I
First, let us consider Antiochus of Ascalon and his claims of a return to the Old Academy, since it is with Antiochus that the issue of eclecticism begins to raise its head seriously in the history of later Platonism (Panaetius and Posidonius could be seen, I suppose, as "eclectic" Stoics)—indeed, in many older works Antiochus is presented as inaugurating a long period of "eclectic philosophy."[2] am on record as protesting against the use of this word as a label for the Platonist (and other) philosophers of this period,[3] but my protest is only valid if the term be used in a dismissive or pejorative sense, with the implication that the philosophers concerned were too muddleheaded or light-minded to stick to the principles of any one of the four main Hellenistic schools. In fact, there is nothing at all wrong with being "eclectic," if that means simply that one is prepared to adopt a good formulation, or a valid line of argument, from a rival school or individual and adjust one's philosophical position accordingly.[4] In this sense, most of the great philosophers are eclectics, and eclecticism is a mark of acuteness and originality, as opposed to narrow-minded sectarianism.[5]
[2] Those of Zeller and Praechter in particular. See the excellent discussion of this by P.L. Donini in Chapter 1 above, pp. 22-29.
[3] The Middle Platonists (London, 1977) (henceforth referred to as Middle Platonists ), xiv-xv. Daniel Babut, in Plutarque et le Stoicisme (Paris, 1969), 6, discussing the question of Plutarch's "eclecticism," produces a good definition of the term in its objectionable sense: "la tendence au compromis... l'habitude d'associer sans discrimination des thèmes empruntés à plusieurs doctrines, sans être conscient ou sans tenir compte des frontières qui les séparent." A "supermarket" approach to philosophy, one might term it (I owe the phrase to Jacques Brunschwig).
[4] Pierre Thévenaz, in L'âme du monde. le devenir et la matière chez Plutarque (Neuchâtel, 1938), while characterizing Plutarch as eclectic, makes the reasonable remark, "L'eclectisme n'est pas toujours le signe d'une impuissance créatrice" (p. 125).
[5] It was this, of course, which made it such a positive value word for Enlightenment figures such as Brucker and Diderot (cf. Donini, Chapter 1 above, pp. 18-22).
On that interpretation of the term, there can be no dispute, I think, that Antiochus was eclectic, offensive as the term would have seemed to him. His striving—and that is what makes him interesting in the present context—was all for orthodoxy and a return to purity of doctrine.
Despite the strong polemical context of his move (his distancing of himself from Philo of Larissa and the Fourth Academy), there is no need to doubt that Antiochus genuinely felt himself to be returning to the true Platonic tradition of the Old Academy by rejecting the (excessive) skepticism of the New. If his epistemology, with its criterion of certainty in kataleptike phantasia , and his ethics, with its basis in oikeiosis , and his physics, with its logos -theory, sound suspiciously like Stoicism to us, he has a coherent explanation: Zeno was a pupil of Polemo, the last head of the Old Academy, and he learned his lessons there better than his fellow-pupil Arcesilaus, who took over the Academy from Polemo (cf. Cicero Fin . 4.3.25). As for the Peripatos, Aristotle and Theophrastus are part of the Old Academic consensus (cf. Cicero Acad 2.15ff.). Such disagreements as they had were matters of terminology, not substance (Acad . 1.18).
The accuracy of Antiochus's view of the history of philosophy is not our concern in the present context.[6] All that is relevant is his striving for orthodoxy, with his simultaneous belief that he was justified in appropriating such Stoic doctrines and formulations as he could find any adumbrations of in Plato or the Old Academics. He is not uncritical of the Stoics, in fact. He feels that they went too far, in the sphere of ethics, in denying any role in happiness to bodily and external goods, and he sharply criticizes Chrysippus (ap . Cicero Fin . 5.28) for treating man, for theoretical purposes, not as a mind in a body, but as mind and nothing else. In this respect Zeno deviated from the Academic consensus
[6] Cf. Middle Platonists , 55-59.
(which, for Antiochus, incorporates Aristotle's teaching in the Ethics , which he had learned from Polemo), and Antiochus condemns him for that.
In fact, Antiochus appears to have fooled nobody—not his contemporary and admirer, Cicero, nor later commentators, such as Plutarch or Numenius,[7] but he did perhaps start something, and that is a controversy about orthodoxy within the Platonist tradition. The controversy, strictly speaking, began with the attempt by Philo of Larissa to argue for the unity of the Academic tradition, trying to show, on the one hand, that the Skepticism of the New Academy could claim support from the procedures of both Socrates and Plato, and, on the other, that the New Academicians—in particular, Carneades—did not absolutely withhold assent to impressions, but only denied the Stoic criterion of certainty. Philo stated a position, but it was Antiochus's violent reaction to this[8] that really started the controversy, one carried on by the author of the Anonymous Theaetetus Commentary —whoever and whenever he was; Plutarch, in his lost work, On the Unity of the Academy since Plato , Lamprias Cat. 63; and Numenius, in his work On the Divergence of the Academics flora Plato , of which we have a number of entertaining fragments. What side one took in this controversy inevitably had some bearing on one's own attitude to Skepticism. Plutarch, for instance, is quite hospitable to it, though chiefly as a weapon to use against the Stoics. I cannot see Plutarch as a genuine Skeptic, but he does cherish the Skeptical tradition,[9] as did Cicero before him, and as Numenius does not.
[7] Cf. Plutarch Cicero 4: Numenius, fr. 28 Des Places.
[8] Cf. Cicero Acad . 2.11, where Lucullus is made to recount Antiochus's reaction to hearing a reading of Philo's work. Antiochus's reaction was recorded in his dialogue Sosus .