THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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Panaitios in the society of the younger Scipio). The ideal state was to be so great and so good that nothing else at all could rank alongside it; it was the first utopia to
raise the banner of a universal republic, and later of a universal monarchy. Plato's utopian polis sought to have a timeless existence like the Idea of the good; the empire
of Alexander and the Roman empire added utopian breadth. The departure from humble dimensions already began in Zeno's social utopia; as the decline and transition
of the Greek polis, even the utopianized one, into the supranational empire of Alexander. Plutarch's speech ‘De fortuna Alexandri’ still brings together the history of
Alexander with recollections from Zeno's ‘Politeia’ in a late retrospective glance, with the usual causal inversion of reality and reflection. Alexander appears here as the
accomplisher of the Stoic ideal state, he is portrayed as bringing together the life, ethos, marriage, and way of life of nations ‘in one festive krater’.* As teaching them
always to regard those who are good as relations, those who are bad as strangers, and the oecumene as their fatherland. The empire of Alexander very quickly
disintegrated into individual states again, but after the Punic Wars Rome rose to power, and its imperialism brought with it a much more colossal krater. For Rome too:
just as the Greek nation was submerged in the empire of Alexander, so was the Latin nation in Caesar's Mediterranean monarchy. Destiny itself, the Tyche so important
to the Stoics and which still appeared to them to constitute order, seemed to contain the Roman expansion. The historian Polybius,† who had close connections with
the Stoics, thus dates a very different world situation from the Second Punic War onwards: previously events were dissipated, now they cohere physically as it were, in
a grand successful sweep. In Polybius the Tyche causes the ways of the world to converge, and creates a spatial­temporal overall destiny for all: Rome. Pax romana
and the Stoic universal state complemented one another to such an extent in the end that it is hardly possible to distinguish where the submissive or conversely patriotic
compromise of the Stoic literati begins when their cosmopolitan utopia ultimately looks like the Roman Empire itself (‘disregarding its human weaknesses’, as Cicero
says). It is certainly not the crushing military might, but rather the universal element, the oecumene, which made Rome so seductive in the eyes of the Stoics. And an
admittedly rigorous, but hair­splitting and by no means rebellious school found it perfectly tolerable when this
* A large bowl in ancient Greece in which the wine was mixed with water.
† Polybius: ?205–?123 B.C., Greek historian under the patronage of Scipio the Younger. He wrote in forty books a history of Rome from 246 to 146 B.C.