Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/391

Rh As to the ethical end, or summum bonum, he affirmed it to be pleasure ; it is for this that we cultivate the virtues and wisdom itself. This doctrine was liable to be misunderstood by those who failed to take into account the life-teaching of Epicurus, which enforced the truth that many immediate pleasures were to be avoided in order to attain true pleasure. This at once gave room and motive for the practice of virtue. On the other hand, as the highest pleasures are to be found in freedom from agitation, the Epicurean was exhorted to seek a life of retirement and to avoid public business. Such a philosophy was easily misinterpreted and became the creed of the rich and idle, or at best of the learned and cultured in Greece and Rome, rather than of the multitude or of the more strenuous and active members of the governing class.

Stoicism, on the other hand, inspired some of the best and finest natures for many centuries. It was founded about B.C. 300 by Zeno, and got its name from the Stoa Poikile at Athens, where he taught. In Ethics it held up a higher ideal than Epicureanism. Happiness, not pleasure , was, according to the Stoics, the end of action, or summum bonum; but that is equivalent to living in harmony with Nature, and that again is equivalent to virtue. It is virtue, therefore, which is alone choice-worthy for its own sake and without regard to fear or hope or anything external to itself. Virtue again is one; wisdom, self-control, justice, courage are only various exhibitions of it. The contraries to these are all included in vice, which, like virtue, is one. There is