for A Companion to Socrates, ed. Kamtekar and Rappe word count: 5551 (7000-word limit) COMMENTS WELCOME SOCRATES IN THE STOA According to Diogenes Laertius' Lives of the Philosophers, an unbroken chain of teachers and pupils links Socrates to the earliest Stoics (I 15). The founder of Stoicism, Zeno of Citium, is said to have studied with Crates (VI 105 and VII 2), who is supposed to have absorbed Cynicism from Diogenes of Sinope (VI 85 and 87), and Diogenes, in turn, reportedly earned the label "Cynic" under the influence of Antisthenes (VI 21), who is called a follower of Socrates (VI 2). Ancient philosophical biographies show a fondness for teacher-pupil successions of this sort, and historical facts did not always get in the way. Nevertheless, there is no doubt about the point that motivates this particular succession: Socrates influenced Stoicism profoundly. Stoics manifested their debt to Socrates in two distinctive ways. First, Stoics embrace paradoxical doctrines in the style of Socrates, and indeed, they embrace many of Socrates' own paradoxes. Cicero saw this clearly, averring that "most of the surprising so-called paradoxa of the Stoics are Socratic" (Acad. 2.136). When Cicero wrote The Paradoxes of the Stoics to show how his rhetorical skill could make Stoic paradoxes plausible to a general audience, he concentrated on six of the "most Socratic" (Parad. 4) theses: only the fine is good, virtue suffices for happiness, vicious actions are equal and virtuous actions are equal, everyone who is not a sage is insane, only the sage is free, and only the sage is rich. Cicero's purposes do not include explaining the Socratic provenance of these paradoxes, and many scholars today would balk at his list. No one denies that paradoxical doctrines link Socrates to the Stoics, but most scholars prefer to attribute different paradoxes to both Socrates and the Stoics: no one does wrong willingly and all virtue is one. 2 A second way in which the Stoics pledge allegiance to Socrates is by invoking him as an example to imitate. Seneca, Musonius Rufus, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius-all prominent Stoics in the time of the Roman Empire-do this. (None did this more than Epictetus; see the next chapter.) The record is less clear for earlier Greek Stoics, whose writing is almost all lost. The evidence of interest in Socrates is perfectly clear: the second head of the school, Cleanthes (331-232 BCE) cites Socrates for the view that advantage is not severed from what is just (Clement SVF 1.558); the obscure third-century BCE Stoics Zeno of Sidon and Theon of Antiochia each wrote an Apology of Socrates (Suda s.v. = SSR I C 505); another thirdcentury BCE Stoic named Sphaerus wrote a work titled On Lycurgus and Socrates in three books (D.L. VII 178); Antipater of Tarsus, a secondcentury BCE head of the school, invoked Socrates in his book On Anger (Athenaeus SVF 3.65 Antipater) and collected Socrates' remarkable divinations (Cicero, Div. I 123); and Panaetius (185-109 BCE) defended Socrates from the charges of bigamy frequently made by Peripatetics (Plutarch, Aristides 335c-d = fr. 152 van Straaten). Still, it is not clear how much of this evidence shows that Socrates was taken to be an example worth imitating. It is not nearly as clear as the evidence for the much later Roman Stoics, or even for Posidonius (c. 135-c. 50 BCE), who numbered Socrates alongside Diogenes the Cynic and the proto-Cynic Antisthenes among those who had made progress (D.L. VII 91 = fr. 29 Edelstein-Kidd). From the relative silence of the historical record, one might infer that the earliest Stoics did not invoke Socrates as an example. But arguments from silence, rarely powerful, are especially weak when the record is meager. Moreover, early Greek Stoics share the commitments that lead later Roman Stoics to invoke Socrates as an example. For example: the third Stoic scholarch Chrysippus of Soli (280-206 BCE), like Seneca (c. 1-65 CE), wrote "protreptic" works to encourage a philosophical way of life, and 3 like Seneca, he concerned himself with the part of ethics "concerning appropriate actions, recommendations and warnings" (D.L. VII 84; cf. Sextus M. VII 12) that Stoics called the "paraenetic" or "perceptive" part (Seneca, Ep. 95.1: parainetikos topos or pars praeceptiva, from Greek and Latin words for 'rule'). But Chrysippus, again like Seneca, recognized the limited value of rules in encouraging progress toward a fully philosophical way of life, and it seems that he, still like Seneca, endorsed the political life of a king in part because of the value that a king could have as an example for citizens to imitate. So it is quite easy to suppose that Chrysippus and his fellow Greek Stoics in the third century BCE agreed with the later Stoics (Tranq. 5.2, Ben. V 6.1-7) and the rest that Socrates was a model worth imitating. At the very least, it is far easier than imagining who else an early Stoic might have proposed, and Socrates was widely thought (by, e.g., Xenophon, Mem. I 2.2-3) to have improved others' lives by serving as an example for them to imitate. So although skepticism about early Stoic invocation of Socrates as an exemplar is possible, it seems more prudent to suppose that even the earliest Stoics manifested their Socratic inheritance in two ways. A Stoic, however, might well find something wrong with distinguishing these two ways, for it is unlikely that any Stoic encountered the Socratic paradoxes as a matter of theory, entirely cut off from Socrates' own life. After all, Socrates did not commit any of his theorizing about the paradoxes to writing, and the writings about Socrates portray him in action and thereby connect what he says (including his paradoxes) with his way of life. This suggests that reflection on what Socrates did led the Stoics to hold him up as an example to imitate and to endorse the Socratic paradoxes. So understood, there is just one inheritance, the gift of Socrates' way of life. On this way of looking at things, there is also something wrong with scouring particular texts to distinguish between the Stoic paradoxes that 4 "really are" Socratic and those that are not. The question for each of the paradoxes is, did the Stoics arrive at this by reflecting on what Socrates did? Unfortunately, this question cannot be answered by looking at the Stoic writings. In part, this is due to the paucity of early Stoic writings, and in part, it is due to the kind of evidence we have for Stoic views, since we do not possess much of any Stoic's intellectual autobiography. Still, we can answer the related question, could the Stoics have arrived easily at their paradoxes by reflecting on what Socrates did? We can do this by reflecting for ourselves on what Socrates did and by testing how easily these reflections point in the direction of Stoic paradoxes. This is the task of this chapter. I will demonstrate how reflection on Socrates' way of life leads not only to the so-called "prudential paradox" (no one does wrong willingly) and the unity of virtue but also to the six theses that Cicero highlights. Then, to test my hypothesis, I will also consider the ways in which the Stoics qualified their enthusiasm for Socrates' life, and I will argue that these qualifications, too, can be connected to deep reflection on what Socrates did. My primary aim is to explain the Stoics' Socratic inheritance. But I also hope to vindicate Cicero against the current scholars and to cast new light on Socrates. I pin these hopes on a simple fact: the way Socrates lived expresses philosophical commitments that are there to be articulated by anyone who examines his life, whether Socrates himself, or Plato, or Antisthenes, or a Stoic. This is why the question of which paradoxes are Socratic cannot be settled by reference to what Socrates managed to see upon self-examination, much less by reference to what some character called Socrates says in someone else's dialogue. And it is why Stoicism enlarges our awareness not just of what philosophy can be, but also of what Socrates, the Greek and Roman ancients' philosopher par excellence, was. 5 From Socrates' Life to Stoic Paradoxes The stories about Socrates reveal a single central commitment: to examine lives, his own and others'. He sought to examine lives himself, and he exhorted others to do so, as well. Reflection on this commitment leads easily to the Stoa if we note four further features of Socrates' way of life. First, Socrates preferred to examine lives by question-and-answer. He did not typically offer long speeches with worked-out theories for others to accept or reject; instead, he asked others questions about their commitments. This characteristic method inspired the genre of Socratic dialogues, and it hardly escaped the Stoics' notice. Book III of Chrysippus' On Dialectic, for example, insists that question-and-answer argument was important to many previous philosophers, including "especially" Socrates (Plutarch, Stoic. rep. 1045f-1046a). Although this feature of Socrates' life does not lead immediately to Stoic paradox, it does suggest three important points. First, because Socrates asks questions with the aim of examining lives, he has good reason to focus his queries on the commitments that affect the shape of those lives. And so he apparently did: in the surviving Socratic dialogues, he targets the "most important things," asking about how to live. The Stoics should notice this, too, but it is available to them to disagree with Socrates about what things count as most important, about what commitments are essential to living. As we shall see, many Stoics did disagree with Socrates on this score. Second, if Socrates expected his method to be able to deliver a full examination, he must have thought that (at least) the fundamental moving and shaping attitudes of one's life are (at least potentially) accessible to one. Socrates is less often depicted reflecting on this point, but he was surely committed to it. For if dialectic is sufficient to examine a life, either there 6 are no inaccessibly unconscious drives, or they make no significant difference to life. Of course, Socrates can concede that at least some people are sometimes unable to recognize some of their commitments. Indeed, he can say of them what we might: that they are in denial. But he can also and must insist that their failure to know themselves does not preclude the possibility of self-knowledge. So a Socratic does not yet have to outrage all common sense. But outrage is coming, for the accessibility of our motivating attitudes is crucial to the paradox that no one errs willingly. Finally, Socrates' commitment to examining lives suggests that there is something good, in general, about examining one's life and, in particular, about engaging in question-and-answer to examine one's life. (Why else would he be so committed to it?) Unsurprisingly, then, Socrates is regularly portrayed avowing the deep importance of the examined life. But this point raises a question: what exactly is the good that Socrates' dialectical examination offers? To answer this question, we should introduce a second feature of Socrates' examinations, namely, their results. These are typically negative: Socrates regularly showed that the examined person did not have a consistent set of commitments. Sometimes, however, negative results are good. In this case, it is plausible that identifying bad things is good-it at least makes the avoidance or elimination of bad things easier-and plausible that inconsistencies in one's commitments about how to live are bad. Inconsistency in one's commitments is bad in at least two ways. First, inconsistency undermines justification. If, for example, Euthyphro has inconsistent attitudes about piety, then he cannot justify prosecuting his father against the charge that the prosecution is impious. Second, inconsistency threatens the smooth flow of one's life. In part, this second problem piggybacks on the first. Imagine that other people object to something that I want to do. If I cannot justify my desired course of action, 7 then how smooth will my life be? Surely it will not be smooth if I have to bend the others to my aims, or be bent by them. Nor is opting for fraud in place of force a guarantee of calm waters ahead. Nor can I easily quit human society to duck the whole problem, for even if the practical difficulties of solo life were easily surmountable, it is likely that I want to live with some other human beings, and so the mere temptation to leave would be just another manifestation of my inconsistency. As this already suggests, inconsistency threatens not just a socially smooth life, but also a psychologically smooth one, but the psychological difficulties of inconsistency extend far beyond any social problems. If I have inconsistent attitudes about how much coffee I should drink, for example, then I am subject to psychological conflict, and I cannot satisfy all my attitudes about coffee (and temperance and nutrition and the rest). There will be dissatisfactions- bumps-in my experience of life. Zeno of Citium and his followers characterized the human good as a smooth flow of life (Stobaeus II 7.6e 77,20-21 Wachsmuth; cf. Diogenes Laertius VII 88 and Sextus M. XI 30), and so these considerations are very close to central Stoic doctrines. But we need a third feature of Socrates' life to reach the eight paradoxes highlighted above. So let us notice that Socrates examined others not just for the negative result of uncovering inconsistency. He also aimed for a positive result: he sought wisdom or knowledge. If we notice this fact-and who could fail to notice it while characterizing Socrates as a lover of wisdom-and if we take Socrates to be a model, then we must think that his dialectical work can, at least in principle, lead to knowledge. Nor is this is an unreasonable thought. We have already seen that Socratic examination can reach all of one's primary motivating commitments and can bring inconsistencies to light. So dialectic can at least minimize inconsistencies in one's motivating attitudes. In fact, it can do more. Socrates typically exposed inconsistencies by questioning 8 the inferential relations among the examinee's commitments. So any set of commitments that survives Socratic dialectic must exhibit not only mere consistency but also some measure of coherence. We can make sense of how Socratic dialectic aims at knowledge by conceiving of knowledge in terms of coherent psychological commitments. The Stoics did conceive knowledge as a coherent set of psychological attitudes. They say that knowledge is a "cognitive grasp" (katalêpsis) or a system of cognitive grasps (also called an "art" or "expertise," i.e., technê) that is "stable, firm, and unshakeable by reason or argument (logos)" (Stobaeus II 7.5l 73,19-74,1; D.L. VII 47; Sextus M. VII 151; Pseudo-Galen SVF 2.93; Philo SVF 2.95; and cf. Cicero, Acad. I 41-42, who attributes this account of knowledge to Zeno). Central to this definition is the idea that one who knows cannot be forced in a dialectical argument to give up something that he takes himself to know and cannot be led by a dialectical argument to assent to anything that contradicts with what he takes himself to know. The Stoic conception of knowledge neatly expresses the positive aim of surviving Socratic dialectic. It also raises difficult questions because it seems to many philosophers clear enough that a person could have a coherent set of false beliefs. The evidence suggests that Socrates himself did not worry about this objection, for it appears that Socrates did not concern himself with what knowledge is. Perhaps he just assumed that we have enough common sense to retain at least some true beliefs that would guarantee the truth of all the commitments in a fully coherent set. Those whom Socrates influenced developed different ways of bolstering this assumption. Plato, for example, at least entertained the thought that our souls are naturally geared to the truth by their disembodied experiences before our lifetimes. The Stoics, by contrast, insisted that we are naturally situated in such a way that at least some of our experiences of the world are veridical; they insist that someone 9 who knows has not only perfect mastery of dialectical arguments but also perfect reliability in assent to sense-impressions. But the finer points of these epistemological reflections on the Socratic way of life are unnecessary to explain the Stoic paradoxes. Once a Stoic embraces psychological coherence as the positive goal of Socratic examination, four of the eight paradoxes are near to hand. Since psychological coherence is knowledge, those who have incoherent (inconsistent or underdeveloped) commitments are ignorant. It also seems reasonable that virtue or excellence characterizes those who know and vice or defect characterizes those who are ignorant. Does this mean that excellence characterizes everything that a knower does, and vice characterizes everything that an ignorant person does? Yes, if we recall the accessibility of motivating attitudes. The person who knows has no conflicting attitudes, conscious or not. So when she judges that such-andsuch is excellent to do in these circumstances, she has no motivation to conflict with doing such-and-such. There is no way to explain how the virtuous could fail to do what she judges to be excellent. And since the virtuous have knowledge, this result means that the excellent cannot fail to do what is, in fact, excellent. On the other hand, the person who is ignorant is doomed to act in defective ways. Even if he does something that is describable in the same terms as what the excellent person would do, we nevertheless cannot say that the ignorant person does something excellent because the excellence of an action depends upon the reasons for which it is done, and the ignorant person's reasons are defective. We are now playing with paradoxes. First, note that all excellent actions are excellent by virtue of the agent's whole coherent psychology. Actions are not just or temperate by virtue of some limited set of judgments or affective conditions: the same full set of attitudes makes this action just and that action temperate. So the conditions that cause just and temperate 10 actions-justice and temperance, respectively-are the same coherent state of the soul. This is the paradox of the unity of virtue. The paradox need not imply that there are no distinctions among the virtues. A Stoic can and some did distinguish by saying that some judgments (or "theorems") are primary in just actions and others primary in temperate actions (D.L. VII 125-126; Stobaeus II 7.5b5 63,6-25 Wachsmuth). But there was controversy over this point (see Schofield 1984). The third-century (BCE) renegade Ariston of Chios denied that a coherent psychology would make judgments in the form of "general theorems" about value (Seneca, Ep. 89.13 and 94.2; and Sextus, M. VII 12), and so he also denied that there are grounds to distinguish among the virtues, except in relation (e.g., D.L. VII 161). He urged a more radical understanding of the thesis that virtue is one. This seems to have been a dispute about how to understand the Socratic point that the virtues are all one and the same; similar disputes occasioned by Ariston will be considered below. Next, recall the point that actions done from psychological coherence are virtuous and actions done without psychological coherence are vicious, and add the assumption that there are no degrees of coherence. (This new assumption is reasonable enough: either one's psychology is in harmony or it is not.) We now can say that all virtuous actions are equally virtuous and all vicious actions are equally vicious, and this gives a point to the paradox that all vicious actions are equal and all virtuous actions are equal. As with the unity of virtue, this paradox is compatible with some distinctions. A Stoic can admit that there are grounds for praising some virtuous actions more than others or for blaming some vicious actions more than others (Cicero, Fin. III 48; cf. Parad. 20). Indeed, a Stoic should admit this insofar as the commitments that are built into a coherent psychology will themselves generally prefer some virtuous actions to others and will generally prefer to restrain some vicious actions more than others. The 11 Stoic will insist, however, that all virtuous actions are equally virtuous and all vicious actions are equally vicious. Another of Cicero's paradoxes follows if we add the reasonable assumption that psychological coherence is a model of health. For now we can say that everyone who fails to be wise will fall short of the standard for mental health, and that gives us reason to say that everyone who fails to be wise is insane. Again, the paradox can be understood in a way that renders it false. The Stoics are not saying that a lack of wisdom is indistinguishable from, say, paranoid schizophrenia. They are simply drawing out a Socratic lesson in a particularly pointed way. Finally, since excellent actions are all and only those done by the knowing and vicious actions are all and only those done by the ignorant, no one does wrong knowingly, and this sustains the prudential paradox that no one does wrong willingly. Again, though, there is potential confusion. The Stoic does not maintain that wrong-doing is always involuntary or free from blame. Rather, the Stoic insists that someone who knows what she is doing would never do wrong. By putting the point in terms of "willingness," the Stoics invite the confusion, but they are nevertheless drawing attention to a perfectly natural sense of acting willingly, the sense in which everyone wills to act while knowing what one is doing. Nor are the Stoics simply sliding from a quotidian sense of "knowing what one is doing" to a demanding sense. When we act from ignorance, we act from an incoherent psychology: we have conflicting or underdeveloped attitudes. But no one wants conflicting or underdeveloped attitudes, at least not as such. When we act, we will to do what we do, and not to undermine or under-support it. But on the Stoics' Socratic analysis, wrong actions cannot be willed in this wholehearted, integrated way. Four of the Stoic paradoxes have now emerged from reflection on the Socratic way of life, and in particular from reflection on knowledge as the 12 psychological coherence sought by Socrates' examinations. The remaining four paradoxes depend upon reflection on a fourth feature of Socrates' life: his zealous commitment to examining lives. It is a standard part of the picture of Socrates that he was on a mission. He did not let other interests get in the way, and he did not back down when his examinations discomfited those around him, not even when he faced death. This should suggest to a Stoic reflecting on Socrates' life that there is nothing comparable to the activity of examining lives, nothing for which one might trade it. The Stoic might naturally express this by saying that only philosophical activity is good, that everything else has at best an incomparably different kind of value. But this thought needs to be brought together with our earlier reflections on knowledge and excellence. Surely the philosophical activity that is good is not done from ignorance but from knowledge: it is excellent, virtuous activity. And so the Stoic is led to the thought that only virtuous activity is good. This introduces another paradox: only the fine is good. Stoics refine this thought by insisting that only virtue itself is, strictly speaking, good, since only virtue has the causal power of benefiting. On this view, virtuous actions, virtuous persons, and virtuous collections of persons (cities, say) are good in a looser sense because virtue benefits through them (Stobaeus II 7.5d 69,17-70,3; Sextus M. XI 25-26; and the textually problematic D.L. VII 94). This paradox, too, can lead to misunderstanding. For if only virtue is good, one might think that there is no reason to go for things like health and wealth. Indeed, Stoics maintain that such things are not by themselves beneficial for us; rather, the excellent use of them is beneficial, and the foolish use of them is harmful. So they-as opposed to their use-are indifferent to our flourishing. But that is not to say that they are entirely indifferent to us: according to most Stoics-Ariston of Chios is the prominent exception-health, wealth, and the like naturally stimulate us to pursue 13 them. Similarly, other people who are not virtuous are indifferent to our flourishing, but not entirely indifferent to us, since we are naturally stimulated to care for other human beings. Still, the Stoics do not consider health, wealth, and the concerns of others to be goods under another name. When a Stoic goes for health or seeks to help her brother, she is merely preferring health and merely preferring to see her brother aided. She does not see any good in health or in her brother's condition, and she will not be troubled if she fails to achieve health or help for her brother. Her true aim is to go for health or seek to help her brother virtuously. Her natural inclinations for health, wealth, the concerns of others, and the rest are sensitive to the circumstances, and when she chooses the best action available to her, she locates her good in nothing but choosing the best action available to her in the circumstances. Two more paradoxes enter as consequences of the Stoic sage's perfect grasp of what is good. First, only the sage is free. Deep attraction to things other than one's own virtue leave one enslaved to fortune, and even imperfect apprehension that only virtue is good leaves one vulnerable, because one's imperfect judgments are weak and "shakeable." But the sage is truly free of fortune's effects. Of course, this freedom that the sage enjoys does not guarantee political freedom, or even freedom from chattel slavery; the Stoics thought that even a chattel slave could and should philosophize (Philo SVF 3.352 and Lactantius 3.253 with Athenaeus SVF 3.353). Second, only the sage is rich. Because the sage alone enjoys what is genuinely good, the sage alone has real wealth, real accumulated value. Of course, the sage's wealth does not guarantee a large amount of money; the Stoics, unlike so many other Greek philosophers, do not think that one has to be financially well-off to live well. Finally, the exclusive goodness of virtue leads to the paradox that virtue suffices for happiness. Happiness is just the name for a life lived well 14 with enjoyment of goods. But for the Stoics, there are no goods except for virtue, and so there is nothing to living well with enjoyment of goods except living virtuously. Taking Exception with Socrates Reflection on Socrates' way of life leads to Cicero's six Stoic paradoxes and the two frequently mentioned by modern scholars. In fact, the connections between Socrates' way of life and fundamental tenets of Stoicism are so deep that one might wonder why the Stoics did not recommend living exactly as Socrates did. Before closing, then, I will consider three ways in which Stoics qualified their enthusiasm for Socrates. One charge of disagreement needs to be quieted, however. It is reported that the Stoics call irony a trait of the worthless, and not of the sage (Stobaeus II 7.11m 108,12-13 Wachsmuth = SVF 3.630), and it might be thought that they are thereby disparaging the irony that is prominent in Plato's portrait of Socrates. This is not the case. The standard Greek meaning of "being ironical" (eirôneuesthai) is deception, and the Stoics can reject deception without disparaging Socratic irony, which gently mocks and riddles without intending to deceive. In fact, the Stoics had better not be disparaging Socratic irony, since their paradoxes preserve a measure of it: the paradoxes are gently mocking expressions-"only the sage is rich," after all-that pose riddles without being intended to deceive. There are real disagreements with Socrates, though. First, according to the standard picture, Socrates worked in the agora, out in the open, and was willing to question anyone, Athenian or foreigner, young or old. Stoic response to this was complex. On the one hand, Socrates' openness to examining all sorts of people shows a love of humanity (cf. Plato, Eu. 3d), and the Stoics embrace Socrates' cosmopolitan commitment to benefiting 15 (that is, examining) foreigners alongside compatriots. In On Lives, for example, Chrysippus suggests that the sage will engage in politics if circumstances permit, but that he will not limit himself to politics in his homeland if he can better serve human beings abroad as a political advisor (see Brown forthcoming: chp. 7). Later Stoics Musonius (fr. 9 [That Exile is no Evil] 42,1-2 Hense = Stobaeus III 40.9 749,2-3 Hense) and Epictetus (Diss. I 9.1) and the Stoicizing Tusculan Disputations of Cicero (V 108) and De Exilio of Plutarch (600f-601a) make the Socratic provenance of this cosmopolitanism explicit. On the other hand, Socrates' willingness to examine anyone reflects the assumption that dialectical examinations pose no significant risks, and the Stoics reject this as reckless. Like Plato (Rep. 537e-539a), who thinks that dialectic is too dangerous to be shared with the young, Chrysippus recommends that teachers of Stoic philosophy exercise caution in introducing opposing points of view (Plutarch, Stoic. rep. 1036de). The underlying thought seems to be that young people are so easily misled that they should not be exposed to full philosophical activity at a young age. But this disagreement with Socrates is readily explained by reflection on Socrates' life. The fate of Socrates and some of his followers should be enough to cause one to rethink the wisdom of fully extending philosophical activity to the young. Here the Stoics are disagreeing with Socrates, but respecting some lessons of his life. Second, Socrates lived as though philosophy is a special kind of career, exclusive of other careers like cobblery and ordinary politics. Socrates' philosophical life is not a life of withdrawn contemplation as it is for Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus-indeed, it is, according to Plato's Gorgias (521d), engaged in politics-but it is, like the contemplative life, separate from other possible careers. Stoics reject this feature of the Socratic way of life, too, for they insist that living philosophically is compatible with any situation in life. As I have already noted, Stoics think that even a chattel 16 slave can and should philosophize. This disagreement, too, might well be rooted in reflection on Socrates' way of life, and indeed, this one might extract from Socrates' life a commitment that is not evident in the way he separates himself from other careers. For Socrates himself dedicates himself full-time to dialectical examinations, he was willing to examine cobblers and the like, in the hope that a cobbler might know more than he about the most important matters. So although Socrates' way of life by itself suggests a special career apart from the need to make money, the way he extends his mission might suggest the different, Stoic picture. Finally, on the standard account, Socrates had a narrow conception of the important matters that one must examine. He ignored not just the question about what knowledge is but also questions about the natural world (Plato, Ap. 19b-d; Xenophon, Mem. I 1.11-16; Aristotle, Metaph. A 6 987b12; etc.). Many Stoics, including the early heads of the school, rejected this; they held that one needed to understand the way the natural world is to have knowledge, i.e., psychological coherence. On their view, physics, logic, and ethics are unified just as justice, temperance, courage, and wisdom are. But here, too, we have a disagreement with Socrates that shows deep engagement with him. First, there were Stoics, especially Ariston of Chios, who opposed the teaching of the scholarchs. Ariston rejected the study of the natural world in Socratic terms by saying that it is beyond us human beings (D.L. VI 103 and VII 160; Seneca, Ep. 89.13 and 94.2; Sextus, M. VII 12; Stobaeus II 1.24 8,13-18 Wachsmuth). Second, at least one of the scholarchs insisted that Socrates did have cosmological views. Zeno of Citium evidently connected the basic doctrines of Stoic cosmology to Socrates by relying on the one portrait of Socrates displaying views about the nature of the cosmos (Xenophon, Mem. I 4.5-18 and IV 3.2-18; see Cicero, N.D. II 18 and Sextus, M. IX 101 with DeFilippo and Mitsis 1994). So the Stoics disagree about whether any of them are disagreeing with 17 Socrates. Their contest over whether the good life requires knowledge of the cosmos is also a contest over who Socrates was, and this vividly exhibits in one small part the development of Stoicism out of reflection on Socrates' way of life. Bibliography Alesse, F. (2000). La Stoa e la Tradizione Socratica. Naples: Bibliopolis. Brown, E. (2000). "Socrates the cosmopolitan." Stanford Agora: An Online Journal of Legal Studies, 1, 77-84. Brown, E. (forthcoming). Stoic Cosmopolitanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DeFilippo, J. G., and P. T. Mitsis. (1994). Socrates and Stoic natural law. In Paul A. Vander Waerdt (Ed.). The Socratic Movement (pp. 252-271). Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Long. A. A. (1988). "Socrates in Hellenistic philosophy." Classical Quarterly, 38, 150-171. Schofield, M. (1984). "Ariston of Chios and the unity of virtue." Ancient Philosophy, 4, 83-95. Striker, G. (1994). "Plato's Socrates and the Stoics." In Paul A. Vander Waerdt (Ed.). The Socratic Movement (pp. 241-251). Ithaca: Cornell University Press. See also MORAL PSYCHOLOGY, ETHICS, THE CYNICS, EPICTETUS ERIC BROWN Department of Philosophy, Washington University Author of Stoic Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) and a variety of articles in ancient philosophy.