A newly discovered 1st century BC papyrus shows how their ideas were considered beyond the pale, writes Tom Hodgkinson

Archaeologists and antiquarians got excited this week because researchers in Italy managed to decipher a bit of ancient writing relating to Zeno, the founder of the Stoic school.

They have apparently read a few lines from a charred scroll found at Herculaneum near Naples. The earthquake in AD 79 had the effect of preserving hundreds of papyrus rolls.

And the story is further proof that Stoic philosophy, far from being a matter of grinning and bearing it, was all about peace, love and cosmic unity. They were the original hippies. And this is very much what I discovered when studying the Stoics for my new book, How to Live Like a Stoic: a Handbook for Happiness.

The scroll talks about a lost work of Zeno’s called the Republic, or Politeia. It was common for the ancient philosophers to have a go at describing their ideal state. Plato, famously, wrote a Republic, and the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus also tried. It’s a literary genre that has survived: think about More’s Utopia, William Morris’s News from Nowhere, and Aldous Huxley’s Island.

The scroll, written by a philosopher called Philodemus in the 1st century BC, described Zeno’s Republic as “morally questionable, since it recommends social and sexual practices regarded as embarrassing”.

The original text of Zeno’s Republic has been lost, but we know about it from later historians like Plutarch. The content seems to reveal Zeno as the original hippie. Says Plutarch:

[T]he much-admired Republic of Zeno, the founder of the Stoic sect, may be summed up in this one main principle: that all the inhabitants of this world of ours should not live differentiated by their respective rules of justice into separate cities and communities, but that we should consider all men to be of one community and one polity.

Yeah, man. One love, one heart. Let’s get together and feel all right.

Plutarch tells us that Zeno also proposed free love and unisex clothing. And that he would ban money, law-courts and gymnasia from his ideal republic. Was he an anarchist?

The third-century BC Stoic Chrysippus was even wilder. According to another historian, his Republic “permits marriage with mothers and daughters and sons… In the third book of his treatise ‘On Justice’ he permits eating of the corpses of the dead.”

Which all goes to show that the Stoics are far stranger, wilder and more radical than most of us realise. Find out more in February when my book is published (you can pre-order it now).

Live well,
Tom

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