ANTIOCHUS OF ASCALON
(130/120?–68/7 BCE)

Antiochus joined the Academy, the school founded by Plato, late in the second century BCE, when Philo of Larissa was its head. Philo was (at this time) a moderate Academic skeptic who had been convinced by the Academy's anti-Stoic arguments that nothing can be known for certain, but he did not embrace the other doctrine for which Academic skeptics argued—suspension of judgment. According to Philo, although certain knowledge is unobtainable, it is possible to identify highly probable impressions, and there is no reason not to accept them, provided that one realizes that one might be wrong. Prominent among them is the impression that nothing can be known.

After defending this view for many years, Antiochus became a dogmatist by accepting that knowledge is possible. His epistemological position was now essentially that of the Stoa. He responded to accusations that he had left the Academy for the Stoa by claiming that Zeno of Citium (335–263 BCE), the founder of Stoicism, had introduced a new vocabulary but was otherwise in essential agreement with the schools of Plato and Aristotle. Far from abandoning the Academy, Antiochus maintained, he had returned it to its true self. For this reason, he and his followers styled themselves the Old Academy. It is unclear what institutional status this group enjoyed or whether Antiochus ever officially succeeded Philo.

Antiochus regarded the criterion of truth and the goal of life as the most important concerns of philosophy, and his ethical theory is the other area about which we are well informed. In opposition to the Stoics, who maintained that virtue is the sole good and therefore sufficient for happiness, Antiochus held that there were also bodily and external goods. He rightly took this to be the view of Aristotle and the Old Academy, but the form in which he presented his theory owes a good deal to the Hellenistic schools. Thus Antiochus relied heavily on the so-called cradle argument, which takes the uncorrupted behavior of infants as its starting point. Antiochus combined evidence from this source about the objects of our first natural concern with the general principle that what accords with a creature's natural impulses is its good, to derive his account of the goal.

He was in broad agreement with the Stoics that our constitution and things that preserve and develop it are the first objects of our natural concern, and not pleasure as Epicurus supposed. But the Stoics take it that this natural concern is replaced by a unique attachment to virtue. Antiochus held that, as the perfection of reason, which is the most important part of our constitution, virtue is the chief good. But he also regarded the other objects of natural concern as goods, albeit lesser goods, and therefore a part of the goal.

Antiochus wanted to claim that, even so, virtue is sufficient for happiness. To this end, he distinguished between the happy life (vita beata ), for which virtue was enough, and the entirely happy life (vita beatissima ), which requires other goods as well.

None of Antiochus's books have survived, but he is known to have written a work about epistemology, the Canonica, and another epistemological work, the Sosus against Philo of Larissa's late views. A book in which he stressed the close relation between the Peripatos, Aristotle's school, and the Stoa is attested, and Cicero tells us that he wrote in many places about his views concerning happiness and virtue.

See also Ancient Skepticism; Cicero, Marcus Tullius; Philo of Larissa; Stoicism; Zeno of Citium.

Bibliography

Barnes, Jonathan. "Antiochus of Ascalon." In Philosophia Togata: Essays on Philosophy, edited by Jonathan Barnes and Miriam Griffin. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Glucker, John. Antiochus and the Late Academy. Hypomnemata 56. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1978.

Mette, H. J. "Philon von Larissa und Antiochos von Askalon." Lustrum 28–29 (1986–1987): 9–63.

Striker, Gisela. "Academics Fighting Academics." In Assent and Argument: Studies in Cicero's Academic Books, edited by Brad Inwood and Jaap Mansfeld. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1997.

James Allen (2005)