The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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26 THE STOIC CREED
In the same way, a merciless war had to be waged,
over the Theory of Knowledge, with Pyrrho and other
sceptics. If there were no such thing as Truth, or if
Truth were not attainable by man, if man s wisest
motto were nihil scire ("to
know nothing"),
then
human reason was rendered impotent and human action
paralyzed. In this connexion, a prominent place must
be assigned to Chrysippus.
These oppositions were inveterate and permanent ;
and they explain much of what might not at first sight
be obvious in the Stoic philosophy.
"
But the Stoic philosophy
is a wide word ;
and we
must not forget that it covers teaching that grew and
developed from the fourth century B.C. to, at any rate,
the second century A.D., and that, while the home ol
its first activity was Greece, the city of its later develop
ment was Rome. We must remember, moreover, that
of it
the materials for our knowledge of the first period are very meagre only fragments of the voluminous
writings of Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus (for they
all wrote voluminously 1 have come down to
) us, and
the Stoicism with which we are most familiar is that
of the second or Roman period associated specially
with the names of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus
Aurelius ; i.e., the Stoicism which has been modified
by the lapse of time, by change of country (from Greece
to Italy, from Athens to Rome), and by assimilation of
elements from other and competing philosophies. No
See, for instance, the list of writings given by Diogenes
1
Laertius in his Lives, Doctrines, and Sayings of Eminent Philo
sophers.