In the final years of the Roman Republic, people still went to graduate school in Athens to study philosophy. Certainly Cicero did: we know that he listened to the lectures of Antiochus of Ascalon for six months during his student years (Brut. 315). So did his brother Quintus, his friend Atticus - though he became an Epicurean (Ac. 14) - and his associates Varro (Ac. 12) and Brutus (Tusc. 5.21) (J. Barnes 1997: 5961; M. Griffin 1997a: 4-7; Brittain 2001: 64-6). But after the Mithridatic War, the philosophical fortunes of Athens waned and philosophers in large numbers arrived in Rome. According to Brittain (2001: 58-63), the evidence suggests that the officially sanctioned schools of philosophy were simply shut down in 88 bce (Ath., Deip. 5.213d). Cicero tells us in his Brutus of the flight of Philo of Larissa to Athens along with the other ‘‘optimates’’ (Brut. 306). Philo of Larissa, Antiochus of Ascalon, the Epicurean Phaedrus, and the Peripatetic Cratippus all arrived in the Eternal City. Cicero himself attended on Philo with great enthusiasm, a fact which he attributes to the dismal political situation of Rome during the Social Wars:
Stirred by an amazing enthusiasm for philosophy I gave myself wholly to Philo. The reason I spent so long in this study - although the variety and the magnitude of the subjects themselves held me with great delight - was that the order of the law courts seemed to have disappeared forever. (Brut. 306, with Brittain 2001: 65)
Many of Cicero’s circle came to have connections with household philosophers who, exiled from the great Athenian schools, had ended up in Roman villas. Lucullus associated with Antiochus, Brutus with Antiochus’ brother, Aristus, Cato the younger with the Stoic Athenodorus, Calpurnius Piso with Philodemus (J. Barnes 1997: 60-2). In the early empire, Augustus himself patronized Stoic philosophers, while Tiberius sponsored the esoteric Pythagorean Thrasyllus as his court astrologer, although he later tried to kill him (Tac. Ann. 6.20-1; for Tiberius’ plot against Thrasyllus see Tarrant 1993: 216-19). Much later, Plotinus and Porphyry also found themselves in Rome (Porph. VP 5.1-7 discusses Porphyry’s arrival in Rome and so marks the beginning of Plotinus’ residency as a teacher there).
Before we leave this overview of Roman philosophical history, it will be useful to dwell for a moment on Cicero’s dialogue, the Academica (Brittain 2001; Tarrant 1985; Inwood and Mansfeld 1997). In it we find Cicero confessing his own philosophical allegiances to Academic skepticism. Cicero’s dialogue also shows the increasing importance of the history of philosophy in our period. Specifically, the Academica attempts to offer a uniform history of the Academy that makes skepticism, rather than dogmatism or doctrinal philosophy, central to the enterprises of both Plato and Socrates (Brittain 2001). Book Two of the Academica features Lucullus expounding the philosophy of the Academic renegade, Antiochus. Lucullus explains that he spent time with Antiochus in Alexandria while serving as quaestor (2.11). Whether their acquaintance could have qualified Lucullus to explicate the minutia of Antiochean doctrine that Cicero has him expound in the Academica is another story. Certainly Cicero caught flack for this representation. Romans could be cruel about intellectuals, as their word, baro, ‘‘egg-head,’’ suggests (M. Griffin 1997a: 14). At issue in the dialogue is the content of Philo’s so-called Roman books (Brittain 2001: 12968). Evidently Philo began to embrace a qualified form of dogmatism while he was the scholarch of the Academy, which for generations had maintained a radical form of skepticism. Akatalepsia, the principle that nothing can be known or rather that, so far, no one has succeeded in showing that knowledge is attainable, became central to the epistemology and ethics of the Academy under Arcesilaus and then Carneades, while at the same time detailed study of Plato’s dialogues had fallen out of favor in the Hellenistic Academy. Philo’s break meant a return to the limited affirmation that some things can be known. Largely due to the puzzling nature of Cicero’s account, Antiochus himself has recently become a philosophical legend, the supposed founder of the Alexandrian metaphysical school of Platonism and the first Academic philosopher to reintroduce Plato’s philosophy of the ideas (but see J. Barnes 1997, who considerably deflates the reputation of Antiochus).
Well and good, one might say, but why are these quibbles of any interest to a student of Roman imperial history? Because they show that philosophy was subject to shifting tides even before it reached Rome. The move to (a dogmatic) Plato was building momentum at a time when ordinary citizens and then emperors still affiliated themselves with the Hellenistic schools. The scriptural reverence for Plato’s dialogues was just on the horizon, as the intellectual vigor of the schools waned through lack of mutual antagonism. At any rate, while Philo modified his skepticism, two thinkers broke away from the Academy altogether. The first was Aenesidemus. Perhaps disgusted by the mediocrity of Philonian skepticism, Aenesidemus sponsored a return to the philosophy of Pyrrho, a fourth-century bce eccentric who wrote nothing, but who evidently maintained that the world was not such that anything could be known about it. Later, Sextus Empiricus was to champion the cause of Neo-Pyrrhonism with his monumental works, Against the Grammarians and Outlines of Pyrrhonism, perhaps relying extensively on the now lost works of Aenesidemus (for the relationship between Pyrrho, Aenesidemus, and Neo-Pyrrhonism, see Bett 1997). Second, though, was Antiochus himself, who (as we hear from Cicero’s Lucullus) actually went so far as to embrace Stoic epistemology. Did he have a doctrine of ideas or concepts that echoed Plato’s own epistemology, however dimly? Did he anticipate the return to the cosmic noetos, the intelligible order valorized in Middle Platonism? The jury is still out on this question.
This transition from the skepticism of the Hellenistic period to a more dogmatic Platonism anticipates the general movement of philosophy back to the classical authors and away from the Hellenistic schools. But this shift was gradual, and it is certainly true that in the first century CE, Stoicism, followed by Epicureanism as a distant second, defined the philosophical spirit of Romans more popularly. Already we have seen that Antiochus, a popularizer of Academic skepticism, was willing to accept the Stoa’s central epistemology, which was entirely empiricist. According to the Stoics, the mind formed its concepts through repeated experience of the objects encountered through the senses, and the accuracy of this process was assured through the device of the so-called ‘‘cognitive impression.’’ In other words, our minds receive as their very birthright a true and accurate assurance (the clear and distinct mark of the cognitive impression) that the world just is how we find it through ordinary sense experience (Frede 1983). This native ability of the mind to discern the truth becomes the focus of the Roman Stoa’s emphasis on the deity within, as we shall see when we come to Epictetus.
World History
