CLAS 196/PHIL196

Skeleton taken from Brennan Chapter 2.


Sources for Ancient Stoicism

We have virtually none of the many treatises on many topics mentioned in Diogenes Laertius. We have Cleanthes' Hymn to Zeus.

What else do we have?

Reconstructing Stoicism (and Epicureanism) has been likened to doing a jigsaw puzzle, but it is like doing a jigsaw with 1) a few different versions of the overall picture, 2) most of the pieces missing or damaged, and 3) different versions of the pieces that we do have.

• Cicero (106-43 BCE)
• A Roman statesman who had periods of forced political inactivity which he spent chunks of writing philosophical works in Latin based on Greek philosophy.
• He wrote many treatises, which contain discussions of many Stoic doctrines.
• But perhaps as important, in those treatises, he came up with the terminology that was to be used in Latin for Stoicism, which is a philosophy full of technical terms.
• Seneca (4 BCE-65 CE)
• Tutor to young Nero and advisor to Nero as emperor.
• Nero became progressively worse, and eventually Seneca ceased being his advisor, but nonetheless many feel that Seneca as a person is not admirable.
• An extremely rich man.
  
• Arius Didymus (0 BCE/CE)
• Probably a Stoic: wrote on ethics (quoted by Stobaeus: see below)
  
• Plutarch of Chaironea (50-120 CE)
• Same Plutarch who wrote comparative lives of Greeks and Romans.
• Wrote attacking Stoics
• On Stoic Contradictions
• On the Common Notions
• He has many verbatim quotations from Chrysippus and seems to have had access to Chrysippus' writings.
• He is very intelligent, but not known for being original in his philosophizing.
  
• Galen (130-210 CE)
• The medical writer
• He is loyal to Hippocrates and Plato, and he often argues against Stoic figures.
  
• Sextus Empiricus (150-200 CE)
• A sceptic: "an avowed enemy of all positive philosophical systems"
• Thus he is looking to convict Stoics of incompetence, inaccuracy, incoherence, bad logic, jumping to conclusions, etc.
• BUT he is a very careful man in reporting what he finds, and he writes about and quotes a lot of stoic philosophy.
  
• Diogenes Laertius (lived around 250 CE)
• Our best and often only source for the lives of early Stoic philosophers.
• His mind is not a fine one.
• He'd as lief gossip as discuss philosophy
  
• But he had access to good libraries
• from which he copied verbatim (best situation), paraphrased (not so good), and summarized a great deal
  
• He is careless and does not use his faculty of judgement to assess competing accounts
• Why read him? He survived.
• Johannes Stobaeus (5th c. CE)
• Wrote anthology: simply wrote out large chunks of texts
• Also wrote out a treatise on Stoic ethics (said to be by Arius Didymus ...)
• History is written by the victors!

Other Items of Interest

• What was a "school" of philosophy in Ancient Athens?
• Not really an institutionalized learning establishment as we are used to
• Rather, a group of philosophers of similar intellectual allegiances who agreed on a "leader" and met regularly along with their followers
• Young men came along to get some education
• Rich Romans sent their young men there to get some polish