Chrysippus, the greatest of the Stoics,[1017] continued and expanded the principle that virtue is the only absolute good, and that all other things are indifferents, depending for their worth upon right use.[1018] But since the wise alone are capable of right use of externals, they alone are truly wealthy.[1019] They are wealthy, even though beggars, and noble though slaves.[1020] They are not eager for wealth[1021] yet they are good economists, since they know the proper source,[1022] time, method, and extent of money-making. The worthless, on the other hand, are most needy, even though wealthy.[1023] Chrysippus seems to have advanced still farther, in teaching the negative doctrine that wealth is an evil, since it may come from an evil source,[##] an idea suggestive of the modern theory of “tainted money.” Naturally, he with the other Stoics, was in sympathy with the Socratics, in objecting to the use of one’s knowledge for purposes of money-making.[1024] The cosmopolitan attitude of the Stoics caused them to be opposed to the theory of slavery as a natural institution.[1025] They taught that enforced service is no evidence of slavery,[1026] but that the real slaves are the ignoble and foolish.[1027] The wise, on the other hand, alone are free, though they are slaves to countless masters.[1028] Chrysippus, like Zeno, probably had dreams of a future ideal state, where the highest eternal law would rule and individual strivings would be lost in the care for the common weal.[1029] If he taught family communism, it was doubtless in a Platonic form.[1030] Utopian social theories after the time of Aristotle were by no means limited to those of Zeno and Chrysippus. As Souchon has observed,[1031] the period between the end of the fourth and the beginning of the second centuries was especially favorable to such speculation. The skeptical criticism of the Sophists had prepared the following generations to call in question the most elementary social principles. Ideal states, such as those of Phaleas and Plato, had opened the way for future imitations. The conquests of Alexander had broadened the vision of the Greek, so that he no longer thought in terms of Plato’s circumscribed city, but rather in terms of a world-state. Moreover, the utter political confusion and unstable economic conditions of the time aroused the more serious-minded to dream of an ideal past or golden age; to idealize the simple, “natural” life of the so-called “pious” barbarian nomads,[1032] or even of the animal world, as opposed to the “artificial” conditions of civilization; and to exaggerate the virtues and communistic character of the old Spartan constitution.[1033] The social theories were largely Stoic in tendency, and thus present a strange combination of individualistic and communistic ideas.[1034]