3. The Historical and Cultural Background of Stoic
Ethics. In looking to Nature as the source of moral
principles which would be binding on any man of
sound reason, Zeno was strongly influenced by histori-
cal and social considerations. The Greek city-state,
which Plato and Aristotle had envisaged as the context
of moral action, was destroyed as an independent po-
litical entity by the conquests of Alexander the Great.
The old civic and national boundaries, though pre
served in theory, were of little consequence in the
enlarged world divided among Alexander's successors,
and the new capitals of Pergamum in Asia and
Alexandria in Africa came to rival Athens as centers
of culture. In a period of such social and political
upheaval, neither the traditional ethics, already found
wanting by Socrates and Plato, nor their immediate
philosophical alternatives provided adequate guides for
conduct. In Alexander's own lifetime the Cynic
Diogenes had challenged contemporary values by
rejecting civic life as an inadequate context for the
proper development of human nature. Zeno, while
avoiding some of the more scandalous aspects of Cynic
asceticism, was equally cosmopolitan in taking the
world itself for the context of moral action, and in
making virtue a disposition of the reason which it is
in the power of any man to realize. But, unlike
Diogenes, Zeno grounded moral theory in physics and
logic, and he also incorporated features of pre-Socratic,
Platonic, and Aristotelian thought. Like Heraclitus he
made logos something common to man and the uni-
verse; like Socrates and Plato he defined virtue in terms
of knowledge. And he seems to reflect Aristotle both
in his treatment of the relation between moral charac-
ter, action, and emotion, and in terminology and
method of analysis.
Zeno was a Phoenician by birth, but he settled in
Athens at an early age and established his school there.
It was fashionable until recently to invoke his Semitic
origin, and that of other early Stoics, as a key to under-
standing the particular character of Stoic ethics, but
this explanation is neither useful nor necessary.
Stoicism is thoroughly Greek, and its ethics derives its
distinctive quality more from a synthesis of existing
concepts than from the introduction of entirely new
ones. Zeno's ethical aim was to provide a basis for
moral action and a means to personal well-being in
the natural endowments of any man, irrespective of
his social status or personal circumstances.
