The autonomy and self-sufficiency
of the city, its autarkeia, was at the center of the pride that its
citizens felt, and it included especially the freedom of the polis to settle
its quarrels within its own walls. It was, of course, precisely that autarkeia which
so soon after Aristotle’s time would have to yield to the imperial will of
Philip, Alexander and his successors, and then the Romans—who added an alien
law and a bureaucracy as well. (Wayne A.
Meeks, The Moral World of the First Christians [Library of Early
Christianity; Philadelphia, Pa.: The Westminster Press, 1986], 20)
. . . the Stoic does not choose
hardships, even though he welcomes those that come, as “showing the man”
(Epictetus, Discourses 1.24). Furthermore, there is no such metaphysical
dualism behind the Stoic asceticism as there was in some forms of Middle
Platonism. For the Stoic mind and body are both material, and the mind or soul
of the individual will not, any more than the body, is a natural event and
therefore cannot be evil. When the great rhetorician Isocrates called death
“the last of evils” (compare Paul’s “last enemy,” 1 Cor. 15:”6), says Musonius,
he showed that he was no philosopher, for “how could there have been any
smattering of knowledge of or acquaintance with true good and evil in the man
who thought that an evil which is necessary sequel even to the best life” (No.
17; Lutz. P. 111).
The doctrine of the sage’s
“self-sufficiency” (autarkeia), his disdain for all “externals,” makes
the Stoic sound like a radical individualist. Early Stoics, like Cynics always,
underlined the isolation of the sage by dividing all humankind into only two
classes, wise persons and fools. There was no middle ground. Chrysippus had
remarked that you drown just as surely a few inches beneath the surface as the
bottom of the pond (Plutarch, Against the Stoics on Common Conceptions =
Moralis 1063A). So, no matter how near one came to moral perfection, one
was not yet a sage until one’s virtue progress toward this perfection. In later
Stoics idealization of the sage goes so far that Seneca remarked that, like the
phoenix, a good perfection is so rare, the philosopher’s concern must practically
be with those people in between, who are making progress toward wisdom and
goodness. Hence for Musonius as for Plutarch, the struggle to win rational
control, which alone produces ultimately the person still engaged in that
struggle, is not yet immune to the external restraints that affect all humans,
not superior to the duties imposed on all members of society. (Ibid., 50)
