The first chapter introduced you to an issue in ancient philosophical debate which was (I hope) accessible without much adjustment. But not all issues in ancient philosophy are so easily available to a modern reader. In this chapter we will pull back the focus and look at some of the factors which separate us from ancient philosophical texts and issues. It is only when we confront these, as well as the factors making some ancient philosophy immediately engaging to us, that we will understand how we can read and argue with texts from such a distant and different culture.
Before turning to the Republic, we need to think about the whole tradition of ancient philosophy, how it has come down to us, some of the changes that have occurred in our reception of it, and the way in which such changes can, for example, shape our reading of Plato and of a work like the Republic.
Ancient philosophy is, to begin with, a very large and rich tradition. It begins in the sixth century BC, and ends in the West with the end of the Western Roman Empire and in the East with the fall of the Byzantine Empire. It arose and developed in Greek city-states, especially Athens, but continued to flourish as the Romans dominated the Mediterranean and beyond, and formed an important part of culture in most of the Roman empire, merging into Christian culture with varied success. It forms a huge and extremely diverse body of texts. It contains a number of very different kinds of philosophical movements, from those that prize mystical insight and dogma to those that favour rigorous argument; a number of different and opposed schools, such as Stoics and Epicureans; and a range of wildly different philosophical positions, including materialism, dualism, scepticism and relativism. More will be said about these differences in Chapter 6; here I shall focus on factors in our reception of this tradition which make a difference to the way that ancient philosophy is seen as forming a tradition or canon, and to the way in which certain philosophers are seen as important.
Firstly, the issue of which parts of a tradition are seen as important only arises when we have the tradition. Much of ancient philosophy was lost to Western Europe in the period of the break-up of the Western Roman Empire, for a variety of reasons to do with cultural changes and the breakdown of political stability. Apart from Plato’s dialogue Timaeus, for many hundreds of years the only ancient philosophical works which were known in depth were those of Aristotle, who dominated medieval philosophy. The period of the Renaissance saw the rediscovery, from a variety of sources, of a much wider range of ancient philosophers. But with the chances and fortunes of history, many ancient authors’ original works have been lost, leaving us with only second-hand accounts of their theories and fragments of their own words. This is the fate of all the ‘Presocratic’ philosophers and of many philosophers after Aristotle, in the so-called Hellenistic period. Discoveries continue to be made of ancient philosophical works, mainly on papyrus rolls discovered in the dry sands of Egypt – and one collection of Epicurean works preserved in charred form at the eruption of Vesuvius. But big gaps remain, and for some individuals and schools of philosophy we remain dependent on often inadequate later accounts.
In AD 79 the eruption of the volcano Vesuvius covered in molten lava many aristocrats’ country houses at Herculaneum, near Naples. This included one, which has been excavated since the eighteenth century, which turned out to contain a large library of books devoted to the works of the philosopher Epicurus and to later followers’ discussions of his ideas. They lift the curtain on a hitherto unknown community of philosophical debate among Epicureans and with other schools. The books are rolls of papyrus (ancient paper), the charred fragments of which have been carefully studied by scholars.
Much of our evidence for ancient philosophy has a similarly accidental quality, and has come down to us in fragments.
This situation opens up differences of approach. With authors whose work has to be studied in fragments and through later sources whose own approach has to be taken into account, historical and interpretative questions have to be faced before we can confidently assume that we actually have the philosophical position in question right. Wading right in with philosophical questions risks prematurely finding a position which turns out to reflect only our own philosophical concerns. It is more straightforward to approach authors whose own work we have as partners in a philosophical dialogue. It is not very surprising, then, that the authors whose philosophy is most prominently taught in philosophy departments are Plato and Aristotle, from whom we have complete works, rather than authors like Epicurus of whose original words we have only a small fraction.
3. A papyrus fragment of a work on anger by the Epicurean Philodemus
This contrast can be overstated, however. Plato is the only author for whom we can feel certain that we possess all the works he made public. None of Aristotle’s published works survive entire; what we have are his (very copious) research and teaching notes, which raise interpretative problems of their own. But even Plato is not a straightforward author to read; for one thing, the dialogue form distances the author from the ideas he puts forward, and interpretations of Plato are probably the most varied of any ancient philosopher. So it is just as possible to get Plato or Aristotle wrong by prematurely taking them to be engaged with our philosophical issues as it is with the Presocratics. And in any case authors and schools whose original work we have only in part can pose philosophical issues that engage us directly, despite the additional historical and interpretative work we have to do. The last twenty years has seen a huge shift in interest in research, publication and teaching in ancient philosophy, away from an almost exclusive focus on Plato and Aristotle to a concern with Hellenistic (post-Aristotelian) philosophers.
Why do we focus on one part of the many-faceted tradition of ancient philosophy rather than another? Apart from the vagaries of transmission, and the question of whether historical or philosophical interest is the driving one, there remains an ineliminable factor of philosophical interest, and this changes from period to period. Researchers and teachers are now interested in a wider range of issues and philosophers than they were twenty years ago, when Plato and Aristotle were more dominant; and similar shifts and changes have occurred many times in the past. Since there is no one single neutral way to take in, never mind discuss, the huge ancient tradition in full, this selectivity is not surprising. Nor should it surprise us that if we are introduced to one way of engaging with ancient philosophy, this should seem natural and inevitable, and that its limitations should become invisible, especially as it gets passed down from teacher to pupil and solidifies in books and journal articles.
We can, at least sometimes, trace an intellectual context to the way in which different parts of the ancient philosophical tradition are found interesting at different times. Some works of ancient philosophy seem dormant, as it were, at some times. They do not raise issues that people already find gripping, or ask questions to which people have competing answers. Then at other times they do do these things. Which parts of the ancient tradition that we engage with depends, at least to some extent, on our own philosophical interests. (How these, and changes in these, should be explained is another matter.) As we shall see, this is not a oneway street. Engaging with texts in ancient philosophy can help us to clarify and further our own thinking on some issues. (More on this in Chapter 3.) Because of their prominence in the teaching and development of Western philosophical thinking since the eighteenth century, some works of ancient philosophy form not just literally the ancient history of the subject, but part of the modern tradition too.