The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

"
ETHICS: EXPOSITION 169
he is counselled to do it, not out of dislike of mankind,
but simply for satisfaction and repose. His philosophy
taught him, further, that if
by a selfish act he sinned
against the community and thereby forfeited his place
and cut himself off as a member from the whole, he
might yet be reinstated in his organic position : that
is his special privilege. "Have
you
ever seen a
dismembered hand," asks Aurelius (Med. viii. 34), "or
foot, or decapitated head, lying severed from the body
to which it
belonged ? Such does a man, so far as he
can, make himself, when he refuses to accept what
befalls, and isolates himself, or when he pursues selfseeking
action. You are cast out from the unity of
nature, of which you are an organic part ; you dis
member your own self. But there is this beautiful
provision, that it is in your power to re-enter the unity.
No other part of the whole doth God privilege, when
severed and dismembered, to reunite. But consider
the goodness of God, with which he has honoured
man : he has put it in his power never to be sundered
at all from the whole ;
and if sundered, then to rejoin
it
once more, and coalesce, and resume his contributory
place."i
1 It is a disputed point how far the Stoic Cosmopolitanism was
due to the non-Hellenic nationality of the leading Stoics ; but,
anyhow, the fact of non-Hellenic nationality is very noteworthy.
Zeno was from Citium, a Phoenician colony in Cyprus, and him
self belonged to the Semitic race. ... Of his disciples, Persseus
came also from Citium ;
Herillus was from Carthage ; Athenodorus
from Tarsus ; Cleanthes from Assus in the Troad. The chief
disciples of Cleanthes were Sphaerus of the Bosporus, and
Chrysippus from Soli in Cilicia. Chrysippus was succeeded by
Zeno of Sidon, and Diogenes of Babylon ;
the latter taught
Antipater of Tarsus, who taught Pansetius of Rhodes, who taught