How Roman is Imperial Philosophy?

Philosophical developments in the Roman Empire deeply influenced how we conceive of Ancient Greek philosophy today. In the high empire Hellenistic philosophy (especially Stoicism) was immensely popular, but increasingly revitalized forms of Aristotelian and Platonic philosophies came to dominate the intellectual field. In particular, it was the scholastic reading of the treatises and dialogues, the advent of the exegetical tradition, that resulted in an almost scriptural status accorded to the works of Aristotle and Plato (Tarrant 2000; J. Barnes 1993; Sedley 1997b). Ironically, for those who associate the Roman Empire with Hellenistic philosophy, it was precisely at this time that the Hellenistic schools began to be eclipsed.

These centuries saw the resurgence of Aristotle’s school, of Pythagoreanism, and of course, the development of Middle Platonism (Dillon 1977), followed by Neoplatonism. There were also revelatory traditions of a multiethnic origin, including the Hermetica, the Chaldean Oracles, and Philo’s particularly Jewish brand of Stoic Platonism. Because the Roman Empire embraced a world whose intellectual aspirations always returned to Greek as the language of choice, we shall see that the majority of the philosophers in this period wrote in Greek. There were few Latin exceptions, of course: the Stoic Seneca, the Platonist Calcidius, and the novelist and author of a Platonist handbook, Apuleius of Madaura (perhaps only marginally an original philosopher). More typical are the Latin writers who chose to write in Greek though they lived in Rome or were themselves Roman. Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations in Greek and other native Italians such as Musonius Rufus wrote in Greek as well (Inwood 1995; Sedley 1997c; M. Griffin 1992, 1997a). Our period gives birth to mottos that sound anything but self-evident to the modern ear. Numenius (a second-century Pythagorean from Syria) quips, ‘‘what is Plato but a Moses who speaks Greek, or Moses but a Jew who Platonizes?’’ (Numen. fr. 8 des Places). This bon mot epitomizes the spirit of imperial philosophy, as Hebrew is eclipsed in favor of Greek, and Classical philosophy is displaced by the revelations of the God of Israel.

In the earlier part of our story, in the first century ce, philosophy from the viewpoint of someone living in Rome could have looked plausibly familiar, especially as the Stoics and Epicureans had already come to be Latinized in the works of Cicero and then of Lucretius and Seneca. Cicero notoriously published the Academica, a dialogue featuring the statesmen Lucullus, Catulus, and Hortensius expounding abstruse epistemological problems. Miriam Griffin persuasively writes of this period, ‘‘there is considerable evidence that, to many Romans, Stoicism as a moral philosophy seemed like a rationalization of (or a poor substitute for) Rome’s own traditional ideals’’ (M. Griffin 1997a: 8, citing Cic. Tusc. 1.2, Fin. 2.67). By contrast, it was the composite identity of the empire, the very fact that the empire itself exceeded anything peculiarly Roman, that coincided with the new spirit ofimperial philosophy. For imperial philosophy was decidedly Hellenic, even if this very Hellenism was born in the distant reaches of the Empire, beyond Rome and beyond Athens (Millar 1997: 243). The powerful ideas of the Platonic and Aristotelian schools found voices in the brilliant exegetical works of Alexander of Aphrodisias, the Alexandrians Philo and Plotinus, and the Syrian-born lamblichus. Beyond this philosophic geography there was a theoretical component to the cosmopolitanism that characterized imperial philosophy.

We glimpse this idea in Celsus’ On the True Doctrine. Celsus was a Middle Platonist philosopher of the second century who penned what was perhaps the first systematic philosophical attack on Christianity (Frede 1994, 1997; Dorrie 1987). From what can be constructed of this treatise through Origen’s reply (written some 70 years after Celsus’ original), it seems that Celsus adapted certain Stoic doctrines concerning the natural revelation afforded by reason, to suggest that there was one primordial and universal wisdom tradition. This true doctrine was attested among the highest and most ancient civilizations, including Egypt, Assyria, Persia, India, and various other tribes (Origen C. Cels. 1.16). The Jewish nation, however, corrupted and distorted this doctrine through the botched efforts ofMoses, who offered a misleading account of reality to his followers. In fact, the uneducated shepherds and goatherds who constituted the followers of Moses actually worshipped the cosmos ( C. Cels. 1.24.4) and not the transcendent god at all. Christians further embraced and amplified the mistakes introduced by the Jews (Frede 1997; C. Cels. 1.26). The Christian claim to possess a uniquely privileged revelation of the truth, resulting in a refusal to accord the same status to the gods of other nations or to recognize the universal monotheism (and what amounts to a largely Middle Platonist metaphysical scheme) of the world’s great religions, betrayed its intellectual inferiority.

Therefore the Roman Empire, as an amalgam or collective unity of the ancient nations, was providentially disposed to preserve and uphold this true doctrine. Imperial philosophy, insofar as it embraced the Syrian, Babylonian, Egyptian, and Greek traditions that came to inform it, was inherently multi-ethnic and could never be provincial (Frede 1997: 247; C. Cels. 1.16: ‘‘Linus, Musaeus, Orpheus, Phere-cydes, the Persian Zoroaster, and Pythagoras collected [these teachings] and preserved their own teachings in the books [they wrote], preserving them until the present day’’). Celsus was a Platonist, but his notion of a universal wisdom lineage has roots in the theories of allegory promoted by the Stoa and the Cosmopolis, promoted by the Cynics. Other Platonists of this era were also inclined to see the Roman Empire as a providential dispensation meant to provide for the flourishing of wisdom. Simon Swain has shown that many passages in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives touch on this theme, and that Plutarch cautiously embraced the idea that ‘‘the Platonic god had brought about the present political ordering of the world’’ (Swain 1997: 186-7; 1996). Although Swain sees in this pro-imperial attitude a gesture of appropriation (Romans need Greek divinity), Michael Frede (1997) is more accurate in noticing the universalizing tendency of Roman imperial philosophy. Rome became a gathering place, a meeting of minds that perhaps first benefited from the Athenian brain drain. But this cosmopolitanism grew as Rome in its military assimilation of other cultures stumbled on the great treasure troves of Hellenic wisdom (Millar 1993a, 1997; Potter 1994).

A quick glance at two of the most influential philosophers in the empire reveals an international cast. One, Alexander of Aphrodisias, dedicated his Concerning Fate to Septimius Severus and Caracalla c.198 ce. Whether the teaching post Alexander filled was one of Marcus Aurelius’ chairs in philosophy, and hence whether Alexander actually taught in Athens, is unknown. Among the successive members of the Aristotelian Commentator tradition of late antiquity (along with, e. g., Philoponus,

Simplicius, Ammonius, all of whom were Neoplatonists), Alexander was known as the dean of commentators. Nevertheless, Alexander wrote his commentaries and independent treatises as the last purely Aristotelian scholar. He made his appearance before the rise of Neoplatonism, and yet the theory for which he was best known, his doctrine of the active intellect, is rightly identified as an antecedent to Plotinus’ theory. Alexander taught that ‘‘our own higher thoughts were really the activity of a single, non-human nouS' (Lloyd 1990: 183; cf. Sharples 1987; Schroeder and Todd 1990). Thus Alexander indirectly influenced the formation of Neoplatonic noetics, and directly inspired the largest body of philosophical literature to have survived from antiquity - a group of works masterfully edited by Kalbfleish as the Corpus Aristote-licum Graecum (CAG) and now being translated under the direction of Richard Sorabji.

Another influential individual from the eastern provinces is lamblichus, who was born in Syria and migrated to Apamea in northern Syria; there, in a city full of Platonist history - Numenius, whom we have already met, was also from Apamea - he radically transformed the shape of Neoplatonic philosophy and infused a religiosity into what might have collapsed into a purely scholastic tradition. lamblichus’ only surviving works, The Life of Pythagoras and On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, are set in the worlds of Magna Graecia and of Egypt, respectively, thus traversing the borders of the Roman Empire. Along the way, lamblichus manages to transform what we might think of as the ordinary structure of pagan ritual into a rite of self-transformation, known as theurgy, or ‘‘divine activity.’’ As lamblichus explains in On the Mysteries, theurgy relies on the resonances between the human soul and the divine world. This resonance is captured in the lexical idea of the sunthema or symbolon, the corresponding tokens that, when united, reveal a complete meaning. Sunthemata are ritual objects employed in theurgic rites. Theurgists attributed their efficacy to causal structures initiated by Henads, the unifying principles of reality whose proper characteristics manifest themselves at every level of being, including the material order. The use of Henads in rites of ascent involves the installation of a given deity or divine energy in the sunthema, which functions as a cosmic switch and allows the soul of the practitioner to unite with the deity invoked. Likewise, certain dimensions of the soul are divinely complemented by corresponding functions, powers, and even virtues that exist among the gods whose assistance provides the foundation for theurgic ascent.

The example of lamblichus’ school in Apamea allows us once more to consider the multi-ethnic quality of imperial philosophy, for this city is also associated with the Chaldean Oracles (Athanassiadi 1999a: 153-4). These hexameter verses, written in archaizing Greek, were traditionally attributed to Julianus the Theurgist, a contemporary of Marcus Aurelius and a medium who succeeded in ‘‘channeling’’ Plato’s soul! The Oracles achieved canonical status in the third century ce, and were celebrated as a sacred text by members of the Neoplatonist school. The extant fragments of this work are preserved for the most part in commentaries on the Parmenides by Proclus and Damascius. There are two kinds of fragments: those that reveal magical practices or theurgic rites, and those that discuss Platonic doctrine in terms of a Middle-Platonist scheme. The word Chaldean connoted Babylonian, and there are indeed several links to Babylonian religion in the texts of the Oracles, as in for example Proclus’ Commentary on the Parmenides, which plays on a Syrian word, Ad ‘‘one’’ (Procl. In Prm. 7.58). At any rate, whether or not the Chaldean oracles participate in only a fabricated ‘‘Orientalism,’’ as many Western scholars insist, for our purposes it is enough to note that imperial philosophy is a philosophy that originates to a large extent at the margins of empire. It would seem that there is hardly anything Roman about philosophy in the Roman Empire.