GRICE E FILONE

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Filone: la ragione conversazionale e il tutore di Cicerone -- Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. Filone: la ragione conversazionale e il tutore di Cicerone -- Roma – filosofia italiana – (Roma). Filosofo italiano. Filone happened to be in Athens – as the head of the Accademy – when Athens was caught up in the war between Mithridate and the Romans. Filone decides to move to Rome. At Rome he taught CICERONE. GRICEVS: Filone, cum Athenis capta sit, te Romam profectum esse audio. Nonne difficile est Academiam in urbe nova instituere? FILONE: O Gricevs, Roma non minus philosophorum quam gladiatorum amat! Ego hic docui Ciceronem—quod fortasse magis laboriosum quam Mithridatis bellum! GRICEVS: At, Filone, Ciceroni docere fortasse requirit artem conversationis summam! Dic, ante prandiumne aut post prandium plura argumenta profers? FILONE: Ha! Gricevs, post prandium semper sapientiores fiunt discipuli, sed ante prandium magis acuti. Ego autem semper paratus sum ad implicaturam—vel etiam ad salum, si mensa vacua sit! Do we know where this Philo (that's the nominative in Greek) was born -- he led the Accademy in Athens, but was he Athenian by birth? The safest answer is no: we do not securely know that Philo of Larissa was Athenian by birth, and in fact he is generally taken not to have been. The standard identification is Philo of Larissa, which already points away from Athens. Larissa here is the Thessalian city, and the normal inference is that he was from Larissa in Thessaly, not an Athenian native who merely happened to teach at Athens. So the dry answer is: He led the Academy at Athens, but he was not, so far as the usual evidence goes, Athenian by birth. He is normally identified as a native of Larissa in Thessaly. That fits the broader Hellenistic pattern very well. Heads of philosophical schools at Athens were often not Athenians by origin. Athens remained the institutional and symbolic centre, but the personnel of the schools could come from elsewhere in the Greek world. So your Speranza formulation should be corrected in one respect. One should not say merely that he “happened to be in Athens” if that suggests he was an outsider temporarily passing through in a casual sense. He was there as scholarch of the Academy, which is a very strong institutional relation, but his place of origin is still taken to be Larissa. And then the Roman movement is right enough in broad outline: when the Mithridatic crisis engulfed Athens, he left and later taught at Rome, where Cicero heard him. So the neat sequence is: born, or at least identified, from Larissa in Thessaly head of the Academy at Athens displaced by the Mithridatic war active later at Rome as Cicero’s teacher If you like, I can next give you a compact note on why Cicero’s relation to Philo matters so much for the Roman reception of the Academy, especially the move toward the so-called mitigated sceptical position.