schools founded by Plato and Isocrates, and before that to the struggle of
Socrates (or the image of Socrates projected by Plato) against the Sophists.
Philosophers were seeking a new material base. The market for rhetoricians to
train orators and lawyers would become the prime support of intellectual life
during the Roman period.^30 This alliance of philosophy and rhetoric was to
be a fateful one for subsequent thought, since it tended to make philosophical
doctrines merely part of the rhetorician’s bag of tricks. The resulting tendency
toward eclecticism was especially prominent during the “Second Sophistic” of
the 100s c.e., when public displays of flowery rhetoric were a prominent form
of public entertainment.
On the philosophical side, the overwhelming tendency was toward syncre-
tism. The philosophical schools in their own right were weak and lacking firm
organizational bases, and they tended to huddle together for support. The
Academy no longer existed as an organization; instead we find free-floating
Platonists, whose main activity was to syncretize some version of the earlier
doctrines (i.e., from Plato through Xenocrates) with the old rivals. Aristotelean
doctrines were now up for grabs. The original texts had been recovered and
publicized, with no organized school to impose an orthodoxy upon them or
to sustain the materialist science of the later Peripatos. Several versions of
Aristotle were current; one of these amalgamated Aristotle with Plato into a
dualism of ideas (forms) plus matter, with mathematics (taken as equivalent to
the psychic level of the soul) as an intermediary between them. Another form
of syncretism combined Plato’s dialogues with an ontological interpretation of
Aristotle’s logic; this was pursued especially by the Platonic teachers such as
Apuleius at Athens and Albinus at Pergamum in the 100s c.e. (CHLG, 1967:
64, 70).
Yet another direction was to syncretize Plato with Stoicism. Antiochus of
Ascalon had initiated this move from enmity to alliance, proclaiming Platonic
knowledge the possession of a Stoic-like sage. Seneca taught a Platonizing
Stoicism as part of his all-around syncretizing; he also frequently cited the
Stoics’ old foil Epicurus in support of Stoic ethical doctrines, and drew on
popular Cynic moralizing. Marcus Aurelius presented Stoicism as a grab bag,
with little care for the incompatibility of different metaphysical strands and an
overwhelming emphasis on a moral stance. By the next century, Stoicism no
longer had a distinctive identity and gradually disappeared.
The main intellectual action at this time consisted in positions pro and con
syncretisms of various sorts. Numenius of Apamea (ca. 150 c.e.) claimed that
Plato and Socrates were Pythagoreans, that the Stoics derived their philosophy
from the Academy, and that Aristotle’s philosophy had nothing to do with
Plato’s (CHLG, 1967: 90, 96). Other Platonists during the century were
anti-Aristotelean but pro-Stoic, while yet others, such as Calvenus Taurus, were
118 •^ The Skeleton of Theory