Roman Stoicism: being lectures on the history of the Stoic philosophy with special reference to its development within the Roman EmpireArnold, Edward Vernon
Religion
Roman Stoicism: being lectures on the history of the Stoic philosophy with special reference to its development within the Roman Empire
Arnold, Edward Vernon
Stoics
=72.= The members of the Peripatetic school founded by Aristotle are of
less importance to us. The Romans found little difference between their
teaching and that of the earlier Academy. Cicero mentions that the
Stoic Panaetius was a keen student of two of the pupils of Aristotle,
THEOPHRASTUS (his successor as head of the Peripatetic school) and
DICAEARCHUS[19]; amongst later teachers in whose views he is interested
he names HIERONYMUS, who held that the supreme good was freedom from
pain[20]; CALLIPHO, who combined virtue with pleasure, and DIODORUS who
combined it with freedom from pain[21]; and amongst his contemporaries
STASEAS of Naples, who stated the same doctrines in a slightly different
form[22], and CRATIPPUS, whom he selected as a teacher for his own
son[23]. It was a common complaint of these teachers that the Stoics
had stolen their doctrines wholesale, and (as is the way with thieves)
had altered the names only[24]. All these writers however agree in
denying the doctrine which Zeno accepted from the Cynics that ‘virtue is
sufficient for happiness,’ and lay stress upon the supply of external
goods (χορηγία) as needed to admit of the active exercise of virtue. They
were diligent students of the written works of their founder, and thus
opened the way for the work of erudition and interpretation which found
its centre in Alexandria in a later period.
[Sidenote: Zeno.]
=73.= Amidst the conflict of these schools ZENO grew up. Born in Citium
on the island of Cyprus in 336 B.C., in the same year in which Alexander
became king of Macedon, he heard as a boy of the Greek conquest of
the East, and was only 13 years of age when its course was checked by
the death of Alexander. Of the town of Citium the inhabitants were
partly Greek, partly Phoenician; and Zeno, whether or not he was of
Phoenician blood, certainly derived from his environment something of
the character of the enterprising and much-travelled Phoenician nation,
and imparted this trait to the school which he founded. He was nicknamed
by his contemporaries ‘the Phoenician,’ and the title clung to his
followers[25]. His father was a merchant of purple, and often travelled
in the one direction to Tyre and Sidon, in the other as far as Athens,
whence he brought back a number of ‘Socratic books,’ which were eagerly
read by the young Zeno, and in time attracted him to the famous Greek
city[26]. We may presume that when he first came to Athens he intended
to carry further his studies without abandoning his calling; but when
news reached him of the wreck of the ship which carried all his goods,
he welcomed it as a call to devote himself entirely to philosophy[27].
His first step in Athens was to seek out the man who best represented the
character of Socrates, as represented in Xenophon’s Memoirs; and it is
said that a bookseller accordingly pointed him to CRATES of Thebes[28],
the pupil and (it would seem) the successor of Diogenes as acknowledged
head of the Cynic school.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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