Not only that, but he might doubt the very value of his role as a philosopher. ‘It is not intelligence which guides the affairs of mortals, but Fortune.’43 This claim, when made by Demetrius’ teacher back in Athens, had generated much outrage among his peers; but Demetrius himself, over the course of his turbulent life, had been brought to acknowledge its force. Fortune – Tyche, as the Greeks knew her – had revealed herself the most terrible and powerful of deities. ‘Her influence on our lives,’ wrote Demetrius, ‘is as beyond computation as the manifestations of her power are unpredictable.’44 Small wonder, in an age that had seen great empires dismembered and kings rise from nothing to rank as gods, that she should have come to be worshipped as the truest mistress of things. Even as philosophers continued their search for the patterns that governed the cosmos, the dread of what might be wrought by Tyche could not help but shadow their efforts. The affairs of the world did not stand still. Demetrius, wondering at the downfall of Persian greatness, had foretold that the Macedonians would in their turn be brought low – and so it came to pass. A new people emerged to claim the rule of the world. In 167 BC, the king of Macedon – a descendant of Demetrius the Besieger, no less – was dragged in chains through the streets of a barbarous capital. Famous cities were put to the torch. Multitudes were sold on the auctioneer’s block. The fate of the Trojans was visited on countless Greeks. Nevertheless, the gods who on the battlefield of Troy had given such free rein to their murderous whims appeared inadequate to explain the sheer jaw-dropping scale of change. ‘For the affairs of Italy and Africa, interwoven with those of Asia and Greece, now tended towards a single end.’45 Surely only a deity as great as Tyche could explain the rise to world empire of the Roman republic?
Yet even Tyche, perhaps, could be tamed. In 67 BC, the most celebrated Roman general of his day arrived on Rhodes. Pompey the Great was, as his soubriquet implied, a man whose conceit had never found it much of a challenge to keep pace with his own achievements. Accustomed since a young man to being idolised, he was always delighted to burnish his reputation with a well-devised publicity stunt. So it was, prior to embarking on a campaign to clear the Mediterranean of pirates, that he dropped in on the world’s most famous philosopher. Posidonius, like his guest, had an international reputation. He was a noted athlete; he had dined with barbarian head-hunters; he had calculated the size of the moon. Among the Roman elite, however, he was famed for one particular accomplishment: the equation of their city’s conquests with the order of the cosmos. Five hundred years after Darius had promoted a very similar vision of empire, Posidonius was able to reassure his Roman patrons that their triumph was born of more than chance. Tyche, who had repeatedly granted victory to their legions, and rewarded them with slaves harvested from across the Mediterranean, and brought them riches beyond the avarice of kings, had not bestowed her blessings merely on a whim. Rather, she had done so because of what one of Posidonius’ students, the great Roman orator Cicero, described as ‘the highest reason, ingrafted in nature’.46 Rome had become a superpower in obedience of ‘natural law’.
This phrase had not originated with Posidonius. Like so many other eminent philosophers, he had been educated in Athens and his thought bore the stamp of the school that he had attended there. Zeno, its founder, had himself arrived in Athens from Cyprus back in 312, when Demetrius of Phaleron was still in power. He and his followers had come to be known – from Zeno’s habit of teaching students in a painted stoa, or colonnade – as ‘Stoics’. Just as Aristotle had done, they wrestled with the tension between the perfection of a heavenly order governed by mathematical laws and a sublunar realm governed by chance. Their solution was as radical as it was neat: to deny that any such tension existed. Nature, the Stoics argued, was itself divine. Animating the entire universe, God was active reason: the Logos. ‘He is mixed with matter, pervading all of it and so shaping it, structuring it, and making it into the world.’47 To live in accordance with nature, therefore, was to live in accordance with God. Male or female, Greek or barbarian, free or slave, all were equally endowed with the ability to distinguish right from wrong. Syneidesis, the Stoics termed this spark of the divine within every mortaclass="underline" ‘conscience’. ‘Alone of all creatures alive and treading the earth, it is we who bear a likeness to a god.’48
It was not merely in the conscience common to humanity, however, that natural law was manifest. If the entire fabric of the cosmos was divine, then it followed that everything was bound to be for the best. To those who lacked this understanding, it might indeed seem that Tyche was a motiveless thing of caprice; but to Stoics, who could recognise in the universe a living thing, in which the explanations for everything that ever happens are bound together like the mesh of an infinite net, cast out deep into the future, none of her works were motiveless. ‘If there only existed a mortal with the capacity to discern the links that join causes together, nothing would ever deceive him. For the man who grasps the causes of future events necessarily grasps what lies in the future.’49 So wrote Cicero – whose admiration for Posidonius was such that at one point he even vainly begged the philosopher to write a treatise on his feats as a statesman. The appeal of Stoic teaching to Roman statesmen was hardly difficult to fathom. Their conquests and their rule of the world; the wealth that they had won, and the teeming populations of slaves, uprooted and transported to Italy; the rank that was theirs, and the dignity, and the renown: all had been fated to happen.
It was unsurprising, perhaps, that Rome’s leaders should have come to see their city’s empire as an order destined as universal. Not for the first time, sway of a global scope served to foster a matching conceit. Pompey did not, however, cast himself as an agent of truth and light. The notion of the world as a battleground between good and evil was foreign to him. Iron courage, unbending discipline, mastery of body and souclass="underline" these were the qualities that had won the Roman people their rule of the world. The role of Greek philosophers was merely to gild this self-image. ‘Always fight bravely, and be superior to others.’50 Such was the admonition with which Posidonius sent Pompey on his way. The tag, though, was not his own. It came from the Iliad. As on the battlefield of Troy, so in the new world order forged by Rome – it was only by putting others in the shade that a man most fully became a man. Setting sail at the head of his war fleet, Pompey could reflect with satisfaction upon the perfect elision of his own ambitions and a beneficent providence. All was for the best. The whole world was there to be set in order. The future belonged to the strong.
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* Specifically, the word used by Herodotus is prospassaleusantes: ‘fastened with pins’.
* The plays staged in honour of the Lenaia were moved there two or three decades before Aristophanes’ debut.
* Assuming, that is, that the plague which ravages Thebes in the play is an echo of the plague that had devastated Athens in 430 BC. No source specifically gives us the play’s date.