Stoics and Septics
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page 7
STOICS AND SCEPTICS
FOUR LECTURES DELIVERED IN OXFORD
DURING HILARY TERM 1913 FOR THE
COMMON UNIVERSITY FUND
BY
I
I
EDWYN BEVAN
|
SOMETIME SCHOLAR OF NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD
AUTHOR OF THE HOUSE OF SELEUCUS
'JERUSALEM UNDER THE HIGH PRIESTS
'
'
I
'
'
OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1913
I
page 9
College
Library
^^/
S.
PREFACE
The following four lectures make no pretence of
being an exhaustive account of ancient Stoicism and
If they attain any measure of success, it is
Scepticism.
rather as an impressionist sketch than as a photograph.
far the picture is a true one can be judged only
How
by the impression which other people get, looking at
One hopes, of course, that
the documents as a whole.
some people who come to the fragmentary records
of these two schools for the first time, such a sketch
to
may be useful, as giving them a point of view and some
Would it be too
general notion of what to look for.
ambitious to hope that some people familiar already
with the ancient philosophies might go back to the
documents and find some things stand out in a fresh
light ?
For those unfamiliar with the field, who may wish to
pursue the subject further than four brief lectures can
take them, some indication of the books I have found
The fundamental Zeller goes
The best books or what appear such
me - upon Stoicism are German: A. Bonhoffer's
useful may be welcome.
without saying.
to
-
and Die Ethik des Stoikers Epictet.
These two are practically two volumes of one work, with
Epictet
an
und die
index
them by a
in
Sloa
common.
BonhofFer has supplemented
third smaller book, Epictet
\lcrH9B
und das Neue
page 10
PREFACE
6
Testament^ which may be recommended to any one inter-
ested in the question, What did primitive Christianity
owe to its Hellenistic environment ? a vexed question
-
nowadays.
I
know
Stoa.
is
Its
The worst book upon
which
author has upon the Greek
Curiously enough, this book seems to be
very uncertain hold
language.
Stoicism
German, L. Stein's Die Psychologic der
badness is in part the consequence of the
also
its
one to which English writers on Stoicism refer partithe impression
cularly often as an authority, under
perhaps that anything written in German has standard
Those beginning the study of the subject
worth.
should be warned.
The exposition of Stoicism in these
Gomperz's book
Die Lebensauffassung der griechischen Philosophen. This is
lectures owes a good deal to Heinrich
a vigorous and interesting defence of a certain attitude
to the world.
Gomperz represents that attitude
When
as being precisely the attitude of the ancient Stoics, he
is, I think, open to criticism, but, even so, it seems to
me that he has helped me to understand the true inwardshould have
ness of ancient
Stoicism
done otherwise.
For Posidonius and the Middle Stoa,
better
than
I
A. Schmekel's Die Philosophie der mittleren Stoa (1892)
is now the book.
In French there is a readable mono-
graph by F. Ogereau, Essai sur le systhne philosophique
In English, two books on Stoicism
des Sto'iciens (1885).
have been produced
Davidson's The
Stoic
in recent years. Professor
Creed (1907) and
W. L.
Professor E.
Vernon Arnold's Roman Stoicism (191 1). If the only
references to them in the following lectures express
dissent,
I
hope I shall not be understood
to
deny the
page 11
PREFACE
7
The points on which one feels
merits of either work.
disagreement are naturally the points where one
in
is
moved to speak. When one assents, no remark seems
called for.
Mr. St. George Stock's little book, Stoicism^
Constable's
in
Philosophies
Ancient
and Moderny and
Mr. R. D. Hicks's Stoic and Epicurean (1910)
in
the
Epochs of Philosophy series (Longmans), may also be read
with
On the subject of Posidonius and the
profit.
Professor Gilbert Murray's
third lecture in his recently published book. Four Stages
later Hellenistic
theology.
of Greek Religion^ should by no means be overlooked.
It will take
many people for the first time into a dim
world which
beginning to be explored, and
they could have no more delightful mystagogos than
is
only
A pupil is not in a position to
Professor Murray.
dispense praise
The
gratitude.
to
his
texts
but
he
may
upon which
a
study
master,
express
of the
Old Stoa must be based have been collected by Hans
von Arnim (Stoicorum veterum fragmenta, Leipzig,
There is an earlier
vols, ii and iii, 1903).
vol. i, 1905
collection of the fragments of Zeno and Cleanthes, by
;
A. C. Pearson
(Cambridge University Press, 1891),
because of the commentary by which the
texts are accompanied.
References to earlier writers on
still
useful
Stoicism (Ravaisson, Hirzel, &:c.) will be furnished in
the works I have mentioned to those who wish to push
their studies into the older literature of the subject.
So much for the Stoics.
For the Sceptics, Zeller again
of course.
A recent book dealing specially with the
is
A. Goedeckmeyer's Geschichte des griechischen
Sceptics
Skeptizismus (Leipzig,
1905),
The book is somewhat
page 12
PREFACE
8
pedantic in its classifications and wayward in the position
which
it
assigns to Cicero, but apart from
that
its
judgements seem to me sound, and it puts together the
material in a form which workers in this
part of the
field are
likely to find signally helpful.
Besides monographs devoted
specially to Stoicism or
there
of
Scepticism
are,
course, numerous works of larger
with
these
schools as
of their
compass dealing
part
subject.
Zeller has been
One may also realready referred to.
commend students to consult the histories of
philosophy
by Doring (1903), Windelband (3rd
Ueberweg (loth ed. 1909), the relevant
ed.
19 12), and
part of Hans von
Arnim's contribution to
Hinneberg's Kuhur der Gegenwart (Teil i, Abtheilung v,
Geschichte der
Allgemeine
Philosophie,
1
909), P. Wendland's Die helknistisch-romhche
Kultur (1907), and Chapter II in
The Conflict of Religions in the
Mr. T. R. Glover's
Roman
Early
Empire (1909).
me to express my sense of the
honour done me by the
Delegates of the Common
It
remains only for
University Fund, to whose invitation
these lectures were delivered, and
to
those friends without whose
would never have seen the lio-ht.
o
February^ I9i3'
it
was due that
my sense of obligation
encouragement they
page 17
LECTURE
I
ZENO AND THE STOA
There is a scene familiar to our imaginations from
childhood.
We
see
a
wandering
Semitic
teacher
arraigned before the clever, inquisitive people of Athens.
Somewhere in the background are the great
Periclean
The Semite is
buildings which crown the Acropolis.
declaring to the men of Athens that the Deity dwells
not in temples made with hands, is not confined in His
dealings to one race, but is the Father of all mankind
an atmosphere, as it were, in which they live
-
and move about and exist, without any such material
shape
as
can
be
work of human
of Tarsus
portrayed
art.
in
metal
About 350
or
years
stone,
the
before Paul
through Athens, another Semitic
from
from
a country close to Cilicia
teacher, coming
passed
-
Cyprus, and from a city which, like Tarsus, was an
-
had gone
old Oriental city penetrated by Hellenism
about among the people of Athens, as clever and
that age as in the days of Paul, and
had declared to them that the Deity was One Power,
inquisitive
in
pervading the Universe, and dwelling in all men everywhere, without distinction of race, and that in the ideal
no temples, because no temple, the
work of builders and artificers, could be worthy of
city there would be
page 18
ZENO AND PAUL
14
God.^
-
It Is a remarkable case of history repeating itself
the same background and so great similarity between
Of course
the actors three and a half centuries apart.
the resemblance between Zeno, the Hellenized Phoenician of Citium, and Paul, the Hellenized Hebrew ot
The author of the
Tarsus, is not purely accidental.
Acts has assuredly put into the mouth of his Paul, with
deliberate purpose, phrases characteristic of the teaching
which went back to Zeno.
Nor is the connexion made
arbitrary one; it is the index of
the actual connexion in history between
Stoicism and Christianity.
Looking back, we can see
by the writer an
a great fact
-
more fully than was possible at the moment when the
Acts was written, to
what an extent the Stoic teaching
had prepared the ground in the Mediterranean lands for
the Christian, what large elements of the Stoic tradition
It
were destined to be taken up into Christianity.
a
of
the
coincidence
all
same, something
remains,
strange
that the founder of Stoicism should have come of a race
whose language was almost identical with Hebrew, and
from a Greek-Oriental
city so near to Tarsus.
The
connexion of Stoicism with that region was always a
*
close one. Chrysippus, the second Founder of Stoicism,
'
came from Cilicia, and his
When
successor, another Zeno, from Tarsus itself
Paul lived in Tarsus, as a young man, it was still one
he has been
as
called,
of the chief seats of the Stoic philosophy.
Citium in Cyprus, the native place of Zeno, had a
*
'lepa T€ oi/co8o/x€tv ov%\v Ser/crei* icpov yap ouSev yfiy] vo/At^etv ovSc
KoWov a$iov Koi ayiov oIkoSo/xu^v re epyov Kai (3avav(T(x)v.
Sto'tcorum veterum fragm. vol.
i,
fr.
265.
Arnim,
page 19
FROM CITIUM TO ATHENS
I
15
It
was largely Phoenician in blood.
population which
was ruled by a dynasty of Phoenician petty kings,
whose names figure in the Punic inscriptions found on
From 361 to 312 B.C., within which period
the spot.
twenty years of Zeno's life probably fall, its
of Milk-yathon the son
king was Pumi-yathon the son
the
first
That Zeno himself was a Phoenician is
of Baal-ram.^
implied, I think,
familiarly
<I>oti'tK:tStoz/ he is called
in our records.
by his master Krates in one anecdote.^
the satirist depicts
Timon
him as an old Phoenician woman.''
When the charge was brought against him of stealing
the doctrines of other schools, his enemies were apt
*
to add like a Phoenician '.'*
group of shrewd Semitic
A
families domiciled in Citium, and doing business round
the shores of the Levant
- such, we may
divine, was the
milieu whence Zeno came in his
Athens,
It is
youth to fourth-century
impossible to harmonize all the stories
current in the later tradition about his conversion to
philosophy
;
but one may take as historical, I suppose,
the assertion that he
first
came
to
Athens on some
mercantile enterprise - bringing a cargo of purple from
Phoenicia, says one account.
opens for the young man ;
about things larger
and we are shown
philosophic
Athens
school
at that
'
than
At Athens a new world
people here are talking
commercial gain and loss,
Zeno going ardently from one
to
another.
The atmosphere of
moment is alive with the philosophic
G. A. Cooke, North Semitic Inscriptions, p. 5 5 f.
^
Diog. Laert. vii. 3.
^
Timon Phliasius, Sill. frag. 20, Wachsmuth.
*
Diog. Laert. vii. 25.
page 20
1
ZENO IN ATHENS
6
movement initiated a few generations before by Socrates.
Plato has probably been dead only some thirty years ;
and the impression of his personality is still preserved
by men who knew the Master's living presence.
The rivalry between the different schools keeps discus-
And Zeno seems to have given them all a
sion keen.
- Crates the Cynic,
hearing
successors of Plato in the
Megarian, the
At last he came
Stilpo the
Academy.
to feel that he himself had a message to deliver, and we
are shown him walking up and down the Painted Porch,
arguing energetically and somewhat annoyed
the
at
He is reported on
people who impeded his progress.
one occasion to have pointed to the wooden basis of an
altar
'
which was
visible at the extremity
This once stood
in the
of the Stoa.
middle of the Stoa
it
;
removed out
there, because it got in people's
to yourselves.' ^
please apply the principle
Zeno made Athens his second home
as a metoikos to a
good old age
;
:
was
way
;
he lived there
but he
felt
a
bond
of piety
him, we are told, to the old city in
Cyprus whence he had come when his name was put
still
tie
;
up
in
some public inscription at Athens as
'
Zeno the
^of Citium' at his own request.^
philosopher', they added
made it incumbent upon
to
Citium
felt that his duty
He
him to refuse the citizenship which Athens was ready to
bestow.^
Of the books which he wrote nothing survives
but the titles and a few detached phrases
of his
life
is
anecdotes, in
^
confined to a
;
our knowledge
number of miscellaneous
which the inventiveness of the Athenian
Diog. Laert. vii. 14.
3
Pint.
^
Diog. Laert. vii. 12.
De Sto. Rep. 4.
page 21
THE PERSON OF ZENO
I
story-tellers
may have had a part
17
impossible
now to
Yet even an invented story will probably have
trovatOy and through our fragmentary record
we may still, I think, get the impression of a real man.
check.
been ben
The Stoic tradition, which counted for so much in the
world of later antiquity, was like other movements of
the human spirit in this also
although its development
and success can be in large measure accounted for by
the conditions of the time, by the receptiveness of the
:
world at that particular moment for that particular thing,
still it
owed its first impulse not to any conjunction of
impersonal causes, but to a
human person of singular
individuality and force.
It
is
obvious that Zeno in the
was one
whom
to
later part
of his life
of the considerable figures at Athens, a man
the city as a whole turned in political emer-
gencies, to
whom kings like Antigonus and Ptolemy
paid court.
Something un-Hellenic there must have
been in his appearance to the end, an Asiatic darkness of
skin, a long, straggling, ungainly body, noticeable among
men who had been shaped from youth up by the exercises
of the gymnasium.
Among all the Greek teachers it was
the Cynics whom he had found most congenial, the men
who had set themselves rudely against all that adornment
and amenity of life which went with the Hellenic spirit,
and had proclaimed every distinction between man and
man conventional and worthless.
In a society where
elaborations and
pursued
^
or
refinements, there was something bare and gaunt
with
pleasure was
'
EiT«Ar/s
Trfjo<T)(r'iixaTL
U«8
T€
(T(^6hpa
uLKovofxias.
KoX
artistic
ixyixtvus
(3aijfiafjLKri<i
Diog. Laeit.
B
vii.
-
1
6.
/xiK/joXoyt'u?,
page 22
CHARACTERISTICS
1 8
was it something impressively plain ?
-
in the life of the
man whose food was so spare that the comedians said he
taught his disciples to be hungry, and who seemed to
have no use for the services of slaves.
More self*
restrained than Zeno
'
{Zrjvo)vo^ iyKpaTecTTepo^) became
a proverbial phrase in Athens.^
But it was rather the
reduction of life to a homely simplicity than
any set
mortification of the flesh, for Zeno was
to
ready
grow
genial over the wine-cups, observing that there was
a bitter sort of beans which became
pleasant when
moistened/^
From some of the little characteristics recorded of
him we may, I think, realize his individuality. He had
learned from the Cynics a bluntness of speech which
outraged polite convention. And he delivered himself
with a dogmatic conviction, having a peculiar
way of
throwing his assertions into the form of short compact
arguments, of hard syllogisms, which gave them an
*
It is reasonable
appearance of mathematical certainty.
honour the gods it would not be reasonable to
honour beings which did not exist therefore the gods
to
:
:
exist,'
^
*
Nothing destitute of consciousness and reason
can produce out of itself beings endowed with consciousness and reason
:
the Universe produces
with consciousness and reason
itself not destitute
^
He
Diog. Laert. vii. 27.
Kat
*
beings endowed
therefore the Universe is
of consciousness and reason.' *
ot
6epfioL
TTiKpol ovTcs Pp^xofxivoL
Stoicorum veterumfragm. vol. i, fr.
'
:
Sext.
'
Nihil
yXvKaivovrai.
Arnim,
285.
Emp. adv. math. ix. 133 = frag. 152, Arnim.
quod animi quodque rationis est e.xpers, id generare ex se
page 23
ZENO AND CHRYSIPPUS
I
19
used the Greek language with little regard for Attic sensi-
- whether because he had never
acquired
because he scorned grace
of
of speech -
strange new terms
bilities
quite
a native or
the fine instinct
to
forcing
thouijhts
which had somehow
to
be
carry the
One
uttered.
thinks of Carlyle, only this was a Carlyle with conHis huge earnestness
centration instead of diflFuseness.
We
are told how
expressed itself in vigorous gesture.
he used to illustrate the kataleptike phantasia^ the im-
pression which gets a grasp on reality, by clenching his
fist.i
It is
shall
as
impossible to give such an account of Stoicism
separate clearly the teaching of the founder
from later developments, because any characteristic of the
was apt
Stoic tradition
to be loosely ascribed to Zeno,
and we cannot now disentangle the original teaching
from the new elements incorporated with it by his successors, especially by the great persevering systematizer,
Chrysippus.
field
The titles of Zeno's works cover a wide
- metaphysics,
logic, physics, ethics, rhetoric
- and
body of positive doctrine to which
the later teaching upon a large number of cardinal points
this implies a solid
must have remained tied down.
But one knows how a
difference of emphasis, of tone, may utterly change
any
statement, and one
may suspect that Stoicism, seen, as
we must see it, through the somewhat pedantic medium
of Chrysippus, is not quite what it would appear to us,
potest
animantem
comjx)tcmque
animantes compotesquc rationis.
rationis.'
'
Cic. De nat. deor.
Cic. Acad. Pr. ii.
144
ii.
rationis.
Mundus
autcni
general
Animans est igitur mundus composque
22.
= frag. 66, Arnim.
B 2