Philosophy in the Roman Empire

Ethics, Politics and Society

Michael Trapp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138270794
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351911412
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ancient History

Drawing on unusually broad range of sources for this study of Imperial period philosophical thought, Michael Trapp examines the central issues of personal morality, political theory, and social organization: philosophy as the pursuit of self-improvement and happiness; the conceptualization and management of emotion; attitudes and obligations to others; ideas of the self and personhood; constitutional theory and the ruler; the constituents and working of the good community. Texts and thinkers discussed range from Alexander of Aphrodisias, Aspasius and Alcinous, via Hierocles, Seneca, Musonius, Epictetus, Plutarch and Diogenes of Oenoanda, to Dio Chrysostom, Apuleius, Lucian, Maximus of Tyre, Pythagorean pseudepigrapha, and the Tablet of Cebes. The distinctive doctrines of the individual philosophical schools are outlined, but also the range of choice that collectively they presented to the potential philosophical 'convert', and the contexts in which that choice was encountered. Finally Trapp turns his attention to the status of philosophy itself as an element of the elite culture of the period, and to the ways in which philosophical values may have posed a threat to other prevalent schemes of value; Trapp argues that the idea of 'philosophical opposition', though useful, needs to be substantially modified and extended.

Chapter 1

‘Ethics’, ‘Philosophy’ and Philosophia

The bulk of this book – Chapters 2 to 8 – will be concerned with specific topics and arguments in Imperial-period ethical and political theorizing, and with the question of how this theorizing fitted in – or failed to fit in – with other contemporary habits of thought and schemes of value. But first, the stage needs to be set with a discussion of the understanding of ethics – and of the larger institution of philosophy – within which the theorizing and the argument took place. This first chapter, therefore, will discuss a range of contextual issues: the scope of ‘ethics’, the place of ‘ethics’ in ‘philosophy’, the varieties of ‘philosophy’ between which choices could be made, and something of the place of ‘philosophy’ in culture and society in the first and second centuries CE.

The history and internal geography of philosophia

To get the necessary grip, however, we must begin by backtracking some three to four hundred years: to the fourth century BCE, which is when the kind of philosophy and ethics still current in the Imperial period was brought into existence – or rather, when the kind of philosophia still current was established. For, in ways which should become progressively clearer as this chapter develops, philosophia – what the individuals to be studied in this book took themselves to be practising – is not identical with the things that can be designated by the modern word ‘philosophy’ and its relatives. And this philosophia (like ‘philosophy’) was not some kind of natural phenomenon; it was a human construct that had the specific form it did in the first and second centuries CE because of a past history of ideological decisions and institutional development that began in the fourth century BCE.

Things that can arguably be labelled ‘philosophy’ were certainly going on already in Greek-speaking communities in the sixth century, but the construction of the philosophia that this study is concerned with is essentially the work of thinkers operating in Athens between about 400 and about 300 BCE: from the first generation of the pupils of Socrates (above all Plato), via the pupils of these pupils (especially Aristotle), to the great systematizers and definers of rival, institutionalized sects at the end of the century (Xenocrates, Zeno, Epicurus). It was these thinkers who decided that the proper name for what they were doing was philosophia, and who set about formalizing its structure and procedures, mapping the intellectual territory over which it claimed rights, and defining its raison d’être. We should remind ourselves, then, first of the point of philosophia, as these thinkers specified it, then of their idea of the internal structure in which ‘ethics’ took its place along with other objects of study and forms of attention.

The point of the exercise, they proclaimed, was nothing more than (and nothing less than) human fulfilment, or happiness (eudaimonia). On the understanding, which they all shared, that there was indeed such a thing as an objectively right and satisfying style of life and state of being for humans, uniquely capable of fulfilling their essential nature and bringing them true happiness, then philosophia was the sole fully effective means of identifying that style of life and state of being.¹ Philosophia, in other words, was not an academic study aimed at satisfying the over-developed curiosity of the idle few; it was an indispensable necessity for anyone with a properly informed desire to live well and be happy. It was a science (technê): something that turned essentially on the acquisition, retention, and reflection on a body of knowledge, but also, equally centrally, on the application of that body of knowledge to secure practical effects. Yet at the same time, it was no ordinary science: uniquely, the field in which those practical effects were realized was not the limited catchment area of some mundane skill, but the totality of an individual human existence. As a later practitioner was to sum it up: ‘Who can doubt that, though life is given to us by the immortal gods, the gift of living well is given by philosophia?’²

Structurally, a widely – though not, as we shall see, universally – endorsed perception held that this philosophia could be sub-divided into, and exhaustively mapped by the combination of, three sub-disciplines: ‘ethics’, naturally; but along with ‘ethics’, ‘logic’ and ‘physics’ as well. This trio could be described as the ‘areas’, ‘parts’ or ‘kinds’ of philosophia, or alternatively as the three ‘philosophies’ (‘logical’, ‘physical’, ‘ethical’).³ Each of them, like philosophia itself, corresponded less comfortably and familiarly with the equivalent modern pursuits than might at first be thought, if for no other reason than that the ranges of subject-matter assigned to them were notably wider. Physikê, ‘physics’, embraced metaphysics, theology (which could be called ‘first physics’), and psychology as well as questions of the make-up and workings of the physical world. Logikê, ‘logic’, dealt with epistemology and linguistics as well as forms and procedures of reasoning and argument. And êthikê, ‘ethics’, the main concern of this book, covered politics and the proper organization of the household community, as well as questions to do with values, character and conduct in the individual. One obvious effect of this tripartite division of philosophia, surely welcomed and intended by its proponents, was to underline the sheer breadth of its concerns. When the specific subject-matters of ‘logic’, ‘physics’ and ‘ethics’ were put together, what came into view was nothing less than the whole field of worthwhile knowledge, indeed the whole field of what counted as knowledge tout court. On this analysis, no aspect of life or the world – no aspect of reality – lay beyond the competence of philosophia.

It was this geography, and this mission statement, that were inherited by subsequent generations of philosophoi, down to the period with which this study is concerned. Rather than being a fully and finally agreed set of propositions, however, it came with a number of unresolved arguments. In particular, there was one which arose over the internal geography of the calling, and which has a special relevance to perceptions of the nature and standing of ethics.

Although they had divided the field neatly into three, the founders of philosophia also experienced, and handed on to their successors, an uncertainty about what the most important objects of knowledge were in the philosophic quest, and what the ideally philosophic life would therefore consist of in practical detail. This uncertainty manifested itself both in arguments between thinkers, and in tensions within individual bodies of thought. One powerful current of thought, associated above all with the example of Socrates, as constructed by his first-generation pupils, held that, because the point of philosophia was its effect on human beings and their lives, it was on the human world – human nature and human interactions – that it should concentrate, to the partial or complete exclusion of other concerns.⁴ But against this pulled a contrasting thought that there were far grander things in reality than the merely human, which it might be important to know in order to put the human ethical quest into its proper context. The knowledge, already indelibly inscribed in definitions of wisdom, that beyond the realm of human beings there was a whole vast cosmos to be understood, along with the higher forms of intelligence and being that might populate it, could not simply be unthought. And this in turn generated a potentially destabilizing temptation. If the cosmos is grander and more divine than man, can its study be properly subordinated to ground-level ethics? Might it not in fact constitute an alternative, and more fulfilling object of attention? Moreover, there was a third current as well, pulling against both of the other two. If the point of philosophia is individual fulfilment, happiness, then is it an unchallengeable given that its path has to lie through elaborate thought of any kind, whether about the human world, or about its grander cosmic context? Might the practical aim in fact call any kind of commitment to theory into question?

The tension between the rival claims of the human and the cosmic as the most compelling focus of attention is evident (notoriously so) in both Plato and Aristotle. In the Republic, Plato begins with a problem in human ethics, the value of just behaviour, which is initially confronted in terms of the structure and workings of the human soul; but the full and final solution offered moves away from the purely human plane into questions about the ultimate structure of reality (‘forms’ and the Good). Correspondingly, in its social and political argument, the Republic first offers a vision of a well-ordered human state, then a competing picture of a community of philosophers attempting as far as possible to distance themselves from earthly concerns in favour of the contemplation of ultimate reality. On the level of personal choices and preferred lifestyles, Plato thus leaves it somewhat unclear whether the best option is to immerse oneself in higher contemplation for its own sake, to the exclusion of any conscious concern with morals and politics, if one is suitably gifted, or whether one ought always to turn one’s attention back to the human. In terms of the dialogue’s most celebrated image, should philosophoi go back into the Cave once they have seen the outside world and grasped it for what it is or should they not? Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, for his part, confronts the issue more directly, but again in such a way as to leave room for continuing argument. In Book 1, he discusses fulfilment (eudaimonia) as a matter of a life lived out in normal (virtuous) human interaction. By contrast, in Book 10, he directly contrasts the fulfilment achievable through a life devoted to the intellectual contemplation of higher truth (theôria) with the fulfilment of a life of virtuous action, and declares the former to be superior.⁵ And yet,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• Chapter 1 ‘Ethics’, ‘Philosophy’ and Philosophia
• Chapter 2 Perfection and Progress
• Chapter 3 The Passions
• Chapter 4 Self, Person and Individual
• Chapter 5 Self and Others
• Chapter 6 Politics 1:Constitutions and the Ruler
• Chapter 7 Politics 2: Good Communities
• Chapter 8 Politics 3: Philosophia in Politics and the Community
• Chapter 9 Philosophia and the Mainstream
• Appendix: Bio-bibliographies
• Bibliography
• Index of Works and Passages
• General Index