Cleanthes' Hymn to Zeus

Cleanthes · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 2 pages

Two pages giving the Stoic hymn of Cleanthes in the translation from Long and Sedley's The Hellenistic Philosophers, volume 1, with the source cited in full and an angle-bracketed conjecture marking a gap in the surviving text.

The hymn opens by making god's activity universal: no deed is done on earth without his offices, nor in the ethereal vault of heaven nor at sea, save what bad men do in their folly. What follows is the characteristic Stoic claim about order — that he knows how to make crooked things straight and to arrange the disorderly, and that he loves things unloved, having welded all things good and bad into one so that they share in a single everlasting reason, the universal logos. Human failure is then described as a failure of perception rather than of will: the bad among mortals neither see nor hear god's universal law, by obeying which they could live well in partnership with intelligence, and devoid of intelligence they rush into one evil or another — some in a belligerent quest for fame, others with an unbridled bent for acquisition, others after leisure and bodily pleasure — achieving only evils despite travelling everywhere in burning quest of the opposite. The last section is petition. Zeus of the dark clouds and gleaming thunderbolt is asked to protect mankind from its pitiful incompetence and to scatter this from the soul, and what is requested is not relief but the power of judgement, by trusting in which he steers all things with justice. The hymn ends on the exchange that follows from that: honour repaid with honour, in perpetual singing of his works, since neither men nor gods have any greater privilege than to sing for ever in righteousness of the universal law.

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