Middle Stoicism
150 BCE – 50 BCE c.
Stoicism made liveable for people with public duties, by admitting that health, wealth and status do actually matter somewhat.
- Active
- 150 BCE – 50 BCE
- Where
- Rhodes and Rome
- Status
- extinct
- Tradition
- Greek
The claim
Virtue is still the only good, but the doctrine of the sage is softened, progress is taken seriously, and appropriate action in ordinary circumstances becomes the practical centre.
What it held
The early Stoa held that everyone is either wise or foolish with nothing in between, and that the sage is so rare as to be nearly hypothetical. That is a difficult doctrine to teach Roman senators. Panaetius and Posidonius made the adjustments that turned Stoicism into the working philosophy of the Roman governing class.
Panaetius dropped or downplayed the harder edges — the conflagration of the cosmos, the extirpation of the passions, the insistence that all faults are equal. In their place he developed a theory of appropriate action built around four roles each person plays: as a rational being, as this particular individual, as placed by circumstance, and as choosing a career. That is a framework anyone can use.
Posidonius went the other way intellectually, expanding the physics into geography, astronomy and history, and reintroducing a Platonic account of the soul's irrational parts against Chrysippus. He was a working scientist who calculated the earth's circumference and explained tides by the moon.
How it argued
Selective revision. Keeping the ethical core while conceding to Platonic and Aristotelian criticism wherever the early school's positions had proved indefensible or unteachable.
What it was arguing against
Not another school so much as its own predecessors — Panaetius against the Stoic doctrine of the sage, Posidonius against Chrysippus on the passions.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether the concessions preserve Stoicism or dissolve it. Later Stoics returned to the hard line, which suggests they thought the latter.
Common misconceptions
That it is simply a watering-down. Posidonius' work on the emotions is a serious philosophical correction, and his empirical range exceeds anything in the early school.
How it began
Panaetius came to Rome and entered the circle of Scipio Aemilianus, which put Stoic ethics directly into the hands of the men governing the Mediterranean.
What became of it
Absorbed into the Roman Stoicism of Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, which is what everyone now means by the word.
Lasting influence
Cicero's On Duties is a reworking of Panaetius and was, for centuries, the most read work of moral philosophy in Europe. It is the channel through which Stoic ethics reached the Renaissance.
Why it still matters
It is the historical case study in what happens to a demanding philosophy when it acquires powerful adherents, and the compromises are visible in detail.
Put another way
A doctrine let out at the seams to fit the men who now have to wear it.
Where to start
Cicero's On Duties. It is the school's ethics as it was actually transmitted.
The surprising bit
Posidonius calculated the circumference of the earth and got a figure Columbus later used — which was the smaller of the two available estimates, and part of why he thought the voyage feasible.
In their own words
We are not born for ourselves alone.
The passions are not mistaken judgements but movements of an irrational part.
Connections
- Answers
- Early Stoicism
- Influenced
- Roman Stoicism
The verdict
The compromise that made Stoicism the most successful philosophy in Roman history, at a cost its successors partly reversed.