THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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the land of the shortest shadow, in the land of wine without mine and thine, where a Dionysian sun still shines, one which melts together. Helios here beams equally on
the just and unjust, does away with the justice of suum cuique, as if he really was a benefactor from the Golden Age, in fact the Golden Age itself.
The Stoics and the international world­state
In a way, the dreams considered so far were still modest in one respect. They settled on an island or in a city, did not go beyond this. The island was admittedly the
model one per se, it provocatively demonstrated how a community ought to be, indeed almost how it could be. Yet the model kept its humble proportions, it never
outgrew the Greek city­state. That all changed with the Stoic designs for an ideal state, they have larger spaces in their favour, ultimately even Roman ones. Though this
was at the expense of detailed, certainly of radical content, and also of the fire which usually radiates from a person, not from a school. Stoic literature is long and multilayered,
it was in fact more effective than Plato and Aristotle put together, but unlike their schools it has no first­rate star in the middle (like the multi­layered neo­
Platonism in Plotinus). In addition there is the threefold, though coherent phenomenon of the school: the Greek one with Zeno and Chrysippos, the Hellenistic one with
Panaitios and Poseidonios, and the Roman one with Epictetus and Seneca. But despite this multi­layered aspect the Stoics exhibit as a historical phenomenon
something of the concentrated and imperturbable qualities which they assigned to the wise man in their teachings. Thus they outlast pedantic Alexandrianism, that
strange winter garden of Greece, and by no means become intricate and weak in the antiquarian hothouse. In the enormous processing of material, in which the Stoics
competed with Alexandria and also agreed with it in many ways, they by no means become lifeless, scholarly and disengaged themselves. They retain their masculinity,
a connection with practice, for all their abstraction, attain a relevance both to the present and the future, are ripe for Rome, and even for the Christian break with Rome.
The Stoics, particularly in their social dreams, draw the logical conclusions from historical changes, they ideologize and utopianize the tendency of these at one and the
same time. This is precisely the case in the image sketched by Zeno around 300 B.C., in the image of the ideal world­state, of the humanitarian state (this concept was
first developed by