Faith in self and purpose to withstand ill-fortune

The Parthenon at the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. Picture: Margaret Wenham

In times like ours of instability, uncertainty and indeterminate threat, the fundamental questions press for attention. How is it possible to make sense of a life, find meaning in it? What might redeem the human individual?

The religious framework that used to provide answers has gone – we live in a post-Christian era. Which does not mean Christianity has lost its profound influence. The societies of the Western world remain culturally Christian, while the faith, theology, teachings and religious practices have largely lapsed. What it means to be culturally Christian is a large topic for another occasion.

In response to the need for answers, there has been a return, if an unwitting one, to the other main foundation source of Western culture, that of classical Greece. In particular, the philosophy of Stoicism has found peculiar modern resonance. To elucidate, I want to take one largely unfamiliar example, that of Phocion, his story recorded in Plutarch’s Lives.

Phocion (402-318BC) was an Athenian statesman and general whose virtues were summed up by Plutarch as “a blend of kindness and severity, of caution and daring, of solicitude for the safety of others and disregard for his own, of abhorring dishonour and indefatigable in the pursuit of justice”. As a boy he had been a pupil of Plato. Although he was openly contemptuous of the fickleness and folly of his fellow citizens, and never curried their favour, they elected him military commander 45 times. When in need they recognised his superior leadership in war. As an orator, he was renowned for his terse advice and harsh judgments.

Phocion lived simply, refusing munificent gifts from men as eminent as Alexander the Great. His wife is reported to have responded to an Ionian woman who was showing off her jewellery: “My ornament is Phocion.” In the later part of his life, Athens was under near constant threat from Macedonia. After one incident, the Athenians arrested him on trumped-up charges of treason. A mob of citizens, slaves and foreigners condemned him and several of his companions to death. He attempted to save the others by accepting guilt himself but was howled down. No one defended him in the public assembly; still, a move to have him tortured was defeated. As he was led to prison, a man ran alongside shouting abuse and spitting at him. Phocion asked: “Will nobody make this fellow behave himself?”

The day of his death was reserved for a festival to the god Zeus. The execution went ahead despite the sacrilege. Furthermore, it was decreed that Phocion’s body be taken beyond the frontier, and no Athenian provide fire for the funeral pyre. A man was paid to carry it away, bring fire and burn it. At night, Phocion’s wife took Phocion’s bones secretly back to her house in Athens and buried them by the hearth. Soon after, the Athenians came to their senses, erected a statue and gave his bones a public burial. Phocion’s accusers were put to death.

Phocion is Stoicism incarnate. His life was dedicated to virtue, and virtue in itself, not as a means to another end – either the religious one of salvation or the worldly one of happiness. More concretely, his implicit oath was to civic duty, to serving Athens and his fellow citizens. In allegiance to justice and truth, his other virtues were personal courage – both in battle and in expressing unpopular judgments in the public assembly – temperance, and a detachment from the folly and evil of others, and from the harsh tricks of fortune.

The Phocion story was taken up with brilliant effect by the neoclassical painter Nicolas Poussin. In his Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion, painted around 1648, now hanging in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, England, he makes Phocion’s wife the key character. She kneels on a grassy mound in the foreground, just outside the walls of Athens, as if at prayer in her own church. She bends down over the ashes of her husband’s body, her own face a mix of grief and fierce determination. Her left hand scoops the ashes into a pile while her right, its palm down, cradles them, a tender reverent gesture. Strewn before her are several unburnt sticks, lying to conjure up the limbs or bones of the huge form of Phocion. There is a complicated play here on the role of fire. The body, suggested by the sticks, and itself in the sketchy form of a cross, is flat and lifeless on the ground, but it is the ashes that contain the spirit, and they are nurtured by his wife, and may splutter back to life, then flare upwards.

In the middle ground of the painting is the city of Athens. Its inhabitants go about their daily lives. Some work; some are at leisure. There are three archers, another man plays the flute, a fifth reads from a papyrus scroll, others swim. Here is the stock-in-trade of the everyday. The people are unthreatened, easy in their lives. Their beautiful city secures them, itself a monument to the pride of human creation, to a this-worldly order. Life goes on as if nothing has happened.

How can this be? An outrage has just been committed by the citizens of Athens, the betrayal of the man who had done more than any other to further their wellbeing. It is hard to imagine an act of greater civic infamy. Yet Athens flourishes.

The painting projects a lesson for every individual. It runs along the lines: do not expect to be saved by your community, remembered by it, or treated according to your deserts. Nevertheless, you have a duty, duty for its own sake, one you should apply yourself to, not with a grim self-denial, but with relish – assuming you have that in you. If misfortune strikes, if you are treated unjustly, even outrageously, you have no grounds for lament, for that is how things are. Whatever rules – fate, supernatural powers, God, or something else – they are neither providential nor merciful. Realism is necessary. The Stoic individual should never complain. To withstand bad fortune, you will need prodigious strength. Also, you will need two other things. First, companionship, here that of man and wife, each for the other. And second, faith in what you do – in what drives you and in the universal laws you obey. There is the potential for grace in both.

John Carroll is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at La Trobe University.