The main plan of this multi-authored essay collection is fresh and appealing: revisit and clarify beyond reasonable doubt the extent to which we can persuasively show that Stoics from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius read and interpreted one or more of Plato's dialogues. When encountering an arguable interpretation, verify that this is the case, demonstrate why, and then elucidate the philosophical and general intellectual significance that emerges. Do not acquiesce in suggestive or impressionistic Platonic echoes, parallels and reminiscences in Stoic texts that may not hold up under scrutiny as direct engagement with Plato's text. Demonstrate the intertextual connections, and then show their significance.
If ‘the Stoics read Plato closely’, as maintained by editor and contributor L. (pp. 5–6), the above project can enhance and perhaps even transform our understanding of the Stoics in relation to Plato. This is why ‘the central theme of this volume’ is to determine whether ‘direct responses to Plato by Stoics focus on a particular topic or on a particular set of connected topics'. Once direct Stoic responses are established, it should then become feasible to make better sense of what L. calls the ‘indirect’ or suggestive responses to Plato in the Stoics, the echoes that are not readily verifiable on their own as direct interpretations (p. 107). The indirect responses likely will fall into place, be it as plausible interpretations or as a mirage to set aside, once an intelligible grasp of the direct responses is known.
While the plan of this collection is exciting, the seven essay contributions, though capably argued, vary in whether the authors establish a direct Stoic interpretation of Plato and then explain its significance. Some advances are made in the collection, but these appear piecemeal, an insight on ethics here, on cosmology there, depending on each author's interpretative foray. The philosophical import of the advances is at times a bare sketch. L.'s introduction contains no overall synthesis, only four sections, each section separately housing and briefly contextualising his comments on one or two of the essays: ‘Whose Socrates?’, ‘Academic Mediations?’, ‘Appropriation and Response’ and ‘A Later Rapprochement?’ The advances made on the volume's interpretative plan are none the less of considerable interest, and these are my focus.
Drawing on Meno 88c–d, M. Schofield makes a solid case that the four virtues as presented by Chrysippus are indebted to the Platonic Socrates, are aspects of knowledge and that they analytically explicate the cardinal virtue of phronêsis according to Zeno. Cleanthes differs from Zeno and Chrysippus by theorising a distinct set of four virtues centred on enkrateia. These are not epistemic, but rooted in strength (ischus) and drawn from Xenophon's Socrates.
J. Bryan shows that Chrysippus closely engaged with Plato's account about the fragility of the human head in Timaeus 74e1–75c7. Chrysippus agrees with Plato that evils in nature are unavoidable concomitants of the demiurge's providence. Her well-balanced essay exemplifies the new directions made possible from explicating Stoic interpretations of Plato.
L. sets lingering scepticism to rest regarding the flimsy assumption that Zeno's lost Republic must be a response to Plato's Republic ‘on the basis of the title alone’ (J. Sellars, p. 203 n. 89 in V. Harte et al., Aristotle and the Stoics Reading Plato [2010]). L. demonstrates that Zeno's Republic was, or at least included, a harshly worded direct response to Plato's Republic. Plutarch's testimony about Zeno criticising Plato's Republic refers to criticism Zeno made in his Republic. Although Plutarch does not disclose the text containing Zeno's criticism, Numenius helps show that it was his Republic. Numenius observes that Zeno was ‘so disdainfully and shamelessly outrageous' in criticising Plato's thought as to be much worse than was suitable for ‘a dog’, that is, for a Cynic to do. In other words, Zeno is worse than a dog here, not Plato being treated worse than a dog by Zeno. The Greek allows for both readings, but L.'s interpretation is correct in my view on cultural grounds, for dogs are popular symbols in antiquity of brazen behaviour (Il. 6.344, Prov. 26:11: the dog returning to its vomit). L. then adroitly connects Numenius' portrayal of Zeno as a brazen Cynic with Diogenes Laertius' comment about people jokingly saying (paizontes) that Zeno's Republic was written ‘on the tail of the dog’ (i.e. by a Cynic) to infer that Zeno's criticism of Plato's Republic as attested by Plutarch was beyond reasonable doubt contained in Zeno's Republic. It is important progress to have established this intertextual connection. Numenius' emphatic compound participle and two superlative adverbs are not just ‘mischievous’, as L. suggests (p. 117), but very strong wording, Zeno atimotata kai aischista periubrikôs. Hence to Numenius, Zeno in his Republic did something more outrageous in a verbal register to Plato's Republic than, say, a dog lifting its leg and urinating on a copy of it. L.'s ensuing outline of Chrysippus' arguable interpretations of Plato (pp. 122–7) is still a draft sketch, but worth developing to take it to similar heights.
P. Scade's investigation into the Stoic ontology of limits is potentially groundbreaking if he were to develop a persuasive argument that this ontology is based on directly interpreting the Parmenides. The same is true of T. Benatouïl's closing remarks that theôria and scholê in Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius may draw upon on Plato's Theaetetus. At present, Scade and Benatouïl sketch only a possible intertextual relationship with these two Platonic dialogues.
G. Boys-Stones draws upon established Stoic interpretations of Plato in Seneca's Letters 58 and 65 that he reinterprets as deviously anti-Platonic in Seneca's philosophical teaching of Lucilius. His reinterpretation would be more persuasive if he could show a broader Roman Stoic antipathy to Platonic dialectic and metaphysics.
G. Reydams-Schils's essay is intriguing but a bit of an odd fit in the volume. Focused in part on Cicero's translation of the Timaeus, it develops no new or revisited Stoic interpretations of Plato. She reassesses and attempts to challenge Antiochus' view (in Cicero's Academica) that Zeno's cosmology developed from Polemo's, for she seeks to vindicate Zeno, not Polemo, as the original cosmologist of the two in adapting Plato's Timaeus. To support her reassessment, however, she portrays the Academic Antiochus and his predecessors in the Academy as so philosophically partisan against Zeno that Antiochus would deny Zeno's worth as a thinker by transferring his ideas to Polemo. This ‘game’ was standard fare in antiquity, or so Reydams-Schils contends: ‘All is fair in war, love, and cultural rivalries’ (p. 47). Her portrayal of Antiochus on Zeno is a selective exaggeration, however, for Antiochus appreciates much about Zeno and his philosophy, as presented in Cicero's Academica (e.g. 1.35–9), and these positive elements go unmentioned in her essay. Interpretative arguments that undermine doxographic credibility should ideally be an unavoidable last resort (e.g. to resolve two conflicting pieces of evidence by showing one of them less credible), for such arguments are rarely conclusive and tend to leave more, not less, uncertainty in their wake. The problem is not only making it seem uncertain whether early Stoic cosmology goes back to Polemo or Zeno, despite the doxography that Zeno develops it from Polemo. To portray Antiochus as a partisan not to be trusted throws into doubt all of Cicero's Antiochus-mediated information about Hellenistic philosophy.
The volume, promising in its plan and offering advances and suggestive moves towards potential advances, comes complete with bibliography and two indexes, one of names and the other of subjects and passages.
