ABSTRACT
As we trace developments through Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, we are exploring a tradition that never defined itself as a body of doctrine. When we come to the Stoics, we meet a different tradition that at once took on the discipline of a school. The Stoa was founded at Athens, not long after Aristotle’s death, by Zeno of Citium, who was followed at its head by Cleanthes, and Chrysippus. My main concern is Chrysippus, both because he wrote a lost but lengthy treatise On the Affections (Peri pathôn), and because fragments of it survive within Galen’s De placitis Hippocratis et Platonis (PHP), a polemical work which has, ironically, become invaluable for the evidence it contains of the theory it rebuts. When I speak of ‘Stoic’ views, I shall primarily mean those of Chrysippus. I shall also pay attention to another writer for whom Galen has become a major source, Posidonius, a contemporary of Cicero (who knew him well, TD 2.61); he counted as a Stoic even though, if Galen is to believed, he reverted in a book also called On the Affections to the views of Plato and Aristotle. Cicero testifies that the early Stoics denied any division of the mind along Plato’s lines, whether into parts or powers:
Whereas the ancients said that those affections [distress, desire, dread, pride] were natural and not sharing in reason, and placed desire and reason in different parts of the mind, he [Zeno] did not agree with these either; for he thought that even the affections were voluntary, and entered into by a judgement of opinion.
