Epictetus and Laypeople
Epictetus and Laypeople
A Stoic Stance toward Non-Stoics
Erlend D. MacGillivray
LEXINGTON BOOKS
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Erlend D. MacGillivray, “The Fall in Ancient Stoic Thought.” In Fall Narratives: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, edited by Zohar Hadromi-Allouche and Aine Larkin (eds.), 51-63. London: Routledge, 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Routledge. Reproduced with permission of The Licensor through PLSclear.
“Reassessing Epictetus’ Opinion of Divination” Apeiron 53:2, 147–60. © 2020 MacGillivray, published by De Gruyter, text slightly modified, https://www.degruyter.com/view/journals/apeiron/53/2/article-p147.xml. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Public License. BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020934438
ISBN 978-1-7936-1823-8 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-7936-1824-5 (electronic)
To my parents Donald and Margaret MacGillivray,
for all the love, patience, and
wisdom that you have continually shown to me.
For who can be more truly the benefactors of their children than their parents, who have not only caused them to exist, but have thought them to be worthy of food, and after that of education both in body and soul, and have enabled them not only to live, but to live well. Philo of Alexandria, Spec. Leg. II.229
Contents
Acknowledgments and Dedication
1 Establishing a Philosophical Identity in Antiquity
2 Limitations on Moral Advancement
3 The Selective Engagement of Laypeople
4 Nonscholastic Instruction and Primitive Humanity
5 Preconceptions
6 Civic Religion and Law
7 Exempla
Conclusion and Suggestions for Future Research
References
Index
About the Author
Acknowledgments and Dedication
I owe the University of Aberdeen a great debt for the myriad instances of support and encouragement that I received during my decade-and-a-half association with the institution, but a few people bear particular mention. First of all, my thanks should be offered to Dr. Jutta Leonhardt-Balzer for the integral part that she played in overseeing my academic development over many years. I am also indebted to the encouragement that I received from Professor Grant Macaskill, Dr. Jane Heath, and Dr. Tomas Bokedal, and the various suggestions they made which improved my manuscript. The funding I obtained from the Arts and Humanities Research Council was also paramount in helping me to bring this book to a successful completion, for which I am most grateful. My time at the British School at Athens, and at Tyndale House, Cambridge, also greatly aided my research and provided me with many happy memories.
Beyond academia, I owe particular thanks to my wife Mary Jane. Her patience with my intermittent absences, the presence of innumerable books crowding our home, and her efforts in supporting me through the ups and downs of academic research have been invaluable. My deepest gratitude though should be expressed to my parents, Donald and Margaret MacGillivray, for the love, patience, and wisdom that they have continually extended to me. They have supported me in every way possible and with unstinting resolve. This book would not exist were it not for them, and for this reason I wholeheartedly dedicate this work to them.
“You must assume either the stance of a philosopher or that of a layperson,” τοῦτ᾽ ἔστι φιλοσόφου στάσιν ἔχειν ἢ ἰδιώτου.
—Epictetus (Discourses. III.15.13.)
One of the many legacies that antiquity has bequeathed to later generations is a substantial store of philosophical literature wherein different views on concepts such as ethics, epistemology, anthropology, theology, and logic have been carefully scrutinized and delineated. Modern scholarly interest in ancient philosophy has, perhaps understandably, largely focused upon explicating the theoretical content of the schools’ propositions, and to do so by, for instance, attempting to systematize their tenets, reflecting upon where cohesion and tensions between various doctrines lie, and highlighting the varying emphases and philosophical preferences that different generations of thinkers could prioritize. The richness of the intellectual depth that is contained in these texts has, perhaps understandably, tended to obscure the value of studying the schools as a sociohistorical phenomenon and in exploring the stances that their proponents took on topics that lie outside of formal philosophical discourse. In this regard, it is the intention of this book to consider ancient philosophers’ attitudes toward a group that would have constituted the largest segment of the society that surrounded them, but which their opinion of has elicited almost no scholarly attention: individuals who lacked philosophical training, laypeople.
To assess the views regarding laypeople that were held across the classical philosophical schools (e.g., Platonic, Peripatetic, Stoic, and Epicurean) and, indeed, even just across an individual philosophical tradition would be a mammoth task, and is not achievable within the space of a single monograph. To render the goal of this book more manageable, its focus will narrow upon exploring the mid-first to early second century CE Stoic philosopher Epictetus’ views of them. The reason for selecting Epictetus is that, as will become evident, he mentions laypeople with notable frequency, and so a robust reconstruction of his views of them can, quite uniquely for an ancient philosopher, be obtained.
Epictetus
Epictetus (ca. 55–135 CE) led, as one of his recent commentators has reflected, “(perhaps) not a strikingly eventual life, but yet a memorable one.”1 Born in Hierapolis in Asia Minor,