Customer Reviews

The Stoic Idea of the City

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3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

Schofield delves quite deeply into the minds of the stoics and their views of community or citizenship, particularly the cosmic city and being a "citizen of the universe" (kosmopolitai). In doing so, he presents perennial concepts that relate to the ideal city, such as natural law, friendship and the peculiar philosophy of eros (love), pointing out works that related this subject to the example of the male system of society that characterized both Sparta and Crete (37-39).

In the first two chapters, one has the tiresome task of getting through a defense over Zeno's Republic. His Republic was disowned by some later Stoics, one of them being Cassius. Schofield meticulously but without easy readability defends Zeno's work as continuing the tradition and style of political philosophy established by Plato (27,28,42,56).

Overall, I suppose this book would be an ideal book for someone who has studied Greek philosophy in depth, but for the common reader, nay, even the beginning student in Greek studies, it is a difficult work to get through. He occasionally uses Greek words without translation, naively assuming the reader has a command over the Greek language. I give it 3 stars because of its difficult readability.