The Stoics

Out of the Greeks' tireless questioning of everything around them grew the discipline of philosophia. It is hardly right to think of it as a unitary discipline, and still less to equate it with our modern philosophy, for the philosophia of the Greeks subsumed many disparate areas of knowledge. In the generations after Aristotle, countless thinkers took up the task of working through the wealth of ideas inherited from the Golden Age of Athens (box 3.1). Work of two kinds lay before them: systematisation and taking stock, and elaboration of the original often concisely expressed and sketchily developed ideas. Amongst the people who participated in this activity were the members of the most famous philosophical school in the ancient world, the Stoics. Founded by Zeno of Citium in the third century BC, and based as much in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) as in Greece, the Stoics grew in numbers and reputation, even counting a Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius (121–180 AD), amongst their later adherents. Despite the esteem in which they were held in their own time, almost none of their writings have survived; they are known to us only from the snippets quoted by other writers, and from a sort of biographical dictionary, Lives of the Philosophers, compiled by Diogenes Laertius in the first half of the third century AD. For the historian of linguistics this is an intensely frustrating state of affairs, for, as we shall see, there is reason to suppose that the Stoics played a part in giving shape to the discipline of grammar.