Typing some Classical Antiquity figures

 

A lot of people (WSS, Cogsocionics, some people on Discord) have been typing figures from Classical Antiquity, still, why not do brief typings here, for complete coverage?

Pericles - LIE with an accent on EIE

"Freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it."

Faced with Sparta's superior army in 431 BC, Pericles proposed to abandon Attica, move the rural population inside the Long Walls, let the enemy burn the farms in full view of their owners, and win by outlasting — because Athens had the fleet, the tribute, and the reserve fund, and Sparta did not. The style of the proposal is more significant here than the content. Thucydides records him laying out the numbers to the assembly like a man reading a balance sheet of a long-horizon plan derived from resources and time, held against every emotional pressure the situation could generate (what the ledger had no line for was the plague, which the crowding inside the walls did much to spread, and which killed him in 429). The same faculty runs through the rest of the career, with his clear attraction to organizationally difficult matters — the conversion of the Delian League from alliance into revenue-collecting empire, the Acropolis program financed from imperial tribute and justified, per Plutarch, as an investment that would employ the citizenry and leave permanent capital behind; the household run on strict daily accounting, to his family's irritation; and the meritocratic principle stated in the Funeral Oration, that advancement should follow capacity rather than class. 

The EIE accent supplies the oratory as Plutarch notes, "they spoke of him as 'thundering' and 'lightening' when he harangued his audience, and as 'wielding a dread thunderbolt in his tongue.'" The Funeral Oration itself is also quite an impressive public speech, although a lot of it may be Thucydides' own invention. 

Marcus Aurelius - EII

"You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength. Dwell on the beauty of life."

I see no reason to deviate from the common typing here. Maybe there's some analytical LII accent, and even an extra-dutiful LSI one, but they stay as accents. The decisive evidence is the form of the Meditations rather than its content. This is not a treatise: it has limited systematic content, and no attempt to derive Stoic doctrine from premises, a private notebook of self-admonition, written in the field, never meant for any reader, in which the most powerful man alive talks himself into being decent tomorrow. He rehearses the same handful of duties endlessly: get up and do the work of a human being; the man who wronged you cannot tell good from evil, so pity him rather than hate him; the finest revenge is to be unlike your injurer. 

And the opening book is a ledger of moral debts to particular persons, itemized virtue by virtue. A mind that begins its private reckoning by cataloguing the specific human beings who taught it how to behave is telling you exactly where its ethics live. It should be added that his dutifulness and a strong sense of obligation did not make him harmless; Christians were persecuted under his reign, the wars ground on, and his one bad judgment of a person was the son he left the empire to. 

Plato - ILE with a strong Beta accent (EIE also not implausible)

"Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each."

Plato is a very difficult personality to type, despite his copious writings and major philosophical influence, and I can be convinced for a Ti-accented EIE as his type, too. Despite including some surprisingly egalitarian aspects (like the striking proto-feminism), The Republic is more of a Beta utopia, and the censorship program is specifically about music and modes and the emotional formation of souls — an very Fe-attentive preoccupation. Even the war on poetry reads as a great artist distrusting the seductive power of the non-rational, and legislating against himself. Still, the engine is abstract, definitional-structural, interested in questioning and playing with definitions — what is justice, knowledge, beauty? His characteristic move is the thought-experiment — the ring of Gyges, the city built "in speech" — Ne generating hypotheses for Ti to test. The mythmaking (the famous cave, the chariot of human soul, with the noble white horse and the unruly black horse, Atlantis) can be read as Ne insight as well as Fe emotional inspiration. There's something Ne-ish even the dialogical form, polyphonous in its character, which gives each point of view a relatively equal footing. He founded not a strict movement but a school, which ran some nine hundred years, and included many developments, some at odds with each other — a testament to the multivariant aspects of its founder's thought.

Aristotle - LII with a slight Te accent

"Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom."

He is occasionally typed as LIE, with people apparently deciding that one of the empirical science founders must be a pragmatist by cognition. But his foundational act was the refining of logic itself: the Organon, the study of the form of valid inference abstracted entirely from content, which had no predecessor and needed no observation whatsoever. As Wikipedia notes, "With the Prior Analytics, Aristotle is credited with the earliest systematic study of logic, and his conception of it was the dominant form of Western logic until 19th-century advances in mathematical logic. Kant even stated in the Critique of Pure Reason that with Aristotle, logic reached its completion."

His characteristic operation everywhere else is the same faculty applied to the world — definition by genus and differentia, the ten categories, the four causes, substance and essence, being qua being: the construction of a total classificatory architecture in which every existing thing has its place and its definition. And his own verdict on the hierarchy of goods is decisive: after ten books of eminently practical ethics — habituation, the mean, the trained dispositions of a decent man — the Nicomachean Ethics concludes that the highest human happiness is theoria, contemplation, knowledge pursued for its own sake.

Julian the Apostate - EIE with a strong accent on ILE

"Zeal to do all that is in one's power is, in truth, a proof of piety."

    As the other pre-395 Roman emperor, besides Marcus Aurelius, with substantial surviving personal writings, he's certainly an intriguing character. The revealing thing about his pagan restoration is how he tried to build it: not by reviving the old cults as they had been, but by giving them a priesthood with moral qualifications, a hierarchy of provincial high priests, charitable hospitals and poor-relief — that is, by copying the organizational architecture of the Church he was trying to destroy, because he understood that its power lay in the emotional and communal life it organized. That is an ideologue's instinct, and Julian's whole reign runs on it: a sacred cause adopted in adolescence and pursued as personal mission, complete with a private revelation to found it on (his Hymn to King Helios reads as theology and as testimony), theurgy, dreams, and omens consulted at every turn, and Ammianus Marcellinus, who admired him, noting drily that his sacrifices grew excessive and his appetite for popularity conspicuous. When Antioch mocked the emperor's philosopher's beard and his austerities, Julian's response was neither punishment (like a more brutal ruler might have done) nor philosophical indifference, but a published satire, a theatrical performance of wounded irony posted for the city to read. The philosophical treatises point out to a substantial intellectual NT accent, and in his personal manner, while not a softie, he was far more "democratic" than most of other Late Antique emperors.


    Comments