Tracking down and grasping the emergence of the new out of the old is such a fascinating and rewarding enterprise. The more so when it is undertaken by young and promising scholars, accompanied by the wisdom and experience of some of the most prominent specialists in the field. This is what happens in the volume under review, directed by S. The eleven studies, all original and of excellent quality, explore the philosophical dynamics of the Graeco-Roman world during the first century b.c. The collective exploration of this specific time period was the subject of a four-year research project at Cambridge, which also produced a sister volume, The Philosophy of Antiochus (of Ascalon), edited by D. Sedley (2012).
The present volume examines the philosophical achievements of a series of figures whose work (like Antiochus') was written in Greek and is only preserved in a fragmentary state – the only exception being Cicero, to whom three chapters are devoted, by D. Sedley, J. Annas and I. Gildenhard. Some of these philosophers, for example Posidonius of Apamea (A. Eunyoung Ju) and Eudorus of Alexandria (R. Chiaradonna, M. Bonazzi), have some share in fame – sometimes they have even been invested with enormous expectations by previous research concerning their input to the history of ancient philosophy – but most of them are otherwise less well known outside of the narrow circle of specialists. So it is with the greatest interest that we can discover the Peripatetics Boethus of Sidon (M. Rashed) and Xenarchus of Seleucia (A. Falcon), the doctor Asclepiades of Bithynia (R. Polito) or the learned scholar Alexander of Miletus, called Polyhistor (A. Long). The paper which opens the volume, by M. Hatzimichali, discusses the textual basis of many of these developments, focusing on the fate of the works of Plato and Aristotle during this period.
Given that substantial brief and clear expositions of the content and arguments of each contribution are provided in S.'s introduction, as well as in the reviews of it by P.S. Horky (Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2013.11.17), P. Lautner (Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2013.09.56) and A. Németh (Rhizomata 2.1 [2014], 124–31), I will assess the potential impact of the book as a whole, and then raise some questions inspired by it.
Although no sufficient historical or philosophical justifications are given, by way of an introduction, for the choice of the first century b.c. as a turning point for the history of post-Hellenistic philosophy examined in the longue durée, the individual chapters succeed in showing convincingly, in my view, how lively the philosophical debates were during this century, and how pivotal and pregnant with consequences for later developments were the ‘new directions’ taken by the philosophers of the time, regarding both the way of doing philosophy, and its very content.
Indeed, on the one hand, philosophy becomes at the time more and more text-centred and exegetical rather than freely aporetical or authentically ‘zetetic’-dialectical. And this tendency goes hand in hand with processes of standardisation and ordering of the authoritative texts, of canon-formation and corpus-organisation (at least in the case of the Platonica and the Aristotelica), although not yet of editorial or text-critical initiatives. It is in this competitive context of philosophical circles or schools gradually transforming themselves into ‘textual communities’, when also new texts, or at least new copies, started (re)appearing (i.e. the ‘esoteric’ Aristotelica), that one can also apprehend the fabrication of the Pseudopythagorean treatises, which certainly deserved a separate section in Hatzimichali's otherwise excellent chapter, given the triadic character of the volume (see the recent overview of them by B. Centrone in C. Huffman [ed.], A History of Pythagoreanism [2014]).
On the other hand, from the first century onwards three different philosophical traditions – Platonism, Aristotelianism and Pythagoreanism – mark a new beginning, or revival, in quite different ways, and it is as fortunate as it is rare that they are all examined in parallel, synchronically, within a single volume. (1) With Antiochus and Eudorus Platonism becomes more ‘dogmatic’ and less sceptical, but also embraces the Pythagorean heritage of the early Academy (eventually in an updated form) and, more unexpectedly, the Aristotle of the Categories and the Metaphysics – three trends that will be central to Neoplatonism, too, later on. (2) Aristotelianism is given a new impetus thanks to the (wider) circulation of the esoteric treatises of Aristotle, which quickly became attractive for Platonists and Neopythagoreans alike (if the two milieus were distinct and not identical; see below). (3) Finally, Pythagoreanism sees a revival in both Rome and Alexandria, and gradually becomes an integral part of the philosophical landscape of the Graeco-Roman world, after having gone through a time resembling the Dark Ages during the Hellenistic period. It will turn into a major trend within both Middle and Neo-Platonism (see J. Dillon, D. O'Meara and myself in Huffman's volume referred to above). Although it is philosophically justified that the Pythagoreanism encountered in the volume ‘is intimately tied to readings of Plato that emphasise his Pythagorising and mathematicising inspiration’ (S., p. xiv), especially with reference to the interpretation of the Timaeus, one misses here a more in-depth assessment of the philosophical importance of Roman Pythagoreanism (on which see J.-J. Flinterman, again in Huffman's volume). The latter is arguably a larger cultural phenomenon, but it too was initiated, or so the story goes, at the time of Cicero and had a pervasive influence on many intellectuals of the time (e.g. on Nigidius Figulus and his circle, or on Varro – whose philosophy is treated, but not with respect to its Pythagorean side, in the twin volume on Antiochus). This Pythagoreanism certainly played a major role in the (preparation of the) shift towards transcendence and ‘the religious’ that is observable already in the first century a.d., if not earlier (see P. Athanassiadi and C. Macris, ‘La philosophisation du religieux’, in C. Bonnet and L. Bricault [edd.], Panthée: Religious Transformations in the Graeco-Roman Empire [2013], pp. 41–83), as well as in the emphasis given to philosophy as a way of life – an aspect of philosophy that is missing from the volume under review.
By contrast, a recurrent theme in the book is the Nachleben and reception of Plato, Aristotle and ‘Pythagoras’, and the creative interpretation, adaptation and appropriation of texts and doctrines deriving directly from them, or from the traditions initiated by them, both within these same traditions and, more interestingly and sometimes intriguingly, outside their scope, in the context of other, different traditions. For example, we can observe: (1) the varying and selective reception of Plato's Timaeus and Laws, as well as of his metaphysics of the Forms, by a Roman intellectual and politician like Cicero, or the adoption of the Platonist Heraclides Ponticus' particulate theory of matter (with thrausmata / anarmoi ogkoi as its minima) by the doctor Asclepiades; (2) Aristotle's integration in the renewed Platonism of Antiochus and Eudorus, especially regarding the ontological propositions he advances in the Categories, or the problems and criticisms he raises in the Metaphysics, to which the two Platonists tried to respond; and (3) the plural appropriation of Pythagorean(ising) ideas not only by Cicero and Eudorus, but also by Posidonius, who recovered extensively ‘a Pythagorean heritage as part of Stoicism's ancestry’, inter alia by giving a mathematical account of the soul and of reason as the ultimate principle of cognition; and even by the polymath Alexander of Miletus, who preserved from oblivion (rather than forged himself, pace Long) a fascinating piece of (terminologically and notionally) updated and highly systematised Pythagorean doxography, the so-called Hypomnemata (i.e. Note[book]s, rather than Commentaries), replete with Platonic, Stoic and medical influences (on which see now A. Laks in G. Cornelli, R. McKirahan and C. Macris [edd.], On Pythagoreanism [2013], pp. 371–84).
After reading this volume we are left with a much more complicated and variegated picture of philosophy on the eve of the Christian era, but exactly for this reason, we are able to grasp aspects of cross-fertilisation of the philosophical traditions that otherwise risk going unnoticed or remaining in the shadows. And it is not the least achievement of the volume's contributors, that they marvellously show how the ‘leaven of the Ancients’ counterbalanced the emerging dogmatism and respect to the auctoritates that were characteristic of the post-Sullan decentralised schools of the Roman oikoumene, thereby making them more diverse and endowing them with much less doctrinal rigidity, and much more openness to external influences, than is usually thought.
