Antiochus and other Platonists of the first century B.C.

Speusippus, Xenocrates, Polemo, and Crates were the successive heads of the Academy. It seems that the successor of Crates, Arcesilaus (fourth/third century), completely changed its character, teaching a kind of non-dogmatic, Socratic, in some sense of the word, sceptical Platonism. This sceptical phase (it continued under Carneades and Philo of Larissa, first century B.C.) seems to have exercised very little influence on later Platonists. A return to dogmatism, from which Platonists from then on never deviated, was initiated by Philo's successor, Antiochus of Ascalon (b. c. 130-120, d. c. 68 B.C.), one of Cicero's teachers. Convinced that the Stoic philosophy was essentially derived from the Old Academy, that Aristotle, in at least one phase of his activity, was a Platonist, and that the Peripatos (which, according to him, originated only after the death of Speusippus), though it modified particularly Plato's ethics, was essentially identical with the Academy, Antiochus incorporated many of their teachings in his own system; and this eclecticism, according to many scholars, paved the way for the Neoplatonic one. But it does not seem that he had any use for the Platonic Two-opposite-principles doctrine. In other words, his return to the Academy did not mean that he returned to all of its teachings.

Where did he stand on the theory of ideas? Speusippus, in some way Xenocrates, and Aristotle had at a certain moment of their careers abandoned it. But Antiochus blames Aristotle for having ‘weakened’ it, and indeed seems to have adopted it. But he did so with considerable modifications. First of all, as he denied any radical difference between intelligence and the senses (despite 30—1 with its assertion that only mens is rerum index, because only mens can perceive ideas; see Lucullus 30: mens ipsa sensus), obviously ideas could not retain their paramount importance3 nor their transcendent status despite the fact that their knowledge was still considered the prerogative of intelligence.