The Theory of Moral Sentiments - Adam Smith [270]
36 Milton, Paradise Lost 2.568-569.
37 See Plutarch, Lives, “Cleomenes” 37 and Polybius 5.39.
38 Of the Messian hero Aristomenes, to whom Smith presumably refers, there is no story of suicide. Smith may have confused him with the Aristomenes who attempts suicide in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses (1.16), or Aristodemus, a Messian hero of the previous century, who is reported to have committed suicide (Pausanias 4.13.4).
39 Ancient accounts of his suicide include Aristophanes, Knights 83-84; Plutarch, Lives, “Themistocles” 31; Diodorus Siculus 11.58; the story is rejected in Thucydides 1.138; Cornelius Nepos, “Themistocles” and Cicero, Brutus 42-43.
40 On Theramenes’ death, see Diodorus Siculus 14.4-5; Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 1.40. On Phocion’s death, see Plutarch, Lives, “Phocion” 34-37; Diodorus Siculus, 18.66-67. On Socrates’, see note above.
41 The betrayal to which Smith refers happened after the battle of Gabiene (316 BC). On Eumenes’ death, see Plutarch, Lives, “Eumenes” 17-19; Diodorus Siculus 19.43-44.
42 See Plutarch, Lives, “Philopoemen” 18-20; Livy 39.49-50; Pausanias 8.51.5-7.
43 Several stories of the suicides of various Greek philosophers are told or alluded to in Diogenes Laertius; see, e.g., 2.120, 2.144, 4.3, 6.76-77, 6.95, 6.100, 7.167, 8.40, 10.15-16.
44 All three accounts are in Diogenes Laertius 7.28-31; Diogenes himself accepts the first, as Smith notes below. The story of Niobe, whose children were killed by Apollo in retaliation for her pride in her fertility, was first told by Homer (Iliad 24) and then by Aeschylus and Sophocles (in lost works), but not Euripides.
45 Persaeus’s ostensible slavery is reported in Aulus Gellius 2.18.
46 Augustus Caesar ruled 27 BC-AD 14; Zeno died c. 263 BC. On the Apollonius to whom Smith here refers, see Diogenes Laertius 7.6, 24, 28.
47 Zeno’s death is noted in Lucian, Long Lives 19 (now thought spurious); and Lactantius, Divine Institutes 3.18.
48 See, e.g., Cicero, De officiis 3.99-111; Cicero, De finibus 2.65; Seneca, De providentia 3.9-11; Aulus Gellius 7.4; Augustine, City of God 1.15.
49 On the death of Cato, see also the note on Sallust above. Cicero’s posthumous praises in his Cato in 46 BC were challenged in Caesar’s much longer (though now largely lost) Anticato.
50 Smith’s reference is untraced.
51 See Seneca, De tranquillitate animi 17.9.
52 Pliny frequently describes suicides and attempted suicides (see, e.g., 1.12, 3.7, 3.9, 3.16, 6.24), and himself sets down a rule for distinguishing noble from cowardly suicides (1.22).
53 The question of suicide’s legitimacy was reopened in part by Hume’s posthumous 1777 publication of his essay “Of Suicide” which sought to marshal “the sentiments of all the ancient philosophers” (though it only explicitly mentions Seneca, Tacitus, and Pliny) to defend a view of suicide as not blameworthy.
54 Smith’s recognition of two distinct strains within Roman Stoicism—one emphasizing self-command, and the other benevolence—distinguishes his view from, e.g., Gataker (“Maxims of the Stoics”) or Hume (“The Stoic”), who share Smith’s emphases on providentialism and benevolence but emphasize self-command to a lesser degree. Some of the tensions in Smith’s conception of Stoicism are traceable in part to his differentiation of these strains.
55 The slave is Epictetus. Domitian (AD 51-96), Roman Emperor from 81 to his death, banished the philosophers from Italy in 89, only eighteen years after Vespasian had banished philosophers from Rome (including Demetrius; see note above).
56 On the beauties of the ordinary, see esp. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 3.2; on death and old age, see Meditations 9.3.
57 On the physician’s prescriptions, see Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 5.8; on the loss of children, see Meditations 11.34, 12.26.
58 See Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 4.23.
59 Smith’s critique of the Stoic paradoxes continues a line of critique dating