When Selling Out is Worth It. On Panaetius of Rhodes and his Roman audience.

This Summer I read René Brouwer’s (2021) Law and Philosophy in the Late Roman Republic (Cambridge). This book is on the mutual impact of Hellenistic philosophy, especially a refined Stoicism, and Roman law when they encountered each other in the expansive heyday of the Roman republic. I have long admired Brouwer’s (2014) Stoic Sage: The Early Stoics on Wisdom, Sagehood and Socrates, and blogged about it back in the day (here). The two books share an economy of prose, and in each case Brouwer (Utrecht) manages to wring quite a bit of philosophical subtlety from rather scanty sources.

If you were to read the books alongside each other, you also get a striking side-way, as it were, glimpse at the history and evolution of Stoicism before, say, Cicero. Perhaps what I am about to share is already familiar to you, but the entry on Stoicism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy makes no mention of it.

It is, perhaps, well-known that there is an ongoing debate of the role of later Stoicism on early modern views of persons and property rights (see, for example, this (1997) essay by A.A. Long, which itself cites a (1938) lecture by Marcel Mauss.) To this day, there is strong interest in Stoic views on cosmopolitanism stimulated by work on Kant and Martha Nussbaum’s influence. And I have a sneaky suspicion that Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic-emperor, is the most admired person in Silicon Valley.

The early Stoics like Zeno, by contrast, were truly radical firebrands, who took up (to simplify) Socrates’ design for the Kallipolis (in the Republic) and mixed these with some of the most shocking of Cynic doctrines (including the permissibility of incest and cannibalism), and turned the combination into a consistent social theory for individual and society. This program included inter alia the communal use of property.

Already in the earlier book, Brouwer writes that “In order to make Stoicism respectable to the very conservative Roman elite, later Stoics, such as Panaetius (c. 185–109), did try to hide provocative doctrines, such as the allowance of incest or cannibalism, held by the founders of their school.” (Brouwer 2014: 116) In the more recent book, Panaetius’ interest of updating Stoicism is spelled out more elaborately. (It’s a major sub-theme of the book.)

In particular, Brouwer notes that Panaetius deviates from the early Stoa by defending private property as essential to justice (see p. 61), and as part of a down-to-earth ethics for men who are not sages and merely progressing toward it. This Brouwer treats as a kind of accommodation to local prejudices (p. 121; Cf. Adam Smith Theory of Moral Sentiments, 6.2.2.16, p. 233 ).

Now, by the time Panaetius of Rhodes undertakes this “almost the entire known world” had been, and now I quote Polybius’ famous opening to The Histories — “conquered and brought under a single empire, the empire of the Romans, in less than fifty-three years.” (Translated by Robin Waterfield.) And in so far as some elite Romans ended up being rather attracted to this new form of Stoicism, Panaetius’ reformulation turned out to be of (ahh) world historical significance.

A living and vibrant intellectual tradition will adapt to changing circumstances in all kinds of ways; sometimes such accommodation really involves major changes. But few do so in such a way such that ‘opportunistic selling out’ seems to be the most apt description for the enormous change in character that Panaetius and his generation accomplished.

But we also shouldn’t pretend Panaetius’ re-orientation of Stoicism is completely unusual; in our own age we have seen effective altruism morph into a program almost uniquely tailored to the (aspirational) 1% (the equivalent of the Romans who ended up being Panaetius’ main audience). To what degree this also changed the underlying intellectual and programmatic commitments is obviously a contentious judgment call. Other examples worth pondering are how large the effects of Christianity becoming the state religion of the empire and, say, Marxism the state ideology of the USSR (etc.), but it seems fair to say that these also created non-trivial changes to their intellectual characters.

What’s interesting about Panaetius’ case, is that because of the systematic character of Stoicism, the innovations required to adjust Stoic doctrine to appease its new audience also made the school more fertile in all kinds of ways (or so Brouwer implies). And arguably this also contributed to its survival in collective (intellectual) memory or manuscripts. To what degree such facts vindicates the choices involved is a troubling question. One of my favorite troubling novels, The Dream of Scipio, by Iain Pears vivifies and explores this theme in a most extraordinary way.