Cyrenaics elaborated the intellectual position of hedonism, along with the ideal
of the sage immune to worldly vicissitudes. This position was fraught with
inner conflicts; but it was precisely these conflicts that contributed to the
intellectual vitality of the school over the next several generations (Reale, 1987:
40–43, 384–386). Hegesias argued that the goal of life is pleasure, but that it
is rarely attainable; therefore life is indifferent, and suicide is acceptable. His
rivals opposed this scandalous doctrine with other sources of happiness in this
world where pleasures are few and fleeting. Theodoris favored the inner
condition of joy based on wisdom, defined as acting without regard to laws
or conventions, indifferent even to torture and death. These dramatic argu-
ments attracted a good deal of attention. They also had the effect of moving
the Cyrenaics onto the same turf as the Cynics; after Hegesias, Anneceris, and
Theodorus, the Cyrenaic school disappeared, and the technical core of its
hedonistic ethics was appropriated by the Epicureans.
Holding a position between the other schools was Phaedo’s at Elis. Advo-
cating a doctrine of detachment, it was kept intellectually alive by controversies
with other schools; in its final generation, Menedemus played against the
Megarian doctrine of an unchanging good (also shared by other schools) by
arguing that the good is wholly in the mind (Reale, 1987: 287–288).
Subject to overcrowding under the law of small numbers, some of these
schools were bound to be short-lived. Against this background of competing
schools, Plato and Aristotle put together the intellectual stances that were to
win long-term eminence. Plato differs from the others, partly in breadth, and
in holding to a core of serious intellectual activity for its own sake. He avoided
the flamboyant lifestyle movements for a relatively conventional practice. Not
that he was without political or religious projects; but discussion of these did
not call for any radical dropping out from ordinary duties, powers, or property.
In any case, competition for attention on that side of the field was already
intense. As long as the relativistic dialectical schools were active, the Academy
took the opposite pole, defending transcendent truths. Plato with his wide
intellectual contacts drew every resource into defense of this position. The
final collapse of the Pythagoreans in his own generation left him free to
appropriate their doctrines, including mathematics as an exemplar of Forms,
and (apparently) also their doctrine of transmigration, which Plato elaborated
into a speculative basis for the soul’s recollection of eternal Forms known in
a prior life.^17
Plato inherited the Pythagoreans’ slot in the intellectual field, but he was
not alone in exploiting their patrimony. The Pythagoreans had already in the
generation around 430–400 b.c.e. released their mathematics into public cir-
culation; and their puzzles such as squaring the circle encouraged a takeoff of
mathematical activity which had considerably overlapped the community of
Partitioning Attention Space: Ancient Greece^ •^99