Download PDF | Myrto Garani (editor), David Konstan (editor), Gretchen Reydams-Schils (editor) - The Oxford Handbook of Roman Philosophy (OXFORD HANDBOOKS SERIES)-OUP USA (2023).
649 Pages
Preface
Roman philosophy? The question is, perhaps, inevitable, even today. Is Roman philosophy anything other than Greek philosophy in a toga? Or still worse, does Greek philosophy cease to be philosophy precisely insofar as it is Roman? We seek to recover from Roman writings whatever information they may provide about Greek philosophical schools, and the dross, as it were, is what is Roman—practical applications, at best, or at worst, misunderstandings and distortions. We raise this question here only to dismiss it.
Several decades of scholarship by now have demonstrated that Roman thinkers have developed in new and stimulating directions the systems of thought they inherited from the Greeks, and that, taken together, they offer a range of perspectives that are of philosophical interest in their own right. Do they constitute a single perspective, a kind of Roman school? Certainly not. But then, neither is this so for Greek philosophy. And if Roman texts are in some respects derivative of Greek, this can equally be said of most of modern philosophy.
Wherever the word “philosophy” is used, it betrays its debt to Greece. Nevertheless, problems relating to the definition of Roman philosophy remain. Does it apply only to works written in Latin? This would seem unduly restrictive, since many Romans wrote in Greek—one thinks at once of Marcus Aurelius, for example— and many whose native language may have been Greek were living in Rome, or under Roman rule, and were in close contact with leading Roman intellectuals: Epictetus is a good instance, and Plutarch another. An inclusive approach, such as this book offers, is surely appropriate. A different question arises in regard to Christian thought: is this to be regarded as philosophical—or as Roman? Here the answer would seem to be self-evidently yes, and this volume contains chapters on Ambrose, Augustine, Latin Neoplatonism, and even Byzantine political thought. And yet, we ourselves are perhaps guilty of some equivocation, insofar as these chapters are gathered in a separate part bearing the heading “After Roman Philosophy: Transmission and Impact.” And if any eyebrows are raised at the inclusion of Byzantium, let it be recalled that the Byzantine Empire identified itself as Roman.
Even this does not exhaust the questions that our manual might raise, and did raise for its editors. Ought poets who were influenced by philosophical currents, but can hardly be called philosophers, to be represented? There is no difficulty when it comes to Lucretius, of course, and perhaps Persius, as a self-proclaimed Stoic, is unproblematic, but what about Horace? Well, he did call himself a pig from the sty of Epicurus. If such a broad criterion for inclusion seems peculiar to Roman philosophy, and perhaps is even a sign of its eclecticism and want of rigor—after all, the gamut of Cicero’s works is no narrower than that of Horace’s verses—it is worth recalling that Greek philosophy was no less latitudinarian. The decision, in many surveys of Greek philosophy, to exclude figures such as Isocrates, or Cleanthes, or for that matter Lucian, is a reflection of modern habits of thought more than ancient. So Augustan poetry has a place in this book, and Apuleius receives his due. Great individuals, especially if there emerged schools bearing their names, like Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus, readily capture attention, but the focus on specific systems may obscure ways in which they respond to questions that are characteristic of their time.
After all, less than a century separates the writings of Plato and Aristotle from those of Epicurus and the early Stoics, and despite many changes in the world around them, they continued to live in an identifiable polis culture with many shared values and presuppositions. Rome was a different place, and from the time when we first have access to their literature to the later Roman Empire there occurred profound, if also subtle, transformations in the perception of such basic categories as time, space, and the conception of the self or subject. The imposition of a universal calendar and the standardization of measures, as well as developments in law, in notions of sovereignty, and in language, had an impact even on the most abstract theories of nature and visions of the human good. Thus, one section of the present volume is devoted to such themes. When it comes to philosophy, even today, style matters, and in a highly rhetorical culture such as Rome’s it mattered all the more. One pointed difference between thinkers writing in Latin and those composing in Greek, even when they were Romanized (if that is the right word), is that the former were deeply conscious of questions of translation.
Genre mattered too. Quintilian boasts that satire was a wholly Roman invention, and yet it was a principal vehicle of philosophy, as witnessed by Horace and Persius, and the fragments of the earlier poet Lucilius. Philosophy is communicated in dialogues (Plato was the forerunner, of course), in oratory, and in consolations. What is more, the topics that philosophers treated also varied. Not just translation, but questions about the essence of poetry, or of freedom of speech under monarchies, assumed new forms in Roman reflection and widened the scope of philosophical inquiry. As the reader will notice at once, there is variety not only in the topics selected for discussion but also in the length and tone of the individual chapters. This was not entirely by design. As drafts were submitted, which for reasons beyond the editors’ or the contributors’ control took place over several years, it became clear that a single size did not fit all subjects, nor was it either possible or desirable to impose a single format or approach to all the essays. For essays the chapters are, not articles in an encyclopedia, which may aspire to greater uniformity. Roman philosophy is, in one sense, still under construction, and very likely always will be (in a large sense, this is no doubt true of philosophy itself).
The reader will find that tendencies, themes, and individuals are treated in several distinct chapters (cross-references are provided), not always from the same perspective. Handbooks today, or “companions” as they are often labeled, are not so much summaries of all that is known as invitations to explore further issues that are not yet wholly resolved. It is in this spirit that the reader is encouraged to approach the several papers collected in this volume.
Introductions often conclude with an overview of the contents of the book, but in a volume such as this, such a guide seemed unnecessary, and perhaps even misleading. The chapter titles and associated abstracts give an adequate indication of the topic. For the rest, the pleasure, we hope, will lie in the fresh encounter with the orientations and methods that inform the several chapters, and precisely for the manner in which they sometimes disagree or even clash. We conclude by expressing our gratitude to the press, and to our editor Stefan Vranka, for their support for this project, to Rebecca Sausville for her diligent copyediting of the entire manuscript, and to the contributors to the volume for their efforts and their patience. Myrto Garani David Konstan Gretchen Reydams-Schils
List of Contributors Daniel Bertoni received his PhD from Harvard University with a dissertation on Greek and Roman botany and taught for two years in the Department of Classics at the University of Miami. Subsequently, he received a JD from the University of California, Berkeley, and now serves as a Trial Attorney at the US Department of Justice. Anne-Isabelle Bouton-Touboulic is Professor of Latin, University of Lille (France). She is the author of L’ordre caché: La notion d’ordre chez saint Augustine (2004) and has edited or coedited several volumes, including Scepticisme et religion (with Carlos Lévy) (2016) and L’amour de la justice, de la Septante à Thomas d’Aquin (2017). Orazio Cappello is an Honorary Research Associate in University College London’s Psychoanalysis Unit. He is the author of several articles on Cicero, Republican and Imperial intellectual history, as well as a monograph on Cicero and skepticism. Ivor J. Davidson is Honorary Research Professor in Divinity, University of Aberdeen, UK. He previously held chairs in Systematic and Historical Theology at the University of Otago, New Zealand, and the University of St Andrews, UK; at the latter he was also Dean of the Faculty of Divinity, Head of School, and Principal of St. Mary’s College. A Classicist by initial training and enduring affections, his publications include the standard modern critical study of the Latin text of Ambrose’s De officiis (2 vols., 2002). Gregson Davis is Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Duke University. He has held joint appointments in Classics and Comparative Literature at Stanford, Cornell, and New York University. His major publications in the field of Latin poetry of the Late Republic include the books: Polyhymnia: The Rhetoric of Horatian Lyric Discourse (1991) and Parthenope: The Interplay of Ideas in Vergilian Bucolic (2012). Elisa Della Calce is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Turin. Her main research interests are in Latin historiography (Livy in particular), the study of value concepts (Wertbegriffe) in Roman thought, and digital humanities. She is currently working on the reception of classical authors in Jesuit texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Michael Erler was Professor ordinarius of Classical Philology at the University of Wuerzburg, He is presently senior professor and chair of the board of directors of the Siebold Collegium, Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Wuerzburg. He is author of several books and articles on Plato, Platonism, Epicurus and the Epicurean tradition, drama, Hellenistic literature, and literature of imperial times. He is interested in the relationship between literature and philosophy. He was president of the International Plato Society (2001–2004), Gesellschaft für antike Philosophie (2007– 2010), and Mommsen Gesellschaft, (2013–2015). Dana Fields is an independent scholar whose work focuses on the Greek-speaking world of the Roman empire. Her recent book Frankness, Greek Culture, and the Roman Empire (2021) addresses the significance of parrhēsia and related ideas in later Greek culture. Matthew Fox is Professor of Classics at the University of Glasgow. He has been exploring the interplay between philosophical and literary in Cicero for over thirty years. Myrto Garani is Associate Professor of Latin Literature at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. She is the author of Empedocles Redivivus: Poetry and Analogy in Lucretius (2007), coeditor with David Konstan of The Philosophizing Muse: The Influence of Greek Philosophy on Roman Poetry (2014), and coeditor with A. N. Michalopoulos and S. Papaioannou of Intertextuality in Seneca’s Philosophical Writings (2020). She is currently working on a monograph on Seneca’s Naturales quaestiones Book 3 (for the Pierides series) and a commentary on Lucretius’s De rerum natura 6 (for the Fondazione Lorenzo Valla series). Pamela Gordon is Professor of Classics at the University of Kansas. She is the author of “Kitsch, Death, and the Epicurean,” in Sergio Yona and Gregson Davis, eds., Epicurus in Republican Rome: Philosophical Perspectives in the Ciceronian Age (2022), and The Invention and Gendering of Epicurus (2012). Quinn Griffin received her PhD in 2016 from The Ohio State University with a dissertation on classical exempla and learned women in the Renaissance. From 2016 to 2021 she served as an Assistant Professor of Classics at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan, where she continued her research on Renaissance and early modern women with an article on the reception of classical authors in Laura Cereta’s “Oration on the Funeral of a Donkey.” She explored the reception of funeral orations and adoxography in the Renaissance in a chapter titled, “The Owl and the Pussycat: Following the Trail of a Neo-Latin Mock Funeral Oration.” She is currently an e-learning developer in Columbus, Ohio, and continues to engage with her research in the context of fiction writing. Erik Gunderson is a Professor of Classics at the University of Toronto. His research is loosely centered around the Greco-Roman discourses of the self. He is the author of six scholarly monographs and edited The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Rhetoric. His most recent book is The Art of Complicity in Martial and Statius: The Epigrams, Siluae, and Domitianic Rome. Myrto Hatzimichali is Associate Professor in Classics (Ancient Philosophy) at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Homerton College. She is the author of Potamo of Alexandria and the Emergence of Eclecticism in Late Hellenistic Philosophy (2011), and has recently contributed to volumes on Plato’s Academy, late Hellenistic Greek literature, the Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s Biology, and the Corpus dei Papiri Filosofici. Christina Hoenig is an Associate professor in Classics at the University of Pittsburgh. Her main areas of research are the Greek and Roman Platonic traditions. A central theme of interest is the translation of Greek philosophical vocabulary into Latin. Her monograph Plato’s Timaeus and the Latin Tradition was published in 2018. Phillip Sidney Horky is Professor of Ancient Philosophy in the Department of Classics & Ancient History, Durham University . In addition to his Plato and Pythagoreanism (2013) and edited volume Cosmos in the Ancient World (2019), he is currently finishing a source book on Hellenistic and Post-Hellenistic Pythagoreanism. His next project is a book entitled The Philosophy of Democracy in Antiquity, for which he received a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (2022–2023). For the period 2023–2028, he will be working with Professor Edith Hall (Durham) on a major research project, funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), on Aristotle’s writing styles and their reception in antiquity. Aaron Kachuck is Professor of Latin Authors and Latin Literature at Université Catholique de Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve). A specialist in Latin literature, and a comparatist by formation, he works at the intersection of literature and religion at Rome. He is the author of The Solitary Sphere in the Age of Virgil (2021), and is currently working on a commentary on the Satires of Persius (under contract), and on articles, monographs, and collective projects related to cosmography in antiquity and in the classical tradition, to the role of ritual in the poetic imaginary of Latin literature, and to Cynicism in antiquity and its later reception. Anthony Kaldellis is Professor of Classics at The Ohio State University. He has published widely on many aspects of Byzantine history, literature, and culture, and his recent work focuses on its Roman aspects, especially in The Byzantine Republic (2015) and Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium (2019). George Karamanolis is Associate Professor in Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna working primarily on ancient philosophy while maintaining research interests in Byzantine and Renaissance philosophy. His publications include the monographs Plato and Aristotle in Agreement? Platonists on Aristotle from Antiochus to Porphyry (2006; rev. paperback 2013), The Philosophy of Early Christianity (2013; rev. 2nd ed. 2021); and the edited volumes Studies on Porphyry (2007, with Anne Sheppard); The Aporetic Tradition in Ancient Philosophy (2017, with Vasilis Politis), and Pseudo-Aristotle On the Cosmos: A Commentary (2020, with Pavel Gregorić).
Duncan F. Kennedy is Emeritus Professor of Latin Literature and the Theory of Criticism at the University of Bristol. Among his writings are Rethinking Reality Lucretius and the Textualization of Nature (2002) and Antiquity and the Meanings of Time: A Philosophy of Literature and Interpretation (2013). James Ker is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His main area of teaching and research is the cultural dimensions of Roman literature, and his books include The Deaths of Seneca (2009). Agnieszka Kijewska is Professor of the History of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy at the John Paul II Lublin Catholic University (Poland). She is interested in the medieval Neoplatonic tradition, mainly, St. Augustine, Boethius, Eriugena, the School of Chartres, and Nicholas of Cusa.
David Konstan is Professor of Classics at New York University. He is the author of Friendship in the Classical World (1997), The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature (2006), and most recently The Origin of Sin: Greece and Rome, Early Judaism and Christianity (2022). He is a past president of the American Philological Association (now the Society for Classical Studies), and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an honorary fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Kurt Lampe is a Senior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Bristol. He is also a psychotherapist in training at the Bath Centre for Psychotherapy and Counselling. His most recent books are the paired volumes, French and Italian Stoicisms: From Sartre to Agamben (ed. Kurt Lampe and Janae Sholtz) and German Stoicisms: from Hegel to Sloterdijk (ed. Kurt Lampe and Andrew Benjamin).
David Leith is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Exeter. He has published variously on the Hellenistic and Roman medical sects, especially Herophilus, Erasistratus, Asclepiades, and the Methodists, and has edited medical fragments for the Oxyrhynchus Papyri series. He is currently preparing a collection, with essays and commentary, of the testimonia on Asclepiades of Bithynia. Ermanno Malaspina is Academicus ordinarius at the Pontificia Academia Latinitatis and President of the advisory Board of the Société Internationale des Amis de Cicéron (www. tulliana.eu). His main interests are Cicero, Seneca, and landscape theories in Rome. He is the editor of Seneca’s De clementia (2016) and of Cicero’s Lucullus (forthcoming). Natania Meeker is Associate Professor of French and Italian at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Voluptuous Philosophy: Literary Materialism in the French Enlightenment (2006) and coauthor of Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction (2020). She is currently completing a monograph, tentatively titled Illusion without Error, on feminine materialisms in eighteenth-century France.
Tim O’Keefe is Professor of Philosophy at Georgia State University. His publications on Epicureanism include two books (Epicurus on Freedom, 2005, and Epicureanism, 2009) and articles on topics such as the Epicureans on the mind–body relation, freedom of action, the ontological status of sensible qualities, friendship, justice, and death. He has lso published on the Pyrrhonian skeptics, the Stoics, the Cyrenaics, Anaxarchus, and the spurious Platonic dialogue the Axiochus. James I. Porter is the Irving Stone Professor in Literature and Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric and Ancient Greek and Roman Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author, most recently, of Homer: The Very Idea (2021). He is currently completing a study of the self as a problem in antiquity from Heraclitus to the Roman Stoics. Gretchen Reydams-Schils is Professor in the Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame, and holds concurrent appointments in Classics, Philosophy, and Theology. She is the author of The Roman Stoics; Self, Responsibility, and Affection (2005) and, most recently, Calcidius on Plato’s Timaeus: Greek Philosophy, Latin Reception, and Christian Contexts (2020). She directs the Notre Dame Workshop on Ancient Philosophy. Malcolm Schofield is Emeritus Professor of Ancient Philosophy, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of St John’s College, where he has taught for fifty years. He has published widely on Presocratic philosophy, Plato, Aristotle, Stoicism, and Cicero’s philosophical writings. His most recent book is Cicero: Political Philosophy (2021). John Sellars is Reader in Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London. His recent books include Hellenistic Philosophy (2018) and Marcus Aurelius (2021).
James Warren is Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College. His publications include Facing Death: Epicurus and His Critics (2004), The Pleasures of Reason in Plato, Aristotle, and the Hellenistic Hedonists (2014), and Regret: A Study in Ancient Moral Psychology (2021). Claudia Wiener is Professor of Classical and Neo-Latin Studies at the LudwigMaximilians-University of Munich. Her research interests include the influence of Stoic philosophy on Roman literature, textual transmission and medieval and renaissance scholarly commentaries on Latin Classics (esp. Persius), and neo-Latin literature in Germany.
She has published inter alia Stoische Doktrin in römischer Belletristik: Das Problem von Entscheidungsfreiheit und Determinismus in Senecas Tragödien und Lucans Pharsalia. Jeffrey Ulrich is an Assistant Professor of Classics who specializes in the ancient novel and the reception of Platonism in Imperial Roman culture. He has written extensively on Platonic elements in Apuleius’s novel and broader oeuvre, and is finishing a monograph on philosophical choice and aesthetic experience in the Metamorphoses. He is also interested in Roman poetry and satire, and has written on Vergil, Horace, and Petronius .
chapter 1 Italic Pythagoreanism in the Hellenistic Age Phillip Sidney Horky Introduction For the soul is celestial, as it was drawn down from its home on highest and, as it were, buried in the earth (demersus in terram), a place opposite to the nature that is divine and eternal. I believe that the immortal gods have sown souls in human bodies so that there might be people to watch over the earth, and who, by contemplating the order of the heavens, might imitate it through moderation and constancy of living.
Nor have I been driven to believe this by the force of reason and dialectical argumentation alone, but also by the excellence and authority of the greatest philosophers. I have learned that Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans— practically our own countrymen (incolas paene nostros)—who were once referred to as “Italic” philosophers (qui essent Italici philosophi quondam nominati), never doubted that the soul we have was culled from the universal divine Mind. (Cato the Elder, speaking in Cic. Sen. 77–78) Grasping what is “Roman” about the philosophy in Rome that preceded his own was a project that Cicero undertook with a certain amount of energy and care. Cicero sought to pursue this project by reference to non-Roman philosophy, especially Greek philosophy.
The ways in which Greek philosophy, chiefly the philosophical ideas of Plato, the Peripatetics, the Stoics, the Epicureans, and the (skeptical) Academy, came to influence Roman philosophy have been thoroughly treated in scholarly literature. However, despite Cato the Elder’s assertion that the philosophy of the “Pythagoreans,” those “who were once (quondam) referred to as Italics” and were “practically” (paene) countrymen of the Romans, provided him with the proper understanding of death, modern studies on the importance of “Italic” philosophy, especially figured as “Pythagorean,” to Roman philosophy are not easy to find.1 More common are unsubstantiated claims that subvert such a project: as Jonathan Powell asserts, “the Neo-Pythagoreanism of the Roman Republic is an interesting byway, but probably without major influence on the philosophy of the time.”2
Yet Powell’s assertion does little to explain the evidence from Cicero’s own corpus of the perceived importance of Pythagoreanism for the development of ancient intellectual cultures, both for early Greek philosophers such as Plato, and, as we will see below, for certain paradigmatic Roman heroes of the early-middle Republic.3 One reason why a proper assessment of the importance of Pythagoreanism for Roman philosophy has not been written is that scholars haven’t quite mapped out the parameters of the Hellenistic Pythagoreanism thought to be associated with the Italian peninsula.
This chapter aims to address two problems that arise out of this observation: (1) it seeks to delineate what “Italic” philosophy might have been for the Romans, especially given what “Italic” or “Italian” would have meant to a Roman such as Cicero, in the first century BCE; and (2) it seeks to elaborate further on the relationship between “Italic” philosophy, as constructed in the first century BCE, and Hellenistic Pythagoreanism. The project of defining, or at least sketching the broad parameters of, Hellenistic Pythagoreanism remains beyond the scope of this piece, but we can nevertheless make use of textual evidence of and reliable testimony about Pythagoreanism in the Hellenistic age, in our project of attempting to giving shape to “Italic” philosophy.4 It has not often been noticed that Cicero actually differentiates the Pythagoreans, whom his authoritative interlocutor Cato refers to as “practically our own countrymen,” from the “Italic” philosophers, a name no longer used to describe the Pythagoreans—as if the old nomenclature had lost its value.
At the end of this chapter, the deep importance of this temporal qualification will become clear. A straightforward reading of this passage would of course note that Cicero has been reading the work of Aristotle, or something like it,5 as Aristotle rather routinely conflates Pythagoreans with “Italian” philosophers in his treatises.6 But what “Italy” was in Cicero’s time was not what it had been in Aristotle’s, nor yet what it eventually would become under Augustus, who confirmed Italian identity by dividing all of “Italy,” understood to include the entire peninsula from Regium to Transpadane Gaul, into eleven regions.7
As Emma Dench and, more recently, Grant Nelsestuen, have argued, a variety of positions about what constituted “Italy” in the first century BCE can be detected, not without ideological implications.8 “Italy” was, throughout the Hellenistic and early Roman Republican ages, more of a construct than a place of firm identity, made up of various ethnic groups distributed throughout a loosely shifting geographical space.9 And, indeed, from the earliest prose writings in Latin, in Cato’s Origines, a robust discourse on this subject was available to Romans.10 Contemporaries of Cicero, such as Varro and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, could plausibly construct wholly diverse geographical orientations of “Italy.”11
Thus, various representations from the past or present could have informed Cicero’s sense of what it meant to speak of Pythagorean philosophy as having once been considered “Italic,” even though it was no longer allegedly so in his (i.e., Cicero’s) own day Cicero, however, understood “Italic” philosophy to be neither Roman nor Greek, but something in-between—something that could be associated with the values of Cato the Elder (whether qua Roman or qua Tusculan is unclear), and yet not unrelated to the Ionian philosophy evidenced by Pythagoras’s relocation from Samos to Croton. Cicero himself may have had particular personal reasons to revive the notion of “Italic” philosophy, which he probably found in Aristotle’s works, but equally probably did not find in other works of philosophical history available to him.
For “Italic” philosophy as such is notable for its absence just as much as its presence: no evidence of any philosophy, including Pythagorean philosophy, being expressly called “Italic” as such, is to be found from Aristotle to Cicero’s time, although interest in this notion explodes after the first century BCE, and the division of philosophy into Ionian and Italian is reinvigorated by figures like Clement of Alexandria and (ps-)Hippolytus of Rome.12 That Cicero associated “Italic” and “Italian” with those peoples who were neither strictly Greek nor Roman, however, can be inferred from a passage of his De Haruspicum Responso, where, by reference to discussion of the Social Wars (which he calls the “Italici Belli”), Cicero differentiates Italic peoples from Greeks and Romans, while nevertheless linking them to the Latins.13
And he may have had good reason to do so: as a novus homo, like Cato the Elder before him (and others, as we will see), Cicero laid claim to being a dual-citizen— having both a Roman patria, to which he was to claim allegiance, and his native patria of Arpinum, which was the land of his ancestors and seat of native cults.14 His commitment to Rome was best explained by having one fatherland that was given by birth, and the other by law. But there still remains the issue of Cicero’s initial association, and subsequent dissociation (quondam), of Pythagoreanism with “Italic” philosophy.
In the Tusculan Disputations, Cicero argues that Pythagoras came from Asia Minor to Italy, bringing the notion of the immortality of the soul, which he learned from his teacher Pherecydes of Syros, to the Italian peninsula.15 Many were thought to have come to Pythagoras to become his students, including Romans. Cicero later (Tusc. 4.3) ropes in some surprising figures: other people would say that the great Roman king Numa Pompilius was disciple of Pythagoras, but Cicero knows better—the chronology is all wrong.16 Even so, the great Cato the Elder, in his Origines, evidenced Pythagorean tendencies, and the paradigmatic republican statesman Appius Claudius Caecus was no less than a bona fide Pythagorean himself.
Thus, according to Cicero, did Pythagoreanism come to inform early philosophy of the Romans of the late fourth and third centuries BCE. But what about “Italic” philosophy? We see this taken up in Cicero’s presentation of the development of Roman philosophy: for, in Cato the Elder’s account of his youth in Sen. 39–41, he claims to have heard a debate, passed down through oral traditions in Tarentum, which involved not only the famous Pythagorean statesman Archytas of Tarentum and Plato but also a remarkable figure known as Herennius Pontius, a Samnite philosopher who was a contemporary of Archytas and Plato. How can we account for this Samnite philosopher’s presence in Cicero’s text? We are encouraged to consider not only the philosophy that flourished in the emigration of Pythagoreanism from Ionia to Italy but also something that Cicero would have recognized as uniquely “Italic”—a philosophy that is considered to have employed the language and concepts of Greek philosophy, but that retained its own native genius.17
And, as we will see, much of what survives of “Italic” philosophy, in the writings associated with the Lucanians Aesara/Aresas, Occelus, and Eccelus, and in the fragments of Ennius of Rudiae, is often linked with Hellenistic Pythagoreanism, representing less a subcategory of the Pythagoreanism known to Cicero and others than a novel aspect that Hellenistic Pythagoreanism took on sometime before the end of the second century BCE. Lucanian Philosophy (i): Aresas/Aesara Lucania was an area in southern Italy that maps roughly onto modern Basilicata, forming a house-shaped space that ranged roughly from Thurii in the southeast, to Metapontum in the northeast, to Venusia in the north, Paestum in the northwest, to Laos in the southwest. This area had been substantially overcome around 420 BCE by non-Greeks who spoke a language called Oscan.
A Sabellic language spoken in southern and central Italy by Lucanians and Samnites alike, Oscan is mostly known from inscriptions that predate the Social War (91–88 BCE).18 Oscan and Greek are understood to have coexisted for a long time in Lucania. A number of Lucanian philosophers are attested, and some texts purporting to have been written by these figures survive. Their imprint was left on Aristoxenus of Tarentum, who, writing in the late fourth century BCE, included a number of non-Greek philosophers who hailed from Italy in his list of Pythagorean philosophers.19 He refers to two brothers named Occelus and Occilus of Lucania, as well as their sisters Occelo and Eccelo.
Texts survive under the name of Occelus and a certain Eccelus (see below), which might have originally been an unnecessary correction of Eccelo, although nothing survives for Occilus or Occelo. Additionally, Aristoxenus refers to two other Lucanian philosophers by name: a Cerambus, otherwise totally unknown, and a certain Aresandrus, whose name might have been corrupted to become “Aresas,” a figure who is better known, and to whom a substantial fragment of a work titled On the Nature of the Human has been attributed by modern scholars.20
The historical Aresas of Lucania was considered the last “diadochy” or leader of the school that traced itself back to Pythagoras, who then imparted his learning to Diodorus of Aspendus, a heretic who was thought to have publicized the Pythagorean acusmata/symbola widely in Greece.21 Plutarch (De Gen. 13) believed that Aresas was one of the last Pythagoreans to stay in western Greece, remaining in Sicily after the Cylonian conspiracy tore the Pythagorean communities apart, and visiting with Gorgias of Leontini. If this information is to be trusted, it would place the historical Aresas in the early part of the second half of the fifth century BCE. The surviving fragment of pseudo-Aresas/Aesara, from a work called On the Nature of the Human, features an inquiry into human nature that focuses on human psychology by reference to law and justice (ps-Aresas/Aesara of Lucania, On the Nature of the Human fr. 1, pp. 48.22–49.8 Thesleff):22
The nature (physis) of the human being seems to me to be a standard (kanôn) for
law and justice, and for the household and the city. For if someone were to follow
the tracks in himself, he would make a discovery in his search: the law (nomos) is in
him, and justice (dika) is the orderly arrangement (diakosmasis) of the soul. Indeed,
being threefold, it has been organized for three functions:
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