It is often repeated in introductions to Greek philosophy that the fundamental difference between classical and hellenistic philosophy is the fact that the focus of the philosophers moved from the well-being of the polis to the happiness of the individual.
Reading G. Lowes Dickinson’s “The Greek View of Life”, I came to realise there was another, perhaps even more fundamental difference, being in the changed concept of virtue itself. Instead of rewording the whole chapter for you, I will simply quote its conclusion, which more or less summarizes Dickinson's point, below.
Those who would like to read the entire chapter (or the whole book), I refer to the http://www.gutenberg.net/etext04/tgeev10.txt Project Gutenberg site, where the complete work can be downloaded (it was written in 1896, so copyright has long expired). The chapter in question is "Section 5. Greek Ethics--Identification of the Aesthetic and Ethical Points of View."
Even from this passage, in spite of its dualistic hypothesis, but far more clearly from the whole tenor of his work, we may perceive that Plato's description of virtue as an "order" of the soul is prompted by the same conception, characteristically Greek, as Aristotle's account of virtue as a "mean." The view, as we said at the beginning, is properly aesthetic rather than moral. It regards life less as a battle between two contending principles, in which victory means the annihilation of the one, the altogether bad, by the other, the altogether good, than as the maintenance of a balance between elements neutral in themselves but capable, according as their relations are rightly ordered or the reverse, of producing either that harmony which is called virtue, or that discord which is called vice. Such being the conception of virtue characteristic of the Greeks, it follows that the motive to pursue it can hardly have presented itself to them in the form of what we call the "sense of duty." For duty mphasises self-repression. Against the desires of man it sets a law of prohibition, a law which is not conceived as that of his own complete nature, asserting against a partial or disproportioned development the balance and totality of the ideal, but rather as a rule imposed from without by a power distinct from himself, for the mortification, not the perfecting, of his natural impulses and aims. Duty emphasises self-repression; the Greek view emphasised self-development. That "health and beauty and good habit of the soul," which is Plato's ideal, is as much its own recommendation tion to the natural man as is the health and beauty of the body. Vice, on this view, is condemned because it is a frustration of nature, virtue praised because it is her fulfilment; and the motive throughout is simply that passion to realise oneself which is commonly acknowledged as sufficient in the case of physical development, and which appeared sufficient to the Greeks in the case of the development of the soul.
Any thoughts on this ? Or any other hypotheseses on this subject ?
Valete,
Q. Pomponius Atticus