Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

n 2 BIRTH OF STOICISM xlv
raitted to insist on considerations of decency and
consequence. Deaf to the voices of tradition and
culture, determined to isolate the individual from the
society, and to flaunt the superiority of will to outer
circumstance, the Cynics fell rapidly into the quagmires
of ascetic bravado. Positive value and professional
eclat were attached to abstinences and mortifications,
whose sole moral justification lay in the reduction of
external needs ; the virtues of simplicity and temperance
were caricatured in exhibitions of mendicancy, dirt, and
foul diet; all forms of regard for social convenance
delicacy or decency or civility were ranked as weak
subservience, as apostasies from idiosyncrasy; to be
'
naked and unashamed '
became a chief part of vocation
and the test of moral independence. From this the
Stoics were saved. If in fear of moral enervation they
approved some gratuitous austerities, and if at some
points they confounded independence of will with
suppression of sensibility, at least they never interpreted
'
accord with nature '
in terms of relapse to animalism,
and it was rather from want of humour and good taste
that they indulged in academic discussions upon
cannibalism, irreverence to the remains of the dead,
community of wives, and such like Cynic banalities,
than with any serious thought of giving them practical
sanction or application.
The course of Stoic ethics is, in fact, the progressive
enlargement and clarification of the Cynic ideal of
conduct, under the stress of that larger conception of
'
nature '
which was inherent in Stoic monism. The full
content and interpretation of the formula was only
d