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Middle Stoicism: Panetius of Rhodes

Panetius of Rhodes(Panetius of Rhodes)

Panetius of Rhodes was one of the most curious characters of the late 2nd century. The friendship which linked Panetius (as well as the historian Polybius) to eminent Romans of his time, to Scipio Aemilianus and to Laelius, at the time when the Roman order was beginning to impose itself on all and, realizing the dream of an universal society, seemed to consume history, is one of the most curious symptoms of the spirit of the times. His nobility of character and his gravity made him worthy, says Cicero 6, of this familiarity. Before 129, the year in which he took charge of the school in Athens. and undoubtedly since 146, he hardly left Scipio, accompanying him in 142 on his trip to Alexandria, taking part with Polybius on a voyage of exploration organized in 146 by Scipio along the west coast of Africa. Panetius saw in Scipio a wisdom, a reserve, a moral demeanor which made him admire 7. Scipio, on the other hand, must have found in Stoicism a much-needed moral guide with the rapid growth of Rome and all the ambitions that she aroused. “As we entrust wayward horses to tamers,” he said to Panétius, “we must bring men who are too confident in their star to the rule of reason and doctrine, so that they realize the weakness of the human things and the inconstancy of fortune. »8 The old traditional education must therefore give way to rational teaching. The Roman disciples of Panetius are numerous and influential; it was Quintus Tubero, the nephew of Scipio, a fervent Stoic in his conduct, who wrote a treatise On the Office of the Judge, where he undoubtedly reconciled his legal knowledge with Stoic doctrine 9; Mucius Scaevola, augur and jurist; Rutilius Rufus, proconsul of Asia Minor; Ælius Stilon, a grammarian and historian who was master of the scholar Varro. After this long stay in Rome, he directed the school in Athens from 129 to 110.

The universe of Panétius is very different from that of Zeno; he has great enthusiasm for Plato, “the divine, the very wise, the very holy, the Homer of philosophers”10. He no longer attached the same importance to the bushy dialectic as the founders of the school, and his teaching began with physics n. But the unity of the cosmos relaxes: the universal conflagration, which was like the symbol of the omnipotence of reason, is denied; this world, so beautiful and so perfect, will always preserve an order identical to that which we contemplate. With the conflagration falls universal sympathy: “What appearance does it have that, from an almost infinite distance, the influence of the stars can extend to the moon, or rather to the earth? » At the same time as sympathy, he rejects divination, based on it; and he is willing to admit a certain relaxation in destiny12.

These modifications go to the heart of things: Panétius is no longer a theologian, he is a humanist; it is the civilizing activity of man that interests him, human reason in movement, creator of the arts and sciences, much more than divine reason immanent in things. Also he rejects for the soul (which is for him only a fiery breath) any destiny outside of its life in the body; he went, we are told, so far as to deny the authenticity of the Phaedo. The soul must die, he says, since it is born, and the proof that it does not exist before birth is the moral resemblance of children to their parents. On the other hand, it is corruptible since it is subject to illness; and finally its ethereal part must regain at death the heights of the world from which it came13.

Nor should we be surprised that he treated the theology of the schools as mere chatter: he is undoubtedly the author responsible for this positive study of theology that we find in his disciple Scaevola who transmitted it in Varro14. There are in fact three theologies: that of the poets, so futile, which places the gods below good men, that of the philosophers which accords poorly with the beliefs necessary for cities, or that, with Evhémère, we think that the gods are only real men who have been deified, or we accept gods who have nothing in common with the gods whose statues we see in cities, since the god of philosophers has no gender, no age, no limited body. Finally, there is civil theology, that of worship, instituted in cities by wise men, and for which Scaevola, political above all, does not hide his predilection.

Panétius wrote in 140 a treatise On Duty, which, according to Cicero, contains a very exact and uncontroversial discussion on the subject. Cicero adds that he followed (but did not translate) this treatise in the first two books of his own work On Duties, “not, however, without correcting it somewhat”lD. These two books form our main source of information on Panetius. His ideal appears to be the conduct of the honest man finding, in a civilized society, the means and opportunities to satisfy and strengthen the inclinations with which nature has endowed him. For him, living in accordance with nature means “living according to the inclinations that it has given us”16. It is our individual nature that must be taken as ruler. “No doubt we should do nothing against universal nature, but, having respected this, let us follow our own nature, and, even if we find ourselves better elsewhere, let us nevertheless measure our wills by regulating them on our own nature. »17 No more of these exaggerated ambitions of superhuman wisdom. Not that Panétius, under the pretext of “naturalism”, allows man to abandon himself to all his passions. The awareness we have of our humanity and our dignity as men is enough to stop us. The idea of humanity is truly the center of the Ciceronian treatise. It is interesting to clarify the meaning and the cases in which he uses it. There are, for example; he says, two kinds of combat: the first is the direct use of force, as with animals; the second is particular to man: these are just wars, preceded by declaration, implying respect for oaths. Or again: there are two kinds of societies, animal societies and properly human societies whose two strongest links are reason and language (ratio and oratio), unknown to animals. Or finally: resistance to pleasure, which is unknown to animals, is on the contrary worthy of man. Cicero will also say that it is “inhuman” to use eloquence, the natural role of which is to save them, to destroy good men; he will say that it is very contrary to humanity to meditate in a banquet where one is invited, to sing in the public square18. In a word, humanity is everything that transforms the brutal instincts of the animal into civilized uses, from the politeness and deportment it requires to the rules of justice that the enemies themselves keep among themselves. , if they are men. The man of Panétius is not the rudimentary man of the cynics for whom civilization only creates useless complications; because the social bond comes from nature itself, and it is nature which invites us to reserve and respect ourselves (perecundia). The arts are not gifts, of gods, as the myths say, but results of human effort, and it is through them that “civilized human life is so far from the way of living of beasts”. Humanity therefore transforms the bestial instinct, but without replacing it; in animals there are tendencies corresponding to all the virtues, a desire to see and hear and a disinterested tendency to play, corresponding to speculative virtue, a desire for self-preservation corresponding to courage and temperance, innate social tendencies. Human virtues are only those natural tendencies regulated by reason19. Man, contrary to what orthodox Stoicism says, is therefore and remains dual, reason and irrational tendencies.

This doctrine of Panetius, which has only reached us in muffled echoes, seems to have been marvelously alive and vigorous. After the somewhat heavy gravity or the disenchanted pessimism of the doctrines of the two centuries which preceded, the thought of Panétius, like that of Carneades, is like a new departure in Greek thought; we have the impression of an ascending intellectual life, in correspondence with the prodigious political transformations which were taking place in the world.

Source: Émile Bréhier(1951). Histoire de la philosophie, Presses Universitaires de France. Translation and adaptation by © 2025 Nicolae Sfetcu

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