A Guide to Stoicism 4 ¶42 — St. George Stock (modern guide)

St. George Stock (modern guide), A Guide to Stoicism 4 ¶42

The good man of the Stoics was variously known as 'the sage', or, 'the serious man', the latter name being inherited from the Peripatetics. We used to hear it said among ourselves that a person had become serious, when he or she had taken to religion. Another appellation which the Stoics had for the sage was 'the urbane man', while the fool in contradistinction was called 'a boor'. Boorishness was defined as an inexperience of the customs and laws of the state. By the state was meant, not Athens or Sparta, as would have been the case in a former age, but the society of all rational beings into which the Stoics spiritualised the state. The sage alone had the freedom of this city and the fool was therefore not only a boor, but an alien or an exile. In this city, Justice was natural and not conventional, for the law by which it was governed was the law of right reason. The law then was spiritualised by the Stoics, just as the state was. It no longer meant the enactments of this or that community, but the mandates of the eternal reason which ruled the world and which would prevail in the ideal state. Law was defined as right reason commanding what was to be done and forbidding what was not to be done. As such, it in no way differed from the impulse of the sage himself.