European logic.^23 Chrysippus’ monistic system, which appropriated for Stoi-
cism elements of the now disused Platonic metaphysics, was a springboard for
Carneades’ sharpening of skepticism with a doctrine of probabilities; and this
in turn spurred the reformulations of Stoic physics and epistemology by Pan-
aetius and Posidonius. Pupils crossed over between the schools—Zeno, Arcesi-
laus, Chrysippus, and Carneades among them—honing the edge of debate
across the generations.
The Roman Base and the Second Realignment
The material bases of the entire philosophical attention space drastically
changed when geopolitical triumph made Roman patronage the arbiter of
intellectual life. The balance of power among the kingdoms and military
leagues that had divided Alexander’s empire was gradually brought into the
Roman protectorate; by 86 b.c.e., when Athens was sacked by a Roman army,
conquest was complete. Additional proof that the doctrines of the opposing
schools were keyed to one another is provided by the intellectual realignment
which occurred when their organizations collapsed between 100 and 50 b.c.e.
This is one of those places in history where the plate tectonics of social life
slip, and the organizational bases of the older mentalities go down in the
temblor. After 50 b.c.e. there are no more long-lasting philosophical schools,
in the sense of propertied organizations belonging to the teachers of a particu-
lar doctrine. There remain individual teachers, sometimes constituting chains
of leading figures. But such organizations as might have existed were very
short-lived.^24
In the transition to the Roman base comes an outburst of innovation, which
then yields to a different way of intellectual life (see Figure 3.5). Stoicism
receives a new system with Posidonius, Epicureanism its classic formulation in
Lucretius. Aristoteleanism loses its independence from Platonic Idealism, while
Platonism repudiates skepticism and goes back to an emanationist religious
ontology, in syncretism with a revived neo-Pythagorean numerology. Skepti-
cism, set adrift by the counterrevolution in the Platonic school, is picked up
as the medical schools undergo their own doctrinal realignment, and receives
its classic formulation at the hands of Aenesidemus.
In the generation when the Athenian schools disappeared, there was a flurry
of innovation at the school of Stoicism at Rhodes, the last intellectual center
outside Roman hegemony. Posidonius overthrew Chrysippus’ monism, substi-
tuting a duality of matter and reason bridged by mathematical forms, and
defending Stoic epistemology against Carneades’ skeptical attacks on the un-
certainty of sense perception by holding that reason is a criterion of truth
independent of the senses (EP, 1967: 6:413–414). Posidonius followed the path
Partitioning Attention Space: Ancient Greece^ •^109