There was therefore something rational corresponding to three out of
four primary passions--against delight was to be set joy; against
grief there was nothing to be set, for that arose from the presence
of ill which would rather never attach to the sage. Grief was the
irrational conviction that one ought to afflict oneself where there
was no occasion for it. The ideal of the Stoics was the unclouded
serenity of Socrates of whom Xanthippe declared that he had always
the same face whether on leaving the house In the morning or on
returning to it at night.
As the motley crowd of passions followed the banners of their four
leaders so specific forms of feeling sanctioned by reason were
severally assigned to the three eupathies.
Things were divided by Zeno into good, bad, and indifferent. To good
belonged virtue and what partook of virtue; to bad, vice and what
partook of vice. All other things were indifferent.
To the third class then belonged such things as life and death,
health and sickness, pleasure and pain, beauty and ugliness, strength
and weakness, honour and dishonour, wealth and poverty, victory and
defeat, nobility and baseness of birth.
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