Long - Death and Immortality in Ancient Philosophy

Each book in this series offers a concise and accessible treatment by a single author of a topic of major philosophical importance in the ancient Greek and Roman world. The emphasis is on a discussion of those debates of real philosophical interest, placed within their historical context. Future volumes will consider topics such as love and friendship, theology, space, legislation and the concept of nature. The books are designed for use in a teaching context, where they will bridge a gap between general introductions to individual philosophers or periods and specialist monographs. They will also appeal to anyone interested in the enduring influence and significance of ancient philosophy.

Death and Immortality in Ancient Philosophy

A. G. Long

University of St Andrews

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A. G. Long 2019

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I started writing this book at the University of Toronto during a Research Fellowship provided by the Leverhulme Trust. My thanks to the Leverhulme Trust and to the scholars and students in Toronto with whom I started to explore immortality in Plato and Empedocles, especially Lloyd Gerson, Brad Inwood and Martin Pickav. During the visit to North America David Ebrey and Suzanne Obdrzalek gave me very helpful comments on my interpretation of Platonic immortality. Back in the UK Sarah Broadie and Anthony Hooper kindly commented on parts of the book, and I have been helped by other scholars visiting or working in St Andrews, particularly Mehmet Erginel, Stephen Halliwell and Peter Woodward. I have also benefited from discussing immortality in early Greek philosophy with Phil Horky and Simon Trpanier, and Stoic eschatology with George Boys-Stones. In the final stages of the project Li Fan, Yun Zou, Siyi Chen, Kaicheng Fang and Rui Xu organized seminars in Beijing and Shanghai on immortality and the philosophy of death, and I received excellent suggestions and objections from them and the other participants. My thanks to the organizers and participants at all the other events (in Cambridge, Durham, Edinburgh, Northwestern, St Andrews and Toronto) where parts of the book were presented and discussed, and to the editors of this series for their expert guidance. Thanks as ever to Jess for her love and encouragement and now to Ben for imposing a non-negotiable deadline.

Parts of my discussion of Plato in have been taken from my contribution to Authors and Authorities in Ancient Philosophy (edited by Jenny Bryan, Robert Wardy and James Warren), also published by Cambridge University Press.

H.G. Liddell, R. Scott, H. Stuart Jones and R. McKenzie (1996) A Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford, Clarendon Press.

H. von Arnim (190324) Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta , 4 vols, Leipzig, Teubner.

The I discuss death in Greek and Roman philosophy. Considering the topics in that order, immortality before death, will, I hope, seem more reasonable in the light of passages that use the language of immortality to describe the best human lives. Platos Timaeus describes how during their lives people can, to an extent, attain immortality, and Epicurus calls immortal the good things enjoyed in a virtuous persons life. When we consider what comes after life, there is a widely recognized disagreement between Plato and Epicurus. In several Platonic dialogues Socrates argues that the soul is immortal and persists everlastingly after death, whereas Epicurus argues that at death the soul loses all cognitive capacity and is disintegrated. Epicurean discussions of death try to make the prospect of non-awareness and non-existence a source of mental resilience, not despair.

In the first part of this book I draw attention to another ancient debate, less recognized in recent work on ancient philosophy, about what it means to be immortal. This other debate is related to philosophical theories about the immortal gods and the cosmos, but it also emerges when philosophers use immortality in their discussions of human beings and human ethics. The ethical side of the debate will come into view in chapter 2, where I examine Platos writing about immortality and love. The cosmological or theological strand can be introduced by the following question: if gods are inhabitants of the cosmos, and if, as some philosophers hold, the cosmos as we know it will eventually come to an end, can the gods be immortal? The philosopher-poet Empedocles and the early Stoics, especially Chrysippus, try to retain the gods immortality in a world-system of merely finite duration, and this affects what they say about human immortality as well. Their answer is, roughly speaking, to distinguish between (a) death as a regular feature of the world we know and (b) the end of this world-system. Calling the gods immortal, which in Greek suggests deathless, is to say that they, unlike human beings, are not subject to the intra-cosmic process called death; it is not to call them everlasting, as they will not outlast the end of this world-system. In early Stoicism there is nothing irreverent in that view of the gods immortality. But Platonists and Epicureans, despite their disagreement on other questions, would unite in rejecting it. For example, the Platonist Plutarch says, with the Stoics as his target, that it is absurd to regard gods as immortal and yet not everlasting. But then Platonists and Epicureans never had to confront the problem of immortal gods in an impermanent world-system. Platonists hold that the world-system in which we currently live will last forever. Epicurean gods are not, at least in a straightforward sense, inhabitants of this world: either they live outside the visible world, or, according to a different interpretation of Epicurean theology, the gods are our own mental constructions of what an endless, perfectly happy creature would be.