How the Stoics Became Citizens of the World
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
At its height, the Roman Empire brought most of Europe, together with large parts of North Africa and the Near East, into a single political and economic space. Roads and sea lanes connected distant provinces, trade flourished, and the Pax Romana, or ‘Roman Peace’, brought long periods of peace, security, and prosperity to peoples more accustomed to being at one another’s throats.
Unlike the European Union, Rome created its union, in the main, by conquest, rather than by cooperation and the voluntary pooling of sovereignty. That’s two thousand years of progress for you. But the EU and the Roman Empire enlarged the political community beyond the borders of individual peoples, with profound consequences for how people lived—and, in time, for how they thought about themselves.
By the Late Roman Republic, the world had never been more cosmopolitan. Stoics such as Panaetius, who shuttled back and forth from Athens to Rome, Rutilius, who stood up for the inhabitants of Asia against his own countrymen, and the Syrian Posidonius, who moved from Athens to Rhodes to start a school that became the empire’s stopping place, were not Greeks or Romans so much as citizens of the world.
The First Citizens of the World
This broadening of horizons had begun well before Rome. In the fourth century BCE, Alexander the Great built an empire that took in the already multinational Persian Empire and stretched into India.
As Alexander battled his way to the Hyphasis River, back home in Greece another boundary was being broken, not, this time, from some palace or military tent but from an empty jar. Upon being asked where he came from, Diogenes the Cynic declared, ‘I am a citizen of the world (Greek, cosmopolites)’. This is the first recorded use of the term that became our ‘cosmopolitan’. In many parts of Britain or America, to call yourself a citizen of the world would be asking for trouble. In a Greek world still organised around close-knit city-states, it was a truly radical and dangerous claim.
Diogenes inspired Crates of Thebes, a wealthy man who abandoned his fortune to follow in the Cynic path. Crates in turn taught Zeno of Citium, who went on to found Zenonism—better known as Stoicism. The Cynic ideals of living according to nature, freedom from external goods, and cosmopolitanism thus passed, in modified form, into one of the most influential movements of the ancient world.
‘The eagle,’ said the Stoic teacher Musonius, quoting Euripides, ‘can fly through all the air, and a noble man has all the earth as his fatherland.’ The wise, argued Musonius, can make themselves at home anywhere, so that exile, to them, is not the punishment that it may seem. Indeed, one of several advantages of exile is that we are not dragged into political service by a country that only seems to be ours, or bothered by people who only seem to be our friends, or waylaid by petty relatives. Musonius points out that the Stoic Rutilius flourished so fulsomely in exile that he refused Sulla’s invitation to return to Rome.
Musonius taught Epictetus. When he was young, the future emperor Marcus Aurelius had the greatest men of his age for tutors, but it was a dog-eared copy of Epictetus that made the greatest impression upon him. Still, today, it is difficult to read Marcus’ Meditations without hearing the echo of Epictetus… and, ultimately, Diogenes: ‘My city and state are Rome… But as a human being? The world. So for me, ‘good’ can only mean what’s good for both communities.’
The Philosophical Basis of Cosmopolitanism
Stoic cosmopolitanism is rooted in the belief that all human beings form part of the same organism and that this organism, like each of its parts, is shot through with God. It is true that some people behave like cancers, but even they, if only they knew it, are doing the work of God, or the universe. Just as our eyes, ears, and teeth each have a role to play in our body, so we, too, each have a role to play in society—even if it is only to serve as a warning to others.
‘Kindly remember,’ said Seneca, ‘that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives, and dies.’
To live selfishly is fundamentally self-defeating. To feel alive and happy, we need to have a sense of working with others, for others—because, like ants and bees, that is the kind of creature that we are. If we do not contribute to our community, we will feel disconnected and depressed. In a word, we will feel dead—and, in truth, might as well be.
Whatever good we do, said Marcus Aurelius, we should do it quietly, without expecting anything in return, ‘as simply as a horse runs, or a bee makes honey, or a vine bears grapes season after season without thinking of the grapes it has borne.’ Our reward will be our own, and much greater than any wealth or honour that might or might not be bestowed upon us: to lead and to have led a good life, to do and to have done what we were born to do.
From Rome to Europe
In 212 CE, Rome extended citizenship to almost every free inhabitant of the empire. But for the Stoics, citizenship had no frontier: every human being belonged to the same community. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Europe divided and redivided into kingdoms, empires, and nation-states whose rivalries repeatedly ended in war. During the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), to take an example, the population of the Germanic lands fell from 21 million to 13 million.
After the Second World War, Europeans returned to an ancient problem: how to belong to something larger without ceasing to be themselves. The European Union offered a new answer. It brought together nations that had fought one another for centuries, contributing to an extraordinary period of peace, security, and prosperity. Unlike Rome, it did so not by conquest but by cooperation.
The importance of European unity becomes clearest when it begins to fracture. Brexit removed one of Europe’s largest powers from the Union. Six years after the referendum, Putin invaded Ukraine, apparently calculating, among other things, that a divided West would fail to respond decisively. Whether Brexit entered into that calculation is impossible to know, but the timing is at least worth noticing.
Perhaps the EU’s most interesting achievement is psychological. A Frenchman can be French and European, just as Marcus Aurelius could be Roman and a citizen of the world.
The Stoics would have gone further still, emphasising that, as well as French and European, the Frenchman was also, and above all, a citizen of the world.
The Stoics sometimes arrived at this insight by looking down upon human affairs as though from the heavens. Marcus Aurelius repeatedly adopts this ‘view from above’ in the Meditations. In Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, Scipio looks back upon the Earth from the Milky Way and is struck by how small the Roman Empire appears. From this far away, even Rome looks provincial.
What about the view from below? When we imagine an alien planet, we rarely imagine it to be divided into countries. We do not even stop to think: surely, the aliens would not be so backward.
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