has no falterings of self suspicion. Surmises, guesses, misgivings,
half intuitions, semiconsciousness, partial illuminations, dim
instincts, embryo conceptions, have no place in his brain or
vocabulary. The twilight of dubiety never falls upon him. Opinion,
whether in the form of an ungripped assent, or a weak supposition,
was alien from the mental disposition of the serious man. With him
there was no hasty or premature assent of the understanding, no
forgetfulness, no distrust. He never allowed himself to be
overreached or deluded, never had need of an arbiter, never was out
in his reckoning nor put out by another. No urbane man ever wandered
from his way, or missed his mark, or saw wrong, or heard amiss, or
erred in any of his senses; he never conjectured nor thought of a
better thing, for the one was a form of imperfect assent, and the
other a sign of previous precipitancy. There was with him no change,
no retraction, and no tripping. These things were for those whose
dogmas could alter. After this it is almost superfluous for us to be
assured that the sage never got drunk. Drunkenness, as Zeno pointed
out, involved babbling, and of that the sage would never be guilty.
He would not, however, altogether eschew banquets. Indeed, the Stoics
recognized a virtue under the name of 'conviviality,' which consisted
in the proper conduct of them. It was said of Chrysippus that his
demeanor was always quiet, even if his gait were unsteady, so that
his housekeeper declared that only his legs were drunk.
There were pleasantries even within the school on this subject of
infallibility of the sage. Aristo of Chios, while seceding on some
other matters, held fast to the dogma that the sage never opined.
Whereupon Persaeus played a trick upon him. He made one of two twin
brothers deposit a sum of money with him and the other call to
reclaim it. The success of the trick however only went to establish
that Aristo was not the sage, an admission which each of the Stoics
seems to have been ready enough to make on his own part, as the
responsibilities of the position were so fatiguing.
There remains one more leading characteristic of the sage, the most
striking of them all, and the most important from the ethical point
of view. This was his innocence or harmlessness. He would not harm
others and was not to be harmed by them. For the Stoics believed with
Socrates that it was not permissible by the divine law for a better
man to be harmed by a worse. You could not harm the sage any more
than you could harm the sunlight; he was in our world, but not of it.
There was no possibility of evil for him, save in his own will, and
that you could not touch. And as the sage was beyond harm, so also
was he above insult. Men might disgrace themselves by their insolent
attitude towards his mild majesty, but it was not in their power to
disgrace him.
As the Stoics had their analogue to the tenet of final assurance, so
had they also to that of sudden conversion. They held that a man
might become a sage without being at first aware of it. The
abruptness of the transition from folly to wisdom was in keeping with
their principle that there was no medium between the two, but it was
naturally a point which attracted the strictures of their opponents.
That a man should be at one moment stupid and ignorant and unjust and
intemperate, a slave and poor, and destitute, at the next a king,
rich, and prosperous, temperate, and just, secure in his judgements
and exempt from error, was a transformation, they declared, which
smacked more of the fairy tales of the nursery than of the doctrines
of a sober philosophy.