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Philosophy in Greece and Rome

The philosophia words first appear in the fifth century BCE, as verbs for an eagerness rather than the name of a discipline; the noun was first defined in the fourth century, by Plato. In Herodotus, Croesus greets Solon: “as one who loves learning you have traveled much of the world for the sake of seeing it”, philosopheōn … theōriēs heineken (1.30, tr. Godley). In Thucydides, Pericles says of the Athenians philosophoumen aneu malakias, which Richard Crawley renders “we cultivate … knowledge without effeminacy” and Thomas Hobbes, keeping the word, “to philosophy, and yet without mollification of the mind” (2.40).

Later the Greeks told a story of the word’s coinage. Plato’s pupil Heraclides of Pontus, as Cicero retells him, had Pythagoras answer the question what art he professed: “artem quidem se scire nullam, sed esse philosophum”, he knew no art, but was a philosopher. Life, he explained, is like the great festival, where some come for the crown and some to buy and sell, “and they were by far the best, whose aim was neither applause nor profit, but who came merely as spectators”; so in life some “earnestly look into the nature of things; and these men call themselves studious of wisdom, that is, philosophers” (Tusculan Disputations 5.8–9, tr. Yonge). In Diogenes Laertius the reason is that “no man is wise, but God alone” (1.12, tr. Hicks). Plato’s Socrates says the same: “the epithet ‘wise’ is too great and befits God alone; but the name ‘philosopher,’ that is, ‘lover of wisdom,’ or something of the sort would be more fitting” (Phaedrus 278d, tr. Fowler). Diogenes also claimed the word for Greece. Against those who held that philosophy began “among the barbarians”, the Magi, Chaldaeans, Gymnosophists and Druids, he wrote: “it was from the Greeks that philosophy took its rise: its very name refuses to be translated into foreign speech” (1.1–4).

Around the name stood other words. The early thinkers’ work was historia peri physeos, inquiry into nature. The thing loved was sophia, wisdom: for Aristotle “what is called Wisdom is concerned with the primary causes and principles” (Metaphysics A.1, tr. Tredennick); for Seneca “Wisdom is the perfect good of the human mind; philosophy is the love of wisdom, and the endeavour to attain it” (Letters 89.4, tr. Gummere). The philosopher’s way of seeing was theōria, spectating, the word of Solon’s travels: the true philosophers, says Plato’s Republic, are “those for whom the truth is the spectacle of which they are enamored” (475e, tr. Shorey). Its condition was scholē, leisure. The sciences that serve neither pleasure nor need arose, Aristotle says, “first in those places where men had leisure”, the mathematical arts in Egypt “because there the priestly class was allowed leisure” (Metaphysics A.1); and “we do business in order that we may have leisure” (Nicomachean Ethics X.7, tr. Rackham). Philosophers, in Plato’s Theaetetus, “always have … leisure, and they talk at their leisure in peace … they do not care at all whether their talk is long or short, if only they attain the truth” (172c–d, tr. Fowler).

The Greeks sorted philosophy themselves, in three ways. Aristotle sorted knowledge by what it does: it “is classed as speculative, practical and productive; and each of these denotes a relation: for it speculates upon something, and produces something and does something” (Topics VI.6, tr. Pickard-Cambridge), and among the speculative there are “three speculative philosophies: mathematics, physics, and theology”, theology preferred to the others (Metaphysics E.1). The Stoics divided it into parts. “Philosophic doctrine, say the Stoics, falls into three parts: one physical, another ethical, and the third logical”, a division first made by Zeno of Citium; they likened philosophy to an animal, “Logic corresponding to the bones and sinews, Ethics to the fleshy parts, Physics to the soul”, to an egg, to “a fertile field: Logic being the encircling fence, Ethics the crop, Physics the soil or the trees”, and to a walled city, and held that “No single part … is independent of any other part, but all blend together”. What the parts divide was itself disputed: “others say that these are divisions not of philosophic exposition, but of philosophy itself”, Zeno of Tarsus among them (Diogenes Laertius 7.39–41, tr. Hicks). Sextus Empiricus found the division older, with Plato “virtually, the pioneer”, and “those who most expressly adopt this division … Xenocrates and the Peripatetics, and also the Stoics” (Against the Logicians 7.16, tr. Bury).

The third sorting is the history of the schools. Diogenes Laertius gave philosophy “a twofold origin; it started with Anaximander on the one hand, with Pythagoras on the other” (tr. Hicks), an Ionian line and an Italian one, and followed each from teacher to pupil, down to Clitomachus, Chrysippus and Theophrastus, and to Epicurus. He summed up the plan, in the Greek, as the beginnings and successions (diadochai), the parts and the sects (haireseis) of philosophy (1.13–20); Succession of Philosophers was already the title of Sotion’s book, which he cites. The schools were named “from cities”, from places, from “incidental circumstances, as the Peripatetics”, from nicknames and from teachers (1.17); philosophers divided into dogmatists and sceptics, in the Greek ephektikoi, those who suspend judgement (1.16). And philosophy grew like tragedy: “in early times it discoursed on one subject only, namely physics, then Socrates added the second subject, ethics, and Plato the third, dialectics, and so brought philosophy to perfection” (3.56).

The lines

English without a named translator is rendered from the original.