Citizens to Lords by Ellen Meiksins Wood

Author:Ellen Meiksins Wood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages
ISBN: 9781844678167
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2011-12-24T05:00:00+00:00

The Culture of Property: Stoic Philosophy in Rome

The topography of a social world shaped by a distinctive property regime is visible also in Roman philosophy, particularly in its variants of Stoicism. Let us remind ourselves of the changes that Stoic doctrine underwent as Roman hegemony spread. In general, the most obvious transformation as Stoic philosophy came within the Roman orbit was a decreasing interest in cosmological, psychological or epistemological questions and a growing preoccupation with ethics alone. But before Stoicism became a truly Roman phenomenon, there were already moves away from the doctrines of the early Stoics and even from their cosmological and psychological foundations. Posidonius of Apameia (135–51 BC), with whom Cicero studied, not only modified Stoic ethical doctrine but also challenged the psychological and cosmological monism that underlay the ethics and politics of Stoicism; and the evidence suggests that this was already true of Posidonius’s teacher, Panaetius of Rhodes (c. 185–109 BC), who first brought Stoicism to Rome and who greatly influenced Cicero. In their hands, Stoicism became a philosophy more congenial to the interests of the Roman ruling class. While early Stoic doctrine could be read as a challenge to slavery, empire and even, perhaps, to property itself, this ‘Middle’ phase of Stoicism provided the philosophical means to defend them. But even short of that, the modifications in ethics made Stoicism more adaptable to the values of Roman elites.

Panaetius came to Rome during the late republic after studying with Stoic philosophers in Greece, where he had met the Roman general, Scipio Africanus the Younger, also a student of Stoicism. He would later return to Greece to head the Stoa in Athens. But while in Rome, he remained close to Scipio and introduced Stoic ethics to the so-called Scipionic circle of intellectually inclined conservative aristocrats, who played a major role in disseminating Panaetius’s ideas.21

What made his teachings especially attractive to men of this kind was that he adapted the ethical doctrine of Stoicism to the particular virtues most highly prized by them in their aspirations to honour and glory, placing an emphasis ‘on such active virtues as greatness of soul or magnanimity, on generosity or liberality, on decorum and propriety, and on energy and industriousness, as against the traditional Stoic stress on fortitude and justice’.22 More fundamentally, Panaetius eased the rigidity of Stoic ethics, making the doctrine more adaptable to ethical ambiguities and compromises of the kind that would be regularly encountered by Rome’s aristocracy, in a world made up not of sages but of ordinary people; and he attached greater value to lesser goods, which fell short of the highest Stoic ideals. Stoicism had always allowed for a distinction between moral goods and goods that were morally indifferent but which could be rated in respect to preferability on other grounds. Material wealth was a typical example of the morally indifferent but preferable good. Now, such secondary goods were given higher status than the Early Stoics had granted them.

Justice, in this view, had more to do with positive legality than with higher moral laws – as one might expect in a society so imbued with legalism.

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