In last night's zoom it became clear to me that it would be good to have an additional timeline beyond what we have now (TIMELINES: Joshua's Timeline of Epicureanism From Classical Athens to Late Antiquity and Nate's Timeline of Ancient Epicurean History)
I focus on this because of the recent reading I've been doing that indicates how the development of skepticism was in the process of blowing up the Academy and how there were many reactions to it - with Stoics and Epicureans to some degree in alignment in response to this negative development. And there are key names in this war over skepticism that are not familiar parts of our discussions at all, including Arcesilaus, Carneades, Panaetus and others cited by Cicero as important, etc.
What's missing it seems to me is a parallel presentation of (1) the leaders of the Academy, Lyceum, and Stoa over the next hundred or so years from Epicurus' time up to the Roman period, and (2) the political leaders of Athens and Rome over the same period. We know that Epicurus was corresponding with the court of Lysemachus during his own time, and the other leaders thereafter would have also had significant impact on what was going on within the schools.
At the moment I'm just putting this out there for us to consider as we go forward, but I think we'd get important context from such a chart showing both the political context AND the leaders of the major schools, probably starting at the time of Plato and going up all the way through Julius Caesar.
All these names and dates can get overwhelming, but rather then try to incorporate everyone from the dawn of history to the present, we'd get a lot out of focusing on the period from Plato to Cicero to see how the Epicurean debates were affected by current leaders and events.
