THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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inwardness together with the colossal cosmos. Thus the sense of brotherhood remained unrealized in economic terms, the preached superiority to external
circumstances allowed these to persist unchallenged alongside utopia. Even Stoics outside the upper classes, such as the slave Epictetus, were as far away from social
revolutionary activities as their inwardness or even their world reason was from the suffering earth. So from this point of view as well a compromise with Rome must
have been easy, apart from the gratitude with which prophets are stirred when their prophecy (here that of the world­state) seems partly fulfilled. In addition there is the
markedly antiquarian sense which the Golden Age and the identification of the wishful state with it had gradually assumed. For the Golden Age was regarded by the
Stoics as irretrievably lost, only a new course of the world could set it in motion again, and this new course presupposes nothing less than Zeus taking the entire world
back into himself again through world conflagration. And even then, after this somewhat too violent upheaval which is also independent of human beings, the Golden
Age — restored again in the new world — will not last: nor is it known why this should be so, in the doctrine of universal optimism like that held by the Stoics. Again it
is precisely this emphatic peace with statically celebrated world perfection, this pantheistic acclimatization to approved fate, which is averse to change, unless it is a
mitigation or reformation (influences on slave economy, married life, and even the running of the state are discernible here). If diseases look like a kind of purgative in
Stoic medicine, with which rational nature heals itself as it were, law and justice are of course shown no such mercy, but neither are they attacked anything like as much
as in other utopias. The whole is held up to them as an example, a prevailing model, so that the parts keep and are kept to it. Nor is the utopia of the Stoics directed
towards what is explosive but rather towards what is complete, towards an increasingly improved harmony with the existing God­nature that is the world. Pretended
world perfection thus prevents the intended world change, just as it seeks to govern it; this makes the Stoics, even their utopia, strangely reformist and conformist at the
same time. There are a few exceptions: the tutor of the Spartan king Kleomenes, who ordered a kind of socialist economy, was the Stoic Sphairos, a pupil of Zeno;
and he is said to have influenced the king with Zeno's ‘Politeia’. The tutor of the tribune Tiberius Gracchus was the Stoic Blossius, and the result: the call for a sharing
out of the land, the fight against the patrician upper classes, was different at any rate from the result in the case of Marcus Aurelius, who did not shake up the Roman
Empire as everybody knows. The Stoic utopian concept