Diogenes Laërtius · fl. 3rd century CE
Lives of Eminent Philosophers 7.120 — Diogenes Laërtius on the Stoics
Translation by R. D. Hicks (1925)
Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers 7.120
Reported speech · Diogenes Laërtius on the Stoics
The Stoics approve also of honouring parents and brothers in the second place next after the gods. They further maintain that parental affection for children is natural to the good, but not to the bad. It is one of their tenets that sins are all equal: so Chrysippus in the fourth book of his Ethical Questions, as well as Persaeus and Zeno. For if one truth is not more true than another, neither is one falsehood more false than another, and in the same way one deceit is not more so than another, nor sin than sin. For he who is a hundred furlongs from Canopus and he who is only one furlong away are equally not in Canopus, and so too he who commits the greater sin and he who commits the less are equally not in the path of right conduct.
Cite this passage
Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers 7.120 (on the Stoics), tr. R. D. Hicks (1925)
https://whatwouldstoicsdo.com/passage/lives-of-the-stoics/7.120
Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book VII, tr. R. D. Hicks (Loeb, 1925). Text: Perseus Digital Library (CC BY-SA 4.0). Sources and licences
In plain English
AI-written notesAfter the gods, Stoics rank honouring parents and siblings, and hold that loving your children is natural to a good person. Every wrong act is equally a failure to be on the path of right conduct, the way someone one mile from a city and someone a hundred miles away are equally not in it.
Older wording
- “sins”
- — moral failings, wrong acts
- “furlongs”
- — an old distance unit, about 200 metres each
- “Canopus”
- — a town in Egypt used as an example of a destination
Themes and situations
- Family and love
- Virtue and character
- Duty and roles
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