Plutarch, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
It is philosophy, and I will say why by showing how the thing is done. When I charge the Stoics with self-contradiction, I do not paraphrase them to my advantage; I set their own words down side by side and let the reader judge. Zeno admits several virtues with Plato, prudence, fortitude, temperance and justice, inseparable yet distinct, and then defines fortitude as prudence in executing and justice as prudence in distributing, so that they become one virtue seeming to differ only in its occasions.
Chrysippus blames Ariston for saying exactly this, that the virtues are different habits of one virtue, and yet defends Zeno, who defines them in the same fashion. Cleanthes too, in his Commentaries concerning Nature, turns force and strength into continence, fortitude, justice or temperance according to the matter it is employed on.1 These are their sentences, set where a man may compare them.
A point scored by misreporting would not survive the quotation; this one stands or falls on it. Zeno's dilemma against hearing the second speaker is the same sort of case. If the first speaker proved his cause, the question is ended; if he did not, it is as though he had not appeared; so the second is never to be heard. Yet the man who built this dilemma wrote against Plato's Commonweal and exhorted his scholars to learn logic so as to dissolve sophisms.
Either Plato proved what he wrote or he did not, and in neither case was it necessary to write against him.2 Here a man is refuted by his own practice, which is the surest refutation I know. Against the Epicureans the matter is a little different. They sacrifice to the gods and deny that the gods meddle in the world, and the Stoics, who mock them for it, themselves sacrifice on altars and in temples which they say ought not to stand nor to have been built.3
I am not scoring a point against one school with the other's weapons; I am showing that neither can live by what it professes. And I hate the Epicurean doctrine that the soul perishes when it is parted from the body, for I hold that the soul, incapable of death, suffers in the body as birds kept in a cage, and that it is impossible for a wise and just man not to be beloved of the gods, or for a man beloved of the gods not to be happy.4
That is the Platonist speaking, and it is not a provincial's grudge. Those who have read me with sympathy have noticed that I take up such questions on the human side and not the metaphysical.5 I admit it. A reply to Epicurus about immortality that comforts a wife for a lost child is argument pitched where men actually live, and I would not trade it for subtlety. But the choice of the human side is a method, and the man who makes it has not thereby given up reasoning.
The Stoics contradict themselves: they make god the author of all things and then make vice a thing, they make the sage happy on the rack and then deny that pain is an evil, they say that only virtue is good and then take care of their health.6 Epicurus makes a pleasant life impossible by taking away the gods, the soul's survival and the love of honour, and his precept to live unknown would have hidden Epaminondas and Lycurgus.
The soul is not one thing but has a rational and an irrational part, and virtue is the ordering of the second by the first, as Plato and Aristotle taught; the passions are to be tuned, not cut out. This is philosophy, done by quotation and argument, and the quotations are theirs.78
Zeno admits (as Plato does) several virtues with various distinctions—to wit, prudence, fortitude, temperance and justice—as being indeed inseparable, but yet divers and different from one another. But again, defining every one of them, he says that fortitude is prudence in executing, justice prudence in distributingEssays and Miscellanies, Morals Vol 4
If he who spake first has plainly proved his cause, the second is not to be heard, for the question is at an end; and if he has not proved it, it is the same case as if being cited he did not appearEssays and Miscellanies, Morals Vol 4
Epicureans, who sacrifice to the Gods and yet deny them to meddle with the government of the world, do thereby refute themselves; whereas they themselves are more contrary to themselves, sacrificing on altars and in temples, which they affirm ought not to stand nor to have been built.Essays and Miscellanies, Morals Vol 4
He thinks it impossible either that a man beloved of the gods should not be happy, or that a wise and just man should not be beloved of the gods. To him the Epicureans are hateful, who held that the soul perishes when it is separated from the body.Essays and Miscellanies, Morals Vol 1
Plutarch always addresses the question on the human side, and not on the metaphysicalEssays and Miscellanies, Morals Vol 1
Or shall we not rather think, that the Epicureans do not take away the conceptions concerning the Gods; but that these Stoics scoff at the Gods and deride them, saying one is a God of fruits, another of marriage, another a physician, and another a diviner, while yet health, issue, and plenty of fruits are not good things, but indifferent things and unprofitable to those who have them? 33.Essays and Miscellanies, Morals Vol 4
For instance, doth anger transport you? The advice in that case is, Shun the occasions of it. Doth jealousy torment you? Take this or that course. Art thou love-sick? It hath been my own case and infirmity to be so too; but I saw the folly of it, I repented, I grew wiser.Essays and Miscellanies, Morals Vol 3
For if they oppose us with this subtle distinction, that man is mortal, and God not mortal but corruptible, see what they get by it. For they will say either that God is at the same time both immortal and corruptible, or else that he neither is mortal nor immortal; the absurdity of which even those cannot exceed who set themselves industriously to devise positions repugnant to common sense.Essays and Miscellanies, Morals Vol 4
The polemics that preserved much of what we know of Stoic doctrine and that scholars have called unfair for a century; the Platonism behind them has been reassembled from the Moralia.