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Philosophy in the Roman Empire: Ethics, Politics and Society: Ethics

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Philosophy in the Roman Empire: Ethics, Politics and Society: Ethics PHILOSOPHY IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE Drawing on unusually broad range of sources for this study of Imperial period philosophical thought, Michael Trapp examines the central issues of personal morality, political theory, and social organization: philosophy as the pursuit of self- improvement and happiness; the conceptualization and management of emotion; attitudes and obligations to others; ideas of the self and personhood; constitutional theory and the ruler; the constituents and working of the good community. Texts and thinkers discussed range from Alexander of Aphrodisias, Aspasius and Alcinous, via Hierocles, Seneca, Musonius, Epictetus, Plutarch and Diogenes of Oenoanda, to Dio Chrysostom, Apuleius, Lucian, Maximus of Tyre, Pythagorean pseudepigrapha, and the Tablet of Cebes. The distinctive doctrines of the individual philosophical schools are outlined, but also the range of choice that collectively they presented to the potential philosophical ‘convert’, and the contexts in which that choice was encountered. Finally Trapp turns his attention to the status of philosophy itself as an element of the elite culture of the period, and to the ways in which philosophical values may have posed a threat to other prevalent schemes of value; Trapp argues that the idea of ‘philosophical opposition’, though useful, needs to be substantially modified and extended. To NGD, SWBT and NWBT Philosophy in the Roman Empire Ethics, Politics and Society MICHAEL TRAPP Kings College London, UK First published 2007 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2007 Michael Trapp Michael Trapp has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Trapp, Michael B. Philosophy in the Roman Empire : ethics, politics and society. - (Ashgate ancient philosophy series) 1. Philosophy, Ancient 2. Rome - Intellectual life I. Title 180.9'37 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Trapp, Michael B. Philosophy in the Roman Empire : ethics, politics and society / Michael Trapp. p. cm.-- (Ashgate ancient philosophy series) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and indexes. ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-1618-4 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Philosophy, Ancient. I. Title. B505.T73 2007 180.937--dc22 2006022224 ISBN 9780754616184 (hbk) ISBN 9781138270794 (pbk) Contents List of Abbreviations vii Preface ix 1 ‘Ethics’, ‘Philosophy’ and Philosophia 1 The history and internal geography of philosophia 1 The point and balance of philosophia: Imperial-period perceptions 5 The ‘dominance’ of ethics 10 Authority and division 13 Philosophia in the community 18 Who qualifies? 23 2 Perfection and Progress 28 Perfection: ideal states of the person 29 Lives and progress 42 Conclusion 62 3 The Passions 63 Background 63 Emotion and its control in the Imperial period 71 Conclusion: continuity and change 96 4 Self, Person and Individual 98 The soul and the real person 99 Programmes of self-discovery? 109 The self in therapeutic advice 116 The Self and the Will? 122 Afterword 133 5 Self and Others 134 The Stoics 135 Peripatetics, Platonists, Epicureans and Cynics 144 Special issues 150 Conclusion 165 vi Philosophy in the Roman Empire 6 Politics 1: Constitutions and the Ruler 166 The political background to Imperial-period theorizing 166 Constitutions 170 7 Politics 2: Good Communities 185 Dio on the Black Sea 185 Harmony and order 190 Collective moral character 195 Sanctions: law, punishment and instruction 199 Constituents of the community 200 8 Politics 3: Philosophia in Politics and the Community 211 Entertainment, leisure and responsibility 211 Philosophoi in formal politics 215 Conclusion 225 9 Philosophia and the Mainstream 226 Politics 226 A more general lack of alignment? 233 The paradox of an educational setting 243 An uncertain status? 245 Conclusion 256 Appendix: Bio-bibliographies 258 Bibliography 263 Index of Works and Passages 273 General Index 279 List of Abbreviations ANRW Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt CIL Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum DPA Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques E-K Posidonius, ed. L. Edelstein and I.G. Kidd IG Inscriptiones Graecae IGSK Inschriften griechischer Städte aus Kleinasien ILAlg Inscriptions latines de l’Algérie NP Der Neue Pauly IP Xenocrates, ed. M. Isnardi Parente L-S The Hellenistic Philosophers, ed. A.A. Long and D. Sedley OCD3 Oxford Classical Dictionary, edn 3 RAC Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum RE Paulys Realenzyklopädie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft (‘Pauly-Wissowa’) SVF Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, ed. H. von Arnim Us. Epicurea, ed. H. Usener W. Stobaeus, ed. C. Wachsmuth and O. Hense This page intentionally left blank Preface This is a book about the philosophical discussion of ethics, society and politics, and about the perceived place of philosophy in society, between the closing decades of the first century BCE and the opening decades of the third century CE. It does not, therefore, deal with the whole chronological period of the Roman Empire, down to the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476 CE, but rather with those parts of it conventionally marked off as the ‘Early’ and ‘High’ Empires, before the emergence of serious (and, as it turned out, eventually terminal) cracks in the imperial fabric with the Emperors from Macrinus (217–18) onwards. The individuals who will be discussed thus include, among others: the Stoics Seneca, Musonius Rufus, Epictetus, Dio Chrysostom, Hierocles and Marcus Aurelius; the Platonists Eudorus, Plutarch, Calvenus Taurus, Atticus, Alcinous, Albinus, Favorinus, Apuleius and Maximus of Tyre, along with the independent Platonist fellow travellers, Philo Judaeus and Galen; the pseudonymous Neopythagoreans ‘Archytas’, ‘Diotogenes’, ‘Ecphantus’, ‘Hippodamus’, and ‘Sthenidas’; the Peripatetics Aspasius and Alexander of Aphrodisias; the Cynics Demetrius and Oenomaus of Gadara; the Sceptic Sextus Empiricus; the compilers and handbook-writers Arius, Aulius Gellius and Diogenes Laertius; and the philosophical satirist Lucian.1 However heterogeneous a list this may seem from some points of view – more on this anon – its chronological outlines and the shared identity of its constituents (or most of them) as citizens or subjects of the Empire, are well marked.2 Although periodizations based on political events do not by any means always transfer satisfactorily into the domain of cultural and intellectual life, this one has perhaps something to be said for it, particularly in respect of its starting-point. The establishment of the Empire may have been a process achieved in stages rather than in one blinding flash, but it none the less brought about radical changes in the outlook of the elites of both the Latin- and the Greek-speaking areas of the Mediterranean world. It would be natural to expect the effects of those changes to have been felt in philosophical thinking as well as in political culture, and to set out to explore when and where (or at least if) such effects were indeed experienced. But in addition to this, the pattern of events within the history of philosophy, quite apart from events in the world of politics, might in any case lead one to treat the closing decades of the 1 Brief bio-bibliographical details are given in the Appendix, on pp. 258–62 below. 2 The question whether all these individuals legitimately count as philosophers – or rather, what the understanding of philosophy is under which (with only one or two exceptions) they count – is taken up below, in Chapter 1. x Philosophy in the Roman Empire first century BCE as a significant period of transition, and thus a plausible starting- point for a distinct chapter in the longer tale. Perhaps most obviously, these were the years which saw philosophy – philosophia, originally a Greek cultural artefact – consolidating its position as an element in Roman elite culture, following the pioneering efforts of such as Cicero, Varro and Lucretius in the preceding generation, and the still more uneasy and sporadic flirtations of the one or two generations before them. Although the relationship continued to be an intermittently stormy one, and although it is debatable how far it ever became accurate to speak of ‘Roman philosophy’, as opposed to ‘philosophy in Latin’, the point remains that, from the end of the first century BCE onwards, philosophia was accepted as part of the culture of the educated Roman in a way that had not been true a mere fifty years previously. But the annexation of Rome by philosophia is not the only development that marks these years as a period of significant change; at the same time the landscape of philosophy in Greek-speaking culture was shifting too. A hundred and fifty years before, in the first quarter of the second century BCE, the centre of the philosophical universe was still, as it had been for two hundred and fifty years, the city of Athens. Philosophers and philosophical teaching could of course be found in many other cities, from Alexandria and Pergamum to Pella; but the centres of authority, to which the best and most ambitious students went, and from which the best teachers came, were the great, original Athenian schools. And among these schools, at least in the eyes of modern scholars, it was three above all that made the philosophical running in the vigorous polemic of their mutual disagreements: Epicurus’ Garden, the Stoa of Zeno and Chrysippus, and Plato’s Academy, as re-oriented from dogmatic teaching to scepticism by Arcesilaus.
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