The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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ETHICS: SPECIAL POINTS 179
be irrational. How much more, then, when its judg
ment is rational and made with circumspection ?
Therefore the mind free from passions
is a citadel ;
man has no stronger fortress to which he can fly for
refuge and remain impregnable. Ignorant is he, who
has not seen this ; unhappy he, who, having seen, yet
(Aurelius, Med. viii. 48). This
flies not to the refuge
was their protest, true and emphatic, valid for all time,
against moral materialism against the degrading
tendency to place genuine worth in the accessories of
ethical life, instead of in the life itself. Right well did
the Stoic see that, when a man fixes his heart on any
thing outside his character, farewell to all high moral
action and to noble thought. Alexander suffered
great misfortune when the Greeks came upon the
Trojans and destroyed Troy, and when his brothers
perished ? By no means ;
for no one is harmed by the
action of another, and what happened then was only
the destruction of the storks nests. But his misfortune
was when lie lost modesty, fidelity, hospitality, and
decorum. When did Achilles suffer misfortune?
When Patroclus died ? Not so ;
but when he began
to be angry, when he wept for a maiden, when he
forgot that he was at Troy, not to get possession of
mistresses, but to fight. These things are the mis
fortunes of men, this is beleaguering, this is destruction,
when right opinions are pulled down, when they are
corrupted" (Epictetus, Diss. i. 28). l
1 " Resolve
to be thyself; and know that he
Who finds himself, loses his misery."
(Matt. Arnold, "Self-dependence.")