ABSTRACT
While classical Greek philosophy had concentrated on the eudaimonist promise of cultivating happiness of the soul, and medieval philosophy on guiding the soul to the eternal happiness of heaven, Renaissance philosophy added to these the more worldly goal of ending the war, factionalism and instability that ravaged Europe, and especially Italy, in the twelfth through sixteenth centuries, by recreating the sciences, society and moral education which had achieved the Pax Romana. Two hundred and six years of pan-European peace was a golden dream to a vulnerable city like Florence, which might endure six bloody regime changes in as many decades. This classical revival, which we now call humanism, with its expectation that philosophy would have an immediate and practical public effect, found some precedent in the political applications of Roman Stoicism, but was far more ambitious in its hopes for broad social transformation, and would not be surpassed in its focus on the practical applications of philosophy until Francis Bacon and, eventually, the Enlightenment. The Renaissance recovery of Stoicism, like that of all major classical sects, had two sides.
The more glamorous was the physical rediscovery of ancient tomes that had languished for centuries in dark library corners where the dust caked thick. Such discoveries were supplemented by the arrival in the West of classics that had long circulated in the East, in Greek or in Arabic translations. It had always been possible for European scholars to get sources from the East, and indeed it was always possible for them to visit remote European libraries and brush the dust off neglected classics. Thus, this physical recovery was the product of a revolution in mindset rather than technology, sparked by Petrarch (1304-1374) and his peers who convinced scholars and, just as important, wealthy patrons that glory, truth, virtue and the peace and power of Rome hid in the written remnants of antiquity. In parallel to this physical recovery of texts was a process of synthetic recovery. To remake
their golden age, humanists wanted to assemble complete, or at least complete-seeming, descriptions of the beliefs and practices of the classical schools whose names had never stopped being famous. This involved harvesting information, not just from new texts, but from the familiar authorities who had circulated consistently throughout the Middle Ages. Thus, while knowledge of Stoicism was greatly expanded by such newly resurrected voices as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, it was also greatly transformed by humanists rereading, with their new agenda, the same Seneca that their medieval grandparents had known. Equally significant were tidbits about Stoicism harvested from authors – some new, some familiar – who were
not themselves Stoics. Cicero, Dio Chrysostum, Diogenes Laertius, Galen, Suetonius whose biographical writings helped humanists judge the character of ancients and thereby how well they lived by their philosophies, even commentators, grammarians and church fathers contributed fragments, which were meticulously gleaned and combined with Stoic sources to produce what was less a contiguous portrait of Stoicism than a mosaic cobbled together from all available pieces. Two further bodies of sources contributed substantially which we now exclude from our
own: spurious material, and the Renaissance tendency toward syncretic conflation.
