Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to himself Author:Marcus Aurelius Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV.—Stoicism In History Historically, Stoicism belongs to the age of the Diadochi; the career of Alexander was ended before Zeno repaired to Athens and enroll... more »ed himself among the disciples of Crates. The conquests of Alexander changed the moral as well as the political outlook of Hellenism; for ethically, as well as socially, it became impossible any longer to regard the TrdAts as the supreme unit of morality. The conception of the state enlarged to that of the nation, and nationality became cosmopolitan in its field of exercise. ' Hellenism' was no longer restricted to the cities and colonies of Greece, but was called upon to realise itself as a social and intellectual entity from the Egean to the Indies. The reconstruction of Ethics was immediate and fundamental. In Plato it is a standing assumption that the city is ' by nature' the Greatest Common Measure of individual morality; in Aristotle the same idea still dominates the field of ethics, and moral prerogative is intimately bound up with civic status ; ' natural' obligation is not identical for the slave and for the freeman, towards the citizen and towards the alien. Greek ethics from the first expressed realised conditions of Greek life; and the changes of formula that are common to all the post-Aristotelian, or more truly to all post-Alexandrian, schools are another testimony to the freshness and sincerity of the Greek intelligence, y In all alike—Stoic, Epicurean, or Cyrenaic—the civic basis V' is abandoned for the individualist and universal. The ethical ideal becomes internal and, as the city widens to the world, transcends limitations of status or franchise; and belongs to man as man, the common seal of his humanity. As a consequence of this it becomes, or appears to become, for a time, less vital in its effec...« less