Promoting a New Kind of Education: Greek and Roman Philosophical Protreptic, by Daniel Markovich

Abstract

Arguments for the uninitiated about why one ought to pursue philosophy were a pervasive form of philosophical activity in antiquity. Such “protreptics”—attempts to exhort (protrepein) a person to philosophize—might reasonably and often have been understood as a marginal facet of a philosopher’s activity. However, this ambitious and wide-ranging study attempts to recover protreptic as a central form of philosophical discourse, treating it as a genre of speech and writing “concerned with the ultimate goals of education” (4), one that philosophers in antiquity used in order to set forth their novel conceptions of the good life and proposals about how to achieve it. One challenge such a project faces is the great variety of forms that philosophical protreptic takes, but Markovich’s aim is not to argue for a Socratic definition that captures all exhortations to philosophy. His book instead traces the intertextual relations between various philosophers’ exhortations, showing how they have influenced and departed from one another in articulating their respective conceptions of philosophy as a new form of education.Chapter 1 carefully surveys some of the problems facing attempts to establish philosophical protreptic as a genre in its own right. Although philosophical protreptic takes a great variety of forms, Markovich argues that instances of this genre are unified both by their “communicative purpose” (6)—they all contain “explicit protreptic utterances” (13), urging the audience to philosophize—and by their historical, intertextual connections. For Markovich, the origins of philosophical protreptic are found in Socrates’s protreptic utterances: brief live exhortations preserved in works like Plato’s Apology. Out of these original Socratic utterances develop longer protreptic discourses in works of other genres (e.g., in Socratic dialogues), which in turn influence the development of protreptic works in their own right, often entitled Protrepticus. Such works, finally, influence texts written in the “protreptic mode” (such as Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy), “works significantly shaped by the protreptic utterances that they contain” (12).In addition to their Socratic provenance, Markovich takes deliberative rhetoric to be an important influence on this genre. Philosophical protreptics emphasize the value of wisdom over that of traditional goods like wealth, health, and honor. Because rhetorical handbooks—like the Rhetoric to Alexander and Aristotle’s Rhetoric—treat these traditional values as sources of persuasion in deliberative rhetoric, Markovich suggests that deliberative rhetoric is a “foil” (14) and perhaps also a “model” (25) for philosophical protreptics. Here, I was not sure that the “exact relationship” between these two genres is in fact detailed as promised (14), and I thought Markovich was a bit too quick to dismiss sophistic exhortations as an influence on philosophical protreptic. As he notes, what is probably the first extant use of “protreptic speech” (protreptikos logos) occurs in Plato’s Euthydemus, where Socrates famously presents “amateur” (idiōtikon, 278d5, 282d6) protreptics as a model for the exhortations he wants to hear from the sophists Euthydemus and Dionysodorus. Although Plato seems to think that these particular sophists fail to provide successful exhortations to philosophy, Socrates’s persistent expectation that the sophists generally will offer “professional” (technēi, 282d8) exhortations nevertheless seems to provide evidence that they promoted their educational programs through a form of discourse somehow analogous to the sample protreptics that Socrates offers.Chapter 2 surveys the protreptics of Socratic authors: Aeschines of Sphettos’s Alcibiades, various exhortations in the Platonic corpus, and Xenophon’s treatment of Socratic protreptic in the Memorabilia. Here, and in subsequent chapters, Markovich’s method is to provide block-indented summaries of the relevant works and then comment on the salient argumentative and rhetorical patterns that emerge. The summaries of these Socratic discourses bring out a typical protreptic pattern that, as Markovich argues in subsequent chapters, will be recycled by many later authors: one’s ultimate aim is happiness (eudaimonia); however, happiness consists not in traditional goods like wealth, beauty, or power but in the care of the soul and the cultivation of virtue; and, because philosophy is the cultivation of virtue, one ought to philosophize. After detailing these paradigms, Markovich then turns in chapter 3 to the most famous text to develop out of this Socratic tradition: Aristotle’s Protrepticus, which was probably the first of the many philosophical texts by that name. Here, Markovich judiciously reviews some of the major difficulties for reconstructing this lost text on the basis of Iamblichus’s paraphrases and again provides a useful summary of the main arguments. The rest of the chapter highlights the various Platonic motifs on which Aristotle draws and briefly reconstructs the intervention that the Protrepticus makes in Aristotle’s debate with Isocrates, whose criticisms of a Platonic conception of philosophy are often thought to have occasioned this text.Chapter 4 surveys our almost exclusively fragmentary evidence about the use of protreptic by various Hellenistic philosophers: Epicurus, Chrysippus, Posidonius, Phylo of Larissa, and Eudoxus of Alexandria. The analysis of Epicurus’s Letter to Menoeceus, which begins and ends with protreptic utterances, brings out some of the novel features of protreptic that Markovich shows to be emblematic of this period: the call to philosophize is directed toward an increasingly universal audience, and the philosophical activity to which these philosophers exhort their audience is regarded as a kind of “therapy” (92). He also draws attention to the development that Chrysippus, Posidonius, and Eudoxus treat protreptic not just as a kind of literary work but as a specific kind of ethical discourse, one that “translate[s] general theoretical rules into practical precepts” (103). But it was not clear to me that this form of “protreptic” discourse has anything more than a name in common with exhortations to take up the study of philosophy. On the whole, however, Markovich is able to extract much more from the scarce evidence about protreptics in this period than one might have thought possible.Chapter 5 examines protreptic works and passages in three authors from the late Roman Republic and the early Empire: Lucretius, Cicero, and Seneca, all of whom, in Markovich’s reading, promote philosophical education for broadly “political” reasons (125). A careful analysis of two protreptic passages in De rerum natura reveals how Lucretius promotes philosophical education as the true means of achieving the peace of mind and lofty perspective that his aristocratic audience typically seeks through military and civil command. Markovich considers the role of protreptic in the philosophical works that Cicero composed at the end of his life—works that constitute his “continuation of politics by another means” (142)—with a view to showing how he adopts protreptic motifs in his project of promoting philosophy as a new education that corrects the traditional education that failed to prevent Caesar’s dictatorship. This chapter also includes a useful collection of protreptic passages from Seneca’s Letters to Lucullus, but the allegedly political character of Seneca’s calls to take up philosophy—which contrast the peace of philosophy with the strife of political oratory (Ep. 14.11–14) and emphasize the leisure required for philosophy (Ep. 17.5)—eludes this reader.Markovich then turns to Greek protreptics in the Second Sophistic. The cast of this fascinating chapter is quite diverse. Markovich shows how the Stoic Musonius Rufus evokes typical protreptic arguments in exhorting a Syrian king to philosophize and examines Epictetus’s treatment of protreptic discourse as an “invitation to therapy” (168). With these two teachers of philosophy are paired two representatives of the Second Sophistic. Dio Chrysostom’s speech In Athens on His Exile exemplifies an explicit Socratic exhortation to the Athenians before describing his own call for his Roman audience to adopt a new, better education. Lucian of Samosata is cast as a “moderate Cynic” whose Nigrinus employs commonplace elements from philosophical protreptic in order to mock initiates’ dependence on their philosophical guides and whose work The Parasite employs those same protreptic tropes to ridicule those who presume that they can prove any paradoxical claim through sophisticated rhetorical techniques (181). Markovich’s treatment of this fascinating and less-studied period includes an excursus on Galen’s Protreptic to Medicine and Clement of Alexandria’s exhortation to Christianity in his Protreptic to the Greeks, both of whose obvious dependence on the conventions of philosophical protreptic reveals that this genre had by this point become closely associated with the promotion of educational programs.Chapter 5, the final substantive chapter, on the Neoplatonic protreptics of Iamblichus, Themistius, and Boethius, contains a complete summary of Iamblichus’s Protrepticus in which Markovich helpfully identifies the protreptic sources from which Iamblichus draws. Two of these—the defense speech of philosophy in Plato’s Phaedo (61c–69e) and the digression in the Theaetetus (172c–177c)—appear for the first time in this study. Given the importance that these texts play in Neoplatonic exhortations like Iamblichus’s, it was not obvious to me that we should understand them as only “implicitly or latently protreptic” (222). In fact, the digression in the Theaetetus is arguably the locus classicus for the “view from above” motif that Markovich rightly identifies as a paradigmatic protreptic theme (246). A brief consideration of Themistus’s Exhortation to the Nicomedians shows how this text employs typical strategies of philosophical protreptic in order to present philosophy and rhetoric as harmonious educational pursuits. The chapter concludes with a treatment of the central argument of The Consolation of Philosophy and details how Boethius employs typical protreptic commonplaces in service of his goals of consolation and exhortation.In the book’s conclusion, Markovich summarizes the core protreptic arguments that readers have now encountered repeatedly and outlines the central philosophical commitments shared by those who employ such arguments. Among these commitments are the idea that there is “only one kind of happiness” (241), that internal excellence (aretē) takes precedence over external and bodily goods, that reason is the most divine aspect of the human being, that philosophy provides one with a “view from above” (246), and that philosophy is an art that restores health to the soul and protreptic is a preparation for such treatment. After summarizing the deliberative rhetorical strategies of these protreptics and sketching the distinct rhetorical goals of the authors surveyed, Markovich concludes by comparing protreptic with other forms of philosophical literature. A brief epilogue makes some observations about the afterlife of ancient philosophical protreptic in historical and contemporary debates about ultimate educational goals.This book makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of philosophical protreptic by examining a much larger and more diverse sampling of this genre than has been treated in a unified study. Markovich succeeds in both extracting a core protreptic message that was repeated over a thousand-year history and demonstrating the enormous fecundity of the original Platonic and Aristotelian protreptics, which were able to be adapted to meet the specific needs of the diverse group of educators who were compelled to promote and defend their novel conceptions of philosophical education.