When we think of Roman philosophy today, what first comes to mind is a question: why on earth couldn’t they do it better? Why didn’t the energy and ingenuity which propelled the Romans to utter dominance in the known world move their philosophy beyond being a mere set of more-or-less elegant reworkings of Greek insights?
It’s not that they were just so busy conquering the world that they had no time or energy for philosophical investigations; they did enough to show that a philosophical impulse was there, as it is in almost all cultures. Something about Rome must have restrained that impulse, keeping it from developing into the creativity of its Greek counterpart. We can, perhaps, identify the restraints by considering a few rough contrasts between Greece and Rome.
The most glaringly obvious of these is that unlike Rome, Greece was politically disunited. During the classical period (510-323 BCE), it contained perhaps as many as 300-400 independent cities or poleis, each of them sovereign on its soil.
One result of this multiplicity of political jurisdictions was that if you ticked off the authorities in, say, Athens (as Socrates did) you could always move to, say, Megara (as he refused to do: # 7). This reminds us of something we should never forget: that philosophy, well-pursued, is a radical, and so dangerous, activity. As Tom Foster Digby put it in 1989:
Philosophical works achieve canonical status because they are recognized as exemplars of philosophy as a social practice. In the Western tradition, this practice is purely, directly, and intrinsically radical, for it involves uncovering, studying, and criticizing the root conceptions that inform all of the more narrowly focused intellectual pursuits, as well as social practices generally.[1]
Merely focusing on your basic concepts and beliefs, let alone criticizing them, brings the possibility that those basic concepts and beliefs, and the practices associated with them, might be found wanting. Even if you eventually uphold them all (as Descartes did), you have done something most people don’t like.
Unlike Socrates, a Roman social critic had no place to flee to, for Rome ruled almost the entire world: if you displeased its emperor, you had to flee to the world’s very edges before you were beyond his authority.
Such repression was not merely a matter of governmental muscle. Rome’s centralization of political authority brought a centralization of culture as well. If you wanted to be a famous playwright or sculptor, all roads led to Rome. When it came to philosophy, which by this time required a great deal of preliminary training, the roads led not only to Rome but to some of its larger mansions. Thus, Lucretius was a client of the prominent poet/politician Gaius Memmius; Cicero and Seneca were from families just below the highest, senatorial rank; and Marcus Aurelius actually was the emperor. Among Rome’s best-known philosophers, only poor, lame Epictetus was outside the circle of privilege—he was a slave. But his master, about whom we know nothing other than that he was wealthy enough to have at least one slave, allowed him to study philosophy.
Roman culture was not only unified, but deeply hierarchical. All of these men, except Marcus Aurelius, were dependent on those above them in the Roman hierarchy, whose higher levels they knew intimately. They all lived the same privileged Roman lifestyle (except Epictetus, who observed it at very close quarters). And that lifestyle was not only unified and hierarchical, but deeply grounded in Greek philosophy, which everyone cultured was expected to read in the original. So they all had approximately the same Roman life experience, and the same Greek conceptual tools to articulate it. Small wonder that their thought conformed to their Roman peers, and moved on tracks originally laid down in Greece.
Culture and government can, of course, diverge; not all Roman philosophers were subservient to imperial authority. Beginning with Nero and continuing under the Flavian Dynasty (69-96 CE), certain Stoics systematically irked the emperors. Indeed, Vespasian, first of the Flavians, was sufficiently irked to banish philosophers from Rome (on the usual charge of corrupting the youth), which pretty much makes my point about governmental centralization. But philosophical criticism of imperial Rome came from within its highest precincts: a number of the banished philosophers were senators.
Finally, Greek society also exemplified a special kind of diversity. Since the Greeks all spoke the same language, and were ethnically pretty homogenous, their diversity was primarily religious: Athena was worshiped at Athens, but other gods in other cities. These alliances could shift, so the Greeks had to compare their gods critically with those of other cities: what if Athena is the wrong goddess to be allied with? Maybe we should join up with Hera instead? Or Ares? Or Zeus?
People therefore had to justify and explain their choice of gods—which required justifying and explaining their basic values and aspirations to others who might not wholly share them. Plato takes this to a new level in the Euthyphro, when Socrates suggests that the holy must be pleasing to all the gods, not just to one or a few: to determine what was holy, you couldn’t just rely on the gods of your own polis, but had to figure out what was pleasing to all the gods of all the poleis. That would have been a philosophical task; Plato accomplished it, implicitly, in his general discussions of the nature of the forms and their common guidance to conduct.
Such issues did not arise in Rome, for its political unity also underwrote an official religion; the Roman gods were to be worshiped because they had overseen the rise of Rome to world domination. Since the gods had given Rome world domination, Romans had no temptation to worship anyone else. Subject peoples were allowed to keep their traditional gods if they wished; but if things got obstreperous their Roman overlords would perform an evocatio, which called forth a local god with promises of a larger temple or cult, endowed with Roman money. This invariably won that god to the Roman side.
Thus, we see two models of human living. One, the Greek model, is politically pluralistic and encourages forms of thought that will liberate individuals from local allegiances; the other is a monolithic system of power that binds each individual to a particular position within that particular system. So it is no surprise that Romans did not think for themselves as some Greeks had done, but conformed to the general and conceptually homogeneous view that surrounded them.
[1] Tom Foster Digby, “Philosophy as Radicalism” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 61.5 (June 1988) pp. 857-863, p. 857