In the case of two Greeks, Posidonius of Apamea in Syria, and Molo, no Egyptian influence can be shown. Both were among the most influential men of their time. Molo’s career and importance have been briefly sketched. To Posidonius must be assigned a still more powerful intellectual influence over his generation and those that followed.[[226]] The leader of the Stoic school or, as it may well be called, sect, he so reorganized its teaching that the Stoa became nothing else than the dominant faith among cultivated men, a situation perhaps paralleled by Confucianism in China, which is also an ethical philosophy that finds it possible to dwell on terms of comity with various forms of cruder popular belief.
What Molo’s philosophic affiliations were is not easy to determine. The Stoics were nearer than most other schools to rhetoricians and grammarians, but many men of these professions acknowledged allegiance to the Academy, to Epicureanism, or even to the revived Pythagoreanism of the first century B.C.E. Of the extensive writings of the Rhodian rhetorician there is not enough left to give even a probable answer.
But most philosophic sects laid stress on the universality of their teachings, and were marked by an intense intellectual rationalism. The crude psychology of those days made the formation of categories a simple thing. Thinkers could scarcely be expected to admit that inherited instincts could qualify the truth of a philosophic dogma. More particularly, the philosophic movements were powerful solvents of nationalism. Even the distinction between Greek and barbarian did not exist in theory for them.[[227]] The notion of the state and the maintenance of its ancestral rites became for them a meaningless but innocuous form, which men of common sense would not despise, but to which one could attach no great importance.
Face to face with congregations like those of the Jews, which enforced their separation by stringent religious prohibitions, the Stoics more than others found their opposition roused. More than others, because many Stoics adopted from the Cynical school the methods of the diatribe, the popular sermon, and, indeed, made an active attempt to carry the universality of their principles into practice. And the Stoics, more than others, would find the height of irrationality in the stubborn insistence on forms for which only an historical justification could be found.
A highly interesting document, which gives a certain phase of the controversy, or perhaps even fragments of an actual controversy, between the general philosophic and the Jewish doctrine, has come down to us in the tract known as the Fourth Book of Maccabees. The author announces his purpose of setting forth a most philosophic thesis, to wit, whether the pious reason is sovereign over the passions. The philosophic argument, which fills the first three chapters, is Stoic in form and substance. Then, to illustrate his point, he cites certain vaguely remembered stories of II Maccabees, which he expands into highly detailed dramatic forms. In the mouth of Antiochus Epiphanes are placed the stock philosophic arguments against the Jews, which are triumphantly refuted by the aged Eleazar and the seven sons of Hannah.
So we hear Epiphanes reasoning with Eleazar and urging him to partake of swine’s flesh (IV Macc. v. 8 seq.):
For it is obviously a senseless proceeding to refrain from enjoying those pleasures of life which are free from shame: it is even wicked to deprive oneself of the bounties of nature. And it seems to me that your conduct will be still more senseless, if you provoke my anger because of your zeal for some fancied principle. Why do you not rid your mind of the silly doctrine of your people? Discard that stupidity which you call reason. Adopt a form of thought that suits your age, and let your philosophic principle be one that actually serves you.... Further consider this: If in the Deity you adore there is really a power that oversees our deeds, it will grant you full pardon for all transgressions which you have been forced to commit.
To a Greek, and no doubt to many modern men, the reasoning is conclusive. It presents the Greek point of view very well indeed, and is doubtless the epitome of many conversations and even formal disputes in which these matters were discussed between Greek and Jew. And just as the argument of Epiphanes seems strangely modern in its appeal to common sense and expediency, so the answer of Eleazar rings with a lofty idealism that is both modern and ancient:
We, whose state has been established by God, cannot admit that any force is more powerful than that of the Law. Even if, as you assume, our Law were not divine, yet, since we suppose that it is, we durst not set it aside without gross impiety.
Eleazar then proceeds to elaborate upon the Stoic paradox that the slightest and the greatest transgressions are equally sinful;[[228]] and that in so far as abstention is a form of self-control, it is an admirable and not a contemptible act. After a detailed account of the hideous sufferings heroically endured by the priest, the author breaks out into a panegyric of him as a maintainer of the Law, in which the fundamental Stoic proposition with which he begins is less prominent than his intense Jewish piety.