The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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ETHICS: EXPOSITION 157
Nero, he appeals to experience in confirmation of his
view. Hereof our ancestors and predecessors com
plained, hereat we ourselves are aggrieved ; and for
this will our successors sigh, because good customs
are abolished, impieties have pre-eminence, and human
affairs grow worse and worse, and men leave no wicked
ness or sin unsought after. ... In a word, we may
always boldly say thus of ourselves, that we are evil,
and (unwillingly
I
speak it)
we always shall be (De
Ben. i.
10). He also maintains (ibid.
iv. 27):
"We
do not say this, that all vices are in all men as particular
vices are in some ;
but that a wicked and foolish man
lacks not any vice. . . . All vices are in all men, but
not all are prominent in each." Upon
this Zeller
remarks : "It
hardly requires to be noticed how nearly
this view coincides with that of Augustine on the virtues
of the heathen, how close a resemblance the Stoic
doctrine of folly bears to the Christian doctrine of the
unregenerate, and how the contrast between wisdom
and folly corresponds to that between the faithful and
unbelievers." l
But now, if virtue be the sole source of human
happiness, certain things follow.
In the first place, time or the length of a man s days
on earth has nothing to do with it. For happiness, or
"even flow of life"
(evpoia /3iov),
it is all one whether
we have lived a single day or a hundred years, if within
the single day our life has been full, its quality
perfect: it is quality, not quantity, that determines.
Hence it is
only in duration that Zeus in his goodness
1
The Stoics, Epicureans^ and Sceptics (Eng. tr.), p. 275, n. i.