directions by letter from the headquarters, and were expected to send contri-
butions.^10
The Peripatos had the rockiest history. The school weathered a wave of
anti-Macedonian sentiment after the death of its patron Alexander the Great
in 323, and prospered under Theophrastus. At Theophrastus’ death, his manu-
scripts and those of Aristotle were removed to private hands in Skepsis, a small
city in Asia Minor, possibly as the result of hard feelings over the succession
of Strato as scholarch (Guthrie, 1961–1982: 6:59). Although the school’s
doctrine changed at that time, the school itself survived for six more genera-
tions. But after 100 b.c.e., we hear of no more scholarchs of the Peripatos.^11
The end point for all the Athenian schools came shortly after 100 b.c.e.,
under the external shock of the Roman conquest.^12 Even earlier, the Stoic
school was coming loose from its Athenian base. A library was founded at
Pergamum around 190 b.c.e. by the Attilid kings in explicit rivalry with the
Ptolemys in Egypt; another was created at Rhodes by around 100 (OCCL,
1937: 64). Panaetius first studied at the Library at Pergamum under its head,
Crates the Stoic, around 165 (EP, 1967: 6:22). In the first generation after 100
b.c.e., Posidonius made the Stoic school at Rhodes far more famous than the
school at Athens, where he himself had studied under Panaetius (Reale, 1985:
434). But after Posidonius, the Rhodes school lapsed, and the Stoa in Athens
is heard from no more.
With each episode of change in the material base comes a new partitioning
of intellectual space. One can readily see in Figure 3.3 the opening up of a field
of intellectual organizations which took place around 400 b.c.e.; then a rear-
rangement of schools around 300, when most of the seven to nine schools
existing at that time disappeared and were replaced by three or four others.^13
Organizational turning points are intellectual turning points as well. Long-last-
ing schools such as the Academy and the Peripatos shifted their doctrines each
time in response to realignments of the entire field. Another big period of
doctrinal shift occurred at the organizational turning point 100–50 b.c.e.,
when the formal schools were replaced by purely personal followings of
philosophers.
Moreover, intellectual space can be filled by more than just formal organi-
zations. Personal networks of masters, pupils, and compatriots are typically
channeled within formal schools when these exist. The organizational pattern
summarized in Figure 3.3 is reflected on the network level in Figures 3.2
through 3.5. The amount of fractionation in the attention space sometimes
exceeds the numbers of formal schools that I have enumerated, and the splitting
of informal networks also contributed to straining the law of small numbers.
Informal networks dominated among most pre-Socratics; there was no actual
school at Miletus, nor in my opinion at Elea or in Sicily. Most of these intel-94 •^ The Skeleton of Theory