The papers in this collection arose from a 2014 Copenhagen conference exploring the ascendancy of Platonism over Stoicism during the first centuries bce–ce, hypothetically facilitating a pathway towards the hegemony of Christianity. The Peripatetic revival during this same period is mostly deferred, while the Epicureans and Cynics are seen ex hypothesi as irrelevant to the Platonic/Stoic rivalry. There is a large amount of scholarship on this topic. The present volume contributes to the discussion with seventeen articles, containing thousands of citations spread across several hundred textual references. Sometimes the safe haven of citation can overwhelm narrative clarity.
Historians of ancient philosophy, whether doxographers or contemporary scholars, can fall victim to -ismatic tendencies, conflating authors with -isms. The -ismatic approach detracts from individual philosophers who wrote in their own voices, free from obeisance to authority, especially after their organised schools had closed and become haireseis of family resemblance only. Thus, B. Inwood observes in his entertaining excursus how Musonius Rufus was more of a pioneering public intellectual, more Cynic than Stoic, notwithstanding his instructing Epictetus. Being true to your school meant less and less in the first centuries, although historians of philosophy often cling to an illusion of allegiance when categorising Platonist and Stoic rivalries. There may be less here than meets the eye.
Technical terms also have a way of breaking free from their inventors. The work of Stoic wordsmiths entered widely into circulation. Stoic interaction with Middle Platonism is consequently complicated by technical terms turned into common coin. G.E. Sterling highlights this in his study of Platonist and Stoic vocabulary present in the Wisdom of Solomon. The authors of Wisdom ‘subordinated’ words they had borrowed from Stoic and Middle Platonist authors, on behalf of Judaism. By employing such philosophical terminology, they transformed Wisdom's Judaic identity as well, giving it a wider appeal and a Hellenised dimension.
Five essays concern themselves with Platonic and Stoic elements found in Jewish and Christian texts of the period, not only in the Wisdom of Solomon but also in the writings of Philo Judaeus, Paul's epistles, John's Fourth Gospel and even the Nag Hammadi homily ‘The Gospel of Truth’. Beginning with Plato's Cratylus and ending with that ‘Gnostic’ homily, H.W. Attridge explores the Judaic conundrum of naming God, examining Philo's use of Stoic conceptual tools, possibly borrowed from the Roman Stoic Cornutus. Attridge then turns to efforts by the early Christians to address this same question, as they responded to Philo's musings. Naming God's essence ultimately required, for early Christians, an insight gleaned from the Fourth Gospel: licensing the unspoken name God gives Himself once ‘I am’ becomes visibly embodied in Jesus.
Using Cicero as a starting point, C. Lévy explores Philo's De aeternitate mundi and De opificio mundi for Platonic and Stoic resources, amidst a sea of allusions to other Greek philosophies, all used by Philo to enhance faith in Jewish cosmology over its secular rivals. Thematic echoes of ancient terms of art resonate with religious texts while at the same time being appropriated by them. As S. Stowers demonstrates, somewhat unwittingly, this can induce critical frisson, when attempting to fathom Philo's or Paul's spiritual use of ‘pneuma’, for example, as a borrowed bit of goods specifically taken from Stoic or Platonic sources, only by overlooking the ancient legacy of the term, going back to Homer, Euripides and, of course, Aristotle.
D.T. Runia's essay takes up Armenian fragments constituting portions of the lost first book from Philo's De providentia. Philo's philosophical excursus dismisses Epicurus by name and apparently the Aristotelians, but mentions with approval only Moses and Plato, notwithstanding his allusions to Stoic terms and arguments. Philo's concluding discussion of God's moral judgement enjoys ancient Greek pedigrees as well, but the God of Moses is clearly Philo's only focus. There is a subjectivism to authorial and textual interpretation. What we see in a text reflects personal history and prolepsis. So, the fragmentary De providentia serves as a litmus test for varied scholarly proclivities, until the desert yields up a better papyrus.
The legacy of oikeiôsis makes its appearance in three papers: in C. Gill's discussion of the term in Stoicism, Antiochus and Arius Didymus; in C. Brittain's allegation of Alexander's Peripatetic appropriation of the Stoic concept in his Mantissa; and in Lévy's brief discussion of that familiarly progressive doctrine of making our bodies, our souls, our families, friends, strangers and the very cosmos part of our own household. Since the Stoics took official ownership for the doctrine, all three essays explore the presence of Stoic oikeiôsis in these various first-century texts.
It is odd that Plato's Lysis and Aristotle's derogation of that same dialogue in his Ethics are ignored. All the separate elements describing the developmental progress of appropriating the other as one's own appear in the Lysis, where all forms of caring and attachment are defined in terms of loving others as one's own. The way parents love children or adults their friends and lovers, the way citizens come to care for one another all fill a basic human need to break the isolation of human existence by connecting with what we need from others. In doing so, eventually the philosopher on this progressive journey encounters that final ‘proton philon’ in the form of the goodness that governs all reality. If the Lysis is the Ur-document of oikeiôsis, this complicates the history of the idea, making it less exclusively Stoic and a more common ancient topos.
Aristotle's passing remarks on the immortality of procreation may also owe their origin to Plato, in his Symposium. But Lévy takes them in a new, speculative direction to connect with Stoic oikeiôsis on the way to Philo's views on the primacy of cosmic eternity and, as I suggest, Philo's affirmation of a Jewish God, who reverses the polarity of oikeiôsis by God's first making the Jewish people his own. In his explication of oikeiôsis in Alexander's Mantissa, Brittain adds a further dimension, suggesting how first-century Peripatetic commentators like Alexander put the cart before the horse by appropriating Stoic oikeiôsis to explicate Aristotelian psychology of pre-rational action.
Gill's naturalistic approach to oikeiôsis is more focused: attending to Cicero's De finibus and Arius Didymus’ account retrieved from a fifth-century ce handbook. Cicero proffers the competing views of Stoics and the Academic Antiochus, while Arius summarises Peripatetic views. Gill compares the three, conceding that Arius’ use of Stoic terms to explicate Peripatetic oikeiôsis reflected the common coin of philosophical language at the time. Gill speculates, who should get credit for inventing developmental oikeiôsis? Possibly Aristotle's house psychologist Theophrastus? Possibly the Stoics for the most viable version? Could Antiochus have retrofitted it from Stoics to suit the Academy? I put my money on Arius’ insistence that the doctrine had its origins from Plato's old Academy (the Lysis?), just as Antiochus even said it did.
Where did the Greco-Roman philosophers of the first centuries get their ideas? Exploring philosophies of eons past invites a tour de force of scholarly inventiveness, but the conjectural nature of this enterprise is much like putting together pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, where the components are not uniquely shaped and are able to simultaneously depict several different yet coherent schemes in the service of one of several unifying, yet competing, visions.
G. Boys-Stones's case study of how the first ‘Platonist’ of the post-Hellenistic age, Eudorus, criticised Aristotle's Categories supports scholarly prudence, though his essay is largely a diatribe against the bugbear of ‘eclecticism’ and ill-conceived transitional thinking. For Boys-Stones, unfortunately, the philosophical systems of an era ought to be the primary preoccupation for historians of philosophy. According to his story, the reason why Platonism triumphs is that its transcendental theory of Forms won the day over Stoic, Epicurean and Aristotelian nominalist competitors. I would caution: as long as Christianity controlled what the jigsaw puzzle depicted.
Individual philosophers of the period studied the history of philosophy themselves. Correcting the mistakes of predecessors also allows for gaining insights from them. As A.G. Long shows, Posidonius’ theory of affective movements corrects and supplements what Chrysippus failed to fathom, by borrowing from Plato's views on pre-rational developmental education. M. Schofield broadens the appeal of philosophical autonomy even further in an elegant essay regarding what Plato and the Stoics personally meant to Cicero over the decades of his career, as Cicero sought to serve his nation honourably, all the while seeking succour and solace from philosophers he studied, especially Plato. Cicero did not have the luxurious leisure of a scholarly life while he was trying to save the Republic, as Cicero sorted through ancient texts and arguments to rally political support.
Other essays in this collection attempt direct comparisons between Stoic and Platonic philosophical systems. M. Hatzimichali explores how various doxographical passages attributed to Arius Didymus exhibit subtle pressures to package Plato and the Platonists more systematically than the original texts themselves presented, due to the systematic thoroughness of professional Stoicism. Hers is a densely argued essay where the narrative is at times overwhelmed with details better served in a much longer paper than this collection could afford. By contrast, M. Bonazzi's essay, ‘The Platonist Appropriation of Stoic Epistemology’, is more contained, concerning how Platonic texts of the period, like Alcinous’ Didaskalikos, had to address the agenda and terminology of the Hellenistic schools in order to muster a defence against the Stoic empiricism of mental ideas and just as importantly against sceptics, in securing access to Plato's transcendent Ideas. Stoic views of mental ideas, or ennoiai, posed a challenge to Plato's direct realism, just as sceptics questioned its very possibility.
G. Reydams-Schils's ‘“Becoming Like God” in Platonism and Stoicism’ addresses a threat of scholastic cross-contamination. She explores the legacy of a singular Theaetetus passage (172c–7b) precious to the Middle Platonists – especially, the Anonymous Commentator, Alcinous and Plutarch – all the while keeping Plato's understanding of our individually becoming like (homoiôsis) god distinctly independent from rather different metaphysical versions of Stoics. It is a pity Reydams-Schils lacked the opportunity to discuss how that very same problem of homoiôsis came to plague Christology, violently.
Two essays address the possibility of Platonic proselytising, winning converts back to Platonism. J. Opsomer addresses Plutarch's efforts to entice Stoics back to Plato. Plutarch's persuasive clincher is that Stoics would consistently live morally better lives if they would return to Platonism, an argument Augustine later made much of. In ‘Seneca and Epictetus on Body, Mind and Dualism’, A.A. Long explores Platonic sympathies present in two Stoic authors regarding Plato's views on the immortality of individual souls. Long suggests that Stoic pneumatic ghosts in the machine might sustain personal disembodiment – a bridge too far for me. Finally, I note that the editor's detailed historiographical introduction does an excellent job of capturing the zeitgeist of this collection.
