22 - Epicurean and Stoic political thought

Summary

Introduction

‘If Aristotle could have returned to Athens in 272 bc, on the fiftieth anniversary of his death’, speculate Long and Sedley, ‘he would hardly have recognised it as the intellectual milieu in which he had taught and researched for much of his life.’ It had been eclipsed as a cultural centre by Alexandria, thanks to the patronage extended by the Ptolemies to a galaxy of scientists and literary men. In philosophy Athens remained the magnet. But the leading thinkers in the Academy and the Lyceum had in the interval been challenged by a host of rivals, some still active or influential: as well as the Cynics we may instance the younger Aristippus and his followers (known to later writers at least as Cyrenaics), various dialecticians such as Stilpo, Philo and Diodorus, and above all the Stoics and Epicureans. These philosophers did not pretend to the encyclopaedic range of scientific and cultural interests characteristic of the Academy and the Lyceum. Philosophy as practised by Stoics and Epicureans started to resemble the specialist discipline of modern times. And their systems of thought have often been perceived as constituting the deracinated philosophies of life one might expect in an age when political power was ebbing away from the city-state to the cosmopolitan courts of the Hellenistic kings. On this view the individual and his happiness become the new exclusive focus of moral reflection, displacing obsolescent questions about the best political order for the city.