The term “ancient philosophy” consists of two elements – the words “ancient” and “philosophy”, each of which gives the whole expression its own specific semantic shade. The word “ancient” comes from the Latin antiquus, which means “ancient”. In this sense, “ancient philosophy” is “ancient” philosophy and represents a conditional set of theoretical, aesthetic and ethical ideas of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. At the same time, “ancient philosophy” is “philosophy”. This word goes back to the Greek φιλοσοφία, literally “loving attitude towards wisdom”. Wisdom was understood by the Greeks as perfect and sufficient knowledge, and the “loving attitude” towards it was interpreted differently – by each philosopher exclusively from within his unique philosophical experience. In this sense, “ancient philosophy” is the philosophy of the ancient Greeks and Romans – regardless of antiquity as such – in fact, for the ancients their philosophy did not seem “ancient”, but was quite “timely” and “modern”.
For the ancient Greek, philosophy begins with wonder, moves with curiosity, passes in doubt and ends in a riddle. “What is known is known to few,” wrote Aristotle in “Poetics.” Philosophical wonder is caused by ordinary and seemingly universally understood things: law, beauty, virtue, order, morality, justice, fate, God, soul, thinking, the universe, etc. The originality and uniqueness of the ancient philosophical tradition lies in the fact that in it all these things were first understood in their entirety, i.e. were consistently presented as a problem, as a concept and as a value. This process of comprehensive understanding of the world, nature and man took place in Antiquity as if in two dimensions: within the framework of the entire philosophical tradition in general (here it will be sufficient to mention the “problematic approach” of archaism, the “conceptual” approach of Attic classicism, the “value” approach of Hellenism) and within a separate individual philosophical generation. What seemed a mystery and a miracle to some philosophers, for others acquired the status of understandable and indubitable, only to later lose its obviousness and cause surprise with renewed vigor. The diversity of philosophical theories, points of view and ideas is a characteristic feature of the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition.
The most characteristic features of the ancient philosophical tradition as a whole also include: a) a general focus on reasonable (“rational”) comprehension of the natural interconnection of things; b) a close connection between philosophical experience and aesthetic experience: almost all philosophical teachings of the ancient world are based on the idea of a perfect, beautiful, rational structure of the cosmos (universe), and the desire for perfection is declared the goal of all philosophical pursuits in essence; c) instability of the conceptual apparatus: philosophical and scientific terminology in Ancient Greece was always in constant motion and comprehension; d) the priority of the universal over the individual: a separate thing, a person, an individual in the ancient philosophical tradition always represented only a “special case” of the manifestation of the general – the type of thing, the world order, the law, the polis (state) and being.