THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

76
THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
master Greek was followed rapidly by the pouring of Oriental cults and
faiths into Greece along those very lines of communication which the
young conqueror had opened up; the broken dykes
let in the ocean of
Eastern thought upon the lowlands of the still adolescent European
mind. The mystic and superstitious faiths which had taken root among
the poorer people of Hellas were reinforced and spread about; and the
Oriental spirit of apathy and resignation found a ready soil in decadent
and despondent Greece. The introduction of the Stoic philosophy into
Athens by the Phoenician merchant Zeno (about 310 B. c.) was but one
of a multitude of Oriental infiltrations. Both Stoicism and Epicureanism
the apathetic acceptance of defeat, and the effort to forget defeat in
the arms of pleasure were theories as to how one might yet be happy
though subjugated or enslaved; precisely as the pessimistic Oriental
stoicism of Schopenhauer and the despondent epicureanism of Renan were
in the nineteenth century the symbols of a shattered Revolution and a
broken France.
Not that these natural antitheses of ethical theory were quite new to
Greece. One finds them in the gloomy Heraclitus and the "laughing
philosopher" Democritus; and one sees the pupils of Socrates dividing
into Cynics and Cyrenaics under the lead of Antisthenes and Aristippus,
and extolling, the one school apathy, the other happiness. Yet these were
even then almost exotic modes of thought: imperial Athens did not take
to them. But when Greece had seen Chseronea in blood and Thebes in
ashes, it listened to Diogenes; and when the glory had departed from
1
Athens she was ripe for Zeno and Epicurus.
Zeno built his philosophy of apatheia on a determinism which a later
Stoic, Chrysippus, found it hard to distinguish from Oriental fatalism.
When Zeno, who did not believe in slavery, was beating his slave for
some offense, the slave pleaded, in mitigation, that by his master's philos-^
ophy he had been destined from all eternity to commit this fault; to which
Zeno replied, with the calm of a sage, that on the same philosophy he,
Zeno, had been destined to beat him for it. As Schopenhauer deemed it
useless for the individual will to fight the universal will, so the Stoic argued
that philosophic indifference was the only reasonable attitude" to a life
in which the struggle for existence ig so unfairly dbonjTecT to inevitable
defeat. If victory is quite impossible it should be scorned. The secret of
peace is not to make our achievements equal to our desires, but to lower
our desires to the level of our achievements. "If wnat you Have" seems in-
sufficient to you," said the Roman Stoic Seneca (d, 65 A. D.), "then,
though you possess the world, you will yet be miserable."
Such a principle cried out to heaven for , its opposite, and Epicurus,
though himself as Stoic in life as Zeno, supplied it. EpSurus^says Fen-
'The table on pages 80-8 1 indicates approximately the main lines of philo*
sophical development in Europe and Acaerica.