Christopher Star, Middlebury College
Musonius Rufus has attracted increased attention as an important Stoic guide for how to live a meaningful life. Indeed, the surviving reports of his teaching primarily focus on ethical questions. Following Stoic doctrine, Musonius often backs up his advice noting that one must live “in accordance with nature” (Striker). Despite the importance of nature for Musonius’s ethics there is little discussion nature itself. A key exception is Fragment 42, which contains a brief discussion of the “nature of the cosmos.” This fragment has received little comment. One scholar, for example, briefly notes that it presents a “perfectly orthodox attitude” toward the Stoic conception of nature (Lutz). In this fragment Musonius sees the nature of the cosmos as defined by change. The four elements are continually transformed into each other. This idea has a lengthy Stoic provenance (Berno). Yet Musonius also notes that humans and gods are affected by these transformations. This paper explores how Musonius’s portrait of nature as change relates to his appeals to nature as grounding human ethical life, particularly with respect to marriage and sexual relationships. I set Musonius’s ethics and physics within a wider cultural and philosophical context to argue that Musonius’s account of cosmic change may destabilize his appeals to nature as a normative force.
Indeed, instability and change lie at the core of this fragment. It is also Fragment 8 of Epictetus and hence can be ascribed to both the student and his teacher. Is Epictetus quoting, paraphrasing, or giving a general idea of what his teacher said about nature and change? The fragment allegedly is records Musonius’s thoughts on friendship, but it is not clear how this discussion of physics relates to the ethics of friendship.
The fragment’s account of change in nature has consequences for Musonius’s discussion of the norms of nature elsewhere, particularly in his analysis of sex and marriage. Marriage between a man and a woman is “in accord with nature” (14). For Musonius a key purpose of marriage is the production of children. Those who engage in sex for pleasure do so unlawfully; even worse, sex between two men is declared to be “contrary to nature.” Musonius goes so far as to state that destroying the conjugal bond and sex for the purpose of reproduction risks destroying “the whole human race” (14). Yet if the nature of the cosmos is defined by change, could the norms of nature be subject to change as well? Indeed, Musonius’s valorization of marriage is part of a larger ethical shift that began in the early years of the principate (D’Angelo). His concerns about a lack of procreation bringing about the doom of humanity might be misplaced. The transformation of elements in Fragment 42 may be related to Seneca’s account of the universal deluge in Natural Questions 3.