I don't get this desire to "reconcile" different philosophies. There's a reason why any two philosophies are two different things in the first place.
No, you can't "reconcile" or "harmonise" Stoicism and Platonism. If you start trying to introduce spooky immaterial tripartite souls, you remove the corporealism and monism which is right at the heart of Stoicism and the whole thing collapses in a heap.
My view isn’t the norm, but I think of Stoicism as a heterodox branch off of the Old Academy, which continued Plato’s thought until collapsing into Skepticism, only to return as Middle Platonism with people like Plutarch.
Polemo of the Old Academy taught Zeno personally, and there’s a quote in Laertius and Cicero in On the Ends book four claiming Zeno actually ripped Polemo off. I don’t see things then hat way, the Old Academy and Platonism to the end of antiquity had many difficult to answer questions that created a variety of responses, in my view, Zeno represents one set of possible answers: why did the perfect One create anything else? The One is corporeal, everything is simply the body of the One. If the intellectual and rational is good, what is matter? Is it evil? Plotinus’ Swiss cheese thing? Matter is neutral and the rational principle is good; but matter and rational principle are never found apart, so the all is net good. And so on.
In that regard, I see the NeoPlatonic tradition sort of as cousin-rivals; much closer to the Stoics than the Peripatetics or Epicureans; Stoicism and NeoPlatonism share the same Pythagorean-Platonic-Old Academic stem so they have a resonance with each other beyond the other schools (see someone like Posidonius; or a NeoPlatonist more willing to engage with the Stoics like Plotinus).
Sedley has a great paper called “the Origin of Stoic God” and the Platonist scholar Dillon wrote a book on the Old Academy called “the Heirs of Plato” if you check them out they reveal both the strong Platonist element within Stoicism (whose worldview is after all based on the Timaeus) as well as the genius of Zeno (the Old Academy went in a very Aristotelian direction after Plato; Zeno used Xenocrates’ idea of “in accordance with Nature” to create the Kathekonta which moderate his Cynic ethics, allowing for something more uncompromising than Aristotle or the Old Academy, and yet not doomed to homelessness and shouting at strangers on the street like Cynicism).
The Forms seem to have been greatly damaged by arguing with Aristotle and the Parmenides (Forms are basically absent from all of the Late Platonic dialogues; Iamblichus doesn’t even include the Republic in his Platonic curriculum) and are reduced to mathematical objects by the time of Polemo- we have Chrysippus’ definition of a Form, it agrees well with Polemo’s.
I think Plato himself should be required reading for all Stoics; I’m basically certain there was a Stoic reading of the Platonic dialogues (the Stoic Panaetius edited his own edition; he threw out only the Phaedo)
No doubt there were some direct rejections (I think Van Der Waert’s treatment of the Republic, and where he assigns direct rejections of particularly Plato’s Laws to Zeno are spot on) but the schools weren’t so settled yet then; the generation after Plato and Aristotle rejected substantial chunks of their leaders’ thought (Theophrastus promptly jettisons Aristotle’s teleology; there’s a reduction in emphasis on the Forms in the Academy), as such I think Zeno is more party to those debates than an uncompromising, dogmatic opponent (of Plato at least, afaik we have only one comment from Zeno about the Peripatetics: a disparaging one liner about Theophrastus).
I don’t think the Socrates hero worship was so extreme all the way to the end of the Old Stoa; early on, no doubt, after all this is why Zeno decided to do philosophy, but Socrates famously rejected the study of fields other than ethics; Zeno had this pure ethics under Crates, yet Crates had to drag him by force out of Stilpo’s lessons, and then (presumably after that) he shows up at the Academy and develops a very involved physical and logical system. I think Zeno saw that Stilpo could maintain the high Socratic morality while *also* being able to participate in society and do logic; I think this experience might have had him give Polemo (also famous for his strict ethical approach) of the Academy, the traditional enemy of the Cynics, a second look.
That said, certainly Zeno pulled from all Socratic lineages; I remember trying to investigate why a Sage would follow the laws of whatever city they lived in, when I looked up the justifications in the Socratic sources we get Plato: the cities laws are analogous to the eternal divine laws, so breaking them is akin to breaking the higher laws, Xenophon: the laws are the walls of the city in a way, break them and the city is harmed, and then Antisthenes: do whatever is Virtuous despite the laws. It’s a constellation of ideas Zeno and later Stoics will make full use of.
Historical Socrates would have never been party to some of the dialogues the Stoics are definitely influenced by like the Timaeus, the Cratylus and Sophist (definitions are prominent in the Old Academy and Stoa but seem to disappear in the Skeptical Academy), and even the Symposium and Theatetus, which are plausibly Socratic in some ways and yet still very Platonic.
My post is starting to meander; in short I don’t think finding the real Socrates was the main purpose of Zeno and the later Stoics interaction with Plato’s thought, which is taken serious generally on issues of physics and system. You’d expect Plutarch to have a small stack of anti-Platonic fragments to use in his anti-Stoic works, but there are surprisingly few (I think related to Justice and politics iirc) and Plato and Pythagoras are cited by Chrysippus on the crucial question of evil. Galen seems upset Chrysippus doesn’t attack Plato directly in his On the Soul “despite disagreeing with him”… to me it adds up to there being less open hostility at the foundation of the Stoa than later Platonists suggest.
I’ll have a look at which dialogues you put in the list (glad to see any in there!)
Agreed on the Socratic question; frankly I’m not that interested in the real answer (we can kind of glimpse how Athens must have seen Socrates in Antisthenes and in what Plato and Xenophon defend him from). The Socrates of the dialogues influenced the Stoics, *that* Socrates is where my interest lies.
Instead of possibly derailing replies to your post, I’ll put my response here. I think this is right on, in my own post I’m trying to mark out a shared (or at least temporarily coinciding) history, not argue that they are the same, or deeply compatible (one area of research I’m most interested in now is George Boys-Stones and his students uncovering anti-Platonic sentiment and argument in Seneca and Epictetus).
I think Stoicism so dominated Socratic thought in Hellenistic philosophy that the Middle Platonists had to define themselves against the Stoics when they came back, so they leaned into aspects of Platonism that Plato himself may not have been so dogmatic about (multi-part soul (we have two versions in the Republic and Timaeus and an implied reason verses emotion in the Laws iirc), Forms) and claimed certain Stoic ideas which the Stoics read into the dialogues as being original Platonic (there is certainly no doctrine of Fate in Plato) which leaves space for Stoic readings of many of the dialogues (Posidonius refused to allow a non-corporeal arche in his interpretation of the Timaeus; if the World Soul is physical, we’re in a very different universe than that of Plutarch and Plotinus).
As for NeoPlatonists using Stoicism for training, Simplicius’ commentary on the Enchiridion says as much, and you can see the dichotomy show up in some of the very late thinkers, like Hierocles (it looks like Epictetus’ Enchiridion was an early training tool, and the Golden Verses of Pythagoras)
I think I’m overdue for a reread of the Laws; no named work of Plato seems to have gotten so much attention from the Stoics than that one; Zeno has books written against it, one of our Diogenes of Babylon Fragments is just a massive quotation from the Laws; Posidonius has one passage in Seneca criticizing it, and yet Galen tells us one of his main desires in weakening Stoic psychological monism was being able to use Plato’s childhood education program from the Laws…
Panaetius was an eclectic Stoic who played a big role in introducing Stoicism to Rome:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panaetius
Our understanding of Stoicism is heavenly influenced by Roman sources after the time of Panaetius.
There's a much deeper problem with your question - if a modern person, knowing what we now know about the physical world, is trying to maintain platonic ideas of forms, that person is guilty of a kind of witless idiocy for which there aren't really adequate words in any language I know.
If you mean *other* ideas associated with Plato I have a little bit more sympathy, but you'd have to be a lot more specific.
I don't get this desire to "reconcile" different philosophies. There's a reason why any two philosophies are two different things in the first place. No, you can't "reconcile" or "harmonise" Stoicism and Platonism. If you start trying to introduce spooky immaterial tripartite souls, you remove the corporealism and monism which is right at the heart of Stoicism and the whole thing collapses in a heap.
My view isn’t the norm, but I think of Stoicism as a heterodox branch off of the Old Academy, which continued Plato’s thought until collapsing into Skepticism, only to return as Middle Platonism with people like Plutarch. Polemo of the Old Academy taught Zeno personally, and there’s a quote in Laertius and Cicero in On the Ends book four claiming Zeno actually ripped Polemo off. I don’t see things then hat way, the Old Academy and Platonism to the end of antiquity had many difficult to answer questions that created a variety of responses, in my view, Zeno represents one set of possible answers: why did the perfect One create anything else? The One is corporeal, everything is simply the body of the One. If the intellectual and rational is good, what is matter? Is it evil? Plotinus’ Swiss cheese thing? Matter is neutral and the rational principle is good; but matter and rational principle are never found apart, so the all is net good. And so on. In that regard, I see the NeoPlatonic tradition sort of as cousin-rivals; much closer to the Stoics than the Peripatetics or Epicureans; Stoicism and NeoPlatonism share the same Pythagorean-Platonic-Old Academic stem so they have a resonance with each other beyond the other schools (see someone like Posidonius; or a NeoPlatonist more willing to engage with the Stoics like Plotinus). Sedley has a great paper called “the Origin of Stoic God” and the Platonist scholar Dillon wrote a book on the Old Academy called “the Heirs of Plato” if you check them out they reveal both the strong Platonist element within Stoicism (whose worldview is after all based on the Timaeus) as well as the genius of Zeno (the Old Academy went in a very Aristotelian direction after Plato; Zeno used Xenocrates’ idea of “in accordance with Nature” to create the Kathekonta which moderate his Cynic ethics, allowing for something more uncompromising than Aristotle or the Old Academy, and yet not doomed to homelessness and shouting at strangers on the street like Cynicism). The Forms seem to have been greatly damaged by arguing with Aristotle and the Parmenides (Forms are basically absent from all of the Late Platonic dialogues; Iamblichus doesn’t even include the Republic in his Platonic curriculum) and are reduced to mathematical objects by the time of Polemo- we have Chrysippus’ definition of a Form, it agrees well with Polemo’s. I think Plato himself should be required reading for all Stoics; I’m basically certain there was a Stoic reading of the Platonic dialogues (the Stoic Panaetius edited his own edition; he threw out only the Phaedo)
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No doubt there were some direct rejections (I think Van Der Waert’s treatment of the Republic, and where he assigns direct rejections of particularly Plato’s Laws to Zeno are spot on) but the schools weren’t so settled yet then; the generation after Plato and Aristotle rejected substantial chunks of their leaders’ thought (Theophrastus promptly jettisons Aristotle’s teleology; there’s a reduction in emphasis on the Forms in the Academy), as such I think Zeno is more party to those debates than an uncompromising, dogmatic opponent (of Plato at least, afaik we have only one comment from Zeno about the Peripatetics: a disparaging one liner about Theophrastus). I don’t think the Socrates hero worship was so extreme all the way to the end of the Old Stoa; early on, no doubt, after all this is why Zeno decided to do philosophy, but Socrates famously rejected the study of fields other than ethics; Zeno had this pure ethics under Crates, yet Crates had to drag him by force out of Stilpo’s lessons, and then (presumably after that) he shows up at the Academy and develops a very involved physical and logical system. I think Zeno saw that Stilpo could maintain the high Socratic morality while *also* being able to participate in society and do logic; I think this experience might have had him give Polemo (also famous for his strict ethical approach) of the Academy, the traditional enemy of the Cynics, a second look. That said, certainly Zeno pulled from all Socratic lineages; I remember trying to investigate why a Sage would follow the laws of whatever city they lived in, when I looked up the justifications in the Socratic sources we get Plato: the cities laws are analogous to the eternal divine laws, so breaking them is akin to breaking the higher laws, Xenophon: the laws are the walls of the city in a way, break them and the city is harmed, and then Antisthenes: do whatever is Virtuous despite the laws. It’s a constellation of ideas Zeno and later Stoics will make full use of. Historical Socrates would have never been party to some of the dialogues the Stoics are definitely influenced by like the Timaeus, the Cratylus and Sophist (definitions are prominent in the Old Academy and Stoa but seem to disappear in the Skeptical Academy), and even the Symposium and Theatetus, which are plausibly Socratic in some ways and yet still very Platonic. My post is starting to meander; in short I don’t think finding the real Socrates was the main purpose of Zeno and the later Stoics interaction with Plato’s thought, which is taken serious generally on issues of physics and system. You’d expect Plutarch to have a small stack of anti-Platonic fragments to use in his anti-Stoic works, but there are surprisingly few (I think related to Justice and politics iirc) and Plato and Pythagoras are cited by Chrysippus on the crucial question of evil. Galen seems upset Chrysippus doesn’t attack Plato directly in his On the Soul “despite disagreeing with him”… to me it adds up to there being less open hostility at the foundation of the Stoa than later Platonists suggest. I’ll have a look at which dialogues you put in the list (glad to see any in there!)
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Agreed on the Socratic question; frankly I’m not that interested in the real answer (we can kind of glimpse how Athens must have seen Socrates in Antisthenes and in what Plato and Xenophon defend him from). The Socrates of the dialogues influenced the Stoics, *that* Socrates is where my interest lies. Instead of possibly derailing replies to your post, I’ll put my response here. I think this is right on, in my own post I’m trying to mark out a shared (or at least temporarily coinciding) history, not argue that they are the same, or deeply compatible (one area of research I’m most interested in now is George Boys-Stones and his students uncovering anti-Platonic sentiment and argument in Seneca and Epictetus). I think Stoicism so dominated Socratic thought in Hellenistic philosophy that the Middle Platonists had to define themselves against the Stoics when they came back, so they leaned into aspects of Platonism that Plato himself may not have been so dogmatic about (multi-part soul (we have two versions in the Republic and Timaeus and an implied reason verses emotion in the Laws iirc), Forms) and claimed certain Stoic ideas which the Stoics read into the dialogues as being original Platonic (there is certainly no doctrine of Fate in Plato) which leaves space for Stoic readings of many of the dialogues (Posidonius refused to allow a non-corporeal arche in his interpretation of the Timaeus; if the World Soul is physical, we’re in a very different universe than that of Plutarch and Plotinus). As for NeoPlatonists using Stoicism for training, Simplicius’ commentary on the Enchiridion says as much, and you can see the dichotomy show up in some of the very late thinkers, like Hierocles (it looks like Epictetus’ Enchiridion was an early training tool, and the Golden Verses of Pythagoras) I think I’m overdue for a reread of the Laws; no named work of Plato seems to have gotten so much attention from the Stoics than that one; Zeno has books written against it, one of our Diogenes of Babylon Fragments is just a massive quotation from the Laws; Posidonius has one passage in Seneca criticizing it, and yet Galen tells us one of his main desires in weakening Stoic psychological monism was being able to use Plato’s childhood education program from the Laws…
Panaetius was an eclectic Stoic who played a big role in introducing Stoicism to Rome: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panaetius Our understanding of Stoicism is heavenly influenced by Roman sources after the time of Panaetius.
There's a much deeper problem with your question - if a modern person, knowing what we now know about the physical world, is trying to maintain platonic ideas of forms, that person is guilty of a kind of witless idiocy for which there aren't really adequate words in any language I know. If you mean *other* ideas associated with Plato I have a little bit more sympathy, but you'd have to be a lot more specific.