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ARIUS, STOBAEUS AND THE SCHOLIAST

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 April 2014

Tad Brennan
Tad Brennan*
Affiliation:
Cornell University
*
tad.brennan@cornell.edu
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Extract

In this article I argue for a change to the text of Stobaeus’ doxography of Stoic ethics. I propose we emend it by reference to a parallel text in the Scholia in Lucianum. In order to make that argument, I offer a new assessment of the value of the scholiast's report of Stoic doxography – a report that, at least in virtue of its length (over 1,000 words of Greek) ought to be better known to scholars of Stoicism than it currently is.

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Research Article
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The Classical Quarterly , Volume 64 , Issue 1 , May 2014 , pp. 270 - 279
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2014 

In this article I argue for a change to the text of Stobaeus’ doxography of Stoic ethics. I propose we emend it by reference to a parallel text in the Scholia in Lucianum. In order to make that argument, I offer a new assessment of the value of the scholiast's report of Stoic doxography – a report that, at least in virtue of its length (over 1,000 words of Greek) ought to be better known to scholars of Stoicism than it currently is.Footnote 1

In the first part I offer arguments for emendation of the familiar kind: that the current text contains several grave errors; that the change I propose rectifies them; and that there is a simple and plausible story that explains how the bad text came to displace the good text.

In the second part of this note, I address the reluctance of previous editors to adopt this emendation. The scholiast on Lucian has been assessed very differently by different scholars. Meineke thought that the scholiast's expanded illustrations preserved material from a source that was older and fuller than our current Stobaeus.Footnote 2 Wachsmuth, reacting against Meineke's praise, hurled contemptuous abuse at the ignorance and unreliability of the homo ineptus, as he called him, the ‘Byzantine school-master … who for the most part didn't even understand the Stoics’ meaning’.Footnote 3 Hahm, the most recent critic to discuss the scholiast's presentation of the Stoic doxography, reverts to Meineke's assessment, and defends the authenticity of the very supplements that Wachsmuth condemned, while rejecting as a fabrication the supplement that I endorse in this article.Footnote 4

My assessment is closer to Wachsmuth's than to Meineke's or Hahm's. The scholiast says many inept things, and his report of Arius' doxography is generally inferior to that in Stobaeus. But a careful assessment of the scholium in question will reveal that there is a pattern to his blunders. The crucial line that I rely on in emending Stobaeus does not fit that pattern; so, I will argue, it comes from Arius, not from the scholiast. Furthermore, the paleographical argument in favour of the emendation is one that previous editors have not considered at all.

I: STOBAEUS 2.7.6

I.A The problems with the textus receptus

Our text of Stobaeus reads as follow:

2.7.6.1 Τοῦ δὲ ἀνθρώπου

ὄντος ζῴου λογικοῦ θνητοῦ, ϕύσει πολιτικοῦ, ϕασὶ καὶ

τὴν ἀρετὴν πᾶσαν τὴν περὶ ἄνθρωπον καὶ τὴν εὐδαιμονίαν

ζωὴν ἀκόλουθον ὑπάρχειν καὶ ὁμολογουμένην ϕύσει.

I translate:

Since a human being is an animal that is rational, mortal, and political by nature, they say that both the whole of virtue concerned with human beings and happiness are a life that follows and agrees with nature.

There are three reasons to be dissatisfied with this text. The first is that it fails to mention a topic that it ought to mention, given its introductory position at the head of a new section, and given how the section is described in a later back-reference in Stobaeus. The second is that its form and structure promise us something like an argument, and yet no argument can be discerned. The third, and most important, is that it says something about virtue that is simply false.

I.A.1 First argument against the textus receptus

Our text, 2.7.6, introduces a new section of the doxography (2.7.6a–f), and so ought to announce the main topics within that section. And the topic of the sixth section is emphatically the telos. Subsections 6a, 6b, 6c and 6e all make this clear, beginning their paragraphs as follows: ‘Now, the telos according to Zeno’, ‘Telos is said in three ways’, ‘They hold that telos differs from skopos’, and ‘They say the telos is being happy’. This can also be seen from the back-reference at 2.7.7, which makes the topic of 2.7.6 to be the telos and happiness.Footnote 5 And yet our introductory paragraph makes no mention of the telos.

I.A.2 Second argument against the textus receptus

An argument is promised by the genitive absolute, most naturally translated ‘Since …’: it offers some sort of ground or explanation for the claim made in the main clause. But what is the connection? And which parts of each clause are being connected? Perhaps the emphasis falls on ζῴου and ζωήν; it is because man is a living thing that his virtue and happiness consist in a life. This is possible, but somewhat banal. Does it fall on the iterated ϕύσει? It is because we are naturally political that what we should follow and agree with is nature. Perhaps, but one would have thought that the connection between our happiness and nature was not mediated by considerations of political theory. That we should follow nature in our behaviour as citizens may well follow from the fact that we are citizens by nature; but the same would seem to apply with equal force to those times when we are not behaving as citizens in any normal political sense.

One feels, then, that there is something like an argument on offer, but none of the obvious connections provide a clear, satisfying and informative argument.

I.A.3 Third argument against the textus receptus

But the really insuperable problem with the text is that it claims that two things are ‘a life’: both our happiness, and our virtue. Now, that eudaimonia is a kind of life was a commonplace after Aristotle, and the Stoics endorse it. Happiness is an event, a kinêsis or energeia, or a sequence of events that manifest a harmonious structure or narrative coherence.Footnote 6 Happiness requires time, occupies time and is temporally extended, as a life is. So the claim that happiness is a life poses no puzzles. But the suggestion that virtue is a life would have been just as unacceptable to the Stoics as to Aristotle.Footnote 7

Virtue, according to the Stoics, is not a life; it is what we live in accordance with, when we life virtuously, that is κατ’ ἀρετὴν ζῆν.Footnote 8 Virtues are things we act in accordance with, κατ’ ἀρετὴν πράττειν.Footnote 9 A virtue is a disposition, more specifically a tenor or inflexible disposition;Footnote 10 or it is the soul in so far as it instantiates such a disposition.Footnote 11 Virtue is not an activity; it ranks among the goods in state rather than the goods in process.Footnote 12 Virtue is a capacity or potentiality, not the events or activities that are performed in accordance with it.Footnote 13 It simply makes no sense, from the standpoint of Stoic orthodoxy, to say that virtue is a life.

I.B The solution

The parallel passage in the Scholia in Lucianum (29.22.45–9) reads as follows (I italicize the added line in order to draw attention to it):

ζῴου δὲ τοῦ

ἀνθρώπου ὄντος λογικοῦ θνητοῦ ϕύσει πολιτικοῦ καὶ τὴν

ἀρετὴν πᾶσαν τὴν περὶ ἄνθρωπον καὶ τὴν εὐδαιμονίαν

καὶ τὸ τέλος λογικὰ εἶναί ϕασι καὶ τὴν μὲν εὐδαιμονίαν

ζωὴν ἀκόλουθον εἶναι καὶ ὁμολογουμένην τῇ ϕύσει.

I translate:

Since a human being is a rational mortal animal, political by nature, they say that both the whole of virtue concerned with human beings, and happiness, and the end, are rational; and happiness is a life that follows and agrees with nature.

What the text now predicates of virtue and happiness (and the telos) is not that they are a kind of life, but that they are rational. The only thing that is said to be a life is happiness.

The change to the syntax of the sentence is considerable. The apodosis in Stobaeus only contains one assertion, with a double subject and a single predicate: ‘virtue and happiness are a life’. The apodosis in the scholiast contains two assertions, the first of which has three subjects, and the second of which has one: ‘virtue, happiness, and the end are rational; and happiness is a life’. The difference between the texts is exactly one line: καὶ τὸ τέλος λογικὰ εἶναί ϕασι καὶ τὴν μὲν εὐδαιμονίαν. Its omission is apparently due to an instance of jumping from like to like, as the scribe's eye passed from καὶ τὴν εὐδαιμονίαν in the third line to καὶ τὴν μὲν εὐδαιμονίαν in the fourth.Footnote 14 So the palaeographical explanation of how the text was omitted is straightforward (though not mentioned or considered by any previous editor). And the improvement in sense will become clear by reflecting on each of the original problems in turn.

I.B.1 The topic announced

What we missed from the textus receptus was an announcement of the topic of 2.7.6, namely the telos. Exactly this reference is found in the missing line, as well as a clear connection between the telos and happiness, as is promised in the back-reference at 2.7.7.

I.B.2 The argument restored

The scholiast's text restores the argumentative axis of the sentence. The key notion is rationality: since human beings are rational, their virtue and end and happiness are all rational; and since rationality entails consistency and agreement with nature, it follows that the happy life must be a life of agreement with nature. So the thread goes from the first claim that the human being is a λογικόν animal, to the claim that our telos and our happiness are λογικά, to the conclusion that our happiness is a life of rational consistency and consequence. The predicate supplied by the omitted line, λογικά, ties the argument together.Footnote 15

I.B.3 The doctrine corrected

No longer do we face the unorthodox claim that virtue is a life. Virtue is only said to be rational; and only happiness is said to be a life. Both of these claims are entirely orthodox and unproblematic.

II

Both Meineke and Wachsmuth mention the scholiast's fuller version of these lines in their editions. Meineke wrote with approval ‘sic enim haec scribenda sunt’, following his general view that the scholiast draws from ‘an ancient source, or from a [version of] Stobaeus that was fuller than [the version] that we now have’.Footnote 16 Wachsmuth thundered back ‘beware of thinking that this is drawn from a fuller [version of] Stobaeus!’, directing us to his extended discussion of the scholiast's deficiencies in his Prolegomena.Footnote 17

What Wachsmuth detailed in his Prolegomena were the errors of doctrine made by the scholiast in many places where his report diverges from our text of Stobaeus. He is right, on the whole:Footnote 18 in most of the places where there is genuinely new content in the scholiast's report,Footnote 19 the new content is palpably rubbish. I offer the first main section of the scholium as an example, with Stobaeus on the left, and the scholiast on the right.Footnote 20

Four things should emerge from the comparison:

  1. 1) One class of divergences between the two versions is a matter of small differences of expression: Stobaeus says λέγεσθαί ϕασι where the scholiast has ἔλεγον, Stobaeus says τὸ μὲν πρῶτον where the scholiast says τὸ μὲν γὰρ πρῶτον, and so on. These are not differences of doctrinal content.Footnote 24

  2. 2) Where the divergences are substantive, the new content is all loosely joined on to the syntax of the Stobaean armature by such paratactic elements as ὥσπερ, ὡς and ὅπερ. I have accordingly italicized all of these additions. The main difference between the texts, then, is this influx of examples. What the two texts have in common in each case is a general statement, and what the scholiast adds is illustration.

  3. 3) His examples are not good; they are opaque or downright unorthodox.Footnote 25 The scholiast's version contains such palpable errors as writing οἱονεὶ for Stobaeus’ οἷον. The scholiast then compounds the error by inventing examples to try to fit the mistake. What is ‘such as to benefit’, in Stoicism, is an object or property or event that either is benefiting or is capable of benefiting. This is why this third category extends over the two earlier categories as well. What is ‘as though it benefited’, by contrast, is something which only appears to benefit without really benefiting, or (for the οἱονεὶ βλάπτειν) something which appears to harm without really harming, e.g. the voluntary toils that bring a pained look, but no real harm, to the person acting temperately in the scholiast's example. But the scholiast's example, and the οἱονεὶ on which he bases it, cannot be right: for by making this a category of deceptive appearances (seems to benefit/harm but does not really), the scholiast vitiates the further claim that this category naturally includes the earlier two categories. The false does not include the true.

    And the details of the examples are entirely elusive as well; what exactly is illustrated by the man who sleeps rough during a storm? What exactly is being called ‘an evil’ in the sense of καθ’ ὅ? And how is the parallel sense of ‘a good’ illustrated by the difference between heating and being heated?Footnote 26

  4. 4) Since nothing has been added except examples, tacked on paratactically, no changes have been made to the relations of subject and predicate in the main sentences that are common to both texts.

The paragraphs transcribed above are illustrative of the differences between the two texts. Two rules govern the significant, substantive differences between the scholiast and Stobaeus: 1) the additions in the scholiast are lists of examples or explanations of examples; 2) the additions in the scholiast do not intrude into the syntax of the sentence as it stands in Stobaeus; they are simply joined on to the ends of clauses.

There is one exception to these two rules: the case of the homoioteleuton that I proposed in §I of this article. In this case, the scholiast contains ten words that are not included in Stobaeus: καὶ τὸ τέλος λογικὰ εἶναί ϕασι καὶ τὴν μὲν εὐδαιμονίαν. These words are not introduced by ὥσπερ, ὡς or ὅπερ. They are not offered as examples of something stated both in Stobaeus and in the scholiast. And their presence radically changes the syntax of the sentence: as noted before, the text of Stobaeus predicates one thing (being a life) of two different subjects (virtue and happiness), where the text of the scholiast makes two separate predications, and never says that virtue is a life. This is a difference of an entirely different order to those found elsewhere in the scholium.

Hahm too treats this scholiastic variant differently than the other locations at which the scholiast's text diverges from that in Stobaeus.Footnote 27 But his view is entirely opposed to mine: he takes this sentence as one of ‘the most blatant examples’ of ‘the scholiast's adaptation’ of Stobaean material. Hahm thinks that the scholiast has ‘rephrased’ and ‘slightly, but significantly, reworded’, the text of Stobaeus, for his own scholiastic purposes. Hahm notes that the change constitutes an improvement:

This, in turn, leads smoothly into Stobaeus’ account of the goal, rewritten [i.e. by the scholiast] to take the emphasis off the definitions per se and to place it instead on the common characteristic that links virtue, happiness, and the goal of life; i.e., rationality. All three are shown to be rational (λογικά) on the basis of their definitions, virtue as the creature of a man who is rational, happiness as ‘living with the same mind’ (ὁμολογουμένην, ὁμολογουμένως), and the goal as life in accord with a single, harmonious rationale (λόγον). Thus the rationality of virtue, happiness, and the goal of life are grounded by the scholiast in the rational nature of man (λογικοῦ), to whom virtue as a living creature is alleged to belong.

There is nothing in this analysis of the argument that I disagree with – indeed, Hahm is noting exactly the improved argumentative coherence that I note above. What I disagree with is the idea that this subtle, coherent and deeply Stoic argumentative structure could have been produced by the same person who confuses οἱονεὶ with οἷον, and who does not see that this makes nonsense of the claim that the third sense includes the previous two.Footnote 28 It is also worth repeating that Hahm never considers the paleographical possibility that the line was dropped out of Stobaeus by homoioteleuton, and never notes the doctrinal problem posed by the claim in Stobaeus that virtue is a life.

CONCLUSION

Wachsmuth was right about the general value of the additional material found in the scholium: it is rubbish tacked on by someone who does not understand Stoicism, and it does not originate in Meineke's hypothesized ‘older and fuller source’. But the Byzantine rubbish all shares common marks, and these marks are not found in the supplementary line whose authenticity I advocate. Keeping in mind the improvements in orthodoxy, sense and coherence that it brings, as well as the simplicity of the paleographical argument that explains its absence, I propose that we should welcome this line into any future edition of Stobaeus.

APPENDIX

The scholiast's text gives rise to several questions about translation and construal. The following notes relate to texts flagged at footnotes 21, 22 and 23:

Note A

Does the scholiast think that συμβαίνει ὠϕελεῖσθαι describes an accidental or incidental benefit, i.e. a benefit κατὰ συμβεβηκός? The heating is the per se cause of an alleviation of cold; but since the disease in this case was (partly constituted by) a condition of coldness, the alleviation of the cold incidentally alleviated the disease. Needless to say, συμβαίνει ὠϕελεῖσθαι in Stobaeus does not mean ‘be benefited κατὰ συμβεβηκός’. Alternatively, could the scholiast's καθώς be intended in the koine sense of ‘as, when’ (LSJ s.v. II)? In that case, the idea might be that a process of being heated is going on at the same time as a process of benefiting (sc. the curing), and we may call the being heated a good on the grounds that it occurs ‘as or when’ the being cured occurs.

Note B

This explanation makes things worse. If being heated, rather than heating, is the cause (αἴτιον), then does that make ‘being heated’ a ‘good’ in first sense (which is the sense in which the good is a cause, αἰτία, of being benefited)? If so, then what exemplifies the second sense here: ‘heating’? But the example did not use a form of the active ‘heating’; it used a form of the passive, ‘being heated’. The active vs. passive distinction of this sentence seems irrelevant both to the prior sentence's distinction between being heated and being (incidentally) cured, and to Stobaeus’ own claim that something can be good in a second sense because benefit occurs in accordance with it.

Note C

I have translated the scholiast's καθ’ ὅ as I translated Stobaeus’ καθ’ ὅ: ‘in accordance with’. But the scholiast's example of the man sleeping outdoors looks alarmingly as though he takes κατά in the temporal sense, as the period during which. If we flesh out this example so as to make it continuous with the man who is cured while being warmed, then the idea seems to be that a man sleeps rough in the winter, and is cooled thereby, and at the same time catches a disease which is (partly constituted by) a condition of coldness. Becoming sick is being harmed (or so one might think if one is ignorant of Stoic ethics), and so becoming sick is an evil. Accordingly, sleeping outside is an evil in a secondary sense, if one becomes sick at the same time as one is doing it. If this is right, then the scholiast is both making an elementary blunder about the Stoic theory of value (treating illness as an evil), and also failing to understand their use of κατά to indicate how one thing occurs in conformity with or accordance with something else.

References

1 This paper emerged from work done in preparation for the New York Colloquium on Ancient Philosophy in the autumn of 2011. I thank Iakovos Vasiliou, NYCAP's organizer, for inviting me to chair a session, and the colloquium's participants for their interest and enthusiasm. Special thanks to Brad Inwood and Peter Simpson for vigorously resisting my proposal. Charles Brittain helped at several stages of its genesis. And as always, my deepest thanks go to Liz Karns.

2 Meineke, A. (ed.), Ioannis Stobaei Eclogarum Physicarum et Ethicarum Libri Duo, Tomus II (Leipzig, 1864)Google Scholar, CLXIII ad p.28 line 22: ‘Sed totum de hoc triplici Stoicorum bono et malo locum nemo plenius illustrat quam Schol. Luciani p. 209. Iac. (vol. VII. p. 338 Lehm.), qui dubitari non potest quin sua ex antiquo fonte vel e pleniore Stobaeo, quam nunc habemus, derivaverit’ (‘But on the entire topic of the Stoics’ three-fold account of good and evil, no one sheds more light than the Schol. Luciani, who undoubtedly drew his material from an ancient source, or from a [version of] Stobaeus that was fuller than [the version] that we now have').

3 Wachsmuth, C. (ed.), Ioannis Stobaei Anthologii Librum Alterum (Berlin, 1884 )Google Scholar XXII: ‘magistellus Byzantinus … qui plerumque ne sententiam quidem Stoicorum assecutus sit’.

4 Hahm, D.E., ‘The ethical doxography of Arius Didymus’, ANRW 2.36.4 (Berlin, 1990), 2935–3055.Google Scholar

5 ‘Having made an adequate examination of goods and evils [2.7.5a–g] and things to be chosen and avoided [2.7.5h–o] and concerning the end and happiness [2.7.6a–f], we next thought it necessary to go over indifferents, too, in their proper place. Now they say that indifferents …’ (Stob. 2.7.7.1–5). The order of the discussions of goods and evils and things to be chosen and avoided seem to have been disrupted and confused in our texts of Stobaeus, and it is not clear to me that Wachsmuth made it better by the radical relocation of a long section – his ‘5b1–5b13’ – and his deletion of a heading at 5h which promises a section ‘On things to be chosen and things to be avoided’. One can have no faith in the current order of the paragraphs, either in the MSS, or in Wachsmuth's edition. But that the contents of 2.7.5 were a discussion of those two contrary pairs (sc. goods and evils, and things to be chosen and avoided) is clear, no matter how the internal contents are best arranged.

6 The βίος σπουδαῖος is a σύστημά τι λογικῶν πράξεων, SVF 3.293.10.

7 Pomeroy, Compare A.J., (ed.), Arius Didymus. Epitome of Stoic Ethics (Atlanta, GA, 1999)Google Scholar. This problem was not noticed by Pomeroy (p. 37), because he mistranslates the Greek: ‘… they also say that every virtue which is associated with man and the happy life is consistent with and in agreement with nature’. But εὐδαιμονίαν is not an adjective; ζωήν is the predicate, not part of a compound subject; and ἀκόλουθον and ὁμολογουμένην are attributes of ζωήν, not predicates of ἀρετήν and ζωήν. At least Pomeroy's English has the advantage of saying something true about virtue, sc. that it is consistent and in agreement with nature, instead of saying something false, as the Greek does.

8 Diog. Laert. 7.87 = LS 63C.

9 Stob. 2.7.5b5 = LS 61D1.

10 Τήν τ’ ἀρετὴν διάθεσιν εἶναι ὁμολογουμένην (Diog. Laert. 7.89 = LS 61A). Their translation of 61A2 as ‘Happiness consists in virtue …’ is misleading. The Greek (ἐν αὐτῇ τ’ εἶναι τὴν εὐδαιμονίαν) can simply mean e.g. ‘happiness depends on virtue’, and does not require confusing happiness as a diachronic process with virtue as a disposition.

11 Our soul is an animal, so virtues are animals, since they are the same as our reason: Stob. 2.7.5b7 = 2.65. But our soul is not a life, either, in the sense in which happiness is a kind of life (our soul may be said to be a principle of life, but it is not an event or temporally extended sequence of events).

12 Τῶν δὲ <ἀγαθῶν>ἐν σχέσει τὰ μὲν καὶ ἐν ἕξει εἶναι, οἷον τὰς ἀρετάς (Stob. 2.7.5k = 2.73 = LS 60 J).

13 διάθεσίν τινα καὶ δύναμιν (Plut. De virtute morali 441C1 = LS 61B8).

14 The particle μέν may not have been in the original text. It appears in the scholiast's text because he has run together several sentences from paragraphs corresponding to Stob. §§5b7, 6 and 6a, which he then coordinates with the μέν and δέ. Without the μέν, the line endings would look even more similar to the copyist who gave us our current text of Stobaeus, i.e. simply καὶ τὴν εὐδαιμονίαν at the end of each line.

15 Charles Brittain observed in correspondence that the argument is reminiscent of that in Diog. Laert. 7.85–9.

16 Meineke (n. 2), CLXX ad p. 38.29, quoted in n. 2.

17 Wachsmuth (n. 3), vol. II.75 in the apparatus quotes the material from the scholiast and then says ‘quod cave ex pleniore Stobaeo haustum esse putes (vide proleg.)’.

18 Wachsmuth (n. 3), vol. I.XXII. Some of his allegations misfire. For instance, among the ‘telic goods’ that Stobaeus lists are ‘prudent walking’, ϕρονίμη περιπάτησις. The scholiast also lists this among telic goods. But then among telic evils, the scholiast lists, as its counterpart, ἀϕρονικὴ περιπάτησις καὶ πλημμελὴς κίνησις (l. 38). Wachsmuth erupts: ‘audin hominem ineptum qui ϕρονίμην περιπάτησιν ad philosophorum disputationem spectare ignoravit et ei contrarium aliquid inter mala opponendum esse ratus “dementem ambulationem” et “improbam motionem” adscripsit?’ (‘Listen to this bungler, who didn't realize that “phronimê peripatêsis” refers to the discussions of the philosophers [i.e. who are walking], and who added “mad strolling” and “wicked motion,” to the [list of] bads, because he thought there should be something contrary to it!’).

The problem here is that the majority of contemporary scholars agree with the scholiast against Wachsmuth, that ‘prudent walking’ does not mean ‘the discussions of philosophers’, but rather, simply, ‘prudent walking’, i.e. doing a trivial and otherwise indifferent thing, walking, in a way that only a Sage can do it. That the example conforms to orthodoxy does not show that it is a faithful transcription from fuller doxography, as Meineke thought. But it also does not show the man's ineptitude, as Wachsmuth thought.

19 I set aside the very frequent differences of expression when they do not change the content – the reader will see a selection of them in the discussion below. They are interesting for independent reasons, as showing the scholiast's willingness to transcribe ad sensum rather than ad litteram. But they do not count as new content that the scholiast could either be right or wrong about.

20 The following sample is roughly 16 lines out of the total 113 lines, or about one seventh of the total, and it is representative of the scholiast's treatment of the material.

21 See Appendix, Note A.

22 See Appendix, Note B.

23 See Appendix, Note C.

24 More substantive are the several places at which Stobaeus presents contrasting categories of ἀγαθά and κακά (i.e. evils), which the scholiast then reports as ἀγαθά and κακίαι (i.e. vices) (29.22.27, 29.22.35). He has been misled by the fact that the corresponding goods have included virtues.

25 To see a clear exposition of the real Stoic view, with expanded examples that are error-free and illuminating, see Sext. Emp. Math. 11.22–6. He explains that the first sense of ‘good’ applies only to virtue itself, the second applies to virtuous actions (i.e. actions done κατ’ ἀρετήν), and the third sense applies to the items referred to by the first two senses (sc. virtues and virtuous actions) and adds to them such other things as virtuous people, virtuous friends and the gods themselves, all of which are ‘such as to benefit’. Similarly, in Diog. Laert. 7.94, the sense of ‘good’ in which it is said καθ’ ὅ is as follows: a πρᾶξις is called ‘good’ inasmuch as it is done in accordance with (κατά) something which is good in the first way, sc. virtue.

26 Hahm (n. 4) spends several pages (2955–62) demonstrating that it is not impossible to illustrate Stoic distinctions about the good, using analogies drawn from heat. This is so. But he does nothing to explain how these particular examples are meant to work, nor does he investigate whether they reflect an understanding of Stoicism.

27 Hahm (n. 4), 2950–1.

28 We may add the further indictment that the scholiast seems to think that the Stoics would treat falling ill as a kind of being harmed, and illness as an evil, if we are right about how the heating and sleeping examples are supposed to be read. That would be such a fundamental error about Stoic ethics that the scholiast would thereby earn Wachsmuth's ire as someone ‘qui ne sententiam quidem Stoicorum assecutus sit’.