ABSTRACT
During Theophrastus’ long reign at the Lyceum two new schools of philosophy appeared, the atomist and the Stoic. At the end of his reign a disaster happened to the Peripatetic school: its library was lost. How the Lyceum was deprived of the great working collections built up by Aristotle and his colleagues and the additions made by Theophrastus is a story told in some detail by Strabo and we shall look at it a little below. Here we can note that the loss must have had a paralysing effect on the peripatetics and may well have encouraged the growth of the rival philosophies. It was symbolic of the changes of the time that the Lyceum library finally reached Rome. This was where economic and military power now lay, and in this chapter we are concerned with how the Romans reacted to Greek philosophy, particularly Stoicism. By Strabo’s time, Roman expansion had made it literally necessary to redraw the map of the world. The old map, like that carved in stone in the Lyceum, would no longer do. We shall also see in this chapter how the Stoic Strabo was concerned with the new map of the world, both literally and metaphorically, in his text.
