I shall close with a view of ancient philosophy by an intellectual insider with an outsider’s perspective – Lucian of Samosata, a second century AD satirical author. In his essay The Runaways he has Philosophy remind her father, the chief god Zeus, of the reason he sent her down to earth in the first place, namely so that humans, hitherto ignorantly and violently mismanaging their lives, would do better. First, she continues, she went to India, to the Brahmans, then to Ethiopia, Egypt and Babylon, and then to Thrace, the wild north. Finally she went to the Greeks, which she had thought would be the easy part, given their intellectual reputation. But it turned out to be harder than she expected. After a promising start, the Sophists mixed philosophy up with – well, sophistry. And then the Athenians executed Socrates! Philosophy goes on to complain about the less than wonderful time she went on to have in Greece. Most people respect her, she says, though without much understanding her, and there are genuine philosophers who love and strive for truth, and this makes it all worth while. But there are also bogus philosophers who aim only at money and status, and bring her into discredit, and they drive her crazy. She needs a bit of divine help to improve the situation.
In the ancient Greco-Roman world philosophy, for better and worse, became a subject, with its own practices, texts and institutions. It was a more urgent matter to its practitioners and its audience than it is for us now. Philosophy was seen as a natural extension of an ordinary good education, given the importance of living well, and the importance of philosophy for doing that. For us there is more of a tension than there was for the ancients between the idea that philosophy enables us to understand ourselves and the world, and the idea that it is a rigorous and intellectually demanding matter. The important role in life played by philosophy in the ancient world has been taken over by a variety of other interests and pursuits. But philosophy still matters, and in many ways we can still relate our concerns to those of the ancients, and find that our study of them leads naturally to direct philosophical engagement. We still have Philosophy’s problem and, lacking divine help, we still have to do the work, search for the truth, and expose the bogus for ourselves.
Timeline
Further Reading
The fragments of the Presocratics can be read in Jonathan Barnes’s Early Greek Philosophy (London, 1987) and in Richard McKirahan’s Philosophy Before Socrates (Indianapolis, 1994). The McKirahan collection contains commentary, and an excellent philosophical introduction is Jonathan Barnes’s The Presocratic Philosophers (London, 1979).
Plato’s dialogues can be best read in Plato: Complete Works, ed. J. Cooper and D. Hutchinson (Indianapolis, 1998). There are also good translations of single dialogues, with commentaries and introductions, published by Oxford (in the World’s Classics series), Penguin, and Hackett. A good introduction is The Cambridge Companion to Plato, ed. Richard Kraut (Cambridge, 1992).
The standard translation of Aristotle is the revised Oxford translation, to be found in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, 1984). Aristotle: Selections, ed. T. Irwin and G. Fine (Indianapolis, 1995) is a good introductory selection. A good introduction is The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Cambridge, 1995).
Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics can be read in B. Inwood and L. Gerson, Hellenistic Philosophy (Indianapolis, 1997), and also in A. A. Long and D. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge, 1987). There is unfortunately no good English collection of the fragments of the Cyrenaics. For Pyrrhonism see Sextus Empiricus: Outlines of Scepticism, trans. Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes (Cambridge, 1994), and also The Modes of Scepticism (Cambridge, 1985) by the same authors. A good introduction is R. Sharples, Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics (London, 1996). For Middle Platonism see John Dillon, The Middle Platonists (Ithaca, 1997), and for Neoplatonism see R. T. Wallis, Neoplatonism (London, 1972).
Ancient philosophy is so varied that there is no good detailed history of the entire tradition by a single author. A very brief introduction is T. Irwin, Classical Thought (Oxford, 1989). Also good is C. Gill, Greek Thought (Oxford, 1995). W. K. C. Guthrie’s six-volume History of Greek Philosophy (Cambridge, 1962–1981), ends at Aristotle and is uncritical, but is a good guide to sources. Histories of ancient philosophy have for some time taken the form of studies of particular philosophies or issues, rather than a single narrative of the whole tradition. Many can be found in the bibliographies of the works mentioned below.
A introductory reader, with texts arranged round issues rather than chronologically, is Julia Annas, Ancient Voices of Philosophy (Oxford, 2000). A more comprehensive reader for advanced students, also arranged topically, is Terence Irwin, Classical Philosophy (Oxford, 1999).
Chapters on philosophy at various periods can be found in the Oxford History of the Classical World (Oxford, 1986). Excellent reference works are the Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd edition (Oxford, 1996), and The Encyclopaedia of Classical Philosophy, ed. Don Zeyl (Westport, 1996).
The forthcoming multi-author Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy and Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought are good guides to the areas they cover.
An extremely useful series is the Cambridge Companions to Ancient Thought, edited by Stephen Everson. These are Epistemology (1990), Psychology (1991), Language (1994) and Ethics (1998).
Notes
The Notes mention only authors and topics not covered in the Further Reading.
Euripides’ play is available in many modern translations. The Epictetus passages are Discourses I 28 and II 17; many modern translations are available. Plato’s account of the divided soul can be found in Books 4 and 9 of the Republic, and in Phaedrus, especially 244–257; also in parts of Timaeus. Galen’s comments are from his On the doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato III 3; there is a translation in the Corpus Medicorum Graecorum, the collected texts and translations of Greek medical writers. For further explorations of this theme in ancient philosophy see A. Price, Mental Conflict (Oxford, 1995), and C. Gill, Personality in Greek Epic, Tragedy and Philosophy (Oxford, 1996), especially Chapters 3 and 4.