Books online Reflections on the Christ Myth
by R.P.Oliver Appendix The most important fact about Stoicism is that it was not a product of the Greek mind and was therefore an alien doctrine foisted onto the Aryan peoples of Antiquity.A1 He was a merchant engaged in the export trade, and when he was more than thirty years of age, he brought a cargo of dye-stuffs to Greece, but was ruined when his ship was wrecked in or near the Piraeus, the harbor of Athens. He walked to the city, where he listened to the lectures of philosophers, doubtless trying to become fluent in Greek, a language which he seems to have spoken with a heavy accent and of which he evidently knew only enough for bargaining in commercial transactions. De republica Zeno’s book was pure Communism – not the practical Communism of Lenin and Stalin, but the Utopian communism that was so successfully used as sucker-bait in the later Nineteenth Century and was scarcely distinguished from anarchism before Marx’s quarrel with Bakunin, which promised that after the Revolution the state would "wither away" and mankind would become one glorious mass of raceless proletarians. We do not know whether Zeno candidly faced the problem of how a nationless and raceless world was to be created and admitted that it would be necessary to slaughter the better part of every civilized society, but he taught that men would somehow become so reasonable that states, governments, courts, police, religion, money, private property, and marriage would be abolished, and the world would be filled with a mass of raceless proletarians, all cuddling one another, freely exchanging the products of their labor, and having all women in common.A3 | |
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