On his own in Vienna for the first time, the twenty-five-year-old Mozart wrote to his father on 4 April 1781: ‘I can assure you that this here is a Magnificent place – and for my Métier the best place in the world.’ He had decided to stay, although the famous kick in the arse from the agent of Archbishop Colloredo in Salzburg did not take place until 9 June. And while his father would never be persuaded that any city was the right city if one did not have a fixed appointment, Mozart was not naive about his prospects in Vienna. Had death not cut him off just as he was emerging from four financially difficult years, he would have been proven right. In the ten years since his arrival he had obtained the coveted court appointment, he had secured the reversion of the post of Kapellmeister at St Stephen's Cathedral, he had enjoyed notable, often lucrative, successes as a performer and as a composer, and he was patronized by the nobility. The present essay will examine these sources of employment and the extent to which Mozart was able to realize them.

The court

In 1781 the court was still the best employer in Vienna. Although Joseph II led an austere and conspicuously frugal court life, he did not dissolve the court's established musical institutions, the Hofkapelle (court chapel) and the theatre. The Hofkapelle provided music for the court's church services. In addition to the musicians, the Hofkapelle in 1781 consisted of the Hofkapellmeister Giuseppe Bonno and the composer Christoph Willibald Gluck.

Mozart is treasured today for his opera buffa and Singspiel, the foundation of the modern repertory. His serious Italian operas belong to the most abundant operatic genre of the eighteenth century, and share its modern neglect. Yet there is no reason to suppose that Mozart despised the rhetorical grandeur of opera seria, with its cast of tyrants, suffering princesses, courtiers and soldiers, and its plots of treachery overcome and magnanimity in suffering. It played a larger role in his pre-Vienna works than any other type of opera, and was by no means neglected thereafter. Mozart was brought up on opera seria, and an opera seria was his last stage work.

The majority of Mozart's serious operas were composed for specific occasions connected to the Austrian ruling house of Habsburg, yet none was written for its capital, Vienna. What today we loosely call ‘opera seria’ comprised a number of sub-genres, selected according to the circumstances of a commission. For Milan, Mozart composed two traditional opere serie, Mitridate, re di Ponto, and Lucio Silla. Such operas acted as a mirror to the upper echelon of society, and an enlightened monarchy is directly reflected, or indirectly admonished, when the tyrant sees the light and forgives his enemies. Although concerned almost entirely with aristocratic characters, this kind of opera seria, whose form was established by the librettist and Imperial poet Pietro Metastasio, was designed for public theatres; yet in a city such as Milan, governed by the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand, the court certainly attended the premiere.

Joan of Arc, or Joan the Maid (Jeanne la Pucelle), as she called herself, exemplifies three powerful female types for the Middle Ages – prophet, virgin martyr, and androgyne – all culminating in one persona, as expressed in her writings: her letters and trial testimony. Given the form and context of her writings, her ‘readers’ almost inevitably began as her doubters, and often adversaries, in some way. A cult figure even during her brief lifetime, she understood early on, with uncanny insight for a minimally educated person, the essential reciprocity between myth and truth while formulating her mission. For each and every extraordinary attribute she claimed to possess, she could provide some kind of authentication. Such was the recurrent cycle of dialogue between past and present, prophecy and proof, governing her career as controversial saviour of France.

Whether one perceives her as cipher or seer, Joan’s entire life (1412–31) was shaped by the Hundred Years’War between France and England, begun in 1337 and eventually ending, partly thanks to her achievements, in 1453. By Joan’s time, and despite such hopeful interludes as the reign of Charles V (1368–80), this inter-dynastic struggle between violently self-determining national identities had resulted in two crushing English military victories over the French: Crécy in 1346 and Agincourt in 1415. Strife from within, among the French noble families, also weakened the kingdom, the gravest being the assassination of Louis, Duke of Orleans, by men of John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, in 1407. Suffering repeated bouts of insanity, Charles VI could do little to avenge his brother’s murder and maintain unity within his kingdom.

In the 1160s, an author who identifies herself as 'Marie' dedicated a collection of Breton stories or lais to a 'noble reis', most likely Henry II Plantagenet. Some time later, a 'Marie' who announces that she is 'de France' penned the Fables, which she says she translates from King Alfred's English translation of Aesopic tales; these she dedicated to 'le cunte Willame'. Finally, the Espurgatoire seint Patriz, an account of an Irish knight's voyage to the underworld, was translated from a religious text of monastic origin into the vernacular for the benefit of a lay audience by one 'Marie', probably around 1190. During the course of her career, 'Marie de France' thus produced works in three different genres - Breton tale, animal fable, spiritual voyage - each of which blends literary traditions and linguistic registers and whose topics progress from a tapestry of marvellous love stories, to a shrewd observation of animal and human social behaviour, and finally, to a vision of sin and redemption.

Writing in haste to his father, Leopold, shortly before a musical soirée on 28 December 1782, Mozart described three new piano concertos he was composing, K.413 in F major, K.414 in A major and K.415 in C major:

One of the most frequently quoted passages in Mozart's entire body of correspondence, these words have been taken to signify many different things: that Mozart was capable of thinking through ‘the problem of the interaction between composer and listener’ in an extremely lucid and erudite fashion, believing ‘an audience could be simultaneously charmed and challenged’; that Mozart's compositional philosophy is ‘fragmentary … [enshrining] a duality, some might say a dialectic, between whole and part’; and that each of the three works exhibits ‘events of an unusual nature such as … sallies into invertible counterpoint’, while also demonstrating ‘a string of connections and progressions … that serve to coalesce the three concertos into one splendidly integrated larger work’.

Since the risk of overinterpreting Mozart's passage is considerable given the simultaneously broad and incisive nature of his prose, it is as well to remember what the passage is not. Above all, it is certainly not an original assessment and articulation of widespread appeal. The idea that a musical piece or set of pieces would be attractive to connoisseurs and amateurs (Kenner und Liebhaber) alike was voiced with great regularity in eighteenth-century critical and commercial circles, often with a view to a composer or publisher enhancing the marketing potential of the work (or works) in question.

INTRODUCTION: THE SCOPE OF MORAL PSYCHOLOGY, ANCIENT AND MODERN

Moral psychology addresses itself to the interface between ethics and psychology. One of the basic principles of moral psychology is the apparently trivial one, that all ethically correct actions are, to begin with, actions: inasmuch as they are the deliberate or at least intentional actions of human beings, ethical actions will share features with the class to which they belong, and fall under whatever constraints belong to the larger kind.

This of course raises an immediate question about the coherence of the topic so described. Psychology is clearly a descriptive field, and ethics is the normative field par excellence; the one tells us how the human mind does function, the other tells us how human agents ought to act. Given this fundamental difference, we may not assume, without further argument, that the first discussion can place any constraints whatsoever on the second. The mere fact that psychology places limits on what is humanly possible does not show, without further argument, that ethics must keep its demands within those limits.

The further argument tends to come, nowadays, in terms of a sort of mixing axiom of morality and modality, that the agent cannot be obligated to do anything it is not possible for the agent to do. This is usually abbreviated to the slogan that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, though its teeth are more often bared in the contrapositive formulation, that ‘not possible’ implies ‘not obligatory’.

INTRODUCTION

Is there a Stoic metaphysics? The answer obviously depends on what we mean by 'metaphysics', a word which no classical philosopher would have understood, despite its two Greek components and its familiarity as the title of the most famous of Aristotle's works. No matter what we might mean by 'meta-', in more than one sense the Stoics have no metaphysics: for them, no science comes 'after' physics (again, in whatever sense of 'after' you like); neither is there any science studying entities which, in some sense, are 'over and above' physics or 'beyond' physics - that is, 'metaphysical' (literally, 'super-natural') entities. For them, 'nature' (phusis) encompasses everything, including things, phenomena, and events which in other worldviews might seem to be 'super-natural' in some way. They had a firm conception of how philosophy (more exactly, its discursive exposition or logos) is and should be divided; and their primary division (into logic, ethics, physics) did not provide any place for anything like 'metaphysics'.

In another sense, however, one might suggest that the Stoics had not only one but two ‘metaphysics’. One is merely a part of physics; the other is a study over and above their standard tripartition of philosophy.

Stoicism has its roots in the philosophical activity of Socrates. But its historical journey began in the enrichment of that tradition with other influences by Zeno of Citium almost a century after Socrates' death, and it continued in the rise and decline of the school he founded. An apparently long pause followed during the Middle Ages, although it seems clear that its philosophical influence continued to be felt through a variety of channels, many of which are difficult to chart. In the early modern period, Stoicism again became a significant part of the philosophical scene and has remained an influential intellectual force ever since.

In the middle of the last century, Max Pohlenz, in a book whose value was always limited by the cultural forces of its time and place (Pohlenz 1948), described the school as an ‘intellectual movement.’ ‘Intellectual movement’ captured something of the longevity and protean variability of Stoicism. The dynamic connotations of that metaphor are apt, but I prefer the metaphor of a special kind of journey. An intellectual engagement with Stoicism is an odyssey in three ways. First, the historical trajectory of the school itself and its influence is replete with digressions, narrative ornament, and improbable connections, yet moving ultimately toward an intelligible conclusion. Second, the task of recovering the history of Stoic thought is an adventure in the history of philosophy. It can be a perilous journey for the novice, one requiring guides as varied in their skills and temperaments as was Odysseus, whose epithet polutropos (‘man of many talents’) indicates what is called for. And third, for those readers who find the central ideas of Stoicism appealing either in a purely intellectual way or in the moral imagination, the ongoing confrontation with Stoicism is one which refines philosophical intuitions, challenges both imagination and analytical talents, and leads ultimately to hard philosophical choices which, if taken seriously, define the kind of life one chooses to lead.

DIFFUSION AND DIMINUTION

Of all the ancient philosophies, Stoicism has probably had the most diffused but also the least explicit and adequately acknowledged influence on western thought. No secular books were more widely read during the Renaissance than Cicero's On Duties (De officiis), the Letters and Dialogues of Seneca, and the Manual of Epictetus. Thomas More's Utopians define virtue as 'life in accordance with nature', and this is characteristic of the way slogans and concepts of Stoic ethics were eclectically appropriated from about 1500 to 1750. Neo-Stoicism (capitalized) is a term often used to refer to currents of thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it is quite appropriate to such figures as Lipsius and du Vair. Yet, despite the Stoic traces in Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Rousseau, Grotius, Shaftesbury, Adam Smith, and Kant (traces that modern scholars are increasingly detecting), Neo-Stoicism scarcely had an identifiable life comparable to Medieval Aristotelianism, Renaissance and later Scepticism, seventeenth-century Epicureanism, or Renaissance Platonism and the Cambridge Platonists. It was not determinate enough to mark a whole period or intellectual movement.

BACKGROUND

Stoicism is a philosophy of moral rigor. This rigor has given rise to two stereotypes. First, a Stoic either has no feelings or successfully suppresses them. Second, the Stoics' belief in an all-encompassing fate only leaves humans with the option of readily complying with its predetermined order. If compliance with fate is the bottom line of Stoic philosophy, what could be more reasonable than an unemotional resignation to its ineluctable decrees? Though in antiquity both friends and foes had a much more complex view of Stoic philosophy, its particular version of determinism was the target of attacks by members of rival schools from early on. What could be the point of moral reflections and an active engagement in life's concerns if everything is fated to happen anyway? The debate on the question of the compatibility of fate with human responsibility therefore never ceased during the five hundred years of that school's existence.

Though the long and intensive intellectual life of the school makes it unlikely that its entire philosophy was based on inherently contradictory principles, the continued attacks and counterattacks at least suggest some tension in the type of determinism fostered by the Stoics. What then, is the gist of Stoic determinism and in what way is it compatible with their insistence on an active life in compliance with carefully worked-out moral principles? Since pioneers like Pohlenz, Sambursky, Long, Rist, and Sandbach have drawn attention to the intricacies of Stoic philosophy, the debate on Stoic compatibilism in secondary literature has steadily increased, and to this very day the question has not been settled to everyone’s satisfaction.

THE STEREOTYPE

According to a stereotypical view, Stoicism in the period of the Roman Empire was philosophically uncreative. The 'school' had an ill-defined institutional status and there was a good deal of eclecticism and merging of different philosophies. The dominant theme was ethics, and the main surviving works consist of exercises in practical moralising based on ideas mapped out centuries before. Unsurprisingly, in the later part of this period, Stoicism was replaced as a living philosophy by a revived Platonism and by a form of Christianity that was increasingly more sophisticated and theoretically aware.

Like all stereotypes, this one contains an element of truth; but it obscures important respects in which Stoicism continued as an active philosophical force for at least the first two centuries a.d. Although there was no institutional ‘school’ as there was in the Hellenistic Age, there were numerous Stoic teachers, and the distinctive three-part Stoic educational curriculum was maintained, with important work continuing in all three areas (i.e., logic, ethics, and physics). As well as being the dominant philosophical movement in the period, Stoicism was also strongly embedded in Greco-Roman culture and, to some extent, in political life, and the ideal of living a properly Stoic life remained powerful. In the third and fourth centuries a.d. and later, Neoplatonic and Christian writers built on key Stoic ideas and absorbed them into their systems.

Stoic Sages never make mistakes. Secure in their understanding of the providential structure of the world, which is identical with fate, which in turn is identical with the will of Zeus (DL VII 135, =SVF 2.580; Plutarch, St. rep. 1049f, 1056c = SVF 2.937; cf. 2.931, 2.1076), Sages order their lives in accordance with it, assimilating their will to the will of Zeus, living in accordance with nature, and so achieving the smooth flow of life, the eurhoia biou so devoutly to be wished for (DL VII 87, =SVF 3.4; Cicero, Fin. III 31, IV 14-15, =SVF 3.15, 3.13; cf. 3.4-9, 3.12-16).

It seems clear enough that if the Sage is to be anything more than an unattainable, regulative ideal (and that is a big ‘if’), the Stoics need powerful reasons, in the form of a powerful epistemology, for supposing that such practical infallibility can ever actually be attainable. And even if the Sage is supposed only to be an ideal figure (and the Stoics were doubtful whether such a superhuman ethical cognizer ever had existed: Sextus, M IX 133, =54D LS; Alexander, Fat. 199.16, =SVF 3.658, =61N LS), still, for the ideal to function as anything more than a piece of remote wishful thinking, it had better be possible at least to approach that ideal; and the Stoics did indeed set great store by the notion of prokopê, moral and cognitive progress (Stobaeus V 906.18–907.5, =SVF 3.510, =59I LS).

In Stoicism, as in Epicureanism, an understanding of the physical place of humanity in the universe was an integral component of a system of thought underpinning each sect's ethical commitments. At the same time as these schools flourished, non-philosophical disciplines were evolving that laid claim to knowledge of parts of this subject: astronomy, which concerned the composition and regularity of the heavens in their own right; geography, which investigated the form and characteristics of the earth and its inhabited parts; and astrology, which asserted connections between the celestial motions and mundane life. The fundamental assumptions of these scientific disciplines were from the start so completely at odds with Epicurus' atomistic, aleatory cosmology that Epicureanism and the exact sciences were doomed to a relationship of mutual irrelevance so long as they coexisted. Between Stoicism and the sciences the possibilities of interaction were greater; though, as we shall see, there were limits to their readiness to embrace each other's approaches.

ASTRONOMY

The central matter of astronomia as it was commonly understood up to the Hellenistic period was the organization of the stars into their constellations and the association of their annual cycle of risings and settings with patterns of weather and human (mostly agricultural) activity.1 But Eudoxus’ astronomical works, which are known to us only through excerpts and secondhand reports, exemplified and indeed likely pioneered a considerable expansion of the science’s scope: in addition to the traditional topics of constellations, weather patterns, and calendrical cycles, he investigated conceptual geometrical models that sought to account for the phenomena of the heavenly bodies and that could be interpreted as reflecting the physical nature of the cosmos.

PHASES

The history of the Stoic school is conventionally divided into three phases:

• Early Stoicism: from Zeno's foundation of the school, c. 300, to the late second century b.c.: the period which includes the headship of the greatest Stoic of them all, Chrysippus

• Middle Stoicism: the era of Panaetius and Posidonius

• Roman Stoicism: the Roman Imperial period, dominated by Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius

Although the Stoic tradition’s continuity is at least as important as any resolution into distinct phases, the traditional divisions do reflect key changes which no school history can afford to ignore. The following account will, in fact, assume a rough division into five phases, despite acknowledgment of extensive overlaps between them:

1. the first generation

2. the era of the early Athenian scholarchs

3. the Platonising phase (‘Middle Stoicism’)

4. the first century b.c. decentralisation

5. the Imperial phase

The primary ground for separating these is that each represents, to some extent, a different perspective on what it is to be a Stoic – that is, on what allegiances and commitments are entailed by the chosen label.

The phrase 'traditional grammar' refers to the body of knowledge about the correct use of word-forms and syntax transmitted in the West at least since the early Middle Ages for the study of Latin and Greek and whose categories were used as a template for the study of other languages. It has long been recognised that traditional grammar shares numerous terms and concepts with the linguistic studies of the Stoics, and this chapter examines the relations between them.

SOURCES

As is so often the case with Hellenistic philosophy, the dearth of reliable, high-quality, first-hand material is a serious obstacle to reconstructing Stoic thought in this area. No Stoic grammatical treatise of any period survives; indeed, only one text with what can be called, broadly, grammatical interests is extant in even something like its original form; in any case this book of Chrysippus’ Logical Questions (PHerc 307) belongs rather in what moderns would call philosophical logic and the philosophy of language – although this overlap is significant in itself (see Section 2.2).

INTRODUCTION

According to Diogenes Laertius, most of the Stoics - beginning with Zeno of Citium - divided philosophical doctrine into three parts: one physical, one ethical, and one logical. Diogenes also reports three homely similes concerning the relation among these parts of philosophy: (1) philosophy is like an animal, with logic corresponding to the bones and sinews, ethics to the more fleshy parts, and physics to the soul; (2) philosophy is like an egg, with logic corresponding to 'the outside' (shell), ethics to 'what is in between' (the white), and physics to 'the innermost part' (yolk); and (3) philosophy is like a productive field, with logic corresponding to the enclosing fence, ethics to the crop, and physics to the earth or trees.

Whatever the precise import of these similes might have been, it seems clear that the Stoics held that physical doctrine stands in an intimate relation to ethics. For the Stoics, the end of human life is ‘to live conformably with nature’ (to homologoumenon têi phusei zên). Consequently, physics – that part of philosophy that pertains to nature and that reveals the import of living ‘conformably with nature’ – obviously has ethical import. Logically distinct from this aspect of the relation of physical doctrine to ethics is a second point of connection between the two: the common contemporary assumption that it is both possible and desirable to undertake a ‘valueneutral’ investigation of nature is quite foreign to Stoic thought. Indeed, it is common to find what might be termed large-scale Stoic philosophical themes influencing physical doctrine – including some of the rather technical aspects of Stoic physical doctrine. In particular, the Stoic themes of the unity and cohesion of the cosmos and of an all-encompassing divine reason controlling the cosmos are of fundamental importance to Stoic physics.

The object of Stoic theology was the governing principle of the cosmos, insofar as this could also be labeled 'god'. The Stoics accordingly regarded theology as part of physics, more specifically as that part which does not focus on the details and the purely physical aspects of cosmic processes, but rather on their overall coherence, teleology, and providential design, as well as on the question of how this cosmic theology relates to popular forms of belief and worship. Issues covered by Stoic theology include the nature of the divine principle of the cosmos, the existence and nature of the other gods, our proper attitude toward the gods - that is, the virtue of piety (eusebeia) and the opposite vice of impiety (asebeia), including our attitude toward traditional myth and ritual - and issues relating to fate and providence, including the way the providential ordering of the cosmos can be known by mankind by means of oracles and divination.

Whereas the founding father of the school, Zeno of Citium, still appears to have published his theological views in the context of his main cosmological work On the whole, his successors accorded a more prominent position to theology as a subject in its own right. Cleanthes explicitly set off theology from the rest of physics, or from physics in the narrow sense (DL VII 41), and wrote a separate work On the gods. Persaeus wrote a work On impiety. Sphaerus appears to have been the first Stoic to have written a separate work On divination. Chrysippus published not only an On the gods and an On Zeus, but also works specifically devoted to fate, providence, divination, and oracles. He appears to have followed in Cleanthes’ footsteps in treating theology as a separate subdiscipline. At any rate he claimed that it was the part of physics that was to be treated last, thus putting it at the final stage of the curriculum (the study of physics as a whole coming after logic and ethics).

Stoic logic is in its core a propositional logic. Stoic inference concerns the relations between items that have the structure of propositions. These items are the assertibles (axiômata). They are the primary bearers of truth-values. Accordingly, Stoic logic falls into two main parts: the theory of arguments and the theory of assertibles, which are the components from which the arguments are built.

SAYABLES AND ASSERTIBLES

What is an assertible? According to the Stoic standard definition, it is

This definition places the assertible in the genus of self-complete sayables, and so everything that holds in general for sayables and for self-complete sayables holds equally for assertibles. Sayables (lekta) are items placed between mere vocal sounds on the one hand and the world on the other. They are, very roughly, meanings: ‘what we say are things, which in fact are sayables’ (DL VII 57). Sayables are the underlying meanings in everything we say or think; they underlie any rational presentation we have (S. E. MVIII 70). But they generally also subsist when no one actually says or thinks them.