[MUSIC] We now turn to post-Aristotelian philosophy, which is sometimes called Hellenistic philosophy. Now the term Hellenistic is used by historians to demarcate the period that goes from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE, to the fall of the Roman republic. This is a period in which Greek language, culture, and institutions are disseminated widely through the Mediterranean and the near eastern world, from Greece to modern day Afghanistan as a result of the military conquests of Alexander the Great. Alexander's empire is said to have Hellenized the lands he conquered. That is, it made them Greek. Hellen is the Greek word for Greek, and Hellanizane, to Hellenize, is to make Greek. Three Greek-speaking empires succeeded Alexander, including that of the Ptolemies in Egypt where the great city of Alexandria was founded and became a center for scientific study and learning that rivaled Athens. Greek-speaking intellectuals from all over the world flocked to Alexandria, whose library was reputed to contain a copy of every book in the world. Athens, however, still remained the center for philosophical learning, and it attracted its own influx of intellectual immigrants. We're going to study the two major schools of philosophy that emerged in Athens in this period, Epicureanism and Stoicism. The founders of these schools arrived in Athens only after the death of Aristotle, which happened to be in the same year as the death of Alexander. Thus in the Hellenistic period of philosophy, the direct chain of intellectual descent from Socrates to his pupil Plato, and from Plato to his student Aristotle is broken. Epicurus arrived in Athens 17 years after the death of Aristotle, and founded a school known as The Garden. Zeno of Citium arrived about six years earlier and developed a following among those who met and held discussions in a painted colonnade known as The Stoa Poikile. They became known as the Stoa, or Stoics. For the next several centuries in Athens, there were lively debates between Stoics, Epicureans, and the heirs of Plato in the Academy, as well as the followers of Aristotle, who came to be known as Peripatetics. Stoicism and Epicureanism remained influential philosophical schools, even past the point where historians marked the end of the Hellenistic period, which is the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE that marks the beginning of the Roman empire. There were many Roman Stoics and Epicureans in the Imperial Period too, including the poet Lucretius and Epicurean, and the dramatist and essayist Seneca, a Stoic. Although they were writing several centuries after the beginnings of the schools to which they owed their intellectual allegiance. And the schools remained an active presence in Athens as well during this period. According to the Acts of the Apostles, the Christian evangelist Paul of Tarsus debates with Epicureans and Stoics on the Areopagus in Athens, early in the mid first century. Unfortunately, the study Hellenistic philosophy faces some of the same problems we face in the case of Pre-Socratic philosophy. Very little of what the original Greek Stoics and Epicureans wrote has survived, and we have to rely on later reports and paraphrases, often from polemical sources. We're going to begin our study of Hellenistic philosophy with Epicurus, who reportedly wrote hundreds of volumes including 41 major treatises. But all of this is lost to us today, except for a few items. Diogenes Laertius, a biographer of the third century CE, who wrote A Life of Epicurus, includes in it three letters from Epicurus to Epicurean communities, and a collection of maxims known as the Principal Doctrines. Another collection of maxims, known as The Vatican Sayings were preserved in a 14th century manuscript in the Vatican library, which was rediscovered only in the 19th century. And in recent decades, we have recovered fragments of Epicurus' massive 37 volume work on nature, from the charred remains of papyrus rolls in a private library in Herculaneum that were buried in volcanic ash during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. Later Epicureans include the Roman poet Lucretius, in the first century BCE, who wrote a massive poem on the nature of things, in which he sets out a version of epicurean philosophy. Another important Roman source for Epicureanism is Lucretius' rough contemporary, Cicero. A statesman and orator who was well versed in the philosophy of his day, and wrote dialogues setting forth the positions of the rival philosophical schools of his day. For example, book one of his work On Ends presents the Epicurean ethical philosophy. And book one of On the Nature of the Gods, sets forth Epicurean theology. While there was no completely standard convention for referring to the text and testimony for Hellenistic philosophy, you will often find references to the excellent source book collected and translated by Long and Sedley, which is called The Hellenistic Philosophers, and was published by Cambridge University Press in 1987. Thus if you see a citation that reads LS 23A, that refers to text A in chapter 23 of Long and Sedley, in this case a quote from Lucretius. By and large I will be citing Epicurus' works by their abbreviated titles. For example, the letter of Menoeceus will be abbreviated Men, and so on for the other letters. And the Principal Doctrines I'll be citing by the acronym for its Greek title, Kuriai Doxai. So the fourth and the principal doctrines is KD 4, just as the fourth item in the Vatican Sayings is VS 4. Now it will also be convenient to refer to Cicero's, On the Nature of the Gods by the acronym of its Latin title, ND for De Natura Deorum. Now before we dig into those Epicurean doctrines, a few notes about his school in Athens which was known as The Garden. Unlike other Athenian philosophical schools of the day whose members hung out in public places like the Painted Stoa, the Epicureans were reclusive. They saw themselves as a community of friends living together according to common principles. They thought of philosophy as a therapeutic discipline. Something that would banish the distress that plagues human life. Epicurean practice emphasized memorization and repetition of key doctrines in condensed form. That's why we have so many maxims in our surviving texts. Epicurus seems to have founded more than one community like The Garden. And his letters to such communities are in many ways like the letters from the Apostle Paul to far flung Christian communities centuries later. That is, they contain reminders and summaries of core doctrines with the injunction to rehearse and memorize them. So epicurean philosophy is not just a body of doctrine, but a way of life. It has much in common with what we think of today as religious practice, although we have to keep in mind that it's practitioners took it to be based entirely on reason.
