Storia della Filosofia Romana

Speranza

STORIA DELLA FILOSOFIA ROMANA

The bulk of the problems we detect as we trace the history of Ancient Roman philosophy is concerned with specific topics and arguments in Roman Imperial-period, theoretical – or speculative, and also ethical and political theorizing, and with the question of how this theorizing on practical matters fitted in – or failed to fit in – with other contemporary habits of thought and schemes of value within the elite culture.

The stage needs to be set with a discussion of the understanding of the distinction between speculative and ethics – and of the larger “institution” of philosophy – within which the theorizing on speculative but also practical matters and the argument took place.

We need to discuss a range of contextual issues:
a)   the scope of ‘ethics’
b)    the place of ‘ethics’ in ‘philosophy’
c)     the varieties of ‘philosophy’ between which choices could be made, and
d)     something of the place of ‘philosophy’in culture and society in the first and second centuries CE.
We neeed to consider the history and the internal “geography” of philosophia.
We need to backtrack some three to four hundred years: to the fourth century a.C., which is when the kind of philosophy and ethics still current in the Roman Imperial period was brought into existence – or rather, when the kind of philosophia still current was established.
For “philosophia antica” – 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.
This “philosophia antica” (like ‘philosophy’) was not some kind of natural phenomenon.
“Philosophia antica” 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
a.C.
Things that can arguably be labelled in Latin “philosophia” (Italian, “filosofia”) were certainly going on already in Greek-speaking communities in the sixth century.
But the construction of the philosophia that the Ancient Romans are concerned with is essentially the work of thinkers operating in Athens between about 400 and about 300 a.C.
Roman philosophy draws from the first generation of the pupils of Socrates (above all Plato), via the pupils of these pupils (especially ARISTOTELE), to the great systematizers and definers of rival, institutionalized sects at the end of the century (Senocrate, Zenone, Epicuro).
It was these thinkers – the “accademici”, the “peripatetics”, the stoics, the scettici and the epicureans 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 thinkers specified it, then of their idea of the internal structure in which theoretical or speculative but practical and ‘ethics’ took its place along with other objects of study and forms of attention.
The point of the exercise, the philosophers proclaim, was nothing more than (and nothing less than) human fulfilment, or happiness (“eudaimonia” – “la buona vita”).
On the understanding, which all the philsophers 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 “accademic” study aimed at satisfying the over-developed curiosity of the idle few, or the ‘elite’.
 “Philosophia” is an indispensable necessity for anyone with a properly informed desire to live well and be happy.

 It was a science, or ars, a “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 NOT an 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?’
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’ (“philosophia moralis” – as in the Oxford White’s Chair of Moral Philosophy) naturally.

But along with ‘ethics’, ‘logic’ (‘propedeutica, philosophia rationalis, as in Wykeham Chair of Logic) and ‘physics’ as well (or “philosophia naturalis” – Oxford will add, “Waynflete Chair of META-physical Philosophy”)
This trio could be described as the ‘areas’, ‘parts’ or ‘kinds’ of philosophia, or alternatively as the three ‘philosophies’ (‘logical’, ‘physical’, ‘ethical’).
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 subject-matter
assigned to them were notably wider.

“Physikê” (“philosophia naturalis”) embraced metaphysics, theology (which could be called ‘first physics’), and psychology (“psichologia rationalis”) as well as questions of the make-up and workings of the physical world.

Logikê, “philosophia rationalis”, “dialectica”, ‘logic’, dealt with epistemology and linguistics as well as forms and procedures of reasoning and argument.

 

“Ethikê” – “philosophia moralis” -- ‘ethics’, covered politics and the proper organization of the household community, as well as questions to do with values, character and conduct in the individual.   Vide Grice, “The conception of value”.

 

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 ‘philosophia rationalis’, ‘philosophia naturalis’ and ‘philosophia moralis’ 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.

 

A partial exception might have to be made for EPICURO, who was capable of declaring both that philosophia was indispensable, and that its necessity was not absolute, but dependent on contingent human fears.

The  “partes” of “philosophia” were “philosophia rationalis” “philosophia naturalis”, “philosophia moralis.” In his Ep. 89.9–13 SENECA discusses the division.
On 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: the Roman Empire.

 

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 philosophers divide 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.

 

First, there’s the ACCADEMIA.

 

One powerful current of thought, associated above all with the example of Socrates, as constructed by his first generation 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.

 

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 PLATONE and ARISTOTELE.

 

In the “De Republica”, PLATONE 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 (“anima”).

 

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, PLATONE’s “De republica” 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 themselves from earthly concerns in favour of the contemplation of ultimate reality.

CICERONE discusses Platone in “Tusculan Disputations” 5.4.10 and “Accademia” 1.4.15).

On the level of personal choices and preferred lifestyles, PLATONE 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” (Urmon’s favourite at Corpus Christi, as it was Grice – under Hardie, “Aristotle’s Ethical Theory”), for his part, confronts the issue more directly, but again in such a way as to leave room for continuing argument.

 

Aristotle, like Grice, discusses “eudaimonia” as a matter, etymologically (vide Ackrill, student of Grice) of a life lived out in normal (virtuous) human interaction.

 

ARISTOTELE directly contrasts the fulfilment achievable through a life devoted to the intellectual contemplation of higher truth (theôria, “speculation”) with the fulfilment of a life of virtuous action, and declares the former to be superior (Nic. Eth. 10.6-8): two ways of life.

 

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). E. N. 10.7.1177b26-1128a8.

Other fourth-century thinkers were less sympathetic to the pull of contemplation and more-than-human subject-matter.

 

The extreme case is that of the cynic DIOGENE, 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 EPCURO was also “cool” (from a Platonic-Aristotelian viewpoint, at least).

 

For EPICURO, elaborate investigation of and theorizing about “natura” 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.

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, Senocrate).

 

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.

 

DIOGENE LAERZIO and SESTO EMPIRICO 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:

 

(a)       the garden with its walls, soil and fruits.

(b)       the egg, with its shell, white and yolk.

(c)       the living creature, with its flesh, bone, and soul 10.

 

(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.

 

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 POSIDONIO, 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, this may mean that Stoics too, like Platonists and Peripatetics, felt conflicting pulls on their intellectual enthusiasm.

Then there’s The point and balance of philosophia in the Roman Imperial-period perceptions.

Philosophers of the Roman 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 what they called “classics” (or “antiquities”) 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.

 

Roman Imperial-period Peripatetics and Platonists, pursuing one kind of triadic pattern, tend to stress the importance of household and city (CIVES) 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

 

Attico (as quoted by Eusebio) specifies the proper aims of “ho êthikos topos”:

 

‘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’ and the summary of Peripatetic ethical teaching quoted by Stobeo 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.

Stoic definitions of the field, on the other hand, pursue a different kind of triadic pattern, centred more explicitly on the character and moral development of the INDIVIDUAL (cives) qua citizen.

 

In this, the central topics are

 

(i)                    the right evaluation of the world and its contents (goods, ills and indifferents)

(ii)                   (ii) the right functioning
of the soul (impulse, passions, virtue and vice)

(iii)                  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” – and the important Roman notion of “officius” or duty) and ‘lifestyle’ (“bios”);15 and the concerns of all three Stoic topic areas are duly considered by Platonists as elements of ‘care for morals’.

 

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, MASSIMO di TIRA 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’.

 

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’ 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 the philosophos  lets fall away and shrugs off as he rises aloft, as they say Heracles was incinerated on Oeta and became a god.

 

Philosophi too 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 marvelous.

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.

They reach the summit and there 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.

 

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’.

 

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 the Discourses, Epitteto, imagining himself confronted with a student who is keen to move on, Epictetus agrees that working on

 

“arguments with equivocal [as per implicatura, since implicatura is cancellable] or hypothetical premises,  or those that conclude with a question, or involve fallacies, like the ‘Liar”, is a popular choice in
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.

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 [via implicaturae – entanglements], 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 for an “elite”.

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 in the way of word, utterance, and reason (“logos”) was as much a study of reality and its divine ordering as were physics and ethics, Seneca and Epitteto
ought not to downgrade logic as low 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 an Epistle, Seneca instructs his correspondent Lucilio in some fairly technical and analytical matter.

 

And EPITETTO makes it quite clear that some training in logic has been important in his own career and remains important to his pupils.

 

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 Arcedamo and Crini 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 or “implicatures” – which Lewis and Short translate as ‘entanglements’ -- of logic, EPITETTO was making just the effort a good philosophos should.

 

But part of the explanation for Epitteto’s 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.

 

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 or conceptual or linguistic fine-tuning (via linguistic botanizing, say) 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 – or “philosophia ratioanlis” -- was superfluous or dispensable.

Over “philosophia naturalis”, too, careful analysis is needed.

 

It is clear that the feeling that physical (including metaphysical and theological – so “speculative”, rather) inquiry might constitute a higher object of attention THAN 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”, “sapientia”), or the freeing and turning around of the soul (“anima”) from the body (“corpus”) when we turn towards the intelligible and what truly is; and wisdom is the “scientia” (“episteme”) of things divine and human.

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

In similar vein, the Peripatetic ASPASIO, in the introductory remarks to his commentary on Aristotle’s “Etica Nicomachea” feels the need to acknowledge that the objects of “theôrêtikê philosophia” (“philosophia naturalis, speculativa”) are higher and nobler, simply of more worth, than those of ethics (“philosophia moralis”) 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.

 

Aat a less technical level, it is noteworthy that MASSIMO di Tira’s discussion of the competing merits of practical virtue and (“virtus”) theoretical contemplation (“contemplation”, “speculation”), 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.

Seneca too, when he is writing “philosophia naturalis”, not “philosophia moralis”, can change his tune, as he does at the beginning of his “Quaestiones Naturales”.

I hold, my good friend LUCILIO, that, just as “philosophia” is superior to all other “artes”, so within philosophia itself, the part which deals with the gods (“scientia divina”) 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.

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.

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.
We see 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
Seneca, have concluded that “philosophia” under the Roman Empire, at least
in its Roman heart, tended positively to confine itself to ethics, to the exclusion or extreme downgrading of other dimensions of philosophical activity.

 

M. P. O. Morford (Winchester, and Trinity, Lit. Hum. Oxon) in his study “The Roman Philosophers: from the time of Cato the Elder to the death of Marcus Aurelius” (London: Routledge), envisages a process by which Roman philosopher of the late Republic, such as CICERONE, building on the legacy of PANEZIO and POSIDONIO, form a “distinctively Roman” style of “philosophia” (“philosophia romana”) ‘with a strong focus on “philosophia moralis”.

 

This tendency is reinforced by developments in Seneca’s generation, to produce an allegedly obsessive concern with philosophy as a practical guide for daily life, which only comes to an end in the later second century CE, with philosophers such as MARC’AURELIO.

This is a reading of the evidence that can be challenged.  

 

The first and second centuries do indeed provide us with a striking array of philosophers whose
surviving or attested output is predominantly ethical, and firmly slanted towards the practical application of ethical principle:

 

Seneca

Demetrio

Musonio

Epitteto (via Arriano)

Dio Chrysostom

Ierocle

Marc’Aurelio.

 

A good many of these were Roman born and bred. If not they did have connections with the centre of Roman Imperial power, and slanted much or all of their work exclusively towards a Roman “addressee”.

 

But the idea that there was an extreme concentration on “philosophia moralis” in the Roman Empire, even among a limited sub-set of philosophers, and that there was something “peculiarly Roman” about this
concentration is, though interesting and discussible, a dubious one.

 

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 moralists’ (“philosophia moralis romana”) concentration on ethics was not
complete or exclusive.

 

For all his warnings about the dangers of losing oneself in advanced logical subtleties, alla Grice – an English ‘futilitarian’, Bergmann said, ‘if ever there was one’ --  L’Epitteto d’Arriano, as already noted, clearly regards logical study as essential for his “philosophia”, and recalls his own teacher Musonio – the Roman Etruscan -- feeling the same way.

 

SENECA’s surviving output includes the Natural Questions, as well as the ethical matter of his Dialogues and Epistles.

SENECA’s Epistles themselves contain elements of metaphysical 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.

 

Plutarco’s surviving philosophical output, though grouped together under the overall title of “Moralia”, 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).

 

MASSIMO DI Tyre, on his more simplified level, treats of cosmology, demonology and psychology along with ethics.

LUCIO Apuleio, similarly,  expounds daimon-theory in his On the God of Socrates.

 

GALENO, like Plutarch, wrote an exposition of the Timaeus, perhaps in commentary form, and unlike Plutarch,
Maximus or Apuleius, studies of logic (“philosophia rationalis”) as well.

 

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.

 

AULO GELLIO’s tutor CALVENO TAURO and his Athenian near-contemporary ATTICO both wrote commentaries on the Timeo di PLATONE, with Tauro perhaps also composing a treatise On Corporeals and
Incorporeals (according to the Suda).

 

 

MODERATO di Gade published his Lectures on Pythagoreanism, dealing inter alia with cosmological
first principles and doctrines of the soul.

 

Nicomachus of Gerasa wrote an Introduction to Arithemtic, a Manual of Harmonics, and a Theology of
Arithmetic.

Numenius of Apamea wrote On the Good, On the Indestructibility of the Soul, On Numbers, and perhaps also yet another commentary on the Timaeus.

 

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.

 

The study of rhetoric (oratoria) and  philosophia rationalis was maintained not only, as mentioned, by Galeno but also perhaps by Attico, who is recorded as having opinions of Aristotle’s “Categoriae”, and again by the commentators on Aristotle.

 

Aspasio,

Andronicus,
Alessandro d’Afrodisia and BOEZIO

all composed commentaries on the “Categoriae”, ASPASIO one on the “De Interpretatione”, and Alexander also on the “De interpretation”, “Analytica priora”, “Analytica posterior” and “Topica”

 

Mention could also be made of the works of FAVORINO on Academic Scepticism and 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 (“philosophia rationalis” and “philosophia naturalis” – “philosophia speculative”) as a fixed background, and concentrated their imaginative and exegetic resources on the payoff  of “philosophia moralis”.

 

When Apuleius or Maximus expound Platonist demonology and cosmology, they do so to bring home lessons about proper human aspirations, and 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.

Then there’s Authority and division

Whatever range of ideas may have been available about the ranking of the constituent “partes” 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 – as did Grice (vide Speranza, “The Grice Club”).

 

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 “Romance” languages – “filosofia” (Italiano).

 

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.

 

“Philosophia” was 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 philosophus 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, not to mention the court entertainer and just the ‘serious’ conversationalist.

 

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.

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 the era of the ROMAN EMPIRE 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 HISTORIA – traditio -- of philosophical endeavour and achievement, which was taken as defining the options for all subsequent participants.

 

Thus, with only minor and peripheral exceptions 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 – filosofo antico --, or group of thinkers, from the past.

 

Of the Roman Imperial-period voices already quoted, Seneca, Arrian’s Epictetus and Luciano’s Hermotimus speak as “stoicus”, seeking to learn and progress within the framework of ideas established in the late fourth and third centuries BCE by ZENONE, Cleante  and CRISIPPO.

 

Alcinous, Atticus and Maximus as “accademici”, experts in (a heavily systematized version of) the thought
of PLATONE.

 

It was equally possible to enrol in the spiritual succession from Epicurus, Aristotle, Diogenes and Crates, PIRRONE or Pythagoras, as an

 

epicureus
peripateticus

cynicus,

sceptic

pythagoricus.

 

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.

 

Like the definition and sub-division of philosophia, this DIFFERENT form of dividedness was a further part of the inheritance from the foundational days of the fourth century BCE, which bequeathed to Roman culture a map of the rather 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.  But we can see that it is problematic.

It is as when Grice complained about J. L. Austin’s “Play Group” being a school – “Surely not one with the immensity of talent found there”: Grice, Strawson, Austin, Hampshire, Hart, Urmson, Warnock, “to name a few”.

 

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.

 

How the de facto dividedness of philosophia was experienced and reacted to by contemporaries.

As the name “hairesis” 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.

 

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. Nothing like the UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD that employed Grice.

 

Lucian’s HERMOTIMUS voices a satirically reductive account of how this ‘decisio’ might be conditioned, explaining that he personally 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 status-hungry.

 

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.

 

Doctrinal differences, flippantly paraphrased, underpin the contrasts made here, but the added suggestion of motives of personal taste (“gusto personale”, “gustus personalis”) 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.

 

Plutarco remarks, in the preface to his lives of Dion and BRUTO, 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.

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 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, 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.

 

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.

 

Seneca had something of a taste for maintaining that Stoicism and Epicureanism were close on many issues, differing only verbally.

But there were also those who came to more strongly “eirenic” conclusions, impressed by a deeper unity which they wished to see beneath the surface diversity.

 

Already in the first century a.C. 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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A similar spirit, though worked out in a much sketchier and more general manner, animates Maximus of
Tyre in the second century CE.

 

MASSIMO argues that that an essential unity of purpose underlies the surface variations in appearance and teaching-style between different philosophoi.

 

MARSSIMO shows that a single tradition of theological wisdom unites the poetry of the past and the philosophia of more recent times.

 

MASSIMO claims that the only sectarian choice it is essential to make is that to reject the pernicious EDONISMO of EPICURO.

Yet other philosophers 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 “Hermotimo” by his interlocutor Licino 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’.

 

Or it could take the intellectually tougher option of the ‘scettico’ (“philosophus scepticus”) remaining within the formal structure of haireseis, 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 “Accademico” sceptical credo that it is certain that nothing is certain.

 

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.

Another possible response, ECCLETICISMO – philosophia eccletica – 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 characteristic of the Roman Imperial-period philosophia in general.

 

This diagnosis has more recently, and rightly, come to seem inappropriate, for the simple reason that
the philosophi 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.

 

The formal record – Diogenes Laerzio supported by the Suda – in fact comes up with just one name, that of the Augustan period 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.

 

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 Roman Imperial period, GALENO di PERGAMO.

 

Though a doctor, and taking Ippocrate 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).

 

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”).

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.

 

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 the different schools as it matches up to his own sense of the truth of the matter.

 

So the simplifying picture that all in Roman philosophy was individualist has to be challenged.

 

Organized systems and derivations of thought were dissolved; all was open to choice, and hodge-podge handbooks encouraged everyone to be his own metaphysician.

 

However, what emerges falls short of being a complete philosophical system, for
Galeno 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.

 

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.

 

Then we have Philosophia in the Roman “elite” community.

So far we have 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. You need a ROMAN MECENA.

 

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 Roman Imperial period was that of educators.

 

Not “primary education”, of course, for those 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.

 

And then stop? Or enjoy it in your villa, or your city palazzo for a cup of tea – or something.

 

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” (a “litterator”, to be entered on
either along with or after study with a rhêtôr or orator.

 

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” (in spite of grand titles like “Accademia”) rather than the court – 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, 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 (“virilis”) and truly perfect adornment that comes from
reason.
A further story, that neatly brings together the claims of philosophia to being a life-directing
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 Senocrates on self-control (“sôphrosynê”).

 

Though set in the fourth century a.C., it was an episode that evidently remained a firm favourite with
Roman Imperial-period writers.

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 self-development,
for which the transitional period between adolescence and entry into full citizenship (“toga virilis”) 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 Roman Imperial legislation.

 

Under a measure apparently first enacted by VESPASIANO, and extended by TRAIANO, 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 Roman Empire depended to a large extent.

 

In the words of a confirmation of this enactment, issued under Antonino, but referring back to the reigns of Aurelio and his predecessor Adriano

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 ambassadors or be enrolled for military service against their will, nor be compelled to perform any other kind of provincial or other service.

In this generous dispensation, philosophoi are counted together with doctors and teachers of the core curriculum of “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, 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, 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, the subject-matter of “philosophia” could be said to be of a quite different order of magnitude and depth from those treated by other educators: the art of right living, rather than the art of getting your syllables right, or of constructing a speech to the
city Council correctly.

 

 

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 (cfr. “the perpetual adolescent”), and it was as much a practical as a theoretical subject.

 

Hard and valuable lessons might indeed be learned in the class-room, 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 adult individuals, looking in for
just one session.

 

Thus, though Arrian’s Epictetus clearly phrases most of his teaching and exhortation specifically for the non-adult, he also addresses himself from time to time to individuals, with growing families and positions of
adult responsibility.

 

How exactly he organized the daily timetable of his teaching  cannot be reconstructed, but it seems as if there was some kind of division between classes for “full-time” enrolled students only, and open sessions to
which others were welcomed as well – or he could ‘teach’ in their houses, too.

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 patrician elite, keep a philosophos (a ‘philosophical chaplain’) as part of their household, notably in their ‘ville’ for consultation, instruction and performance as required – sometimes in their city palazzi -- a position exemplified by the cases of the CATONE UTICENSE’s Atenodoro Cordylion, CICERONE’s Diodotuo, or
CRASSO’s Alessandro, and exploited for its satirical mileage in Luciano’s On Salaried Posts.

 

Others could reckon to encounter both philosophical professionals and philosophically minded lay-people (who speak “ordinary language”) in the normal course of social life, so as to be able to air problems and share insights both in informal conversation (alla Grice – vide “conversational implicature”).

 

There was also the somewhat more structured exchanges of the “symposion” or “convivium” (“Philosophy as conviviality”, “Prejudices and predilections, the life and opinions” (of Paul Grice) 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 “epistula”: as for instance not only in the relationship with Lucilio 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 a Roman province.

 

Philosophical material could be heard in public oratorical performance, whether from professional teachers, or other fellow travellers.

 

Both public and private libraries (“libreria”) existed to sustain as extensive and detailed a reading of
philosophical literature as the individual might desire.

 

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 Diogene d’Oenoanda.

The model of the “philosophus” as a practitioner not confined to contexts of formal instruction, but ranging freely over all kinds of private social situations, is developed in a number of Roman Imperial-period texts.

 

Plutarch takes a common line in articulating it with reference to the great
precedent of Socrates.

 

Plutarco’s “Quaestiones convivales” is evidence of the continuing habit of talking philosophy over wine at the symposion.

 

The very first question raised is ‘Whether philosophia is a fitting topic for conversation at a drinking party’. They agree it CAN be, if “convivial” enough.

 

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 and Julianus Eutecnius.

 

Accessibility of philosophical books in Memphis in the third century CE is attested and private circulation of philosophical books by letters.

As Plutarco put it, most people of course think that “philosophi” 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
(“cathedra”) 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.

 

SOCRATE was the first to show that life admits philosophia at all times and in all parts, and without
qualification in all experiences and deeds.

In the same vein, MASSIMO DI Tyre 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.

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.

 

The Roman philosopher wished to be acknowledged and valued as educators, but with a far wider scope
than that exercised by those normally so described.

 

The Roman philosoopher 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.

 

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 and who formed the moral character of whole communities.

 

Philosophoi should be seen as “directors of souls” or ‘legislators’, but in the mould of figures like Minos, Solon and Lycurgus, whose laws established ethical norms and practices rather than mere rules of procedur – a “paedagogus generis humani” – as Seneca puts it.

 

 

The Roman philosopher 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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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 as a Roman philosopher?

Something of the differences in scope and social sitedness between the philosophia
of the Roman 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 MUSONIO, Epictetus, Hierocles, Alcinous, Atticus, Taurus, Aspasius and Alexander seem to belong quite uncontroversially in any history of the philosophy of the period – CICERONE and MARC’AURELIO perhaps not.

 

This has to do with ‘status’. “Lawyer” valued more than “philosopher”, and surely “emperor” even more.

From their surviving work, and from what we know of
their lives and careers, the Roman philosopher is however  readily characterizable as a professional 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.

 

G. MUSONIO RUFO (25–100) was a Roman eques of Etruscan ancestry.

 

MUSONIO’s 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.

 

Though he began as a slave in
a Roman Imperial household, EPITTETO (55–135) ended up running a philosophical school or “club”. It is this school that forms the setting for the discourses recorded by Arrian.

 

Calveno Tauro (c.95–c.170 CE) is shown in Aulus Gellius’ reminiscences in his “Notti attiche” teaching in Athens, with a daily time-table that included both the study of philosophical texts and
discussion sessions.

 

T. AURELIO ALESSANDRO d’AFRODISIA Alexandros, fl. 198– 209 CE) has always been known from his own words as the holder of a Roman Imperial “Chair in Peripatetic philosophy”.

 

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.

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:

 

CICERONE was a lawyer, and held public posts.

 

L. Anneo SENECA (c.1 BCE–65 CE)’s principal career was as a tutor and then a counsellor to the Emperor NERONE.

 

L. Mestrio PLUTARCO (50–125 CE) 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),speaks of his Epicurean inscription as a substitute for other
kinds of didactic activity, rather than a continuation of it.

 

There would seem to be no particular problem, either, about occasional references to “non-philosophical”
writers – like Morford’s favourites: OVIDIO, ORAZIO, VIRGILIO and LUCANO -- who nevertheless transmit information about philosophical doctrine, or perceptions of the nature and standing of philosophy.

 

The satirist LUCIAN (120–190) is another case.

 

 A man of letters like Aulo Gellio (c.126–c.200 CE) was also a philosopher.

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 Ancient Roman philosophy, and whose inclusion therefore calls for explanation.

 

Perhaps above all, the trio of Dio Chrysostom, APULEIO, and Maximus of Tyre.

 

Practically nothing is known of the life and circumstances of MASSIMO, apart from the claim that he
lectured in Rome ‘in the time of Commodus’ (i.e. 180–192 CE).

 

Dio and Apuleius have more distinct identities.

 

Cocceianus Dio 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 MUSONIO, he was exiled under the Emperor Domitian, but restored with the accession of Nerva (a family friend) in 96/7 CE.

 

COCCEIANO DIO’s subsequent career saw him lecturing in cities around the eastern half of the Roman Empire, but he was also active in local politics in PRUSA until his death some time after 100.

 

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.

LUCIO APULEIO was born to a prosperous family, again eminent in local politics, in Madauros in Africa
Proconsularis in the 120s CE.

 

APULEIO 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.

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 ‘semi-philosophers’
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, or as I prefer, ‘technical’, 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 shows no such scruples).

 

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.

 

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.

 

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 Massimo on the other – are beside the point, just like concerns about their
profundity, originality, and fastidiousness over style.

 

For the educated Roman 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 the bishop  episcopus AGOSTINO only a century and a half after his death.

 

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, Albino) – arrangements which certainly reflect perceptions of the sixth century, and can very plausibly be taken as indicative of earlier reactions, too.

 

Then there was the general pose of interpreters rather than originators adopted by Seneca.

If our wish is to study the Roman Imperial period phenomenon whole, these individuals demand to be included; something substantial would be missed if they were not.

 

The range of ROMAN PHILOSOPHY was interesting.

 

There was 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.

 

There was 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.

 

The Roman philosopher revolved around the central importance to ancient ethics of character and character formation.

 

The focus of the Roman philosopher shiftsfrom ideas about the inner life and characterstructure
of the individual, to thinking about the relations of the individual with others and the outside world.

 

The Roman philosopher found points of controversy in the area of inter-personal ethics and social relations.

 

The Roman philosopher argued over relationships and structures at the level of substantial communities,
i.e. to politics.

 

The Roman philosopher was concerned with constitutional theory and the issue of
monarchy.

 

Most notably, the Roman philosopher was engaged with a visions of the best society, and issues relating to specific groups within it.

 

The Roman philosopher was concerned with the question of where and how philosophia was supposed to fit into the community.

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 a conclusion 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 Roman 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 élite classes under the Roman Empire.