Introduction

The School of Doubt conducts a parallel philological and philosophical exami- nation of Cicero’s Academica, a work on Hellenistic epistemology written in the first half of 45 bce. The treatise has a unique history, insofar as fragments of two different versions are extant: the second of a two-volume first edition, a dialogue known as the Lucullus; and, forty-six paragraphs of the first book of a four-volume second edition, the Academic Books.1 Both versions ostensibly explore a controversy that divided Plato’s Academy at the turn of the first century bce, pitting Philo of Larissa against his pupil Antiochus of Ascalon. Their dispute was centered on a disagreement over the foundation of knowledge. As the story goes—a story in large part drawn from the pages of the Academica— Antiochus took issue with certain teachings of Philo’s Academy, whose tradition, developed during the school’s Hellenistic period, came to stand for the unknowability of all perceptual and conceptual objects (impressions, or visa) and for withholding assent to any such impression. These two postures, which defined Academic teaching in the third and second centuries bce, were known as akatalêpsia and epochê respectively. While rejecting this dialectical attitude as a betrayal of the Platonic legacy in which he was educated and to which he professed his loyalty, Antiochus leaned closer to the certitude of the Stoics. Specifically, he believed that the Stoa’s theory of “kataleptic impression” (καταληπτική φαντασία) provided a secure foundation for knowledge and a route back to the systematic spir- it of Platonism. Stoic sense-perception, the keystone of their philosophical system, was built around katalêpsis and claimed that the senses granted the individual access to the truth of the world, so long as certain perceptual condi- tions were met. This possibility was denied by the Hellenistic Academy, after its third-century bce leader Arcesilaus made this refutation his life’s work and the Academy’s crusade for decades to come. By the time Cicero had taken an interest in philosophy, the skeptical current in the Academy still controlled the school under Philo’s stewardship; Stoicism was still the enemy, despite a grow- ing interest, felt most acutely in Antiochus, in less virulent forms of doubt and

1 I follow general practice in referring to the surviving fragments as the Lucullus—and Catulus for the lost first dialogue of that edition—and the Academic Books. When discussing Cicero’s Academic project as articulated in the two editions, I use the label Academica. I note that, while the other titles are attested in his correspondence, Cicero never refers to the treatise, or any of its segments, using that designation. For a discussion of titles, see §I.1.2 and §I.1.3. For the text of the Lucullus and fragments of the Academici Libri I use Plasberg (1922).

2 Introduction more constructive approaches to philosophy’s problems.2 Notwithstanding these tendencies, in Cicero’s account the argument between Antiochus and Philo rehearsed the Hellenistic conflict between Stoa and Academy. Composed after Cicero’s Consolation for the death of his daughter Tullia in 45 bce and the protreptic Hortensius, and contemporary with the ethical re- view presented in On Ends, the Academica stands as a decidedly technical work. Its subject matter, falling into the Hellenistic category of ‘logic’, manifests an indifference to Cicero’s personal situation, to the reasons for doing philosophy and to moral dilemmas we may suppose he was facing during that period. The first half of 45 bce was witness to a momentous phase in Roman history and in Cicero’s life. Caesar’s victory at Pharsalus (48 bce), confirmed by the massa- cre of Pompeian forces at Munda (45 bce), left the Republican world-order in chaos and pushed Cicero out to the margins of the world he once led. Grieving for his daughter and in the vulnerable position of a supplicant to Caesar and his faction, Cicero resolved to write philosophy—something of an unexpected turn, judging from the extent of his labors in justifying it. He began this project by studying the fundamentals of knowledge, the usefulness and legitimacy of reason and the individual’s relation to the world as mediated through cogni- tion and perception. In light of these reflections, one of the driving concerns of this monograph is to argue that the Academica is no less engaged with its context than any other work written by Cicero in the 50s and 40s bce—works that have warranted critical attention because of their explicit engagement with social and political questions. I contend that to understand the profound relationship between philosophical discourse and personal, social and political anxieties, we are required to take on board the technical aspects of Cicero’s philosophical views—their substance—along with the method by which he explores and defines them.

2 We have no evidence to suggest that Cicero, his teachers or the Academic sources he refers to in his philosophica used the label ‘skepticism’ (in Greek, σκεπτικός or σκέπτεσθαι). We find the first attested use in antiquity referring to a philosophical movement in the second century CE and the term is canonized in the second or third century CE (§III.10.1). As Carlos Lévy (2017) has lately reminded us, branding Cicero a “Roman Skeptic” (cf. Woolf 2015) is not an uncontroversial move and one that has gained greater traction among Anglo-American Ciceronianists than on the continent. I employ the label as a shorthand to describe the Hel- lenistic Academy in line with the tradition in which I developed as a scholar. However, sensi- tive to Lévy’s preoccupations, I explore the tenor of Cicero’s skepticism and defend my use of the term in Part 3. More generally, one of the aims of The School of Doubt is to study the Academica in the wider context of Western skeptical philosophies, and recourse to the term will, I hope, keep that comparative perspective foremost in the reader’s mind. I thank Prof. Ermanno Malaspina for drawing my attention to this point.