1 - The late Roman Empire from the Antonines to Constantine

Summary

PERIODIZATION, ‘LATE ANTIQUITY’ AND THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

From the second until the eighth century ce, people living around the Mediterranean Sea experienced an unprecedented intermingling of cultures and ideas which would not be repeated until our own era. Roman conquest made possible this cultural fusion, which coalesced during the Augustan pax Romana extending into the late second century and continued to flourish under the Germanic successor kingdoms and the Umayyad Empire. This is the dynamic, creative, intellectually flexible period with which this book is concerned. Understanding and valuing this period as deserving of study on its own terms, however, is a relatively new development. The utility of this volume’s previous edition notwithstanding, the title of the Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy shows that A. H. Armstrong did not conceptualize this era as a coherent historical period. Rather his goal was to compile a resource for those who had read W. K. C. Guthrie’s History of Greek Philosophy and now wondered how and why ‘Greek philosophy took the form in which it was known to and influenced the Jews, the Christians of East and West, and the Moslems, and what these inheritors of Greek thought did with their heritage’. Armstrong’s perspective also minimizes the contribution of Latin philosophical texts except as initiating a break with the classical paradigm. In other words, Armstrong intended to bridge classical and medieval thought. Such is not the vision of The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity.