SVF III.314

Original — Ancient Greek

Sed et philosophus summae Stoicae sapientiae Chrysippus sic incipit libro quem fecit περὶ νόμου· ὁ νόμος πάντων ἐστὶ βασιλεὺς θείων τε καὶ ἀνθρωπίνων πραγμάτων· δεῖ δὲ αὐτὸν προστάτην τε εἶναι τῶν καλῶν καὶ τῶν αἰσχρῶν καὶ ἄρχοντα καὶ ἡγεμόνα, καὶ κατὰ τοῦτο κανόνα τε εἶναι δικαίων καὶ ἀδίκων καὶ τῶν φύσει πολιτικῶν ζῴων προστακτικὸν μὲν ὧν ποιητέον, ἀπαγορευτικὸν δὲ ὧν οὐ ποιητέον.

StoicOs Translation

And Chrysippus too, philosopher of the highest Stoic wisdom, begins thus in the book he wrote On Law: 'Law is king of all things divine and human; it must be the overseer of what is noble and what is base, and ruler and guide, and thereby the standard of just and unjust — and, for beings political by nature, prescriptive of what is to be done and prohibitive of what is not to be done.'

Context

A Roman jurist of the Severan age opens his textbook with Greek authorities on law and preserves, verbatim, the incipit of Chrysippus' On Law — Stoic natural law flowing directly into the Roman legal tradition and thence into Justinian's Digest.

Source notes:Text visually verified against the page scan of von Arnim, SVF III (1903), no. 314, p. 77 (Vol. III OCR unreliable for Greek). The Roman jurist Marcianus quotes, in Greek, the opening of Chrysippus' On Law; the quotation entered Justinian's Digest.

What the source actually tells us

As strong as transmission gets: author, book and position ('sic incipit') named, the Greek quoted untranslated inside a Latin legal text. The opening phrase adapts Pindar's famous 'nomos king of all' — a deliberate literary signal by Chrysippus himself.

Philosophical meaning

Law, for Chrysippus, is not convention but the cosmos' own command — the same right reason that pervades all things (cf. III.4) speaking in the imperative to beings political by nature. Prescribing and forbidding is exactly what impulse is in the individual soul (III.175): one nomos, outer and inner.

Scholarly uncertainty

The quotation is short and its continuation lost; whether the Digest's text preserves Chrysippus' exact word order at every point cannot be checked against another witness. The framing praise ('summae Stoicae sapientiae') is Marcianus'.

Go deeper

• Read SVF I.537 — the Hymn to Zeus: the common law →
• Read SVF III.175 — impulse: the law within →
• Read SVF III.4 — living in accordance with nature →