History of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russell [148]
Stoicism is less Greek than any school of philosophy with which we have been hitherto concerned. The early Stoics were mostly Syrian, the later ones mostly Roman. Tarn (Hellenistic Civilization, p. 287) suspects Chaldean influences in Stoicism. Ueberweg justly observes that, in Hellenizing the barbarian world, the Greeks dropped what only suited themselves. Stoicism, unlike the earlier purely Greek philosophies, is emotionally narrow, and in a certain sense fanatical; but it also contains religious elements of which the world felt the need, and which the Greeks seemed unable to supply. In particular, it appealed to rulers: 'nearly all the successors of Alexander—we may say all the principal kings in existence in the generations following Zeno—professed themselves Stoics,' says Professor Gilbert Murray.
Zeno was a Phoenician, born at Citium, in Cyprus, at some time during the latter half of the fourth century B.C. It seems probable that his family were engaged in commerce, and that business interests were what first took him to Athens. When there, however, he became anxious to study philosophy. The views of the Cynics were more congenial to him than those of any other school, but he was something of an eclectic. The followers of Plato accused him of plagiarizing the Academy. Socrates was the chief saint of the Stoics throughout their history; his attitude at the time of his trial, his refusal to escape, his calmness in the face of death, and his contention that the perpetrator of injustice injures himself more than his victim, all fitted in perfectly with Stoic teaching. So did his indifference to heat and cold, his plainness in matters of food and dress, and his complete independence of all bodily comforts. But the Stoics never took over Plato's doctrine of ideas, and most of them rejected his arguments for immortality. Only the later Stoics followed him in regarding the soul as immaterial; the earlier Stoics agreed with Heraclitus in the view that the soul is composed of material fire. Verbally, this doctrine is also to be found in Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, but it seems that in them the fire is not to be taken literally as one of the four elements of which physical things are composed.
Zeno had no patience with metaphysical subtleties. Virtue was what he thought important, and he only valued physics and metaphysics in so far as they contributed to virtue. He attempted to combat the metaphysical tendencies of the age by means of common sense, which, in Greece, meant materialism. Doubts as to the trustworthiness of the senses annoyed him, and he pushed the opposite doctrine to extremes.
'Zeno began by asserting the existence of the real world. "What do you mean by real?" asked the Sceptic. "I mean solid and material. I mean that this table is solid matter." "And God," asked the Sceptic, "and the Soul?" "Perfectly solid," said Zeno, "more solid if anything, than the table." "And virtue or justice or the Rule of Three; also solid matter?" "Of course," said Zeno, "quite solid."'1
It is evident that, at this point, Zeno, like many others, was hurried by anti-metaphysical zeal into a metaphysic of his own.
The main doctrines to which the school remained constant throughout are concerned with cosmic determinism and human freedom. Zeno believed that there is no such thing as chance, and that the