III. THE STOIC COMPROMISE

Since an increasing number of Epicurus’ followers interpreted him as counseling the pursuit of personal pleasure, the essential problem of ethics—what is the good life?—had reached not a solution but only a new formulation: how can the natural epicureanism of the individual be reconciled with the stoicism necessary to the group and the race?—how can the members of a society be inspired to, or frightened into, the self-control and self-sacrifice indispensable to collective survival? The old religion could no longer fulfill this function; the old city-state no longer lifted men up to self-forgetfulness. Educated Greeks turned from religion to philosophy for an answer; they called in philosophers to advise or console them in the crises of life; they asked from philosophy some world view that would give to human existence a permanent meaning and value in the scheme of things, and that would enable them to look without terror upon the certainty of death. Stoicism is the last effort of classical antiquity to find a natural ethic. Zeno tried once more to accomplish the task in which Plato had failed.

Zeno was a native of jCitium in Cyprus. The city was partly Phoenician, chiefly Greek; Zeno is frequently called a Phoenician, sometimes an Egyptian; he was almost certainly of mixed Hellenic and Semitic parentage.⁴⁴ Apollonius of Tyre describes him as thin, tall, and dark; his head was bent to one side, and his legs were weak; Aphrodite, though Hephaestus was no better, would have surrendered him to Athena. Having no distractions, he rapidly amassed wealth as a merchant; when he first came to Athens, we are told, he had over a thousand talents. According to Diogenes Laertius he was shipwrecked on the Attic coast, lost his fortune, and arrived in Athens, about 314, almost destitute.⁴⁵ Sitting down by a bookseller’s stall he began to read Xenophon’s Memorabilia, and was soon fascinated by the character of Socrates. “Where are such men to be found today?” he asked. At that moment Crates, a Cynic philosopher, passed by. “Follow that man,” the bookseller advised him. Zeno, aged thirty, enrolled in Crates’ school, and rejoiced in having discovered philosophy: “I made a prosperous voyage,” he said, “when I was wrecked.”⁴⁶ Crates was a Theban who had turned over his fortune of three hundred talents to his fellow citizens and had taken up the ascetic life of a Cynic mendicant. He denounced the sexual looseness of his time, and counseled hunger as a cure for love. His pupil Hipparchia, having plenty to eat, fell in love with him, and threatened to kill herself unless her parents gave her to him. They begged Crates to dissuade her, which he tried to do by laying his beggar’s wallet at her feet, saying: “This is all my fortune; think now what you are doing.” Undiscouraged, she left her rich home, donned the beggar’s garb, and went to live with Crates in free love. Their nuptials, we are informed, were consummated in public, but their lives were models of affection and fidelity⁴⁷

Zeno was impressed by the stern simplicity of the Cynic life. The followers of Antisthenes had now become the Franciscan monks of antiquity, vowed to poverty and abstinence, sleeping in any natural shelter that they came upon, and living upon the alms of people too industrious to be saints. Zeno took from the Cynics the outlines of his ethic, and did not conceal his debt. In his first book, The Republic, he was so far under their influence that he espoused an anarchist communism in which there should be no money, no property, no marriage, no religion, and no laws.⁴⁸Recognizing that this utopia and the Cynic regimen offered no practicable program of life, he left Crates and studied for a time with Xenocrates at the Academy, and with Stilpo of Megara. He must have read Heracleitus receptively, for he incorporated into his own thought several Heracleitean ideas—the Divine Fire as the soul of man and of the cosmos, the eternity of law, and the repeated creation and conflagration of the world. But it was his custom to say that he owed most of all to Socrates, as the fountainhead and ideal of the Stoic philosophy.

After many years of humble tutelage Zeno at last, in 301, set up his own school by discoursing informally as he walked up and down under the colonnades of the Stoa Poecile, or Pointed Porch. He welcomed poor and rich alike, but discouraged the attendance of young men, feeling that only mature manhood could understand philosophy. When a youth talked toe much Zeno informed him that “the reason why we have two ears and only one mouth is that we may hear more and talk less.”⁴⁹ Antigonus II, when in Athens, attended Zeno’s classes, became his admiring friend, sought his advice, seduced him into momentary luxury, and invited him to come and live as his guest in Pella. Zeno excused himself and sent his pupil Persaeus instead. For forty years* he taught in the Stoa, and lived a life so consistent with his teachings that “more temperate than Zeno” became a proverb in Greece. Despite his intimacy with Antigonus the Athenian Assembly gave him the “keys to the walls,” and voted him a statue and a crown. The decree read:

Whereas Zeno of Citium has passed many years in our city in the study of philosophy, being in all other respects a good man (sic), and also exhorting all the young men who have sought his company to the practice of temperance; making his own life a model of the greatest excellence . . . it has been resolved by the people to honor Zeno . . . to present him with a golden crown . . . and to build him a tomb in the Ceramicus at the public expense.⁵¹

“He died,” says Laertius, “in the following manner,” reputedly in his ninetieth year. “When he was going out of his school he tripped and broke a toe. Striking the ground with his hand, he repeated a line from the Niobe: ‘I come; why call me so?’ And immediately he strangled himself.”⁵²

His work at the Stoa was carried on by two Asiatic Greeks—by Cleanthes of Assus and then by Chrysippus of Soli. Cleanthes was a pugilist who came to Athens with four drachmas, worked as a common laborer, refused public relief, studied for nineteen years under Zeno, and lived a life of industry and ascetic poverty. Chrysippus was the most learned and prolific of the school; he gave the Stoic doctrine its historic form by expounding it in 750 books, which Dionysius of Halicarnassus held up as models of learned dullness. After him Stoicism spread throughout Hellas, and found its greatest exponents in Asia: in Panaetius of Rhodes, Zeno of Tarsus, Boethus of Sidon, and Diogenes of Seleucia. Out of the casual fragments that survive from a once voluminous literature we must piece together a composite picture of the most widespread and influential philosophy in the ancient world.

It was probably Chrysippus who divided the Stoic system into logic, natural science, and ethics. Zeno and his successors prided themselves on their contributions to logical theory, but the streams of ink that flowed from them on this subject have left no appreciable residue of enlightenment or use.* The Stoics agreed with the Epicureans that knowledge arises only out of the senses, and placed the final test of truth in such perceptions as compel the assent of the mind by their vividness or their persistence. Experience, however, need not lead to knowledge; for between sensation and reason lies emotion or passion, which may distort experience into error even as it distorts desire into vice. Reason is the supreme achievement of man, a seed from the Logos Spermatikos, or Seminal Reason, that made and rules the world.

The world itself, like man, is at once completely material and inherently divine. Everything that the senses report to us is material, and only material things can cause or receive action. Qualities as well as quantities, virtues as well as passions, soul as well as body, God as well as the stars, are material forms or processes, differing in degrees of fineness, but essentially one.⁵⁴ On the other hand all matter is dynamic, full of tensions and powers, perpetually engaged in diffusion or concentration, and animated by an internal and eternal energy, heat, or fire. The universe lives through innumerable cycles of expansion and contraction, development and dissolution; periodically it is consumed in a grand conflagration, and slowly it takes form again; then it passes through all its previous history, even in minutest detail;* for the chain of causes and effects is an unbreakable circle, an endless repetition. All events and all acts of will are determined; it is as impossible for anything to happen otherwise than it does as it is for something to come out of nothing; any break in the chain would disrupt the world.

God, in this system, is the beginning, the middle, and the end. The Stoics recognized the necessity of religion as a basis for morality; they looked with a genial tolerance upon the popular faith, even upon its demons and its divination, and found allegorical interpretations to bridge the chasm between superstition and philosophy. They accepted Chaldean astrology as essentially correct, and thought of earthly affairs as in some mystic and continuous correspondence with the movements of the stars⁵⁵—one phase of that universal sympatheia by which whatever happened to any part affected all the rest. As if preparing not only an ethic but a theology for Christianity, they conceived the world, law, life, the soul, and destiny in terms of God, and defined morality as a willing surrender to the divine will. God, like man, is living matter; the world is his body, the order and law of the world are his mind and will; the universe is a gigantic organism of which God is the soul, the animating breath, the fertilizing reason, the activating fire.⁵⁶Sometimes the Stoics conceive God in impersonal terms; more often they picture him as a Providence designing and guiding the cosmos with supreme intelligence, adjusting all its parts to rational purposes, and making everything redound to the use of virtuous men. Cleanthes identifies him with Zeus in a monotheistic hymn worthy of Ikhnaton or Isaiah:

Thou, O Zeus, art praised above all gods: many are thy names and thine is all power for ever.

The beginning of the world was from thee: and with law thou rulest over all things.

Unto thee may all flesh speak: for we are thy offspring.

Therefore will I raise a hymn unto thee: and will ever sing of thy power.

The whole order of the heavens obeyeth thy word: as it moveth around the earth:

With little and great lights mixed together: how great art thou, King above all for ever!

Nor is anything done upon the earth apart from thee: nor in the firmament, nor in the seas:

Save that which the wicked do: by their own folly.

But thine is the skill to set even the crooked straight: what is without fashion is fashioned and the alien akin before thee.

Thus hast thou fitted together all things in one: the good with the evil:

That thy word should be one in all things: abiding for ever.

Let folly be dispersed from our souls: that we may repay thee the honor wherewith thou hast honored us:

Singing praise of thy works for ever: as becometh the sons of men.⁵⁷

Man is to the universe as microcosm to macrocosm; he too is an organism with a material body and a material soul. For whatever moves or influences the body, or is moved or influenced by the body, must be corporeal. The soul is a fiery breath or pneumadiffused through the body, just as the world soul is diffused through the world. At death the soul survives the body, but only as an impersonal energy. At the final conflagration the soul will be reabsorbed, like Atman into Brahman, into that ocean of energy which is God.

Since man is a part of God or Nature, the problem of ethics can be easily solved: goodness is co-operation with God, or Nature, or the Law of the World. It is not the pursuit or enjoyment of pleasure, for such pursuit subordinates reason to passion, often injures the body or the mind, and seldom satisfies us in the end. Happiness can be found only through a rational adjustment of our aims and conduct to the purposes and laws of the universe. There is no contradiction between the good of the individual and the good of the cosmos, for the law of well-being in the individual is identical with the law of Nature. If evil comes to the good man it is only temporary, and is not really evil; if we could understand the whole we should see the good behind whatever evil appears in the parts.* The wise man will study science only sufficiently to find the law of Nature, and will then adapt his life to that Law. Zen kata physin, to live according to Nature—this is the purpose and sole excuse of science and philosophy. Almost in Newman’s words Cleanthes surrenders his will to God’s:

Lead me, O God, and thou my Destiny,

To that one place which you will have me fill.

I follow gladly. Should I strive with thee,

A recreant, I needs must follow still.⁵⁹

The Stoic, therefore, will shun luxury and complexity, economic or political strife; he will content himself with little, and will accept without complaint the difficulties and disappointments of life. He will be indifferent to everything but virtue and vice—to sickness and pain, good or ill repute, freedom or slavery, life or death. He will suppress all feelings that may obstruct the course or question the wisdom of Nature: if his son dies he will not grieve, but will accept Fate’s decree as in some hidden way the best. He will seek so complete an apatheia, or absence of feeling, that his peace of mind will be secure against all the attacks and vicissitudes of fortune, pity, or love.† He will be a hard teacher and a stern administrator. Determinism does not imply indulgence; we must hold ourselves, and others, morally responsible for every action. When Zeno beat his slave for stealing, and the slave, having a little learning, said, “But it was fated that I should steal,” Zeno answered, “And that I should beat you.”⁶¹ The Stoic looks upon virtue as its own reward, and as an absolute duty or categorical imperative, derived from his participation in divinity; and he will console himself, in misfortune, by remembering that in following the divine law he becomes an incarnate god.⁶² When he is tired of life, and can leave it without injuring others, he will have no scruples against suicide. Cleanthes, having reached his seventieth year, entered upon a long fast; and then, saying that he would not go back after coming halfway, continued it until he died.⁶³

The Stoic, however, is not unsocial, neither so proud of poverty as the Cynic, nor so enamored of solitude as the Epicurean. He accepts marriage and the family as necessary, though he has no praise for romantic love; he dreams of a utopia in which all women will be in common.⁶⁴ He accepts the state, even monarchy; he has no fond memories of the city-state, and considers the average man a dangerous simpleton; he prefers the Antigonids to King Mob. In truth he cares little for any government; he wishes that all men might be philosophers, so that laws would be unnecessary; he thinks of perfection not, as Plato and Aristotle did, in terms of the good society, but in terms of the good man. He may take part in political affairs, and will support every move, however modest, toward human freedom and dignity; but he will not fetter his happiness to place or power. He may give his life for his country, but he will reject any patriotism that hinders his loyalty to all mankind; he is a citizen of the world. Zeno, in whose veins, as we have seen, there probably flowed both Greek and Semitic blood, longed like Alexander for a breaking down of racial and national barriers, and his internationalism reflects Alexander’s passing unification of the eastern Mediterranean world. Ultimately, Zeno and Chrysippus hoped, all those warring states and classes would be replaced by one vast society in which there would be no nations, no classes, no rich or poor, no masters or slaves; in which philosophers would rule without oppression, and all men would be brothers as the children of one God.⁶⁵

Stoicism was a noble philosophy, and proved more practicable than a modern cynic would expect. It brought together all the elements of Greek thought in a final effort of the pagan mind to create a system of morals acceptable to the classes that had abandoned the ancient creed; and though it naturally won only a small minority to its standard, those few were everywhere the best. Like its Christian counterparts, Calvinism and Puritanism, it produced the strongest characters of its time. Theoretically it was a monstrous doctrine of an isolated and pitiless perfection. Actually it created men of courage, saintliness, and good will like Cato the Younger, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius; it influenced Roman jurisprudence in building a law of nations for non-Romans; and it helped to hold ancient society together until a new faith came. The Stoics lent countenance to superstition, and had an injurious effect upon science; but they saw clearly the basic problem of their age—the collapse of the theological basis of morals—and they made an honest attempt to bridge the gap between religion and philosophy. Epicurus won the Greeks, Zeno won the aristocracy of Rome; and to the end of pagan history the Stoics ruled the Epicureans, as they always will. When a new religion took form out of the intellectual and moral chaos of the dying Hellenistic world, the way had been prepared for it by a philosophy that acknowledged the necessity of faith, preached an ascetic doctrine of simplicity and self-restraint, and saw all things in God.