Download PDF | Long A.A. - From Epicurus to Epictetus_ Studies in Hellenistic and Roman Philosophy-Clarendon Press Oxford (2006).
456 Pages
Preface
In Stoic Studies I collected a dozen papers on the school’s ethics, psychology, and intellectual tradition that I had previously published in journals and multi-authored volumes. This book is partly a sequel to that earlier one by including a further set of essays I have written on Stoicism, but in this larger collection scepticism and Epicureanism receive comparable attention. In fact the book covers most of the topics in Hellenistic and Roman philosophy that have engaged my interest over the past thirty years.
These topics include, most prominently, ethics, by which I mean not only moral theory but also the psychology of selfhood and emotion, social philosophy, and political thought. Besides ethics, the book discusses three other topics that particularly intrigue me—epistemology, language, and cosmology (which, in the ancient context, includes theology). Ethics is chiefly represented in Parts I and V of the book and in two of the chapters on Epicureanism, but the subject was so central to Hellenistic and Roman philosophy that it is also featured, to some extent, throughout all five parts.
To underscore its centrality, I begin in Chapters 1 and 2 with a pair of general studies that explore the common ground as well as the differences between the ways of life advocated by Epicurus and Zeno. As the founding fathers of their respective philosophies, these figures make an appropriate beginning for the whole book. I end in Part V, first with Cicero, whom I treat both for his own sake and as an important contributor to the Stoic tradition of political thought, and finally with the Roman Stoics Seneca and Epictetus.
The three intervening parts of the book deal with the principal movements of Hellenistic philosophy, and in them too I proceed, as far as possible, chronologically and comprehensively. Part II includes five studies of scepticism, starting in Chapter 3 with an essay that considers Aristotelian epistemology in relation to early and later Pyrrhonism, and concluding, in the essay pro and contra astrology (Chapter 7), with material that ranges in date from Cicero, through Sextus Empiricus and Ptolemy, down to Augustine. I devote Chapters 4 and 5 to the seminal work of Timon, Pyrrho’s publicist, and Arcesilaus, the founder of what we call Academic scepticism.
The other leading representative of Academic scepticism was Carneades. He figures prominently in Chapter 6, the study of scepticism about gods, on which our main sources are Cicero and Sextus Empiricus. In Part III I start with a study of Epicurean cosmology and causality (Chapter 8), drawing heavily on Lucretius as well as the fragmentary work of Epicurus himself. Not only these two Epicureans but also other Epicurean thinkers provide material for Chapter 9, the essay on pleasure and social utility. In Chapter 10, while Epicurus himself is still prominent, Lucretius and his Roman context are the principal focus of attention. Early (pre-Roman) Stoicism is the subject of Part IV. Here I begin (Chapter 11) with a study that proposes Plato as the principal catalyst for Zeno’s highly original epistemology, which in turn strongly motivated the scepticism of the Academic Arcesilaus. Stoic contributions to the study of language are my theme in Chapter 12, where I situate their linguistic innovations in the context of their rationalist psychology. In Chapter 13 I turn to the strange but fascinating doctrine of world-conflagration and everlasting recurrence.
The Roman philosophy of the book’s title registers contributions that I find it important to emphasize over and above the obvious fact that some philosophy was composed in Latin. A reader who reaches Part V of the book will already have encountered Lucretius, whose poetic rendering of Epicureanism in Latin is a gigantic achievement. Lucretius was a philosopher in his own right, but he presented himself as primarily his master’s voice, and so I treat him in Part III. Cicero, by contrast, is too complex in his philosophical orientation to be housed in any of the book’s earlier parts. He is the principal figure of Part V, not only where he is named, in Chapters 14 and 15, but also in Chapter 16, where much of my treatment of Stoic ideas about persons, property ownership, and community is filtered through Cicero’s De officiis. In its Roman importations, Stoic ethics acquired some distinctly Roman colouring but without losing its original Greek integrity. I illustrate this in my two concluding essays, Chapter 17 on Seneca, and Chapter 18 on Epictetus. These two studies are the only work in this book that has not had an earlier airing in periodicals or multi-authored volumes.
However, I have edited and revised everything else, updating it where that seemed necessary and sometimes appending postscripts to indicate my later thoughts and subsequent bibliography. In deciding what to include in this collection, apart from the necessity to be selective, I have been primarily guided by the wish to produce a book that is sufficiently broad and accessible to interest general readers as well as specialists. My selection excludes articles of a largely technical character and work that seems too antiquated or too recent to warrant reproduction here. Many of these items, however, are included in the book’s bibliography.
As I remarked in the preface of Stoic Studies, so here too each of these pieces began its life as the result of an invitation to lecture or contribute to a conference or collective volume. I am immensely grateful for these encouragements to write on the subject-matter of the book and for all the comments friends far too numerous to mention here have given me. (Though I have registered my special thanks to some of them in the notes to chapters, I must have benefited to a much greater extent than those mentions indicate.) I owe a special thanks to Peter Momtchiloff of Oxford University Press for prompting me to produce the book and for all the help he has given at its various stages of production.
I am also grateful to two graduate students at Berkeley, Curtis Dozier and Will Shearin, and to Patricia Slatin, a former graduate student, for assistance in preparing the typescript. My life as a teacher and scholar of ancient philosophy would never have happened without the crucial prompting and support of two remarkable people, who were close friends of one another. Eric James (Lord James of Rusholme), High Master of Manchester Grammar School during my seven high-school years there, fired my interest in Plato by his brilliant teaching. It was thanks to his advice that I applied for admission to University College London. As a student there, I came under the charismatic and kindly influence of Tom Webster (Professor of Greek). It was entirely due to his encouragement that I was diverted from an administrative career and obtained my first teaching job at the University of Otago, New Zealand. I dedicate this book to the memory of these two great men.
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