The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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ETHICS: EXPOSITION 167
the correct conception of punishment. "Society,"
says Seneca (De Ira, ii. 31),
parts
cannot continue, if the
of it do not assist and maintain one another.
We will not, therefore, strike a man because he has
offended, but that he may offend no more ;
nor should
punishment ever refer to the past, but to the future,
for it does not minister to anger but is preventive
(non enim irascitur sed This cavet)." might have been
a sentence from Austin the jurist, or a quotation from
J. S. Mill s Utilitarianism or it
; might have been taken
from More s Utopia, where we read that the end of
punishment intendeth nothing else but the destruc
tion of vices and saving of men : with so using and
ordering them, that they cannot choose but be good,
and what harm soever they did before, in the residue
of their life to make amends for the same."
The Stoic s altruism also seems to have justified to
him the position, that no one willingly inflicts an injury
on another a position that the later Stoics, such as
1
Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, make a great deal of.
As it is man s nature to be social, and as his reason
shows him that sociality is
a law of the universe, and
what he rationally sees he naturally submits to, the
person inflicting an injury does so from ignorance, not
knowing what he does.
This same deep-seated altruism produced
in the
Stoic that wide charity and generosity of spirit that
so frequently, especially among the Roman Stoics,
characterized him, and prevented his becoming either
a bigot or an ascetic.
His tolerance was a conspicuous
1
See Epictetus, Diss. i. 18 and 28, and ii. 26 ; also, Aurelius,
Med. ii. i, iv. 3, etc.