Workshop 'Ancient Pseudepigraphy and the Anchors of Philosophical Innovation' - Day 1

Program

14:00 – 14:10
Albert Joosse (Universiteit Utrecht)
Introduction

14:15 – 15:00 Keynote I
Annette Merz (Protestantse Theologische Universiteit, Groningen)
Personal letters from philosophers: authentic or pseudepigraphic?

15:15 – 16:00
Gina White (University of Kansas)
Democritus the Cynic? Familiar Characters and Novel Philosophy in the Pseudo-Hippocratic Letters

16:15 – 17:00
Julien Decker (Université de Rouen Normandie)
The Need for Theory in the Cynic Pseudepigraphic Letters

Abstracts

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Personal letters from philosophers: authentic or pseudepigraphic? Methodological reflections with case studies on the Letters of Mara bar Serapion to his Son and Epicurus to his Mother.

Annette Merz (Protestantse Theologische Universiteit, Groningen)

My contribution will focus on the methodological problems scholars face when they try to establish the authentic resp. pseudepigraphic character of personal letters written by ancient philosophers or in their name. An overview of characteristics of undisputed pseudepigraphic personal letters (esp. from the Cynic Epistles) will provide a starting point. Then two cases of highly disputed philosophical letters to family members will be discussed: Mara bar Serapion’s Letter to His Son, preserved in a 6/7th cent. CE Syriac manuscript (BS add 14658), and Epicurus’ Letter to His Mother, preserved in the second cent. CE Inscription of Diogenes of Oenoanda.

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Democritus the Cynic? Familiar Characters and Novel Philosophy in the Pseudo-Hippocratic Letters

Gina White (University of Kansas)

Among the corpus of letters purported to be written by Hippocrates, but probably written in the 1^st century BCE or CE (Lewin 1968), one series stands out for its complexity and literary sophistication. Letters 10-17 form a single narrative arc describing an imagined meeting between Hippocrates and the philosopher Democritus, and have been called “a kind of epistolary novel”, or a “novella in letters” (Stewart 1958: 186; Smith 1990: 20).

Since Heinze 1889 the Cynic elements in the final letter, letter 17, have been acknowledged (see also Diels 1918; Stewart 1958; Lewin 1968; Smith 1990). Democritus’ two long speeches in this letter take a fundamentally Cynic moral-philosophical stance: they are concerned with the foolishness of accepted social practices, they preach a message of apatheia, and they compare humans unfavourably to animals. They also exhibit many of the stylistic features associated with Cynic diatribe: these speeches form a sustained attack on vice, they are morally exhortatory rather than theoretical, they rely upon everyday examples, and they employ colloquial language and an aggressive tone (Sayre 1958: 1-24 and Dudley 1937: 35-7). While the status of this final letter as a piece of Cynic protreptic has been widely accepted, its role as the culmination of a longer narrative sequence has, however, often been ignored. The purpose of this paper will be to consider how the earlier letters (10-16) characterise their central characters – Hippocrates and Democritus – in such a way as to prepare the reader for the Cynic diatribe of Letter 17.

The paper will focus on how these letters anchor their accounts in traditional characterisations of Hippocrates and Democritus, yet innovate upon these – taking these figures associated with technical, scientific knowledge and using them in support of a philosophy that rejects standard scientific inquiry.

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The Need for Theory in the Cynic Pseudepigraphic Letters

Julien Decker (Université de Rouen Normandie)

A little less than a hundred letters have come down to us under the name of Diogenes and Crates. But they were written some 400 years after their deaths, specifically from the 1^st century B.C. to the 2^nd A.D. They took up the great topoi of Cynic philosophy and reused the chreiai transmitted by tradition. Their heterogeneity can be explained by the plurality of authors. But most of the letters reveal a similar strategy in diverting Cynical anecdotes from a simple narrative scheme to offer a lesson to followers. In this way, they become apologues or manuals of life.

Somehow, it would be unfair to reduce these texts to a merely practical dimension of philosophy. On the contrary, it is because the practice of Cynicism faced social problems that these writings circulated as a theoretical justification of practices. Thus, these letters invite us to consider how they remedy some gaps induced by the absence of a Cynic theory. If to be a Cynic is to imitate the eminent example of Diogenes or that of Crates, then it seems obvious that followers had difficulty in identifying the nature of rules that had to be extracted from simple exempla.

As Cynics underwent many criticisms and in particular rejection from certain Stoics, it was necessary to define the contours of a probably absent doctrine and make intelligible their own behaviour. In particular, the adiaphoria theme is developed there, probably in the light of Stoic adiaphora. The example of begging is also eloquent since this marginal practice of Diogenes was not a philosophical injunction. However, it became that popular that it required a rationale able to interpret Diogenes’ gesture and justify the contours of this practice among his followers, with the consequence that the letters often lost the geloion aspect of the anecdotes. Therefore, the authority conferred by the apocryphal writing strategy interests me on two levels: first, it reflects a need for seriousness at a time when Cynicism was confined to a shameless way of life; secondly, first-person enunciation preserves the importance of Diogenes’ and Crates’ exempla in defining rules.