THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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seduction was of service to it; when the utopia of fraternity, in countless rhetorical presentations, later turned into eulogies of the Roman Empire. Zeno had already
prophesied the world­state; this in marked contrast to the restricted nature of Plato's polis, and also to its restricted castes. And if Zeno had even linked individuals with
the universe by skipping over nations, then he had already done so all the more by skipping over borders.
He started out from individual, inward, morally liberated human beings. They were to be formed into an enormous association in which those who were less wise were
educated by example. Zeno tolerates no coinage in his ‘Politeia’, no power over other people, no law courts, not even schools of wrestling. Chrysippos said that all
existing laws and constitutions were wrong, chiefly because of the power which they contain, and with which they are maintained. An existence is imagined without fixed
law, without war, the Golden Age all over again, and friendship, both in small circles and in large associations, guarantees an undisturbed coherence. The surviving
fragments provide only a dim picture of the particulars of this utopia, and of the fantastic parts as well. But because of the inwardness from which it starts out, because
of the indifference of the Stoics towards external circumstances and because of their feigned and genuine contempt for them, it is probable that this utopia remained
unrealized at least in economic terms. And as far as the political aspect is concerned, the ‘best constitution’, the Stoics soon became eclectic, despite Chrysippos. They
preached mixtures of democracy and aristocracy, following a non­utopian like Aristotle in this respect. They were even well­disposed towards monarchs, in fact they
finally praised the uniform head of the ideal centralized state. So that a king among the Diadochi devoted to the Stoics, Antigonos Gonatas, was the first to describe
kingship as a ‘glorious act of servitude’ (to the people); the emperor Marcus Aurelius even more emphatically derived a morality of the ruler from the Stoic ideal of the
state. Thus far does a social utopia here plunge into given fact; the oecumene alleged to be moral does not yet break — as the religious one does later, under Augustine
— with Caesar. But the significance of the Stoic utopia does not lie in its institutions anyway, nor in the consistent communism which it declaims. Its significance lies in
the programme of world­citizenship, which here means the unity of the human race. At the bottom the individual remains its representative; the ‘superior state’ begins as
the selection of individuals for moral education and non­violent communal life. But it by no means ends there; it is one­sided and exaggerated when Wilamowitz
remarks on one occasion that Plato's ideal construct is a community, but Zeno's is an individual. Even