Arcesilaus’ skepticism appropriated a tool that had formerly been used on
the far “right” and among the dropouts standing above all the schools. Now
it was being used as a stance within the intellectual field itself rather than to
uphold a lifestyle movement as Pyrrho and Timon had done. Its focus of
attention was not to defend a positive doctrine, as in the case of the Megarians’
Eleatic metaphysics, but to attack the technical doctrines of the Stoics. A purely
intellectual skepticism of this sort is parasitical on a strong opponent. The
revolution of the Academy, like that of the Peripatos, indicates just how
dominating a presence the Stoa had become.
The pre-reformed Academy had staked out a religious claim that the Stoics
directly challenged. Plato in his late work the Laws was advocating worship
of heavenly bodies, with the sun as object of a compulsory state cult. Speusip-
pus and Xenocrates formulated a philosophical religion which foreshadowed
the Neoplatonism of five centuries later. Numbers were worshipped as a
hierarchy of existence culminating in the One of pure Being (DSB, 1981:
14:535; Dillon, 1977: 11–38). The Academy wavered over the introduction of
Babylonian star worship as an astronomical religion; other early scholarchs—
including Xenocrates’ successor Polemon, who was one of Zeno’s early teach-
ers—tried out ethical preaching, and attempted to mediate the ethical debates
among the older Cynics and Cyrenaics and the new Epicureans and Stoics.
Where Academic religion was esoteric, the Stoic school acquired a much more
successful base in popular religion, with the doctrine of the divine world-soul
and its worship in the temple of the mind, a doctrine which made room for
participating simultaneously in public worship as an outward symbol. Zeno’s
successor Cleanthes, Arcesilaus’ contemporary, was especially known for his
piety and his hymns.
Whereas Xenocrates had eliminated the dialectical element in Plato in favor
of the religious, the new skeptical Academy reversed the emphasis. This in
effect signaled a decision not to contest the Stoics’ conquest of their religious
ground, but to attack them for purely intellectual adequacy. Arcesilaus ended
the Academy’s wavering with a forceful shift to negative skepticism, elaborated
at a high level of technical sophistication. In religious questions its stance
became a polemical agnosticism.
Although we have lost most direct record of these generations, the battle
among rival Hellenistic schools was fruitful for a good deal of development in
philosophy. Later generations of Academics and Stoics lived in symbiosis,
posing challenges for each other. Chrysippus, who deserted his teacher Arcesi-
laus, reformed Stoic metaphysics and promoted an innovative logic. Building
on the first school of logicians, the now defunct Megarians, Chrysippus broad-
ened logic far beyond Aristotle’s logic of syllogisms to a theory of conditional
and other complex propositions, providing formal proofs adumbrating modern
108 •^ The Skeleton of Theory