Preface

The period of ancient Greek and Roman philosophical thought that falls between the Hellenistic philosophers of the third and second centuries bc, on the one hand, and the Platonism of late antiquity on the other, is at present the least known in the English-speaking world. During the second half of the twentieth century much scholarship was devoted to showing that the thought of those two periods was of general philosophical interest and deserved a place in standard syllabuses. For the Hellenistic period, in particular, one problem was the difficulty of finding, and making reference to, much of the textual evidence, scattered as it was in a wide range of mostly later ancient authors. This problem was solved, and the philosophical interest of the material highlighted, by the publication in 1987 of A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley’s sourcebook The Hellenistic Philosophers. For late antiquity a similar role has been played by Richard Sorabji’s sourcebook The Philosophy of the Commentators, 200–600 AD, published in 2004. That had its origins in a conference held at the Institute of Classical Studies in London in 1997, with the express intention of introducing the period and the main personalities and issues within it to those who might be familiar with some aspects of ancient philosophy, but not with that period, and might be encouraged to work on it.

It was with a similar intention that a conference on the philosophy of the period from 100 bc to ad 200 was held at the Institute in 2004. The proceedings of that conference have been published in Sorabji and Sharples 2007; but it was also intended that it should give rise to a series of sourcebooks, of which this is one, containing a selection of material relevant to the study of the Peripatetic tradition between 200 bc and ad 200. Some explanation, both of the use of the term ‘Peripatetic’ and of the chronological limits, is called for.