Aristo of Chios Quotes on Virtue
Aristo of Chios (3rd c. BC) — the early Stoic who broke with Zeno of Citium over the structure of Stoic ethics and led the dissident Stoic faction at Athens — gave the early Stoic tradition its most rigorous statement of the radical-Stoic position on the unity of virtue. The central commitment, transmitted through the doxographical tradition (no fragments survive), is that virtue is genuinely one rather than divided into the four cardinal virtues of the standard Stoic teaching — and that the standard Stoic doctrine of preferred and dispreferred indifferents (preferring health to sickness, wealth to poverty within the broader Stoic framework that treats both as ethically indifferent) is an inconsistent compromise with the Peripatetic tradition that should be abandoned in favor of the strict doctrine that all things outside virtue are indifferent simpliciter. The framework supplied a principal alternative within early Stoicism and remains the canonical statement of the radical-Stoic position on the unity of virtue.
Quotes
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Attributed to Aristo of Chios:
“Between virtue and vice nothing is preferred; the indifferent is genuinely indifferent.”
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Attributed to Aristo of Chios:
“The wise man requires no physics; what should be done in any situation is the only true science.”
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Attributed to Aristo of Chios:
“The argumentative philosopher is a runner who never leaves the starting line.”
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Attributed to Aristo of Chios:
“Health and illness are nothing in themselves; they are occasions for the exercise of virtue or vice.”
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Attributed to Aristo of Chios:
“Logic without ethics is a sword in a child's hand.”
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“Aristo the Bald, a native of Chios and nicknamed the Siren, said that the chief good was to live in perfect indifference to all those things that are of an intermediate character between virtue and vice ; making not the slightest difference between them, but regarding them all on a footing of equality. For that the wise man resembles a good actor; who, whether he is filling the part of Agamemnon or Thersites , will perform them both equally well. Diogenes Laërtius , vii. 160”
Ἀρίστων ὁ Χῖος ὁ Φάλανθος, ἐπικαλούμενος Σειρήν, τέλος ἔφησεν εἶναι τὸ ἀδιαφόρως ἔχοντα ζῆν πρὸς τὰ μεταξὺ ἀρετῆς καὶ κακίας μηδ᾿ ἡντινοῦν ἐν αὐτοῖς παραλλαγὴν ἀπολείποντα, ἀλλ᾿ ἐπίσης ἐπὶ πάντων ἔχοντα· εἶναι γὰρ ὅμοιον τὸν σοφὸν τῷ ἀγαθῷ ὑποκριτῇ, ὃς ἄν τε Θερσίτου ἄν τε Ἀγαμέμνονος πρόσωπον ἀναλάβῃ, ἑκάτερον ὑποκρινεῖται προσηκόντως. -
“Virtue is the health of the soul .”
Stoicorum veterum fragmenta , fragment 359