Member-only story
The Lucan trilogy: 2 — Julius Caesar as Stoic fool and the Stoic theory of justice
I write this on my way back from a lovely visit at Marshall University, in West Virginia. I have been there for a couple of days, talking about Stoicism to veterans from multiple American wars (Vietnam, Iraq-1, Iraq-2, and Afghanistan), to explore together what not just Stoicism, but the classics more broadly, have to say about war. The goal is to heal and also reflect on what we do in the 21st century on the basis of analogous things people were doing over two millennia ago.
[I wish to thank the organizers of a year-long course entitled “The Wars Within, The Wars Without,” Christina Franzen, an associate professor of classics, and Robin Riner, a professor of anthropology, for inviting me to Marshall to kick off their initiative.]
The core text of the course is Lucan’s De Bello Civili (Civil War), which has strong Stoic themes, as we’ve seen in the first installment of this trilogy. In this essay I’ll focus on a fascinating paper about Lucan’s poem written by David B. George and entitled “Lucan’s Caesar and Stoic oikeiosis theory: the Stoic fool.” The paper contrasts Caesar, the Stoic fool, with Cato, the Stoic sage, and interprets much of what is going on in the poem in terms of the Stoic theory of oikeiosis, or appropriation of other’s concerns.
