position by its total commitment to living its doctrine, and the term “philoso-
pher” conjured up more than anything else the image of the black-robed figure
preaching in the streets, contemptuous of worldly things. Nevertheless, the
movement disappeared around 300 b.c.e., the same time as most of its rivals.
The Skeptics, too, were a movement rather than a school. Again there were
forerunners, before the famous expositor Pyrrho. The style of paradox making
had been in the air ever since the followers of Heraclitus and of Parmenides
around 450 b.c.e. The Megarian school of logicians incorporated many skep-
tical themes. Pyrrho seems most notable for making skepticism a full-fledged
commitment; he allegedly refused to choose between alternatives, even in daily
life, and was guided about by friends to keep him from hurting himself (D.L.,
1925: ix, 61; cf. Frede, 1987: 181–183). Basing himself on a different intellec-
tual content, he nevertheless ended up in practice in much the same position
as the Cynics. His disciple Timon systematized the doctrine but did not attempt
to live it. There were no more independent Skeptics in the following generation;
instead, skepticism was taken over by one of the organized schools, the
Academics, in the revolution carried out by Arcesilaus.
Adding the informal lineages to the formal schools reinforces the general
pattern. They further heightened the competition for intellectual space in the
300s b.c.e., lasted for a few generations, and disappeared or amalgamated into
the small number of factions which survived.
Small Numbers Crisis and the Creativity
of the Post-Socratic Generation
The three generations from Socrates’ students down through 300 b.c.e. were
a time of structural crisis for the philosophical community. The law of small
numbers was being seriously violated. At the outset, a new organizational form
came into existence. Half a dozen formally organized schools rushed into this
new space, while there were two older schools still operating (the Pythagorean
and the Abderan); in addition, there appeared two lifestyle movements, unor-
ganized anti-schools so to speak: Skeptics and Cynics. The new schools all had
an initial burst of creativity, intellectual energy stirred up by the opening
structural opportunities. They divided the cultural capital already available by
applying it in divergent directions and elaborating explicitly against one an-
other.
Euclides and the Megarian school appropriated Parmenides’ metaphysics
in a fairly pure form. They declared that Being is always unitary and “the sole
good is that which is always one and alike and the same” (Reale, 1987:
281–282, 374). Euclides ethicized Eleatic metaphysics while explicitly ground-
ing Socrates’ ethical standards in an objective ontology. This was roughly the
Partitioning Attention Space: Ancient Greece^ •^97