1 (1) Pythagoras of Samos instructed the region of Italy once called ...

(5) Should I mention others? Theophrastus, Aristotle’s successor, usually disagrees with
his teacher and is not shy about it, is he? 5 So much for the Greeks, not to mention that
they always admired Homer, Plato and Demosthenes more than Aristotle. What about
the Latins? Did they ever regard Aristotle as a sage? No, nor as the greatest philosopher
either. Was Varro an Aristotelian? Hardly, but he kept his path (if we want to believe
Lactantius) straight between the two – Plato and Aristotle both. 6 Cicero was an
Academic and a follower of Plato who always awarded Plato first place in philosophy, as
almost everyone has done. 7
Plancus was part Stoic, part Epicurean, but Brutus and Seneca were Stoics, the group that
Jerome thinks most like the Christian religion. 8 Passing its teachings along as if he too
were a Stoic, Ambrose followed Panaetius and Cicero. 9 The same pair lined up like
colleagues with Hilary and Augustine, whose professed view is that Plato is the prince of
philosophers. 10 Apuleius wanted to be a Platonist and to be known as one. Macrobius
also pays much more deference to Plato, and this is no different than the view of Boethius
– last of the scholars but, so it seems to me, more Platonist than Aristotelian even while
he is completely Aristotelian. Somewhere he promised that he would show that there is
little distance between those authorities – following Porphyry, I suppose, who holds the
Platonic and Aristotelian sects to be the same, with Plato as master and Aristotle as
pupil. 11
5
Theophrastus of Eresus (c. 372-c. 286 BCE) became head of Aristotle’s school in Athens when his teacher
had to leave town after Alexander died in 323. Theophrastus continued Aristotle’s work, but some
authorities believe that he also criticized it by innovating in logic and other fields.
6
Marcus Terentius Varro (116-27 BCE), already legendary as a polymath in Cicero’s time, was more
interested in erudition and literature than in philosophy, though his encyclopedic work On the Latin
Language deals with philosophical problems of language. as much from a Stoic point of view as from any
other. Lact. ???; Zippel’s citation seems wrong: De falsa relig. 1.6.
7
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE) was an eclectic in philosophy, having studied with Stoics and
Epicureans as well as Academics. While Cicero revered Plato, he also honored Aristotle, and the
‘Academy’ that he knew had changed greatly since Plato’s day, having become the home of sceptics who
attacked Stoics and Epicureans as dogmatists. While Valla was no doctrinaire Ciceronian on issues of
Latinity, he was powerfully affected by Cicero’s new celebrity, which had been advertised by Petrarch in
the fourteenth century and then later by numerous humanists, including Poggio Bracciolini, Valla’s
nemesis. Although Cicero was well known in the Middle Ages, Petrarch and others recovered some works
that had fallen into oblivion, thus finding powerful new authority for cultural changes that they wished to
promote.
8
Hier. Comm. in Is. 4.11: Marcus Iunius Brutus led the conspiracy to assassinate Julius Caesar in 44 BCE.
During the subsequent triumvirate, Lucius Munatius Plancus was consul in 42. Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c.
4 BCE-65 CE) wrote important plays as well as prose works and letters, until Nero forced him to kill
himself. Most of his prose, whose style and content greatly influenced the first Christians who wrote in
Latin, deals with moral philosophy in the Stoic tradition; Brutus as Stoic ??? Plutarch ???
9
Although Ambrose (c. 333-97 CE) modeled a work On the Duties of Ministers on Cicero’s De officiis, he
was also strongly influenced by Neoplatonism. Likewise eclectic was the Stoic Panaetius of Rhodes (185-
09 BCE), whose treatise On Duty Cicero used for his famous work.
10
Both Hilary of Poitiers (d. c. 368 CE) and the great Augustine of Hippo (354-430) had studied the
Neoplatonists before converting to Christinity.
11
Apuleius of Madaurus (c. 125-c. 170) called himself a Platonist, wrote works on Socrates and Plato and
was certainly a pagan. It is unclear, however, whether Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius was a Christian.
Born in the fourth century, Macrobius produced a Neoplatonic reading of Cicero in his Commentary on the
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