One line of thinking traces the ancestry of ancient scepticism back to Democritus, whose atomist theory calls into question the reliability of our senses (reality is atoms and void). It seems to be well attested that the man who came to be regarded as the founder of scepticism, Pyrrho, frequently quoted Democritus with approval. At the beginning of Part III of this work (“Epistemology”) Jacques Brunschwig marshals available evidence to argue that Pyrrho was not, however, interested in theoretical questions about knowledge but was instead a moralist intent on imparting a new “art of happiness”. Pyrrho admired Democritus as “the laughing philosopher”, who could contemplate “a world entirely ruled by chance and necessity”, a “detached observer of a universe which has no meaning”.
The other four parts of this pleasingly bulky book are headed “Introduction”, “Logic and language”, “Physics and Mmetaphysics”, and “Ethics and politics”. The editors have decided to arrange it by subject rather then chronologically or by school, in order to retain “the cut and thrust of debate”. They have limited its scope to the period between “the last days of Aristotle” (died 332 bc) and 100 bc. It is not aimed at specialists or general readers, but at serious students of philosophy or ancient history.
Contributors’ names I recognised were Jonathan Barnes, David Sedley, R.J. Hankinson, and A.A. Long. Among the scholarly apparatus at the back are a tabulated chronology of significant events and schools and a bibliography that covers 47 pages. The introductory part begins with a chapter on sources which in turn begins with a section on “Why so much has been lost”. An important source for Hellenistic philosophy is “the carbonized remains of the philosophical library of a villa near Herculaneum”.
Hellenistic philosophy is back in intellectual fashion and this work should provide a very valuable resource. The Stoics believed in a kind of “emotional management” which allowed one to live in “the smooth flow of life” (“Stoic ethics”). Epicurus thought that a life of pleasure could not be obtained through “drinking parties” but through “sober reason” (“Epicurean ethics”). At the end of a chapter on theology, Jaap Mansfield says that the “average citizen would have found it hard to distinguish between Epicurean, Stoic and Academic or Pyrrhonist participants in religious rites. The differences were in their heads.” In an epilogue Michael Frede notes that by the middle of the third century ad the great Hellenistic schools were no longer a living force. People seem to have wanted some kind of Platonism: “the demand for a transcendant God. The belief in a vast realm of spiritual beings, an other‐worldly view of life and the belief in an afterlife.”
