Kenny Anthony. Ancient Philosophy: A New History of Western Philosophy Volume 1
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God’ (7. 148). God is an active principle, matter is an active principle; both
of them are corporeal, and togeth er they constitute an all-pervasive cosmic
Wre (LS 45g).
Zeno’s writings do not survive: the most famous of them in antiquity
was his Republic. This combined Platonic utopianism with some cynic
elements. Zeno rejected the conventional educational system, and thought
it a waste of eVort to build gymnasia, law courts, and temples. He recom-
mended community of wives, and thought that men and women should
wear the same, revealing, clothing. Money should be abolished and there
should be a single legal system for all mankind, who should be like a herd
grazing together nurtured by a common law (LS 67a).
In spite of these communistic proposals, which many of his own
later disciples found shocking, Zeno in his lifetime was held in honour
by the Athenians, who gave him the freedom of the city. Ki ng Antigonus
of Macedon invited him to become his personal philosopher, but
Zeno pleaded old age and sent to court instead two of his brightest
pupils.
After Zeno’s death his place as head of the Stoa was taken by Cleanthes
(331–232), a converted boxer of a religious bent. Cleanthes wrote a hymn to
Zeus, later quoted by St Paul in a sermon in Athens, which exalted the
Stoic active principle in terms that were appropriate enough for Ju daeo-
Christian monotheism. The underlying Stoic conception of God is very
diVerent, however, from that of the biblical religions. God is not separate
from the universe but is a material constituent of the cosmos. In his prose
writings Cleanthes expounded in detail the way in which the divine Wery
element provided the vital power for all the living beings in the world
(Cicero, ND 2. 23–5).14
Cleanthes was succeeded as head of the school by Chrysippus of Soli,
who governed it from 232 to 206. Chrysippus had been Cleanthes’ pupil,
but he seems to have had no great respect for his teacher. ‘You tell me your
theorems’, he is said to have told him, ‘and I’ll supply them with proofs.‘
He spent some time as a student at the Academy, inoculating himself
against scepticism. He was the most intelligent and the most industrious of
the Hellenistic Stoics. His literary output was prodigious: his housekeeper
reported that he wrote at a rate of 500 lines a day, and he left 705 books
14 On Cleanthes’ theology, see Ch. 9 below.
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behind. Nothing but fragments survive. But it is clear that it was he who
rounded Stoicism into a system; it used to be said, ‘If there had been no
Chrysippus, there had been no Stoa’ (D.L., 6. 183).
It is diYcult to separate out precisely the contributions of the three early
Stoics, since their works have all been lost. However, there is little doubt
that Chrysippus deserves the main share of the credit for the signiWcant
advances in logic that will be examined in detail in the next chapter. In
physics he substituted breath (pneuma) for Cleanthes’ Wre as the vital
principle of animals and plants. He accepted the Aristotelian distinction
between matter and form, but as a good materialist he insisted that form
too was bodily, namely pneuma. The human soul and mind are made out of
this pneuma; so too is God, who is the soul of the cosmos, which, in its
entirety, constitutes a rational animal. If God and the soul were not
themselves bodily, Stoics argued, they would not be able to act on the
material world.
The fully developed Stoic physical system can be summarized as follows.
Once upon a time, there was nothing but Wre; gradually there emerged
the other elements and the familiar furniture of the universe. Later, the
world will return to Wre in a universal conXagration, and then the whole
cycle of its history will be repeated over and over again. All this happens in
accordance with a system of laws which may be called ‘fate’ (because
the laws admit of no exception), or ‘providence’ (because the laws
were laid down by God for beneWcent purposes). The divinely designed
system is called Nature, and our aim in life should be to live in accord with
Nature.
Chrysippus was also the principal author of the Stoic ethical system,
which is based on the principle of submission to Nature. Nothing can
escape Nature’s laws, but despite the determinism of fate human beings are
free and responsible. If the will obeys reason it will live in accordance with
Nature. It is this voluntary acceptance of Nature’s laws that constitutes
virtue, and virtue is both necessary and suYcient for happiness.15
The Stoics all agreed that because society is natural to human beings, a
good man, in his aim to be in harmony with Nature, will play some part in
society and cultivate social virtues. But Chrysippus had a number of ethical
and political views that marked him out from other Stoics. Like Zeno, he
15 The Stoic ethical system is considered in greater detail in Ch. 8 below.
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wrote a Republic, in which he is alleged to have defended incest and
cannibalism (LS 67f). Chrysippu s diVered from some of his fellows in insisting
that a philosopher need not devote himself to scholarship: for a Stoic it
was acceptable, indeed praiseworthy, to take part in public life (LS 67w).
Scepticism in the Academy
During the latter part of the third century Stoic doctrine came under
attack from the Academy. The academic heirs of Plato began to take their
inspiration from Plato’s questioning master, Socrates, and turned to a form
of scepticism. The leader of the Academy from 273 to 242 was Arcesilaus, a
pupil of Pyrrho of Elis, a man often regarded as the founder of philosoph-
ical scepticism. Pyrrho, an older contemporary of Epicurus, who had served
as a soldier in Alexander’s army, taught that nothing could be known and,
accordingly, wrote no books. It was Arcesilaus and another of Pyrrho’s
pupils, Timon, who brought scepticism to Athens in the early years of the
third century. Timon denied the possibility of Wnding any self-evident
principles to serve as the foundation of sciences. In the absence of such
axioms, all lines of reasoning must be circular or endless.
The scepticism of Timon and Arcesilaus came to fruition, in a modiWed
and more sophisticated form, with the work of Carneades, who headed the
Academy from 155 to 137. Like Pyrrho, Carneades left no writings, but his
arguments were recorded by a pupil who attended his highly popular
lectures. They have come down to us principally through the good oYces
of Cicero, who was once taught by Carneades’ pupil Philo. In 155 Carneades
was sent by Athens, along with a Stoic and a Peripatetic philosopher, on an
embassy to Rome. During this embassy he displayed his rhetorical skill by
arguing on successive days for and against justice. Cato the Roman Censor,
who heard his performance, sent him packing as a subversive inXuence
(LS 68m).
Arcesilaus criticized the Stoics because they had claimed to found their
search for truth upon mental impressions incapable of falsehood:
there were, he argued, no such impressions. Carneades too attacked Stoic
epistemology, and taught that probability, not unattainable truth, should
be the guide to life. Though not himself an atheist, he ridiculed mercilessly
both the traditional pantheon and Stoic pantheism. His arguments against
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the Stoic theory of divination were adopted and skilfu lly developed by
Cicero.16
Lucretius
No philosopher of the second century was as intelligent or persuasive as
Carneades, and in the Wrst century primacy in philosophy passed from
Greek to Latin authors. Latin philosophy, like Greek philosophy, began in
verse and only later turned to prose. The Wrst complete Latin philosophical
work that has reached us is a long and magniWcent poem in hexameter
verse, On the Natu re of Things, by Lucretius.
Almost nothing is known of Lucretius’ life: we can conjecture the rough
dating of his poem by noting that it was read by Cicero in 54, and was
dedicated to one C. Memmius, who stood for the consulship in 53.
Lucretius was an adoring admirer of Epicurus, and the six books of the
poem set out the Epicurean system in verse which, as Cicero observed,
always displays great artistry and sometimes shows Xashes of genius.
Lucretius himself described his poetic skill as honey to disguise the worm-
wood of philosophy (1. 947 ). Parts of the poem were translated into English
by John Dryden. Had he completed the task, his version would have been a
worthy rival of Pope’s Essay on Man.
Lucretius begins his poem by praising the bravery of Epicurus in throwing
oV the fear of religion. People cannot stand up to the tyranny of priests,
because they fear eternal punishment; but that is only because they don’t
understand the nature of the soul. In his W rst book Lucretius sets out
Epicurean atomism: nature c onsists of simple bodies and empty void, bodies
perceived by sense, and void established by reason. Bodies are made out of
atoms as words are made out of letters: the words ‘ignis’ and ‘lignum’ are
made up of almost the same letters, ju st as the things they signify, namely
Wre and wood, are made up of almost the same atoms (1. 911–14).
In a famous passage early in the second book Lucretius describes the
philosopher looking down, from the heights of virtue, on the petty
struggles of mankind. He extols the Epicurean pursuit of simple pleasures
and avoidance of unnecessary desires.
16 The debate between Stoics and Sceptics is considered in detail in Ch. 4 below.
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O wretched man! in what a mist of life
Enclosed with dangers and with noisy strife
He spends his little span; and overfeeds
His crammed desires, with more than nature needs!
For nature wisely stints our appetite
And craves no more than undisturbed delight;
Which minds unmixed with cares and fears obtain;
A soul serene, a body void of pain.
So little this corporeal frame requires,
So bounded are our natural desires,
That wanting all, and setting pain aside,
With bare privation sense is satisWed. (2. 16–28)
The third book sets out the Epicurean theory of the soul and the mechan-
isms of sensation. Once we understand the material nature of the soul, we
realize that fears of death are childish. A dea d body cannot feel, and death
leaves no self behind to suVer. It is those who survive who have the right to
grieve. Give up fear of death, Lucretius tells his patron,
For thou shalt sleep, and never wake again,
And, quitting life, shalt quit thy living pain.
But we, thy friends, shall all those sorrows Wnd
Which in forgetful death thou leav’st behind;
No time shall dry our tears, nor drive thee from our mind.
The worst that can befall thee, measured right,
Is a sound slumber, and a long goodnight. (3. 90–6)
Even Epicurus had to die, though his genius shone so brightly in compari-
son with other thinkers that he reduced them to nothing just as the rising
sun puts out the stars (3. 1042–4).
Lucretius’ fourth book, on the nature of love, is full of lively description
of sexual activity, as well as atomistic explanations of the underlying
physiology. No doubt it was the content of this book that gave rise to
the legend, reported by St Jerome and dramatized by Tennyson, that
Lucretius wrote the poem in the lucid intervals of a madness brought on
by over-indulgence in an aphrodisiac.
St Jerome also preserves a tradition that the poem was left unWnished
and edited, after the poet’s death, by Cicero. This seems unlikely, for
Cicero, having expressed his admiration on Wrst reading of the poem,
never mentions it in his own philo sophical writing, even though he
devotes considerable attention to the Epicurean system.
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Cicero
Cicero himself was eclectic in his philosophy, which is a boon to the
historian, since his writings provide information about a variety of philo-
sophical tendencies. He made his Wrst acquaintance with the diVerent
philosophical schools when he studied in Athens in his late twenties.
Later he studied at Rhodes under the Stoic Posidonius. He was greatly
inXuenced by Philo of Larissa, the last head of the Academy, who came to
Rome from Athens in 88 bc. He kept in his house, as personal guru, the
Stoic Diodotus until his death in 60.
For a long time Cicero’s busy life in politics and in the courts did
not leave him much leisure for any philosophy except political philosophy.
In the late 50s he imitated Plato by writing a Republic and a Laws, which
have survived only in part. He withdrew from public life, however, when
Julius Caesar came to supreme power after a civil war in which he himself
had taken the opposite side. Cicero spent much of Caesar’s dictatorship
in literary activity, and after the death of his only daughter, Tullia,
in February 45 he wrote ever more frantically so as to forget his
grief. Most of his philosophical works were written in the years 45
and 44.
The two Wrst in the series are now lost, a Consolatio on the death of Tullia,
and the Hortensius, an exhortation to the study of philosophy that was to
play a dramatic part in the life of St Augustine. Ten other works, however,
survive, impressive in their range and eloquence.
Cicero set himself the task of creating a Latin philosophical vocabulary,
so that Romans could study philosophy in their own language.
Many, indeed, of the philosophical terms of modern languages derive
from his Latin coinages. In his own opinions, he took elements from
diVerent philosophical tendencies. In epistemology he favoured the mod-
erate sceptical opinion that he had learnt from Philo: he presents the
academic system and its variants in his Academica, which appeared in two
diVerent versions. In ethics he favoured the Stoic rather than the Epicurean
tradition. He looked to moral philosophy for consolation and reassurance.
In his de Finibus and Tusculan Disputations he writes, often with great passion
and beauty, on the relation between emotion, virtue, and happiness.
His works On the Nature of the Gods and On Fate contain interesting discussions
of philosophical theology and the issue of determinism, and his On
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Divination puts to good use arguments he had learnt, at a remove, from
Carneades.17
Cicero wrote philosophy without profundity, but his arguments are
often acute, his style is always elegant, and he is capable of great warmth.
His essays on friendship and old age have been popular throughout the
ages. His Wnal work on moral philosophy, On Duties (de OYciis), was ad-
dressed to his son shortly after the assassination of Julius Caesar in March
44. It was, during various periods of history, regarded as an essential item in
the education of a gentleman.
After Caesar’s death Cicero returned to politics with a series of bitter
attacks on the Caesarian consul Mark Antony. After Antony went into
partnership with Caesar’s adopted son Octavian, Cicero was executed in the
putsch that they jointly organized. He did not live to see the quarrel
between the two that led to Antony’s defeat at Actium in 31. He was
dead before Octavian became the Wrst Roman emperor, changing his name
to Augustus.
Judaism and Christianity
For the long-term development of philosophy the most important event in
the Wrst century of the Roman Empire was the career of Jesus of Nazareth.
The impact of his teaching on philosophy was, of course, delayed and
indirect, and his own moral doctrine was not without precedent. He
taught that we should not render evil for evil; but so had Plato’s Socrates.
He urged his hearers to love their neighbours as themselves; but he was
quoting the ancient Hebrew book of Leviticus. He told us that we must
refrain not just from wrong deeds, but from wrong thoughts and desires;
Aristotle too had said that the really virtuous person is one who never even
wants to do wrong. Jesus taught his disciples to despise the pleasures and
honours of the world; but so, in their diVerent ways, did the Epicureans
and the Stoics. Considered as a moral philosopher, Jesus was not a great
innovator: but that, of course, was not at all how he and his disciples saw
his role.
The framework of Jesus’ teaching was the world-view of the Hebrew
Bible, according to which the Lord God Yahweh had created, by mere Wat,
17 See Ch. 9 below.
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heaven and earth and all in them. The Jews were God’s chosen people,
uniquely privileged by their possession of the divine law revealed to Moses.
Like Heraclitus and other Greek and Jewish thinkers, Jesus predicted that
there would be a divine judgement on the world, amid cosmic catastrophe.
Unlike the Stoics, who placed the cosmic denouement in the indeWnite and
distant future, Jesus saw it as an imminent event, in which he would
himself play a crucial role as the Messiah.
Around the time of Jesus’ cruciWxion (c. ad 30) Jewish ideas were gaining
a hearing in Rome. Since the Hebrew Scriptures had been translated into
Greek in Alexandria in the time of the Wrst Ptolemys, there had been a
substantial Greek-speaking Jewish diaspora. In the Wrst century ad the
outstanding representative of Hellenistic Jewish culture was Philo, who
led a delegation to the emperor Caligula in 40 to protest against the
persecution of the Jews in Alexandria and the imposition of emperor-
worship. He wrote a life of Moses and a series of commentaries on the
Pentateuch designed to make the Hebrew Scriptures intell igible and palat-
able to those educated in Greek culture.
In its early days Christianity spread through the empire via the Greek-
speaking diaspora, but it soon came into contact with Gentile philosophy.
St Paul, preaching the gospel in Athens, held a debate with Epicurean and
Stoic philosophers, and the sermon against idolatry placed in his mouth in
the Acts of the Apostles is skilfully crafted, and shows an awareness of
matters at issue between the philosophical sects. Taking his cue from the
altar of the unknown God, Paul undertook to show the philosophers
the god whom they worshipped in ignorance.
[God] is not far from every one of us. For in him we live, and move, and have our
being; as certain also of your own poets have said, for we are also his oVspring.
Forasmuch then as we are the oVspring of God we ought not to think that the
Godhead is like unto gold or silver or stone, graven by art and man’s device. (Acts
17: 27–9)
The ‘poet’ Paul quoted was Cleanthes, the second head of the Stoa. Later
legend imagined Paul in philosophical discourse with the Stoic philosopher
Seneca. The story was no doubt untrue, but it was not wholly fanciful. Paul
once appeared in court before Seneca’s brother Gallio, and he had friends
in the palace of Seneca’s master Nero.
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The Imp erial Stoa
Seneca was the most signi W cant philosopher of the Wrst century. Born in
Spain, at Cordoba, at the beginning of the Christian era, he was in 49 made
tutor to the 12-year-old Nero. When Nero came to the throne in 54 he became
a senior adviser, and guided the emperor through a period of comparatively
good government, which came to an end in the year 59 when Nero murdered
his own mother. Seneca lost all inXuence on Nero after 62 and gradually
withdrew from public life. In 65 he was forced to slit his veins for alleged
participation in a plot against the tyrant, and died a Socratic death.
Seneca wrote a number of tragedies, and left a scrapbook of questions
on physical phenomena, but his reputation as a philosopher rests on
his ten ethical dialogues, and his 124 moral epistles, mostly written during
the period of his retirement. Seneca’s style is more exhortator y than
argumentative; he prefers preaching to debate. He was not interested in
logic, and he had a philistine attitude to the liberal arts: he compared a
person over-learned in literature to a man with an over-furnished house
(Ep. 88. 36). He had a certain interest in the physical sciences, and wrote a
treatise On Natural Questions, but he likes to draw a moral from natural
phenomena, and of the three branches of Stoic philosophy it is ethics that
is his main concern.
He urges us to strive towards liberation from the passions. In the longest
and best known of his dialogues, On Anger, he insists on the crucial
diVerence between bodily turmoil on the one hand, and the false judge-
ments which were the essential element from which we need puriWcation.
On this issue, earlier Stoics had not spoken with a single voice. ‘None of
those things that strike the mind fortuitously should be called passions:
they are not things the mind causes but things that happen to it. It is not
passion to be aVected by the appearances of things that present themselves;
passion consists in surrendering oneself to them and following up this
fortuitous impact’ (2. 3. 1). Weeping, turning pale, sudden intakes of
breath, and sexual arousal are not passions, but mere bodily phenomena:
it is what happens in the mind that matters. Seneca is able to conduct the
Stoic crusade against the passions with greater clarity and energy once
this distinction has been made.
Seneca was a materialist, accepting the Stoic doctrine that the human
mind was a material part of a material divine world-soul (Ep. 66. 12). But
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he often writes about the relation between soul and body in a manner that
is distinctly other-worldly. ‘The human heart is never more divine than
when it meditates on its own mortality, and realises that a human being
is born in order to give up life, and that this body is not a home but a
short-term hostelry which one must leave as soon as one sees one is
becoming a burden on one’s host’ (120. 14). Seneca recognizes the diYculty
of the Stoic path to virtue. He distinguishes between three stages in
moral progress. There are those who have given up some vices but not
all—they are without avarice, but not without anger; without lust but
not without ambition; and so on. Then there are those who have given up
all passions but are not yet safe from relapse. The third class, the closest
approximation to wisdom, consists of those who are beyond relapsing,
but have not yet acquired secure self-conWdence in their virtue (Ep. 75. 8–14).
Seneca also made popular the distinction in Stoicism between doctrines
and precepts. The doctrines provided the general philosophical framework;
the precepts enabled the true concept of the highest good to Wnd expres-
sion in speciWc prescriptions to individuals (Ep. 94. 2). This distinction
enabled Stoics to counter the allegation that their system was too elevated
to be of any practical use, and justiWed the philosopher in giving the kind of
pastoral advice of which Seneca’s own letters are full.
Many, in both ancient and modern times, have regarded Seneca as a
hypocrite: a man who praised mercy but was implicated in a tyrant’s
crimes; a man who preached the worthlessness of earthly goods but piled
up a gigantic fortune. In his defence it can be said that he acted as a
restraining inXuence on Nero, and that in his last years he sought genuine
detachment from the world. He was under no illusion that he lived up to
Stoic standards. ‘I am a long way, not only from perfection, but from being
a halfway decent person,’ he wrote (Ep. 57. 3).
Seneca was the founding father of the Imperial Stoa. Two other prom-
inent members of the school show how wide was the appeal of Stoicism
under the empire: the slave Epictetus and the emperor Marcus Aurelius.
The Stoics of the imperial period were far less interested in logic and
physics than their predecessors in Hellenistic times, and like Seneca
both Epictetus and Marcus are remembered principally for their m oral
philosophy.18
18 J. Barnes, Logic and the Imperial Stoa (Leiden: Brill, 1997) has made a gallant case for the logical
competence of Epictetus.
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