A History of Philosophy, Vol. I: Greece and Rome

Summary

Frederick Copleston published Greece and Rome in London in 1946 as the opening volume of a history he had begun as lectures for Jesuit students at Heythrop. It runs from Thales of Miletus, early in the sixth century BC, to the last Neoplatonists of the pagan schools, and it sets the pattern of the whole series: a long biographical and textual approach to each thinker, a patient restatement of his arguments, and a short estimate at the end. The Pre-Socratics come first, presented as men asking what the one abiding stuff of a changing world might be. Thales answers water, Anaximander the boundless, Anaximenes air; the Pythagoreans turn to number and the purification of the soul; Heraclitus makes strife and the Logos the law of perpetual flux, while Parmenides denies that change is thinkable at all and Zeno defends him with paradoxes of motion. Empedocles, Anaxagoras and the atomists try to reconcile the two positions. Copleston then shows the turn toward man in the Sophists, the relativism attributed to Protagoras, and Socrates, whose search for definitions of courage, piety and justice he treats as the hinge of the story. Plato and Aristotle receive the bulk of the book. The Plato section moves from the Divided Line and the Cave to the Forms, the immortality and parts of the soul, the ideal city, the craftsman-god of the Timaeus and Plato's suspicion of imitative art. The Aristotle section covers logic and the syllogism, substance, the four causes, act and potency, the Unmoved Mover, the soul as form of the body, happiness and the mean, the polis and the Poetics, and then sets the two masters side by side. A final part follows philosophy after Alexander: the Stoic and Epicurean schools as guides to tranquil living, the Sceptical Academy, the Roman Stoics Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, Philo's reading of Scripture through Greek categories, and Plotinus's ascent from the many to the One. Copleston treats this late material as the place where Greek reason moves closest to religion. His own position is visible but contained. He writes as a Thomist who thinks Greek philosophy prepared ground the Church Fathers later cultivated, and he says so in his evaluative passages, especially on Aristotle's God and on Plotinus. The expository chapters, however, can be read by anyone who wants an accurate map of what the Greeks argued. Contemporary reviewers welcomed the learning; some found the scholastic asides intrusive. Copleston himself later regarded this first volume as the weakest of the series. For a classical school the volume is a reference shelf for the ancient half of the curriculum. A student about to read the Republic or the Nicomachean Ethics can read the matching chapters first to learn the shape of the argument, then return afterwards to test Copleston's account against the text. Because the book remains under copyright, this library offers only a description, a guide and a purchase link.

Plot or Argument

• The Ionians and the search for an arche

  Copleston opens by arguing that philosophy in the Greek sense began in the Ionian colonies, then traces the Milesian answers to the question of the underlying stuff of things, the Pythagorean brotherhood with its mathematics and doctrine of transmigration, Heraclitus on flux and the Logos, and the Eleatic denial of change in Parmenides and Zeno.

• Pluralists, atomists and the end of early cosmology

  Empedocles' four roots moved by Love and Strife, Anaxagoras' Mind that orders the mixture, and the atoms and void of Leucippus and Democritus are presented as attempts to save both the Eleatic logic and the evidence of the senses.

• Sophists and Socrates: philosophy turns to man

  The paid teachers of rhetoric, the measure doctrine of Protagoras and the scepticism of Gorgias lead into Socrates' cross-examinations, his identification of virtue with knowledge, and the smaller Cynic, Cyrenaic and Megarian schools that claimed his inheritance.

• Plato's dialogues and doctrine

  Plato's life and the order of the dialogues, his theory of knowledge, the Forms and their relation to particulars, his psychology and arguments for immortality, the moral and political theory of the Republic and Laws, the cosmology of the Timaeus, his view of art, and the successors in the Old Academy.

• Aristotle's system and the comparison of the two masters

  Aristotle's writings and development, logic, metaphysics of substance and causation, natural philosophy and the soul, ethics, politics and poetics, closing with Copleston's comparison of what Aristotle kept from Plato and what he rejected.

• Hellenistic schools, Philo and Plotinus

  The early, middle and Roman Stoa, Epicurus, the Sceptics and the New Academy, the eclectic and Neo-Pythagorean currents, Jewish-Hellenistic thought in Philo, and Plotinus with the later Neoplatonists, followed by a concluding review of ancient philosophy as a whole.

Characters

• Frederick Copleston, author

  Heythrop lecturer who wrote this first volume from his teaching notes in the 1940s and frames it with a Thomist estimate of Greek thought.

• Heraclitus and Parmenides, subject

  The paired early thinkers of flux and of changeless being whose disagreement sets the problem later Greek philosophy tried to solve.

• Socrates, subject

  The Athenian questioner whose demand for definitions of the virtues marks the turn from cosmology to ethics.

• Plato, subject

  Founder of the Academy, presented through the Forms, the immortal soul and the just city.

• Aristotle, subject

  Plato's pupil, presented through substance, the four causes, the Unmoved Mover and the ethics of the mean.

• Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, subject

  Roman-era Stoics, a freed slave and an emperor, who treat philosophy as a discipline of the will.

• Plotinus, subject

  Third-century founder of Neoplatonism, whose ascent to the One closes the volume's narrative.

Lessons

• Change, permanence and the first philosophers

  The Pre-Socratic chapters show that Western philosophy started from a puzzle about the world, not about ourselves: how can things change and still be the same things? Students who follow Heraclitus and Parmenides learn that a question can be more lasting than any of its answers, and that Plato and Aristotle can only be understood as replies to it.

  • Why does Parmenides think that change cannot be thought without contradiction?
  • How do the atomists try to keep both Parmenides' logic and the evidence of the senses?
  • Is the problem of change still an open question in physics or in your own experience of growing up?

• Socrates and the discipline of definition

  Copleston places Socrates at the hinge of the book because he insisted that a person who cannot say what courage or piety is may not really possess it. The lesson for a classroom is practical: careful definition is a moral act, since loose words let us excuse ourselves.

  • Why does Socrates identify virtue with knowledge, and what objection does Aristotle later raise?
  • How do the Sophists differ from Socrates in what they teach and why they teach it?
  • Choose a virtue and try to define it in the Socratic manner; where does your definition break down?

• Weighing Plato against Aristotle

  The comparison chapter at the end of the Aristotle section asks students to hold two great systems in mind at once. Plato looks upward to Forms that exist apart; Aristotle finds form in the things themselves. Testing Copleston's comparison against the Republic and the Ethics trains students to judge a secondary source rather than simply trust it.

  • Where does Aristotle's account of substance answer Plato's theory of Forms most directly?
  • Does the difference between the two men show up in their ethics as well as their metaphysics?
  • Which of the two offers the better account of how we know universal truths, and why?

• Philosophy as a way of life after Alexander

  The Hellenistic chapters show schools offering peace of mind to people living in large empires rather than small cities. Stoics sought it in accepting providence and governing the will, Epicureans in quiet pleasure and freedom from fear of the gods. Their claims can be weighed against the apostolic preaching that met both schools in Athens.

  • What does the Stoic mean by living according to nature?
  • Why did Epicurus think the fear of death was irrational?
  • In what ways does Christian hope answer the Stoic and Epicurean search for tranquillity, and in what ways does it differ from both?

Context

The book belongs to the middle of the twentieth century, when Catholic seminaries were teaching from neo-scholastic Latin manuals and the English-language alternatives on ancient thought were either brief textbooks or specialist studies such as John Burnet's work on the early Greeks. Copleston aimed at a single readable account that took the texts seriously and still served students preparing for theology.

Composition

Copleston had intended to pursue doctoral work in Rome, but the outbreak of war in 1939 kept him in England, where he taught the history of philosophy at Heythrop College. The volume grew out of those courses and was published by Burns Oates & Washbourne in 1946; American paperback reprints later divided it into two parts, and Continuum reissued it in 2003.

Reception

Reviewers in 1946 and 1947 praised its range and its fidelity to the sources while noting the Thomist standpoint of its judgments. It became one of the most widely used English introductions to ancient philosophy in seminaries and universities, and later specialist work on the Pre-Socratics and on Hellenistic philosophy has superseded parts of it.

Comparisons

• The Republic

  Read the Plato chapters on the Divided Line, the Cave and the ideal state alongside Books VI-VII of the Republic to see how much of Copleston's account of Plato rests on this one dialogue.

• Timaeus

  Copleston's chapter on Plato's physics depends on the Timaeus and discusses whether its Demiurge is a creator in the later Christian sense; students can judge the answer from the dialogue itself.

• Metaphysics

  Copleston's chapter on Aristotle's metaphysics follows the Metaphysics from the four causes to substance and the Unmoved Mover of Book Lambda.

• The Nicomachean Ethics

  The ethics chapter summarizes happiness as activity in accordance with virtue and the doctrine of the mean; reading Books I-II of the Ethics alongside it shows what a summary must compress.

• Discourses (selection) and Encheiridion

  The Roman Stoa chapter treats Epictetus' distinction between what is and is not in our power, which the Encheiridion states in its opening lines.

• Meditations

  Marcus Aurelius appears among the later Stoics; his private notebook shows Stoic doctrine turned into daily self-examination rather than system.

• Enneads

  The Plotinus chapter is a guide to the Enneads, setting out the One, Intellect and Soul and the return of the soul by purification.

• A History of Philosophy, Vol. II: Augustine to Scotus

  The next volume picks up where this one ends, showing how Augustine and the medieval schools received the Platonism and Aristotelianism expounded here.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• How each Pre-Socratic answers the question of what stays the same through change.
• Why Copleston treats Socrates as a turning point rather than one Sophist among others.
• How Aristotle keeps Plato's concern with form while bringing it down into individual things.
• How the later schools change philosophy from a theory of the cosmos into a rule of life.
• Where Copleston's evaluative remarks begin and his exposition ends.

Key terms and names

Arche

The first principle or basic stuff the Ionian thinkers sought beneath the changing world.

Logos

For Heraclitus, the rational law that governs the strife of opposites; later taken up by the Stoics.

Elenchus

Socrates' method of testing a claim by questioning until its contradictions appear.

Form

In Plato, an unchanging intelligible reality such as Justice itself; in Aristotle, the structure that makes a thing what it is.

Unmoved Mover

Aristotle's first cause, which moves the heavens as an object of desire while remaining unchanged.

Ataraxia

Freedom from disturbance, the goal Epicureans and Sceptics promised their followers.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What did Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes each propose as the basic stuff of the world?
2. Comprehension What does the allegory of the Cave teach about the relation between opinion and knowledge?
3. Comprehension How does the Stoic distinguish what is in our power from what is not?
4. Interpretation Why does Copleston present the Sophists as both a danger and a necessary stage in Greek thought?
5. Interpretation How far is Aristotle's Unmoved Mover from the God of Genesis, and what does Copleston make of the gap?
6. Interpretation Why might Plotinus' ascent to the One have appealed to Christian readers such as Augustine?
7. Big Question Can reason alone discover that there is a first cause of the world, or does that knowledge require revelation?

Faith Connections

• Acts 17:16–34 (Scripture)

  Paul debates Epicurean and Stoic philosophers on the Areopagus and quotes a Greek poet; the passage shows the very schools of Copleston's last part meeting the gospel.

• John 1:1–14 (Scripture)

  John's Logos uses a word with a long Greek history from Heraclitus to the Stoics, but declares that the Word became flesh, which no Greek school had taught.

• Augustine, Confessions, Book VII (Church Fathers)

  Augustine describes reading the books of the Platonists and finding there much about God's Word but not the Incarnation, a judgment Copleston's Plotinus chapter helps students understand.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Greek and Roman philosophy forms a continuous inquiry, moving from the physical first principle of the Ionians through the moral questions of Socrates to the systems of Plato and Aristotle and the religious ascent of Plotinus, and each stage answers problems left by the one before.

Rhetorical device: problem and response. Copleston presents the pluralists and atomists as responses to Parmenides, so that each new theory is read as an answer to an inherited difficulty.

Debate: Resolved: Aristotle's account of form is a better guide to understanding nature than Plato's theory of separate Forms.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Using Copleston's chapters on Socrates and Plato, explain why Socrates believed no one does wrong knowingly, and assess the claim in light of Romans 7.

Comparison with The Republic: Read Copleston's account of Plato's ideal state and then Books II-V of the Republic; identify one point where his summary clarifies the dialogue and one where it leaves out something important.

Medical Lens

This is a history of philosophy, not of medicine, but several of its chapters bear on how the ancients understood soul and body. Early Greek cosmology overlapped with medical theory: Empedocles was remembered as a healer, and the Pythagorean circle produced physicians who speculated about health as balance. The chapters on Plato's psychology and Aristotle's De Anima describe the two classic Greek accounts of how soul relates to body, which later shaped medieval and early modern medicine. The Hellenistic chapters show schools presenting philosophy itself as a cure for disturbance of mind; the Stoic view of the passions as false judgments is sometimes compared with cognitive therapy, a modern parallel rather than an ancient claim.

• Part I, chapters on the Pythagoreans and Empedocles

  Early theories of the soul, purification and the balance of opposing elements, where medicine and cosmology were not yet separate disciplines.

  Ancient Medicine Mind Body
• Part III, chapter on Plato's psychology

  The tripartite soul of reason, spirit and appetite and the arguments for immortality, relevant to ancient ideas of inner conflict.

  Mind Body
• Part IV, chapter on Aristotle's philosophy of nature and psychology

  The soul as the form of a living body and the faculties of nutrition, sensation and intellect.

  Mind Body
• Part V, chapters on the Stoics and Epicurus

  Philosophy offered as therapy for fear, grief and disordered passion, including the Epicurean argument against fearing death.

  Philosophy AS Therapy

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Stage a conversation in which Heraclitus and Parmenides argue over a river, a growing child and a melting candle; let Aristotle arrive at the end and propose act and potency as a way out.

• Classroom

  Divide the class among the Hellenistic schools. Each group reads Copleston's chapter on its school and then advises a grieving friend as a Stoic, Epicurean or Sceptic would, before the class compares the advice with 1 Thessalonians 4.

• Essay

  Using the Plato and Aristotle chapters together with Book VII of the Republic, write an essay on whether the Forms are best understood as separate realities or as the intelligible structure of things.

• Fiction

  Write a short scene set in Athens in 399 BC from the viewpoint of a young listener who has just heard Socrates cross-examine a Sophist and is not sure who won.

Further Reading

• Early Greek Philosophy, John Burnet

• A History of Greek Philosophy, W. K. C. Guthrie

• The Presocratic Philosophers, G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven

• Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Diogenes Laertius

• The Republic, Plato

• Enneads, Plotinus