Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 077 - Caesarian Section – Philosophy in the Roman Empire.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Caesarian Section, Philosophy in the Roman Empire. In the very first episode of this podcast, I pointed out that relatively wealthy societies have always been the fertile soil in which philosophy has flourished. It's no accident that pre-Socratic philosophy first emerged in the affluent trading cities of Ionia, or that Athens became the centre for philosophical activity only after becoming the centre of a Mediterranean empire. A bit of social disruption may not be an insurmountable obstacle, and can even be helpfully provocative. Just think of Plato's engagement with the political events leading up to the death of Socrates. But clearly some degree of stability is also needed to ensure that some members of the society can become not just literate, but well-read, and have the leisure to devote their lives to reflection and study. So you might expect that philosophy did pretty well in the Roman Empire. By the time of Augustus Caesar, who began his reign in 27 BC and died in 14 AD, the Romans already held sway not only over all of Italy, but also modern-day France and Spain, parts of Germany, Greece, Asia Minor, and the fertile lands of Northern Africa. With some boundary changes, for instance the addition of a remote island the Romans called Britannia, the empire was able first to thrive, and then at least to survive, for centuries to come. While Athens remained strongly associated with philosophy, Rome itself played host to many a philosopher, including those who spoke and wrote in Greek. For instance, we'll find the most important late-ancient philosopher Plotinus living there in the 3rd century AD. A third philosophical center was Alexandria on the coast of Egypt, founded by its namesake Alexander the Great, then built up into a cultural hub under the Ptolemies during the Hellenistic Age. It was still important for philosophy as late as the 6th century. Plotinus, incidentally, came originally from Egypt, a reminder that philosophers who used Greek came from all over the Eastern Empire and not only from mainland Greece. In fact, a good number of philosophers, such as the important Platonist thinker Iamblichus, hailed from Syria. Philosophy would still be a going concern in Syria even after the fall of the Western Empire. As late as the 9th century, Muslim patrons seeking translators to render Greek philosophical works into Arabic could draw on the expertise of Christians of Syrian extraction. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. In fact, we were already ahead of ourselves before this episode even started. Here I am introducing philosophy in the Roman Empire, but we've already looked at several figures who wrote in the Imperial Age, including most obviously the so-called Roman Stoics. It's hard to miss the fact that they lived after the fall of the Republic, given that one of them, Marcus Aurelius, was actually an emperor. Other Imperial Age figures we've examined include Marcus's doctor Galen and the greatest of the skeptics Sextus Empiricus, who, like Marcus and Galen, lived in the 2nd century AD. I have to admit that dates have never been my strong point, but in this case, the chronological confusion is not really my fault. Splitting philosophy into historical periods is always a tricky and somewhat arbitrary business, and this case is no exception. The so-called Hellenistic schools survived very nicely until well after the Hellenistic period, pretty much however one chooses to define that period. Thus we have Stoics, skeptics, and Epicureans still defending their school's doctrines, or lack of doctrines, well into the time of the Roman Empire. Conversely, the most distinctive philosophical feature of late antiquity begins already in the 1st century BC, the Renaissance and ultimate fusion of dogmatic Platonism and Aristotelianism. During the Hellenistic period, Aristotle had a few adherents, but he was not a dominant figure. The Platonic Academy, meanwhile, adopted a skeptical bent. Once Aristotelianism and dogmatic Platonism came back into vogue, there was a kind of free-for-all, in which five or even six distinct schools had some claim on the best minds of the early empire. From the 1st century BC to the 2nd century AD, Aristotle began a comeback that would eventually see him crowned as the chief philosopher by all medieval traditions. Platonism also emerged as a force to be reckoned with. At this time, the philosopher, historian, and literary stylist Plutarch was able to declare himself a proud adherent of the Academy. By this, he certainly did not mean that he was a skeptic, but rather that he adopted the sort of Pythagoreanizing Platonism which had first been seen among Plato's immediate followers. Nonetheless, during this transitional period of the early empire, which is sometimes referred to as the post-Hellenistic age of philosophy, the Hellenistic schools were still going strong. I've already reminded you about proponents of Stoicism and skepticism in these centuries, and can further remind you of Diogenes of Oinoanda, the Epicurean. You may also recall that a sixth group, the Cynics, were still on hand to mock the pretensions of emperors like Nero and Caligula. Hand in hand with this proliferation of schools went an institutionalization of those schools. As David Sedley mentioned in my interview with him, as early as 155 BC an embassy of Greek philosophers was sent to Rome for political purposes. They represented three separate schools, Stoicism, Skepticism, and Aristotelianism. In a later echo of this idea that the schools could have official spokesmen, our right royal friend Marcus Aurelius established four chairs of philosophy in Athens. For him, the four chief schools were, of course, Stoicism, and then Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Epicureanism. Rich patrons and political rulers continued to influence the way philosophy was practiced right down to the last days of the Western Empire. We know that Plotinus benefited from association with wealthy Roman aristocrats, for instance. These aristocrats typically sent their kids out to be educated, especially in grammar and rhetoric, a practice that influenced the development of philosophy. The case of Philo of Alexandria is illustrative. An aristocratic Hellenized Jew of the first century AD, Philo received an education that included the study of grammar, geometry, and the great Greek poets. St. Augustine, growing up in the second half of the fourth century AD, underwent a Latin version of this curriculum and almost wound up as a rhetoric teacher himself. The Christian Neoplatonist, John Philoponus, was sneeringly called the Grammarion by his arch-enemy, Simplicius, because he was a teacher of grammar. This same school structure would serve philosophy well in the imperial age. Like Plato, Aristotle, and Epictetus before him, Plotinus set up a philosophical school. Later, there were important schools of Platonists in both Alexandria and Athens. But what the rich and powerful give, they can take away. The Christian emperor Justinian shut down the school of Athens in 529 AD, an act which has come to symbolize the dying of pagan philosophy in the late empire. Because so much philosophy in the later ancient period was done in a school setting, we must always read the works of this period with pedagogy in mind. Some of Plotinus's treatises were written in direct response to issues raised by students in his school. In fact, the most voluminous body of philosophical writing in late antiquity had an explicit educational purpose. These were the commentaries devoted to the dialogues of Plato and the treatises of Aristotle, sometimes little more than records of school lectures expounding the texts of these two great masters. Here's a jaw-dropping statistic for you. By word count, about half of the entire surviving corpus of Greek philosophical writings consists of late ancient commentaries on Plato and Aristotle. More generally, in terms of sheer quantity, most surviving philosophical literature in Greek was written not in classical antiquity, but in late antiquity, the period of the later Roman Empire. Some of these works were written about one thousand years after Plato and Aristotle. Those were one thousand years during which texts could disappear, the fate of the writings of the pre-Socratics and of early Stoics like Chrysippus, for instance. This disappearance was not mere accident, a case of too many libraries going out of business or catching fire. Rather, it is a sign of evolving intellectual tastes. Until very recently, the preservation of any writing was a costly and time-consuming business. Texts needed to be copied in order to be disseminated, and this was of particular importance when there were shifts in the technology of the book. In late antiquity, there was a shift from the papyrus roll to the codex, much more like our modern-day book, with leaves of paper, folded, sewn together, and placed between two covers. Plato never leafed through pages. He rolled and unrolled. But by the time the scribes of the Byzantine Empire were copying out the earliest manuscripts of Plato that have survived until today, scrolls were an outmoded technology. The codex was the only game in town. Styles of writing, too, underwent transitions, with a major shift in the 9th century AD from writing in uncials, which is like writing all in capital letters, to writing in minuscule, which is more like a lower-case cursive script. Texts could easily be lost when these shifts in writing technology and practice occurred. A book written in an outdated script was like the vinyl records in your attic, supplanted first by cassette tapes, then by CDs. With every change, someone needed to make a deliberate choice to copy out a text by hand in the new style. So, as texts were passed down from generation to generation, decisions were implicitly made about which works were worth copying. This means that the philosophical tastes of late antiquity and the Byzantine period were a filter through which Greek literature had to pass to reach us. The same is true of medieval European tastes and ancient Latin literature. It's no accident that the works of Platonists and Aristotelians have survived better than the works of Stoics and Epicureans. After all, Aristotelian Platonists were the ones who decided what would survive. Of course, this too needs explanation. We just saw that in the second century AD, Stoicism and Epicureanism were honored with official chairs in Athens. So how did it come about that these two schools faded away whereas Platonism and Aristotelianism rose into the ascendancy? If you were to lay the blame at the feet of one man, it would have to be Plotinus. Writing in the third century AD, he defended a Platonist system that would become the dominant philosophy of late antiquity. This system went on to be a pervasive influence on medieval philosophy in both Arabic and Latin. Scholars distinguished this system from what came before by calling it Neoplatonism. Not everyone likes the term, but we're pretty much stuck with it, so I'm going to go ahead and speak freely of Neoplatonism and Neoplatonists in episodes to come, but with the following caveats. First, it's important always to remember that ancient Platonists called themselves just that, Platonists, and never Neoplatonists, this term having been invented only in the modern age. Second, it's not as if Plotinus came out of nowhere. There were Platonists before him, as we'll see starting in the next episode. Really, there is a continuous development of dogmatic Platonism starting in the first century BC. Third, and along the same lines, it's not as if Neoplatonists after Plotinus just agreed with him about everything. In fact, they often mention him to disagree with him, and there are many differences between his thought and what we'd find in, say, a Neoplatonist commentator in sixth century Alexandria. Still, it remains the case that Neoplatonism, in all its variety, ruled the roost in late antiquity. But I still haven't really explained why it succeeded at the expense of the other schools. To some extent, it simply absorbed its rivals. There is a good deal of Stoic cosmology and ethics woven into the fabric of Neoplatonism. This co-opting strategy had been used already by Plotinus before Plotinus, but he perfected it. Much the same can be said about Aristotelianism. Plotinus's attitude towards Aristotle is a matter of some controversy, but there's little doubt that he managed to integrate a number of Aristotelian ideas into his philosophy, even as he criticized Aristotle explicitly on other points. We'll have ample opportunity to observe Neoplatonists expressing these mixed emotions towards Aristotle, but it was always at least a love-hate relationship, and not infrequently a love-love relationship. For Neoplatonists, the usual goal was not to refute Aristotle, but to show how Aristotle could be harmonized with Plato. As for Epicureanism and skepticism, these schools really do vanish from the scene in late antiquity. Neoplatonists find them useful only as opponents to be defeated, and often seem to think that Epicureanism in particular is barely worth refuting. There are plausible historical explanations for this. With the dogmatic shift in Platonism, the skeptics lacked a sufficient institutional basis, such as the academy. Their anti-belief program had in any case been compromised in the days of the early empire, provoking a backlash by the more stringent skeptics who called themselves Pyronists. But Pyronism would not be influential again until the early modern period, when it appealed to authors of no less astanding than David Hume. Similarly, Epicureanism never regained the heights of devotion and articulacy we find in Lucretius, and it was universally rejected in the later imperial age. This outcome was certainly unpredictable from the standpoint of the 2nd century AD, when we have inscriptions of Epicurus being erected in Turkey and an endowed chair for the school in Athens. So what happened? In the case of both skepticism and Epicureanism, the answer may be that late antiquity was no time to be anti-religious. The skeptics suspended belief about the nature of the gods, along with everything else. The Epicureans did admit the existence of the gods, but immediately added that these gods have nothing to do with us, so we need not fear them. There was no place for such views in the religious ferment of the later empire, when paganism struggled to retain its cultural standing in the face of a new faith, Christianity. It was put forth with a vehemence and sudden success that was disconcerting, and sometimes terrifying, to its opponents. Adherents of traditional religion could not help seeing the Christians as disruptive fanatics. Pagan religious beliefs had always allowed for a degree of ecumenical inclusivism. Egyptian and Greek gods were identified with the traditional gods of the Italian peninsula, or simply added to the pantheon. By contrast, Jews and Christians made claims to exclusive possession of the truth. As monotheists, they simply would not play well with others. This led to violent conflict between Jews and Romans, and to even more violent conflict between Romans and Christians. The Christians began, of course, as victims of persecution, being fed to lions and that sort of thing, but over a period of several centuries, Christianity steadily gained power and influence, and then, finally, imperium. In the early 4th century, Constantine changed the Roman Empire into a Christian Empire, and his successors mostly adopted the new faith. We'll be coming to an exception in due course, it turns out that this exceptional emperor was a Neoplatonist philosopher. Of course, the traditional cults and beliefs did not die out overnight. In fact, most of the significant philosophers of late antiquity were still pagans. I already mentioned that Christian hostility towards paganism could still affect the philosophical scene in 529 AD, when Justinian closed the school in Athens. I've also mentioned the bitter dispute between John Philoponus and Simplicius, a dispute not unrelated to the fact that Philoponus was a Christian and Simplicius a pagan. In short, then, this was a period when philosophy was closely allied to religious belief. It was only to be expected that, in such an environment, Epicureanism and skepticism would drift into near oblivion. Harder to expect was the success of Neoplatonism in co-opting, or being co-opted by, one last tradition, Christianity itself. Since before Plotinus, dogmatic Platonism had been a deeply religious enterprise. Plutarch, who we met a few minutes back, devoted numerous works to philosophical discussions of religious topics, such as the nature of demons or oracles. Iamblichus, the Neoplatonist who hailed from Syria, put pagan religious belief at the very center of his philosophy, and was followed in this by generations of passionately religious Platonists. They modified the system pioneered by Plotinus, making room for the multiplicity of gods and semi-divine entities recognized in late antique paganism. So it would seem that any marriage between Neoplatonism and Christianity was bound to be a stormy one. Nonetheless, despite the occasional marital squabble, Christians found in Neoplatonism a partner worth loving and honoring, if not obeying. This, too, calls out for an explanation. Part of the credit should, again, go to that man Plotinus. He was certainly no Christian, but his Neoplatonism was a fairly austere affair, metaphysically speaking. As we shall see, he posited a single first principle called the One, who bears a striking resemblance to the monotheistic god of the revealed religions. This resemblance made it possible for Neoplatonism to be purged of its more baroque pagan structures, yielding a metaphysical picture that would be found attractive in 9th century Baghdad in 11th century Constantinople. Indeed, it was possible for the tradition of commentary on Aristotle to pass from pagans to Christians almost without skipping a beat. Pagan teachers taught Christian students, and these students passed on the Neoplatonic reading of Aristotle to subsequent generations. We find the same practices of teaching and commenting on Aristotle not only in the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire, but also among Christians writing in Syriac and Arabic up until the time of Islam. There is another reason that the monotheistic religions were able to absorb this strand of the ancient philosophical tradition. They had a lot of practice. Christians and Jews had been appropriating ideas from Greek philosophy since the time of Jesus of Nazareth. A somewhat older contemporary of Jesus, and like him a Jew, was Philo of Alexandria, who should be credited as the first representative of these faiths to engage seriously with Greek philosophy. Among Christians, the earliest church fathers were likewise deeply influenced by Platonism and Stoicism. Indeed, even St. Paul seems to have been influenced by the philosophical ideas that penetrated the worldview of antiquity. For this reason, the coming episodes will need to trace two parallel and intersecting stories within the history of philosophy—not only the resurgence and triumph of Plato and Aristotle among pagan thinkers, but also the appropriation of the pagan intellectual heritage among Jews and Christians. This leads us to another difficulty, not unlike the problem of demarcating Hellenistic from later ancient philosophy. When does late ancient philosophy end and medieval philosophy begin? Nowadays, figures like Augustine and Boethius are frequently taught in the context of classes on medieval philosophy. But these were indisputably men of late antiquity. Augustine lived from the 4th to the 5th centuries and Boethius from the 5th to the 6th. Their worldview was shaped not just by the Bible, by controversies over grace and the nature of the Trinity, but also by Plotinus and Aristotle. Thus, the history of philosophy in Western Europe is difficult to split into discrete periods, ancient versus medieval. The same goes, of course, for the plain old history of Western Europe. Feudal structures of land ownership started to emerge already in late antiquity, as a strong imperial center disintegrated amongst civil war and barbarian raids. Perhaps this instability was one more factor that contributed to the popularity of Neoplatonism. It is, as we'll see, a philosophy that urges us to turn away from our bodily existence and towards a more perfect, stable realm. But before we get to Neoplatonism, we need first to look at its roots in the earlier so-called post-Hellenistic period. As Rome made its transition from republic to empire, admirers of Plato turned their back on skepticism. This meant a return to the Pythagorean obsession with number and the confident metaphysical speculations of the old academy. This is not to say that the immediate followers of Plato, Xenocrates and Spusippus, who we looked at in episode 51, were treated as unimpeachable authorities. For these early imperial Platonists, only Plato was beyond criticism, and it was possible to heap scorn on old academic interpretations of the master. These thinkers are sometimes called the Middle Platonists, because they come after the ancient Platonic tradition of the old academy and before the Neoplatonism of Plotinus. But this somewhat dismissive label masks their pivotal role in ancient thought. Middle Platonism paved the way for much of what would be new in Neoplatonism, and we count among the Middle Platonists two of the greatest philosophers of the age, Plutarch and Philo of Alexandria. So, join me next time to see Platonism rediscover its form, or rather forms, here on the History of Philosophy, without any gaps.