Interpreting Pain in early Stoicism

Abstract

A dilemma might have faced Stoic philosophers on pain: in their view, properly speaking, the only evil is vice; but how else could pain be defined, seeing that in all evidence it is the opposite of the good, hence an evil? Proviso that in their view this was a real dilemma, in which way did the Stoics try to solve it without abandoning their own basic philosophical assumptions? In any case, what they could not avoid was trying to explain the undeniable existence of pain in humans and suggest possible remedies for the evident detrimental effects that it has on the individual way of life. Could pain at least be governed, and if so, how? In what follows I shall try to reconstruct step after step the Stoics’ answers to the difficult questions involved in the topic and show that their treatment of the problem is extended from ethics to physical and physiological aspects, in the end requiring from their audience an effort of comprehension: understanding the true nature of pain and hence developing the rational persuasion that pain in the body cannot, under certain conditions, be avoided but can at least be endured, while pain in the soul is human responsibility only, insofar as it depends on unsteady opinions, lack of knowledge and erroneous evaluations of a state of affairs.