12.The insight that we learn some false beliefs through socialization goes back at least to the Stoic Chrysippus. However, Chrysippus only seems to have considered deliberate socialization, not the kind of unconscious transmission that Seneca describes clearly. See Teun Tieleman, Chrysippus’ On Affections: Reconstruction and Interpretations (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2003), 132 ff., and Graziano Ranocchia, “The Stoic Concept of Proneness to Emotion and Vice,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 94, no. 1 (2012): 74–92.
13.At the beginning of Letter 60, Seneca provides an emphatic explanation of how Lucilius picked up his beliefs about the value of wealth as a child from his parents and others responsible for his upbringing.
14.See, for example, J. W. Bridges, “Imitation, Suggestion, and Hypnosis,” chapter 18, in J. W. Bridges, Psychology: Normal and Abnormal, with Special Reference to the Needs of Medical Students and Practitioners (New York: Appleton, 1930), 311–24. Available from the American Psychological Association: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2008-08475-018.
15.Seneca, Letters 7.8.
16.Seneca, Letters 94.69.
17.Seneca, On Anger 3.8.2.
18.Seneca, Letters 109.1–2.
19.For Aristotle, neither women nor slaves possessed the mental capacity to benefit from the study of politics. Additionally, as he wrote in Politics 1260a11, “natural slaves” lack the power of deliberation entirely. Women possess the power of deliberation, “but in a form that lacks authority,” which excludes them from participating in politics. By contrast, Plato, who was Aristotle’s teacher, believed that women could be guardians of the state.
20.Daniel S. Richter, Cosmopolis: Imagining Community in Late Classical Athens and the Early Roman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 68. In chapter 4, Richter highlights the vast differences between the views of Aristotle and the Stoics on human equality.
21.Lactantius, Divine Institutes 3.25, cited and translated in Richter, Cosmopolis, 67. For more on human equality and slavery in early Stoic philosophy, see Lisa Hill and Prasanna Nidumolu, “The Influence of Classical Stoicism on John Locke’s Theory of Self-Ownership,” History of the Human Sciences (May 2020): 6–7.
22.On natural law in Stoicism and Cicero, see Maryanne Cline Horowitz, “The Stoic Synthesis of Natural Law in Man: Four Themes,” Journal of the History of Ideas 35, no. 1 (1974): 3–16; Elizabeth Asmis, “Cicero on Natural Law and the Laws of State,” Classical Antiquity 27, no. 1 (2008): 1–33; and Fernando H. Llano Alonso, “Cicero and Natural Law,” ARSP: Archiv für Rechts- und Socialphilosophie / Archives for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy 98, no. 2 (2012): 157–68.
23.Cicero, On the Republic 3.33.
24.Philosophy scholar Phillip Mitsis concluded that the Stoics gave “expression to the notion of natural human rights.” The Stoics, with their idea of the cosmopolis, lived “in a moral climate conducive to the recognition of their fellow citizens’ needs and rights—rights that the Stoics think we all share in virtue of the fact that we are human.” Mitsis, “The Stoic Origin of Natural Rights, in Topics in Stoic Philosophy, ed. Katerina Ierodiakonou (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 176–77.
25.Our modern idea of human rights—for example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, developed by the United Nations in 1948—combines aspects of universal, natural law with civil and international law. Interestingly, this had been an important question for Cicero: how closely can civil law be brought into harmony with natural law?
26.Paul Meany, “Why the Founders’ Favorite Philosopher Was Cicero,” FEE (May 31, 2018). https://fee.org/articles/why-the-founders-favorite-philosopher-was-cicero/. I am grateful to Meany for his articles on Stoicism, Cicero, natural law, and natural rights, which encouraged me to investigate the Stoic contribution to the development of natural and human rights.
27.In fact, when Thomas Jefferson died, he had a volume of Seneca’s writings open on his bedside table, and Jefferson listed Cicero as a major influence on his drafting of the Declaration of Independence. John Locke, who influenced Jefferson’s thinking on natural rights, also read the Stoic philosophers and recommended them to his students.
28.M. Andrew Holowchak, “Thomas Jefferson,” section 2.2, “Nature and Society,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/jefferson/.
29.As the political historian Charles McIlwan noted, “The idea of the equality of men is the profoundest contribution of the Stoics to political thought, that idea has colored its whole development from their day to ours, and its greatest influence is in the changed conception of law that in part resulted from it.” McIlwan, The Growth of Political Thought in the West: From the Greeks to the Middle Ages (New York: Macmillan, 1932), 8.
See also chapter 3, “The Cosmopolis in Human Rights,” in Tony Honoré, Ulpian: Pioneer of Human Rights, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), which documents how Stoicism led to the ideas of human equality, freedom, and the dignity of all in the Roman legal tradition, especially in the work of the jurist Domitius Ulpianus or Ulpian (c. 170–c. 228).
30.Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 53.
31.Marcelo Gleiser, “The Trouble with Tribalism,” Orbiter (July 18, 2019). https://orbitermag.com/the-trouble-with-tribalism/.
32.Seneca, Letters 95.52–53.
33.Seneca, Letters 48.2.
34.Seneca, On Benefits 4.18.4.
35.Ilaria Ramelli, Hierocles the Stoic: Elements of Ethics, Fragments, and Excerpts (Atlanta: Society for Biblical Literature, 2009), xxxv.
36.Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 4.3. He repeats this “doctrine” and elaborates it throughout the Meditations, exploring how “we were born to help one another” (11.18).
37.Cicero, On Ends 3.62.
38.Cicero, On Ends 3.62–63.
39.Cicero, On Ends 3.63.
40.Ramelli, Hierocles the Stoic, 89–91.
41.John Sellars, Stoicism (London: Routledge, 2014), 131.
CHAPTER 10: HOW TO BE AUTHENTIC AND CONTRIBUTE TO SOCIETY
1.Epicurus wrote to one friend, “I am thrilled with pleasure in the body when I live on bread and water,” and in another letter he wrote, “Send me some preserved cheese, so I may have a feast when I like.” See Cyril Bailey, Epicurus: The Extant Remains (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), 131.
2.The stark difference between the Stoic view of rationality in nature and a random world of colliding atoms and is summed up nicely in a phrase that Marcus Aurelius often used to describe the divide between the Stoics and the Epicureans: “providence or atoms.”
3.This saying of Epicurus, lathe biōsis or “live unknown,” was widely known in the ancient world. See for example the essay of Plutarch, Is “Live Unknown” a Wise Precept? In Plutarch, Moralia, Volume 14 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 318–43.