Antiochus of Ascalon is one of the Hellenistic philosophers who have been less studied during the revival of interest in the Hellenistic period over the last decades; perhaps because he cannot be assigned to one of the three schools – Epicureanism, Stoicism and the Sceptical Academy – that dominated the philosophical discussion of his time. He had begun his study of philosophy with Philo of Larissa in the Academy, where he stayed for many years. But at some point he decided to abandon the sceptical stance and adopted the Stoic epistemology. However, this was not a conversion to Stoicism; in his ethics Antiochus declared his adherence to the older Academics, including Aristotle as Plato's most distinguished student. In a time when a philosophical pedigree was more important than any claim to novelty, he could thus call his school the Old Academy.
In recent years a concerted effort has been made to rehabilitate Antiochus as an important figure in the Hellenistic period. The papers from a research seminar convened in Cambridge were published in a volume that covers all aspects of his life and philosophical work (D. Sedley [ed.], The Philosophy of Antiochus [2012]). Antiochus’ own works are lost, but we can recover the content of some of them from three speeches in Cicero's books where he explicitly states that he is basing his exposition on Antiochus. T., herself a member of the Cambridge seminar, presents her book on the version of Peripatetic ethics in De finibus 5 as a kind of case study of Antiochus’ method. Her aim is not to engage in Quellenforschung, but rather to show that Antiochus’ work was not simply a case of eclecticism, but rather an ‘update’ of Peripatetic doctrine, reflecting the development of ethics since Aristotle's time, and in particular Stoic ethics.
Antiochus could not simply have gone back to the books of the great older philosophers – Aristotle's school treatises were hard to get at the time, and Antiochus had not read the Nicomachean Ethics (neither had Cicero), though he mentions it as a work of Aristotle's son. So Cicero has his speaker Piso explain that his exposition is based for the most part on the work of Aristotle's successor Theophrastus (Fin. 5.12). Theophrastus could count as a faithful Peripatetic, though, conveniently for Antiochus and Cicero, he could also be blamed for being ‘softer’ than Aristotle in not holding on to the claim that virtue alone is sufficient for happiness. Apart from that, having lived in Athens for many years, Antiochus must also have been familiar with the views of the Peripatetics of his time, though Piso dismisses them as lacking the gravitas of their predecessors (Fin. 5.13–14).
Piso begins his exposition with a classification of theories about the highest good that Antiochus knew from the Academy – the famous Carneadea divisio. In this instance, Carneades used the (Stoic) description of wisdom (prudentia) as an art of living to arrive at the conclusion that the goal of life, according to the Stoics, was ‘to acquire the primary things according to nature, even if you cannot get them’ (Fin. 5.19) – obviously designed to make the Stoic theory look absurd. It is odd that Antiochus should have used this version here (Cicero does not in Fin. 2.34–5), in the context of an attempt to persuade the Stoics that they actually agreed with the Peripatetics except for their newfangled terminology. In the rest of the exposition, the Stoics’ highest good is mostly given as virtue. In any case, the classification sets the Peripatetic theory firmly in the Hellenistic framework of Stoic οἰκείωσις (translated as ‘appropriation’, following A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley in The Hellenistic Philosophers, vol. 1 [1987]). If this was an update, it evidently happened before Antiochus, and it seems likely that some of the Peripatetics of Antiochus’ time had already accepted it.
The main part of T.’s book consists in a kind of running commentary on the arguments of Fin. 5, Piso's exposition of Peripatetic ethics, in which she points out similarities and differences with Stoic and older Peripatetic doctrine, trying to show Antiochus’ independence of Stoicism and his use of genuine older Peripatetic material. She also documents the frequent parallels with a summary of Peripatetic ethics that appears in Stobaeus and may go back to the first century bce, but does not seem to be based on Antiochus’ own work. In her references, especially to Aristotle's Ethics, T. sometimes seems to forget the limited knowledge Antiochus had of Aristotle's school treatises. So, for instance, it is very unlikely that Antiochus based his account of social oikeiosis on Aristotle's treatment of friendship in Eth. Nic. 8; and the mention of the famous phrase ‘political animal’ does not prove that Antiochus had read the Politics. After all, Carneades had already argued that the Stoics differed from the Peripatetics only in terminology, not in doctrine; and his argument was of course based on the apparent similarities of Stoic and Peripatetic conceptions of the human good. As T. plausibly suggests, the frequent examples of the natural development of living things towards their mature state may well go back to Theophrastus and could also be read as instances of Stoic teleology rather than final causation. And of course there might also have been contemporary accounts of ‘Peripatetic oikeiosis’, as shown by the parallels in Stobaeus.
The crucial difference between the schools comes to the fore at the last point. It seems that the prestige of the Stoic claim that virtue was sufficient for happiness was so great that Antiochus found it necessary to ascribe it to the old Academics as well. He argued that the Stoics should admit degrees of happiness, and say, with the Peripatetics, that while virtue by itself was sufficient to make one happy, one would be happier if one also had the other goods such as health, wealth, good children and friends etc. This seemed actually to be implied by the Stoics’ own admission that, given the choice, one should prefer a life with those other things to one without them.
Cicero as speaker offers a quick refutation, mainly arguing that unless one held that virtue was the only good, one could not maintain that it was sufficient for happiness. For Antiochus, this claim rested entirely on the dubious argument that the value of virtue would appear so much greater than all other goods combined that there would always be a prevalence of the good over the bad for a virtuous person. But the Stoics had a better point. They held that in a situation where it is no longer possible to act virtuously, the ideal Stoic would commit suicide (Fin. 3.60–1) – not out of despair, of course, but because of his devotion to the supreme reason that rules the universe, and with which humans as rational animals are united in a community. Priam after the fall of Troy did not have that consolation.
How convincing, then, was Antiochus’ ‘update’ of the old Academic doctrine? It was neither a correction nor a completion (as opposed to his addition of the Stoic definition of knowledge to the Old Academic epistemology, which he saw as a correction [Cicero, Acad. 1.43]), and I doubt that Antiochus saw himself as making changes in the older theory (except for the rejection of pleasure as a good). Given his background, he may well have given what he saw as an accurate account.
It was probably a good idea to remind the philosophically interested Romans that Stoicism was not the only respectable moral theory. What Antiochus offered was a Stoicised version of Peripatetic ethics without the awkward terminology, and that was clearly a success. The Stoics would not have been impressed. The main arguments Antiochus used were well known from the time of Carneades and had been discussed between Stoics and Academics throughout the second century.
But Antiochus was obviously well received among upper-class Romans like Cicero, Varro and Brutus. Antiochus’ presence clearly also contributed to the intellectual life of Rome. Antiochus’ school did not last long after his death. One reason for this was of course the fact that in the following decades, Aristotle's school treatises became widely available; another reason was probably that much of Antiochus’ success was due to his personality. So Antiochus was indeed an important figure in his lifetime – but he was not an important philosopher.
