Half-free will

.. or Oenomaus, Revisited.

Berlin, typically, who hold the prestigious Oxford chair of the history of ideas, thoguht he would teach his friend Hampshire a historic lesson or two. Hampshire, like Spinoza, is forgetting the idea of a half-free will.

Hemidoulia ("half-slavery") was coined by Oenomaus.

Oenomaus was a slave (vide wiki below). He should not be confused with Oenomaus, a philosopher, a cynic, and a linguist. Unlike Oenomaus, Oenomaus felt that there was a word missing in the Greek language: "half-slave" -- and so he coined it ("hemidoulia", "hemidoulos"). Little did he know that he was implicating (or perhaps entailing) a word whose idea behind Berlin fails to explicity trace ("we want the whole loaf", he irreverently writes): "half-free". Oenomaus, or Oinomaus, if you must, thougth, contra Epictetus, that our will is only Half Free.

Of course, in peoples who never had the Institution of Slavery, you won´t have this subtle discussions. Native Americans, for example, possibly lacked the notion of "free" (or "slave" for that matter). It´s a bit like surnames. "Joseph London". The idea is that he was called "London", or "Londoner" in a place OTHER than London. For anyone would be a Londoner in London. And so forth.

But I should elaborate on that. Or not.

J. L. Speranza

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Oinomaus or Oenomaus or Œnomaus, as I prefer, wiki tells me, was a gladiator from Gaul, [Orosius, Histories 5.24.1] who escaped from the gladiatorial school of Lentulus Batiatus in Capua. Together with the Thracian Spartacus and a fellow Gaul, Crixus, he became one of the leaders of rebellious slaves during the Third Servile War (73-71 BC), but died early in the war, alas. Oenomaus was involved in one of the first major successes of the slave army, the rout of the army of the praetor Gaius Claudius Glaber, who had tried to lay siege to the slave army near Mount Vesuvius. Oenomaus fell in an early battle even before his fellow commander, Crixus, died, possibly during the winter of 73-72 BC when the slave armies were plundering cities and towns in the south of Italy (Orosius, Histories 5.24.2; Bradley 96). Oenomaus appears as a character in Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of Spartacus ("Spartacus!"), and actually he engages in song-and-dance double act with him.

cfr.

Oenomaus (or Oinomaus, or Oinomaos, literally, Greek: Οiνόμαος; 2nd century) -- or Œnomaus, as I prefer. Of Gadara. A Cynic philosopher. He is known principally for the long extracts of a work attacking oracles, which have been preserved among the writings of Eusebius of Caesarea. He was a native of Gadara, which was then a partially Hellenized community in northern Palestine. One of four philosophers listed in the Chronicle of Jerome, as flourishing in the 3rd year of Hadrian's reign (119 AD). It has been suggested that he is identical to Abnimos ha-Gardi, who is mentioned several times in the Talmud as the pagan friend of Rabbi Meir. Although this is not impossible, there is nothing in the Jewish stories to provide a convincing link to Oenomaus. According to the Suda, Oenomaus wrote the following works: "On Cynicism", ·"Republic",
"On philosophy according to Homer", "On Crates and Diogenes and other subjects". The Emperor Julian also mentions that Oenomaus wrote tragedies. Against the Oracle (Greek: Κατα χρηστηρίων), or "Detection of Deceivers" (Greek: Γοήτων Φωρά, Latin: Detectio Praestigiatorum) he wrote, provoked as he was to write it, having himself been deceived by an oracle. Naturally, not everyone in the Roman world was impressed Oenomaus' thoughts; the Emperor Julian accused him of impiety.
"Let not the Cynic be shameless or impudent after the fashion of Oenomaus, a scorner of all things divine and human: rather let him be, like Diogenes, reverent towards the divine."
Oenomaus, like most Cynics, was not an atheist, but he did view the gods as being unconcerned with human affairs.

One of his targets was the Stoics who held that Fate (Ananke, Necessity) governs everything and yet admitted human "liberty" (eleutheria, cfr. eleutheros) in how we respond to Fate.
---- "For surely the most ridiculous of all things is this, the mixture and combination of the two notions, that there is something in men's own power, and that there is nevertheless a fixed chain of causation."

Hence his "half-slave" (hemidoulia) and "half-free" (hemieleutheros).

This apparent contradiction was at the heart of Oenomaus's attack on oracles, since Apollo at Delphi, far from being able to do what he could do of his own free will, would be "compelled" by Fate to make his pronouncements.
More importantly, oracular pronouncements, according to Oenomaus, if true, remove "free-will" from human beings --. Epictetus was using stuff like "eleutheros" applied to "will".

Refs.

Donald R. Dudley, (1937), A History of Cynicism, p. 162. Methuen
Suda, Oinomaos
Julian, Oration, vii.
Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica, book v. 18-36; book vi. 7.
Julian, Oration, vi.