upon himself. He may become poor, but what of it? He can still be virtuous. A tyrant may put him
in prison, but he can still persevere in living in harmony with Nature. He may be sentenced to
death, but he can die nobly, like Socrates. Other men have power only over externals; virtue,
which alone is truly good, rests entirely with the individual. Therefore every man has perfect
freedom, provided he emancipates himself from mundane desires. It is only through false
judgements that such desires prevail; the sage whose judgements are true is master of his fate in
all that he values, since no outside force can deprive him of virtue.
There are obvious logical difficulties about this doctrine. If virtue is really the sole good, a
beneficent Providence must be solely concerned to cause virtue, yet the laws of Nature have
produced abundance of sinners. If virtue is the sole good, there can be no reason against cruelty
and injustice, since, as the Stoics are never tired of pointing out, cruelty and injustice afford the
sufferer the best opportunities for the exercise of virtue. If the world is completely deterministic,
natural laws will decide whether I shall be virtuous or not. If I am wicked, Nature compels me to
be wicked, and the freedom which virtue is supposed to give is not possible for me.
To a modern mind, it is difficult to feel enthusiastic about a virtuous life if nothing is going to be
achieved by it. We admire a medical man who risks his life in an epidemic of plague, because we
think illness is an evil, and we hope to diminish its frequency. But if illness is no evil, the medical
man might as well stay comfortably at home. To the Stoic, his virtue is an end in itself, not
something that does good. And when we take a longer view, what is the ultimate outcome? A
destruction of the present world by fire, and then a repetition of the whole process. Could anything
be more devastatingly futile? There may be progress here and there, for a time, but in the long run
there is only recurrence. When we see something unbearably painful, we hope that in time such
things will cease to happen; but the Stoic assures us that what is happening now will happen over
and over again. Providence, which sees the whole, must, one would think, ultimately grow weary
through despair.
There goes with this a certain coldness in the Stoic conception of virtue. Not only bad passions are
condemned, but all passions. The sage does not feel sympathy: when his wife or his children die,
he