Some questions never go away. For instance, the proper role of the individual in society is a topic which still provokes debate today. For most of history--even in the Classical world--this question has been interesting because it is both important and impossible to answer absolutely. Often a person's answer to such questions depends on environment, faith, or personal preference. For the Classical commentators Thucydides, Epicurus and Epictetus, the central factor determining their answer to the timeless question of the proper role of the individual in society was the nature of the political regime of their era.
In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides approaches the question from an interesting perspective: that of the Athenian leader Pericles giving a funeral oration. In the funeral oration, Thucydides' Pericles addresses multiple groups of Athenians, enfranchised or not, on the topic of "civic duty". Both women and warriors have an important role to play in Pericles' polis. (Source Book, p.12) Essentially, everyone matters, and is an active participant in politics. "Each individual is interested not only in his own affairs but in the affairs of the state as well." (Source Book, p. 10) For Pericles, this activism has great rewards, as the Athenian sense of individual importance and pride bestows a certain "natural courage" in battle superior to the strict discipline of their arch-enemy, Sparta:
There are certain advantages, I think, in our way of meeting danger voluntarily, with an easy mind, instead of with a laborious training, with natural rather than state-induced courage. We do not have to spend our time practicing to meet sufferings which are still in the future, and when they are actually upon us we show ourselves just as brave as these others who are always in strict training. (Source Book, p. 10)Even though this speech is likely fictional, and even if all member of Athenian society were not politically equal or satisfied, the "Funeral Oration" is still a telling account, for in its glorification of civic and political activism, it reveals something about the predominant attitudes in Periclean Athens.
The Greeks had a long valued the individual. The Homeric concept of manly virtue, arete, emphasized courage and the importance of heroic participation in society. (Western Heritage, p. 30) Even more fundamental was the Hoplite Phalanx. The building-block of Greek military hegemony, the Phalanx was a formation which relied upon cooperation. Each warrior depended on the man next to him for protection, and this helped foster a sense of mutual interdependence among Greek warriors. (Western Heritage, p. 31) Fifth-century BC Athens, the shining example of Classical democracy, took this individualistic heritage to a logical extreme--democracy.
Pericles himself epitomized the Athenian glorification of the individual in politics. In the middle of the fifth century BC, the young Pericles rose to power in a contest in which he outmaneuvered the previous Athenian leader, Cimon. The central event of Pericles' career was the First Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. (Western Heritage, p. 49-50) The "Funeral Oration" was in honor of soldiers who had fallen in this war. Of course, this speech was most likely a fictional creation by the great chronicler of the war, Thucydides.
Thucydides had been an Athenian military commander, but his loss to the Spartan general Brasidas at Amphipolis in 424 BC resulted in his exile from Athenian life. (Western Heritage, p. 56) During his banishment, Thucydides wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War. The influence of the Sophists, a group of rationalist philosophers, deeply influenced Thucydides. His History, therefore, was probably more reasoned, scientific and impartial than any previous histories.
Since Thucydides was in exile, he may have been something of a dissident, with a critical view of Athens. Despite this he penned a very pro-democracy "Funeral Oration", as he felt Pericles would have given. The truth of Thucydides' representation is unimportant for our purposes, for what we are really interested in are sample opinions of the day. Thucydides' Sophist background and historical eye suggest that, as a student of rhetoric, he would have been able to construct a sound Athenian argument on the individual's proper role in society. The "Funeral Oration" is an exhortation to participate in government--in fact it is almost propaganda. Thus, from his account we see that for Athenians of Thucydides' day, government was clearly a very important issue. Greece at the time was caught in the Peloponnesian War and split into areas dominated by the authoritarian regime of Sparta and the (admittedly imperfect) democracy of Athens. To Thucydides, active participation in the affairs of the polis defined the virtuous Athenian citizen. In this way, Thucydides' account of Pericles' "Funeral Oration" shows that the Athenian political regime greatly influenced his own view on the proper role of the individual in society.1
In his Letter to Menoceus, Epicurus presents a quite different view. The essential tenet of Epicureanism is that individuals should attempt to maximize pleasure and minimize suffering. In the Letter, Epicurus writes: "The end of all our actions is to be free from pain and fear, and, once we have attained all this...the living creature has no need to go in search of something that is lacking." (Source Book, p. 87) Although Epicurus does not explicitly state his views on government, we can easily extend this philosophy to caricature his views on the proper role of the individual in society. Epicurus stresses fulfillment on an individual basis, not a public one. He feels the individual is important--pleasure on a personal scale is the main theme of the Letter--but political activism is not worth mention in his view. While prudent individuals should seek the favor of political leaders, public participation and civic activism are largely futile to Epicurus, (Source Book, p. 86) for the individual's main purpose is the pursuit of pleasure.
Living approximately two centuries after Thucydides, Epicurus' Athens was the result of a very different historical heritage. After the "Golden Age" of Periclean Athens, confidence in democracy fell. In 415 BC, Alcibiades led Athens to violate the Peace of Nicias with Sparta. By 404 BC, Athens had fallen to Spartan amies under Lysander.2 (Western Heritage, p. 56) These losses precipitated a "Crisis of the Polis" in which Athenians questioned the efficacy of their system of government and their very culture.
In this environment of self-doubt, Phillip II of Macedon conquered Greece in the middle of the fourth century BC. His son, Alexander "the Great", created a vast empire throughout Asia Minor and beyond. (Western Heritage, p. 68-70) Even though Alexander's great empire fragmented after his death in 323 BC, the smaller Antigonid dynasty was enough to dominate the Greek poleis. The poleis never recovered their former vitality after the conquests of Phillip and Alexander. As the Greek poleis lost political autonomy and became subservient to imperial command, political vigor and rationalism waned and magic, religion and astrology became more central to people's understanding of the world.
This was the Athens of Epicurus at the time of his Letter. To most Hellenestic minds, civic activism was largely futile in light of the distant, massive empire. Since personal political fulfillment was all but impossible considering the scale of even the smaller Antigonid empire, people sought a different type of self-fulfillment. Magic and astrology filled this need--so did Epicurus' philosophy of self-gratification. By focusing on what the individual should do, Epicurus implicitly assumed that individuals were important. But that importance existed in a very small sphere. As long as they did not warp Epicurus' original intent of pleasant moderation by taking their pleasure-seeking to excess, Epicureans would likely have been good citizens in the Hellenistic world. Epicurus possessed a view of the proper role of the individual in society defined by the autocratic regime of the Hellenistic period. Since the regimes Epicurus and Thucyidides lived under were very different, their views on the proper role of the individual were equally different. However, the central factor in determining their views was the same--the nature of the political regime of the day.
Like Epicurus, the Stoic3 writer Epictetus opposes political activism in his Encheiridion. His opposition is somewhat different, though. Epictetus believes that the workings of the state are something to endure, not something to change. He views politics disdainfully, as unimportant to personal self-fulfillment:
It is not your business, is it, to get office, or to be invited to a dinner-party? Certainly not. How, then, can this be any longer a lack of honour? (Source Book, p. 91)So it is the good Stoic's place to accept politics as it is. Later in the Encheiridion, Epictetus says that "one who is making progress" will neither praise nor criticize anyone or anything. (Source Book, p.96) This philosophy of respectful silence is certainly not conducive to a large degree of political participation. Epictetus is necessarily at odds with the mood of civic activism prevalent in Periclean Athens, for political activism implies that one can be disturbed.
This is not to say that Epictetus is against leadership entirely. He advocates a non-political type of public involvement--leadership by doing. For instance, Epictetus says, "At a banquet, do not say how people ought to eat, but eat as a man ought." (Source Book, p. 95) This is quite different from the shouting-match democracy of Periclean Athens. So it would be an oversimplification to say that Epictetus is wholly against the concept of civic duty, for he does believe in honor, duty and the importance of the individual. Epictetus merely considers involvement in formal politics pretentious and fruitless.
Stoicism had its roots in the same period of Athenian intellectual crisis as Epicureanism. In the fourth and third centuries BC, Zeno of Citium established a fatalistic school of Athenian Stoics. Zeno condoned political participation--if a person's lot was to be a political leader, they must endure that situation like anything else. (Western Heritage, p. 73-74)
Epictetus was an ex-Roman slave4 who adopted and modified Athenian Stoicism in the late first and second century AD. As a Roman, though, Epictetus developed a Stoicsm somewhat different from Zeno's, especially different in its treatment of the proper role of the individual in society.
Part of this difference stems from the historical and political heritage of Rome. Even in the earlier days of the Republic, beginning with the 509 BC revolt against the Etruscan king and ending with the rise of populares in the second and first centuries BC, civic activism was less revered than in Athenian democracy. Relatively few people5 were empowered and the empire was quite large. Later dictatorships were even less conducive to civic activism. Epictetus lived in the centuries after the imperial system reached its heights, under the Augustan Principate. In this period the imperium of the emperor was largely unquestioned, especially by the masses, and for this reason individual political empowerment waned even more.
The reign of Nero, early in Epictetus' life, exemplifies the political apathy of the period. Even Nero himself felt politics so uncontrollable that he committed suicide after a rebellion in Gaul. (Western Heritage, p. 113) If Emperor Nero felt so disempowered, Roman citizens must have perceived their own lack of political agency quite acutely indeed. Along with the rise of Stoicism, other systems, most notably Christianity, de-emphasized the importance of worldly affairs, in some manifestations encouraging the faithful to steer clear of political confrontation and simply "render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's." (Luke 20:25) The popularity of the Flavian Coliseum revealed an escapist love of sport among Romans. Overall, it was a gloomy and pessimistic period in which the individual was not glorified--the "Silver Age of Latin Literature". (Western Heritage, p. 117)
Traditionally, the Roman upper class had vied for administrative positions. This was still the case in the first century AD. But by the second century, near the end of Epictetus' life, political apathy was so high that even traditionally powerful families turned down magisterial positions. Due to this "elite flight", the emperor had to force public offices on lesser citizens. (Western Heritage, p. 118) Not only were politics and government distant; by the second century AD people wanted it that way.
Writing under the rule of some of the less successful Roman Emperors, Epictetus' view was that for good or for ill, virtuous people would tolerate the government. In this way, he was an apologist for those in power. It was not the government's success or failure that was important, but the noble ability to endure its actions that mattered to Epictetus.
For all three of these writers, the idea of virtue is essential to their view of the proper role of the individual in society. The question then, is how to define virtue. In all three systems, it is something for which individuals should strive. Furthermore, it is something which is attainable. If virtue must be feasible, realistic constraints bind conceptions of virtue to historical reality. Thucydides, Epicurus and Epictetus all have different views of virtue, and thus of the proper role of the individual in society. Their views, though, were similarly tempered by the political realities of their day. These three writers--and probably any political thinkers, then or now--cannot escape their own political environment in forming their view of the proper role of the individual.
Endnotes
1 Or at least his view on what their view was. Some amount of confusion arises because we must view Thucydies through the mouth of Pericles. Still, even if Thudydides' view was the polar opposite, it which still be couched in terms of opposition to the Athenian regime.
2 The Spartan armies received aid from the Persians in the conclusion of the Peloponnesian War.
3 The core of stoic philosophy was a belief that the endurance of unchangeable hardships honorably was the most ennobling thing a person could do.
4 In fact, Epictetus was a freedman of a freedman of Emperor Nero. (Source book, p. 88) Thus, he may have been more positively disposed towards Nero and other ineffectual emperors than most Roman citizens. He lived under Nero, the Flavian Emperors, and the "Good Emperors".
5 For much of the Republic's early history, Patricians were the only ones with any real political clout. Later, Plebeians became somewhat more enfranchised, the eventual result of the "Struggle of the Orders". (Western Heritage, p 84-85)
© 1998 Garrett Moritz. All rights reserved.