Panaetius of Rhodes
c. 185 – 110 BCE · Rhodes & Rome
Head of the Middle Stoa and the figure who carried Stoicism from the Greek schools into Roman public life. A member of the Scipionic Circle in Rome, he softened the early school's severity — admitting that wealth, health, and reputation, while indifferent, were preferable — and shifted its focus toward practical ethics. His lost treatise On Duties is the direct source of Cicero's De Officiis.
Key works
- On Duties (Peri tou kathekontos) — Lost; reconstructed through Cicero's De Officiis, which adapts its first two books.
- On Providence — Fragments only; argued for divine governance with greater caution than the early Stoa.
Selected passages
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We are not born for ourselves alone; our country claims a share, and our friends a share, of our being.
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Each man should hold fast to that which is his own, so far as it is not vicious, that the seemliness we seek may the more readily be secured.
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The whole glory of virtue is in activity.
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There are four principal virtues: wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance. The first is the knowledge of things; the second, the ordering of society; the third, the endurance of toil and pain; the fourth, the moderation of pleasures.
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The duties of a man are to be inferred from his station in life. What is becoming to one is not becoming to another. We must consider who we are.
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The first office of justice is to hurt no one, unless provoked by wrong. The second is to be useful to all, especially to the commonwealth.
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No man is by nature fitted for any particular office, but all men are capable of virtue if they are properly trained. The seeds of virtue are in every human soul.
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We must choose the mean in all things, and avoid the extremes. The virtues lie in the middle between two vices.
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The highest praise is to be called a good man. Riches, honor, and power are empty if they are not joined with virtue.
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Panaetius held that we should choose the role in life best suited to our nature, and play it with dignity.