Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
William O Stephens on Musonius Rufus, Food, and Fashion (Episode 94)
744 Plays1 year ago
Why does Musonius Rufus lecture on food and men’s fashion?
Caleb talks to William O Stephens to find out. Learn how the Stoics thought about ordinary issues of life in order to live extraordinarily well.
https://williamostephens.com/
(01:11) Musonius Rufus and Epictetus
(09:09) Why Care About Food and Fashion?
(13:42) Food
(23:16) Optimizing Health
(29:58) The Social Dimension
(36:14) Beards
(45:17) What is Natural?
(52:42) Epictetus on Beards
***
Subscribe to The Stoa Letter for weekly meditations, actions, and links to the best Stoic resources: www.stoaletter.com/subscribe
Download the Stoa app (it’s a free download): stoameditation.com/pod
If you try the Stoa app and find it useful, but truly cannot afford it, email us and we'll set you up with a free account.
Listen to more episodes and learn more here: https://stoameditation.com/blog/stoa-conversations/
Thanks to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
Recommended
Transcript
Epictetus' Defiance through Beards
00:00:00
Speaker
You come into the room, they see you have a long beard. It's like, hey, this dude could be a philosopher. He's got a beard. The guy who's coercing him is trying to force him to strip that off. Deny that you're a philosopher by getting rid of this badge. He says, to heck with that. You want to behead me. If that's up to you, if it pleases you, go ahead and try.
00:00:22
Speaker
if it'll do you any good. So basically, I love this passage from Epictetus. He's saying, you can't coerce me,
Introduction to Stoa Conversations with Dr. Stevens
00:00:30
Speaker
dude.
00:00:30
Speaker
Welcome to Stoa Conversations. My name is Caleb Montaveros, and today I am speaking with repeat guest Dr. William O. Stevens, professor emeritus of philosophy at Creighton University and most recently author of Epictetus and Caridian, a new translation and guide to stoic ethics.
00:00:53
Speaker
Do check out some of our past episodes. Episode 26 is all about Epictetus's Handbook. Today, we're going to be focusing largely on Musonius Rufus. Well, thanks for coming back. Thank you, Caleb. Thanks for having me back.
Influence of Musonius Rufus on Epictetus
00:01:11
Speaker
Well, let's start with this connection tying Musonius Rufus to Epictetus. How did Musonius Rufus influence Epictetus?
00:01:23
Speaker
Yeah, so Epictetus attended lectures from several different Roman teachers of his day. But Misonius was the one who was, depending on one's interpretation of him, either the only Stoic teacher Epictetus directly interacted with,
00:01:46
Speaker
or the most stoic leaning of Epictetus's teachers. Scholars disagree a little bit about whether we should consider Musonius Rufus to be a sort of full-blooded stoic.
00:02:02
Speaker
or whether he had Stoic sympathies, but was also influenced by Plato's thought and certainly the cynics. You definitely see a cynic stamp in Musonius's or on Musonius's version of Stoicism.
00:02:26
Speaker
So I myself am inclined to consider both Musonius Rufus and Epictetus to be Stoics. But regarding influence, yeah, you see a strong influence of Musonius on Epictetus. It's a little harder because we have a lot more texts from Epictetus with the four surviving books of the discourses of
00:02:50
Speaker
And we have the handbook, which is really not a very clear, in many respects, and not a very clear window into Epictetus's philosophy. The Discourses is much more complete, so you get a much more well-rounded view of Epictetus's philosophy in the classrooms, teachings, than in the handbook. Which is not to say that the handbook isn't useful, but
00:03:12
Speaker
Discourses give you a lot more text to work with. In Musonius' case, we have fewer texts. We have these discourses, these fragments of his. And if you look for parallels or influences from Musonius' thinner body of writings, you do see things like examples that are shared or echoed in Epictetus.
00:03:34
Speaker
Like, for example, the fighting cock, the rooster, and using the rooster as an example of a male bird that is rightly proud of its comb on its head and
00:03:52
Speaker
that is an indication that nature has equipped roosters with combs so that they keep them because it announces that that's a male bird, not a hen, but a rooster. And both Epictetus and Musonius cite that as an example of why human males who are adults ought not to cut their hair short.
00:04:18
Speaker
So that's one kind of example. But again, the great respect that both have for the cynics, for Diogenes.
00:04:28
Speaker
that's clear in both Musonius and Epictetus. Musonius is a little more forward thinking when it comes to equal education for
Musonius and Women's Education
00:04:37
Speaker
women. You do not see that in Epictetus. He does not echo Musonius's forward thinking views about equal education and having an equal virtues that women have the same virtues that men do.
00:04:52
Speaker
Tony says, not quite consistent on their social roles as a consequence of that. He's not perfectly consistent on egalitarianism between the sexes, but he is forward-thinking in a way that Epictetus is not. Epictetus has several rather pejorative texts when he talks about women.
00:05:18
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Those are some of the influences that Musonius has on Epictetus. Yeah, the fact that they share the admiration of the cynics is very interesting. And at least Epictetus seems to take the cynic almost as the paradigmatic sage or at least one of the paradigmatic sages. He says, right, it's not the fact that not everyone should be a cynic, but nonetheless, a cynic is in a sense still the ideal, right?
Epictetus on Diogenes and Socrates
00:05:43
Speaker
Exactly. And that's exactly why I think it's very safe to regard Epictetus as a full-blooded stoic because he does not urge his students to follow Diogenes. He says that's a very, very special calling and almost nobody has what it takes. Because in Epictetus's day, there were plenty of cynics running around, but none of them pulled it off.
00:06:11
Speaker
And Musonius also seems to have that complaint about cynics of his day that they just didn't pull it off. They didn't really walk the talk. Both of them say, hey, anybody can grow their hair long and can grow a long straggly beard. That doesn't make you virtuous. That doesn't make you wise. That doesn't make you a good philosopher in dealing with arguments and challenges coming from the skeptics that you need to be able to respond to as a stoic philosopher.
00:06:40
Speaker
And so, yeah, Diogenes is a hero for Epictetus, but he's a very special, asterisk kind of hero. Whereas Epictetus's biggest hero was clearly Socrates in Epictetus's discourses. Because Socrates was what? Well, he wasn't a cynic. Well, it wasn't just because Diogenes came after Socrates.
00:07:01
Speaker
It was because Socrates, like Stoics following him, was married, had children, participated in the government of Athens, and so he fulfilled his civic and familial duties and his husbandly duties, and of course Diogenes and the cynics following him,
00:07:25
Speaker
They did not marry, and with the exception of Cretes, allow Hipparchia to convince him that he should marry. But that was unusual, very unusual that a male cynic would get married. And they did not have children so far as I know, given the historical record.
00:07:46
Speaker
But Diogenes was certainly a freewheeling bachelor masturbating in public and that sort of thing. So that's not the sort of thing that Epictetus and Musonius go for. Musonius is really very conservative.
Musonius' Views on Family and Sexuality
00:08:00
Speaker
You can almost think of him as a proto-Catholic.
00:08:03
Speaker
because he advocated having a really big family, lots and lots of kids. The more the better, the more the merrier. And he thought just seeing a husband and wife with a long trail of lots of kids walking into the market was a beautiful, joyous thing. So, Musonius explicitly argues against homosexuality. He argues that's contrary to nature.
00:08:33
Speaker
Men should be having, men should be married, they should have lots of kids with their wives and he promotes big families and he's homophobic. Whereas Epictetus doesn't speak to that. He doesn't seem to have the kind of philosophical objection to homosexual sex acts that his teacher, Musonius, did. It's also not as sensitive when it comes to
00:09:03
Speaker
diet as Musonius is. Musonius is more conservative in that respect too. There's a former Stoa guest, Kevin Voss, who was a practicing
00:09:17
Speaker
Catholic love Musonius Rufus, in part because you do see the fact that he's got this pronatalist philosopher. He believes in traditional Roman values, but nonetheless, they're slightly more liberal than I think what the typical Roman would practice, so they're somewhat more amenable.
Connecting Everyday Life with Stoicism
00:09:34
Speaker
But he thought that Musonius Rufus went quite well and indeed helped explain some traditional Catholic views.
00:09:42
Speaker
But at any rate, one thing that I think makes Musonius Rufus so interesting is that he tackles some of these really specific issues, like how should one eat? Should you have a beard? How should you furnish your house, right? But before we jump into what he says about those, like why should a stoic care
00:10:04
Speaker
at all about issues like diet, the length of a beard, shouldn't they just be focused on virtue? Yeah, well, why do we focus on virtue? Because the stoic definition of the goal, the T-loss of all living things, including human beings, is to live in agreement with nature. That comes first. That's the target that we all aim for.
00:10:32
Speaker
And then the Stoics say, okay, well, nature is polyvalent. It's ambiguous. It has multiple meanings. There's nature with a capital N, which is the whole cosmos, the universe. So living in agreement with nature with a capital N means not trying to fight gravity. That's not possible for anything that's a body, any embodied thing.
00:11:00
Speaker
but it also means more specifically living in agreement with the particular kind of constitution characteristic of members of your species. And human beings are mammals, and so we need to eat and drink and sleep, and it's appropriate for us, or it can be appropriate for us to procreate given the right circumstances to keep ourselves from getting too cold, too warm, like all mammals do.
00:11:30
Speaker
But then you've got a third layer or level of nature, which is one's own particular nature. So you have to live in agreement with your nature as a mammal when you're a human being. But you also have to live in agreement with your nature as a primate. And all primates are social creatures. The stoics didn't, the ancient stoics didn't, were not primatologists.
00:11:55
Speaker
So they didn't know that non-human primates, chimpanzees and gorillas can learn and have learned American Sign Language.
00:12:03
Speaker
and that they have a kind of rudimentary kind of reciprocity that's the origin of morality, as Franz de Waal argues. But they focused on us as special because of our reason, our Lagas. And your Lagas tells you that you, as an individual human being, share a lot in common with other human beings.
00:12:29
Speaker
a great deal, but you also have your own distinctive set of strengths and weaknesses.
00:12:35
Speaker
And so not every profession is going to be appropriate for you. Not every job or task is going to be particularly suited to you rather than some other human being who might be bigger or faster or smaller or quicker, more dexterous with their hands or younger. So recognizing your own particular individual strengths and weaknesses is part of living in agreement with your own particular nature as an individual.
00:13:06
Speaker
And so what is virtue? Virtue is the perfection of reason. So that's how we get to virtue, right? Your human nature is what makes you special is that you can imitate the divine. You can imitate the gods who are perfectly rational.
00:13:24
Speaker
and they're not embodied the way we are, but that's what we have in common with the gods. And so living in agreement with your human reason means living in agreement with the will of the gods or providence. And so you get back to the first layer again of living in agreement with the universe and things that happen. Where does, what would you start thinking about the food? Where does that enter
Ethics of Eating in Stoicism
00:13:46
Speaker
the picture? Yeah, so, okay. So you have to eat, right? As a mammal, you have to eat, not just as a human being.
00:13:51
Speaker
And so what you eat, and how much you eat, and how quickly you eat, and whether you're eating by yourself or with other people, all of these things are ethically charged. And the Stoics recognize this going way back, way back to Socrates and the early Greeks.
00:14:15
Speaker
Eating is a social activity, but it's necessary for survival. And certain customs of eating involving etiquette are very prominent in our cultural ways of life, food ways, as they're called.
00:14:36
Speaker
So you are what you eat, but you're more than that because you're also how you eat and where you eat. I mean, one thing to remember is that for the ancient Greeks, they did not picnic.
00:14:52
Speaker
This is a 20th century and 21st century Western kind of thing to do because you can get dirt in your food. The wind can blow leaves into your plate of food.
00:15:07
Speaker
And if you're sitting on the ground and eating, then of course insects can get in your food. And so on the basis of hygiene alone, eating outside the ancient Greeks thought was something you only do when you're forced to, if you're a soldier campaigning.
00:15:23
Speaker
and you can't pitch a tent and you're on the march, then you can nibble on some bread. But that's not your preference. Your preference would be to set up a camp, set up a tent, and cook your food and keep it clean and eat it indoors. And this is why Diogenes the cynic, who would eat outdoors, was scandalous to the Athenians, because you don't eat outside. That's what dogs do.
00:15:54
Speaker
dogs eat outside. And so Diages, of course, is like, yeah, it's okay. If eating is natural, it's natural anywhere, anytime. That's his reasoning. And that distinguished him very much from the Stoics and from the early Athenian philosophers, the Greek philosophers.
00:16:13
Speaker
So, yeah, I mean, food comes from nature. Food comes from the ground. We grow crops. We have orchards, the Greeks and the Romans. You know, food production was very important because they faced food insecurity much more often than the privileged.
00:16:33
Speaker
us do in the 21st century. There are Americans that face food insecurity, and of course, plenty of people outside the United States that wrestle with food insecurity. But this was an issue in the ancient world, and it was very much a matter of wealth, of course. But they had to deal with famines and that sort of thing too, and food could spoil, and they did not have refrigeration as we do.
00:16:58
Speaker
So food mattered, and it mattered ethically, and it mattered for living in agreement with nature. So living in agreement with nature means eating in agreement with nature. How do you eat in agreement with nature? Well, Eustonius has very decided opinions on that, right? Right, right. So as a very austere leaning, austere side of the spectrum stoic, conservative kind of stoic, his view was that food is fuel.
00:17:30
Speaker
And the purpose of food is to energize you. And one of his arguments for this is if you think about how long it takes to eat a meal and digest it and then get the energy from that food, from those calories, you realize that it's only a few seconds or maybe a minute if you really chew your food a lot and the saliva mixes on your tongue
00:17:59
Speaker
And so you're tasting it for a few seconds and then you swallow it. And then that food is in you for hours and hours and hours. And you don't taste it when it's going down your esophagus and you don't taste it when it's in your stomach and you don't taste it as it's going through your large intestine and your small intestine, right? And so for him, the notion of hedonism
00:18:26
Speaker
is just wrong, right? As a Stoic, you live and agree with nature. That's what guides your choices, your power of reason.
00:18:35
Speaker
not what titillates your palate, not what feels good. If you ate and drank just because it, you know, if you thought the purpose of food and drink was to make you feel good, you'd get drunk a lot. I would drink milkshakes all day long, right? I mean, that's not gonna give you a healthy diet and people who do overeat and drink too much wine and drink milkshakes when instead they should be having healthier food.
00:19:03
Speaker
their bodies pay the price. And so it's a clever argument, I think, that Musonius has. It says, look, any food that has calories is going to fuel your actions. And when you're not eating, your actions should be as directed toward virtue as when you are eating. So what's the virtuous way to eat? Not too fast? Not too much? Not at the wrong time?
00:19:34
Speaker
Not when there are more important things to be doing, right? If you have tasks to do that are urgent, you don't say, oh, I'll put that on hold. I've got to start making my elaborate dinner. Not spending too much time fussing over food, it's preparation, it's presentation. Musonius doesn't go for any of that.
00:19:54
Speaker
And these are the considerations, his suspicion, his rejection of luxury. And remember the Rome that he's in, there are plenty of very luxurious wealthy people who hire expensive cooks and chefs, who spend hours preparing all sorts of fancy food and who pay top dollar to have food imported from foreign lands, exotic,
00:20:21
Speaker
birds and bears and camels and all sorts of animals that live far, far away from where Rome was, these would be imported and it takes a lot of money and it takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of effort. I mean, Sony thinks that's just all ridiculous.
00:20:41
Speaker
It's a waste of money and in most importantly, it's a failure to understand what the purpose of food is. The purpose of food is fuel. So you eat what's abundant, nearby, easy to get and cheap. And for him, that meant plants. Yeah, largely plants. Largely plants. And you know, if you have a little cheese with that, okay. If you have a little milk with that, again, given the circumstances, if you can get milk,
00:21:11
Speaker
and it's cheap and it's available, a little milk is fine. A little cheese if it's available and cheap and nearby is fine. Honeycombs, if you can find them, great. A little bit of honey, but mostly veggies. And you can eat most of them raw and he thought it was okay to cook them a little bit and okay to cook grain. The Romans ate this kind of porridge.
00:21:37
Speaker
It's basically just cooked grain. So it's basically like gruel or porridge. And they would add some vegetables and seasonings to it and that sort of thing. You could even add an egg to it. And if it was really fancy, it would be from semolina, from wheat, but they also would make it from barley and that sort of thing.
00:21:56
Speaker
Nice. Baking bread was kind of a big deal. That was a little bit more elevated, but it was considered highly civilized to eat baked bread. So those were the kinds of foods that Musonius advocated. And he argued against meat, because you got to go hunt the animals. And if they're domestic, you got to butcher them. And they take longer to cook.
Dietary Beliefs and Professions
00:22:21
Speaker
And when you're cooking them, there are people who love the smell of roasting meat and they get all, oh God, barbecue, yummy, yummy. And, and Musonius is saying, you're letting your, your nose lead your brain, right? Your nose is telling you, oh, I didn't want to eat this roast beef or whatever it is, right? Or suckling pig. They would eat, Romans would eat pig uteruses.
00:22:49
Speaker
They loved, there was a special delicacy and brains and all sorts of crazy stuff like that. Crazy to us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Miasonius was like, that stuff, it's not easy to get. It takes a long time to prepare. It's very expensive. And if you're eating it because it tastes good, you got it backwards. You eat when you're hungry to get fuel so you can get back to work.
00:23:16
Speaker
To what extent would, or how would, how do you think Musonius Rufus's view compares with the view of some people who take an optimization type strategy towards food? So whether they're athletes or professionals, they think about, you know, I want to eat whatever is best for me to perform my job. I don't care how much it
00:23:37
Speaker
I don't care what it tastes. They probably care less about how easy it is to access, but it's ultimately, it's serving some instrumental purpose, which is to fulfill probably the most obvious cases would be like professional performance or athletic performance. Yeah. Masonius rejects being finicky about food.
00:24:05
Speaker
He's very, very practical, practicality and rejecting luxury are what he argues for. And in defending his argument for a very simple vegetarian diet, because vegetarian diets can be very fancy. I mean, you could optimize with
00:24:26
Speaker
all sorts of, you know, precise measurements of how much you have of each different food group to get your micronutrients. So, I mean, vegetarians could spend, you know, you can spend a lot of money living as a vegan. But Musonius is far more rustic than that. And that's why he and he admires farmers.
00:24:51
Speaker
And he says, look, if you're a farmer and you're eating what the land produces, not what comes off the hoof, not chicken breasts or thighs, not pork or beef or goat or mutton lamb, whatever, but crops that come right out of the field,
00:25:17
Speaker
you are gonna be sturdier, you're exercising outside, you're going to have better digestion, you're not gonna overdo it, you're going to be able to work longer and harder, you're gonna be less vulnerable to getting colds and diseases with that kind of healthy high fiber diet as we would describe it. So optimization for athletes, I mean,
00:25:46
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, here I'm thinking of Porphyry because Porphyry, I don't want to digress too long because we're talking about the Stoics, but Porphyry argues that if you're a soldier, and of course, he's a follower of Plotinus, so he's a Neoplatonist, but he argues that if you're a soldier, you have certain bodily needs that a philosopher who's a contemplative will not have.
00:26:13
Speaker
So Porphyry argues that soldiers need not give up meat. And if you're an athlete and you're a wrestler, for example, and you're really bulking up your muscles, back then it was considered, the ancients thought it very common or appropriate for large athletes who were building muscle to eat a big portion of their diet as meat.
00:26:42
Speaker
But what Porphyry argues is, if you want to be a philosopher, you're not a soldier, you're not an athlete of the body, you're trained to be an athlete of the soul. And to be an athlete of the soul, you should separate yourself from physical pleasures of the body and that sort of thing. So this is where he and Musunius would agree. Food is not for pleasure. They both reject hedonism.
00:27:04
Speaker
So if the optimization is to fine tune your physicality and make your body, you know, work at peak performance, I think Musonius would say, again, this is not what farmers mess with. So his kind of model eater is going to be a vegetarian farmer.
00:27:31
Speaker
Yeah, that's interesting. I suppose you also have, um, Epictetus shaming his students when they're thinking about taking on particular roles. And he says, look, if you, if you're thinking about becoming an athlete, that means you're going to need this training regimen and this diet. He does especially mention diet. So probably if we can infer a little bit, you know, we saw his roof, it says would view would
00:27:55
Speaker
accept that whatever roles you have is going to determine how you should eat. But he'd still probably nonetheless, I imagine, be wary of some ways in which you have this optimization culture around food and maximizing for trying to basically just push up all these different numbers for the sake of it.
00:28:17
Speaker
And which profession you choose is going to be ethically charged for both Epictetus and Eustonius. So again, Eustonius very explicitly admires farmers. And he says that when you're out working the fields, you can philosophize very easily.
00:28:34
Speaker
because you're paying attention with your eyes and your hands and your back, but your mind is free to philosophize about what living in agreement with nature means for a farmer and for a citizen and for a husband and a father and an uncle and a brother and all the rest. He doesn't think that hunting is necessary for feeding yourself except in incredibly extraordinary circumstances.
00:29:03
Speaker
That's really not a profession that he would recommend for a philosopher, for someone who wants to live as stoic, because you need to learn different kinds of skills. And are you hunting these animals to sell them to other people? I mean, that's just not the kind of profession that he admires. He doesn't express admiration for hunters. Busonius doesn't express admiration for athletes either, as I recall, in the way that Epictetus
00:29:34
Speaker
respects their dedication, right? So for both of them, this notion of oscasis and training, it needs to be training toward being a better philosopher, being a good person. And that means cultivating the virtues. And philosophers take that, that historic philosophers, take cultivating the virtues as the most important thing.
00:29:58
Speaker
Right, right. So I think a lot of how Musonius Rufus thinks about how he should eat depends on how he sees the function of food and have you said it's food as fuel, food as nutrition. But doesn't that leave out the social role that food plays in so many of our lives? You know, we're also social creatures and if you think about
00:30:22
Speaker
At a larger scale, we have traditions around food and our own lives. You go to some family member's house, they make you something, you make them something. There's something that's, I think, that's plausibly lost in Musonius' more restrictive account of food. How do you think he would respond to that or think through those kinds of issues?
Social Aspects of Eating
00:30:39
Speaker
I think that's a fair assessment. I think it's a good question and it's a fair assessment because
00:30:46
Speaker
in the two in Discourse 18a and b, the two in which he discusses food, he doesn't discuss the social dimension of eating. Epictetus does a much better job of that. So Epictetus uses examples, he discusses examples of being invited to a banquet
00:31:06
Speaker
and how you need to be polite and wait for the platter to come around to you and then you can take some food. Not too much, not too greedily, right? A certain decorum is appropriate in that sort of social setting and it is incumbent upon you to fulfill that social role as a diner, as a dinner guest.
00:31:26
Speaker
So Epictetus is more sensitive to that and discusses that explicitly in the discourses. But you're right, Caleb. I mean, what we have from Musonius, again, we don't have as many texts, but from what we do have in 18a and b, he really doesn't speak to that. And so we can speculate a little bit about that, I think, if I'm cautious about it, I suppose.
00:31:57
Speaker
Epictetus, of course, was born into slavery and was probably beaten and abused by one master or several. Maybe he became lame because one of his masters twisted and broke his leg, or maybe he developed lameness from rheumatism. We have two different reports on that. But in any case, Epictetus had a very, very humble origin
00:32:23
Speaker
His origin story is quite different than Seneca and different than Musonius Rufus, who was not born into slavery and not later manumitted and then founded his own school. Musonius was a member of the equestrian class. So he was a Roman knight, as they call it. But to be a member of the equestrian class was second highest to the senators.
00:32:53
Speaker
So he was not a patrician, but he was next down. And so he was a nobleman. And so he would have been, he would have had much more experience throughout his whole life at banquets.
00:33:17
Speaker
And so maybe we could imagine that he took for granted the social dimension of eating. But what we have in terms of the texts
00:33:29
Speaker
suggests that his emphasis in teaching his students was not, oh, well, you don't wanna be a sloppy eater and violate etiquette. That's not the most important message he's imparting to his students. The most important message he's imparting is don't become a glutton like these other wealthy equestrians that I see all the time who spend tons of money on these elaborate banquets
00:33:57
Speaker
importing rare game meat from foreign lands and scouring the ocean for all this fancy seafood, right? And the Romans love their seafood and they love to eat as a delicacy dormice.
00:34:15
Speaker
right, these tiny chubby little mice that they would prepare in special ways. For Epictetus, I'm sorry, for Missoni's Rufus, pressing, pushing against the hedonism endemic in Roman higher society was his emphasis.
00:34:32
Speaker
And so I think he wouldn't disagree with what Epictetus says about following etiquette and maintaining social relations among family members and fellow citizens and that sort of thing. But for Musonius, the emphasis is very much remembering food is not to make you feel good. Food is not for pleasure, it's fuel.
00:35:00
Speaker
And you should eat to live, you should not live to eat. And those were the, that habit, that living contrary to nature, eating contrary to nature for Musonius was primarily resisting this hedonistic understanding of food.
00:35:22
Speaker
Yeah, I suppose maybe he made a philosophical oversight. Maybe not. It's hard to say we don't have all of his texts, but another reading is the one that you just mentioned that it's a matter of emphasis, you know, who's Musonius Rufus living with? Who is he teaching? They're going to be Roman equestrians, or if not equestrians, people who have
00:35:44
Speaker
become, shown their talents become animated and are sort of entering into those higher rungs of Roman society. And perhaps that's when you want to be thinking about, and as he does in a number of domains, that temptation towards, as whether that's realized as luxury, over-rating the harm of exile, whatever have you, that's what's top of mind for him and probably what he thinks is most important for his peers and students. Yeah. Yeah, I think so.
00:36:14
Speaker
So now we can maybe pivot into what he thought about beards. And maybe we could step back a little bit, like give a little bit of background to this discussion.
Philosophers, Beards, and Cultural Shifts
00:36:24
Speaker
Why do so many ancient philosophers discuss whether one should have a beard or not? Well, I don't know that many of them in the texts that we have, again, that are extant, not many of them discuss
00:36:42
Speaker
having a beard and whether you should or not, we do know that beards were extremely popular both in ancient Greece and in ancient Rome among philosophers. That's definitely the case. And the tradition there goes back at least to Socrates, if not before. So that images that we have of pre-Socratic philosophers, they are all bearded.
00:37:10
Speaker
So what's up with that? Well, a lot actually. So the practice of shaving historians believe really began with Alexander the Great. And so that was after Socrates, after Diogenes in the Hellenistic period. And my understanding is that
00:37:36
Speaker
In ancient warfare, Alexander was an innovator as a great general. I mean, he wasn't just Alexander of Macedon, right? What made him so great? Well, he conquered much of the known world at the time. And why was he so successful? Well, because he was a brilliant tactician. And he recognized that if you're battling against someone and you have a long beard,
00:38:02
Speaker
and they're swinging their sword at you with their free hand, they can grab your beard and get you and stick you and run you through. So you wanna be, right? You don't wanna have a long beard and long hair that they could grab onto, right? You wanna keep it close to your face. So the practice of shaving was instigated or was begun by
00:38:31
Speaker
in Alexander the Great's time, apparently. And in ancient Rome, again, they have long hair, ancient Romans before what, the second, third century BC, they followed their Greek predecessors in having long hair and long beards. So the ancient Romans, ancient from Musonius' time, they had long hair and long beards. So in Rome,
00:39:02
Speaker
It was Scipio Emilianis, who in around 160 or so, I guess when he was in his peak adulthood, he introduced to Rome the practice of shaving. And it caught on.
00:39:19
Speaker
And so from 160 to 150 BC and forward up into the up through the empire. But even before that, the norm, the cultural norm was to shave. And
00:39:44
Speaker
the Romans in many ways, once again, following some Greek precedence, they started styling their hair in fancy ways, the wealthy did. And the same was true with the beards that were grown. So who was growing the beards? Well, only the minority of people after 160 BC in Rome
00:40:09
Speaker
were growing beards. Some people grew beards as an expression of being under duress. If they had a lawsuit against them, if they were convicted of a crime and someone took them to court and they lost, if they were about to be dragged into court and be sued and litigated against by someone, they would grow a beard as an expression of I'm kind of harried and under pressure.
00:40:36
Speaker
Um, if they got sick or they had some, you know, issue with their skin on their face and it would be irritated by shaving, then they would grow a beard. Uh, but most of the people, most of the time were clean shaven except for philosophers because the philosophical tradition of wearing a beard continued on from
00:40:57
Speaker
Socrates and his predecessors all the way down through the Hellenistic age. Now, why did philosophers wear beards? Well, this is where Musonius says, you know, there's a tradition of this. But before we talk about that, again, we have to talk about Musonius' kind of rustic understanding of nature. And this is something that he shares in common with Epictetus. You see the influence there. Epictetus too agrees. Shaving the beard is wrong for men.
00:41:26
Speaker
It's not just wrong for philosophers. It's contrary to nature for men. Why? Well, because facial hair grows naturally in adult men. This is what marks your passage from adolescence into manhood, is you grow a beard.
00:41:47
Speaker
And the Romans had this practice of around the age of 20, when they first started wearing the toga virilis, the toga of manhood, some of them would shave their beard, their first beard around age 20, and then keep it. They would have a religious celebration. So there was religious significance to your first shaving. And Nero was one guy who shaved
00:42:17
Speaker
when he was 20 and he had this very gaudy golden box that he kept his beard trimmings in. And Augustus, through this huge party when he had his first beard trimmed, he paid to have the citizens celebrate. So it had all this religious significance. And then of course, the non-philosophers continued to shave their beards regularly.
00:42:42
Speaker
But Musonius argues that that's contrary to nature. It would be like the cock that I mentioned before, tearing off its own comb. Beards come naturally to a man's face. So you leave it alone. You let it grow, right?
00:42:59
Speaker
and the lion doesn't shave off its mane. And so it distinguishes the male of the human species from the female. Women don't have beards, men do. Boys don't have beards, men do. So if you shave your beard, Musonius argues, who are you trying to look like? Either a boy or a woman, right? Or even worse, someone who's trying to
00:43:28
Speaker
seduce someone who's trying to be seduced by someone who likes hairless men boys or men girls, right? And so if you spend a lot of time
00:43:45
Speaker
cloffing your hair and getting styled hair and careful, you know, haircuts, grooming with a lot, again, a lot of time, a lot of effort on your appearance of the hair on your head, whether it's up here or down here. If you spend a lot of time doing that to make yourself look appealing to somebody else, you're acting as a prostitute. You're trying to please somebody else's conception of beauty. But look at the lion.
00:44:13
Speaker
Lions are magnificent, right? They're not gonna be more beautiful if you shave their mane off. And so, Musonius's notion of stoic beauty is that what's beautiful is what's natural for men. And what's natural for men is this, and letting this grow. So he did think that it was okay to trim your hair to crop it, but he likened it to a vine. If you have a vine,
00:44:42
Speaker
and it's getting so long that it's falling off and it's becoming a problem, then you only trim off the excess.
00:44:50
Speaker
And the hair should be the same way. The hair on your scalp should be the same way. You only trim off the excess. So I imagine that what he has in mind here is if your hair grows over your eyes and you can't see, then your vine is too long. You trim off the hair that's blocking your eyes. Or if it grows way down over your ears and gets tangled up in your ears and you have trouble hearing, then you cut it off your ears. That's what I imagine he's talking about.
00:45:17
Speaker
Got it, got it. Yeah, so I suppose part of it is he has this opposition to luxury,
Grooming and Natural Living in Stoicism
00:45:23
Speaker
right? And the way people style their hair is just has so much to do with them valuing luxurious matters. But fundamentally, it seems like it's about his view of
00:45:34
Speaker
nature and what's natural. And there's this question with Masonius Rufus, and you see it in Epictetus as well, where you have this broad picture of live according to nature. What does that mean? At the top level, it means living in line with the logos, living as a human animal, as someone who is rational,
00:46:00
Speaker
and has a social aspect to the rationality. But then Musonius goes even more specific and says, there are particular bodily things that are natural. How we think about our hair is just another, we should think about what's the best thing to do with our hair, think about what's natural. And you're not referring to these broader abstract notions of rational being pro-social and so on, but a much more specific
00:46:27
Speaker
Story almost in a way you see in a number of other different religious traditions ask questions about what you want to do while you look at what's natural because there's this assumption that there's a well ordered world and you can read off that order from What you see in front of you, so I suppose
00:46:46
Speaker
What can you say about how Stoics debated over that, debated over different conceptions of nature? Would people have pushed back on Musonius as Rufus, as idea that the fact that hair grows on men, on older men, is one of the most important things that distinguishes them from other sexes? Just as today, you might have debates over
00:47:12
Speaker
whether a certain sexual orientation is natural or something of that sort, right? Yeah. Well, again, for him, it's of a piece with all the different kinds of hair that the human body sprouts out. But it's pretty clear that given what he does say about trimming only the excess off, that the notion of shaving your chest
00:47:42
Speaker
right, that models and certain athletes do now, in America anyway, and elsewhere. Musonius would absolutely reject. Now, why would he reject that? Well, what about shaving off all the hair on your body everywhere, including your pubic hair, your eyebrows, and your eyelashes?
00:48:07
Speaker
That'd be a problem because eyelashes serve a natural purpose. Eyelashes and eyebrows keep dust and debris from falling into your eyes. Similarly, hair on your scalp protects your head.
00:48:22
Speaker
When it's cold, it keeps you warmer. When it's hot, it keeps you from getting sunburn, right? And pubic hair has its purpose too when you're engaged in sexual activity. It protects, you know, it protects that tender part of the body. And so shaving off pubic hair or chest hair or back hair or eyebrows or eyelashes
00:48:46
Speaker
None of it would be in accordance with nature. It has no practical value. Nature gives you those kinds of hairs for a reason. Nostril hair. Nostril hair filters out, again, dust and other things that can get in your nose. So if you trim your nostril hair away or you cut it out or pull it out, then your nose is more vulnerable to taking in foreign bodies.
00:49:15
Speaker
So nostril hair is worth keeping too. Now he doesn't talk about hair in the ear. As an old man, I can tell you that hair that grows inside the ears is kind of a nuisance. Musonius didn't talk about that. But you see his point about the other kinds of hair. You don't need to trim your eyebrows. You shouldn't, you don't need to trim your eyelashes. You shouldn't, your body here, you shouldn't as a man. He doesn't, he doesn't speak to women. So he doesn't talk about shaving armpits or legs or whatever.
00:49:44
Speaker
His students are men, and so that's who he's speaking to. So that's kind of his conception of, that's his conception of providence, right? You wouldn't have it if nature didn't give it to you for a good reason, for a useful purpose.
00:50:07
Speaker
And the protective feature of hair is homologous to, he argues, to the feathers on birds. Birds are protected by their feathers. And so it's not good for the bird, a living bird, to have its feathers plucked out. Similarly, you let it grow.
00:50:31
Speaker
you let it grow. He also argues that trimming, he says nature tends more to give you extra than a deficiency. So in other words, if you're a young person and you've got plenty of hair and then it's not that usually nature will give you more hair than you need, over time your hair will continue to grow. But he says it's easier to trim back excess
00:51:00
Speaker
than it is to get the equivalent of implants, right? If you're going bald and you need hair, that's harder to do, right? And back in the ancient world, they didn't do that. If you were balding, you were balding, but they wouldn't shave it all off. And for him, it is coded to gender roles, right?
00:51:29
Speaker
I mean, Epictetus talks about this too. I mean, you can, Epictetus says, you know, the beard is a calling card from a distance. You can see whether the person approaching is a man or a woman, right? Because from the facial hair, right? You can distinguish between men and boys and men and women and men and girls. And women have higher voices generally than men do.
00:51:54
Speaker
Um, so for them, given their providential conception of nature, these sorts of, uh, what fi- phenotypical, uh, features they have meaning they're significant. Yeah. So what would you say is one of the most important philosophical insights or upshots from Musonius's thought on beards? On beards? Or on beards on hair, just in general. Yeah. Like what do you take away from it? Uh,
00:52:26
Speaker
Well, I mean, all of the stuff about the physiology and providence is very interesting. But I find the most interesting text to actually not be in Musonia, so I'm cheating a little bit, but to be in Epictetus, because there's this wonderful passage in the discourses where he says,
00:52:46
Speaker
You know, if somebody's trying to boss you around and they're trying to coerce you, they might look at your beard and for Roman stoic philosophers as for Greek philosophers, the beard, not just for men, but is specifically the badge of a philosopher. So it's not only in accordance with your male nature to keep your beard, but if your chosen profession is to be a philosopher, you really need to have a beard.
00:53:15
Speaker
Why is that? Because of this tradition, going back to Socrates, looking like Socrates, right? And maybe these other kind of in accordance with nature arguments that this is really what's natural for men and philosophers can recognize what living in agreement with nature means for men. And that means leaving the beard alone, let it grow, comb it out, keep it in decent shape.
00:53:40
Speaker
But let it grow. And so the passage and the discourse, as I'm sure you know it, is where somebody says, hey, there you are, Epictetus, with your beard. And if somebody says, shave it off, or I'll behead you, cut your beard off, or I'll behead you, Epictetus responds and says, if it'll do you any good, go ahead and cut my head off.
00:54:10
Speaker
And when I used to teach this to my undergraduates at Creighton, they were like, what's this hang up with beers? Who cares about a beard? And then they would think about it and think, well, wait a second. You don't need a beard to philosophize. And that's true. You certainly don't. You can be a hell of a philosopher and quite clean shaven, right? As you are my friend, right? Right? So why would the hair on your chin make you a good philosopher or a bad philosopher? It doesn't.
00:54:39
Speaker
It doesn't, right? But in this passage from Epictetus, what he's saying is, look, the subtext is, I'm announcing that I'm a philosopher. This is my badge. I don't have a shield. I don't have a card that says I'm a philosopher. I don't have a diploma that says I'm a philosopher, but I let this grow.
00:55:01
Speaker
And that makes me following into tradition, going back to Socrates, where men let this grow with their philosophers. And so if the guy is threatening to behead him, if he doesn't shave off his beard, the fancy word here is, I love this word, pogonotomy. Pogonotomy from the Greek, cutting off of the beard, right?
00:55:24
Speaker
or depilation, shaving. Epictetus says, in the subtext is he's saying, you can't coerce me into giving up my calling card as a philosopher. Because you're telling me, deny in public that you're a philosopher by shaving your beard. Strip it off. Don't be who you are. Don't adhere to the scruples of your chosen profession as a philosopher.
00:55:54
Speaker
Give up this sign, this calling card that you are a philosopher, that you announce to everyone without speaking a word. You come into the room, they see you have a long beard. It's like, hey, this dude could be a philosopher. He's got a beard. The guy who's coercing him is trying to force him to strip that off. Deny that you're a philosopher by getting rid of this badge. He says, to heck with that. You want to behead me. If that's up to you, if it pleases you, go ahead and try.
00:56:24
Speaker
if it'll do you any good. So basically, I love this passage from Epictetus. He's saying, you can't coerce me, dude. You can't make me get a face tattoo either. You can't force me to shave my eyebrows off. You can't force me to dress in a bizarre way or to strip naked, right? Unless you have physical superiority, in which case you can do all of those things to me.
00:56:51
Speaker
Right? You can pin him down and you can strip his clothes off and paint him purple and green and shave off his eyebrows and everything else. But then Epictetus is nothing to be ashamed of because he's being physically overpowered, but not coerced. You're only coerced when you give in to what somebody else wants you to do. Right, right. Excellent. That's a, that's a great passage. Well, thanks again for coming on. This has been a lot of fun. Thank you, Caleb. Enjoyed it.
00:57:21
Speaker
Thanks for listening to Stoa Conversations. Please give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and share it with a friend. And if you'd like to get two meditations from me on stoic theory and practice a week, just two short emails on whatever I've been thinking about, as well as some of the best resources we've found for practicing stoicism, check out stowletter.com. It's completely free. You can sign up for it and then unsubscribe at any time as you wish.
00:57:51
Speaker
If you want to dive deeper still, search Stoa in the App Store or Play Store for a complete app with routines, meditations, and lessons designed to help people become more stoic. And I'd also like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. You can find more of his work at ancientlyre.com.
00:58:13
Speaker
And finally, please get in touch with us. Send a message to stoa at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback, questions, or recommendations. Until next time.