Hellenistic and Roman Philosophy

Hellenistic and Roman philosophy is the long period of Greek and Latin thought that runs from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE, and of Aristotle a year later, to 529 CE, when the emperor Justinian ended the last pagan school of philosophy in Athens. Over these eight and a half centuries the centre of gravity moved from Athens to Alexandria and Rome, and Greek remained the main language of philosophy even as Latin writers adapted it for a Roman audience. Four new movements dominated the first centuries, the Cynics, the Epicureans, the Stoics and the Sceptics, alongside the continuing schools of Plato and Aristotle. In the final centuries a revived Platonism, now called Neoplatonism, absorbed most of the others.

What united these schools was a conviction that philosophy is above all a way of life. Logic and physics still mattered, and the Stoics and Epicureans built complete systems of both, but the point of studying them was to reach a settled state of mind and a life free from fear, anger and confusion. That practical orientation explains why figures such as Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius are still read for guidance today. The era follows Ancient Greek Philosophy and overlaps with the early Christian thinkers whose work opens Medieval Christian Philosophy.

The conquests of Alexander transformed the setting in which philosophers worked. In a little over a decade he destroyed the Persian Empire and carried Greek armies to Egypt, Bactria and the Punjab. After his death his generals fought over the spoils and carved out large monarchies: the Seleucid Empire in Syria, Mesopotamia and Iran, the Ptolemaic Kingdom in Egypt, and the Antigonid kingdom in Macedon itself. Greek became the language of government and culture from the Aegean to the borders of India, and historians call this world of the Hellenistic period Hellenistic, from Hellen, Greek.

For the Greek city-states, independence became largely a fiction. Athens still had its assembly and its festivals, but real power lay with distant kings and their garrisons. Many historians have linked the philosophies of the age to this loss of control: if the citizen could no longer shape the fate of his city, he could at least govern himself. The connection is plausible but should not be pushed too far, since Hellenistic thinkers also produced technical work in logic and natural philosophy that owed little to politics.

Athens nonetheless remained the capital of philosophy. Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum continued there, and the new schools also chose the city. Meanwhile the Ptolemies founded the Museum and the great Library at Alexandria, which drew mathematicians, astronomers and physicians. Euclid compiled his Elements there, and Archimedes of Syracuse corresponded with its scholars. Scientific inquiry increasingly separated from philosophy proper, though the boundary stayed porous.

The Cynic movement began slightly before the Hellenistic age, but it flourished in it and shaped what followed. Its roots lay in the circle of Socrates: Antisthenes, one of his companions, taught that virtue is enough for happiness and that it needs nothing but the strength of a Socrates. The figure who made Cynicism famous was Diogenes of Sinope, an exile from a Greek city on the Black Sea who lived in Athens and Corinth in the fourth century BCE. The name Cynic probably comes from the Greek for doglike, an insult his behaviour provoked and that his followers adopted with pride.

Diogenes argued that most of what people value, money, status, reputation and polite manners, is mere convention and a source of servitude. The good life is a life according to nature, requiring only what nature requires. He is said to have slept in a large storage jar, to have thrown away his cup on seeing a child drink from cupped hands, and to have eaten and performed other private acts in public to show that nothing natural is shameful. Asked where he came from, he called himself a citizen of the world, the earliest recorded use of the word cosmopolitan. The most famous story, almost certainly embellished, has Alexander offering him anything he wished and Diogenes asking him to stand out of his sunlight.

His pupil Crates of Thebes gave away a fortune to live as a Cynic, and his wife Hipparchia, unusually for a woman of her time, shared his life and arguments. Cynicism was never a school with buildings or a fixed curriculum; it was a style of life marked by frank speech, physical toughness and contempt for social norms. Its influence ran deepest through one of Crates' students, Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism. Wandering Cynic preachers remained a familiar sight in the cities of the Roman Empire for centuries.

Epicurus, born in 341 BCE on Samos to Athenian parents, taught at Mytilene and Lampsacus before settling in Athens around 307 BCE. There he bought a house with a garden, and the Garden became the name of his school. Unusually, it admitted women and slaves, and its members lived together in a community devoted to friendship and study. Only three of his letters and some collections of maxims survive directly; much of what is known comes from the biographer Diogenes Laertius and from later followers.

Epicurus took his physics from Democritus. The universe consists of atoms moving in infinite void, combining and separating to form countless worlds. He added one notable change: atoms occasionally swerve by a tiny amount from their paths, an idea meant to explain how collisions begin and, on some readings, to leave room for free choice. The soul too is made of fine atoms and disperses at death. The gods exist, but they live in blissful detachment and take no interest in human affairs.

From this physics followed an ethics aimed at peace of mind. The goal of life is pleasure, but by pleasure Epicurus meant above all the absence of bodily pain and of mental disturbance, a state he called ataraxia. He divided desires into those that are natural and necessary, such as food and shelter; natural but unnecessary, such as luxurious food; and empty, such as the craving for fame or immortality, which can never be satisfied and cause most human misery. The two great sources of anxiety were fear of the gods and fear of death, and both were groundless. Since death is the end of sensation, it is nothing to us: where death is, we are not. Justice, in his view, was an agreement among people neither to harm nor to be harmed.

Opponents caricatured Epicureans as gluttons and libertines, and the word epicure still carries that echo. In fact Epicurus recommended a simple diet, withdrawal from politics and the company of friends. His school was remarkably stable, and its members revered his writings almost as scripture.

Zeno, from a Greek and Phoenician city on Cyprus, came to Athens around 312 BCE, studied with Crates the Cynic and with other teachers, and around 300 BCE began teaching in the Stoa Poikile, the Painted Porch on the edge of the Agora. His followers took their name from the building. His successor Cleanthes wrote a celebrated hymn to Zeus, and the third head, Chrysippus of Soli, who led the school from about 230 to 206 BCE, worked the doctrines into a vast and rigorous system. Of his reportedly more than seven hundred books, none survive whole.

The Stoics divided philosophy into logic, physics and ethics, and compared it to an egg or a living creature in which the parts depend on one another. In logic they developed a theory of propositions and of arguments built from statements linked by if, and and or, a form of logic quite different from Aristotle's and in some respects closer to modern logic. In physics they held that the cosmos is a single living whole pervaded by a divine rational principle, the logos, identified with God, fate and nature. Everything happens by an unbroken chain of causes, and the world periodically dissolves in fire and is reborn.

The ethics, which drew heavily on the Cynics, is what made Stoicism famous. Virtue, meaning wisdom, justice, courage and self-control, is the only good, and vice the only evil. Everything else, health, wealth, reputation and even life itself, is indifferent: some indifferents are preferable and reasonable to pursue, but none can make a person happy or unhappy. Happiness consists in living in agreement with nature, which means accepting what fate brings while acting rightly in the roles one holds. The passions, such as fear, grief and anger, are not forces separate from reason but mistaken judgements, which the wise person can correct. Because all human beings share in reason, the Stoics also taught that they belong to a single community, an idea that influenced later thinking about natural law and universal rights.

Later Stoics softened the system. Panaetius of Rhodes, in the second century BCE, made it more practical and found an audience among the Roman elite; his pupil Posidonius, a polymath based on Rhodes, wrote on history, geography and the tides as well as ethics.

A third current questioned whether certain knowledge is possible at all. Pyrrho of Elis, who reportedly accompanied Alexander's army to the East, is said to have concluded that things cannot be judged true or false and that the right response is to suspend judgement, which brings tranquillity. Ancient biographers claimed he was influenced by meeting Indian sages, a suggestive link with Indian philosophy, but the evidence for his travels and their effects is thin. He wrote nothing, and his views come mainly through his pupil Timon.

More influential at the time was the sceptical turn of Plato's own school. Around 266 BCE Arcesilaus became head of the Academy and revived the questioning method of Socrates, arguing against every positive claim, above all the Stoic theory that some impressions are so clear that they guarantee their own truth. A century later Carneades, perhaps the most brilliant debater of antiquity, continued the attack while proposing that one could act on what is merely persuasive without claiming knowledge. When Athens sent him as an ambassador to Rome in 155 BCE, he is said to have argued for justice one day and against it the next, alarming the elder Cato, who wanted the philosophers sent home. Among his successors was Clitomachus, a native of Carthage.

In the first century BCE Aenesidemus broke with the by then milder Academy and revived the name of Pyrrho. He collected ten modes, standard patterns of argument showing that the same thing appears differently to different animals, people and circumstances, so that no appearance can be preferred. The fullest surviving account of this Pyrrhonism comes from Sextus Empiricus, a physician of around 200 CE. His works, rediscovered in the sixteenth century, profoundly affected Michel de Montaigne and the debates of Early Modern Philosophy.

As the Roman Republic expanded east in the second century BCE, absorbing Macedon and Greece after its victories in the Punic Wars had made it master of the western Mediterranean, Greek philosophy came to Rome. It arrived as teachers, as ambassadors, as enslaved prisoners of war and as libraries carried home as plunder. The Roman elite was at first suspicious: philosophers were expelled from the city more than once. But by the first century BCE an education in Greek philosophy was standard for an ambitious Roman.

The war between Rome and Mithridates of Pontus changed the map of philosophy. Athens sided with Mithridates, and in 86 BCE the Roman general Sulla besieged and sacked the city, damaging the Academy and the Lyceum. Afterwards the main schools no longer had a continuous institutional life in Athens; teaching dispersed to Rhodes, Alexandria and Rome, and Aristotle's library was reportedly shipped to Italy.

Two Latin writers of the late Republic did most to make Greek philosophy Roman. Lucretius set out the whole of Epicurean physics in a long Latin poem, On the Nature of Things, written in the 50s BCE, hoping to free his readers from the fear of the gods and death. Cicero, statesman and orator, wrote a series of dialogues in the 40s BCE that presented the debates between Stoics, Epicureans and Academics to Latin readers, inventing much of the Latin philosophical vocabulary in the process; he counted himself a moderate Academic sceptic. The murder of Julius Caesar, which Cicero welcomed, led to his own proscription and death in 43 BCE. In the same period Philodemus, an Epicurean teacher, lived at a villa in Herculaneum whose library, buried by Vesuvius in 79 CE, has yielded charred papyri that scholars are still deciphering.

Under the Roman Empire founded by Augustus, Stoicism became the most influential philosophy among the governing class, and the bulk of complete Stoic texts that survive come from this period. Seneca the Younger, a Spanish-born senator and playwright, served as tutor and then adviser to the young emperor Nero. His letters and essays on anger, the shortness of life and tranquillity of mind are among the most readable works of ancient ethics. His great wealth sat awkwardly with his teaching on detachment, and critics in his own day noted the contradiction. Implicated in a conspiracy, he was ordered to kill himself in 65 CE.

Epictetus was born a slave in Phrygia, in Asia Minor, and owned by a member of Nero's court. Freed, he taught in Rome until the emperor Domitian expelled philosophers around 93 CE, and then at Nicopolis in western Greece. A student, Arrian, recorded his lectures in the Discourses and condensed them into the Handbook. His central lesson is to distinguish what is up to us, our judgements, desires and choices, from what is not, such as our bodies, property and reputation, and to place our happiness entirely in the former.

Marcus Aurelius, emperor from 161 to 180 CE, spent much of his reign fighting on the Danube frontier and dealing with plague. In private notebooks, written in Greek and known as the Meditations, he reminded himself to accept what fate sends, to act justly towards others and to remember how brief and small each life is within the whole of nature. In 176 he endowed chairs in Athens for teachers of the four main schools, the Platonist, Aristotelian, Stoic and Epicurean, a sign that they were still regarded as the core of a philosophical education.

From the first century BCE Platonism regained the dogmatic confidence that the sceptical Academy had abandoned. Teachers known as Middle Platonists, from Antiochus of Ascalon to Plutarch of Chaeronea in the second century CE, blended Plato with ideas from Aristotle and the Stoics and read the Timaeus as an account of a divine creator. The Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria used similar ideas to interpret the Hebrew scriptures, an early example of the meeting between Greek philosophy and Judaism that later shaped Christian thought. Aristotle's works, edited into roughly their present form in the first century BCE, attracted learned commentators such as Alexander of Aphrodisias around 200 CE.

The last great creative movement of ancient philosophy began with Plotinus, probably born in Egypt around 205 CE. He studied in Alexandria under Ammonius Saccas, joined an expedition of the emperor Gordian III against Persia in the hope of learning Persian and Indian wisdom, and from about 244 taught in Rome. His pupil Porphyry arranged his writings into six books of nine treatises each, the Enneads.

Plotinus pictured reality as a hierarchy flowing from a single source, the One, which is beyond being and description. From the One emanates Intellect, the realm of the Platonic Forms, and from Intellect comes Soul, which animates and orders the physical cosmos. Matter, at the lowest level, is almost nothing. The human soul belongs by nature to the higher levels, and through philosophy and inner purification it can turn back towards its source, rising in rare moments to union with the One. Modern scholars call this system Neoplatonism, though its adherents simply considered themselves Platonists.

Porphyry also wrote an introduction to Aristotle's logic, the Isagoge, that became a standard textbook for a thousand years, and a fierce attack on Christianity. His successor Iamblichus, in Syria, placed greater weight on theurgy, ritual practices intended to unite the soul with the gods. In the fifth century the school of Athens, refounded around 410, reached its height under Proclus, who built Neoplatonism into an elaborate system and wrote commentaries on Plato. In Alexandria a parallel tradition flourished. Hypatia, a mathematician and astronomer who taught Platonist philosophy there, was murdered by a Christian mob in 415 during a political conflict in the city.

By the fourth century the religious world around the philosophers had changed. Christianity spread across the empire, and after Constantine I it gained imperial favour, becoming the official religion under Theodosius in the 380s. Philosophical encounters had begun early: the Book of Acts describes Paul the Apostle debating Epicureans and Stoics in Athens. Christian intellectuals were divided between those who rejected pagan philosophy and those who borrowed its methods. Augustine of Hippo, in North Africa, was drawn to Christianity partly through reading Neoplatonist books, and his synthesis of the two shaped Latin theology. In Italy, under Ostrogothic rule after the end of the Western Roman Empire, Boethius translated parts of Aristotle's logic into Latin and, awaiting execution around 524, wrote The Consolation of Philosophy, in which a personified Philosophy consoles him with largely Platonist and Stoic arguments.

In 529 the emperor Justinian I, ruling from Constantinople over what historians call the Byzantine Empire, issued laws forbidding pagans to teach. The Neoplatonic school of Athens, then led by Damascius, ceased to function. According to the historian Agathias, Damascius, Simplicius and several colleagues went to the court of the Persian king Khosrow I of the Sasanian Empire, and a peace treaty of 532 guaranteed their safe return. What happened afterwards is uncertain; Simplicius went on writing commentaries on Aristotle, possibly in Harran in northern Mesopotamia, and the Alexandrian school, which had accommodated itself to Christianity, continued teaching into the seventh century.

The date 529 is therefore a symbol more than a clean break. Greek philosophical learning survived in Constantinople, in Christian Syriac schools and in Alexandria, from where it passed in later centuries into Arabic. In Baghdad the Neoplatonists' commentaries on Aristotle shaped the work of al-Kindi, al-Farabi and Avicenna, the story taken up in Islamic and Jewish Philosophy, while Augustine and Boethius carried Platonism and Aristotelian logic into the Latin Middle Ages. The Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics, largely forgotten as living schools, returned to influence when their texts were recovered in the Renaissance.