1. Plato's First Successors

When Plato died he bequeathed to Greek culture and the world a twofold gift, his Academy and his writings. In the same manner as the property of the land on which it was founded was the material foundation upon which the existence of the Academy rested, the respect for Plato's personality was a shield to protect its ideological cohesion in spite of all the changes which took place in its teaching. The cult of Plato as a person was in the Academy added to that of Apollo, the Muses and Eros. On the seventh day of the month of Thargelion, towards the end of our month of May, Plato's birthday was celebrated in the Academy. It was the holy day of the birth of the god Apollo and there is no doubt that the fixing of Plato's birthday on this festive day is connected with the legend on the Apollonian origin of the adored philo­sopher.I Plato's statue served as a symbol of his continued presence in the Academy. It was the work of the sculptor Silanion and was dedicated to the Muses in the Academy by the Persian Mithridates, the son of Orontobates.2

Not far from the Academy was Plato's grave.3

When the founder and the first scholarch had gone from the Academy, the principle of leadership was already so deep-rooted that there was no doubt about the necessity for a successor. Thus the Academy created a type of philosophical school with a recognised head (scholarch) and a succession of scholarchs. This and its permanent site marked it off as a specific institution. Likewise, as the model of the philosophical and political society of the Pytha­goreans influenced the foundation of the Academy, so it became itself a model for other, later philosophical schools in Athens and also for scientific institu­tions named after it "Academy".

Plato's successor in directing the Academy was Speusippus, the son of Plato's sister Potone, who was probably more closely allied to Plato by affinity than by philosophical conviction. We may presume that Plato re­commended him as his successor or designated him by expressing this wish. The fact that Aristotle was not appointed scholarch of the Academy, although he had been a member of the Academy for fully twenty years as well as Plato's disciple, was however, if not the cause, certainly the outward manifestation

lef. p. 309 seq. "Diog. Laert. 3,25.

3Pausanias I 30,3.

F. Novotný, The Posthumous Life of Plato© František Novotný — Ludvík Svoboda 1977

20 Antiquity

of the split between Aristotle and Plato's school of thought, of the dissension which was later to become a significant factor in the history of European culture. Aristotle left Athens immediately after Speusippus assumed the rank of scholarch. When he returned there after twelve years, he did not join the Academy but founded his own school in Lyceum. Another excellent disciple of Plato's, Xenocrates, also left Athens together with Aristotle and stayed away for a time. Obviously he too did not find the new conditions in the Academy quite to his liking. However, it was this Xenocrates who was entrust­ed with the direction of the Academy only eight years later (in 339). when Speusippus's prolonged illness - gout - impeded, wearied and incapacitated him from discharging his duties. A few years later Speusippus died.4

Xenocrates directed the Academy for twenty five years (from 339 till 314 B. C.). His successor was his disciple Polemo (314-269 B. C.), after him Crates of Athens (269, four years 268-264 B. C.). The next scholarch, Arcesilaus of Pitane in Aeolis, deviated to such an extent from original Platonism that his activity is regarded as the beginning of the second period in the history of the Academy.

Plato did not leave to his Academy a philosophical system with firmly fixed dogmas. Like the demiurge in his Timaeus he too left his work unfinished to his successors, but what he did le,ave them was the essence of his philosophy: love of wisdom, an active endeavour to ascend through intellectual reasoning from the world of appearances to the unchangeable everlasting truth. Plato did not teach to profess undisputable truth, but to enquire into it. In his search for truth he solved some problems but left others unsolved. The result was that his Academy did not become a school of imitating epigones.

Neither Plato's lectures nor his writings could give the Academy a unity of teaching that could manifest itself in a settled body of fixed doctrines. As far as it is possible to speak about Plato's teaching, his successors were affected particularly by its later period, the period of criticism and reconstruction of the system of ideas, in which the significance of the mathematical and philoso­phical dyad of the limited and unlimited was prominent. The earlier Plato of the dialogues and of the ideas there expressed became influential only later.

'In an attempt to erase from tradition any intimation of personal disagreement between Aristotle and Plato it is said in Aristotle's biography (Vita Marciana para 429 R) that after Speusippus' death the members of Plato's school invited Aristotle and that he took charge of it toghether with Xenocrates; Aristotle in the Lyceum, Xeno­crates in the Academy. This report shows, it is obvious, Aristotle's school as a depen. dent branch of the Academy.

According to another report which is contained in the Academicorum philosophorum index Herculanensis col. VI-VII, p. 38 seq. M, the young members of the Academy elected Xenocrates, because Aristotle was in Macedonia. Ph. Merlan defends the authenticity of this report in an article The successor of Speusippus (Transactions of the Amer. Philol. Assoc. 77, 1946).

Plato's First Successors 21

The Platonists demonstrated their divergence of opinion by various degrees of attachment to the Academy, there were even secessions, but above all by originating and developing a special "academic" philosophy, bearing the individual mark of the personalities of different scholarchs. Already in the ancient beginnings of the history of philosophy the Academics' philosophy differed from Plato's. In the second century A. D. Numenius, a predecessor of the Neo-Platonists, wrote "About the Rift between the Academics and Plato" (IIe:pt 'r~<;; 'rWV 'Axex3'Yl[Lex'Cxwv 7t'po<;; IIM'rc.>vex 3LCXG'rOCO'e:c.><;;) rebuking the Aca­demics for not remaining true to Plato's teaching. Perhaps also Chalcidius' statement in his commentary from the fourth century A. D. on Plato's Timaeus (chapter 246) on "the younger philosophers" may refer already to some of the first Academics, who - like unworthy heirs scattering their father's fortune - broke down Plato's complete and rich philosophy into disjointed opinions. In reality, however, the Academics did not abandon their teacher when they no longer upheld some of his doctrines, nor when skepticism pre­vailed among them, but when they attempted to create rigorous dogmatic systems.

Already Speusippus asserted to a considerable degree his independence from Plato. He agreed with him on the dualistic distinction of beings perceived by sense ('rcX extO'&'Yl'roc) and beings apprehended by intellect ('rcX vO'Y)'roc). However, Plato's contradiction between knowledge (emO''r~[L'Yl) and belief (36~ex), which Plato himself modified considerably later on by developing the concept of "correct opinion", was removed by Speusippus by applying the epithet "scientific" (e7t'LO''t"'Yj[LoVLX6<;;) to both kinds of cognition: the criterion of in­tellectual things is "scientific logos" (emO''t"'Yj[LovLXO<;; A6"'(0<;;), the criterion of sensible things is "scientific perception" (e7t'LO''t"'Yj[LOVLX~ ex~O'&1JO'L<;;) - Plato in his younger years would have certainly considered this unification of the notions "knowledge" and "perception" a blasphemous oxymoron.

Speusippus obviously rejected Plato's fundamental idea, that the Beginning and the End of everything is the Good. Against this he asserted, by pointing to the development of plants and animals, that the beautiful and fine, i. e. the Good, is not at the beginning but at the end as the result of development. Aristotle confirms this in his Metaphysica XII 7, 1072 b 30. As is apparent in other parts of the Metaphysica Speusippus repudiated the identification of the Good with the One, at which Plato arrived in his later period, and acknowl­edged only the One as a principle in the true sense of the word. This is connec­ted with Speusippus' quantitative conception of the supersensible world which he substituted for Plato's doctrine of ideas. It is not Plato but Speusippus to whom we can attribute the replacement of ideas by numbers. Numbers are according to him related to the things perceived in the same manner as ideas (d3'Yl) are related to them according to Plato; without numbers true knowledge would not be possible. Speusippus maintained that there was no distinction

22 Antiquity

between arithmetical numbers and numbers as the highest beings, but he became entangled in contradictions which Aristotle holds against him.5

Speusippus does not regard numbers as the only beings in the world of reason, but as the highest beings. Like Plato Speusippus too considers mathematical erudition a necessary preparation for the study of philosophy.

We know far too little about Speusippus' views on the soul and body or about his ethics to be able to give any views on his relation to Plato in this respect.

A more faithful follower of Plato than Speusippus was Speusippus' successor in the Academy Xenocrates of Chalcedon, Plato's immediate disciple, a true philosopher, a serious man of strict morals. He increased Plato's dyad of beings perceived by the intellect and of beings perceived by sensation to a triad when he recognised as an independent being also the object of opinion (OUO"tlX v01)TIj -IXLO"&tjTIj - ~O~IXO"TIj); it seems that here also he was following Plato, who according to Aristotle's testimony acknowledged also "mathema­tical beings" as an intermediate category between beings perceived by sensa­tion and ideas. Everything within the world belongs to the sphere of sensibles, what is outside the world to the sphere of intelligibles, and the object of opinion is the world itself, which is perceived by sight and at the same time apprehended by reason with the help of the science of astronomy. This triple distinction of beings corresponds to the triad of modes of cognition: knowl­edge, sense-perception and opinion. Knowledge is firm and true; sense-percep­tion is also true, but not to the same degree as knowledge; opinion is either true or untrue. With a peculiar predilection for rational application of religious concepts Xenocrates made the three godesses of fate the representatives of the following three realms: Atropos, the unchangeable, represents the world of knowledge, Clotho the world of sense-percetion and Lachesis the world of opinion.

Xenocrates identified with the deities also other philosophical constructs. Accepting Plato's teaching of the One and the Dyad as the principal beings he regarded the One as the principle of the odd, the masculine, as the father ruling the world, called him God and identified him with reason (voo<;); the Dyad he regards as the female principle, the "mother of gods", the ruler of the subheavenly regions, the soul of the world.

In an attempt to be systematic, Xenocrates abandoned the distinction between Plato's visible heavenly gods and the anthropomorphic gods of the po­pular creed. According to him the universe is god and the Olympic Gods are stars; under the Moon dwell the demons, either good or bad, intermediaries between people and the gods. How far he developed the beginnings of demo-

SF. Gada, Plat6nuv nastupce v Akademii (= Plato's Successor in the Academy), (Listy

filol. 44, 1917, 167 seq., where the sources are mentioned).

Plato's First Successors 23

nology accepted from Plato, we do not know, his writing "On the Gods" (llEpt &EWV) having been lost.

Whilst Speusippus did not approve of Plato's ideas and put numbers in their place, Xenocrates endeavoured to uphold Plato's doctrine and at the same time to apply numbers as principles. He defined the idea as the "exam­plary cause" (ochtocv 7tOCpOC~E~'Y{J.OC't'~x~v) of natural things. (Proclus, On the Parmenides V 136 Cons). If he is rightly credited with that third method of interpreting the numbers, which Aristotle mentions in the Metaphysics XIII, I, 1083b 2, he identified the mathematical number with the ideal num­ber. The soul too he apprehended as a number moving by itself.6

On the question of the origin of the world Xenocrates was the first who tried to reconcile the narrative in Plato's Timaeus on the origin of the world with the divergent teaching of Aristotle, that the world is without a beginning. He regarded the narrative in the Timaeus - and he had a number of follo­wers - as an explanation of the causal and not chronological deduction of the complex from the simple principle.7 According to some ancient testi­monies it was not Aristotle who was the author of the teaching on the eternity of the world, but the Pythagoreans. In this connection particular reference is made repeatedly to Ocellus of Lucanus.8

Xenocrates confirmed in the Academy the division of philosophy into logic, physics and ethics. This division became for many centuries the basis of philosophical systems. Cicero is not right if he attributes it in the Academica I 19 to Plato himse1f.

About Polemo, Xenocrates' disciple and successor, Diogenes Laert. 4,19 recounts that he lived in seclusion in the garden of the Academy and his disciples lived clQse by in small huts, which they built not far from the shrine of the Muses and the lecture-hall. When Cicero stayed in Athens in the year 79 the seat where Polemo used to sit in the Academy was still shown. Polemo is not known to have established himself as an independent philosopher of any importance in his own right. As far as his philosophy is ever mentioned, his teaching of the Good is remembered. According to Cicero's De finibus 4,14 Polemo most lucidly expressed that the supreme Good is to live ac­cording to nature. From other passages it is also obvious that this principle included also the reasonable enjoyment of everything nature offers to man.

Neither did Polemo's successor Crates distinguish himself in the history of the Academy by any originality of thought. He and his friend Crantor,

\ Plutarch, On the Creation of the Soul l. 'Mmograph: J. Baudry, Le probleme de

l' origine et de t' eternite du monde d,ans la philosophie grecque de Platon a I' ere chretienne (Paris, 1931).

"Philo, On the indestructibility of the world 12; Censorinus, De die natali 4,3; Joannes Stobaeus, Anthology I, 20, 3. The Documents were collected by R. Harder, Ocellus Lucanus (Berlin, 1926, p. 3 seq.).

24 Antiquity

the author of the influential essay On Grief (IIe:pt 7!ev.&OUC;;) agreed with Polemo in their comparatively tolerant attitude to the emotions, quite unlike the Cynic and Stoic austerity.

It is possible to assume that there were also some oriental influences in the development of the Academy, perhaps even in its first period, but evidence referring to this is not substantial enough.9

Even Plato's direct disciples and other members of the older Academy maintained a sufficient distance from Plato in order to be able to make his person and work the subject of their studies and literary activity. Already Speusippus had written about Plato; Diogenes Laert. 4,5 mentions among his writings also IIA(hcuvoc;; eyxw!lLOV, "Encomium on Plato", and in 3,2 recalls Speusippus' account contained "in the writing named Plato's Funeral Feast" (~v 't'i;) e7!L'YPlXcpO!l~VCP IIAoc't'cuvoc;; 7!e:pL3e:L7!VCP); it is possible to assume that this is one and the same work, a speech composed for the funeral celebration in honour of Plato's memory. Even if we did not have a brief summary ofSpeu­sippus' "Encomium" - this was the term which could be applied to a eulo­gistic speech in prose or to a laudatory poem - which we read in Apuleius' work De Platone et eius dogmate I 2, we might guess that Speusippus followed the accepted form of prose encomia and described on one hand the natural gifts and on the other hand the erudition of his hero, his deeds (7!pOC~e:LC;;) and his merits (&pe:'t'IXL).

Plato's biography written by Xenocrates is also quoted.1° According to the testimony of Plato's disciple Hermodorus Diogenes Laert. 2,106 and 3,6 recounts an incident from Plato's life, but he does not give the title of the work from which he took it.ll It is said that Philippus of Opus also wrote about Plato.12 In the Herculanean list of the Academics col. VI 10 para 35 M it is said that Erastus - known from Plato's 6th epistle - and Asclepiades wrote about Plato.

Crantor was the first commentator of Plato's writings. He wrote a com­mentary on the dialogue Timaeus in which he expounded his view on the composition of the soul as well as on the relation of the creation of the world to the origin of time; he thought that the story about Atlantis was true.13

·Without sufficient evidence W. Jaeger, Aristoteles, p. 133, asserts that the Academy was at the time after Plato's death the centre of orientalizing currents foreshadowing the rapprochment of East and West effected hy Alexander's campaign.

Similarly Plato's and his disciple's rela­tions with the Orient are pursued hy G. Bidez in his hook Eos ou Platon et l'Orient (Bruxelles 1945); his results also cannot all be accepted as certain.

lOSimplicius, On Arist. Physica 1165, 35 D; On Arist. De caelo 12, 33; 87, 22 Heiherg. fragm. 53 Heinze. Diogenes Laert. does not mention Xenocrates' hiography.

nCf. Simplicius On Aristotle's De Physica 247, 33; 356, 32 D.

12Suidas under "<llLAOcrOqlO<;". 13Crantor's commentary on the Timaeus

is mentioned hy Proclus On Timaeus I, 76, 1 seq. and 277,8 seq. D. Plutarch in the treatise On the Origin of the Soul in the

Plato's First Successors 25

None of Plato's works which were written in the older Academy are extant. One of the duties of the Academy was certainly also the critical "publishing",

i. e. the right of production of correct transcriptions of Plato's works. That such transcriptions were made is supported by a report by Antigonus of Carystus (3d century B. C.) in Diogenes Laert. 3, 36; according to this report such copies were immediately after their publication lent for reading in return for a fee. It has not been ascertained whether the members of the Academy deserve the credit for issuing these copies.14

From Antigonus' report one can infer the interest of readers in Plato's writings. But the clearest evidence are the remnants of Egyptian papyrus containing fragments of Plato's dialogues. They prove that Plato was also read in Egypt, in Greek or in hellenised colonies, as for instance in Fayyum, on the very border-line of the desert.

Timaeus 1 seq. does not mention the com­mentary, but refers to Crantor's concept of the soul, which he opposes to Xenocrates' notion, according to whom the soul is the mixture of two components, reason (\lo'll't"~

cp&nc;) and belief in relation to the objects of sensation (1) m:pl 't"oc oc!(J~'Il't"oc 8o~a(J't"~ cpu(J~<;).

l40n the controversial question whether the Academy published or did not publish Plato's work see for differing opinions G. Jachmann, Der Platontext (Nachr. d. Gesell. d. Wissensch., Gottingen, phil. hist. Kl., 1941, 11, Gottingen 1952) and Ernst Bickel, Geschichte und Recension des Platontextes (Rhein. Mus. 92, 1943).