GREECE AND ROME

Ideas and Philosophy of Ancient Greece and Rome

Ideas and Philosophy of Ancient Greece and Rome

Greek philosophy and ideas

Greek philosophy focused on the role of reason and inquiry. Many philosophers today concede that Greek philosophy has shaped the entire Western thought since its inception.

The single most important philosophy in Rome was Stoicism, which originated in Hellenistic Greece. The contents of the philosophy were particularly amenable to the Roman world view, especially since the Stoic insistence on acceptance of all situations, including adverse ones, seemed to reproduce what the Romans considered their crowning achievement: virtus, or "manliness," or "toughness." The centerpiece of Stoic philosophy was the concept of the logos. The universe is ordered by God and this order is the logos, which means "rational order" or "meaning" of the universe(Bakalis ,2005).

Stoicism is perhaps the most significant philosophical school in the Roman Empire, and much of our contemporary views and popular mythologies about Romans are derived from Stoic principles. This is actually not a philosophical school, but one could generally group a number of Hellenistic schools under this rubric, including the Second Academy (Hellenistic Platonists), the Second Sophistic, the Cynics, the Skeptics, and so on, and, for the most part, the Stoics as well. What is important for our purposes is that all these schools to some degree or another espoused the idea that human beings cannot arrive at certain truth about anything. Basically, life became this great guessing game: the lot of humanity is to be cast into a twilight world in which all that we know and think is either false or occupies some middle position between the false and the true (which was called the "probable," "readily believable," or the "verisimilar"). This comes to dominate thought in late antiquity; the first philosophical attacks Christianity levels against the thought of antiquity are refutations of sceptical principles. Of all the philosophies of antiquity, this is perhaps the most familiar to you: the skeptic principle of doubting everything became, in the modern era, the fundamental basis of the scientific method (Bakalis ,2005).

Logos is a linguistic term; it refers particularly to the meanings of words. The meaning of an individual word all by itself is semeion; the meaning of an individual word in the context of a sentence is logos. For the Stoic, the meaning (logos) of each individual life, action, and situation is determined by its place in a larger whole, which is, of course, the whole course of history. In this view, history becomes a kind of speech by God.

It is progressive, it is teleological, and it is meaningful (but only when it's all done: a sentence has no meaning until it's completed). Each and every event, physical and historical, has a place within this larger rational order or meaning. Since the order is rational and meaningful, that means nothing happens which is not part of some larger reason or good (Christianity will adopt this idea wholesale; check out Boethius' Christianization of this ...