The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

"
Do
"
164 THE STOIC CREED
a man must attend, and should attend, to his own
interest and preservation ; but, in doing- so, he is also
furthering the interest of others. The two are mutually
implicated, and there is no true severance between
them. If, after all, they (the gods) take no thought
for anything to do with us, then it is in my own power
to take thought for myself ;
and what I have to
consider is my own interest ;
and the true interest of
everything
is to conform to its own constitution and
nature ;
and my nature owns reason and social obliga
tion ;
socially, as Antoninus, my city and my country is
Rome, as a man, the world. These are the societies,
whose advantage can alone be good to me "
(Aurelius,
Med. vi. 44).
This raises the question, then, in general, What is
the community in whose interest is bound up that of
the individual ? In the first instance, no doubt, it is a
man s family ; then his tribe ;
then his city or his
nation the particular people
to which he himself
belongs. But there is no logical stopping-point even
here. You must go on from people to people, and from
race to race, until you
have embraced mankind. It is
not blood-relationship, but community of reason, that
makes men brothers. And so the Stoic said, Every
man is a citizen of the world : he finds in every other
man a brother and a friend as Musonius puts it,
"
The
world is the common fatherland of all men." * He even
went farther, and maintained that every man is a citizen
of a still larger world. Says Epictetus (Diss. ii. 5) :
you not know that, as a foot alone is no longer a
foot, so you alone are no longer a man ?
For what is