{"_index":"sire","_id":"443","_score":null,"_source":{"id":443,"authors_free":[{"id":595,"entry_id":443,"agent_type":null,"is_normalised":null,"person_id":357,"institution_id":null,"role":{"id":1,"role_name":"author"},"free_name":"Watts, Edward Jay","free_first_name":"Edward Jay","free_last_name":"Watts","norm_person":{"id":357,"first_name":"Edward Jay","last_name":"Watts","full_name":"Watts, Edward Jay","short_ident":"","is_classical_name":null,"dnb_url":"http:\/\/d-nb.info\/gnd\/131826530","viaf_url":"","db_url":"","from_claudius":null}}],"entry_title":"Doctrine, Anecdote, and Action: Reconsidering the Social History of the Last Platonists (c. 430\u2013c. 550 C.E.)","main_title":{"title":"Doctrine, Anecdote, and Action: Reconsidering the Social History of the Last Platonists (c. 430\u2013c. 550 C.E.)"},"abstract":"Two Parallel narratives have tended to dominate modern recon-\r\nstructions of the final century and a half of Platonism\u2019s long ancient \r\nhistory. The first ties the dramatic intersection of pagan-Christian \r\nconflict, imperial policy, and philosophical principles to the end of Platonic \r\nteaching in the Eastern Roman Empire. 1 A second, distinct narrative analyzes \r\nLatin philosophical writings and traces the gradual unraveling of the ties that \r\nbound Latin philosophical culture and its Greek counterpart. 2 Each of these \r\nnarratives has its own unique way of viewing and understanding Platonism. \r\nThe first story culminates with the emperor Justinian\u2019s closing of the Athe-\r\nnian Platonic school. It tends to present the affected philosophers as a small, \r\nisolated group of pagan intellectuals whose conflict with an increasingly as-\r\nsertive Christian political order pushed them to the empire\u2019s margins. The \r\nsecond narrative ends with Boethius and Cassiodorus and stresses how their \r\nphilosophical efforts both underlined Graeco-Latin philosophical separation \r\nand planted the seeds of medieval scholasticism. It sees Platonism primarily \r\nas a movement held together by scholastic practices and doctrinal continuities \r\nin which Latin writers participated only at some remove.\r\nThis paper proposes a different, more expansive way to think about late \r\nantique philosophical life. Ancient philosophical culture was not defined ex-\r\nclusively by religious concerns and doctrinal ties. Beginning with the Old \r\n\r\nAcademy of Xenocrates, Platonists shaped themselves into an intellectual \r\ncommunity held together by doctrinal commonalities, a shared history, and \r\ndefined personal relationships. 3 As the Hellenistic world developed and \r\nPlatonism spread beyond its Athenian center, doctrine, history, and social \r\nties stopped being conterminous. Platonists remained connected by a shared \r\nintellectual genealogy, but Platonism\u2019s social and doctrinal aspects became decentralized as individual schools with their own interests grew up in vari-\r\nous cities. 4 Although no direct institutional connection joined them to the \r\nAcademy, late antique Platonists saw themselves as part of an old philosophi-\r\ncal lineage that reached back to Plato. 5 In their schools, the history of an \r\nindividual circle\u2019s past mingled with that of the larger intellectual tradition it \r\nclaimed to have inherited. This amalgamated tradition was handed down from \r\nteachers to students in personal conversations that had a number of important, \r\ncommunity-building effects. They attracted students to Platonic philosophy, \r\nencouraged them to identify with the movement\u2019s past leaders, and influ-\r\nenced their ideas and actions once they joined a specific group. As this paper \r\nwill show, the Platonic circles that these men and women formed were then \r\ndefined as much by the relationships they formed and by the behaviors they \r\nexhibited as by the doctrines they espoused. [introduction p. 226-227]","btype":3,"date":"2011","language":"English","online_url":"","online_resources":"https:\/\/uni-koeln.sciebo.de\/s\/rilfF7I9t8ywGlp","doi_url":null,"categories":[],"authors":[{"id":357,"full_name":"Watts, Edward Jay","role":{"id":1,"role_name":"author"}}],"book":null,"booksection":null,"article":{"id":443,"journal_id":null,"journal_name":"Classical Philology","volume":"106","issue":"3","pages":"226-244"}},"sort":["Doctrine, Anecdote, and Action: Reconsidering the Social History of the Last Platonists (c. 430\u2013c. 550 C.E.)"]}