Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics

An Introduction to Hellenistic Philosophy

R.W. Sharples

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134836390
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Altertum

Short and accessible Arranged by topics rather than philosophical schools Most recent work on the subject Looks at implications for contemporary issues

1

HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHY

Aims, context, personalities, sources

AIMS AND CONTEXT

So now I lay aside poetry and other trifles; what is true and proper, that I care about, and ask about, and am totally involved in…. And so that you shan’t ask me under what leader, and in what philosophical household, I seek protection, I have not signed up to swear an oath to any master, but come ashore as a guest wherever the storm carries me. At one moment I become active and plunge into the waves of the state, a guardian of true virtue and her unbending servant; at another moment I stealthily slip back into following the precepts of Aristippus, and try to be superior to circumstances rather than submitting to them.

(Horace, Epistles 1.1.10–19)

Horace is writing a poem, and we must allow for poetic licence. But his remarks may stand at the start of this discussion as a reminder – along with many other passages in Roman literature – that it was the philosophies developed in the Hellenistic period, that is to say after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, that provided the intellectual context for the late Republic and early Empire. (The unbending servant of true virtue, active in the affairs of state, is Stoic; Aristippus, like Epicurus, advocated the view that pleasure is the goal of life, but in a form with which Epicurus disagreed, as we will see in Chapter Five.) Earlier Greek philosophical writings – in particular, Plato’s dialogues – were both studied and influential; but even they were read in this period in the light of Hellenistic preoccupations. Cicero’s philosophical writings reflect his education in Hellenistic philosophical debate; Lucretius turns dry Epicurean prose treatises into moving rhetorical poetry; Seneca’s prose writings explicitly, and his tragedies implicitly, draw upon Stoic philosophy – and Epicurean too. Virgil in the sixth book of the Aeneid constructs from Stoic and Platonic-Pythagorean materials an account of the destiny of the human soul and its place in the cosmos which suits his own patriotic purposes; the former slave Epictetus and the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (both indeed writing in Greek) each presents Stoic teachings in his own way.

The philosophies of the Stoa and of Epicurus provided Horace and other Romans not just with abstract philosophical doctrines or with material for literary exploitation, but with views on how life should be lived. That was the explicit concern of both schools. It is an aim that deserves to be taken seriously and will be taken seriously in this book, and that for two reasons.

First, the time is ripe to do so in terms of the progress of modern scholarship. Hellenistic philosophy, as presented in the Latin writings of (above all) Cicero and Seneca, was a staple of western European education, and thus an indirect source of practical guidance, up until the nineteenth century. Indeed in the latter part of that century presentation copies of the writings of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, along with Fitzgerald’s version of Omar Khayyam, played among free-thinkers something of the role of gifts to the young on significant occasions that leather-bound Bibles and prayer books played among the Christian devout; and the tone of some of the older books on Stoicism, in particular, still to be found in libraries is oddly devotional to the modern ear. But the other side of the coin was that in some academic circles Hellenistic philosophy came to be seen as a period of decline; partly because of the nineteenth-century swing towards things Greek rather than things Roman, combined with assumptions about a decline of Greek culture generally in the Hellenistic period, and partly because the pre-eminence of Plato and Aristotle made it seem as if the history of Western philosophy could be studied without much reference to the Hellenistic period. Moreover, in England at least in the middle years of the twentieth century a practical concern with how people should live was not seen as a prominent part of the business of philosophy. That would indeed have seemed absurd to Plato, and even to Aristotle, departmentalised though his view of philosophy was; but, for better or worse – and as events showed, for the better – it became necessary to re-establish the credentials of Hellenistic philosophy as philosophy if it was to be taken seriously.

That re-establishment has been one of the major achievements of twentieth-century classical scholarship. It has become clear, for example, that Stoic logic and philosophy of language anticipated recent developments in ways that had not previously been realised, partly because of the nature and obscurity of the sources, of which more shortly, but partly because the departmentalisation of modern scholarship had driven a wedge between philology and contemporary philosophical concerns.¹

Fortunately, the philosophical credentials of Hellenistic philosophy can now be regarded as re-established. We can thus safely restore the question ‘what is the best way for people to live?’ to the central position that it held for the Hellenistic schools themselves, without risking the charge that this is moralising rather than philosophy. And that charge would in any case – which brings us to the second point – be far less likely in the present-day intellectual context, where the question may seem particularly urgent. Traditional values and institutions have been rejected or weakened by self-styled modernisers of various types. Recent attempts to reduce all human activity to economic competition are being questioned. And religious or quasi-religious cults and fundamentalisms of various types hasten to fill the gap by offering answers to moral questions.

The search for values by which to live, the question of the proper place of competition in human life, and the tension between sectarian dogma and argument were indeed already issues in the period of thought we are studying. This search for values has sometimes been linked – especially by those who saw it as moralising rather than philosophy, and so as evidence of decline – to the changed political and social situation after the conquests of Alexander the Great. There is some truth in this picture, though to question traditional moral and political arrangements had already been the business of philosophy for over a century, since the Sophists in the fifth century BC. But, regardless of specific similarities between then and now, we may have something to learn from earlier thinkers, if not about how human beings in fact ought to live, at least about what sort of question that might be asked and how we might set about answering it. More than one recent writer has suggested that the ancient Greek culture that preceded philosophy proper might be worth studying in this connection;² and the same may be true of the philosophy of the Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics as well. At least we can learn from what we may find to be their mistakes or limitations. In a more immediate way one recent writer has told of the strength he gained, when a prisoner of war, from the writings of the Stoic Epictetus.³

It is perhaps possible to study ancient philosophical doctrines, or ancient works of literature, in a purely antiquarian way without being motivated by contemporary concerns in doing so and without letting ourselves be affected by them at all. But even if such detachment is humanly possible, which seems doubtful, it seems needlessly restrictive, provided always that we retain a sense of historical perspective and seek to be aware of differences between ourselves and the ancients as well as of similarities.

THE PARTS OF HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHY AND THE ARRANGEMENT OF THIS BOOK

The Stoics conventionally divided philosophy into three parts: logic, or the study of reason; physics, or the study of nature and the cosmos; and ethics, or the study of human nature and how we should live. (Stoic ‘logic’ was wider in its scope than the modern term would suggest, including not only our logic but also, on the one hand, epistemology or the theory of knowledge, and on the other hand, the study of language and rhetoric.) This threefold division became standard in later ancient philosophy. Epicurus rejected logic in our sense of the term and indeed rhetoric too, and confined the first part to theory of knowledge or, as he called it, ‘canonic’ (from kanôn, a rule or yardstick by which we can judge the truth). There were debates within the Stoic school over the order in which the three parts should be studied; there was however general agreement that theory of knowledge came first, since unless we know how we can know anything we have no foundations on which to build. The Sceptics, denying that we can know anything, in a sense got no further than this first stage.

There are two ways in which a survey of Hellenistic philosophy could proceed, either by schools or by topics. In the present book the latter arrangement has been selected, for two reasons. Although the Stoic and Epicurean doctrines were in some respects diametrically opposed, they also have many features in common, and an approach by topics will serve to bring out these differences and similarities. There are ancient precedents for recognition of the common property that the schools shared; Seneca, though writing as a Stoic, is ready to make use of Epicurean doctrines too where they suit his purpose:

Let us thank God that no one can be forced to stay alive; we can trample on necessity itself. ‘Epicurus said that/ you say; ‘what are you doing with what belongs to someone else?’ My property is – the truth. I will continue to hurl Epicurus at you, so that those people who swear oaths of loyalty and reckon not what is being said, but who said it, may realise that what is best is common property.

(Seneca, Letters on Morals 12.10–11;
see also Chapter Five)

An arrangement by topics will also facilitate comparison with modern preoccupations – most obviously in ethics, but not only there.

THE PERSONALITIES AND THE SOURCES

A major difficulty in the study of Hellenistic philosophy is the relative lack of primary sources. Something therefore needs to be said straight away about the nature of our evidence; and this can helpfully be combined with an introduction to the major personalities in the various schools.⁴

Epicureanism

Epicurus, born in 341 BC in Samos to a family of Athenian colonists, set up his school, the Garden, in Athens in 307/6 BC. The story is told that he was moved to study philosophy by the inability of his schoolteacher, when he came to the line in Hesiod’s Theogony (116) ‘First of all Chaos came to be’, to explain to him where Chaos came from. His philosophy is a development – though with very significant modifications, as we shall see – of the doctrines of the fifth-century atomists Leucippus and Democritus, and he was taught by an atomist philosopher, Nausiphanes; according to ancient reports Epicurus disparaged his teacher and other philosophers generally, but some of these reports reflect the tendentious hostility of a member of his school who had quarrelled with him.⁵ Epicurus died in 270 BC.

His writings have survived partly by manuscript transmission and partly in papyrus fragments. Diogenes Laertius, in his popularising account of The Lives of the Philosophers (probably written in about 200 AD), devoted the whole of the tenth and final book to Epicurus, and included in their entirety three letters of Epicurus and the collection of Principal Doctrines. The first letter, to Herodotus (not the historian), is a summary of the whole of Epicurus’ system intended as an aide-memoire for those already familiar with it; the second, to Pythocles, which may in its present form be only a summary of the original, is concerned with astronomical and related phenomena; the third, to Menoeceus, is concerned with ethics. We also have a collection of sayings of Epicurus in a Vatican gnomologium or anthology.

In addition, we possess extensive fragments of Epicurus’ other writings – and especially of his treatise On Nature, in thirty-seven books – among the papyri excavated from the library of the villa at Herculaneum, buried under liquid mud by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, of one of the family named Piso, a family which had included the patron of the Epicurean Philodemus (p. 7). At Pompeii red-hot ash from the same eruption destroyed all combustible material; but the mud that engulfed Herculaneum, by cutting off the air, ensured the preservation, in carbonised form, of wooden objects such as furniture – and also of documents on papyrus. Part of the library was excavated in the eighteenth century; the remainder is still buried under what has long since become not mud but solid rock. Needless to say, the unrolling and reading, let alone the interpretation, of texts on carbonised rolls of papyrus has been a slow process, not helped by the obscurity of Epicurus’ prose style, and much still remains to be fully understood even from what has already been excavated.

Epicurus asserted that words should be used in their immediate and most obvious sense (ad Hdt. 38). Laudable though this aim might be, and in accordance with the Epicurean emphasis on clarity, Epicurus, who rejected traditional culture, failed to realise that making one’s writing attractive to the general reader can actually help in communicating one’s point, and while he certainly uses each word in a single well-defined sense he achieves this by concocting obscure jargon which makes his writings heavy going for the uninitiated. But then it is not clear how far Epicurus intended his writings to appeal to those who were not already devotees of his system; the Letter to Herodotus is explicitly (35) intended for those familiar with Epicurus’ teachings already, and while it may be wrong to judge Epicurus himself by his followers’ summarising of the first four Principal Doctrines in a ‘fourfold remedy’, an amulet against doubt – ‘God is not to be feared, death should cause no apprehension, and the good is easily obtained, the terrible easily endured’ (LS 25J) – Epicureanism does seem to have about it something of the closed world of the religious sect. It was to have distinguished adherents, including Romans active in politics in the first century BC (notably Cassius, the conspirator against Julius Caesar); on the face of it such political involvement fits oddly with a doctrine that advocated withdrawal from politics. It seems that one could be influenced by Epicurean principles without necessarily adopting an Epicurean way of life altogether.⁶

The Herculaneum papyri preserve works by other Epicureans, notably Philodemus (c.110–c.40/35 BC). Philodemus wrote distinguished Greek elegiac poetry, but explicitly rejected the use of poetry as a medium for conveying philosophical thought. The Latin writer Lucretius, however, in the 50s BC, gave some aspects of Epicure...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Hellenistic philosophy: aims, context, personalities, sources
• 2 How do we know anything?
• 3 What is reality?
• 4 What are we?
• 5 How can I be happy?
• 6 What about other people?
• 7 Epilogue
• Notes
• Suggestions for further reading
• Index