The great philosophical exodus of 86 BCE

A pivotal event in Greco-Roman relations determined the future of western philosophy

The final phase of the siege of Athens in 86 BCE, Wikimedia.

Is history the result of inevitable, predictable dynamics, as Marx thought? Or does it depend on the outsized effect of “great men” (and women!) like Julius Caesar and Cleopatra? Or is it just, as Winston Churchill allegedly put it, one damn thing after another?

I have no idea. But I can’t help be fascinated by history. Which is ironic, since it was one of my least favorite subjects in high school. The history of philosophy is no less intriguing, so much so that my colleague Peter Adamson has argued that studying history of philosophy is (one way of) doing philosophy.

Not sure I’d go that far myself, but there is one particular episode in history that dramatically affected the history of philosophy, and that might provide us with some interesting food for thought. The story is recounted in some detail in chapter 1 of The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics, written by David Sedley.

It begins in 86 BCE, when the Roman General Lucius Cornelius Sulla puts Athens under siege because the Athenians sided with King Mithridates VI of Parthia against Rome in the First Mithridatic War that took place during 87 and 86 BCE. The Athenian forces were under the command of the general Archelaus and of Aristion—an Epicurean philosopher! Which is particularly odd, since Epicureans were notoriously averse to getting involved in politics, since this would likely cause much pain and get in the way of the their stated goal of ataraxia, or tranquillity of mind.

Just as interestingly, it was Aristion’s predecessor as leader of Athens, the Peripatetic philosopher Athenion, who had made the fatal decision to align his city with the Parthians against the Romans. Just imagine a time in which philosophers are entrusted the government of a city and the command of an army!

The two philosophers likely, and justifiably, saw the Romans as the aggressors, and sought an alliance with Mithridates in order to preserve their city’s independence. It didn’t work, and Sulla’s army entered and sacked the city.

Sulla, maybe. Munich’ Glyptothek, Wikimedia.

The destruction of Athens turned out to be the final blow to its hitherto unchallenged cultural pre-eminence. (In political terms, Athens had not been a significant power since the defeat against Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, which ended over three centuries earlier, in 404 BCE.) Philosophers stopped flocking to Athens, and the ones that resided there started to leave for less turbulent places. For instance, Philo of Larissa and Antiochus vied for the headship of Plato’s Academy, but did so while respectively residing in Rome and Alexandria. Philo won the context, and in the process brought a number of volumes from the Academy’s library with him to Rome. The Epicurean Philodemus also moved from Athens to Italy and carrying a collection of original writings by Epicurus.

The Stoics too moved. After the death of the scholarch Panaetius (185-110 BCE) his student Posidonius went to Rhodes, in the South Aegean. Effectively that was the end of the Stoa as an institution, though of course Stoicism itself continued well into the third century CE. The Rhodian school became vibrant for a while, featuring figures like Hecato, Paramonus of Tarsus (a student of Panaetius), and Posidonius’ own grandson, Jason of Nysa.

Cicero (in De Finibus V.1-6) describes a visit to Athens, which he undertook in 79 BCE, in nostalgic terms. The city was about past glories, with few current offerings in philosophical classes.

The result of these changes driven by politics and war was a marked decentralization of philosophical activity, with the result that philosophy became popular and actively practiced throughout what was soon to become the Roman Empire, with multiple centers in Rome, Alexandria, Rhodes, and Tarsus (modern western Turkey), among others.

The new generations of philosophers felt the loss to the extent that they developed a new approach to their studies: the exegesis of “ancient” texts, out of respect for their Athens-centered predecessors. So we find, for instance, Epictetus’ students (e.g., Discourses I.17) learning logic by dissecting the treatises of Chrysippus.

This in turn led to the formation of sub-schools that championed individual interpreters within a given tradition. For instance, according to Sedley, Athenaeus (2nd century CE) tells us of rival Stoic clubs named “Antipatrists,” “Diogenists,” and “Panaetiasts,” respectively named after the last three formal heads of the Athenian Stoa: Antipater, Diogenes of Babylon, and Panaetius.

The Roman Republic eventually collapsed under the pressure put on it by people like Sulla and his famous successors, Julius Caesar. This ushered the age of Empire, and philosophers became influential there as well. For example, Augustus, the first Roman emperor, chose the Stoic Athenodorus of Tarsus as Governor of the city. Athenodorus then became Augustus’ lifelong moral counselor. Later on Seneca, while writing his On Peace of Mind, consulted the work of Athenodorus, who was in fact already known to Cicero, thus creating a direct link between two of the greatest Roman philosophers of all time.

Augustus of Prima Porta, 1 century CE, Wikimedia.

Another Stoic to gain Augustus’ confidence was Arius Didymus. He wrote a letter of consolation to Augustus’ wife, Livia, on the occasion of the death of their son Drusus. That letter then became the model for Seneca’s own letter to the grieving Marcia, one of the most influential Stoic texts.

Philosophical education, once confined mostly to Athens, became popular during the Empire, and it usually consisted of a comparative treatment of the four major schools: Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and Epicureanism. Later on, in 173 CE, Marcus Aurelius visited Athens and established four chairs of philosophy there, one for each major school. Perhaps it was a belated attempt to bring back the ancient cultural glory of that city.

We have now come full circle from Sulla’s destruction of Athens in 86 BCE to Marcus Aurelius’ gift of philosophy chairs more than two and a half centuries later. The contrast could not be more stark: Sulla went down in history as a bloodthirsty tyrant who began the historical motions that led to the end of the Roman Republic, while Marcus Aurelius is remembered as one of the “five good emperors” who presided over the period of maximum expansion and prosperity of the Roman Empire.

However, it were Sulla’s actions that had a more profound—and positive—effect on the cultural history of the entire Mediterranean area. As he indirectly forced philosophers and their schools to relocate and decentralize, he was unwittingly responsible for the Renaissance of post-Hellenistic philosophy that produced towering figures like Posidonius, Musonius Rufus, Seneca and Epictetus, among many others.

As I said at the beginning, I don’t know whether something like the above would have happened regardless of Sulla’s undertakings or whether we might have looked at a completely different history of philosophy and culture more broadly had he failed to capture Athens, or had he been defeated in the Civil War against his rival Gaius Marius, a war triggered—ironically—by a dispute about which of the two generals would lead the Roman campaign against Mithridates.

Then again, the course of events might have been significantly different if Athenion the Peripatetic had not made the fatal decision to fight against Rome. Athens might have retained its cultural pre-eminence, albeit at the expense of political subjugation. Be that as it may, the name of Sulla the Dictator is now inextricably connected with what may be the most important philosophical diaspora of all time. I’m sure that would have surprised the hell out of him.