School
School of the Sextii
Overview
The School of the Sextii was an eclectic Ancient Roman school of philosophy founded around 50 BC by Quintus Sextius the Elder and continued by his son, Sextius Niger, however it went extinct shortly after in 19 AD due to the ban on foreign cults. The school blended elements of Pythagorean, Platonic, Cynic, and Stoic philosophy together with a belief in an elusive incorporeal power pervades the body in order to emphasize asceticism, honesty, and moral training through nightly examinations of conscience as a means of achieving eudaimonia. The primary sources of information on the school are Seneca the Younger, who was taught by one of its members named Sotion, and the 5th century writer Claudianus Mamertus. Other members of the school included Papirius Fabianus, Crassicius Pasicles, Celsus. While Seneca the Younger often conflates the school with Stoicism, the Sextians were not as inclined to rigorous logical exercises or any abstruse abstract thinking, and unlike the Stoics, advocated avoidance of politics, engaging in the correspondence between words and life, and vegetarianism.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
Xenophanes, Parmenides, Melissus and Zeno are to be reckoned as belonging to this school. Xenophanes may be regarded as the founder of it; Parmenides is supposed to have been his pupil, and Melissus, and especially Zeno, are called the pupils of Parmenides. In fact, they are to be taken together as forming the Eleatic school; later on it lost the name, being then called Sophistic, and its locality was transferred to…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy
States what School of the Sextii is.
As for Empylus, of whom he himself and his friends often make mention in their epistles, as one that lived with Brutus, he was a rhetorician, and has left behind him a short but well-written history of the death of Caesar, entitled Brutus.
Plutarch, Plutarch
States what School of the Sextii is.
And the more rude among them used to be angry with their children, to see them, as they walked together, receiving Cicero with respect into the middle place. And being, as Plato would have the scholar-like and philosophical temper, eager for every kind of learning, and indisposed to no description of knowledge or instruction, he showed, however, a more peculiar propensity to poetry; and there is a poem now extant…
Plutarch, The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch
Close in meaning to School of the Sextii; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed School of the Sextii
Related ideas
- Internet Archive
- Eudaimonia
- Cynicism (philosophy)
- Stoicism
- Platonism
- Politics
- Pythagoreanism
- Ancient Roman philosophy
- Vegetarianism
- Seneca the Younger
- Aulus Cornelius Celsus
- Quintus Sextius
- Sotion (Pythagorean)
- Sextius Niger
- Papirius Fabianus
- Claudianus Mamertus
Place in the tradition
Part of Ancient Roman philosophy.