This important book is the third volume in a Cambridge series of source books in post-Hellenistic philosophy, following volumes on Peripatetic and Platonist philosophy by Robert Sharples and George Boys-Stones. Like that of those earlier collections, its scope is broad, covering the work of multiple individuals in an array of domains across an expansive frame of time. Inwood’s anthology spans over three hundred years of philosophical history, from the last official scholarchs of the Stoic school to Stoicism’s known exponents and practitioners in late antiquity. Throughout, Inwood provides a systematic and thoroughly representative selection of evidence, often assembling texts by (or dealing with) lesser-known figures, explaining their relationship to more familiar works, and treating each with expertise founded on decades of careful scholarship in the field.
The uneven nature of surviving evidence requires organizational tradeoffs, of which Inwood is well aware. Other volumes in the series employ a strictly thematic organization, grouping texts from across the entire period under consistently applied thematic headings. Inwood adopts a looser, hybrid approach, primarily thematic, as he says, but also chronological: where evidence is more plentiful, the focus narrows to individual figures. Where it is less so, it widens to encompass frames of time. Three of the book’s six chapters are devoted to periods of roughly a century each, and Posidonius, Seneca, and Epictetus each receive lengthy chapters in their own right. Each chapter opens with a general introduction and is then parsed thematically under the standard Hellenistic divisions of logic, physics, and ethics. Further subheadings vary considerably, expanding at times in accordance with available evidence or with Inwood’s judgement of importance. The overall effect is that of zooming in and out as the evidence allows.
All of this adds up to a deal of complexity in the volume’s organization, and it takes a moment to absorb Inwood’s plan. One upshot is that the book is somewhat less suited for use as a straightforward reference work or companion volume: one cannot consult a particular section to find all available evidence grouped under a given theme, nor, in some cases, can one find evidence for a particular figure gathered under a single heading. Occasionally this gives a distorted sense of the significance of individual thinkers (Panaetius is treated somewhat perfunctorily, Posidonius at length). Nonetheless, all of Inwood’s chapters repay close sequential reading, and the wide-angle lens adopted in the chapters surveying entire periods is highly effective, affording an impressive, panoptic view of the school’s various scholarchs and teachers in later antiquity. Chapters on the period “From Posidonius to Seneca” and “The Second Century CE” especially comprise evidence for figures who have received comparatively little attention. Inwood includes (among others) Attalus, admired by Seneca, and Chairemon of Alexandria, notable for being an Egyptian priest as well as a Stoic philosopher. Here too are substantial excerpts from texts by Hierocles, Cleomedes, and Cornutus, whose work collectively constitutes important evidence for Stoic ethics, cosmology, and the Stoics’ allegorical handling of myth. Some of this material is of historiographical or anthropological rather than strictly philosophical interest, conveying the scope and variety of the reception and adaptation of Stoicism, but it bears out Inwood’s claims about the flexibility of Stoic doctrine and the diversity of Stoicism’s adherents in later antiquity. The excerpts from and commentary on Musonius Rufus are especially useful.
A notable feature of Inwood’s treatment is his rejection of any ‘Middle’ Stoic period. This older periodization, rooted in 19th-century German scholarship, treats Panaetius and Posidonius in particular as representatives of an intermediate, syncretizing phase of Stoicism marked by substantive departures from earlier doctrine and incorporating elements of Platonist ethics and psychology. Rejecting this classification, Inwood rather sees Antipater of Tarsus, Panaetius’ teacher and the last Stoic scholarch based exclusively in Athens, as the beginning of a later phase in which Stoics “began to grapple with the philosophical legacy of Plato and Aristotle more directly than they had in previous decades” (p. 4). This point of demarcation neatly coincides, as Inwood notes, with forceful criticisms of the school mounted by Carneades in the second century BCE. Our evidence indeed reflects the impact of these criticisms, particularly in ethics: from the time of Diogenes of Babylon, there is a marked shift in Stoic formulations of the human telos, along with hints of other concessions or innovations along related lines.[1]
Inwood’s decision to view Antipater as a turning point supplies a useful new frame, marking off an earlier phase of Stoicism that reaches its fullest development under Chrysippus and his immediate successors from later trends. Somewhat harder to explain is Inwood’s tendency to dismiss reports of innovation and syncretism by Panaetius and Posidonius, who followed in Antipater’s wake. The suggestion that Antipater marks a new direction in Stoicism is compatible with the view that Panaetius and Posidonius continued it, and the overall state of our evidence gives the impression that, from the time of Carneades, the school’s leading figures were increasingly swayed to one degree or another by criticisms coming from the Academy. Diogenes Laertius says outright that both thinkers abandoned the claim that virtue is sufficient for happiness (7.128) and that Posidonius treated health and wealth as goods (7.103). Galen’s report, though certainly tendentious, suggests that Posidonius modified Stoic psychological theory in ways that would complement such a view.
Inwood follows some others in downplaying these reports, making a compelling if not conclusive case. Inwood presents De officiis 3.12 as evidence of Panaetius’ commitment to the sufficiency of virtue for happiness (p. 51). What Cicero says there, however, is that Panaetius held that whatever conflicts with the honorable (honestum) can neither improve nor degrade one’s life. This is not, strictly, a reference to external resources and conditions as such but rather to outcomes the pursuit or avoidance of which would obstruct or undermine virtuous action. It is consistent with this claim to suppose that Panaetius regarded external resources as valuable for their contribution to virtuous activity and perhaps even as necessary means to it. Such a view would still be a substantive departure from Chrysippean Stoicism, which rejects any instrumental basis for the value of promoted indifferents. Inwood suggests that “a recognition of external and bodily factors as goods” entails a rejection of the claim that virtue is sufficient for happiness, hence that Posidonius, having accepted the sufficiency thesis, cannot have recognized health and wealth as goods (p. 136).[2] But a commitment to the sufficiency of virtue for happiness implies this only if one assumes with Aristotle that happiness comprehends every kind of good, as Posidonius may or may not have done.[3] The testimonies of Cicero, Seneca, and Diogenes are all compatible with a view according to which at least some external resources are a necessary basis for virtuous action, to be pursued for this reason. A position along these lines would help to explain the characterizations found in Diogenes and Galen.[4]
Well over a third of the volume is devoted to excerpts from Seneca and Epictetus. Here as elsewhere Inwood aims to “redress” an overemphasis on ethics in our “picture of later Stoicism” (p. 1) and tends to present these figures in the same light as earlier thinkers, extending the Hellenistic division of ethics, logic, and physics to his treatment of each of them. In the case of Seneca, this scheme yields a single passage in which Seneca reports the Stoic distinction between dialectic and rhetoric and two passages in which he disparages logical quibbles. Epictetus frequently employs logical terms and gives valuable reports of earlier disputes and technicalities, but both logic (in our narrower sense) and dialectic are firmly subordinated to ethics throughout the Discourses.[5] Physics, a substantial interest of Seneca’s, is a somewhat different case, but here too Seneca is largely expounding, criticizing, or choosing among theories propounded by others. This does not undermine the interest or usefulness of the evidence Inwood gathers, but it tends to confirm that Seneca and Epictetus are on a different philosophical footing than theorists such as Posidonius or Archedemus.
Inwood’s commentary throughout is largely concerned with questions of continuity and innovation rather than philosophical interpretation or reconstruction, and readers unaware of interpretive controversies will not always be alerted to them. The much-contested significance of huparchon in the Stoic account of cataleptic impressions (p. 14) receives no comment. In connection with the Stoic argument from apraxia, a perennial crux of debate between Stoics and Academics, Inwood writes that “Carneades simply revised the theory of action to require only assent to the likelihood of something being the case, rather than to its truth” (p. 13). This glosses over significant interpretive complications, including the well-attested fact that Carneades typically argued for wholesale suspension of assent (not merely a restriction on its scope); in place of Stoic assent, he advocated a weaker attitude of approval and an original account of persuasive (pithanon) impressions.
Translations are fresh and lively throughout, even in cases of overlap with Inwood’s own previous, highly regarded translations of Seneca’s letters. They tend towards the colloquial and informal, nicely complementing the more formal (and occasionally stuffier) prose of some older existing translations. A mistranslation on page 512 should be corrected since it affects the basic sense of the passage. Inwood has Marcus ascribing to Epictetus the directive to use “avoidance [ekklisis] only on the things which are not up to us”. But what Epictetus repeatedly says, and Marcus reports here (Med. 11.37), is that we should seek to avoid only what is in fact up to us. This is in keeping with Epictetus’s repeated injunction to suspend desire (orexis) entirely while restricting aversion (ekklisis) to what is in our control. Given the truth conditions of these attitudes, which are in fact beliefs (or structures of belief) about what is good and bad, this strongly suggests that avoiding mistakes (hamartêmata) is something a non-sage can do, even if she cannot yet realize the condition of virtue or perform the morally perfect actions (katorthômata) that belong only to the sage.
The book is notably free of typographical errors and includes a highly useful concordance and index of sources alongside a bibliography and general index. To organize, translate, and comment on texts of this range and complexity to the high standard Inwood achieves is a monumental labor. This is a beautifully produced and hugely useful volume, indispensable for anyone working in the field and a worthy companion to counterpart collections in the series.[6]
Notes
[1] In the formulations of Diogenes and Antipater, the older, Chrysippean focus on a cognitive grasp of nature is replaced by an emphasis on indifferents as practical objectives of one sort or another (Stobaeus, Ecl. 2, p. 76.6-15 Wachsmuth, Clement, Strom. 2.21.129). Cicero (Fin. 3.57) and Seneca (Ep. 92.5) independently report that Antipater made concessions to Carneades, Stobaeus says that ‘selective value’ (axia eklektikê) was coined by Antipater (Ecl. 2, p. 83.14-19), and Plutarch singles out Antipater’s formulations as the focus of significant dispute (Comm. not. 1072F).
[2] Like I. G. Kidd, Inwood cites Seneca Ep. 87 as evidence that Posidonius accepted the sufficiency thesis. But this too is inconclusive. Cf. Severin Gotz, “Posidonius on Virtue and the Good,” Classical Quarterly (2023) 73, 636-47.
[3] Plato’s Socrates arguably combines the sufficiency thesis with a recognition of goods other than virtue, as does Antiochus.
[4] Cicero (Off. 3.12) makes clear that Panaetius saw no conflict between duty and utility, but this position is compatible with the claim that we have reason to pursue health and wealth as instrumental means to virtuous action, even if we have no reason to pursue them in any way that conflicts with duty.
[5] Like W. A. Oldfather’s, Inwood’s translation (p. 366) of a passage at Discourses 1.8 has Epictetus apparently employing an invalid argument schema (denying the antecedent). Barnes argues that this should not be rendered as an argument at all but as a point about logical equivalence relying on the Philonian interpretation of conditionals. On this construal, the relevant equivalence is not between “owing money” and “having borrowed and not repaid” (p. 365) but between (P ∧ Q ) → R and ¬ ((P ∧ Q ) ∧ ¬ R). See Jonathan Barnes, Logic and the Imperial Stoa (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 31-3.
[6] Thanks to Nate Powers for comments on an earlier draft of this review.