Stoic “Virtue” Is Delusional
Don’t Let It Ruin Your Happiness
Even those who know very little ancient Roman history likely know the final words that Shakespeare put into the mouth of Julius Caesar — “et tu, Brute” — “you too, Brutus?” — which he said upon discovering that a man he thought was a friend was part of a conspiracy to kill him.
Killing Caesar unleashed a horrendous civil war that caused the deaths of scores of notable Romans, including Brutus, whose real final words we have. Brutus quoted a line from a now-lost play spoken by Heracles — the god who was considered to be the protector of mankind:
O wretched virtue, you were merely a name,
And yet I worshipped you as truly real;
But now, it seems, you just do what fate commands.[1]
We don’t know whether Brutus was a Stoic, but these final words make it seem so. Plutarch quotes the same lines from that play in his introduction to On Superstition, as part of his criticism that the Stoics considered virtue to be a physical, corporeal, i.e., “real” thing.
The point here is that the Stoics, both contemporary and ancient, hold as an article of faith that virtue is the only good.
Virtue, however, is just an abstract concept. It is but a name. There’s nothing there that’s…
