Note 1 — Chapter III · HISTORY OF THE STOICS UNTIL THE END OF THE SECOND CENTURY B.C.

A. Authorities for the Stoic philosophy. (1) Review of authorities. To give a faithful exposition of the Stoic philosophy is a work of more than ordinary difficulty, owing to the circumstance that all the writings of the earlier Stoics, with the exception of a few fragments, have been lost.1 Those Stoics whose complete works are still extant—Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Heraclitus, Cornutus—lived under the Roman Empire, and therefore belong to a time in which all Schools alike exposed to foreign influences had surrendered or lost sight of many of their original peculiarities, and had substituted new elements in their place. The same remark applies to writers like Cicero, Plutarch, Diogenes, Sextus Empiricus, and the commentators on Aristotle, who may be considered as authorities at second hand for the teaching of the Stoics; but it is more than doubtful whether everything which they mention as Stoic teaching really belongs to the older members of that School. That teaching can, however, be ascertained with sufficient certainty on most of the more important points, partly by comparing accounts when they vary, partly by looking to definite statements on which authorities agree for the teaching and points of difference between individual philosophers, such as Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrysippus; partly too by consulting such fragments of their writings as are still extant. Yet, when the chief points have been settled in this way, many difficulties still remain. In the first place, it will be found that only isolated points of their teaching, with at most a few arguments on which to base them, are recorded; but the real connection of their tenets, and the motives which gave rise to them, can only be known by conjecture. Had the writings of Zeno and Chrysippus come down to us in their entirety, we should have had a much surer foundation on which to build, and far less would have been left to conjecture. An opportunity, too, would then have been afforded of tracing the inward growth of the Stoic teaching, and of deciding how much of that teaching was due to Zeno, and how much to Chrysippus. That this work of discrimination can now only be done very imperfectly, is the second difficulty, and it arises from the nature of the authorities. It may be ascertained without difficulty what the teaching of the Stoics was since the time of Chrysippus, but only on a few points are the differences between Chrysippus and his predecessors known. For the most part, the authorities do not hesitate to attribute to the founder of the School all that was known to them as belonging to its later members, just as everything Pythagorean was directly attributed to Pythagoras, and everything Platonic to Plato. Still, there can be no doubt that the Stoic teaching was very considerably expanded by Chrysippus, and altered in many ways. But how considerable the alterations were, and in what they consisted, are questions upon which there is little direct evidence.