Ancient Goods

This chapter traces into the Hellenistic period the use of the ancient classification of goods into three kinds: goods of the body, goods of the mind, and ‘external’ goods, i.e., goods located outside the person. The division has its origins in Plato and Aristotle, and can be found in accounts of Platonic ethics, in later Peripatetic ethics, and had an indirect impact on Stoicism. It concludes that, in the Hellenistic period, the pursuit of ever-more-refined classifications became an end in itself. The threefold classification of goods hardened into doctrine, and excessive concern with it tended to obscure the discussion of the good. Seneca, for one, reacts strongly and understandably against the Stoic obsession with categories of goods.

Classical Antiquity Studies · History

• Stoicism Comes to Rome

  Brad Inwood•Oxford Handbook of Hellenistic…•2025

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