of particular schools, and almost all connected to the networks of the center.
Originally independent schools such as those of Abdera, Lampsacus, and
Mytilene achieved their fortune when they finally established their school in
Athens, like that which made the Epicureans famous. The center provided a
focus of attention and the opportunity for the meshing of networks. Creativity
is sustained when there are multiple bases for contending factions. Athens at
its height was cross-cut by a variety of schools, anchored in external differences
in political support, religious orientation, and lifestyle radicalism. Shifts in
these external bases provided the ultimate forces that drove internal realign-
ments in carving up intellectual space.
In the Hellenistic period, the external bases narrowed. Most of the periph-
eral nodes dropped out (see Figure 3.3); the rival schools by and large were
now based only in Athens, displacing those with an independent center of
support. There was one other center of intersecting circles: Alexandria ab-
sorbed the medical schools from Cos and Cnidus, as well as Peripatetics and
Stoics from Athens. For a century there was a balanced situation of creativity
between the rivals, down to the generation of Chrysippus or Carneades. With
the growing hegemony of Rome and the political collapse of Athens, by around
100 b.c.e. the material bases provided by the Athenian schools had disap-
peared. Intellectual centers migrated away, to Pergamum, Rhodes, Naples; but
each of these fostered a single school, not a cosmopolitan center, and none
survived more than a generation or two. Alexandria still functioned institu-
tionally, but too much alone to sustain much creativity. Philosophy became
largely absorbed by the practice of rhetoric, an occupation of municipal law-
yers and wandering speech makers, a base which provided neither centraliza-
tion nor insulation for intellectuals to pursue autonomous concerns.
The coming of Christianity and other popular religious movements further
decentralized the intellectual world. The Gnostic sects were small and organi-
zationally dispersed; the Christian church was more hierarchical, but its bases
were geographically far-flung and dependent on regional political fortunes. The
most creative period was marked by the balance of rivalry when Christians
entered the philosophical schools at Alexandria, provoking the great pagan
synthesis of Plotinus and his followers. But both Christian philosophers and
Plotinine pagans migrated away to the centers of political patronage, respec-
tively to Syria and to Rome, from whence the networks soon further dispersed.
By late antiquity, Athens and Alexandria had become not centers of intersect-
ing factions but local strongholds of a particular faction. Elsewhere relig-
ious intellectuals were active at Constantinople, Pergamum, Antioch, Milan,
Carthage. Centralization was lost first, leading to the defocusing of intellectual
life, the general loss of abstraction, and the predominance of particularistic
506 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths