14 - Cleitophon and Minos

Summary

As later chapters will show, Plato’s political ideas were immediately and immensely influential. Aristotle’s own political thinking largely starts where Plato left off, and much of Hellenistic constitutional theory shows an indelibly Platonic imprint. However, at least at first sight, this influence seems to owe relatively little to the post-Platonic Academy itself. The major figures who immediately succeeded Plato, Speusippus and Xenocrates, seem by and large to have been more interested, or at any rate more innovative, in ethics (and metaphysics) than in politics, though Speusippus is reported as having written an On Legislation, Xenocrates a Politicus, in one book, and – interestingly – an Elements of Kingship for Alexander, in four. Polemon, who took over the headship from Xenocrates, and taught the Stoic Zeno, was also primarily known for his contributions in ethics. After him, with Arcesilaus, the Academy takes a sceptical turn; when Antiochus of Ascalon, in the first century bc, announces a return to the positive doctrines of the ‘Old Academy’, his version of ‘Platonic’ (and Aristotelian) political ideas turns out to be a heavily Stoicized one.

Yet this broad-brush picture cannot be quite right. There clearly was continuing and direct engagement with Plato’s political writings on the part of the Academy: the field was not left entirely to Aristotle. Thus the second part of the famous two-day disquisition at Rome, for and against justice, by the Academic sceptic Carneades seems to have exploited Glaucon’s case against, in Republic II; and we also have fairly secure, and reasonably extended, evidence of the close reading of both the Republic and the Laws within the ‘Old Academy’ itself.