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THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO THE STOICS. Edited by BRAD INWOOD. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2003. Pp. ix, 438.
IT is A SOBERING REFLECTION on the state of our evidence that five hundred years and more of Stoicism can be compassed by a single volume in the Cambridge Companion series. But it is not just evidential complications that prevent the publication of viable Companions to Zeno and Chrysippus (and Aristo and Panaetius and Posidonius and Epictetus ...). As David Sedley reminds us in the opening chapter (a historical survey of "The School from Zeno to Arius Didymus"), it is also to do with the centripetal force exerted on its members by the conventions of hellenistic institutional philosophy-something that might not have stifled philosophical development, but certainly discouraged the rhetoric of innovation. It continued to do so, furthermore, after the closure of the Athenian schools in the first century B.C.: its historical primates retained their authoritative position in the minds of a diasporate Stoa which, one might have thought, would have been relatively free of their influence (cf. 29). Through no fault of his own, Christopher Gill, who picks up the story in Chapter Two (The School in the Roman Imperial Period"), is scarcely able to point to any substantial new contribution to philosophical debate among them: only a "greater focus on practical ethics" (40-41). The odd thing, it sometimes seems, is the impression of vigour later Stoics (such as Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius) are able to give.
The relative lack of clearly marked lines of development and debate within a corpus of evidence spanning such a long period makes a companion, something to help one find a toe-hold, very welcome. The danger such a volume has to negotiate is precisely that of imposing even greater homogeneity on the system than our evidence already encourages. Susanne Bobzien's treatment of Stoic logic (Chapter Four), the most defiantly expository chapter among contributions generally more elliptical in their companionship, manages to avoid this danger where the need for system and clarity might be thought to make it most tempting. R. J. Hankinson's neighbouring discussion of Stoic epistemology (Chapter Three) is not so consistently successful. His account of Stoic thought on the "criterion of truth" in fact throws up some fine...