Volume 1 - Discourses - Books I - II - College of Stoic Philosophers

INTRODUCTIONhis lifepreoccupied him in his youth, that throughouthe was obsessed with the fear of restraint,, andtended to regard mere liberty, even in its negativeaspect alone, as almost the highest conceivablegood. It isperhaps no less noteworthy that hecame from Hierapolis in Phrygia. f"From of old thePhrygians had conceived of their deities with asingular intensity and entered into their worshipwith a passion that was often fanaticism, andsometimes downright frenzy. It is, therefore, notunnatural that the one Greek philosopher who,despite the monistic and necessitarian postulates ofhis philosophy, conceived of his God in as vivida fashion as the writers of the New Testament, andalmost as intimately as the founder of Christianityhimself, should have inherited the passion for a personalgod from the folk and land of hisIWnativity. JBeside these two illuminating' facts, the oilierdetails of his life history are of relatively little im-1portance. He was owned for a time by Rpaphroditus,the freedman and administrative secretary olNero, and it was while yet in his service that hebegan to take lessons from Musonius Rufus, thegreatest Stoic teacher of the age, whose influencewas the dominant one in his career. 2 He was of1 It innoteworthy, afl Lagran^o, p. 201, obwTvtw, that**MontamtH, who BOOH after the time of Kipiotetuti threatenedChristianity with tho invuHi'on of imdtHoipliued Bpiritnalgraces," wan alnc ftPhrygian.a Wo many passages in Kpietetiw can be paralleled ckmelyfrom tho remaining fragincniH of RufuH (an Kpictc*UiH alwayncalln him) that thorc can b