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Anthony Long

University of California, Berkeley, Classics, Emeritus

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I am an emeritus professor of classics and philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. My main field of research is ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, especially Pre-socratics, Plato, Hellenistic philosophy, and Plotinus. My latest published books are Plotinus Ennead II.4 On Matter (Parmenides Publishing 2022) and Selfhood and Rationality in Ancient Greek Philosophy: Heraclitus to Plotinus (Oxford University Press 2022).

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Books by Anthony Long

Pleasure and Social Utility in Epicureanism

in A.A. Long, From Epicurus to Epictetus, 2006

Pleasure and Social Utility in Epicureanism

A.A. Long, From Epicurus to Epictetus, 2006

Lucretius on nature and the Epicurean Self

A.A.Long, From Epicurus to Epictetus, 2006

Stoicism in the Philosophical Tradition: Spinoza, Lipsius, Butler

Hellenistic and Early Modern Philosophy Eds. J.Miller and B. Inwood (Cambridge), 2003

Stoic Linguistics

Law and Nature in Greek Thought

Philo on Stoic Physics

Socrates in Later Greek Philosophy

Plato and Hellenistic Philosophy

Stoic Psychology

Thinking & Sense-Perception

Natural Catastrophe in Greek and Roman Philosophy

Ancient Ethics and the Natural World ed. U Coope and B. Sattler

Theophrastus' De sensibus on Plato

polyhistor, 1996

Aetius, Stoic Physics, and Zeno

Aetiana IV, 2018

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Poets as Philosophers and Philosophers as Poets

Logoir and Muthoi, 2019

IN AND OUT OF THE STOA: DIOGENES LAERTIUS ON ZENO

Authors and Authorities, 2018

Lives of the Eminent Philosophers copy

Diogenes Laertius, 2020

Diogenes' encyclopedic account of Greek philosophy is unique in its range and amplitude. He drew ... more Diogenes' encyclopedic account of Greek philosophy is unique in its range and amplitude. He drew upon a large range of earlier biographers and compilers of doctrines (doxographers), as he conscientiously acknowledges, but he also organized that material according to schemes that he seems partly to have chosen for himself As we would expect of any author with antiquarian interests, chronology strongly shapes Diogenes' presentation of his individual philosophers; however, rather than 0 }®,~ treating the whole set in the order of y~t to Gldes.t he presents them according • ". t to their position as reputed or actual founders of schools and by their succession J""""r within schools. Arranging the philosophers in this way harks back to the Hellenistic XVI epoch (late fourth century BC to early first century BC), when Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum had been augmented at Athens by the new schools ofZeno (Stoa) and Epicurus (Garden), both of which flourished well into the Christian era. Five of Diogenes' ten books (Books 3-7 and 10) are composed accordingly, with Plato's Academic successors from Speusippus to Clitomachus also assigned their own section, Book 4. The remaining books are more random in their collection of individuals. The "successions" of these philosophers have more to do with perceived or imagined affinity and indebtedness than with formal allegiance to an actual school. Thus Socrates is obscurely tucked into Book 2, which begins with the early Ionian cosmologist Anaximander and ends with twelve of Socrates' associates and later adherents. These Socratics include not only such major figures as Xenophon, Aristippus, and Euclides but also Simmias and Cebes, whose main claim to fame was their presence as Pythagoreans in Plato's dialogue Phaedo. Socrates owes his unemphatic position in this group to reputedly being a student of the Athenian philosopher Archelaus, himself a student of the Ionian Anaxagoras. Diogenes, however, had previously affirmed Socrates' preeminence by asserting in the prologue to Book 1 that Socrates "introduced moral philosophy" (1.14). Thence, he says, philosophy passed down to "the Socratics" (from Plato to Clitomachus, Books 3-4), to Aristotle and the Peripatetics (Book 5), and thirdly to the Cynics and Stoics (Books 6-7). Thus, the emblematic figure of Socrates could seem to have parented half of Diogenes' Book 2, and the whole of Books 3 through 7-not bad for a philosopher who himself wrote nothing. Of the remaining five books, only number 10, which treats Epicurus alone, is about a philosopher who actually initiated a school with an official line of successors. Book 8, headed by Pythagoras, includes, among others, Empedocles and the eminent astronomer Eudoxus, while Book 9, starting with Heraclitus and ending with Timon, along the way includes the Eleatics (Parmenides and Zeno), the Atomists Leucippus and Democritus, and the sophist Protagoras. Most heterogeneous is Book 1: here Diogenes starts with Thales ofMiletus, who had been everyone's favorite first philosopher since the time of Aristotle or earlier. But instead of continuing, like modern textbooks, with Anaximander and Anaximenes (Thales' younger Milesian cosmologists), Diogenes groups Thales with ~so-called sages, pre-philosophers who include the celebrated Athenian poet-statesman Solon.

Slavery as philosophical metaphor in Plato and Xenophon

Our language for mental experience is metaphorical through and through. 1 Take, for instance, the... more Our language for mental experience is metaphorical through and through. 1 Take, for instance, the expressions 'screwed up', 'not missing a beat', 'firing on all cylinders', or 'going ballistic'. No one spoke this way a hundred years ago, but they trip off our technologically habituated tongues as if they were natural. Some metaphors die out. Others become so entrenched that we can hardly imagine a time when they were not in use even though their constituent words have long ceased to have much if any literal application. This is the case with the metaphor of slavery in expressions like enslavement to work, or habit, or especially passion, which is as old in English as Hamlet's observation to Horatio (Hamlet Act 3 scene 2, 69-70): 'Give me that man that is not passion's slave, and I will wear him in my heart's core'. Shakespeare could have been distantly influenced by Seneca, who tartly wrote: 'Show me the person who is not a slave-whether to lust, greed, or ambition-and all are slaves to hope and to fear' (Letters 47.17). Such language could only originate in a culture that knew slavery as a horribly living practice. 2 1 * I originally wrote this essay for a conference on ancient slavery at the University of California at Irvine in 2008. I am grateful to Kinch Hoekstra and John Ferrari for commenting on my first draft and to Louis-André Dorion for sending me his article 'Plato and enkrateia'.

A.A. Long Methods of Argument in Gorgias' Palamedes

The Stoic Distinction between Truth and the True

Les Stoïciens et leur Logique, ed. J. Brunschwig, pp. 297-312 , 2006