Thursday, October 17, 4:30 - 6:00 pm
402 Cohen Hall
This paper sketches the development of Chaldean ‘philosophy’, as it was called in antiquity, in order to interrogate the relationship between Greek, Persian and Babylonian intellectual traditions. My argument is in three parts. The first focuses on the rise of mathematically based astrology in 5th- and 4th-century Babylon. I suggest that, after a period of resistance against Persian rule under Darius and Xerxes, Chaldean astrology emerged from a new climate of collaboration and assimilation under the later Achaemenids. I then look at developments after the fall of the Persian empire: Seleucus of Seleucia (ca. 150 BCE), I argue, exemplifies a period of exceptionally fertile intellectual crosspollination, when leading Chaldeans drew on Babylonian datasets and observational techniques to intervene in Greek philosophical debates. The final part of my paper addresses the crisis of Chaldean philosophy that resulted from the rise of Platonism, and its remodeling along Platonic lines in the Antonine period.