Introduction

Sources

The Stoics were a philosophical school of the Hellenistic period and in the Roman Empire . The name comes not from the founder but from a description  of the place where they used to do their teaching in Athens : the stoa poikile or ‘painted porch.’ We will be dealing with a school of philosophy in this lecture rather than concentrating on some single important philosopher. The reason for this is that there is very little writing remaining from the founder of the school – a chap called Zeno of Citium (344-262) (Citium is in Cyprus) or from his earliest followers; and most of those who came along later to modify the doctrine only seem to have made relatively minor changes, so they can’t really be the focus of our studies; and the people who wrote summaries or critiques or propaganda or other works from which we find out what the doctrines of the school were are also pretty insignificant – philosophically speaking.

You’ll see in the iLearn site that I’ve given links to a few people who are useful in this respect.

1. We learn a good deal about the Stoic philosophy from Cicero, the Roman lawyer, orator, essayist and enemy of Caesar. Being an enemy of Caesar wasn’t a particularly wise move. He died. His book ‘On The Ends: of Good and of Evil’ is a general study of the philsophphies that were dominant in the in the 1^st C BC . It talks about the Epicureans and the Academy of Plato , and it also has a section where describing and critiquing the Stoics. Cicero wasn’t a Stoic himself, but he tried to be a fair commentator. (A lot of the other sources, like the early Christian controversialists, for example, were not at all interested in being fair: they were only interested in debunking an enemy school.)

2. There’s an essay by Seneca, who was a Roman Stoic and who wrote a good deal of moral advice for his friends and acquaintances. Amongst those acquaintances was the Emperor Nero to whom he was an advisor. At first he did some good in that role, possibly moderating some of that wicked or insane man’s crimes, but eventually Nero had him commit suicide.

3. There’s a book of sayings gathered from the teachings of Epictetus, who is probably the best known Stoic philosopher these days. His Enchiridion, or ‘handbook,’ is a bit disjointed and disorganized and lack much in the way of an argument structure, but you may find them entertaining.

4. The same is true of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. He was a student of Epictetus, but more significantly, he was the Emperor of Rome during a period that Gibbon described as one of the great ages of peace in the world.

None of these sources are particularly outstanding as guides to the complete Stoic moral philosophy: that has to be cobbled together from a lot of obscure sources (few of which have any online presence) and with a good deal of interpretation. More than in most cases, we’re going to have to rely upon secondary sources.

Background

The Stoic school arose in a world that was quite different from the world of Socrates and Plato. That world we called the Classical Period of Greece, and it was organized as a collection of city states, all of whom considered that they were or ought to be independent of any of their neighbouring cities. As I think I mentioned, it was as if we accepted that Tweed Heads should be an independent state, and Surfer’s Paradise another one, and those two allied against their eternal enemies in Robina. These small states, however had all been comprehensively conquered by Alexander in the time of Aristotle, and incorporated in his world empire which stretched all the way to India . Even after Alexander’s death there was no essential return to the old organization, for the Empire was then divided amongst his generals into smaller successor empires which still did not allow independence for the constituent cities, although the idea of the city continued. This period is known as the Hellenistic period. (Actually there are firm dates for this period: begins 323BC with the death of Alexander and ends 31BC with Battle of Actium. Why then? Dunno.)

The Hellenistic world was eventually largely taken over by the Romans. The Romans had a much more emphatically imperial mission, and there was no room for the Greek ideal of independent cities in their world. There was only room for one city and that was Rome . Given that the ideals that were rationalised in the ethics of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were closely tied to the ideal of the city-state, many people have thought that the change to a different social ideal must have had an effect upon the type of ethics that was likely to be appropriate. The Epicureans, for example, rejected the idea of civic life entirely, as did the Cynics, whereas the Stoics reacted in what might seem to be the opposite way by treating the whole world as a single city. (With respect to that last observation – note that one could argue that if everything is in the city then the city isn’t a useful division of the social world, and so we might as well eliminate it from our considerations – it’s a bit like public property is no-one’s property.) On the other hand, as we shall see, the Hellenistic philosophers were still concerned with getting happiness, and still thought that happiness was to be got from virtue, and still made a tight connection between virtue and knowledge – just like the three greats of the classical period.

We may also be able to detect a degree of fatalism that could be blamed on the fact that a man in an imperial system has little opportunity to shape his own fate – or at least, he’s more impressed by the large impersonal forces that shape his fate than is the man who lives in a small, largely agricultural, mostly tribal or clan-based society. Some have argued that, more than this, the disturbances of the time – meaning famine, war, and revolution – were such that pessimism became the order of the day. The new philosophical movements, in reaction, became less concerned with pure speculation and more concerned with providing security for the individual. It has been said, for example, that Stoicism was “a system put together hastily, violently, to meet a bewildered world.”[1] That may be so, but there’s no real indication that those disturbances were greater than they had been, so perhaps – if there’s any truth to this at all – it is a reaction to the perceived instability and isolation and helplessness.

Schools

In any case, it is just a fact that the moral thought of the Hellenistic period was changed somewhat from the moral thought that had preceded it. In this period there were many different philosophical schools; of which the most important were the Sceptics, the Epicureans and the Stoics. The Sceptics don’t need to concern us too much because they were a generally negative school of philosophy who merely told people that they didn’t know the things that they thought they knew – and that they never could know those things. The sceptical approach is a healthy antidote to rampant speculation and sloppy thinking (think of Socrates,) but it can’t provide a positive approach to life, and that is what the two most important schools were able to do. The Epicureans and the Stoics could actually give their followers advice on how to live.

Philosophically speaking, I have to say that I find the Epicurean philosophy preferable to the Stoic. It is better organized and doesn’t rely upon gods and, like me, is purely materialistic. It had much of importance to say about the good life. Epicurus advanced an ethics of Hedonism; the one true and proper goal of life is the pursuit of pleasure. But this is not at all what it may at first seem. Epicurus’s hedonism is what is usually called ‘negative hedonism.’ According to negative hedonism: pleasure is of value because of its role in eliminating pain: Epicurus held that the removal of all pain was the greatest pleasure (distinct from the most intense or sensuous pleasure). Pleasure is not a positive quantity that we can have more and more of. Moreover, we can’t distinguish a happy life from an unhappy one by measuring the amount of pleasure in it.  A life of pleasure is to be judged its quality – by the preponderance of pleasure in it, i.e. by the absence of pain in it – not by the quantity. Epicurus proposes that the key to the good life – a life free of mental and physical pain – is simplicity, for this increases our chances of attaining the tranquility Epicureans are after and also makes us less dependent on fortune and the influence of others. A wise person, thinks Epicurus, reduces their desires to the natural and the necessary, thus maximising their capacity to move through life with a perfect tranquility of mind and generally an absence of mental and physical pain.

For the sake of interest you might like to compare the consequences of this negative hedonism with the consequence of the positive hedonism of someone like Aristippus, a student of Socrates who founded a school at Cyrene . These Cyrenaics held that the one proper goal of life was the pursuit of pleasure: the most pleasure in the most intense form that is possible for us, particularly the sensual pleasures of good food, fine wine and sex. Nothing survives of Aristippus’s writings, but we have some idea of his philosophy from ancient commentators. Aristippus appears to have held the view that immediate gratification is wiser than calculated prudent behaviour. When asked about the painful consequences of his advice, he is supposed to have said that a wise person should never forego certain pleasures of the present for uncertain, merely possible, pains of the future. The only restraint on the pursuit of pleasure that Aristippus appears to have endorsed, is restraint in the interests of increasing our capacity to experience more and more intense pleasures. Aristippus had the reputation of being willing to do anything for pleasure, including wearing women’s clothes and dancing for King Dionysius of Syracuse (he was reputedly called “the king’s poodle”).

I’ll describe one other school that was active at the time before we start to look at the specifically Stoic doctrine. It actually started about the time of Plato but some of its concerns and arguments were taken over into the Stoic philosophy. You will have often heard people described as being cynical: this refers to the supposed character of the philosophical doctrine of the so-called Cynics. The name means ‘doggish’ and was given to them because the behaviour of some of them was felt to be no better than a dog’s. For example, Diogenes of Sinope was criticized for some piece of horrible indecency that he performed in the agora and his only comment was that he wished that the pangs of hunger could be so easily removed by rubbing his stomach. More importantly though, this sort of behaviour was motivated by their coming down firmly on the Nature side of the Custom vs. Nature division that runs through Greek social thought. Their belief was that the happy life was to be gained by acting according to your reason no matter what the conventions might be where you lived, because that would be to act according to Nature. Social conventions that got in the way of this naturalness had to be ignored. This idea that we should prefer a life lived ‘according to Nature’ turns out to be fundamental to Stoic ethics.

Stoic Doctrine

Norms, Nature, and Law

The idea has a fairly natural ancestry in Aristotle’s idea of things having a function. You may recall that in Aristotle’s analysis of what was good for a man he began by investigating how we actually used the word good when we weren’t trying to apply it to people. He noted that we talked of a good flute as being the sort of flute that was so constituted that it did what flutes were supposed to do very well, and that a good flute player was the sort of flute player who had the necessary skills and aptitudes to play the flute well, and so on. In very general terms Aristotle relied upon the idea that to be a good thing is to be a thing of that kind and to have the characteristics that led to it performing well the function that that thing is supposed to perform. (You’ll recall that we introduced the term ergon to talk about this supposed ‘characteristic activity;’ that we talked of something being agathon, or good of its kind; and that we also noted that the word aretê, which we translated as virtue, seemed to be just as appropriately translated as ‘excellence’ and to refer to the ability of the characteristics so qualified to contribute to the performance of the ergon.)

Now, when we talk of something having its proper function, we are actually making what we call a normative claim; that is, we are saying that there is some function that that thing ought to perform. In this case the word ‘ought’ is clearly not a moral term: it just means that if the thing is to be counted as a flute, let us say, then it has to be able to be tootled upon. Anything which can’t be tootled upon can’t be a flute. Actually, that’s not quite true either. Something might not be able to be tootled upon but might still be a flute: it would be a bad flute. Such a case would arise if we could be sure that the thing was intended by its creator to be a flute and that it is only because it was badly made, or broken, or has become blocked, that it can not perform the flutey function. If, on the other hand, the maker of the flute deliberately left no opening at the end then it cannot be claimed that this was meant to be a flute, or that its intended function was fluting, or even that it is a bad flute. The best that could be said of it is that it was intended to be a toy flute – which of course isn’t any sort of flute at all.

Stoics adopted this idea, and spoke of it being in the nature of a flute to be tootled upon: that was what a flute was for and that was what could be expected to happen to a flute. It’s just the natural way that things are for flutes. When the Stoics speak of the nature of things, then, this is one of the fundamental ideas that they have in mind: that the nature of a thing is the functional norm that attaches to the thing.

That then is the functional view on the nature of things. That is one way to look at a claim that for each thing there is a way that it ought to be treated or that it ought to behave. Another way is to draw an analogy to the way that laws govern how people ought to behave. So we could say that the norms attached to each thing define a law that describes its relationship to the rest of the world – the actions and behaviours that are allowed for it. So there is a law about how flutes are to be treated and what flutes can do. As you would guess, this idea of a law to describe how things ought to be for all particular objects in the world was most importantly applied to people. Moreover, given that norms for things had already been made equivalent to the natures of those things, it was an easy step to say that the natures of things were somehow a kind of law binding those things. A flute is a good flute if it follows the law of nature concerning flutes – and, really, what else could a flute do? This might lead you to think that every flute would be a good flute and every person a good person, but the Stoics were not tricked into this conclusion. We’ll see how they got around it in a moment, but we’ve got more to say about Nature first.

At this point we can understand the Stoic claim that each individual or particular thing in the world has a nature or a normative ‘characteristic activity’ and there’s a law for it. The Stoics, however, extended this idea to the idea that there is a norm for the whole wide world: that there is a way for it to be naturally. Thus there is an idea of a Natural Law (with capital letters) which describes how the world is. One of the reasons that the Stoics made this move was to forestall the objection that arises from the trivial observation that much that happens to flutes is not appropriate to them – it does not comply with the norm that describes what is right for flutes; nor is it in their nature. For example, a flute may be dropped, badly made, played by a tone deaf person, and so on. Is this a violation of some law applying to flutes? The Stoics thought it might be seen that way, but this only appears to be a bad thing from a small and limited perspective. Seen from the point of view of the laws which apply to the whole world, these occurrences are all quite according to the nature of the world, and are part of its necessarily perfect operation. It was the Stoic view that everything that happened in the world was according to Nature if viewed in that way, and thus everything would be a part of Nature’s perfect ordering of the World – even those things that appeared from the point of view of a particular thing to be unnatural. Of course, the important application is to people rather than flutes. In that case Marcus Aurelius, for example, compares the evils which may happen to us with the unpleasantness of a doctor’s prescription which is necessary for our health. Thus:

Welcome everything which happens, even if it seems harsh, because it contributes to the health of the universe and the well-faring and well-being of Zeus. For he would not have brought this on a man unless it had been advantageous to the whole.[1]

In the case of the flute, for example, if it is accidentally broken, that is a bad and unnatural thing for it; but that might lead to the student picking up the lyre and it is natural that this should be the case, and the opportunity that the breaking of the flute provided was essential to this outcome.

(Before we move on, let’s also notice the mention of Zeus in the previous quote. By this point in the Stoic reasoning Nature is starting to look like something active and purposive, and when you talk of laws you are also tempted to suppose that there must be a lawgiver. In fact the Stoics tended to identify the Law with Nature and with the only real god Zeus. I think that we’re generally familiar with the idea of a single supreme legislator whose will is the ground for the norms that we must follow. Things like this made the Stoic philosophy more amenable to later Christian adaptation than philosophies like the effectively atheistic Epicureanism. More of this later.)

Virtues and Values

Now, how do the Stoics manage to speak of good and bad people? The Stoics liked to point out that Man is different from all other things in the world because Man is a rational animal. Man is able, by his own efforts, to understand the universe and its reasons and to shape his action according to his own reason, which may be either in harmony with Nature’s or in discord. If his reasons and actions are in harmony with Nature then we call them good, and if otherwise we call them bad. Only Man can be really good or bad because only man has the ability to act agreeably or contrarily to the Natural Law. The Stoics are effectively attributing the possibility of human good and evil to our possession of free will – but they never used that terminology. We’ll see that this conception of Man’s uniqueness and its moral consequences was taken over as part of the Christian conception of Man.

The Stoics see the proper aim of a Man in this life as being to cultivate the virtue of rationality and the consequent virtues of action so as to bring oneself into accord with Nature. It is a feature of the Stoic view that they had a story to tell about how we become good people – a story which is at the same time descriptive and prescriptive, telling us both what does happen and what ought to happen. It is also a story that appeals to the notion of oikeiôsis; a notion that is fundamental to Stoic doctrine. This word, which has various translations, such as ‘affinity’ or ‘appropriation’ or ‘orientation’, means something like ‘the recognition of something as belonging to oneself, being appropriate to oneself.’ This ‘affinity’, let’s call it, evolves in step with the moral development of the human being – of which it at the same time both a cause and an effect. That’s a pretty sophisticated idea: so how does this story go? Here’s how Cicero summarises it:

‘We begin with a classification: the Stoics call “valuable” (this, I think, is the term we should use) whatever is either itself in accordance with nature, or brings about something that is. Worthy of selection, therefore, is whatever has sufficient importance to be worthy of value (value the Stoics call axia). On the other hand, they call “non-valuable” what is contrary to the above. The starting-point, therefore, is that things in accordance with nature are to be adopted for their own sake, and their contraries are likewise to be rejected.

This tells us how we get started with a valuation of things in the world; but it has to be said that Cicero is a little misleading here, for what he says tends to divide the world into two parts, whereas the Stoics actually admitted three parts. What he really should have said was that things in accord with nature have a positive value and things that were contrary to nature had a negative value, and that there were also things that were neither – for example, whether my shoes are laced under-then-over or over-then-under is neither here nor there with respect to the nature of the universe. Anyway, continuing:

‘With this established, the initial “appropriate action” (this is what I call the Greek kathêkon) is to preserve oneself in one’s natural constitution. The next is to take what is in accordance with nature and reject its opposite. Once this method of selection (and likewise rejection) has been discovered, selection then goes hand in hand with appropriate action. Then such selection becomes continuous, and, finally, stable and in agreement with nature. At this point that which can truly be said to be good first appears and is recognized for what it is.

‘A human being’s earliest concern is for what is in accordance with nature. But as soon as one has gained some understanding, or rather “conception” (what the Stoics call ennoia), and sees an order and as it were concordance in the things which one ought to do, one then values that concordance much more highly than those first objects of affection. Hence through learning and reason one concludes that this is the place to find the supreme human good, that good which is to be praised and sought on its own account. This good lies in what the Stoics call homologia. Let us use the term “consistency”, if you approve. Herein lies that good, namely moral action and morality itself, at which everything else ought to be directed. Though it is a later development, it is none the less the only thing to be sought in virtue of its own power and worth, whereas none of the primary objects of nature is to be sought on its own account.’[2]

In this description by Cicero , we recognise 5 stages:

1.                    We see that it is admitted that humans begin as mere animals. A small child or an infant of course does not have the capacity to order its life according to reason. The nature of the child is to prefer those things which are essential to its flourishing, such as food, shelter, mother, and so on. That is its ‘affinity’ at this stage. These preferences are the so-called ‘primary’ things according to nature; but they are merely instinctive, and are the same sort of ‘preferences’ as we see in cats and dogs.

2.                     Beyond the ‘primary’ things, the growing child learns to value and to select other things that are good, such as health, wealth, good reputation, and so on. These are things which are certainly not instinctive, but on the other hand the affinity for these things does not require any sort of reasoning or judgement.

3.                    The next stage is to choose ‘appropriate actions’, which are things that our reason urges us to do, and that can be rationally justified. These are things such as going running to maintain fitness and health, or studying hard to pass exams, or any of a range of other actions that we’d justify because of their utility in achieving some other goal. (Note that there are things here reminiscent of the Aristotelian analysis of our motivations to action, they are justified by the further ends that they serve.) At this point the affinity that we feel for things is beyond the capacity of any non-rational thing, because it is only through reason that we are able to see how these new things actually are appropriate to us.

4.                    On the other hand, these new affinities are justified only piecemeal. We reason out that we need to exercise in order to be healthy, for example, but we may not reason out why we need to be healthy; or, if you’re worried that we’ve already said that healthiness is a valued thing for which we have an affinity without the use of reason, we could take the example of reasoning that we need to study in order to pass this course without having reasoned out why we need to pass this course. (Maybe we want to pass the course to impress our friends. The Stoics wouldn’t see this as being very virtuous.) Thus the Stoics see the next stage as being the continuous use of reason to determine our affinities. Our justifications have to go all the way up.

5.                    And finally, the Stoics note that even if we apply reason to everything, there is no guarantee that we will achieve a consistency in our conclusions: but a rational being must strive for consistency, and the last stage of human improvement is reached when the Stoic saint acts on a complete and correct understanding of the way that everything fits together in the universe according to the laws of Nature and God’s providence.

This final stage is not something that everyone is going to be able to reach: it is definitely, however the goal that everyone should try to achieve.

It is only at this final point that we can really start talking about virtue and the good. Virtue, according to the Stoics, is just what the person who has achieved the perfection of wisdom would do; and only virtue can be said to be unconditionally good or morally good. Anything that isn’t absolutely virtuous or vicious is morally indifferent, but that doesn’t mean that there are no distinctions between things that weren’t the actions of the perfectly rational being. Some of those things which were supposed to be preferable and other things were marked as ‘to-be-avoided.’ Something like health, for example, is objectively better for one than ill-health; and if the opportunity to choose between the two arises where no moral hazard is created in either case then the virtuous man will choose health. The choice for health is, however, distinct from virtue, because it is not always the choice that a perfectly rational being will make in all circumstances: it is dependent upon circumstances. The virtuous man may feel it is his duty to expose himself to diseases in order to test new medicines, for example, or as part of his duties as a doctor in some place stricken by a plague.

Such a view of virtue is pretty abstract. The need for some real guidance into how to act was supplied by arguments that purported to show that acting according to perfect reason would require that the actions be exemplars of the more familiar virtues of wisdom, temperance, generosity, and courage. But these arguments aren’t very interesting in themselves and we’ve seen very similar arguments in the Ethics of Aristotle. So I’ll pass over those. As a matter of interest though, it was the capacity of the Stoics to give practical advice of a certain degree of elevation that made their philosophy so successful. The books of Epictetus, Seneca, and Aurelius that are linked on the website are examples of this which had periods of popularity all the way into the Renaissance.

And it should also be noted that the concept of oikeiôsis, or affinity, was the origin of one of the great triumphs of the Stoic doctrine. In the most primitive societies it is typical that people feel bound to just their immediate family or to just a small band of interrelated persons, and in tribal societies this is expanded a little more to include more of one’s kin and collateral members. In the society of the Classical period the acknowledgement of responsibilities and feeling of duties or expectations of reciprocity didn’t extend any further than the citizens of your own city, though there was some notion of a national identity to be contrasted with the barbarians beyond. Under the various empires that followed, from Alexander to Rome , there was more of an idea of belonging to a larger political scene, but those beyond the Imperial frontiers were not to be considered as being part of any community to which one also belonged. The Stoics, however, extended the idea of affinity to include the whole human race. In their view all man are brothers.

The mere fact of their common humanity requires that one man should feel another man akin to him.[3]

The rational justification of this idea is that the whole of Nature is subject to the very same Law, which covers all men equally:

They hold that the universe is governed by divine will: it is a city or state of which both men and gods are members, and each one of us is part of this universe; from which it is a natural consequence that we should prefer the common advantage to our own.[4]

Some Criticisms of Virtue

On the other hand, if one aspires to being a man of perfect virtue, but does not believe that one perfectly comprehends the plan of the universe, the way of Nature, or the will of Zeus – as will be the case for many people – then it is perfectly reasonable to say that the full consequences of your choice cannot be known to you, and you are justified in always choosing to play it safe and select the thing that appears to be merely preferable. Thus the doctor in the previous example runs away from the plague-stricken village because he cannot be sure that sacrificing the undoubted good of his health for the doubtful benefit of the sick villagers would really be according to the greater plan for things. Maybe the villagers are supposed to die! This was a standard criticism of the Stoics’ point of view – it didn’t seem to be very specific in mandating what an aspiring-to-be-good to be good person would do, since those persons are none of them in a position to know what the perfect virtuous person would do. (This is an easy way to rationalise any sort of bad behaviour that one wishes, but it’s also a serious moral question that we do face in many situations today. For example, maybe we shouldn’t give food aid to starving Africans because it just makes things worse – local farmers are penalised, population is supported, etc. and the famine comes back worse next year.)

There is a more serious criticism though, and I’m sure it’s occurred to many already. The Aristotelian idea that everything has a function or characteristic activity or ergon, from which the Stoics derived the idea of Nature itself, was part of Aristotle’s argument for a particular type of eudaimonia. By being excellent at being a person one was supposed to be able to achieve happiness – and for Aristotle (in his more practical moments anyway) this happiness included a good deal of external factors of success, such as friendship, wealth, and so on. For the Stoics, on the other hand, it appears that the life lived according to Nature is absolutely independent of any worldly success; so what makes them think that this is a desirable thing that anyone should aim to achieve. Why wouldn’t someone who understands Nature and the Law and the Will of Zeus and all that, and observes that it involves them in great unhappiness, simply say ‘the heck with all that’? Well, the Stoics aren’t alone in that problem of course. It’s a standard problem for ethical theories; but if you’re going to make a point of stating paradoxes such as that the virtuous man is happy even when being tortured, as the Stoics did, then you’d better have a good reply. They do have replies, and you can look them up, but they do start to look a bit jury rigged.

Passions

There’s plenty more to say about the Stoic system, but there’s one thing we do need to mention because it’s fundamental to their reputation today, and that is their attitude to the passions. When we speak of someone as being stoical now we rarely have any intention of attributing a philosophical theory to them; all we mean is that they face adversity with equanimity: their passions remain undisturbed. Mr Spock from Star Trek was a classic case of Stoicism in this sense. What does this have to do with the Stoicism that we’ve been looking at?

Basically, it’s supposed to be a consequence of the Stoic sage’s realisation that the things that are supposed to be impediments to his happiness – like torture for example, or the brutal axe-murdering of his entire family – are merely external things; and since his happiness is entirely an internal thing, he has no grounds to be distressed by these events. And since he always acts rationally he is not unduly distressed.

Of things that exist, some are in our own power, some are not in our own power. Of things that are in our own power are our opinions, impulses, pursuits, avoidances, and, in brief, all that is of our own doing. Of things that are not in our own power are the body, possessions, reputation, authority, and, in brief, all that is not of our own doing.

…

If you hold that only to be your own which is so, and the alien for what it is, alien then none shall ever compel you, none shall hinder you, you will blame no one, accuse no one, you will not do the least thing unwillingly, none shall harm you, you shall have no foe, for you shall suffer no injury.[5]

The Stoics have a good deal to say about passions, but since it doesn’t much affect their ethical theory beyond what I’ve just said, we don’t need to consider it.