Heraclitean fire, world-soul—that had been the object of so much refinement
under Academic attack.
The other schools went through equally large doctrinal shifts. The Aris-
toteleans, who were already fading from intellectual prominence in the pre-
vious century, took the typical path of a weakening position and were becom-
ing eclectic, wavering toward Epicureanism and Pythagoreanism. By the time
Aristotelean doctrines came into Rome around 70 b.c.e., they were no longer
carried by members of the Peripatetic school but by freelance scholars such as
Tyrannio and Andronicus of Rhodes (CHLG, 1967: 112–115; Guthrie, 1961–
1982: 6:60–61). The materialism of the intervening period was forgotten, and
Aristotle’s texts were now seen as a modification of the Platonic doctrine of
Forms.
As the maneuvers of the past two centuries became unraveled, the Academy
again went through a revolution. Philo of Larissa (ca. 110 b.c.e.) had already
softened the skeptical stance to fallibilism, emphasizing the difficulty of know-
ing but upholding the goal of knowledge (Tarrant, 1985: 3, 54–57). This might
be regarded as a concession to lay audiences, since a pure skepticism is
intellectually respectable only within a well-buffered intellectual community,
which was now collapsing. Philo was now dependent on the patronage of
Romans, who had been shocked by Carneades’ famous speeches while on an
embassy in 155 b.c.e., when he defended justice one day and attacked it the
next. Philo’s pupil and successor Antiochus of Ascalon, who had high-ranking
Roman sponsorship, went still further, to proclaim belief in the sage who
reaches full truth with unerring certainty. Antiochus attacked not only all-out
skepticism but also the moderated forms of probabilism and fallibilism upheld
by his predecessors in the Academy. His religious turn evoked protest among
the more traditional members of the skeptical Academy. The controversy
appears to have been responsible for the major creative development of the
Roman transition.
Skepticism has the peculiarity of acting as a meta-school above the clash of
positions in intellectual space, and thus has a special appropriateness for times
when intellectual lines are chaotic. As the factions of Roman philosophy settled
down into syncretism, skepticism became their constant accompaniment. It
also acquired a distinctive material base within the medical schools, which now
took a heightened organizational significance as organized philosophical train-
ing lapsed.
Both realignments of the philosophical schools—the Hellenistic realignment
around 300 and the Roman realignment after 100—coincided with a rear-
rangement of medical schools. Around 300–250—which is to say, at the time
of the first great realignment in Hellenistic philosophy—the Empiricist physi-
cians had appeared (Frede, 1987: 236–239, 243–260). Empiricists stressed the
Partitioning Attention Space: Ancient Greece^ •^111