Monash University

The long and tedious life composed by Philostratus in obedience to the command of Julia Domna, the wife of the Emperor Severus, quite early in the third century, is what Germans call a tendenzroman, a novel with a purpose.

Hierocles, early in the fourth century, expressly sets Apollonius against Christ, and there can be no doubt that this comparison was in the mind of Philostratus also.

Epictetus quotes a fine saying of Apollonius.

When you wish to discipline yourself, and it is hot and you are thirsty, take a mouthful of cold water and spit it out, and tell nobody.

Dion enters upon his matter by an emphatic condemnation of atheism and of deism.

Many, he says, have set up a bad god, what they are pleased to call pleasure, a womanish deity, whom they adore in the dark with cymbals and pipes.

This is what the Stoic Hierocles called the harlot doctrine of Epicurus, what in its modern garb of utilitarianism Carlyle scoffs at as the worship of the frying-pan.

We should not grudge them their jollity if their heresy ended with their drinking songs.

But, but in the intervening years, you know, the other elements began to seep in too, and, and you realize that it's a, it's a philosophy built around, you know, a, a, a profound social conscience and contribution.

One of the, one of the, the sort of middle stoics a- around Marcus Aurelius's time, his name was Hierocles.

You know, he talked about how there are these circles of our concern, and that, yeah, we're the center.

We're all sort of self-absorbed.

But yeah, so, uh, October, you know, we're...

It was great to get that in there, but we also got in someone we missed the first time around too, and that's Hierocles.

Yes.

Um, so October 4th and October 28th, we have some Hierocles, you know, who's basically, you know, he was teaching and at his heyday around 150 AD.

So, you know, Marcus is a, is a younger man at that point, you know, sort of rising up through the ranks, but he's really articulating what some have called the Stoic Golden Rule, this whole notion of the circles of concern.

And ethical behavior, the way we behave in life should be to attempt to draw the further circles out from us closer to us so that we treat a friend like family, we treat strangers like friends, we treat foreigners like, you know, they're part of our own people.

It dovetails so nicely with the, the sort of Christian ethos which is coming out from, you know, in, in this moment of the idea of, of love thy neighbor, right? And that, that a society is sort of defined by how it treats the stranger.

And the further the person is from you, you know, sort of the, the, the more beautiful.

We were all lions and recherchés.

There was a modern Platonist; he quoted Porphyry, Iamblichus, Plotinus, Proclus, Hierocles, Maximus Tyrius, and Syrianus.

There was a human perfectibility man; he quoted Turgot, Price, Priestley, Condorcet, Destutt de Tracy, and the ambitious student in ill health.

There was Sir Positive Paradox; he observed that all fools were philosophers, and that all philosophers were fools.

Yeah.

And it also brings like the, you know, the circles from Hierocles, right? Where did it go expanding? It brings them closer, right? Because if you can, you know, meet people like from my village, it's so small, you know, that we don't even have a supermarket to meet each other in, you know, but we have to go to another one.

But, It is where you kind of actually meet the people and you see you share something in that moment, right? You share a community, like not necessarily a community of thought, but a community of place.

And then we go to the same supermarket, right? So we have things in common that shows kind of like the humanity that you share.