The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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STOIC MASTERS AND THEIR WRITINGS 27
doubt, through the labours of recent scholars particu
larly Zeller, Stein, Hirzel, von Arnim we are able,
to a not inconsiderable extent, to reproduce the leading
teaching of the earliest Stoics, and to apportion to each
his distinctive doctrines, and thereby to trace advance
in the first or Greek period.
Yet not without a certain
danger.
It is proverbially difficult to prove a negative ;
and if we were left solely to deep-sea dredging for our
evidence, we should inevitably infer that no human
body was ever buried in the sea, for human bones have
not been dredged from the depths of the ocean. It
needs great care and discrimination before we can, with
any plausibility even, demonstrate from mere fragments
of the writings of an author that this or that doctrine
was not held by him. But with care and discrimina
tion much may be done ; and, at any rate, we can now,
more specifically, appraise the works of Cleanthes and
appreciate his originality. So long as the Hymn to
Zeus was the solitary specimen of his productions
known to students, or taken notice of by them, his
place could only be that of a religiously-minded man,
bent on giving a theological interpretation of the
universe, and breathing a pious submission to the
world-order which it was refreshing to feel and to come
in contact with.
But now that his fragments and the
references to him and criticisms of him in Greek and in
Latin writers have been fully brought together,
1
he is
seen to stand forth a most important figure in Stoicism,
stamping his personality on the physical speculations
of the school (just as Chrysippus stamped his personality
on its logic) ; and by his Materialism carried through-
1
See, e.g.,
Pearson s Fragments of Zeno and Cleanthes.