2. Diogenes Laertius, quoted in Werner Jaeger, Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His Development (1934; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 33.
3. Ibid., 111.
4. On Aristotle on the Pythagoreans, see Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (1892; repr., New York: Meridian, 1958), 291.
5. Aristotle, Metaphysics, in Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Modern Library, 1951).
6. Paul Friedlander, Plato (New York: Pantheon, 1958), 1:172.
7. Quoted in G.E.R. Lloyd, Aristotle: The Growth and Structure of His Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 68–79.
8. W. D. Ross, Aristotle (1949; repr., London: Methuen, 1966), 1.
9. Aristotle, Introduction to Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Modern Library, 1967), xiii.
10. G. S. Kirk, “Greek Science,” in Hugh Lloyd-Jones, ed., The Greek World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 121–22.
11. Leonard Mlodonow, Euclid’s Window: The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace (New York: Free Press, 2002), ix.
12. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (1945; repr., New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 163.
13. Exemplified by the famous third man argument, which Plato himself had to confront in the Parmenides. If a man is a man because he partakes of the ideal Form of Man (or a woman the Form of Woman or a chair the Form of Chair), then there must be a third, even more ideal Form of Man to cover the similarity between the particular man and his ideal Form; and likewise a fourth ideal Form to which both the other Forms and ordinary men are similar; and so on ad infinitum.
14. Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 167.
15. Richard Tarnas, Passion of the Western Mind (New York: Harmony, 1991), 57.
16. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, in Introduction to Aristotle, ed. McKeon, 11.
17. Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 169.
18. W.K.C. Guthrie, The Greek Philosophers from Thales to Aristotle (1950; repr. New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 139.
19. For instance, see Frank Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (New York: Atheneum, 1967).
20. W. D. Ross, Aristotle (1949; repr. London: Methuen 1966), 186.
21. Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 167; Francis Cornford, Before and After Socrates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962). Admittedly, I use “aspiration” in a slightly different way from Cornford’s original formulation.
22. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J.A.K. Thomson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 206, 208.
23. Guthrie, Greek Philosophers, 152.
24. Ibid., 191.
25. Ibid., 83.
26. Ibid., 271, 273.
27. Ibid., 101.
28. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. W. Hamilton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 53.
29. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 93.
Chapter 5: Good Citizen or Philosopher Ruler?
1. Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 67.
2. Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 24–25.
3. Aristotle, The Politics of Aristotle, ed. Ernest Barker (1946; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 258. See John B. Morrall, Aristotle (London: Allen & Unwin, 1977), 94.
4. Plato, Plato’s Epistles, ed. Glenn Morrow (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), 123.
5. Plato, Republic, introduction, 576.
6. A. E. Taylor, Plato: The Man and His Work (London: Methuen, 1960), 109.
7. Plato, Gorgias, trans. W. Hamilton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), 149.
8. Ibid., 126 (513e).
9. Plato, Republic, 451 (X:616b–617b).
10. Ibid., 235 (X:45b).
11. In fact, the image of Socrates’s political legislator as a doctor of souls runs through all his works and not just the Republic.
12. Plato, Epistles, Epistle VII.
13. This has led some, like Karl Popper, to see Plato’s Republic as endorsing a kind of racism.
14. Plato, Republic, 261.
15. Ibid., 263.
16. Michael Rostovtzeff, A History of the Ancient World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928), 1:204.
17. Antony Andrewes, The Greek Tyrants (1956; repr., New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 91. Solon is also a key figure in Plato’s Critias, where he learns about the laws and institutions of another Platonic utopia, the vanished Atlantis.
18. Plato, Epistles, 220.
19. Ibid., 219.
20. Ibid., Epistles, 177.
21. Ibid., 229. Plato would expand on this notion of good laws, not good men, as a political principle in the last dialogue he ever wrote, the Laws. In general, both the Laws and its immediate predecessor, the Statesman, give us a very different picture of the Philosopher Ruler from the all-powerful, all-knowing sage in the Republic. His aims are more modest, his methods more pragmatic, with a stress on proportion and process. If the discussion is more realistic, it is also less bracing to read.
22. Plato, Republic, 263.
23. Aristotle, Politics of Aristotle, 52 (II:1264 a16).
24. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J.A.K. Thomson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 81 (I:1100a).
25. As noted by C. A. Bates, Aristotle’s “Best Regime”: Kingship, Democracy, and the Rule of Law (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), which forcefully argues that Aristotle’s ideal political system, or politeia, is not an aristocracy, as W. D. Ross and many other critics have claimed, but democracy on the Athenian model.
26. Aristotle, Politics, 41.
27. Ibid., 42.
28. Ibid. See J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), 71.
29. Aristotle, Politics, 51.
30. For example, Aristotle, Politics, 119.
31. Ibid., 123.
32. Ibid., 126, 127.
33. This is during his remarks on the virtues of ostracism in Greek law. Aristotle, Politics, 135.
34. Werner Jaeger, Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His Development (1934; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 313.
35. For instance, W.K.C. Guthrie, The Greek Philosophers from Thales to Aristotle (1950; repr., New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 113.
36. Jaeger, Aristotle, 321.
Chapter 6: The Inheritors: Philosophy in the Hellenistic Age
1. Paul Zanker, The Mask of Socrates: The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
2. Edwyn Bevan, “Hellenistic Popular Philosophy,” in J. B. Bury, ed., The Hellenistic Age: Aspects of Hellenistic Civilization (1923; repr., New York: Norton, 1970), 81.
3. Alexander Kohanski, The Greek Mode of Thought in Western Philosophy (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984), 73–74.
4. P. E. More, The Greek Tradition, vol. 3, Hellenistic Philosophies (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1923), 19.
5. Gordon Clark, Selections from Hellenistic Philosophy (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1940), 4.
6. Epicurus, “Letter to Menoeceus,” in Whitney J. Oates, ed., The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers (New York: Random House, 1940), 33.
7. Seneca quoted in Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (1945; repr., New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 260; Moses Hadas, ed., The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca (New York: Doubleday, 1958), 7.
8. The story about Epictetus’s leg is from Plotinus’s student Celsus. See Origen, Contra Celsum, Libra VIII, ed. M. Marcovich (Boston: Brill, 2001), vii, 53.
9. More, Greek Tradition, 81.
10. A. E. Taylor, Platonism and Its Influence (1924; repr., New York: Cooper Square, 1963), 8–9. This led the Academy’s fifth president, Arcesilaus (d. 241 BCE), to embrace a version of Skepticism that left Platonist followers of the time, and scholars since, scratching their heads, but which seems to have been directed to refute the notion that anything w
e know from our senses is known for certain.
11. More, Greek Tradition, 65.
12. Diogenes quoted ibid., 261.
13. There are many versions of the story, but the best comes from Diogenes Laertius.
14. That may have been a deliberately ironic turn of phrase, since Diogenes’s father seems to have been charged with counterfeiting: it may even have been why Diogenes was exiled from Sinope. See More, Greek Tradition, 260.
15. See E. A. Barber, “Alexandrian Literature,” in Bury, Hellenistic Age, 67, 69–70.
16. John Dillon, The Heirs of Plato: A Study of the Old Academy (347–274 B.C.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
17. Felix Grayeff, Aristotle and His School (London: Duckworth, 1974), 52, 57.
18. Cicero, Academica, bk. I. See David Sedley, “The Origins of Stoic God,” in Dorothea Frede and André Laks, eds., Traditional Theology: Studies in Hellenistic Theology (Leiden: Brill, 2011).
19. A point raised by G.E.R. Lloyd in Greek Science After Aristotle (New York: Norton, 1973).
20. In Theophrastus’s case, Aristotle’s assertions about final causes and the Unmoved Mover came to play a less and less prominent part of Aristotelian science, as opposed to Aristotelian philosophy. See Lloyd, Greek Science After Aristotle.
21. Theodore Vrettos, Alexandria: City of the Western Mind (New York: Free Press, 2001), 6–7.
22. P. M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 315.
Chapter 7: Knowledge Is Power
1. P. M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 315–17.
2. Ibid., 320.
3. Athenaeus was an Athenian grammarian of the first century BCE. Theodore Vrettos declares his account “more valid” than the one that has Neleus’s heirs burying the library until it was resurrected by one Apellico, whose house in Athens was then looted by the Roman general Sulla in 86 and the books transferred to Rome by Andronicus of Rhodes. See Theodore Vrettos, Alexandria: City of the Western Mind (New York: Free Press, 2001), 38–39; and Felix Grayeff, Aristotle and His School (London: Duckworth, 1974), 74–75. The Andronicus version was laid to rest by Jonathan Barnes in Philosophia Togata II: Plato and Aristotle in Rome (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). What is beyond dispute is that some of the library, and perhaps some of Aristotle’s work in his own handwriting, wound up in the royal library at Pergamum, another center of Peripatetic study in the Hellenistic era.
4. Grayeff, Aristotle and His School, 72.
5. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, 319.
6. Ibid., 352–53, 354.
7. G.E.R. Lloyd, Greek Science After Aristotle (New York: Norton, 1973), 77.
8. The author was Tertullian, and the work was De Anima.
9. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, 348.
10. B. L. van der Waerden, Science Awakening (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 202–3.
11. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (1945; repr., New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 217; on Aristotle’s celestial spheres, see G. Huxley, “Greek Mathematics and Astronomy,” in Hugh Lloyd-Jones, ed., The Greek World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 147.
12. Alexander Kohanski, The Greek Mode of Thought in Western Philosophy (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984), 116.
13. Van der Waerden, Science Awakening, 196.
14. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, 391.
15. Van der Waerden, Science Awakening, 197.
16. As noted by Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974).
17. Lloyd, Greek Science After Aristotle, 49.
18. J. B. Bury, “The Hellenistic Age and the History of Civilization,” in Bury, Hellenistic Age, 21–22.
19. Thomas Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 36.
20. According to Plutarch, “Marcellus,” in Plutarch, Makers of Rome, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert (Harmonds worth: Penguin, 1965).
21. This is sometimes confused with a catalog of the Library itself: Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, 454–55.
22. Ibid., 429.
23. Plutarch, “Marcellus,” 99.
24. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, 431; Lloyd, Greek Science After Aristotle, 96.
25. Michael Rostovtzeff, A History of the Ancient World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928), 360, 363; Van der Waerden, Science Awakening, plate facing 216.
26. F. J. Dijksterhuis, Archimedes (Copenhagen: E. Munksgaard, 1972), 18–19.
27. Reviel Netz and William Noel, Archimedes Codex (Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2007), 41.
28. Ibid., 41–43.
29. Dijksterhuis, Archimedes, 24.
30. Plutarch, “Marcellus,” 99; Van der Waerden, Science Awakening, 209.
31. Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire, trans. F. W. Walbank (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 365.
32. Ibid., 366.
33. Ibid., 367.
34. Plutarch, “Marcellus,” 101.
35. Ibid., 103.
36. Dijksterhuis, Archimedes. What problem was he working on when he died? Scholars like to speculate.
37. Plutarch, “Marcellus,” 105.
38. Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 217.
Chapter 8: Hole in the Soul: Plato and Aristotle in Rome
1. Cicero’s account of his discovery of Archimedes’s tomb comes from Book II of his Tusculan Disputations, trans. C. D. Yonge (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1853).
2. F. R. Cowell, Cicero and the Roman Republic (1948; repr., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 324.
3. Mark Morford, The Roman Philosophers (New York: Routledge, 2002).
4. Jonathan Barnes and Miriam Griffin, eds., Philosophia Togata II: Plato and Aristotle in Rome (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), vi–vii.
5. F. W. Walbank, A Historical Commentary on Polybius (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), vol. 1.
6. Robert Malcolm Errington, The Dawn of Empire: Rome’s Rise to World Power (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1972), 268.
7. Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert (Harmonds worth: Penguin Books, 1979), 41.
8. Walbank, Historical Commentary on Polybius, 18.
9. Aristotle, The Politics of Aristotle, ed. Ernest Barker (1946; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 114 (III, vii).
10. Polybius, Rise of Roman Empire, 314–15.
11. Ibid., 317.
12. Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 381 (VIII:561d).
13. Ibid., 368 (551d).
14. Polybius, Rise of Roman Empire, 310, 350.
15. J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), 71.
16. J.P.V.D. Balsdon, ed., Roman Civilization (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 39.
17. Plutarch, “Cato the Elder,” in Plutarch, Makers of Rome, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 145–46.
18. Sallust, Jugurthine War / The Conspiracy of Cataline, trans. S. A. Handford (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 177, 180.
19. Ibid., 178. Sallust made his own contribution to that part of the formula with his Jugurthine War, an account of Rome’s ruthless conquest of the African kingdom of Numidia and its king Jugurtha.
20. Cicero, “On Duties (II),” in On the Good Life, trans. Michael Grant (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 135.
21. Neal Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 66.
22. Cicero, De Re Publica, ed. Geoffrey Poyser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), 190 (II).
23. Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought, 177.
24. Cicero, De Officiis, trans. Harry G. Edinger (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974), 28 (I).
25. Ibid., 112 (II).
26. L. R. Taylor, Party Politics in the Age of Caesar (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948), 99.
27. Plato, Gorgias, trans. Walter Hamilton (Harmondswort
h: Penguin, 1960), p. 47.
28. In fact, “the more one tries to build up either Dialectic or Rhetoric, not as a faculty, but as an exact science, the more one will be inadvertently destroying their nature.” Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. Lane Cooper (1932; repr., Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1960), 21.
29. Ibid., 24 (III:19).
30. Elaine Fantham, The Roman World of Cicero’s “De Oratore” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 171.
31. Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. Lane Cooper (1932; repr., Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1960), 23 (I:4).
32. Cicero, On the Ideal Orator, trans. James May and Jakob Wisse (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
33. Cicero, De Re Publica, 129 (I).
Chapter 9: Dancing in the Light: The Birth of Neoplatonism
1. See Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966); and chapter 13 of this book.
2. Caesar quoted in Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), 62.
3. Ibid.
4. Plutarch, “Life of Caesar,” in The Fall of the Roman Republic, trans. Rex Warner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958), 303.
5. Virgil, Aeneid, quoted in Erich Gruen, ed., The Image of Rome (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 63; Virgil, Fourth Ecologue, ibid., 61.
6. The rhetorician Porcius Latro, quoted in M. L. Clarke, The Roman Mind (New York: Norton, 1968), 100.
7. Tacitus, Agricola, in Tacitus on Britain and Germany, trans. Harold Mattingly (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965).
8. R. H. Barrow, The Romans (1949; repr., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 89.
9. Clarke, Roman Mind, 110–11.
10. Tacitus, Germania, in Tacitus on Britain and Germany.
11. Plato, Critias, in Timaeus and Critias, trans. Desmond Lee (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 143.
12. As noted by Hegel in Phenomenology of Spirit, and quoted in Alexander Kohanski, The Greek Mode of Thought in Western Philosophy (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984), 86.
13. A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics, 2nd ed. (1974; repr., London: Duckworth, 1986), 80–81.
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