- Aristotle, Plato and Pythagoreanism in the First Century BC: New Directions for Philosophy editor by Malcolm Schofield
This is the second edited volume resulting from a major Cambridge project on the first century. David Sedley, editor, The Philosophy of Antiochus, appeared in 2012. Both volumes display the ability of the organizers to attract influential established scholars and promising younger ones to conferences aimed at high quality research. While neither volume strives for much consensus, this collection lacks a single figure to unify it, and one is left to tease out one’s own unifying theme. While Schofield begins his introduction with the theme of new directions, what should we make of a title embracing Aristotle, Plato, and Pythagoreanism? It is not that any single figure claimed that three philosophies were identical, but that the desire for the “classics” of philosophy and for an “ancient vision” was now widely felt and manifested itself in various ways.
Myrto Hatzimichali begins with an objective, non-partisan discussion of the Platonic and Aristotelian corpora during this century. This topic seems basic, but has much more to do with the second half of the century. However, it has the merit of introducing us to the rising importance of texts for philosophy, particularly in this later part of the period, making the biggest difference for Aristotelian study. Riccardo Chiaradonna then argues that the early Aristotelian commentators brought about a real difference, though less than a revolution. “No real exegetical work is detectable behind Antiochus’ cursory references to Aristotle,” making him “late Hellenistic rather than post-Hellenistic” (33). When Chiaradonna considers Eudorus, Pythagoras makes his first major appearance in the book (42), though not at the expense of making Eudorus’s exegesis anti-Aristotelian (43). Aristotelian exegetes simply had a “rather ‘free’ attitude towards Aristotle” retaining the right to disagree (48–49).
Marwan Rashed tackles Boethus’s ontology, offering a serious and thorough piece of philosophic reconstruction. When he speaks of “the Peripatos’ nearly exclusive focus, in the first century BC, on the Categories” (53), I was hesitant, because the prestige and scholarship of Porphyry’s mammoth commentary on the work may have resulted in a bias in testimonia. Like Rashed, Andrea Falcon takes one Peripatetic, and downplays any suggestion of an “enemy within” the Peripatetic tradition. He draws attention (91) to our dependence on Alexander’s testimony, whose hostility has ensured Boethus of an unsympathetic hearing ever since.
Anna Eunyoung Ju sadly passed away in March 2010, but had first submitted her paper on Posidonius as a historian. She regards Posidonius (rightly) as having a “strong historical [End Page 840] sense” (97), and deals primarily with the tricky evidence of Plutarch at Moralia 1023b–c. Her thoughtful interpretation requires her to treat linguistic details of the passage as distinctly Posidonian, but she allows that Plutarch may be working through a source, in all likelihood Eudorus (100n21). While her conclusions are nevertheless modest, I am puzzled by the last sentence: “This emphasis [on mathematical reason] allowed Posidonius to reinterpret inherited Platonism by mathematicising it …” (117), given that Speusippus and Xenocrates were already mathematicized. Roberto Polito’s polished article on Asclepiades and Heraclides subtitled “medical Platonism?” seems more marginally relevant, being somewhat more interesting on fourth-century Heraclides than on Asclepiades. Since a basic hypothesis is “that Asclepiades appropriated themes from the tradition to which Heraclides belonged for the purpose of criticising or ridiculing them” (138), Asclepiades turns out to be somewhat anti-Platonist.
A. A. Long tackles the Pythagorean work of Alexander Polyhistor, for which it is difficult to find any philosophic context. After some sensible and at times intriguing discussion, Long comes down in favour of it being a learned literary construct. We stay partly with Pythagoras for Mauro Bonazzi’s article on Eudorus, “an interesting philosopher, who substantially contributed to the renewal of Platonism, from both an historical and a philosophical perspective” (160). Bonazzi weaves magic out of the evidence for Eudorus and key passages of Platonic, Aristotelian, and pseudo-Pythagorean sources...