|
HOME | GREEK LANGUAGE | LIBRARIES | BLOG | HELP | SEARCH | FREEWARE | BOOKSTORE |
|
|
|
|
|
From, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. I, The early Presocratics and the Pythagoreans, Cambridge University Press, 1962, pp. 1-25.
|
Page 22
The philosophies which dominated the scene from the end of the fourth century onwards were Epicureanism and Stoicism. The latter in particular attained such widespread influence that it might almost be called the representative philosophy of the Hellenistic and Graeco-Roman ages. Both harked back for their inspiration to the thinkers of the great creative period which ended with Aristotle. They were not on this account lacking in originality, to which Stoicism in particular has strong claims. Indeed, to say at what point a philosophic system ceases to be a synthesis of earlier thought and becomes an original creation is by no means easy. Few would deny originality to Plato, yet his philosophy could be plausibly represented as arising simply from reflection on the utterances of Socrates, the Pythagoreans, Heraclitus and Parmenides. What distinguishes the Hellenistic systems is rather, as I have indicated, a difference of motive. Philosophy no longer springs, as Plato and Aristotle rightly said that it did in the first place, from a sense of wonder. Its function is to bring an assurance of peace, security and self-sufficiency to the individual soul in an apparently hostile or indifferent world. It was natural therefore that philosophers should be less directly interested in questions of cosmology and physics, and should choose as the physical setting for their moral teaching an adaptation of some existing scheme. In this way the speculations of the earlier physical schools, though to some extent transmuted, live on in the Hellenistic world.
Epicurus, who was in his late teens when Aristotle and Alexander died, singled out religion as the root of spiritual malaise. The greatest single cause of mental distress lay in fear of the gods and of what might happen after death. It was an outrage that men should be tormented by die notion that our race was at the mercy of a set of capricious and man-like deities such as Greece had inherited from Homer, gods whose malice could continue to pursue its victims even beyond the grave. The atomic theory of Democritus, which accounted for the origin of the Universe and for all that happens therein without the postulate of divine agency, seemed to him at the same time to express the truth and to liberate the mind of man from its most haunting fears. Undoubtedly the gods exist, but if, as true piety demands, we believe them to lead a life of calm and untroubled bliss, we cannot suppose them to concern themselves with human or mundane affairs. At death the soul (a combination of especially fine atoms) is dispersed. To fear death is therefore foolish, since so long as we live it is not present, and when it comes we no longer exist and are therefore unconscious that it has come.
|
|
Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-Greece/guthrie-history-intro.asp?pg=22
