xii Preface to the First Edition
is of course very likely that not everyone's favorite texts are included.
We are, however, confident that there is enough material to meet the
needs of most courses.
There is too little in this book in the sense that we have excluded
authors, such as Panaetius and Posidonius, who certainly deserve serious
attention. If the label 'Hellenistic philosophy' is to be of much use it
should refer primarily to an historical period, in which case, Theo-
phrastus, some later Peripatetics, and many others might have been
included. In a sense there is also too much material from a later period
which is, strictly speaking, post-Hellenistic; Sextus Empiricus (the main
spokesman for Pyrrhonian scepticism) should not be as fully represented
as he is, since he represents a philosophical movement which began just
as the Hellenistic period proper was drawing to a close and in many
respects bears the imprint of the rather different approach taken to
philosophy in the Imperial period. But Sextus's importance to later
philosophy is so great, and his connection to earlier, strictly Hellenistic,
philosophy so close, that to curtail his role in this book was unthinkable.
In translating the fragments and reports of the teachings of the Helle-
nistic philosophers we were faced with some especially vexing problems.
First, although there is a common conceptual ground for most of the
argumentation in the texts, they were written over a period of some eight
hundred years and in two languages, Greek and Latin. Languages change
and the meanings of words change as well. This fact makes consistent
translation a somewhat delicate matter. The highly technical nature of
much of the vocabulary of Hellenistic philosophy also presents problems
for the translator; we face neither the literary and therefore relatively
straightforward language of Plato, nor the familiar jargon of the Aristote-
lian school, but rather, we face new and unfamiliar terminology at every
turn; it was the genius of the Greek language that it lent itself to creative
neologism, and so facilitated the kind of linguistic innovation to which
philosophers have always been prone. But this very flexibility produced
turns of phrase which are sometimes bizarre and rebarbative in Greek
and which have had to remain so in English.
Second, precisely because the common conceptual ground of Hellenis-
tic philosophy is so frequently charged with hostility, one author may
well interpret the argument of his opponent according to a legitimate,
although altered, sense of a term. We have made an effort to be consistent
in translation in the three main sections of the book where this is crucial.
Where it is not, we have tried to be true to the immediate context.
We have used what we judge to be the best available editions of the
texts and have not troubled the reader with textual minutiae except where