2.1 εἶπον γὰρ ἐν ἑαυτοῖς λογισάμενοι οὐκ ὀρθῶς Ὀλίγος ἐστὶν καὶ λυπηρὸς ὁ βίος ἡμῶν, καὶ οὐκ ἔστιν ἴασις ἐν τελευτῇ ἀνθρώπου, καὶ οὐκ ἐγνώσθη ὁ ἀναλύσας ἐξ ᾅδου. In the Hellenistic period, the two dominant philosophical schools were those of Epicurus and the Stoics. Epicureans believed that there were gods but denied that they were provident in the universe and believed that the soul was mortal; death was therefore eternal oblivion. Stoics believed in gods, providence, and the later ones certainly in a soul that could plausibly survive death, albeit a corporeal soul whose ability to personally survive in the form of the person after death depended on their acquisition of virtue and wisdom, and was limited to the time between ekpyrotic conflagrations. (But their disappearance wasn’t so terrible, since the next rebirth of the universe would see its exact repetition and therefore that soul’s recurrence anyway.) The people who say to themselves that “our life is short and grievous, and there is no healing in the death of a man, and no release from Hades is known” sound suspiciously Epicurean, just as the author of Wisdom sounds suspiciously Stoic here and elsewhere. So-called Middle Platonism was an elite, academic (no pun intended) affair beginning with Antiochus of Ascalon (d. ca. 69/69 BCE), who revived the epistemological confidence of the Old Academy under the scholarchy of Speusippus and Xenocrates. These two phases of dogmatic Platonism—reading Plato’s Dialogues and epistles through the lens of his “Unwritten Doctrines” and identifying a sort of core set of Platonic teachings—bookended a phase of Academic Skepticism more or less coextensive with the Hellenistic period. Middle Platonism eclectically incorporated Pythagorean, Stoic, and Orphic thought and also reclaimed Aristotle as a key to Plato; in all of these, it anticipated the Late or “Neoplatonism” of Plotinus and his successors. Whether Wisdom is best read as a Stoic or a Middle Platonic text partly depends on its period of composition (if in the mid-to-late first century BCE, it is still more likely to be Stoic; if in the early-to-mid first century CE, it is somewhat more likely to be Middle Platonic), and reflects the same ambiguity in all of the “Middle Platonic” authors. 2.2 ὅτι αὐτοσχεδίως ἐγενήθημεν καὶ μετὰ τοῦτο ἐσόμεθα ὡς οὐχ ὑπάρξαντες· By attributing belief in soul death to those “not thinking rightly,” Wisdom implicitly teaches the immortality of the soul. ὅτι καπνὸς ἡ πνοὴ ἐν ῥισὶν ἡμῶν. It may be that talking about the soul as a “breath” (πνοή) rather than as spirit (etymologically related πνεῦμα) is supposed to be a demotion of the life principle in the living person. καὶ ὁ λόγος σπινθὴρ ἐν κινήσει καρδίας ἡμῶν. σπινθήρ means “spark.” The language evokes both philosophical debates about the seat and origin of thought and mind in the human being as well as medical debates about the function of different organs in relation to cognition and spiration, from the Hippocratics through the Rationalists and the Empiricists to the later Roman Methodists and finally to Galen. 2.3 οὗ σβεσθέντος τέφρα ἀποβήσεται τὸ σῶμα καὶ τὸ πνεῦμα διαχυθήσεται ὡς χαῦνος ἀήρ. Again, this is unmistakably Epicurean: when the “spark” of reason is extinguished (σβεσθέντος), the body goes away to ashes (τέφρα, implying a Greek custom of burial through cremation prior to the entombment of the remains) and the spirit (πνεῦμα here) is dissolved into open air. Epicureans thought that the soul was made of a particular kind of intelligent, sensate atom that was aggregated in a living body, through which it had sensation, but logically would dissipate after death, hence unable to retain its cognition or its sense of personhood. The Stoics sidestepped this problem by suggesting that reason (λόγος) was an intrinsic property of spirit (πνεῦμα). 2.4 καὶ τὸ ὄνομα ἡμῶν ἐιλησθήσεται ἐν χρόνῳ, καὶ οὐθεὶς μνημονεύσει τῶν ἔργων ἡμῶν· The concept of being forgotten in the revolving ages of time is a common feature of Greek thought. Its earliest instance is in the dilemma that faces Achilles in the Iliad: his two possible fates include the chance to go home, marry, have children and grandchildren, and die old and full of years, contented and well-loved, but be forgotten over time, or to stay at Troy, die before the walls young and in his prime, and be remembered forever. Yet the Greeks also habitually distrusted the memory of humans and felt as a rule that they were the heirs of a fragmentary, once-greater civilization and accumulated knowledge. καὶ παρελεύσεται ὁ βίος ἡμῶν ὡς ἴχνη νεφέλης καὶ ὡς ὁμίχλη διασκεδασθήσεται διωχθεῖσα ὑπὸ ἀκτίνων ἡλίου καὶ ὑπὸ θερμότητος αὐτοῦ βαρυνθεῖσα. The references to smoke (κάπνος) and cloud (νεφέλη) are also evocative of Qohelet, which of all the Jewish sapiential literature composed in the postexilic period comes the closest to Epicurean nihilism. The author has in mind here the rich and powerful rulers of the gentile world, but he may also, through them, want to symbolize philosophical positions within Judaism that he dissents from. 2.5 σκιᾶς γὰρ πάροδος ὁ καιρὸς ἡμῶν, καὶ οὐκ ἔστιν ἀναποδισμὸς τῆς τελευτῆς ἡμῶν, ὅτι κατεσφραγίσθη καὶ οὐδεὶς ἀναστρέφει. The idea that there is no “recall” from death is a commonplace in Greek and Roman myth and poetry in the first century BCE. Both Vergil and Ovid illustrate the idea through their respective accounts of Orpheus and Eurydice, though they have wildly different attitudes towards it. 2.6 δεῦτε οὖν καὶ ἀπολαύσωμεν τῶν ὄντων ἀγαθῶν καὶ χρησώμεθα τῇ κτίσει ὡς ἐν νεότητι σπουδαίως· 2.7 οἴνου πολυτελοῦς καὶ μύρων πλησθῶμεν, καὶ μὴ παροδευσάτω ἡμᾶς ἄνθος ἔαρος· 2.8 στεψώμεθα ῥόδων κάλυξιν πρὶν ἢ μαρανθῆναι· 2.9 μηδεὶς ἡμῶν ἄμοιρος ἔστω τῆς ἡμετέρας ἀγερωχίας, πανατχῇ καταλίπωμεν σύμβολα τῆς εὐφροσύνης, ὅτι αὕτη ἡ μερὶς ἡμῶν καὶ ὁ κλῆρος οὗτος. Horace said it no less well: Tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas, quem mihi quem tibi / finem di dederint, Leuconoe, nec Babylonios / temptaris numeros. ut melius, quidquid erit, pati: / seu pluris hiemes seu tribuit Iuppiter ultimam, / quae nunc oppositis debilitat pumicibus mare / Tyrrhenum: sapias vina liques, et spatio brevi / spem longam reseces. dum loquimur, fugerit invida / aetas: carpe diem quam minimum credula postero (Odes I.11). 2.10 καταδυναστεύσωμεν πένητα δίκαιον, μὴ φεισώμεθα χήρας μηδὲ πρεσβύτου ἐντραπῶμεν πολιὰς πολυχρονίους· The hedonism of the Epicurean-esque impious might be fine if it were not for the fact that it takes advantage of the “just pauper” (πένητα δίκαιον). The divide between the wicked rich and powerful, whose hedonistic pleasures are at the cost of the poor, suffering righteous, is a major theme in Wisdom and throughout Jewish and Christian scripture, particularly prophetic, sapiential, and apocalyptic texts. 2.11 ἔστω δὲ ἡμῶν ἡ ἰσχὺς νόμος τῆς δικαιοσύνης, τὸ γὰρ ἀσθενὲς ἄχρηστον ἐλέγχεται. “And let our strength be the law of justice, for weakness is proven useless.” The association of might-makes-right with a mentality of worldly power, unrestrained by ethics, also goes back far in the Greek tradition. The locus classicus is Thucydides’ History, in which he reports the Athenian answer in the Melian Dialogue: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” (δυνατὰ δὲ οἱ προύχοντες πράσσουσι καὶ οἱ ἀσθενεῖς ξυγχωροῦσιν; V.89). Wisdom, by contrast, stands in a tradition of philosophical ethics which insists that unrestrained power is not virtuous. If written under Roman rule, it is worth noting by way of parallel that the Romans often contrasted licit power to exercise in society (imperium and auctoritas) from the simple ability to do something (potestas).
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