So th' ancient Stoics in the Porch,15
With fierce dispute maintain'd their church,
Beat out their brains in fight and study,
To prove that virtue is a body;[1]
That bonum is an animal,
Made good with stout polemic brawl;20
In which some hundreds on the place
Were slain outright,[2] and many a face
Retrench'd of nose, and eyes, and beard,
To maintain what their sect averr'd.
All which the Knight and Squire in wrath, 25
Had like t' have suffer'd for their faith;
Each striving to make good his own,
As by the sequel shall be shown.
The sun had long since, in the lap[3]
Of Thetis, taken out his nap, 30
And like a lobster boil'd, the morn
From black to red began to turn;[4]
- ↑ The Stoics, who embraced all their doctrines as so many fixed and immutable truths from which it was infamous to depart, allowed of no incorporeal substance, no medium between body and nothing. With them accidents and qualities, virtues and vices, and the passions of the mind, were corporeal.
- ↑ We meet with the same account in Butler's Remains, vol. ii. 242. "This had been an excellent course for the old round-headed Stoics to find out whether bonum was corpus, or virtue an animal: about which they had so many fierce encounters in their Stoa, that about 1400 lost their lives on the place, and far many more their beards and teeth and noses." Grecian history does not record these brawls; but Diogenes Laertius, in his life of Zeno, book vii. sect. 5, says, that this philosopher read his lectures in the Stoa or Portico, and hopes the place will be no more violated by civil seditions: for, adds he, when the Thirty Tyrants governed the republic, 1400 citizens were killed there; referring to the judicial murders committed there in 404-3, b. c., on the overthrow of the Athenian constitution.
- ↑ As far as Phœbus first does rise
Until in Thetis' lap he lies.Sir Arthur Gorges.
See also Virgil's Georgics, i. 446-7. - ↑ Mr M. Bacon says, this simile is taken from Rabelais, who calls the lobster cardinalized, from the red habit which cardinals wear.
some late editions read Lully; but the former has been retained with the author's corrected edition. If Butler meant Cicero he must allude to his Stoicorum Paradoxa, in which, for the exercise of his wit, Cicero defends some of the most extravagant doctrines of the Porch.
