Letters from

WHICH MUSONIUS?

Gretchen Reydams-Schils, Gregory Hays, Marlene L. Daut, and Ferdinand Mount

To the Editors:

In his “Tune Out & Lean In” [NYR, March 11], Gregory Hays discusses recent translations and introductions that aim to make later Stoics such as Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius available to broader audiences. The review also covers Yale’s 2020 reissue of Cora Lutz’s 1947 translation of Musonius Rufus, Epictetus’s teacher, for which I provided a new introduction. Hays asks if we should take Stoicism to task, for instance, for its alleged narrow focus on the individual and its related failure to address structural and systematic exclusion and oppression. The Stoics, after all, did not propose that slavery be abolished. But in his critique of what he sees as ancient Stoicism’s potential complicity with problematic, right-wing aspects of its current revival, Hays gets Musonius Rufus (and the other later Stoics of the Roman imperial era) fundamentally wrong—which is decidedly odd coming from a classics scholar who himself translated Marcus Aurelius’s

Meditations.

For a start, Musonius is not the equivalent of an “evangelical youth pastor.” Apart from his sly wit, his lectures (even the one on having children) do not represent family values in the contemporary American sense. His argument for limiting sex to procreation, for instance, arises not from Christian preoccupations with sin and purity but from a concern common in antiquity about controlling passions that are seen as deeply debilitating and conducive to unhappiness. Even if contemporary readers do not share his views on sexuality, contraception, and abortion—or cringe at his notion of the “happy poor”—perhaps we can concede that Musonius has a point in rejecting practices of the exposure of newborns and infanticide by the wealthy Roman elite (“not to rear later-born offspring”).

A legitimate concern, not raised by Hays, is that Musonius’s view of human sexuality is explicitly heteronormative, yet Musonius’s observation that relationships between women and men, and not just friendship (or eros) between men, can be a vehicle of the “good life” as defined by ancient philosophy is significant and revolutionary. Antiquity was often “homonormative,” in the etymological sense of privileging rapports among men, and Musonius Rufus decisively breaks with that pattern. And, yes, he focuses on marriage, but I think his point of view can be extended to other types of relationships between women and men. While Hays dismisses Musonius’s apparent proto-feminism as a mere rhetorical ploy to challenge socially accepted patterns of promiscuity in the sexual behavior of men, Musonius in fact does the exact opposite; he uses the traditional claim of men’s superiority over women, which he himself does not accept, as a rhetorical device to critique double standards: “It behooves men to be much better if they expect to be superior to women.”

Finally, how much violence does one need to do to Roman Stoic accounts in order to reduce them to “self-help manuals” (why don’t we reduce Kant’s notion of moral autonomy too, while we are at it?), or to claim that they make one care only about oneself? For one, the Stoic notion of “self” is very different from our notion of the individual; the Stoics saw people as always embedded both in the larger natural order of the universe and in a web of social relations. Moreover, even the later Stoics rely on a very sophisticated system of thought, and Stoicism is the only current of philosophy in antiquity to posit that sociability, in the so-called cosmopolis or community of gods and men, is intrinsic to rationality, human and divine. I have had students read accounts of Stoic cosmopolitanism paired with some of James Baldwin’s essays (“The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American” and others). Baldwin’s perspective is indeed radically different, but both together worked wonders to make students reassess critically certain unreflective conservative forms of American chauvinism—the kind, precisely, that disenfranchises entire segments of American society.

Judging also by Hays’s review, classics appears to be going through a wave of self-destruction. It seems to me that one of the most important tasks of the humanities in the current US context is to teach how to read texts carefully, paying attention to the complexities, nuances, and rhetorical strategies, and, yes, shortcomings and flaws. But not the latter without the former. How we read texts matters, as Simon Goldhill too has argued recently in Bryn Mawr Classical Review. We should always be negotiating a delicate balance between assimilation and letting the differences, the unfamiliar otherness, stand; between drawing inspiration from such accounts and questioning assumptions. Hays himself might have done better by paying at least some attention to what I, as an expert in Stoicism in my own right, actually have written about Musonius Rufus. This feminist, who would push back in no uncertain terms against ultraconservative appropriations of Stoicism by groups such as the so-called Red Pillers, finds herself curiously silenced. In that sense, Hays’s contribution is not a review at all, nor is it, I would argue, about the Stoics.

Gretchen Reydams-Schils Professor, Program of Liberal Studies, with concurrent appointments in the Departments of Classics, Philosophy, and Theology Fellow, Medieval Institute Director, Workshop on Ancient Philosophy University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana

Gregory Hays replies:

One of the hallmarks of the classics is their continuing ability to provoke strong disagreement, even after two millennia. I think Professor Reydams-Schils and I are looking at the same Musonius from different angles. She is struck by the degree to which he transcended his time, I by the degree to which he didn’t. I’d encourage interested readers to explore the fragments (and her introduction) for themselves. They might also enjoy Guy Davenport’s story “C. Musonius Rufus,” in his 1979 collection Da Vinci’s Bicycle.

There they’ll find yet another Musonius, along with the disembodied shade of the third-century Roman emperor Balbinus, and Mussolini paying a visit to Ezra Pound.

VICTORY AND MISERY IN HAITI

To the Editors:

There are some dangerous misstatements and curious falsehoods in Ferdinand Mount’s recent review of David A. Bell’s Men on Horseback [NYR, January 14]. Mount states, “Haiti did eventually achieve independence, but only because Napoleon’s troops died of yellow fever by the thousands.” Although thousands of Napoleon’s troops did die of yellow fever, this is not the reason that the Black troops ultimately succeeded to create the first independent, slavery-free nation of the American hemisphere. Many of Napoleon’s troops also defected from his army due to lack of provisions. The Haitian revolutionaries strategically prevented the French from acquiring munitions and other necessary goods for subsistence, referred to as vivres. Moreover, calling themselves the indigenous army, under the leadership of General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the

Black troops used their superior military tactics and intimate knowledge of the terrain, both of which helped them to capture multiple strongholds across the island, to eventually force General Rochambeau (Leclerc had died of yellow fever in November 1802) to evacuate in November 1803.

Mount also introduced two other errors, astonishingly, in the same paragraph. First, no serious historian of the Haitian Revolution “hotly debate[s]” or even contests that Napoleon’s troops gassed people of color by the thousands. Second, the claim that the French troops got the gas from the “island’s volcanoes” is quite simply erroneous, as Haiti has not had an active volcanism for more than 10,000 years. On the whole, it is distressing to see that in 2021 nonspecialist historians are still using what Michel-Rolph Trouillot called “formulas of erasure” and “formulas of banalization” to silence the radical import of the Haitian Revolution: in other words, essentially claiming that Haiti’s independence only happened because of French mistakes rather than Haitian achievements. I hope that in the future interested readers might seek out accurate information on the meaning and significance of the Haitian Revolution.

Marlene L. Daut Professor and Associate Director, Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies Professor, Department of American Studies University of Virginia Charlottesville, Virginia

Ferdinand Mount replies:

I began by describing Toussaint Louverture as “liberator of Haiti and leader of the greatest slave revolt in history after Spartacus.” Not exactly “a formula of erasure”—or of “banalization,” come to that. I then pointed out that Louverture and the other charismatic leaders covered in David Bell’s book “were adored in the first place because they were genuine military heroes,” whose remarkable exploits “were accomplished with dash and daring, brilliant organizational and tactical skills, and often miserably ill-clad and ill-trained soldiers.” I don’t think, though, that the death of half the French invaders from yellow fever can be brushed aside as irrelevant to the victory of the Haitian Revolution. I am sure that Professor Daut is right about the details of the French atrocities, and I may well have been wrong in my hasty reading of the sources. But the real point that I wanted to make was that Louverture, like the other charismatics except for George Washington, cannot escape his share of the blame for the failure to establish a durable democracy after his death. The miserable later history of Haiti owes much to the greedy and brutal intrusions of the colonial powers, but quite a lot surely to Louverture’s own dictatorial tendencies.

CORRECTION

In Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Chemical Warfare’s Home Front” [NYR, February 11], in 1944 Otto Hahn received the Nobel Prize in chemistry, not physics. Letters to the Editor: letters@nybooks.com. All other correspondence: The New York Review of Books, 435 Hudson Street, Suite 300, New York, NY 10014-3994; mail@nybooks.com. Please include a mailing address with all correspondence. We accept no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts. Subscription Services: nybooks.com/customer-service or The New York Review of Books, P.O. Box 9310, Big Sandy,TX, 75755-9310, or e-mail nyrsub@nybooks.info. In the US, call toll-free 800-354-0050. Outside the US, call 903-636-1101. Subscription rates: US, one year $89.95; in Canada, $95; elsewhere, $115.

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