Tea at Trianon: The Four Virtues of Stoicism

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, January 10, 2023

The Four Virtues of Stoicism

Even the pagans valued virtue, if only on a natural level. From The Collector:

Questions of the best way to live have been around for at least as long as humans have lived in settled societies. Before that, there was little need or time to think about it. But as civilizations grew into empires more and more people found they had the time and the need to think about how to live well. The Romans were no different. They absorbed a lot of Greek and Hellenistic culture, and while they were not nearly as philosophically minded as the Greeks were in their Athenian heyday, there was one particular philosophy that flourished in Rome – Stoicism. Such was its influence that it scaled the heights of power impacting a Roman Emperor himself and it is partly through his writing that we know so much about Stoicism today. At the core of Roman Stoicism was an ethical system based on the four cardinal virtues that reached back to the Greek philosophical traditions and to Socrates. (Read more.)