Page:The hymn of Cleanthes; Greek text tr. into English (IA hymnofcleanthesg00clearich).pdf/18

 14 Reason, which is ethical, not merely intellectual. The emphasis on should not be overlooked. The great masters of Stoicism were cosmopolitan in their outlook, as they were in origin. The of the Universe is a familiar thought with them; all men share in the universal reason of God (the world-soul), subject to a common law and a common citizenship. In the Meditations of M. Aurelius it is not without significance that the word (and its compounds) occurs more than eighty times: Dill, Roman Society, pp. 324 sq.; G. H. Rendall, op. cit., Introd., p. cxxxvii. Observe how the author of 4 Maccabees would enlist the Stoic doctrine in the service of Jewish philosophy.

13. : Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, (a Presence) “that rolls thro' all things.”

14. : often in Homer as an epithet of Zeus.

15. Cf. John i. 3. For cf. Bacchyl. iii. 37, (of Zeus).

16-18. Nature is here put under the immediate government of the deity.

17-20. Evil is not directly due to God, but a necessary accompaniment of the process by which He created the world out of Himself. Cleanthes appears to argue somewhat as Browning would do: cf. Plat. Rep. ii. 379ᶜ, ; Eccles. vii. 13 foll. (and Tyler's Introd. to his ed. of Eccles., p. 73, ed. 2). The hymn is throughout inspired by the consciousness that it is one spiritual power which penetrates and controls the Universe, and is the source of every work done under the sun, “except what evil men do in their folly.” Caird, ''Evol. of Relig. in Greek Philosophers'', ii. 76; E. R. Bevan, Stoics and Sceptics, p. 54.

18., odd )( even (i.e. the reconciliation of opposites): cf. Plat. Gorg. 451ᶜ; Ritter-Preller, 53, 55.