but of the overall ‘cultivation’ that the whole process was designed to confer. From start to finish, the standard school curriculum centred on a canon of written classics – Greek writing for Greeks, both Greek and Latin for Romans – and those written classics in their turn both revealed and participated in an honoured tradition of artistic, literary, military and political achievement, while at the same time, equally centrally, inculcating firmly defined standards of language and style. What was absorbed was therefore a combination of linguistic norms, specific literary and historical knowledge, and a general cultural pride and piety. The resulting cultivation – for which the marked Greek term was paideia – was hugely important to the personal and class identity of the social and administrative elite. Possession of paideia operated both as a bond and as a marker of difference. It gave its (elite) possessors a shared point of reference and sentiment, but also provided an arena in which they could compete for respect and distinction, on grounds of the strength of their grasp of Culture, and the ease with which they could deploy it as an expressive resource.63 At the same time, paideia served – like later concepts of ‘gentility’ – to mark off the elite as a whole from the lower orders. At the very least, it did so by giving them a shared medium of communication and recognition denied to their social inferiors (who could not afford the time and money necessary to take an interest in it, let alone acquire mastery). But it is arguable that it did more, operating not only 63

The old standard discussions of the shape and importance of paideia are Marrou 1956, 95–101 and 217–26, and Marrou 1938; among more recent discussions, see especially Anderson 1993, 69–85, Schmitz 1997, 39–66, Whitmarsh 2001, 5–9.

Philosophia and the Mainstream

245

as a replication but also as a symbolic justification of the social order: cultivation could be viewed as the product of an innate superiority rather than of superior material resources – a matter of nature not nurture – and thus as a reason why it was right and proper that those actually at the top of the heap, in power, rank and influence should indeed be there.64 Now, if this was the importance of paideia, and if it was into this kind of construct that, in assimilating itself to education, philosophia was necessarily seeking to insert itself, the question of the degree of integration it actually managed to achieve gains a still sharper edge. The claim of philosophia to be both radically different and essential was tough enough on its own. It becomes even more sensitive if the institutional position from which it was launched was itself so centrally enmeshed with the self-image of the elite. So: was the potential for friction and unease that has been uncovered in philosophical values and teaching, and now also in the claims to educational centrality, realized in practice? And if so, how and where did it show up, either in educational surroundings or in culture and society more generally? The answer to these questions, I believe, turns out on examination of the whole range of available evidence to be as interestingly complicated as the questions themselves. A spectrum of reactions from the standpoint of general culture and the conventionally cultured can be observed, running from warm acceptance through uneasy attempts to limit and to control, to downright hostility, not always neatly separated from each other; and these reactions themselves find echoes in what philosophoi, from their side of the fence, have to say about general culture. This picture seems to fit very neatly with the initial suggestion that the culture of the times ought to have found philosophia awkward, a kind of cuckoo in the nest. An uncertain status? Philosophia embraced Signs of assimilation, of a desire to welcome philosophia as a distinguished constituent of high culture, are not hard to come by. The very volume of philosophical writing that survives from the Imperial period, by individuals who evidently thought of themselves as deeply cultivated – Seneca, Plutarch, Dio, Apuleius, Arrian, Maximus – could be taken as proof enough on its own. An equally obvious sign of acceptance and integration is the readiness with which classics of philosophical writing are included in reading-lists intended to define and promote good learning: Dio Chrysostom’s recommendation of Xenophon (as both Socratic and historian) in his Oration 18,65 for instance, or Quintilian’s of 64

Schmitz 1997, 44–50. Schmitz’s argument is directed towards explaining the importance of star sophistic declaimers, to whom he wishes to suggest the elite delegated the responsibility of showing off, or ‘performing’, the superiority of the honestiores; but its conception of the role of paideia has implications for philosophoi and philosophia too. 65 Dio Or. 18.13–19.

246

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, Theophrastus, the older Stoics, Cicero’s philosophica, Brutus, Cornelius Celsus, Plautus, Catius, and (with reservations) Seneca in Book 10 of his Education of the Orator.66 But it is worth looking at other evidence too, to underline the breadth and depth of philosophia’s penetration. As we have already seen, the worth of the institution was endorsed at the highest official level by the inclusion of philosophoi, along with doctors and teachers of grammar and rhetoric, in the Empire-wide immunity legislation passed in progressively more generous versions by Vespasian and Trajan.67 It counted as a similarly weighty endorsement when, in 176 CE, Marcus Aurelius endowed Chairs of Stoic, Platonic, Epicurean and Peripatetic philosophy at Athens, from the Imperial treasury, with salaries (reportedly) of 60,000 sesterces per annum.68 But this too is only the administrative recognition of a much more broadly based acceptance and enthusiasm. The word philosophia itself, along with its cognates philosophos /philosophus and philosophein/philosophari, were clearly in general usage positive terms, even if sometimes applied to assorted pieces of cleverness or skill not closely related to the pursuit of wisdom and virtue,69 or a general disposition to reasonableness and/or self-restraint,70 rather than to conscious philosophical commitment. More tellingly, they appear with some regularity on Imperial-period inscriptions, honouring and commemorating both the living and the dead. Being a philosophos/us was evidently something to praise and congratulate others for, and to boast of in oneself, in the public space for which inscriptions were made.71 Thus in an inscription from Hadriani in Mysia, one philosophos, Avianius Apollonios, honours another, his friend the Stoic T. Avianius Bassus Polyainos, ‘in accord with the decision of the city of Hadriani’, with the dedication of a statue.72 On a late 66

Quint. Educ. 10.1.81–4 and 123–31. There is, however, room for argument over how representative Quintilian’s list is of general practice; his evident desire to produce a comprehensive and definitive account of oratorical education may very well have led him into unrealistically ambitious stipulations. 67 See above, 19–20. 68 Dio Cassius 71.31; Lucian Eunuch 3; Philostratus Lives of the Sophists 2.2.566; Tatian Against the Hellenes 19; cf. Millar 1977, 502, Hahn 1989, 119–27. 69 E.g. the use of philosophus to refer to an architect in the (late antique) Passio quattuor coronatorum, drawn attention to by Nock 1926, xxii, fn. 30; philosophêma for a politician’s ‘clever device’ in Plutarch Roman Questions 23.269b; philosophein for the invention of clever arguments in Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon 5.27. 70 As for instance in Galen (Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato [PHP] 5.5), or Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon 5.23.7, 8.5.7; the occasional ironical application of the term, as for instance at ibid. 5.27.1 (of a sexual invitation) does not disturb the general picture. 71 As is made evident also in a number of rhetorical texts, e.g. Hermogenes 1, p. 38 Walz; Nicolaus, p. 274; Nicephorus, p. 466 (all cited by Nock 1926, xviii, fn. 9). 72 Published by Mendel 1909 (no. 409), with further discussion by Sahin 1974. For the topic of philosophers in inscriptions more broadly, see the bibliography cited by Sahin: Tod 1957; J. and L. Robert, Bulletin Epigraphique 1958, no. 84 (197–200) and Hellenica 11.108, no. 1.485; Habicht, Inschr. des Ask., 162 (but a more up-to-date survey is now needed, given the rate of epigraphic publication). Other examples of statues honouring living individuals as philosophoi/i include IGSK 17.2, Ephesus 8.2.4340 ([...] Secundinus of Tralles, a Platonist,

Philosophia and the Mainstream

247

second- or early third-century stele from Antinoopolis, a Platonist philosopher and member of the Museum who may be the commentator Severus mentioned by Proclus and others,73 is similarly honoured (though by inscription alone, without statue).74 A funerary inscription from the Rhineland records the death of a philosopher who looks to have been ‘chaplain’ to the consul of 174 CE, Salvius Julianus.75 Alexander of Aphrodisias, honouring his father with a statue, celebrates himself as ‘the Successor (diadochos, i.e. holder of the Chair of Peripatetic Philosophy at Athens)’, and his father as ‘the philosophos’.76 And a co-ordinated pair of inscriptions, in Ephesus and Athens, dating from the first century CE, celebrate the lofty philosophical eloquence and virtue of a Plato redivivus, Ofellius Laetus. 77 This public, visible presence of the names and images of living and recently deceased philosophoi was matched by equally numerous images of the great figures of the past, further testifying to a sense that this was a calling that brought honour not only to the individual, but also to the community in which he lived and worked (and/or the individual in whose domestic space he was displayed). Although it is only rarely possible now to connect a work of sculpture with its original site or sites, the very volume of statues, busts and herms depicting the great philosophoi is evidence for their wide distribution and general visibility in the Imperial period.78 And we can at least point to some certain cases: the collocation of Demetrius of Phalerum, Protagoras, Thales, Heraclitus and Plato in the hemicycle of the Temple of Nectanebo in the Memphis Serapieion;79 Antisthenes, Xenophon, Socrates and Dio Chrysostom in the Pergamum Asklepieion;80 and assorted philosophers in the late antique herm gallery of Welschbillig.81 Mosaics depicting groups of sages were popular: there are famous instances (all involving Socrates as one of the group) from Cologne (second-century), Baalbeck (thirdcentury) and Apamea (third-century),82 as well as what is sometimes taken as a honoured by one of his pupils) and ILAlg 1, 2115 (a Platonist philosophus, generally taken to be Apuleius, honoured at public expense by the citizens of Madauros). Herms of Plutarch at Delphi and Chaeronea (Dittenberger Syll.3 843a–b), set up either during his lifetime or immediately after his death, do not explicitly commend him as a philosophos, but the word is subsequently used in later epigraphic commemoration of both him and his descendants: Ziegler RE (s.v. Plutarchos) = Ziegler 1964, 15.20–42, citing Syll.3 843 (IG VII 3423), 844 (IG VII 3425) and 845. See also Hahn 1989, 128–30. 73 Dillon 1977, 262–4. 74 Bernand 1984, 96–8 (no. 14), citing earlier discussions. 75 CIL 13.8159, cited by Nock 1926, xxii. 76 See Chaniotis 2004a, 388–9 and 2004b; Sharples 2005c. 77 IGSK 17.2, Ephesus 8.2.3901 and IG 22 3816 (Athens); discussion by Nollé 1981 and Bowersock 1982. 78 See Schefold 1943/1997, Richter 1965/1984 and Zanker 1995. 79 Lauer and Picard 1955, ch. 7; Richter 1984, 129, 186. The statues were of Hellenistic date, but still on display in the Imperial period. 80 Boehringer and Horn 1966, 472ff. 81 Wrede 1972; on ancient portrait galleries more generally, see Lorenz 1965. 82 Richter 1984, 197–8; Schefold 1997, 394–7.

248

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

depiction of Plato’s Academy (first-century) from Pompei.83 More idiosyncratic is the inclusion of the trio of Socrates, Simmias and Cebes from Plato’s Phaedo in what is otherwise a set of scenes from comic drama, in a mosaic (third to fourth century) from Mytilene.84 Frescoed philosophers include a famous Socrates from Ephesus, dating from the first century CE – seemingly the sole survivor of a series of thinkers paired with Muses.85 In the smaller medium of coin types, portraits of Chrysippus and Aratus appeared on coins of Soil-Pompeiopolis, Heraclitus on coins of Ephesus, Pythagoras on coins of Samos, and Anaxagoras on coins of Clazomenae, all in the second century CE.86 Philosophical writing, including much by minor voices and a good deal of technical matter as well as the central classics of literary philosophia, was widely available and evidently in steady demand. Statistics for papyrus finds from Romanperiod Egypt are subject to the usual caveats rising from the random nature of papyrus data, and the probability that provincial Egypt is not in all ways representative of the situation Empire-wide. Nevertheless, it is indicative of something that a recent (February 2003) version of the online Mertens-Pack papyrological database can count eighty-nine papyri of Plato, eleven of Aristotle, ten of Xenophon’s Socratica, five of Plutarch’s Moralia, three of Aeschines Socraticus, perhaps two of Chrysippus, and one each of Dio Chrysostom, Hierocles and Musonius.87 (By way of control, the figures for some major literary authors across all periods are 1641 papyri of Homer, 172 of Demosthenes, 164 of Euripides, 137 of Hesiod, 114 of Menander, 93 of Thucydides, 79 of Callimachus, 40 of Aeschines the orator, 35 of Sophocles and 32 of Aeschylus.) Individual items, both within and beyond those just listed, fill out the picture in intriguing ways. The Hierocles papyrus (P.Berol. inv. 9780v), found at Hermopolis and dating from the late second or early third century, runs to 732 lines of exposition of the Stoic concepts of oikeiôsis and self-perception.88 The celebrated anonymous commentary on Plato’s Theaetetus (P.Berol. inv. 9782) – our earliest surviving philosophical commentary, put together in (perhaps) the first century BCE – is preserved on a second-century papyrus also found at Hermopolis.89 A library catalogue from Memphis, of the third century (P.Petersburg 13), lists works by Aristotle, Theophrastus, Chrysippus, Eratosthenes, Dio and the Socratics Crito, Simon and Cebes in its surviving portion.90 And the letter of Theon to Heraclides mentioned in Chapter 2 (P. Mil. Vogliano 11) records the copying and dispatch

83

Naples, Museo Nazionale Archeologico (inv. 124545), from the House of T. Simius Stephanus; a first-century copy of a (?) third-century Greek original; reproduced as the frontispiece (p. [5]) to vol. 1 of DPA. 84 Berczelly 1998. 85 Richter 1984, 204; Schefold 1997, 314–15. 86 Nock 1926, xix–xx, fn. 17; Schefold 1997, 412–18. 87 http://www.ulg.ac.be/facphl/services/cedopal/pages/mp3anglais.htm. 88 Bastianini and Long 1992; twelve columns of sixty-one lines each, some very fragmentary. 89 Bastianini and Sedley 1995. 90 Mitteis and Wilcken 1912, 182–4.

Philosophia and the Mainstream

249

from Alexandria of texts of the Stoics Boethus, Diogenes of Babylon, Chrysippus, Antipater and Posidonius. Although any kind of quantification is impossible, this data none the less suggests quite widespread private reading of technical matter, in addition to the study of more literary philosophical works standardly recommended in educational treatises of the period as part of the literary-rhetorical curriculum. Resistance? For the cultured, both Greeks and Romans, philosophia was evidently something it was good to know about, and show respect for. But at the same time, there are also plentiful signs of various sorts of desire to hold back to some degree: to limit the degree of respect shown, to withhold endorsement of the more extreme claims that might be made for philosophia’s standing and importance. Education. Perhaps the most visible, and the most well-known of such signs can be seen in the field of higher education, where friction caused by ideological considerations converged with professional competition for pupils, income and prestige. The explicit and implicit claims of philosophia to constitute the crown and centre of a full and proper education, touched on in Chapter 1, could on occasion call forth aggressive reactions from teachers of the rival craft of rhetoric. In our period, the bitterest and the most confident of these comes from the same Quintilian whom we have seen happily admitting philosophical texts to his ideal reading-list. Evidently, as the following passage from the preface to his Education of the Orator makes clear, it was a different matter when philosophi tried to push any further: 9. My aim, then, is the education of the perfect orator. The first essential for such a person is that he should be a good man, and consequently we demand of him the possession not only of exceptional gifts of speech, but of all the excellences of character as well. 10. For I will not admit that the principles of upright and honourable living should, as some have maintained, be regarded as the concern of philosophia alone. The man who really can play his part as a citizen and is capable of meeting the demands of both public and private business, the man who can guide a state by his counsels, give it a firm basis by his legislation and purge its vices by his decisions as a judge, is assuredly none other than the orator of our quest. 11. Therefore, although I admit I shall make use of certain of the principles laid down in philosophical textbooks, I would insist that such principles have a just claim to form part of the subject-matter of this work and do actually belong to the art of oratory. 12. I shall frequently be compelled to speak of such virtues as courage, justice, self-control; in fact scarcely a case comes up in which some one of these virtues is not involved; every one of them requires illustration and consequently makes a demand on the imagination and eloquence of the advocate. Can there be any doubt then, I ask you, that wherever imaginative power and amplitude of diction are required, the orator has a specially important part to play? 13. These two branches of knowledge were, as Cicero has clearly

250

Philosophy in the Roman Empire shown,91 so closely united, not only in theory but in practice, that the same men were regarded as uniting the qualifications of orator and philosophus. Subsequently this single branch of study spilt up into its component parts, and through indolence came to be regarded as consisting of several distinct subjects. As soon as speaking became a profession and the practice of making an evil use of the blessings of eloquence came into fashion, those who had a reputation for eloquence ceased to study moral philosophia, 14. and ethics, thus abandoned by the orators, became the prey of weaker intellects. As a consequence certain persons, disdaining the toil of learning to speak well, returned to the task of forming character and establishing rules of life and kept to themselves what is, if we must make a division, the better part of philosophy, but presumptuously laid claim to the sole possession of the title of philosophus, a distinction which neither the greatest generals nor the most famous statesmen and administrators have ever dared to claim for themselves. For they preferred the performance to the promise of great deeds. 15. I am ready to admit that many of the old philosophi inculcated the most excellent principles and practised what they preached. But in our own day the name of philosophus has too often been the mask for the worst vices. For their attempt has not been to win the name of philosophus by virtue and the earnest search for wisdom; instead they have sought to disguise the depravity of their characters by the assumption of a stern and austere air accompanied by the wearing of clothing differing from that of their fellow men. 16. Now as a matter of fact we all of us frequently handle those themes which philosophia claims for its own. Who, short of being an utter villain, does not speak of justice, equity and virtue? Who (and even common country-folk are no exception) does not make some inquiry into the causes of natural phenomena? As for the special uses and distinctions of words, they should be a subject of study common to all who give any thought to the meaning of language. 17. But it is surely the orator who will have the greatest mastery of all such departments of knowledge and the greatest power to express it in words. And if ever he had reached perfection, there would be no need to go to the schools of philosophy for the precepts of virtue. As things stand, it is occasionally necessary to have recourse to those authors who have, as I said above, usurped the better part of the art of oratory after its desertion by the orators, and to demand back what is ours by right, not with a view to appropriating their discoveries, but to show them that they have appropriated what in truth belonged to others.92

This is a careful balancing act. Quintilian has no wish to expose himself as a boor or an ignoramus by scorning philosophia wholesale, and no wish to remove the classics of philosophical literature from the list of works from which the aspiring rhetorical (literary) trainee can learn; but at the same time he is determined that philosophia should not be allowed to claim a status, ideologically or professionally, that he feels it is not entitled to. To maintain this 91 92

Cicero On the Orator 3.50-61. Educ. 1 Pref. 9–17; see also 12.2.

Philosophia and the Mainstream

251

position he leans heavily on a distinction between the philosophical greats of the past and their degenerate modern successors. The stance is anything but a personal idiosyncrasy of Quintilian’s. Rhetoricians in general, and the oratorical performers and writers trained by them, wished to honour philosophia as a part of their cultural heritage, and to make use of its written products, but without conceding its claim to represent a categorically higher form of training. The same sense of rivalry, and consequent antiphilosophical animus, combined with a loving knowledge of philosophical writing, can be seen also in the letters of M. Cornelius Fronto, as he contrasts achievable rhetorical culture with unrealistic philosophical aspirations,93 worries that his Imperial pupil Marcus Aurelius will be seduced into wrong decisions by philosophical scruple,94 and tactfully contests his philosophical hostility to niceties of style and the cultivation of eloquence.95 And we see it in the orations of perhaps the most self-conscious of all proponents and defenders of the high art of rhetoric in the Imperial Period, Aelius Aristides, in particular in his Defence of Rhetoric and Defence of the Four.96 In this connected pair of speeches, Aristides takes vehement issue with the famously low assessment of rhetoric and (rhetorically trained) statesman set out, on behalf of philosophia (dialectic), in Plato’s Gorgias, accusing his opponent of self-contradictory and wholly unjustified malice. But he can only do so because he too knows and loves his Platonic texts – and knows that his audience knows and loves them too. This was anything but a one-sided exchange, however. From their side of the fence, philosophoi responded with earnest, but none the less pointed discussions of the value of conventional education, conceding ancillary value to the standard curriculum (including rhetoric), but only as subordinate preparation for profitable engagement with their own discipline. In the allegory of the Tablet of Cebes, all pilgrims have to pass through the territory of literary, rhetorical and mathematical study, but on the strict understanding that it belongs to Pseudopaideia, False Culture, and that True Culture lies elsewhere, higher up the hill.97 Maximus of Tyre’s Oration 37, Philo Judaeus’ On Congress, and Seneca’s Epistle 88 urge a similar case, at varying levels of sophistication.98 Or again, in Oration 22, Maximus can be found urging the superiority of philosophical discourse over poetry, oratory (especially sophistic declamation), and history.99 Administration. These discussions of the relative value of philosophia and the ‘liberal arts’ (enkuklios paideia; liberalia studia) reinforce the perception that educational practice was always likely to prove a specially prominent battleground for conflicting views of the former. But at the same time, they underline 93

To his Friends 1.2, 1.15. Friends 1.14. 95 To M. Caes. 3.16, On Eloquence 1, To Verus 1.1. 96 Aristides Orr. 2 and 3; cf. Boulanger 1923, 218–70. 97 Tablet 11–15. 98 Hadot 1984, 63–100 and 295–6. 99 Trapp 1997a, 186–94. 94

252

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

the propensity of educational debates to matter to educated society more broadly. And indeed, there are plenty of other indications that the unease about the scale of the claims of philosophia that we have seen in the educational context percolated out into the wider world beyond. These signs can be seen both in the sphere of civic and Imperial administration and in general cultural debate. It has been noted that a measure of philosophical success could be seen in the inclusion of philosophoi in legislation aimed at encouraging and rewarding educators, and other classes of civically useful professionals.100 But on a full view of the facts, this turns out to have been only a very partial success story. For while it is true that philosophoi did for a time enjoy the same privileges as doctors and teachers of grammar and rhetoric, and to that extent were acknowledged as deserving parity of esteem, it is also evident that their hold on this official status was nowhere near as secure. For one thing, it seems that they did not spring to the administrative mind quite as readily as their fellow beneficiaries. Although the basic legislation was passed under Vespasian, it applied at first only to doctors and teachers of grammar and rhetoric; it was not until the time (probably) of Trajan that it was extended to philosophoi as well. And secondly, though they did not exactly lose the entitlement before the others, philosophoi nevertheless came under greater pressure than the rest when the climate of imperial generosity changed. When, under Antoninus Pius, increasing worries about city economics and finances led to some scaling down of the scope of the privilege, it was they who lost out most severely. Antoninus’ legislation set maximum numbers, for different sizes of city, for the numbers of doctors, grammarians and rhetors allowed to qualify. For philosophoi, however no number has been set ... because practitioners of philosophia are few and far between. I believe that the exceedingly wealthy will provide financial assistance to their home towns of their own free will; and if they quibble about their wealth, that very action will make it clear that they are not true philosophoi.101

This might at first sight seem to be a compliment and a favourable exception. On closer examination, it turns out in fact to be a cruel trick, making it not easier but more difficult for philosophoi successfully to claim exemption, by giving civic authorities the excuse they needed to turn applications from this quarter down. It seems that philosophoi, being numerically few and, more importantly, not as central to the life of the city as doctors, grammarians and rhetors, could safely be pushed around in ways that the others could not. Culture and society. But it was not only at the administrative level – where questions of financial prudence intertwine with issues of taste and attitude – that signs of unease and of a desire to pin philosophia back could be found. In the Latin-speaking half of the Empire, where the elite could think of themselves as 100 101

See above, 19–20 and 246. Digest 27.1.6.7.

Philosophia and the Mainstream

253

heirs to and participants in a distinctively Roman tradition of values and achievement, respect could be comfortingly tempered with the reflection that philosophia was, in its origins and in its more arrogant manifestations, a Greek creation, and so legitimately to be practised with restraint by the good Roman. The same Quintilian who admits philosophical literature into the educational canon, but indignantly contests philosophers’ claims to moral hegemony, also contrasts the idle theorizing of Greek philosophoi with Roman practical virtue.102 And, famously, the highly cultivated Tacitus could record with apparent approval and relief that his father-in-law Agricola remembered being saved by his mother’s alertness from indulging in philosophia ‘more deeply that was legitimate for a Roman of the senatorial class’.103 Some other celebrated Latin rejections, however, seem to spring from different motives, not so closely to do with Roman-ness or anti-Hellenism. When Petronius’ Trimalchio is made to declare that he wishes his funeral inscription to proclaim that ‘he never took lessons from a philosophus’, he is articulating, for our cultivated scorn, the self-satisfied philistinism of the irredeemably low-minded parvenu.104 And when his creator, Petronius, is shown by Tacitus as pointedly not talking philosophy, à la Phaedo, in the hours before his enforced suicide, this has more to do with the carefully cultivated image of an ironist and dandy than with any striking of Roman attitudes.105 At all events, the complexity of Roman feelings, and the range of variations available and displayed, should not be underestimated. The same period that contains Quintilian’s and Tacitus’ declarations also sees the philosophical verse of Persius,106 along of course with Seneca’s Epistles, Dialogues and Natural Questions. If Romans could take refuge in the thought that philosophia was suspect and could legitimately be taken with a pinch of salt because it was Greek, it does not follow that in the Greek-speaking half of the Empire, it was accorded automatic or universal respect on the same grounds. Dio Chrysostom in the opening sections of his Alexandrian Oration (Or. 32) paints a vivid, if also manifestly self-seeking, picture of a philosophos having to work hard to secure himself a hearing in the face of indifference, and strong competition from other, easier forms of entertainment,107 in what was the largest, wealthiest, most civilized and most sophisticated city of the Greek-speaking East at the turn of the first and second centuries. More telling still are the satires of Lucian, composed in and around the third quarter of the second century – at just the time when philosophia seemed to be consolidating its institutional position with events like the endowment of the 102

Quintilian Education 12.2.29–30; cf. 10.1.35–6, 12.2.8ff. Tacitus Agricola 4.3. Philosophia here gets caught up in a more general Roman elite practice, of using reactions to Greek cultural imports as a means of debating what it means to be Roman: cf. König 2005, 205–12 and 225–35, referring also to Woolf 1994. 104 Petronius Satyricon 71.12. 105 Tacitus Annals 16.19. 106 See esp. Satires 4–6. 107 Dio 32.1–13; for the strategy of this oration as a piece of moral protreptic, see Trapp 1995, 167–75. 103

254

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

four Imperial Chairs at Athens.108 Lucian’s blend of philosophical subject-matter with the detached cynicism (small ‘c’) of satire – mixing Platonic dialogue with models of comic writing from Aristophanes to Menippus and Bion – testifies simultaneously to the importance for educated culture of knowing about philosophia, and to a felt need to escape from straight capitulation to its claim to authority. When setting himself to give a direct defence of his mockery, Lucian like Quintilian takes refuge in the contrast between the great philosophoi of the past – whom of course he respects as much as the next (educated) man – and their degenerate and hypocritical heirs in the modern world.109 But this is (ironic?) attitudinizing. His refusal to take philosophia at its own high valuation of itself, turning on the standard satirist’s fulcrum of ‘common sense’, cuts as deeply against the contemporary as it does against the classic product.110 Lucian’s work is very helpfully double-edged in its implications. It shows how seriously philosophia was taken as an element in educated culture, but also how important it was felt to be to have defence mechanisms available to muffle it and draw its sting. This idea of a perceived need to counter the starkness of the moral and intellectual challenge posed by philosophical evangelism, by means of some kind of dampening or sidestep, is worth dwelling on, for it can arguably be seen at work in a much larger range of literary production. As has already been observed, one of the remarkable features of the literature and culture of this period is the space they found for works of philosophical popularization, expounding the nature, challenge and teachings of philosophia, in whichever sectarian variant, in forms other than that of the scholastic text: a category which can be conceived so as to embrace a very large proportion of the works exploited in this volume, from Seneca’s Epistles and Arrian’s Epictetus, via Plutarch’s Moralia and pseudoPythagorean writing, to the declamatory products of Dio, Apuleius and Maximus. It was argued in Chapter 1 that these were, and are, works of philosophia, and that argument is not being revoked now.111 But at the same time they can also be taken as evidence of a pervasive desire for a sweetening of the pill, for works that held out the suggestion that the threat posed by philosophical radicalism to more comfortable and conventional pieties was not terminal: that a reconciliation could be effected that would allow the two to co-exist. A convenient example of how one such work can be read in this kind of reconciliationist key is provided by Orations 18–21 of Maximus of Tyre (already discussed for other reasons in Chapters 3 and 5 above). The issue debated in this four-part sequence – the right and wrong ways to understand and to manage feelings of erotic attraction – is a perennially important one, with a rich history in philosophical literature.112 As explained earlier, Maximus analyses and resolves it with the aid of the distinction (common to both Stoic and Platonic tradition) 108

On the foundation of the Chairs, see n.68 above. Lucian Fisherman, esp. 5–9, 29–37. 110 On Lucian’s satire, see Hall 1981 (esp. 151–93), Robinson 1979 (esp. 50–4), Jones 1986 (esp. 24–32), Branham 1989. 111 See above, 23–7. 112 Trapp 1997a, 156–8; Foucault 1990, 189–232. 109

Philosophia and the Mainstream

255

between hedonistic relationships and those that aim at mutual moral improvement and, second, the more specifically Platonic notion of physical beauty as a pointer to transcendent reality.113 But for present purposes, the important point is that the doctrinal content of the lectures is tricked out in a supremely confident display of urbane literary learning. The whole discussion is cast as an examination and defence of the erotic ideals and practices of Socrates, which both comfortably distances the issue and allows for extensive quotation from and imitation of Socratic literature (Xenophon and Aeschines as well as Plato). On the pretext provided by Plato’s Phaedrus (one of the foundational classics of philosophical erotics), both the careers and the poetry of Sappho and Anacreon are also passed in review. The whole package is delivered in Maximus’ characteristically ornate and lively style, with its preference for inspirational uplift sooner than precise argument and moral challenge, and its impeccable literary pedigree.114 The audience is informed about the right way to talk about the issue, in the light of the best philosophico-literary precedents, as much as given any practically useful instruction applicable to their own lives. And they are reassured by a worked example that philosophical questions can be integrated perfectly with good literary taste, rhetorical ability, and knowledge of the best traditions of Hellenic culture. Productions such as this may well have helped to ease the anxieties of the conventionally cultivated. But this was perhaps not without a cost. It is intriguing to observe that they seem simultaneously to have created anxiety of another kind among philosophical writers, alarmed that conciliation might go to far. Evasive listening, encouraged by over-stylish writing and performance, seems to have been perceived as a real problem. Perhaps the liveliest expression of this worry from the period is Book 3, chapter 23 of Arrian’s Discourses of Epictetus, entitled ‘To those who read and dispute for mere display (epideiktikôs)’, already quoted from in an earlier chapter. In a manner revealing in its very vehemence, Epictetus pours scorn on an imagined interlocutor who is more concerned for the size of his audience and their applause than for any moral benefit he might be able to confer. Against this he insists that, just as Socratic literature should be read ‘in true Socratic fashion, and not as though it were something that came from Lysias or Isocrates’, so the live discourse of a philosophos should be listened to with the right, submissive, openness and receptivity: Rufus [Musonius Rufus, Epictetus’ Stoic teacher] used to say, ‘If you are at leisure to praise me, I am speaking to no purpose’. And indeed he used to speak in such a manner that each of us who heard him supposed that some person had informed on him; such was his grasp of how men behave, and his sureness in placing each man’s personal faults before his eyes. The philosopher’s lecture-room is a surgery. You should not have felt pleasure by the time you leave it, but pain, for you are not healthy when you come in. ... And am I to come up with pretty thoughts and reflections, so that each of you will go away praising me, but with the 113 114

See above, 94–6. Trapp 1997a, 156–86; 1997b.

256

Philosophy in the Roman Empire same [complaints] that you brought in with you? And is it for this that young men are to travel abroad and leave their parents, their friends, their relations and their property, so that they can say ‘Splendid!’ when you come up with fine reflections? Was that what Socrates used to do? Or Zeno? Or Cleanthes?115

Just as, from the ‘lay’ side of the fence, philosophoi can be seen as being better at looking the part of seekers after wisdom and virtue than living it, so from the other side, the lay public can be suspected of taking the easy course of listening to, enjoying and praising the style of philosophical discourse while disregarding its beneficial content. They can thus seem to honour philosophia (and claim the cultural credit for so doing) even as they frustrate its true goals with a deft sidestep. Versions of Epictetus’ worries can be seen also in Plutarch’s On Listening and several times (whatever one may think of the honesty with which this is done) in the Orations of Maximus.116 The position of philosophia in general culture, and in reflection on the conditions of civilized existence, was thus in various ways a contested one. Suspicions ran both ways: from the wider world about the realism and reasonableness of the high – even arrogant – claims made by philosophoi about their importance to good living; from philosophoi about the propensity of the wider world to either evade or muffle their saving message. Both sides worried about the proper relationship between the cultivation of philosophia and the practice of other forms of cultivation, in ways that left it perpetually uncertain whether philosophia did or did not belong at the heart of paideia. Given the importance of paideia to the sense of identity of the ruling elite of the Empire, and perhaps to the continuing smooth functioning of the whole political order, this was no small matter. Conclusion This chapter began with the idea of a ‘philosophical opposition’ as a frame for relating philosophia to the wider world of the Roman Empire, and for identifying its distinctive position. It has been suggested (i) that ‘opposition’ is not so sensitive and fruitful a term to apply as ‘detachment’, ‘divergence’ or ‘lack of alignment’, and (ii) that if the full measure of philosophical detachment or divergence is to be taken, a much wider range of thinking has to be surveyed than the purely political. What then comes into view is a whole series of respects in which the values preached by philosophoi could be seen as out of line with those in which the members of the educated elite were standardly raised. Awareness of this divergence created a two-way tension between philosophoi and conventional elite culture, which in turn gave them and their calling an intriguingly precarious status 115

Arrian Disc. of Epict. 3.23.29–32. Plutarch On Listening 37c–48d; Maximus Orr. 1.6–7 and 25 (but note the somewhat conflicting suggestion in Or. 1 that listening to philosophia is in fact a painless affair). 116

Philosophia and the Mainstream

257

in contemporary society and its institutions. The particular quality of this precariousness can only fully be appreciated when one brings together a sense of the contemporary identity of philosophia as life-guidance, awareness of the magnitude of its claims to authority, knowledge of the institutional positioning sought by philosophoi, and knowledge of the contours and importance of ‘culture’ to the ruling classes of the Empire. It was suggested in Chapter 1 that a parallel could be drawn between the kinds of authority claim made in early imperial society by philosophia and those made in other contexts by religions; it might now seem that there is a parallel too in the kinds of response evoked in society at large. We have been confronted with a body of thought that presented itself as central to right living, and to the correct positioning of humanity in the grander scheme of things; that embedded itself in the educational system though in various ways subversive of normal attitudes and values; and that found its absolutist claims to knowledge of reality and right living both eagerly embraced and in various ways resisted and deflected by the surrounding world. This cannot but make us think of the case of Christianity in Late Antiquity, and the Medieval and early Modern periods. It is a comparison that is hugely worth pursuing, especially as the period that has been studied in this book is the one in which Christianity began its rise to the position in which it too could elicit this kind of response; and especially as Greco-Roman philosophia was so obviously one of the models it used in reshaping itself for its new role. But this is too large a suggestion to take any further at the end of what is already a wordy book. It might be enough to end with the thought that the social and cultural position of philosophia under the Empire is for a whole host of reasons at least as interesting to reflect on as any particular doctrine propounded by its practitioners.

Appendix: Bio-bibliographies This catalogue aims to give a first orientation only. Only works relevant to this volume are listed, not each author/thinker’s complete output. Where editions and translations appear in a standard series (OCT, Teubner, Budé, Loeb, etc.), full details are not given, either here or in the Bibliography. Translations of a good many relevant texts can be found in Long and Sedley 1987 and Sorabji 2004; further sourcebooks for the period 100 BCE to 200 CE, to accompany Sharples and Sorabji (forthcoming), are planned. Albinus. Platonist philosophos of the mid-second century CE, pupil of Gaius and teacher of Galen. Text: Hermann 1853 (Teubner, Platonis Dialogi, VI). Studies: Dillon 1977, 267–71, 304–6; Göransson 1995. Alcinous. Otherwise unknown author of the Didaskalikos tôn Platônos logôn (Handbook of Platonism), presumed to have flourished in the middle of the second century CE; once treated as identical to Albinus. Text: Whittaker 1990 (Budé). Translation: Dillon 1993. Studies: Whittaker 1990, vii–lxxii; Dillon 1977, 267–304 (‘Albinus’); Dillon 1993; Göransson 1995. Alexander of Aphrodisias. Peripatetic philosophos, appointed to the Imperial chair at Athens between 198 and 209 CE. Texts: Bruns 1887 (Suppl. Arist. 2.1, 1–186: On Soul, Supplement (Mantissa) on Soul); Bruns 1892 (Suppl. Arist. 2.2, 117–212: Ethical Problems, On Fate). Translations: Fotinis 1979; Sharples 1983, 1990, 2004a. Study: Sharples 1987. Apuleius (c.125 to after 170 CE). Orator, novelist and Platonist philosophus. Texts (philosophica): Beaujeu 1973 (Budé), Moreschini 1991 (Teubner). Translation (Apology and God of Socrates): Harrison et al. 2001. Studies: Dillon 1977, 306–38; Moreschini 1978; Tatum 1979, ch. 4; Harrison 2000, 1–88, 136–209. ‘Archytas’. Undated late Hellenistic or early Imperial-period pseudepigraphic ‘Pythagorean’ author. Text: Thesleff 1965. Translation: Guthrie 1920/1987. Studies: Thesleff 1961; Centrone 2000. Arius [Didymus?]. Controversially reconstructed author of a controversially reconstructed doxographic handbook; sometimes supposed to be identical with

Appendix: Bio-bibliographies

259

a ‘court philosopher’ of Augustus. Texts: Stobaeus Eclogues 2.7 (2.37–152 Wachsmuth); Diels Doxographi Graeci, 445–72. Translation (summary of Stoic ethics only): Pomeroy 1999. Studies: Hahm 1990; Göransson 1995. Arrian. L. Flavius Arrianus (86–160 CE), statesman and writer. Texts (Discourses and Handbook of Epictetus): Schenkl 1916 (Teubner); Oldfather 1925 (Loeb). Translations: Oldfather 1925 (Loeb); Carter and Hard 1995 (Everyman); Seddon 2005. Study: Stadter 1980. Aspasius. Commentator on Aristotle’s Ethics, c.100–150 CE. Text: Heylbut 1889. Translation (Bk 8): Konstan 2001. Study: Sharples and Alberti 1999. ATTICUS. Platonist philosophos of the second half of the second century CE, perhaps holder of the Imperial Chair of Platonism at Athens. Text: Des Places 1977. Studies: Dillon 1977, 247–58; Moreschini 1987. Aulus Gellius (b. c.125/8). Roman miscellanist, known only for his Attic Nights. Text: Marshall 1968/1990 (OCT). Translation: Rolfe 1927 (Loeb). Study: Holford-Strevens 1988. Calvenus Taurus. Platonist philosophos of the first half of the second century CE, known principally from the reminiscences of Aulus Gellius; some sources give his nomen as ‘Calvisius’. Text: Gioè 2002, 223–82. Study: Dillon 1977, 237–47. ‘Charondas’. Undated late Hellenistic or early Imperial-period pseudepigraphic ‘Pythagorean’ author. Text: Thesleff 1965. Translation: Guthrie 1920/1987. Studies: Thesleff 1961; Centrone 2000. Cicero (106–43 BCE). Roman orator, statesman and philosophus. Texts (philosophica): OCT (various hands; incomplete); Teubner (various hands). Translations: Miller et al., six vols, 1913–33 (Loeb); some treatises also in World’s Classics and Penguin Classics. Study: Powell 1995. Demetrius. Cynic philosophos of the first century CE, known principally from references by his friend and admirer Seneca. Study: Billerbeck 1979. Dio Chrysostom (c.45–c.115 CE). Stoicizing orator and politician. Text: von Arnim 1893–6. Translation: Cohoon and Crosby 1932–51 (Loeb). Studies: Desideri 1978; Jones 1978a; Swain 2000. Diogenes of Oenoanda. Epicurean sponsor and part author of a large philosophical inscription set up in Oenoanda in Lycia in c.120/130 CE. Text and translation: Smith 1993, 1996, 2003.

260

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

Diogenes Laertius. Otherwise unknown author of the Lives of the Philosophers, supposed to have flourished around 200 CE. Texts: Long 1964 (OCT); Marcovich 1999–2001 (Teubner). Translation: Hicks 1925 (Loeb). Studies: Mejer 1978; Gigante et al. 1986; ANRW 2.36.5, 3556–792, 2.36.6, 3793–4307. ‘Diotogenes’. Undated late Hellenistic or early Imperial-period pseudepigraphic ‘Pythagorean’ author. Text: Thesleff 1965. Translation: Guthrie 1920/1987. Studies: Thesleff 1961; Centrone 2000. ‘Ecphantus’. Undated late Hellenistic or early Imperial-period pseudepigraphic ‘Pythagorean’ author. Text: Thesleff 1965. Translation: Guthrie 1920/1987. Studies: Thesleff 1961; Centrone 2000. Epictetus. Stoic philosophos who flourished in the second half of the first century CE. For text and translations, see above under ARRIAN. Study: Long 2002. EUDORUs. Alexandrian Platonist philosophos of the first century BCE. Study: Dillon 1977, 115–35. Favorinus (c.85–155 CE). Orator, antiquarian and (Academic) sceptic philosophos. Text: Barigazzi 1966. Study: Holford-Strevens 1988, 72–92. GALEN (129–216/17 CE). The most prolific medical writer of the second century CE. Text: Kühn 1821–33 (repr. 1964–5); selected texts in CMG from 1909 on. Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato: text and tr., De Lacy 1980–4. Translation (selected works): Singer 1997. Study: Nutton 2004, 216–47. Hierocles. Stoic philosophos of the first half of the second century CE. Text: Long and Bastianini 1992. Translation (partial): Long and Sedley 1987, 53B, 57C-D and G. Studies: Inwood 1984; Long 1993. ‘Hippodamus’. Undated late Hellenistic or early Imperial-period pseudepigraphic ‘Pythagorean’ author. Text: Thesleff 1965. Translation: Guthrie 1920/1987. Studies: Thesleff 1961; Centrone 2000. Lucian (c.120–c.190 CE). Satirical writer. Text: Macleod 1972–87 (OCT). Translations: (complete) Harmon et al. 1913–67 (Loeb, 8 vols); (selections) Turner 1961 (Penguin Classics; repr. Indiana Univ. Press), Sidwell 2004 (Penguin Classics), Costa 2006 (World’s Classics). Marcus Aurelius (121–180 CE). Emperor 161–180. Text: Dalfen 1979 (Teubner). Translations: Haines 1916 (Loeb); Farquharson 1989 (World’s Classics). Study: Rutherford 1989.

Appendix: Bio-bibliographies

261

Maximus of Tyre. Platonist orator, who flourished in the second half of the second century CE. Texts: Trapp 1994 (Teubner); Koniaris 1995. Translation: Trapp 1997a. Musonius. G. Musonius Rufus, Roman knight (eques) and Stoic philosophus, c.25–100 CE. Texts: Hense 1905 (Teubner); Jagu 1979. Translation: Lutz 1947. Studies: Lutz 1947; Geytenbeek 1963. Oenomaus of Gadara. Cynic philosophos of the first half of the c2nd CE. Text: Hammerstaedt 1988. Studies: Hammerstaedt 1988, 1990. PHILO OF LARISSA (159/8–84/3 BCE). Platonist; last head of the sceptical Academy in Athens. Study: Brittain 2001. Philo Judaeus (c.20 BCE-c.50 CE). Jewish philosophos, writer and statesman. Text and translation: Colson and Whitaker 1929–62 (Loeb, 10 vols). Study: Dillon 1977, 139–83. PHILOPATOR. Stoic philosophos of (?) the Hadrianic period; Galen attended lectures by one of his pupils in Pergamum (Affections and Errors 1.8.41). Plutarch. L. (?) Mestrius Plutarchus, c.45–c.125 CE, Platonist philosophus, scholar and writer. Text and translation (Moralia): Babbitt et al. 1927–2004 (Loeb, 16 vols). Translation (selections): Kidd 1992 (Penguin Classics), Russell 1993 (World’s Classics). Study: Dillon 1977, 184–230. QUINTILIAN. M. Fabius Quintilianus (c.35–c.95 CE). Advocate and teacher of rhetoric, author of the twelve-book Education of the Orator (Institutio Oratoria). Text: Winterbottom 1970 (OCT). Translation: Russell 2002 (Loeb). Study: Kennedy 1972, 487–514. Seneca. L. Annaeus Seneca (c.2 BCE–65 CE), statesman and Stoic philosophus. Texts: Epistles and Dialogues, Reynolds 1965 and 1977 (OCT); On Clemency, On Benefits, Hosius 1914 (Teubner); Natural Questions, Hine 1996 (Teubner). Translations (complete): Epistles, Gummere 1917–25; Dialogues, Clemency, Benefits, Basore 1928–35; Natural Questions, Corcoran 1971–2 (all Loeb). Studies: Griffin 1976; Inwood 2005. Sextus Empiricus. Sceptical philosopher and (?) doctor, believed to have flourished in the second half of the second century CE. Text: Mutschmann 1914 (Teubner). Text and translation (complete but unreliable): Bury 1933–49 (Loeb). Translations: Annas and Barnes 2000; Bett 1997. Studies: Annas and Barnes 2000; Bett 1997.

262

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

‘Sthenidas’. Undated late Hellenistic or early Imperial-period pseudepigraphic ‘Pythagorean’ author. Text: Thesleff 1965. Translation: Guthrie 1920/1987. Studies: Thesleff 1961; Centrone 2000. sTOBaeus. Ioannes Stobaios, ‘John of Stobi’, probably c5th CE; author of an anthology of excerpts from poets and prose authors, bearing mainly on ethics. Text: C. Wachsmuth and O. Hense, 1884–1923. Tabula Cebetis. Pseudepigraphic dialogue of late Hellenistic or early Imperial date. Text and translation: Fitzgerald and White 1983; Hirsch-Luipold et al. 2005. Translation: Seddon 2005. Studies: Fitzgerald and White 1983; Hirsch-Luipold et al. 2005. ‘Zaleucus’. Undated late Hellenistic or early Imperial-period pseudepigraphic ‘Pythagorean’ author. Text: Thesleff 1965. Translation: Guthrie 1920/1987. Studies: Thesleff 1961; Centrone 2000.

Bibliography Alföldy, G. (1985), The Social History of Rome, tr. D. Braund and F. Pollock, London: Croom Helm (edn 2, Routledge 1988). Anderson, G. (1993), The Second Sophistic: a cultural phenomenon in the Roman Empire, London: Routledge. Annas, J. (1981), An Introduction to Plato’s Republic, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Annas, J. (1989), ‘Epicurean emotions’, Greek Roman and Byzantine Studies 30: 145–64. Annas, J. (1993), The Morality of Happiness, New York: Oxford University Press. Annas, J. and Barnes, J. (tr. and comm.) (2000), Sextus Empiricus: Outlines of Scepticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arnold, E.V. (1958), Roman Stoicism, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Balsdon, J.P.V.D. (1979), Romans and Aliens, London: Duckworth. Barnes, J. (1989), ‘Antiochus of Ascalon’, in M. Griffin and J. Barnes (eds), Philosophia Togata I, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 51–96. Bastianini, G. and Long, A.A. (1992), ‘Hierocles’, in Corpus dei papiri filosofici greci e latini (CPF) I, vol. 1**, Florence: Olschki, 268–451. Bastianini, G. and Sedley, D. (1995), ‘Commentarium in Platonis Theaetetum’, in Corpus dei papiri filosofici greci e latini (CPF) III, Florence: Olschki, 227–562. Beaujeu, J. (ed.) (1973), Apulée. Opuscules philosophiques, Paris: Les Belles Lettres (Budé). Becchi, F. (ed.) (1990), Plutarco. La virtù etica, Naples: D’Auria. Berczelly, L. (1988), ‘The date and significance of the Menander mosaics at Mytilene’, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 35: 119–26. Bernand, A. (1984), Les Portes du désert, Paris: CNRS. Bett, R.A.H. (tr. and comm.) (1997), Sextus Empiricus: Against the Ethicists, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Billerbeck, M. (1979), Der Kyniker Demetrius: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der frühkaiserzeitlichen Popularphilosophie, Leiden: Brill. Bobzien, S. (1998), Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boehringer, E. and Horn, R. (1966), ‘Die Ausgrabungsarbeiten zu Pergamon im Jahre 1965: Marmorplastiken des Asklepieions und der Hallenstrasse’, Archäologischer Anzeiger 1966: 459–75. Boulanger, A. (1923), Aelius Aristide et la sophistique dans la province d’Asie au IIe siècle de notre ère, Paris: De Boccard. Bowersock, G.W. (1969), Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bowersock, G.W. (1982), ‘Plutarch and the sublime hymn of Ofellius Laetus’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 23: 275–9. Boys-Stones, G. (2001), Post-Hellenistic Philosophy: a study of its development from the Stoics to Origen, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

264

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

Boys-Stones, G. (2003), ‘The Stoics’ two types of allegory’, in Id. (ed.), Metaphor, Allegory and the Classical Tradition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 189–216. Brancacci, A. (1985), Rhetorike philosophousa: Dione Chrisostomo nella cultura antica e bizantina, Naples: Bibliopolis. Brancacci, A. (2000), ‘Dio, Socrates and Cynicism’, in Swain 2000, 240–60. Branham, R.B. (1989), Unruly Eloquence. Lucian and the comedy of traditions, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Branham, R.B. and Goulet-Cazé, M-O. (eds) (1996), The Cynics, Berkeley: University of California Press. Brennan, T. (2000), ‘Reservation in Stoic ethics’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 82: 149–77. Brittain, C. (2001), Philo of Larissa: the last of the Academic Sceptics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, E. (2003), review of Sorabji 2000, Classical Philology 98: 100–2. Brown, P. (1992), Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Brown, R.D. (1987), Lucretius on Love and Sex. A Commentary on De Rerum Natura IV, 1030–1287, Leiden: Brill. Brunt, P.A. (1973), ‘Aspects of the social thought of Dio Chrysostom and of the Stoics’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 19: 9–34. Brunt, P.A. (1975), ‘Stoicism and the Principate’, Papers of the British School at Rome 43: 7–39. Brunt, P.A. (1977), ‘From Epictetus to Arrian’, Athenaeum 55: 19–48. Burkert, W. (1972), Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, tr. E.L. Minar, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Centrone, B. (2000), ‘Platonism and Pythagoreanism in the early empire’, in Rowe and Schofield 2000, 559–84. Chaniotis, A. (2004a), ‘New inscriptions from Aphrodisias (1995–2001)’, American Journal of Archaeology 108: 377–416. Chaniotis, A. (2004b), ‘Epigraphic evidence for the philosopher Alexander of Aphrodisias’, Bulletin of the Institute for Classical Studies 47: 79–81. Clarke, J.R. (1998), Looking at Lovemaking: constructions of sexuality in Roman art 100 B.C. - A.D. 250, Berkeley: University of California Press. Clarke, M.L. (1971), Higher Education in the Ancient World, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Clay, D. (1983), Lucretius and Epicurus, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Daniélou, J. (1973), Gospel Message and Hellenistic Culture, tr. J.A. Baker, London: Darton, Longman & Todd. De Lacy, P. (ed., tr. and comm.) (1980–4), On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato, 3 vols, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag. Desideri, P. (1978), Dione di Prusa: un intelletuale greco nell’impero romano, Messina: G. D’Anna. Dihle, A. (1982), The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity, Berkeley: University of California Press. Dillon, J.M. (1977), The Middle Platonists, London: Duckworth (rev. edn 1996). Dillon, J.M. (1993), Alcinous. The Handbook of Platonism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bibliography

265

Dillon, J.M. and Long, A.A. (eds) (1988), The Question of ‘Eclecticism’: studies in later Greek philosophy, Berkeley: University of California Press. Dobbin, R.F. (tr. and comm.) (1998), Epictetus. Discourses Book I, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dodds, E.R. (ed. and comm.) (1959), Plato. Gorgias, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dover, K.J. (1978), Greek Homosexuality, London: Duckworth. Dudley, D.R. (1937), A History of Cynicism, London: Methuen (repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1967; Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1998). Duff, T. (1999), Plutarch’s Lives: exploring virtue and vice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Düring, I. (ed. and tr.) (1951), Chion of Heraclea: a novel in letters, Göteborg: Wettergren & Kerber. Dyck, A. (1996), A Commentary on Cicero, De Officiis, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Edwards, C. (1997), ‘Self-scrutiny and self-transformation in Seneca’s Letters’, Greece & Rome 44: 23–38. Everson, S. (ed.) (1991), Psychology (Companions to Ancient Thought 2), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fitzgerald, J.T. and White, L.M. (eds) (1983), The Tabula of Cebes, Chico: Scholars Press. Forschner, M. (2003), ‘Philosophie und Politik: Dions philosophische Botschaft’, in Nesselrath et al. 2003, 128–56. Fortenbaugh, W.W. and White, S.A. (eds) (2004), Lyco of Troas and Hieronymus of Rhodes, New Brunswick: Transaction. Fotinis, A.P. (tr. and comm.) (1979), The De Anima of Alexander of Aphrodisias, Washington, D.C.: The University Press of America. Foucault, M. (1990), The Care of the Self, tr. R. Hurley, London: Penguin Books (tr. of Le Souci de soi, Paris: Gallimard, 1984). Frede, M. (1986), ‘The Stoic doctrine of the affections of the soul’, in M. Schofield and G. Striker (eds), The Norms of Nature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 93–112. Frede, M. (1997), ‘Euphrates of Tyre’, in Sorabji 1997, 1–11. Frede, M. (1999), ‘Epilogue’, in K. Algra et al. (eds), The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 771–97. Frischer, B. (1982), The sculpted word: Epicureanism and philosophical recruitment in ancient Greece, Berkeley: University of California Press. Fritz, K. von (1954), The Theory of the Mixed Constititution in Antiquity: a critical analysis of Polybius’ political ideas, New York: Columbia University Press. Geiger, J. (1979), ‘Munatius Rufus and Thrasea Paetus on Cato the Younger’, Athenaeum 57: 48–72. Geytenbeek, A.C. van (1963), Musonius Rufus and Greek Diatribe, tr. B.L. Hijmans, Assen: van Gorcum. Giani, S. (ed. and comm.) (1993), Pseudo Archita. L’educazione morale, Rome: Gruppo Editoriale Internationale. Gigante, M. et al. (1986), Diogene Laerzio, storico del pensiero antico (Elenchos 7.1–2), Naples: Bibliopolis. Gioè, A. (ed. and comm.) (2002), Filosofi medioplatonici del II secolo d. C.: testimonianze e frammenti, Naples: Bibliopolis. Gleason, M. (1995), Making Men: sophists and self-presentation in ancient Rome, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

266

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

Glucker, J. (1978), Antiochus and the Late Academy, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Goldhill, S. (1995), Foucault’s Virginity: ancient erotic fiction and the history of sexuality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gombrich, E.H. (1952), ‘A classical “Rake’s Progress”’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 15: 254–6. Goodenough, E.R. (1938), The Politics of Philo Judaeus, New Haven: Yale University Press. Göransson, T. (1995), Albinus, Alcinous, Arius Didymus, Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis. Gottschalk, H.B. (1987), ‘Aristotelian philosophy in the Roman world from the time of Cicero to the end of the second century AD’, in ANRW 2.36.2, 1079–174. Griffin, M. (1971), review of Bowersock, Greek Sophists, Journal of Roman Studies 61: 279–80. Griffin, M. (1976), Seneca: a philosopher in politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Griffin, M. (1989), ‘Philosophy, politics and politicians at Rome’, in M. Griffin and J. Barnes (eds), Philosophia Togata I, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1–37. Griffin, M. (1996), ‘Cynicism and the Romans: attraction and repulsion’, in Branham and Goulet-Cazé 1996, 205–21. Griffin, M. (2000), ‘Seneca and Pliny’, in Rowe and Schofield 2000, 532–58. Guarducci, M. (1929), ‘Poeti vaganti e conferenzieri dell’età ellenistica: ricerche di epigrafia greca nel campo della letteratura e del costume’, Atti della R. Accademia dei Lincei 6.2: 627–65. Gunderson, E. (2000), Staging Masculinity: the rhetoric of performance in the Roman world, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Guthrie, K.S. (tr.) (1920/1987), The Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library, rev. D.R. Fideler, Grand Rapids: Phanes Press. Habicht, C. (1969), Die Inschriften des Asklepieions, Berlin: De Gruyter. Hadot, I. (1984), Arts libéraux et philosophie dans la pensée antique, Paris: Etudes augustiniennes (rev. edn Paris: Vrin 2005). Hadot, P. (1995), Philosophy as a Way of Life: spiritual exercises from Socrates to Foucault, tr. M. Chase, Oxford: Blackwell (tr. of Exercises spirituels et philosophie antique, Paris: Etudes augustiniennes, 1987). Hadot, P. (1998), The Inner Citadel: the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, tr. M. Chase, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press (tr. of La Citadelle intérieure: introduction aux “Pensées” de Marc Aurèle, Paris : Fayard, 1992). Hahm, D.E. (1990), ‘The Ethical Doxography of Arius Didymus’, ANRW 2.36.4, 2935–3055 and 3234–43. Hahn, J. (1989), Der Philosoph und die Gesellschaft, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner. Hall, J.A. (1981), Lucian’s Satire, New York: Arno. Hammerstaedt, J. (1998), Die Orakelkritik des Kynikers Oenomaus, Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum. Hammerstaedt, J. (1990), ‘Der Kyniker Oenomaus von Gadara’, in ANRW 2.36.4, 2834–65. Harlow, M. and Laurence, R. (2002), Growing Up and Growing Old in Ancient Rome: a lifecourse approach, London: Routledge. Harris, W.V. (2001), Restraining Rage: the ideology of anger control in classical antiquity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harrison, S.J. (2000), Apuleius: a Latin sophist, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bibliography

267

Harrison, S.J., Hilton, J.L. and Hunink, V.J. (trs) (2001), Apuleius. Rhetorical Works, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hartlich, P. (1889), ‘De exhortationum a Graecis Romanisque scriptarum historia et indole’, Leipziger Studien 2: 209–336. Heylbut, G. (ed.) (1889), Aspasii in Ethica Nicomachea quae supersunt commentaria (Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca 19.2), Berlin: Reimer. Hirsch-Luipold, R. et al. (2005), Die Bildtafel des Kebes: Allegorie des Lebens, Darmstadt: Wissenschftliche Buchgesellschaft. Holford-Strevens, L. (1988), Aulus Gellius, London: Duckworth (rev.edn Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Hope, V. (2000), ‘Status and identity in the Roman world’, in J. Huskinson (ed.), Experiencing Rome: culture, identity and power in the Roman Empire, London: Routledge, 125–52. Houser, J.S. (1998), ‘Eros and aphrodisia in the works of Dio Chrysostom’, Classical Antiquity 17: 235–58. Inwood, B. (1984), ‘Hierocles: theory and argument in the second century A.D.’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 2: 151–84. Inwood, B. (1985), Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Inwood, B. (1995), ‘Seneca in his philosophical milieu’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 97: 63–76. Inwood, B. (1997), ‘Why do fools fall in love?’, in Sorabji 1997: 57–69. Inwood, B. (1999), ‘Rules and reasoning in Stoic ethics’, in K. Ierodiakonou (ed.), Topics in Stoic Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 95–127. Inwood, B. (2000), ‘The will in Seneca the Younger’, Classical Philology 95: 44–60. Inwood, B. (ed.) (2003), The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Inwood, B. (2005), Reading Seneca: Stoic philosophy at Rome, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jagu, A. (ed. and comm.) (1979), Musonius Rufus. Entretiens et fragments, Hildesheim: Olms. Jones, A.H.M. (1940), The Greek City from Alexander to Justinian, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jones, C.P. (1971), Plutarch and Rome, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jones, C.P. (1978a), The Roman World of Dio Chrysostom, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jones, C.P. (1978b), ‘A Syrian in Lyon’, American Journal of Philology 99: 119–27. Jones, C.P. (1986), Culture and Society in Lucian, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kahn, C.H. (1988), ‘Discovering the will: from Aristotle to Augustine’, in Dillon and Long 1988, 234–59. Kahn, C.H. (2001), Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans: a brief history. Indianapolis: Hackett. Keenan, J.G. (1977), ‘A papyrus letter about Epicurean philosophy books’, Getty Museum Journal 5: 91–4. Kennedy, G.A. (1963), The Art of Persuasion in Greece, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kennedy, G.A. (1972), The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kenny, A. (1992), Aristotle on the Perfect Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

268

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

König, J. (2005), Athletics and Literature in the Roman Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Konstan, D. (tr.) (2001), Aspasius, Anonymous, Michael of Ephesus. On Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 8 and 9, London: Duckworth. Korenjak, M. (2000), Publikum und Redner: ihre Interaktion in der sophistischen Rhetorik der Kaiserzeit, Munich: Beck. Lachenaud, G. (ed.) (1993), Plutarque. Opinions des philosophes, Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Lauer, J-P. and Picard, C. (1955), Les Statues ptolémaiques du Sarapieion de Memphis, Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Lefèvre, E. (2001), Panaitios’ und Ciceros Pflichtenlehre: vom philosophischen Traktat zum politischen Lehrbuch, Stuttgart: Steiner. Lendon, J.E. (1997), Empire of Honour: the art of government in the Roman world, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewis, N. and Reinhold, M. (eds) (1955), Roman Civilization: selected readings, New York: Columbia University Press. Long, A.A. (1974), Hellenistic Philosophy, London: Duckworth. Long, A.A. and Sedley, D. (1987), The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Long, A.A. (1993), ‘Hierocles on oikeiôsis and self-perception’, in K.J. Boudouris (ed.), Hellenistic Philosophy, vol. 1, Athens: Ionia Publications, 93–104 (repr. in Stoic Studies, 250–63). Long, A.A. (1996), Stoic Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (repr. 2001, University of California Press). Long, A.A. (2002), Epictetus: a Stoic and Socratic guide to life, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lorenz, T. (1965), Galerien von griechischen Philosophen- und Dichterbildnissen bei den Römern, Mainz: von Zabern. Lutz, C. (1947), ‘Musonius Rufus: “The Roman Socrates’’’, Yale Classical Studies 10: 3–147. Lynch, J.P. (1972), Aristotle’s School, Berkeley: University of California Press. MacMullen, R. (1966), Enemies of the Roman Order, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Malherbe, A.J. (tr.) (1977), The Cynic Epistles: a study edition. Missoula: Scholars’ Press. Manning, C.E. (1973), ‘Seneca and the Stoics on the equality of the sexes’, Mnemosyne 26: 170–7. Marrou, H-I. (1938), Mousikos Anêr: étude sur les scènes de la vie intellectuelle figurant sur les monuments funéraires romains, Grenoble: Didier & Richard. Marrou, H-I. (1956), A History of Education in Antiquity, tr. G. Lamb, London: Sheed and Ward. Mayer, R.G. (1991), ‘Roman historical exempla in Seneca’, in P. Grimal (ed.), Sénèque et la prose latine (Entretiens Hardt 36), 141–69. Mejer, J. (1978), Diogenes Laertius and his Hellenistic Background, Wiesbaden: Steiner. Mendel, G. (1909), ‘Catalogue des monuments grecs, romains et byzantins du Musé Impérial Ottoman de Brousse’, Bulletin de correspondence hellénique 33: 245–435. Millar, F.G.B. (1977), The Emperor in the Roman World, London: Duckworth. Mitteis, L. and Wilcken, U. (1912), Grundzüge und Chrestomathie der Papyruskunde, Leipzig: Teubner.

Bibliography

269

Moles, J.L. (1978), ‘The career and conversion of Dio Chrysostom’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 98: 79–100. Moles, J.L. (1983a), ‘The date and purpose of the fourth Kingship Oration of Dio Chrysostom’, Classical Antiquity 2: 251–78. Moles, J.L. (1983b), ‘“Honestius quam ambitiosius?” An exploration of the Cynic’s attitude to moral corruption in his fellow men’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 103: 103–25. Moles, J.L. (1990), ‘The Kingship Orations of Dio Chrysostom’, Papers of the Leeds International Latin Seminar 6: 297–375. Moles, J.L. (2005), ‘The thirteenth oration of Dio Chrysostom: complexity and simplicity, rhetoric and moralism, literature and life’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 125: 112–38. Moles, J.L. (unpublished), ‘Deface the currency’, paper delivered at the conference ‘Purse and Paideia’, University of Liverpool, 2001. Momigliano, A. (1941), ‘Epicureans in revolt’, Journal of Roman Studies 31: 149–57 (repr. in Id., Secondo contributo alla storia degli studi classici, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1960). Morales, H. (2004), Vision and Narrative in Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moreschini, C. (1978), Apuleio e il platonismo, Florence: Olschki. Moreschini, C. (1987), ‘Attico: una figura singolare del medioplatonismo’, in ANRW 2.36.1, 477–91. Morford, M. (2002), The Roman Philosophers, London: Routledge. Morgan, T. (1998), Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nesselrath, H-G. et al. (2003), Dio von Prusa. Menschliche Gemeinschaft und göttliche Ordnung: die Borysthenes-Rede, Darmstadt: Wissenschftliche Buchgesellschaft. Nippel, W. (1980), Mischverfassungstheorie und Verfassungsrealität in Antike und früher Neuzeit, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Nock, A.D. (ed.) (1926), Sallustius. Concerning the Gods and the Universe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nock, A.D. (1933), Conversion: the old and the new in religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nollé, J. (1981), ‘Ofellius Laetus, platonischer Philosoph’, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 41: 197–206. Nutton, V. (1978), ‘The beneficial ideology’, in P. Garnsey and C. Whittaker (eds), Imperialism in the Ancient World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 209–21. Nutton, V. (2004), Ancient Medicine. London: Routledge. Oliver, J.H. (1953), The Ruling Power: a study of the Roman Empire in the second century after Christ through the Roman Oration of Aelius Aristides, Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society. Oltramare, A. (1926), Les Origines de la diatribe romaine, Lausanne: Payot. Pembroke, S.G. (1971), ‘Oikeiosis’, in A.A. Long (ed.), Problems in Stoicism, London: Athlone, 114–49. Pernot, L. (tr. and comm.) (1997), Eloges grecs de Rome, Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Pohlenz, M. (1948–9), Die Stoa, 2 vols, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Poliakoff, M. (1982), Studies in the Terminology of Greek Combat Sports, Königstein: Hain. Pomeroy, A.J. (ed. and tr.) (1999), Arius Didymus. Epitome of Stoic Ethics, Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature.

270

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

Powell, J.G.F. (ed. and tr.) (1990), Cicero. On Friendship and the Dream of Scipio, Warminster: Aris & Phillips. Powell, J.G.F (ed.) (1995), Cicero the Philosopher, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Procopé, J. (1993), ‘Epicureans on anger’, in G. Most et al. (eds), Philanthropia kai Eusebeia, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 363–86. Rees, D.A. (1957), ‘Bipartition of the soul in the early Academy’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 77: 112–18. Reydams-Schils, G. (2002), ‘Human bonding and oikeiôsis in Roman Stoicism’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 22: 221–51. Reydams-Schils, G. (2005), The Roman Stoics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Richter, G.M.A. (1965), The Portraits of the Greeks, 3 vols, London: Phaidon (rev. edn R.R.R. Smith, 1 vol., Oxford: Phaidon, 1984). Rist, J.M. (2001), ‘Plutarch’s Amatorius: a commentary on Plato’s theories of love?’, Classical Quarterly 51: 557–75. Robinson, C. (1979), Lucian and his Influence in Europe, London: Duckworth. Rowe, C.J. and Schofield, M. (eds) (2000), The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Russell, D.A. and Wilson, N.G. (ed., tr. and comm.) (1981), Menander Rhetor, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Russell, D.A. (ed.) (1992), Dio Chrysostom. Orations VII, XII, XXXVI, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Russell, D.A. (tr.) (1993), Plutarch. Selected Essays and Dialogues, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rutherford, R. (1989), The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius: a study, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sahin, S. (1974), ‘Ein Stein aus Hadrianoi in Mysien in Bursa’, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 24: 257–8. Salmeri, G. (2000), ‘Dio, Rome, and the civic life of Asia Minor’, in Swain 2000, 53–92. Sandbach, F.H. (1975), The Stoics, London: Chatto & Windus. Schefold, K. (1943), Die Bildnisse der antiken Dichter, Redner und Denker, Basel: Schwabe (rev. edn 1997). Schmitz, T. (1997), Bildung und Macht: zur sozialen und politischen Funktion der zweiten Sophistik in der griechischen Welt der Kaiserzeit, Munich: Beck. Schofield, M. (1991), The Stoic Idea of a City, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (repr. 1999, University of Chicago Press). Seddon, K. (tr.) (2005), Epictetus’ Handbook and the Tablet of Cebes, London: Routledge. Sedley, D. (1989), ‘Philosophical allegiance in the Greco-Roman world’, in M. Griffin and J. Barnes (eds), Philosophia Togata I, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 97–119. Sedley, D. (1997), ‘Plato’s auctoritas and the rebirth of the commentary tradition’, in J. Barnes and M. Griffin (eds), Philosophia Togata II, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 110–29. Sharples, R.W. (tr. and comm.) (1983), Alexander of Aphrodisias. On Fate, London: Duckworth. Sharples, R.W. (1987), ‘Alexander of Aphrodisias: scholasticism and innovation’, in ANRW 2.36.2, 1176–243. Sharples, R.W. (tr.) (1990), Alexander of Aphrodisias. Ethical Problems, London: Duckworth. Sharples, R.W. (1996), Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics, London: Routledge.

Bibliography

271

Sharples, R.W. and Alberti, A. (eds) (1999), Aspasius: the earliest extant commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics, Berlin: de Gruyter. Sharples, R.W. (2000a), ‘Science, philosophy and human life in the ancient world’, in J. Wolff and M. Stone (eds), The Proper Ambition of Science, London: Routledge, 7–27. Sharples, R.W. (2000b), ‘The sufficiency of virtue for happiness: not so easily overturned?’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 46: 121–39. Sharples, R.W. (2004a), Alexander of Aphrodisias. Supplement to On the Soul, London: Duckworth. Sharples, R.W. (2004b), ‘Alexander of Aphrodisias: what is a mantissa?’, in P. Adamson et al. (eds), Philosophy, Science and Exegesis, vol. 1, London: Institute of Classical Studies, 51–69. Sharples, R.W. (2005a), ‘An Aristotelian commentator on the naturalness of justice’, in C.J. Gill (ed.), Virtue, Norms and Objectivity: Issues in Ancient and Modern Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 279–93. Sharples, R.W. (2005b), ‘Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt’, in C. Natali and S. Maso (eds), La catena delle cause, Amsterdam: Hakkert, 197–214. Sharples, R.W. (2005c), ‘The implications of the new Alexander of Aphrodisias inscription’, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 48: 47–56. Sharples, R.W. and Sorabji, R. (eds) (forthcoming), Greek and Roman Philosophy, 100BC to 200AD (BICS Supplement), London: Institute of Classical Studies. Singer, P. (tr.) (1997), Galen. Selected Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Skinner, M.B. (2005), Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture, Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. Slings, S.R. (ed. and comm.) (1999), Plato. Clitophon, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, M.F. (1993), Diogenes of Oenoanda. The Epicurean inscription, Naples: Bibliopolis. Smith, M.F. (1996), The Philosophical Inscription of Diogenes of Oinoanda, Vienna: Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Smith, M.F. (2003), Supplement to ‘Diogenes of Oenoanda. The Epicurean inscription’, Naples: Bibliopolis. Sorabji, R. (ed.) (1997), Aristotle and After, London: Institute of Classical Studies. Sorabji, R. (2000), Emotion and Peace of Mind: from Stoic agitation to Christian temptation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sorabji, R. (ed.) (2004), The philosophy of the commentators, 200–600 AD. Vol. 1 Psychology (with Ethics and Religion), London: Duckworth. Soury, G. (1942), Aperçus de philosophie religieuse chez Maxime de Tyr, platonicien éclectique, Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Stadter, P. (1980), Arrian of Nicomedia, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Swain, S. (1996), Hellenism and Empire: language, classicism, and power in the Greek world, AD 50–250, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Swain, S. (ed.) (2000), Dio Chrysostom: politics, letters, and philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Syme, R. (1958), Tacitus, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tarrant, H. (1983), ‘The date of Anon. In Theaetetum’, Classical Quarterly 33: 161–87. Tatum, J. (1979), Apuleius and ‘The Golden Ass’, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Taylor, C. (1989), Sources of the Self: the making of modern identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

272

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

Thesleff, H. (1961), An Introduction to the Pythagorean Writings of the Hellenistic Period, Åbo: Åbo Akademi. Thesleff, H. (1965), The Pythagorean Texts of the Hellenistic Period, Åbo: Åbo Akademi. Tod, M.N. (1957), ‘Sidelights on the Greek philosophers’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 77: 132–41. Trapp, M.B. (1990), ‘Plato’s Phaedrus in second-century Greek literature’, in D.A. Russell (ed.), Antonine Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 141–73. Trapp, M.B. (1995), ‘Sense of place in the orations of Dio Chrysostom’, in D. Innes et al. (eds), Ethics and Rhetoric, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 163–75. Trapp, M.B. (tr. and comm.) (1997a), Maximus of Tyre. The Philosophical Orations, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Trapp, M.B. (1997b), ‘Philosophical sermons: the “Dialexeis” of Maximus of Tyre’, in ANRW 2.34.3: 1945–76. Trapp, M.B. (1997c), ‘On the Tablet of Cebes’, in Sorabji 1997, 159–80. Trapp, M.B. (2000), ‘Dio’s Plato’, in S. Swain (ed.), Dio Chrysostom, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 213–39. Trapp, M.B. (2003), Greek and Latin Letters: an anthology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trapp, M.B. (2004), ‘Philosophy in a minor key?’, in L. de Blois et al. (eds), The Statesman in Plutarch’s Works, Vol. I, Leiden: Brill, 189–200. Trapp, M.B. (forthcoming), ‘Cynicism’ and ‘Apuleius and Maximus of Tyre’ in Sharples and Sorabji (forthcoming). Veyne, P. (ed.) (1987), A History of Private Life I, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 36–49. Veyne, P. (1990), Bread and Circuses: historical sociology and political pluralism, tr. B. Pearce, London: Penguin (tr. of Le Pain et le cirque: sociologie historique d’un pluralisme politique, Paris: Seuil, 1976). Warren, J. (2000), ‘Diogenes Epikourios: keep taking the tablets’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 120: 144–8. Webb, R. (1997), ‘Imagination and the arousal of the emotions in Greco-Roman rhetoric’, in S. Morton Braund and C. Gill (eds), The Passions in Roman Thought and Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 112–27. Whitmarsh, T.J.G. (2001), Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: the politics of imitation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Whittaker, J. (ed. and comm.) (1990), Alcinoos. Enseignement des doctrines de Platon, Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Wirszubski, C. (1950), Libertas as a Political Ideal, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woolf, G. (1994), ‘Becoming Roman, staying Greek’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 40: 116–43. Wrede, H. (1972), Die spätantike Hermengalerie von Welschbillig. Untersuchung zur Kunsttradition im 4. Jh. n. Chr. und zur allgemeinen Bedeutung des antiken Hermenmals, Berlin: de Gruyter. Zanker, P. (1995), The Mask of Socrates, Berkeley: University of California Press. Ziegler, K. (1964), Plutarchos von Chaironeia, Stuttgart: Druckenmüller.

Index of Works and Passages (selective)

AELIUS ARISTIDES Orations 2: 251 3: 251 26: 198 Sacred Tales: 91

ALCINOUS Didaskalikos (Handbook) 1.1: 8–9 2.3: 223 3.3: 5 4.6: 114 25.3: 47, 114 25.5: 104 25.7: 105 26: 132 27–30: 46 27.2–3: 34 28.4: 9, 47 29: 147–8 32: 74–5, 147 33: 151, 158 34: 170–1, 200–1

ALEXANDER OF APHRODISIAS On Fate: 131–2 On the Soul 3.1: 30 3.3–7: 46 3.28: 108 Supplement on the Soul (Mantissa) 150–3: 45 156–9: 145 159–68: 145–6

ANON. THEAETETUS COMMENTARY (P.BEROL. INV. 9782) 5.18–6.31: 46, 140 7.14–20: 140

APULEIUS On the God of Socrates 13.148: 106 On Plato and his Doctrines 1.12: 132 2.1–28: 5–6 2.2: 46, 148 2.3: 50 2.7: 148 2.13–14: 151–2, 158 2.22: 152 2.24–8: 170–1, 201

‘ARCHYTAS’ (PSEUDO-ARCHYTAS) 33.2–35.30 Thes.: 171, 173, 192, 199– 200 36.2–11 Thes.: 171

[ARISTOTLE] On the Cosmos: 182

ARRIAN Discourses of Epictetus 1.4: 52, 125 1.7.32: 8 1.10: 222 1.11.28–33: 78, 86, 142 1.18.11–16: 86, 91, 142

274

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

1.18.17: 102 1.19.11–15: 140 1.28: 91 1.29.21: 60 1.30.4: 125 2.2.21–6: 57 2.4.2–3: 162 2.10.14–18: 137, 162 2.18.15: 163 2.18.25: 84 2.25: 8 3.2: 119 3.2.4: 79–80 3.2.5–18: 7 3.3.14–15: 85 3.3.17–19: 78 3.7: 219–20 3.7.19: 162 3.7.21: 165 3.16: 45 3.22: 165 3.22.9: 153 3.22.26: 55 3.22.34–7: 153 3.23.29–32: 116–17, 255–6 3.24.60: 60 3.24.84–8: 85 4.1: 127–8 4.1.129–30: 102 4.1.131: 127 4.4.24–6: 60, 86 4.5: 148 Handbook of Epictetus 1.1: 59 1.5: 84–5 3: 60 5: 33–4, 84 29.7: 84 48: 85 51: 55

ASPASIUS Commentary on Nic. Eth. 1.2–2.9: 9 2.6–13: 26 16.9–22: 145 30.5–18: 34 42.13ff.: 76–7 158.1–186.29: 151

ATTICUS Fragments (Des Places) 1: 5

AULUS GELLIUS Attic Nights 7.2.6–13: 131 9.5.8: 40 12.5: 46 19.1: 82

CICERO On Duties 1.107–15: 120–1 On Ends 3.16–34: 42–4, 139 3.65: 143 3.89–91: 143 5: 45–6

DIGEST 27.1.6.7: 252 27.1.6.8: 19–20

DIO CASSIUS Histories 52.2–13: 172

DIO CHRYSOSTOM Orations 1–4: 180–1 7: 203–4, 212 7.148–52: 163 10: 209–10 14: 209–10 15: 209–10 31.140–2: 203 32: 193–4, 196, 197–9, 212, 253 32.7: 214–15 32.17–19: 200 32.29: 215 33: 196–7 34: 197 36: 186, 189–95 36.8: 163

Index of Works and Passages

DIOGENES OF OENOANDA fr. 2: 149–50 fr. 3: 50, 149–50 fr. 34: 72 fr. 44: 72

DIOGENES LAERTIUS 1.17–21: 14 7.39–41: 4–5 7.85–131: 6 7.85–8: 42–4

DIOGENIANUS fr. 2: 130–1 fr. 4: 130–1

275

‘HIPPODAMUS’ (PS.-HIPPODAMUS) 98.12–102.20 Thes.: 171, 192, 199, 201

LUCIAN Fisherman 30: 6 50: 34 Hermotimus 7: 6–7 16: 15, 34 84: 16 Zeus Refuted 18: 130

MARCUS AURELIUS

‘DIOTOGENES’ (PS.-DIOTOGENES) 71.18–75.16 Thes.: 172, 175, 192

‘ECPHANTUS’ (PS.-ECPHANTUS) 79.9–84.8 Thes.: 172, 175–6, 192, 199

GALEN Affections and Errors of the Soul 1.1: 72 1.3: 92–3 1.7.37–9: 116 1.6.28–9: 89 1.8.42–3: 17–18 Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato (PHP) 5.5–6: 90 That the Capacities (QAM) 67.2–16: 90 73.3: 90

HIEROCLES Elements of Ethics (P.Berol. inv. 9780v): 110–12, 248 57G L-S: 138–40 Stob. 4.22.24: 161–4

Meditations 1.16.7: 163 1.17.13: 163 4.48.3: 60 6.13.1: 60 6.30.1: 222

MAXIMUS OF TYRE Orations (Dialexeis) 1: 16, 213 1.3: 22, 148 1.5: 50 1.5–8: 214 4: 16 5: 132 8–9: 106 10: 47, 114–15 11.12: 182 12: 148 13: 131–2 14: 153 15–16: 223 16.4–5: 201 16.6: 9 18–21: 94–5, 158–9, 254–5 19.4: 207 21.7: 47, 115 21.8: 95, 115 22: 212–13, 251 25: 213

276

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

PLUTARCH

26.1: 6 27.6–7: 201 29–33: 16 32.9: 164–5 33.2: 207 33.7: 30 33.7–8: 39 35: 153 37: 56, 251 39.2: 192 41: 132

MUSONIUS RUFUS fr. 3: 205–6 fr. 4: 205–6 fr. 8: 184, 222 f. 11: 204–5 frr. 12–14: 161–3

OENOMAUS OF GADARA fr. 16: 130–1

PAPYRI (see also Anon. Theaetetus Comm., Hierocles) P.Mil.Vogliano 11: 21, 54, 248 P.Oxy. 2891: 243 P.Oxy. 3069: 21, 54 P.Petersburg 13: 21, 248

PHILO JUDAEUS On Congress: 56, 251 Emb. To Gaius: 177 On Flight and Finding 35–6: 224–5 Joseph: 224–5 Moses: 172, 176–7, 224–5

‘PHYNTIS’ (PS.-PHYNTIS) 151.18–153.7 Thes.: 205

Advice to a Couple: 206–7 Consol. to Apol. 118de: 61 Dialogue on Love: 95–6, 160–1, 205–6 Divine Sign: 107 Face in the Moon: 107–8 Fate: 132 Female Heroism: 205 Friend and Flatterer: 152–4 Inquisitiveness 516–17: 90–1 520–2: 90–1 Late Vengeance: 108 Listening 1–2: 18–19 Moral Virtue: 73–5, 82 449ab: 82 Old Men: 194–5, 202–3, 223–4, 237–8 796de: 22 Peace of Mind 473b–474a: 119 474d: 61 475a–476c: 87 477cd: 60, 88 Philosophers Should Converse: 224 Political Precepts: 194–5, 223–4, 237–8 Progress in Virtue: 46 79b–83e: 61, 82, 118 85e–86a: 61 Restraining Wrath 452f–453a: 62 454a: 61, 87 463de: 61, 62 464bd: 87 Stoic Self-contrad. 1043bc: 218 Study of Poetry: 56 Life of Dion 1: 15

POSIDONIUS fr. 88 E-K: 4

QUINTILIAN Education of the Orator 1 Pref. 9–17: 249–51 6.2: 239–40 10.1.81–4, 123–31: 246

SENECA

[PLATO] Clitopho 407b: 55

Epistles 1.1–3: 55

Index of Works and Passages 7: 213–14 9: 154 13.10: 61 20.3: 61 24.19: 118 29.10: 61 42.1–2: 50 44.1–2: 50 45.5: 7 47: 208–9 65: 8 65.16–22: 102–3 68.6–8: 61 71.36: 124 73.1–2: 230 75: 52 76.9–10: 30 77.34: 61 80.3–4: 124 81.21: 152 85: 78 88: 56, 251 89.14: 6 90.1: 50 90.3: 6 90.46: 50 92: 33 92.3: 119 94: 56–8 95: 57–8 99.15–26: 81, 143 116.1: 79 116.4–5: 51 121: 42–4, 112–14, 118 Consol. to Marcia 1.1: 205 16.2–4: 205 25–6: 103 Natural Questions 1 Pref.: 9–10 On Anger 1.9: 78 2.2–4: 80–2 2.3.5: 78 2.4.1: 124 3.3: 78 3.36: 61 On Benefits 1.4.2: 136 1.6.1: 136 On Clemency: 177–80 1.3.2: 137 1.22–4: 200

277

2.5–6: 142–3 On the Constancy of the Sage 10.4: 79 On Leisure 1.4: 137 3.1–5: 221–2 4–6: 221–2 On Peace of Mind 1.10–12: 220–1 2.9: 221 3.1: 221 6–7.2: 221 7.4: 152 On Providence 5.6–8: 129 On the Shortness of Life 18: 220

SEXTUS EMPIRICUS Outline of Pyrrhonism 1.1–17: 14, 16 1.8: 37 1.23–4: 38 1.26–9: 50 1.28–30: 37–8 Against the Professors 7.17–19: 4–5

‘STHENIDAS’ (PS.-STHENIDAS) 187.10–188.13 Thes.: 172, 175

STOBAEUS Florilegium 2.7.2: 5, 45 2.7.3: 34 2.7.5–12: 6, 151 2.7.13–26: 5, 55, 146, 151 2.7.24: 9 2.31.123: 205 2.31.126: 205 4.1.93–5: 171, 192, 199, 201–2 4.1.135–8: 171, 173, 192, 199–200 4.5.61: 171 4.7.61–6: 172, 175–6, 192, 199 4.22: 161–4 4.23.61: 205 4.27.23: 138–9

TABLET OF CEBES 24, 28–9, 32, 54–5, 56, 251

This page intentionally left blank

General Index (see also Index of Works and Passages)

Achilles Tatius 242, 246 Aelius Aristides 91, 198, 251 Agricola, Cn. Iulius 253 Albinus 26, 105 Alcinous 5, 8-9, 34, 45-7, 52, 55, 72-3, 100, 104-5, 114, 132, 135, 147-8, 151, 155, 1589, 170-1, 200-1, 222-3 Alexander of Aphrodisias 12, 23-4, 30, 45, 100, 108, 112, 1312, 145-6, 169, 247 Alexandria 193, 196-9, 212 anamnêsis 47, 114-15 Andronicus 12, 77 anger 71, 73, 78, 80-1, 86, 91-3, 117-18 Anonymous Theaetetus Commentary 46, 140, 242, 248 anticipation (of ill) 61 Antiochus of Ascalon 16, 45-6, 112-14, 141, 147 Antipater 136, 161 Antisthenes 156 Antoninus Pius 19, 252 Antonius 72 apatheia 68-70, 78-82, 84, 87, 92-3 see also metriopatheia appropriate action see kathêkon appropriation see oikeiôsis Apuleius 5, 12, 24-6, 45, 50, 52, 105-6, 132, 135, 148,

151-2, 158-9, 170-1, 182, 201, 242, 247 Aquila 54 ‘Archytas’ 55, 171, 173, 192, 199 Aristo of Chios 4, 56, 57 Aristotle 3-4, 34-5, 63-5, 151-2, 163, 216-17 Arrian 7, 52, 82 Aspasius 9, 12, 34, 76-8, 145, 151 assent see synkatathesis ataraxia 31, 37-8, 40-1, 48-50, 70-1, 84 ateleia (immunity) 19-20, 246, 252 Athens, as centre for philosophia x, 24, 246-7 Atticus 5, 12, 105 Augustine, St 26, 123, 126 Aulus Gellius 12, 24, 82, 131 autonomy 126-33 banishment 226-7 beauty 94-5 body 99-109 Boethus (Peripatetic) 12, 77 Borysthenes 185-6, 188-90 Brunt, P. 209, 29 Brutus, Marcus 136, 228 Caesar, C. Iulius 120, 227-8 Cato, M. Porcius (the Younger) 21, 120-1, 139, 141, 227-8 chance see Fortune

280

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

‘Charondas’ 217 children 43, 141, 202 Christianity xiii, 13, 62, 229, 257 Chrysippus x, 14, 42-5, 51, 54, 6970, 81, 83, 90, 93, 110-12, 131, 141, 151, 157, 164, 166, 187, 218, 248 Cicero 11, 34, 42, 44, 83, 110-13 city see polis civic values 167-8. 197-8, 237-40 Cleanthes 14, 41, 66, 69-70, 83, 93, 129, 136, 151, 256 clemency 177-80 concord (homonoia) 190-2, 192-5 consistency 119-20 constitutions (political) 170-4 democracy 172 mixed constitution 171-2 monarchy 172-3, 174-84 contemplation 3, 8-10, 222-5 continuity 120-1 Cornutus 227 corruption by association 45, 49, 59, 153-4, 213 see also seductiveness of things cosmos as model for political order 181-2, 186-90, 232 as object of contemplation 3, 8-10 in philosophical myth 106-8, 187-9 Crates 150, 165 Cynicism 36-7, 49-50, 93-4, 195, 196, 205, 209-10 concern for others 150 erôs 156 marriage 164-5 politics 220, 222 status as sect 36-7, 93 virtue and happiness 37, 49-50 see also Crates, Demetrius, Diogenes, Oenomaus daimones 105-9, 180

Demetrius 11, 150, 169, 220 democracy see constitutions Demonax 22, 150 diatribe 93 Dillon, J. xii Dio Cassius 172 Dio Chrysostom 11, 24-7, 55, 169, 173-4, 180-2, 183, 185-90, 193-4, 195-9, 203-5, 209-10, 212, 214-15, 222, 227, 245, 247, 248, 253 Diogenes (Cynic) 4, 128, 150, 156, 164, 209 Diogenes of Oenoanda 21, 24, 40-1, 48-9, 72, 99-100, 149-50, 219 Diogenianus 130 ‘Diotogenes’ 172, 175, 192 Domitian 227-8, 230 dreams 61-2 ‘eclecticism’ 16-18, 72-3 ‘Ecphantus’ 172, 175-6, 192 education see liberal arts, paideia, philosophia emotion(s) 31-2, 63-97 and bodily constitution 89-91 and pathos 68-70 in philosophy and rhetoric 239-41 therapy of 82-91 Empire, Roman administration of 166-8 establishment of ix-x, 166 reflected in political theory 172-3, 174-84, 189, 231 see also ateleia; Antoninus Pius, Domitian, Gaius, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, Nero, Trajan, Vespasian encomium, civic 197-8 entertainment, public 211-15, 239

General Index Epictetus 7-8, 11, 13, 15, 20, 23, 33, 39-40, 45, 52, 55, 57, 60-1, 62, 79-80, 84-6, 91-3, 101-2, 116-17, 120, 121, 123-30, 136-7, 140-2, 143, 148, 153, 162-3, 169, 205, 220, 222, 228, 255-6 Epicureanism concern for others 137, 149-50, 162 emotion 70-1 erôs 93-4, 155-6 happiness 39-41 human development 48-9 marriage 164-5 politics 218-19, 219-20, 227 propagandizing 149 providence 132-3 reason in 41 soul 99-101 see also Antonius, Diogenes of Oenoanda, Epicurus Epicurus 1, 4, 16, 40, 49, 59, 72, 83, 100, 154 epochê 37-9 erôs 93-6, 155-65, 242-3 ethics definition of 2, 5-6 place in philosophia 3-5, 6-13 eudaimonia 2, 28-41 Eudorus 5, 34, 45, 112 euergetism 149, 168, 236-8 eupatheiai 35, 66-9, 74-5, 79-80 Euphrates of Tyre 11, 21, 23 exemplum (personal example) 58-9, 88 Fate and responsibility 129-33 Favorinus 12 ‘first movements’ 80-2 flatterer (kolax) 154 Fortune (chance, tychê) 28, 32, 53, 127, 208 Frede, M. xi-xiii, 11 freedom 84, 86-7, 126-8, 209-10

281

friendship 150-5 Fronto, M. Cornelius 251 Gaius (Caligula) 174, 177 Galen 12, 17-18, 72, 78, 89-91, 116 gladiators 213-14, 238 God, gods 29, 31 (assimilation to), 44, 128-30, 175-6, 179, 180-2, 187, 191-2 Goldhill, S. 242 goods, external 31-5 Griffin, M. 178, 229 Hadrian 19 hairesis x, 13-18 happiness see eudaimonia Hecato 136, 139 Heracles 154, 181 Heraclides 54, 248 Hierocles 11, 40, 42, 110-14, 136, 138-40, 161-4, 248 Hipparchia 165 ‘Hippodamus’ 171, 192, 195, 201-2 homoiôsis theôi 31 homosexuality 157-61, 162-4, 190, 204, 236 honour 31, 167-8, 236, 238 hormê 42-3, 59, 65-6 impressions see phantasiai indifferents (adiaphora) 33, 43-4, 66-8, 85-6 individuality 116-17 inquisitiveness 88-9 Inwood, B. xiii, 111, 126 Joseph 224-5 justice 134-5, 139-40, 191-2, 199-200 Kahn, C. 123-6 kathêkon, kathêkonta 6, 42-4, 135-42, 161-4, 220-2 kingship literature 174-5

282

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

Latin, as language for philosophia x, xiii, 11, 43, 68, 80-1, 123-6 law, legislation 22-3, 173-4, 176-7, 179, 186-7, 199-200 letter-writing 21, 51-2, 54, 84, 152 liberal arts 56, 251 likeness to God see homoiôsis theôi logic 2, 4-5, 7-8 Long, A. xii-xiii, 80, 125 Longus 242 Lucian 6, 13, 14-15, 16, 21, 22, 24, 34, 130, 243, 253-4 Lucretius 41, 49, 71, 156 MacMullen, R. 17, 229 Marcus Aurelius xiii, 11, 19, 52, 163, 169, 222, 246, 251 marriage 161-5, 205-7, 242 Maximus of Tyre 6-7, 9, 12-13, 16, 22, 24-7, 30, 39-40, 47, 50, 52-3, 56, 76, 94-6, 103-4, 106, 114-15, 132, 148, 1534, 158-9, 182, 192-3, 201, 203, 207, 212-14, 223, 251, 254-5 Menander Rhetor 198 metriopatheia 37, 50, 64-5, 69-70, 78-9, 82, 86-9, 92-3 see also apatheia Moderatus of Gades 12 Moles, J. 209-10 Momigliano, A. 227 monarchy see constitutions Morford, M. 11 moral character, collective 195-9, 211-15 Moses 176-7, 225 Musonius Rufus 11, 23-4, 117, 161-4, 169, 174, 184, 204-5, 222, 227, 255 myths (philosophical) 106-8, 187-8

Nature 31, 40-1, 47, 48, 50, 128, 137, 141, 161, 179, 206-7 nature and instruction 55-6 Neo-Pythagoreans 12, 170, 1726, 191-2, 199, 201-2, 205, 217 see also ‘Archytas’, ‘Charondas’, ‘Diotogenes’, ‘Ecphantus’, ‘Hippodamus’, Moderatus, Nicomachus, Numenius, ‘Phyntis’, ‘Sthenidas’, ‘Zaleucus’ Nero 173, 174, 177, 227, 230 Nicomachus of Gerasa 12 Nicostratus 136 Numenius 12, 105 Oenomaus of Gadara 130-1 oikeiôsis 42-6, 110-14, 137-42, 145-7, 242 old age, the old 202-3 otium 220-2 paideia 55-6, 88, 180-1, 244-9, 249-51, 254-6 Panaetius 11, 51, 57, 120, 135-6 passion see pathos pathos, pathê 31, 63-97 in rhetoric 245-7 stages of 80-2 Peregrinus 150 Peripateticism concern for others 145-7 emotion 35, 64-5, 76-8 human development 45-7 image of sect 15, 34 reason 8-10, 30-2 revival as sect xi soul 46, 64-5, 100-1 sufficiency of virtue 34 virtue 32 see also oikeiôsis, pathos; Alexander of Aphrodisias, Aristotle, Aspasius Persius 253

General Index persona (prosôpon) 57, 120, 135-6, 219 Petronius 253 phantasiai, right use of 45, 59, 656, 85-6 Philo of Larissa 54, 58 Philo Judaeus 56, 172, 174, 1767, 224-50, 251 Philodemus 71 Philopator 132 philosophia administrative status 19-20, 246, 252 as ‘art of life’ 2, 6-7 and conventional values 233-43, 249-56 definition of 1-2, 13 and education 18-20, 56-7, 243-5, 249-51 evaluations of 245-56 history of ix-xiii, 1, 3-5, 14 imagery for 4-5, 6-9, 22-3, 39, 41, 53-4, 55, 61, 76, 82-3, 87, 95-6, 104, 114-15, 197, 255-6 Imperial Chairs (Athens) xi, 24, 246-7 kings and 181, 183-4, 224-5 parts of 2-13 philosophia/philosophein as terms in general usage 246-7 ‘philosophical opposition’ 22630, 256-7. philosophical texts and writing 51-4, 93, 248-9, 254-6 and ‘philosophy’ 1-2, 13, 23 polemic 14-5, 32-5, 38, 39-40, 49, 51, 73-5, 82, 111-14, 140, 162 and political participation 21525 resistance to 249-56 and rhetoric 18, 24-7, 234-6, 239-41, 245-6, 249-51, 254-5

283

satirized 254 sects, sectarian choice 13-18 in society 18-23, 195-9, 211-15, 243-9 women and 206-7 philosophical martyrs 227-8 philosophoi, portraits of 247-8 inscriptions relating to 24, 26, 246-7 who count as? 23-7 ‘Phyntis’ 205 physics importance in Imperial period 11-13 relation to ethics 2-10, 13, 31, 35 pity 127, 143, 178 Plato 1, 3-4, 63-5, 94-6, 154, 156-7, 159, 160, 170-1, 181, 183, 191, 200-1, 216-17, 240, 251 Platonism concern for others 147-8 emotion 35, 63-5, 73-6, 86-9 erôs 94-6, 157-61 Fate 132 human development 45-8, 50-1 political thought 172-5, 200-1, 216-18, 222-4, 232, 237-8 reason 8-10, 30-2, 35-6, 74-6 revival as dogmatic sect xi self-discovery 114-16 soul 46, 63-5, 99-109 sufficiency of virtue 34-5 virtue 32 see also anamnêsis, oikeiôsis, pathos; Alcinous, Apuleius, Atticus, Maximus of Tyre, Plutarch, Taurus pleasure 30, 39-41 Pliny (the Younger) 232 Plotinus xi, xii, 109 Plutarch 11-12, 15, 18-19, 21-2, 24, 34, 40, 46, 51, 53, 56, 60-2, 73-5 (?), 82(?), 86-9, 91, 92-3, 94-6, 106-8, 117-19, 152-4, 160-61, 169, 172,

284

Philosophy in the Roman Empire

194-5, 199-200, 202-3, 205-7, 223-4, 237-8, 254, 256 Polemo 19 polis 185-202, 231-2 poverty, the poor 203-5 Posidonius 5, 11, 58, 70, 78, 81, 89-90 Potamo 17 precepts (vs. theory) 57-8 progress, moral 28-9, 42-62, 11720, 152-5, 195-9 (collective) progressive (prokoptôn) 50-1, 58, 80, 153-4, 158 prohairesis 102, 123-5, 128-9 protreptic 54-5 punishment 108, 178-80, 193-4, 199-200 Pythagoras 114, 217, 248 Quadra, Hostius 243 Quintilian 239-40, 245-6, 249-51, 253 reason 30-41, 42-5, 47, 49, 99-109 see also Epicureanism, Platonism, Scepticism, Stoicism recollection see anamnêsis redescription (relabelling) 60, 85-6, 208 ‘Roman philosophy’ x, 11 see also Latin Roman values xii, 177, 189, 235, 252-3 Rutherford, R. 229 Sarapion 54 Scepticism xii, 16 concept of good life 37-9, 50 emotion 70, 72 politics 219 reason in 38-9 see also Sextus Empiricus

Schmitz, T. 244-5 security 29, 31-2 seductiveness of things 44-5, 59 see also corruption by association selection (eklogê) 66-7 Self, the 98-133 self-discovery 109-116 self-formation, philosophical and other 233-41 self-perception 110-14 self-scrutiny 59-62, 83-9, 1212 Seneca 6-10, 11, 15, 21, 24, 30, 33, 42, 50-2, 55-6, 57-8, 59, 61, 78-82, 92-3, 102-3, 108, 110-12, 117-19, 122-6, 127, 136-7, 142-3, 152, 154-5, 169, 177-80, 200, 205, 207, 208-9, 214, 220-2, 230, 243, 251 Sextius 61 Sextus Empiricus 12, 37-9, 50, 70, 72, 219 sexual desire see erôs sexual morality 162-4, 196, 204, 242-3 slaves, slavery 207-10 Socrates 1, 3, 20, 55, 94-5, 106, 128, 142, 148, 158, 194, 196, 224, 237, 247-8 sociability 45, 135-50, 163 social classes 200-10 solidarity, social 161-3, 190-5, 241-2 Sorabji, R. xii, 81, 125 soul 30, 63-5, 74, 89-90, 99-109 statues 24, 26, 238, 246-8 ‘Sthenidas’ 172, 174, 175 Stilpo 155 Stoicism autonomy 127-32 concern for others 135-44, 220-2 consistency 119-20 emotion 35, 65-70, 78-82, 82-6 erôs 156-7, 161-4

General Index Fate 44, 67, 68, 129-32 freedom 84-5, 127-8, 209-10 friendship 151-2 human development 42-5, 50-1, 110-14 human warmth 79-80, 136-44 marriage 161-4 political thought 172-4, 177-81, 183-4,185-94, 216-18, 220-2, 227-30 reason 30-2, 42-5, 66-8, 135-8, 141-2, 173-4, 186-7, 190-1 Sage 44, 50-1, 66-7, 117, 139, 152, 163, 221 soul 65-6, 99-103 virtue 32, 67 sufficiency of 32-4 ideas of will in 122-6 see also apatheia, eupatheiai, hormê, indifferents, kathêkon, Nature, oikeiôsis, pathos, phantasiai, selection, synkatathesis; Chrysippus, Cleanthes, Epictetus, Hierocles, Marcus Aurelius, Musonius Rufus, Panaetius, Posidonius, Seneca, Zeno Suetonius 243 suicide 60, 120-1, 127, 227-8

synkatathesis 59, 66-7, 123 Tacitus, Cornelius 227-8, 253 Tablet of Cebes 28-9, 53-4, 56, 251 Tarsus 193-4, 200-1 Taurus, Calvenus 12, 24, 34-5, 40, 112 Theon 54, 248 Thrasea Paetus 228 time 117-19 Trajan 19, 174, 180, 246, 252 Trimalchio 253 truth to self 120-1 tyrant 88, 127-8, 180-1, 228 virtue, virtues 32, 67 sufficiency of virtue 32-5 Vespasian 19, 227-8, 230, 246, 252 voluntas 124-6 Will, the 122-6, 129-33 women, status of 205-6 and philosophia 206-7 Xenocrates 1, 19, 105 ‘Zaleucus’ 217 Zeno x, 1, 14, 43, 68-9, 81, 136, 140, 155, 157, 163, 166, 191, 216-17, 256

285