extent of denying that Leucippus even existed. His appropriation of their
capital sealed their fate.
Zeno of Citium in founding the Stoics reached far back for a distinctive
collection of intellectual forebears: Heraclitus for a cosmology of change
(including such specific doctrines as the periodic extinction of the world by
fire); Antisthenes’ ethical exemplar Heracles as emblem of the conquest of pain;
the logos doctrine of a transcendent world order. Initially the Stoics incorpo-
rated something of Cynic extremism, and aroused a good deal of scandal with
their tolerance of incest and their doctrine of replacing the family with a
community of men with women in common (Bryant, 1996: 439). This uncon-
ventionality gave way within another generation, and by the time of Chrysip-
pus, the Stoics had taken the opposite space from the Epicureans (and their
predecessors in this respect, the morally anti-conventional Cyrenaics and Cyn-
ics) with respect to externals of lifestyle. Doing one’s ethical duty in social
obligations was a doctrine that appealed to the religiously secularized upper
class, and gave the Stoics a broad market base as a respectable form of
education.
The Stoics captured the middle ground of public opinion about religion.
They declared temples superfluous because man’s intellect is a portion of the
divine substance, and the true temple is the mind. Zeno and Chrysippus
rejected the anthropomorphic gods but allowed them as symbolic (Dodds,
1951: 238–240). In a larger perspective, the Stoics and Epicureans were com-
peting over the same rationalistic religious space; the Epicureans too allowed
that the gods existed, but declared that they, like everything else, were com-
posed of material atoms. This was in effect a defensive concession to popular
religion, which placed legal penalties on outright atheism in places such as
Athens during these centuries. But the two schools were at pains to differentiate
themselves within this space, the Stoics taking a pantheist line, the Epicureans
the view that the gods existed concretely, but that they had nothing to do with
human affairs, living in remote places in the void. The rival schools also carried
on the broad consensus of the preceding period that virtue resides in detach-
ment, while disputing the nuances of apatheia (freedom from passion) and
ataraxeia (tranquillity of spirit). Underlying this dispute was a real difference
in lifestyle orientation: the Epicureans withdrawing socially to achieve har-
mony through contemplation, the Stoics interpreting the ideal condition as an
inner equanimity with which the wise man carries out his worldly duties.
The shift to Hellenistic philosophy is usually attributed to changing external
conditions. A long-standing interpretation calls it a failure of nerve, a loss of
the acute intellectual edge of Plato and Aristotle’s generations, and more
generally the falling off into overripeness which in art history makes the very
term “Hellenistic” a synonym for post-creative decadence. But in fact, periods104 •^ The Skeleton of Theory