Philosophy has a rich cultural history that deeply influenced domains such as ethics, politics and society from its inception. As Western Philosophy, it is certainly one of the most important pillars of western civilization. From its canonical definition in Athens around the 4^th century BCE, to the era of the Roman Empire, to the “dark ages” of mediaeval Christianity, to Hegelian-style reflections of society and history up to Marxist-inspired capitalist criticism, philosophy has impacted how we think about ourselves, about others and about the world as a whole. No doubt, then, that philosophy has had a major positive influence on cultural, societal and political narratives throughout the ages.

Philosophy is not a monolithic block that rests untouched by how its surroundings changes. It reacts to changes in specific ways, sometimes even initiating these changes itself. One such big societal change happened at the end of the Roman republic and the beginning of the era of the Roman Empire. In his book “Philosophy in the Roman Empire”, Michael Trapp of Kings College London focuses specifically on this period and examines central issues of the then prevalent major philosophical schools.

Trapp’s book does not thus deal with the whole chronological period of the Roman area but picks out a specific period between the closing decades of the Roman republic of the first century BCE and the opening decades of the third century CE. For Trapp, this is a decisive transformative period for philosophy. By then, Athens has lost her pre-eminence in the Mediterranean cultural world of antiquity, being superseded by the vast Hellenistic empires of Philipp of Macedon and Alexander the Great. The philosophical schools became more international, without the institutional successions which previously defined the peripatetic, academic or epicurean schools. And both Plato and Aristotle came back into the reckoning as the sources of positive doctrine and builders of full dogmatic systems. 

It is during this prevalent phase of philosophy, that it became accepted as part of the culture and education of the Roman elites. While the Roman republic came to an end and the Roman Empire started to assert itself, the Roman political theoreticians had to grapple with a new, untried and controversial form of political authority – the monarchical principle of a vast territory. Philosophy in its Greek form was not unprepared to the politically analyze the monarchical principle, having itself experienced the emergence of the monarchical principle in the Hellenistic period against the previous prevalent focus of political theorizing – the city republic, the polis.  

While philosophy thus entered the Roman culture, it brought with it a bunch of unresolved issues from its previous Greek past. Michael Trapp traces these issues in his chapter 1 entitled “Ethics”, “Philosophy” and Philosophia. In this chapter, Trapp discusses and analyzes the larger institution of philosophy as it developed in the Greek culture and traced the most important contextual issues and topics, which are necessary to understand to correctly position philosophy within the period of the early Roman Empire. Trapp outlines basically three important issues:

First, previous philosophers developed a common understanding about what the whole point of philosophy is all about: Philosophy and its specific body of knowledge leads to nothing less than human fulfillment or happiness – its final end is eudaimonia,  the good and happy life of humans. Its fundamental assumption is thus that there is an objectively right and satisfying style of living and state of being for humans.

Secondly, philosophers developed an understanding of the internal structure of the different domains within philosophy: ethics, logic, and physics – giving in their majority clear priority to ethics. Philosophy centered on questions of how to live well, other rational activities were means to better reach that goal, but not self-sufficient by themselves. The correct balance within the internal structure of philosophy was an important topic for the different philosophical schools.

Thirdly, philosophers recognized that there existed different schools and traditions in philosophy – different hairesis or sects of philosophy. These different sects had their own traditions and required some sort of loyalty from the adherents. Philosophy was never pictured as an endeavor in which the persons engaged in as individuals, but as a communal activity being practiced within a certain tradition of thought, requiring some sort of adherence.

How to resolve these issues or how to progress was a task, which the Roman philosophers of the period inherited from previous centuries. In further chapters, Trapp analyses central concepts of the philosophical schools such as perfection and progress (Chapter 2), the passions (Chapter 3), Self, Person and Individual (Chapter 4), Self and Others (Chapter 5), Politics 1: Constitutions and the Ruler (Chapter 6), Politics 2: Good Communities (Chapter 7), Politics 3: Philosophia in Politics and Community (Chapter 8), and Philosophia and the Mainstream (Chapter 9).

Trapp thus concisely traces in his book the continuities of the philosophical discussions among the leading philosophers of the time to the previous defining centuries of philosophy. He chooses to closely stick to the surviving material of the most prominent philosophical schools and individuals. Chapter by chapter he thereby outlines how the philosophers of the early Roman Empire took on questions previously discussed and how they enlarged on certain topics in new and innovative ways.  

This methodology of close reading allows him on the one hand to dispel older interpretations that Roman philosophers in their “Roman pragmatic spirit” almost exclusively concentrated on ethical issues and neglected the other disciplines of logic and physics altogether. This – as Trapp shows in his book – is a crude misconception, as this focus on the good life was prevalent long before philosophy got entrenched in Roman elite culture. And, moreover, even Roman philosophers with a clear focus on how to lead the good life did research and published works on larger issues in cosmology and logic, some of the material albeit lost through the centuries.

His analyses on the surviving material on the other hand allows the reader a succinct introduction to the different philosophical schools and their differences. By juxtaposing the different starting points of the prevalent schools of philosophy, these passages give the reader a somewhat rich introduction to the different train of thoughts in the time of the early Roman Empire.

But this approach has its shortcomings, too. The reader never glimpses an overall interpretation of the specific position of philosophy in the early Roman period. The reader is drowned in the minute details of philosophical arguments of important philosophers such as Seneca, Epictetus or Marc Aurel or the differences among the various philosophical schools. Maybe this is Trapp’s ultimate thesis in the book: showing how the philosophers in the Roman Empire are strongly engaged in the tradition and continuity of philosophy as they discovered it. Even though Trapp sometimes mentions how Roman philosophers took on the challenges and sometimes developed certain issues, the reader is at pains to get a good overview. It is clear that a detailed discussion of the surviving material in the Roman Empire can demonstrate the rich philosophical discussion that went on among their adherents. And this by itself is enough to dispel older prejudices about the innovative status of Roman philosophy vis-à-vis the previous Greek or the later Christian period. But a clearer overview of the specific status of this period might have helped the reader to better appreciate the exact point of why the chosen period in the history of philosophy has been central to the development of thinking.

All in all, Michael Trapp’s book is an interesting overview and discussion of a clearly interesting and important period of philosophy in a transformative culture that changed how philosophy theorized about political legitimacy and power. Trapp’s book is a detailed introduction not just about the most important philosophical discussions, but also gives a very readable introduction to the different prevalent philosophical schools. His methodology of juxtaposing the different schools against each other, while concentrating on the most marked differences between these schools, allows the reader to get a better grip on the philosophical schools.

 

  

 

© 2018 Harry Witzthum

 

Harry Witzthum, Ph.D. did his doctorate in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield (UK). His research interests comprise the philosophy of mind and psychology, philosophy of language, and cognitive science.  He currently lives in Switzerland.