In 307 BC Megara was taken by Demetrius, nicknamed Poliorcetes: the besieger of cities. What happened at such a capture is known: the city was plundered, houses emptied, inhabitants carried off as slaves.
Stilpo was at that moment head of the Megarian school and counted as the best-known philosopher of his generation. Listeners came from far away; Zeno of Citium studied under him before founding the Stoa.
Demetrius knew his reputation and gave orders that Stilpo's house be spared. When he spoke with him afterwards, he asked whether anyone had taken anything from him, so that it could be made good.
Stilpo answered that nobody had been seen carrying anything of his away. He still had with him everything that was his.
His city was destroyed, and according to some accounts his daughters had been carried off. The compensation Demetrius offered would have been meaningless: what had gone did not come back with money.
Seneca tells the story twice, in the letters to Lucilius and in his book on firmness, and draws his own conclusion from it: the wise man loses nothing, because everything genuinely his sits inside him.
Stilpo stayed in Megara and went on teaching. His school was eventually absorbed into what his student Zeno began, and along that road runs a straight line from this conversation to the letters of Marcus Aurelius, four hundred years later.
A conqueror offers you compensation for what he himself has taken. Whatever you answer names what you own.
The tempting sorting is that Stilpo lost nothing. He lost everything a person can lose, and his answer does not deny it.
He shifts the meaning of the word. What can be carried away was never his: houses, gold, and by the cruel logic of that time people too. Those he held on loan, and the war asked for them back. What could not be carried away was what he knew and who he was.
That is the dichotomy of control in one sentence, spoken to the man who had just supplied the proof. Demetrius could take everything and had touched precisely that one thing not at all, not out of clemency but because it was impossible.
The sharpness lies in the word Stilpo chooses. Not: I have lost nothing. But: nobody has been seen carrying anything of mine away. He is speaking about what another can take, and that is exactly the line between the two boxes.
This is the case where the teaching collides hardest with what we find acceptable. If his daughters were genuinely carried off, then Stilpo's answer is not only philosophical but cold, and Seneca moreover uses it as evidence without pausing over that.
The Stoics would say that grief at such a loss is not forbidden, only the demand that it should not have happened. But that distinction is easier to make on paper than at a broken door. Whoever finds this case fine should take that question along with it honestly.
Make the inventory for yourself: if everything outside you fell away, what would you still carry with you? And do you spend as much maintenance on that part as on the rest?
Yours, Not Yours · A Stoic practice ground · All cases · Questions or suggestions