Stoics

For he too, having learned from the barbarian philosophy, knows of the purification by fire of those who have lived ill — which the Stoics afterwards called conflagration;

And the Stoics too say that certain things were written by Zeno the first, which they do not readily permit the disciples to read, unless they have first given proof whether they philosophize genuinely.

" The Stoics define nature as a craftsmanlike fire, going by a way toward generation;

To Zeno the Stoic the soul seems to be fire.

The Stoics, however, grant us a tenancy, as it were, like that of crows:

— Is there any reason, then, why we should not dismiss our friends the Stoics?

in the meantime I summon you to those Stoics who, shut out from public life, have withdrawn to the cultivation of life and the framing of laws for the human race, without any offence to those in power.

Some of the Stoics answer against this thus:

I had spared you, and had passed over whatever knotty matter still remained, content to give you, as it were, a taste of the things said by our school, to prove that virtue alone is effective enough to fill out the happy life.

What has Chrysippus left out among the Stoics?

But at Athens — as I used to hear from my father, who jested at the Stoics with wit and elegance — there is in the Ceramicus a statue of Chrysippus seated with hand outstretched, and the hand signifies that he took delight in this little question:

But there is this difference, that pleasure is spoken of also in the mind — a faulty thing, as the Stoics think, who define it thus:

and they censured Antipater the Stoic, who had been much occupied in it.

From whose number both Plato and Socrates must be removed — the one because he left behind a most perfect school, the Peripatetics and the Academics, differing in name but agreeing in substance, from whom the Stoics themselves dissented in words rather than in opinions;

But that first premise — that the wise man, if he were to assent, would also hold an opinion — the Stoics say is false, and Antiochus their supporter;

For they hold that the wise are friends to the wise even though unknown to one another;

Our school, on the whole, divides this whole question of the immortal gods into four parts.

For it befits a philosopher, a pontiff, and Cotta to hold about the immortal gods an opinion not wandering and unsettled, as the Academics do, but, as we Stoics do, firm and certain.

Cicero in the third book of his Bounds of Good and Evil, and in other parts of his works, proves with great erudition from the writings of the Stoics, that there are certain first principles of nature, called by the Greeks the first natural impressions, which are succeeded by other principles of obligation superior even to the first impressions themselves.

In opposition to the Stoics, and others, who admitted the dread of servitude, sickness, or any other calamity, or even the ambitious love of glory to be a just cause of voluntary death, in opposition to them, the Platonists justly maintain, that the soul must be retained in the custody of the body, from which it cannot be released, but at the command of him, who gave it.

For the Stoics maintain it not to be lawful, as may be seen from a fragment in Stobaeus, under the title of Magistracy, from Cicero’s speech for Murena, and towards the conclusion of Seneca’s books on Clemency;

But it is well that the Stoics affirm even the arts to be corporeal.

And I do not mean only those who fashion it out of manifest bodily things — as Hipparchus and Heraclitus out of fire, as Hippo and Thales out of water, as Empedocles and Critias out of blood, as Epicurus out of atoms (if atoms too compose corporealities by their conjunction), as Critolaus and his Peripatetics out of some fifth substance I know not what (if that too is a body, since it includes bod …

’ More moderately the Stoics do not charge every sense nor always with falsehood.

2 Take, according to the Stoic doctrine, two kinds of ungrateful men.

but no one can profit a wicked man, as you Stoics say;

For, turned from the Christians to the philosophers, from the Church to the Academy and the Porch, he took from there, from the Stoics, the notion of setting Matter alongside the Lord — Matter which, on his view, has itself always existed, neither born nor made, having no beginning at all nor end, out of which the Lord afterwards made all things.

For the Stoics will have it that God ran through Matter as honey through honeycombs.

Now there is the saying of the Stoic:

But I think it must be reckoned, as our intimate Antiochus held, a correction of the Old Academy rather than any new school.

or if we pursue the Old Academy, which, as you know, I approve, how acutely it will have to be expounded by us, how subtly, how darkly even we must dispute against the Stoics!

Zeno cries out, and that whole Porch is in an uproar, that man was born for nothing else than honourableness, that honourableness by its own splendour draws men's minds to itself with no advantage whatever set outside it and no enticing reward, and that the pleasure of Epicurus is shared only among the beasts, into whose company it is a sin to thrust both man and the wise man.

’ There are many kinds of statement, and none more twisted than this, in which Chrysippus hopes the Chaldaeans will be content for the sake of the Stoics.

Wherefore, if it is consistent for the Stoics, who say that all things come to pass by fate, to approve oracles of this kind and the other things that are derived from divination, while the same is not to be said by those who say that the things which are future are true from all eternity—see to it that the case of the latter be not the same as that of the Stoics;

whereas I have, by way of amusement, cast into the form of commonplaces those very propositions which the Stoics scarcely uphold even in their lecture-halls and at their leisure.

whereas Cato, in my judgment a perfect Stoic, both holds views that are by no means approved among the crowd, and belongs to that school which pursues no flower of oratory and does not amplify its argument, but accomplishes what it has set out to prove by minute little questions, as it were by pin-pricks.

And because these propositions are astonishing and run counter to everyone's opinion — they are even called by the Stoics themselves *paradoxa* — I wished to test whether they could be brought out into the light, that is, into the forum, and stated in such a way as to win assent, or whether learned discourse is one thing and popular discourse another;

Nor indeed will I pass by the Stoics, who say that the divine pervades all matter, even the meanest, who simply disgrace philosophy.

nay, even to the Stoics themselves they seem hard to comprehend;

Surely your own Stoics declare:

Now I shall prove to you that I am not deserting the precepts of the Stoics;

Our school deny that the wise man will attach himself to any and every commonwealth;

But when I say "our own," I do not bind myself to any one of the chiefs of the Stoics;

Meanwhile, in accordance with what all the Stoics agree upon, I give my assent to the nature of things;

And so I shall not say, as most of my school do, that the sect of Epicurus is a teacher of vice, but I say this:

We may dispute with Socrates, doubt with Carneades, find peace with Epicurus, conquer human nature with the Stoics, exceed it with the Cynics.

Do not think this hardness belongs to the Stoics alone:

For these our Stoics have pronounced wise men, unconquered by toils, despisers of pleasure, and victors over every terror.

the Stoics, having entered upon the manly road, are not concerned that it should seem pleasant to those who set out upon it, but that it should snatch us away as soon as possible and lead us out to that lofty summit which has risen so far beyond the reach of every missile that it towers above fortune.

placing too matter, with God the Creator, from the porch of the Stoics;

Come now, let the Pythagoreans learn, let the Stoics acknowledge, let Plato himself learn, whence Matter—which they will have to be unborn—drew both its origin and substance for all this fabric of the world;

Some affirm him to be incorporeal, others corporeal — as the Platonists and the Stoics respectively;

but the Stoics place him outside the world, to whirl this mass from without after the manner of a potter;

he had come from the Stoics.