THREE strains merged in Greek philosophy: the physical, the metaphysical, and the ethical. The physical culminated in Aristotle, the metaphysical in Plato, the ethical in Zeno of Citium. The physical development ended in the separation of science from philosophy in Archimedes and Hipparchus; the metaphysical ended in the skepticism of Pyrrho and the later Academy; the ethical remained until Epicureanism and Stoicism were conquered or absorbed by Christianity.
Amid this spreading Hellenistic culture Athens—mother of much of it, mistress of most of it—retained her leadership in two realms: the drama and philosophy. The world was not too busy with war and revolutions, new sciences and new religions, the love of beauty and the quest of gold, to spare some time for the unanswerable but inescapable problems of truth and error, matter and mind, freedom and necessity, nobility and baseness, life and death. From all the cities of the Mediterranean young men made their way, often through a thousand hardships, to study in the halls and gardens where Plato and Aristotle had left almost living memories.
At the Lyceum the industrious Theophrastus of Lesbos carried on the empirical tradition. The Peripatetics were scientists and scholars rather than philosophers; they devoted themselves to specialist research in zoology, botany, biography, and the history of science, philosophy, literature, and law. In his thirty-four years of leadership (322-288) Theophrastus explored many fields, and published four hundred volumes dealing with almost every subject from love to war. His pamphlet “On Marriage” severely handled the female sex, and was severely handled in turn by Epicurus’ mistress Leontium, who wrote a learned and devastating reply.1 Nevertheless it is to Theophrastus that Athenaeus attributes the tender sentiment that “it is through modesty that beauty becomes beautiful.”2 Diogenes Laertius describes him as “a most benevolent man, and very affable”; so eloquent that his original name was forgotten in that which Aristotle gave him, meaning that he spoke like a god; so popular that two thousand students flocked to his lectures, and Menander was among his most faithful followers.3 Posterity preserved with especial care his book of Characters, not because it created a literary form, but because it sharply satirized the faults that all men ascribe to other men. Here is the Garrulous Man who “begins with a eulogy of his wife, relates the dream he had the night before, tells dish by dish what he had for supper,” and concludes that “we are by no means the men we were” in former times. And here is the Stupid Man who “when he goes to the play, is left at the end fast asleep in an empty house . . . after a hearty supper he has to get up in the night, returns only half awake, misses the right door, and is bitten by his neighbor’s dog.”4
One of the few events in Theophrastus’ life was the issuance of a state decree (307) requiring the Assembly’s approval in the selection of leaders for the philosophical schools. About the same time Agnonides indicted Theophrastus on the old charge of impiety. Theophrastus quietly left Athens; but so many students followed him that the storekeepers complained of a ruinous fall in trade. Within a year the decree was annulled, the indictment was withdrawn, and Theophrastus returned in triumph to preside over the Lyceum almost till his death at eighty-five. “All Athens,” we are told, attended his funeral. The Peripatetic school did not long survive him: science left impoverished Athens for affluent Alexandria, and the Lyceum, which had dedicated itself to research, subsided into a penurious obscurity.
Meanwhile Speusippus had succeeded Plato, and Xenocrates Speusippus, at the Academy. Xenocrates governed the school for a quarter of a century (339-314), and brought new credit to philosophy by the honorable simplicity of his life. Absorbed in study and teaching, he left the Academy but once a year, to see the Dionysian tragedies; when he appeared, says Laertius, “the turbulent and quarrelsome rabble of the city made way for him to pass.”5 He refused all fees, and became so poor that he was on the verge of being imprisoned for taxes when Demetrius of Phalerum paid his arrears and had him freed. Philip of Macedon said that among the many Athenian ambassadors sent to him Xenocrates was the only one who proved incorruptible. His reputation for virtue annoyed Phryne. Pretending that she was being pursued, she took refuge in his house; and seeing that he had but one bed she asked if she might share it with him. He consented, we are told, out of humane considerations; but he proved so cold to her entreaties and her charms that she fled from his bed and board, and complained to her friends that she had found a statue instead of a man.6 Xenocrates would have no mistress but philosophy.
With his death the metaphysical strain in Greek thought neared exhaustion in the very grove that had been its shrine. The successors of Plato were mathematicians and moralists, and spent little time on the abstract questions that had once agitated the Academy. The skeptical challenges of Zeno the Eleatic, the subjectivism of Heracleitus, the methodical doubt of Gorgias and Protagoras, the metaphysical agnosticism of Socrates, Aristippus, and Eucleides of Megara resumed control of Greek philosophy; the Age of Reason was over. Every hypothesis had been conceived, aired, and forgotten; the universe had preserved its secret, and men had grown weary of a search in which even the most brilliant minds had failed. Aristotle had agreed with Plato on only one point—the possibility of acquiring ultimate truth.7 Pyrrho voiced the suspicions of his time in suggesting that it was above all on this point that they had both been mistaken.
Pyrrho was born at Elis about 360. He followed Alexander’s army to India, studied under the “Gymnosophists” there, and perhaps learned from them something of the skepticism for which his name became a synonym. Returning to Elis he lived in serene poverty as a teacher of philosophy. He was too modest to write books, but his pupil Timon of Phlius, in a series of Silloi or Satires, sent Pyrrho’s opinions abroad into the world. These opinions were basically three: that certainty is unattainable, that the wise man will suspend judgment and will seek tranquillity rather than truth, and that, since all theories are probably false, one might as well accept the myths and conventions of his time and place. Neither the senses nor reason can give us sure knowledge: the senses distort the object in perceiving it, and reason is merely the sophist servant of desire. Every syllogism begs the question, for its major premise assumes its conclusion. “Every reason has a corresponding reason opposed to it”;8 the same experience may be delightful or unpleasant according to circumstance and mood; the same object may seem small or large, ugly or beautiful; the same practice may be moral or immoral according to where and when we live; the same gods are or are not, according to the different nations of mankind; everything is opinion, nothing is quite true. It is foolish, then, to take sides in disputes, or to seek some other place or mode of living, or to envy the future or the past; all desire is delusion. Even life is an uncertain good, death not a certain evil; one should have no prejudices against either of them. Best of all is a calm acceptance: not to reform the world, but to bear with it patiently; not to fever ourselves with progress, but to content ourselves with peace. Pyrrho tried sincerely to live this half-Hindu philosophy. He conformed humbly with the customs and worship of Elis, made no effort to avoid dangers or prolong his life,9 and died at the age of ninety. His fellow citizens so approved of him that in his honor they exempted philosophers from taxation.
By the irony of time it was the followers of Plato who carried forward this attack upon metaphysics. Arcesilaus, who became head of the “Middle Academy” in 269, transformed Plato’s rejection of sense knowledge into a skepticism as complete as Pyrrho’s, and probably under Pyrrho’s influence10 “Nothing is certain,” said Arcesilaus, “not even that.”11 When he was told that such a doctrine made life impossible he answered that life had long since learned to manage with probabilities. A century later a still more vigorous skeptic took charge of the “New Academy,” and pressed the doctrine of universal doubt to the point of intellectual and moral nihilism. Carneades of Cyrene, coming to Athens like a Greek Abelard about 193, made life bitter for Chrysippus and his other teachers by arguing with galling subtlety against every doctrine that they taught. As they had undertaken to make him a logician he used to say to them (turning the tables on Protagoras): “If my reasoning is right, well and good; if it is wrong, give me back my tuition fee.”12 When he set up shop for himself he lectured one morning for an opinion, the next morning against it, proving each so well as to destroy both; while his pupils, and even his biographer, sought in vain to discover his real views. He undertook to refute the materialistic realism of the Stoics by a Platonic-Kantian critique of sensation and reason. He attacked all conclusions as intellectually indefensible, and bade his students be satisfied with probability and the customs of their time. Sent to Rome by Athens as one of an embassy (155), he shocked the Senate by speaking one day in defense of justice, and on the morrow deriding it as an impracticable dream: if Rome wished to practice justice it would have to restore to the nations of the Mediterranean all that it had taken from them by superior force.13 On the third day Cato had the embassy sent home as a danger to public morals. Perhaps Polybius, who was then a hostage with Scipio, heard these addresses or of them, for he speaks with the anger of a practical man against those philosophers
who in the discussions of the Academy have trained themselves in extreme readiness of speech. For some of them, in their efforts to puzzle the minds of their hearers, resort to such paradoxes, and are so fertile in inventing plausibilities, that they wonder whether or not it is possible for those in Athens to smell eggs roasted in Ephesus, and are in doubt whether all the time they are discussing the matter in the Academy they are not lying in their beds at home and composing this discourse in a dream. . . . From this excessive love of paradox they have brought all philosophy into disrepute. . . . They have implanted such a passion in the minds of our young men that they never give even a thought to the ethical and political qaestions that really benefit students of philosophy, but spend their lives in the vain attempt to invent useless absurdities.14
Though he described for many ages the theorist who loses his life in the cobwebs of speculation, Polybius was wrong in supposing that moral problems had lost their lure for the Greek mind. It was precisely the ethical strain that in this period replaced the physical and the metaphysical as the dominant note in philosophy. Political problems were indeed in abeyance, for freedom of speech was harassed by the presence or memory of royal garrisons, and national liberty was implicitly understood to depend upon quiescence. The glory of the Athenian state had departed, and philosophy had to face what to Greece was an unprecedented divorce between politics and ethics. It had to find a way of life at once forgivable to philosophy and compatible with political impotence. Therefore it conceived its problem no longer as one of building a just state, but as that of forming the selfcontained and contented individual.
The ethical development now took two opposite directions. One followed the lead of Heracleitus, Socrates, Antisthenes, and Diogenes, and expanded the Cynic into the Stoic philosophy; the other stemmed from Democritus, leaned heavily on Aristippus, and drew out the Cyrenaic into the Epicurean creed. Both of these philosophical compensations for religious and political decay came from Asia: Stoicism from Semitic pantheism, fatalism, and resignation; Epicureanism from the pleasure-loving Greeks of the Asiatic coast.
Epicurus was born at Samos in 341. At twelve he fell in love with philosophy; at nineteen he went to Athens and spent a year at the Academy. Like Francis Bacon he preferred Democritus to Plato and Aristotle, and took from him many bricks for his own construction. From Aristippus he learned the wisdom of pleasure, and from Socrates the pleasure of wisdom; from Pyrrho he took the doctrine of tranquillity, and a ringing word for it—ataraxia. He must have watched with interest the career of his contemporary Theodoras of Cyrene, who preached an unmoralistic atheism so openly in Athens that the Assembly indicted him for impiety15—a lesson that Epicurus did not forget. Then he returned to Asia and lectured on philosophy at Colophon, Mytilene, and Lampsacus. The Lampsacenes were so impressed with his ideas and his character that they felt qualms of selfishness in keeping him in so remote a city; they raised a fund of eighty minas ($4000), bought a house and garden on the outskirts of Athens, and presented it to Epicurus as his school and his home. In 306, aged thirty-five, Epicurus took up his residence there, and taught to the Athenians a philosophy that was Epicurean in name only. It was a sign of the growing freedom of women that he welcomed them to his lectures, even into the little community that lived about him. He made no distinctions of station or race; he accepted courtesans as well as matrons, slaves as well as freemen; his favorite pupil was his own slave, Mysis. The courtesan Leontium became his mistress as well as his pupil, and found him as jealous a mate as if he had secured her by due process of law. Under his influence she had one child and wrote several books, whose purity of style did not interfere with her morals.16
For the rest Epicurus lived in Stoic simplicity and prudent privacy. His motto was lathe biosas—“live unobtrusively.” He took part dutifully in the religious ritual of the city, but kept his hands clear of politics, and his spirit free from the affairs of the world. He was content with water and a little wine, bread and a little cheese. His rivals and enemies charged that he gorged himself when he could, and became abstemious only when overeating had ruined his digestion. “But those who speak thus are all wrong,” Diogenes Laertius assures us; and he adds: “There are many witnesses of the unsurpassable kindness of the man to everybody—both his own country, which honored him with statues, and his friends, who were so numerous that they could not be contained in whole cities.”17 He was devoted to his parents, generous to his brothers, and gentle to his servants, who joined with him in philosophical studies.18 His pupils looked upon him, says Seneca, as a god among men; and after his death their motto was: “Live as though the eye of Epicurus were upon thee.”
Between his lessons and his loves he wrote three hundred books. The ashes of Herculaneum preserved for us some fragments of his central work, On Nature; Diogenes Laertius, the Plutarch of philosophy, handed down three of his letters, and late discoveries have added a few more. Above all, Lucredus enshrined the thought of Epicurus in the greatest of philosophical poems.
Perhaps already conscious that Alexander’s conquest was letting loose upon Greece a hundred mystic cults from the East, Epicurus begins with the arresting proposition that the aim of philosophy is to free men from fear—more than anything else, from the fear of gods. He dislikes religion because, he thinks, it thrives on ignorance, promotes it, and darkens life with the terror of celestial spies, relentless furies, and endless punishments. The gods exist, says Epicurus, and enjoy, in some far-off space among the stars, a serene and deathless life; but they are too sensible to bother with the affairs of so infinitesimal a species as mankind. The world is not designed, nor is it guided, by them; how could such divine Epicureans have created so middling a universe, so confused a scene of order and disorder, of beauty and suffering?19 If this disappoints you, Epicurus adds, console yourself with the thought that the gods are too remote to do you any more harm than good. They cannot watch you, they cannot judge you, they cannot plunge you into hell. As for evil gods, or demons, they are the unhappy fantasies of our dreams.
Having rejected religion, Epicurus goes on to reject metaphysics. We can know nothing of the suprasensual world; reason must confine itself to the experience of the senses, and must accept these as the final test of truth. All the problems that Locke and Leibnitz were to debate two thousand years later are here settled with one sentence: if knowledge does not come from the senses, where else can it come from? And if the senses are not the ultimate arbiter of fact, how can we find such a criterion in reason, whose data must be taken from the senses?
Nevertheless the senses give us no certain knowledge of the external world; they catch not the objective thing itself, but only the tiny atoms thrown off by every part of its surface, and leaving upon our senses little replicas of its nature and form. If, therefore, we must have a theory of the world (and really it is not altogether necessary), we had better accept Democritus’ view that nothing exists, or can be known to us, or can even be imagined by us, except bodies and space; and that all bodies are composed of indivisible and unchangeable atoms. These atoms have no color, temperature, sound, taste, or smell; such qualities are created by the corpuscular radiations of objects upon our sense organs. But the atoms do differ in size, weight, and form; for only by this supposition can we account for the infinite variety of things. Epicurus would like to explain the operation of the atoms on purely mechanical principles; but as he is interested in ethics far more than in cosmology, and is anxious to preserve free will as the source of moral responsibility and the prop of personality, he abandons Democritus in mid-air, and supposes a kind of spontaneity in the atoms: they swerve a bit from the perpendicular as they fall through space, and so enter into the combinations that make the four elements, and through them the diversity of the objective scene.20 There are innumerable worlds, but it is unwise to interest ourselves in them. We may assume that the sun and the moon are about as large as they appear to be, and then we can give our time to the study of man.
Man is a completely natural product. Life probably began by spontaneous generation, and progressed without design through the natural selection of the fittest forms.21 Mind is only another kind of matter. The soul is a delicate material substance diffused throughout the body.22 It can feel or act only by means of the body, and dies with the body’s death. Despite all this we must accept the testimony of our immediate consciousness that the will is free; else we should be meaningless puppets on the stage of life. It is better to be a slave to the gods of the people than to the Fate of the philosophers.23
The real function of philosophy, however, is not to explain the world, since the part can never explain the whole, but to guide us in our quest of happiness. “That which we have in view is not a set of systems and vain opinions, but much rather a life exempt from every kind of disquietude.”24 Over the entrance to the garden of Epicurus was the inviting legend: “Guest, thou shalt be happy here, for here happiness is esteemed the highest good.” Virtue, in this philosophy, is not an end in itself, it is only an indispensable means to a happy life.25 “It is not possible to live pleasantly without living prudently, honorably, and justly; nor to live prudently, honorably, and justly without living pleasantly.”26 The only certain propositions in philosophy are that pleasure is good, and that pain is bad. Sensual pleasures are in themselves legitimate, and wisdom will find some room for them; since, however, they may have evil effects, they need such discriminating pursuit as only intelligence can give.
When, therefore, we say that pleasure is the chief good we are not speaking of the pleasures of the debauched man, or those that lie in sensual enjoyment. . . but we mean the freedom of the body from pain, and of the soul from disturbance. For it is not continued drinkings and revels, or the enjoyment of female society, or feasts of fish or other expensive foods, that make life pleasant, but such sober contemplation as examines the reasons for choice and avoidance, and puts to flight the vain opinions from which arises most of the confusion that troubles the soul.27
In the end, then, understanding is not only the highest virtue, it is also the highest happiness, for it avails more than any other faculty in us to avoid pain and grief. Wisdom is the only liberator: it frees us from bondage to the passions, from fear of the gods, and from dread of death; it teaches us how to bear misfortune, and how to derive a deep and lasting pleasure from the simple goods of life and the quiet pleasures of the mind. Death is not so frightful when we view it intelligently; the suffering it involves may be briefer and slighter than that which we have borne time and again during our lives; it is our foolish fancies of what death may bring that lend to it so much of its terror. And consider how little is needed to a wise contentfresh air, the cheapest foods, a modest shelter, a bed, a few books, and a friend. “Everything natural is easily procured, and only the useless is costly.”28 We should not fret our lives out in realizing every desire that comes into our heads: “Desires may be ignored when our failure to accomplish them will not really cause us pain.”29 Even love, marriage, and parentage are unnecessary; they bring us fitful pleasures, but perennial grief.30 To accustom ourselves to plain living and simple ways is an almost certain road to health.31 The wise man does not burn with ambition or lust for fame; he does not envy the good fortune of his enemies, nor even of his friends; he avoids the fevered competition of the city and the turmoil of political strife; he seeks the calm of the countryside, and finds the surest and deepest happiness in tranquillity of body and mind. Because he controls his appetites, lives without pretense, and puts aside all fears, the natural “sweetness of life” (hedone) rewards him with the greatest of all goods, which is peace.
This is a likably honest creed. It is encouraging to find a philosopher who is not afraid of pleasure, and a logician who has a good word to say for the senses. There is no subtlety here, and no warm passion for understanding; on the contrary Epicureanism, despite its transmission of the atomic theory, marks a reaction from the brave curiosity that had created Greek science and philosophy. The profoundest defect of the system is its negativity: it thinks of pleasure as freedom from pain, and of wisdom as an escape from the hazards and fullness of life; it provides an excellent design for bachelorhood, but hardly for a society. Epicurus respected the state as a necessary evil, under whose protection he might live unmolested in his garden, but he appears to have cared little about national independence; indeed, his school seems to have preferred monarchy to democracy, as less inclined to persecute heresy32—an arresting inversion of modern beliefs. Epicurus was ready to accept any government that offered no hindrance to the unobtrusive pursuit of wisdom and companionship. He dedicated to friendship the devotion that earlier generations had given to the state. “Of all the things that wisdom provides for the happiness of the whole life, by far the most important is friendship.”33 The friendships of the Epicureans were proverbial for their permanence; and the letters of the master abound in expressions of ardent affection.34 His disciples returned this feeling with Greek intensity. Young Colotes, on first hearing Epicurus speak, fell on his knees, wept, and hailed him as a god.35
For thirty-six years Epicurus taught in his garden, preferring a school to a family. In the year 270 he was brought down with the stone. He bore the pains stoically, and on his deathbed found time to think of his friends. “I write to you on this happy day which is the last of my life. The obstruction of my bladder, and the internal pains, have reached the extreme point, but there is marshaled against them the delight of my mind in thinking over our talks together. Take care of Metrodorus’ children in a way worthy of your lifelong devotion to me and to philosophy.”36 He willed his property to the school, hoping “that all those who study philosophy may never be in want. . . so far as our power to prevent it may extend.”37
He left behind him a long succession of disciples, so loyal to his memory that for centuries they refused to change a word of his teaching. His most famous pupil, Metrodorus of Lampsacus, had already shocked or amused Greece by reducing Epicureanism to the proposition that “all good things have reference to the belly”38—meaning, perhaps, that all pleasure is physiological, and ultimately visceral. Chrysippus countered by calling the Gastrology of Archestratus “the metropolis of the Epicurean philosophy.”39 Popularly misunderstood, Epicureanism was publicly denounced and privately accepted in wide circles throughout Hellas. So many Hellenizing Jews adopted it that Apiköros was used by the rabbis as a synonym for apostate.40 In 173 or 155 two Epicurean philosophers were expelled from Rome on the ground that they were corrupting youth.41 A century later Cicero asked, “Why are there so many followers of Epicurus?”42 and Lucretius composed the fullest and finest extant exposition of the Epicurean system. The school had professed adherents until the reign of Constantine, some of them, by their lives, degrading the name of the master to mean “epicure,” others faithfully teaching the simple maxims into which he had once condensed his philosophy: “The gods are not to be feared; death cannot be felt; the good can be won; all that we dread can be conquered.”43
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.48 Recognizing 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.56 Sometimes 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 pneuma diffused 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.
The conflict between religion and philosophy had now seen three stages: the attack on religion, as in the pre-Socratics; the endeavor to replace religion with a natural ethic, as in Aristotle and Epicurus; and the return to religion in the Skeptics and the Stoics—a movement that culminated in Neo-Platonism and Christianity. A like sequence has occurred more than once in history, and may be taking place today. Thales corresponds to Galileo, Democritus to Hobbes, the Sophists to the Encyclopedists, Protagoras to Voltaire; Aristotle to Spencer, Epicurus to Anatole France; Pyrrho to Pascal, Arcesilaus to Hume, Carneades to Kant, Zeno to Schopenhauer, Plotinus to Bergson. The chronology resists the analogy, but the basic line of development is the same.
The age of the great systems gave way to doubt in the ability of reason either to understand the world or to control the impulses of men into order and civilization. The skeptics were such not in the Humian but in the Kantian sense: they doubted philosophy as well as dogma, sapped the foundations of materialism, and advised a quiet acceptance of the ancient cult; in Pyrrho, as in Pascal, skepticism led not from but to religion, and Pyrrho himself ended as the venerated high priest of his city. The Epicurean abandonment of politics for ethics, the flight from the state to the soul, could only represent a moment in the return of the pendulum; and the concentration on individual salvation paved the way for a religion that would appeal to the individual rather than to the state. There were many who could not find in life the consolations that had satisfied Epicurus; poverty, misfortune, disease, bereavement, revolution, or war overtook them, and all the counsels of the sage left them empty-souled. Hegesias of Cyrene, though he started like Epicurus from the standpoint of the Cyrenaics, concluded that life has in it more pain than pleasure, more grief than joy, and that the only logical outcome of a naturalistic philosophy is suicide.* Philosophy, like a prodigal daughter, after bright adventures and dark disillusionments, gave up the pursuit of truth and the quest of happiness, returned repentant to her mother, religion, and sought again in faith the foundations of hope and the sanctions of charity.
Stoicism, while seeking to construct a natural ethic for the intellectual classes, sought to preserve the old supernatural aids for the morality of the common man, and, as time went on, gave a more and more religious color to its own metaphysical and ethical thought. Zeno denied any real existence to the popular gods,67 but a generation later Cleanthes proposed to prosecute Aristarchus for heresy. Zeno offered no personal immortality, but Seneca spoke of heavenly bliss in terms almost identical with those of the Eleusinian and Christian faiths.68 After Zeno Stoicism became a theology rather than a philosophy, and nearly every proposition in it took a theological form. The greater part of the system was composed of arguments about the existence and nature of God, the emanation of the world from God, the reality of Providence, the correspondence of virtue with the divine will, the brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God, and the final return of the world to God. In this philosophy we find the sence of sin that was to play so stern a role in primitive and in Protestant Christianity, the lofty inclusiveness that as in the new religions welcomed all races and ranks, and a celibate asceticism that derived from the Cynics and culminated in a long line of Christian monks. From Zeno of Tarsus to Paul of Tarsus was but a step, which would be taken on the road to Damascus.
Many components of the Stoic creed were Asiatic in origin, some were specifically Semitic. In essentials Stoicism was one elemental phase of the Oriental triumph over Hellenic civilization. Greece had ceased to be Greece before it was conquered by Rome.