The Hellenistic Schools

In the period of Near-Eastern history beginning with the conquests of Alexander, there were by the standard accounts that have come down to us four great schools of philosophy: the cynic, the stoic, the epicurean, and the skeptic.

Each of the first three of these four may be defined by a clear conception of the ideal life. For the fourth, the ideal life is more of an unspoken implication.

For the cynic, the ideal was renunciation. For the stoic, indifference. For the epicurean, a sort of sustainable low-intensity pleasure. For the skeptic, it was the bursting of balloons, a ruthless honesty about the fact that no one (else) knows what they think they know.

There was a distinction between the Academic and the Pyrrhonistic variants of skepticism, but in both cases the underlying glee seems to have been the same, the conviction that most people in the world have minds full of balloons, hot and airy ideas easily burst by sharpened logical arguments.

What fun!

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