The Platonic Origins Of Stoic Theology

Abstract

Abstract This article investigates what the Stoic doctrine of the two principles, God and matter, owes to Plato. It engages with recent scholarly views to the effect that the Stoics were influenced by Old Academic interpretations of the Timaeus and argues that, although the Timaeus probably did play a role in the genesis of the Stoic doctrine, some role was also played by a dualist theory of flux set forth in the etymologies of the Cratylus. It also discusses Theophrastus’ account of Plato’s achievements in physics (fr. 230 FHS&G) and the report of Old Academic physics contained in Cicero’s Academica, 1. 24–9, and commonly taken to go back to Antiochus of Ascalon, and it shows that those reports too are likely to have been influenced by the Cratylus.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 23 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.