SVF I.162

Original — Latin

Zeno naturalem legem divinam esse censet eamque vim obtinere recta imperantem prohibentemque contraria.

StoicOs Translation

Zeno holds that the natural law is divine, and that it possesses the power of commanding what is right and forbidding the contrary.

Context

In the first book of De natura deorum, Cicero lets the Epicurean Velleius survey — and ridicule — the theologies of earlier philosophers. This sentence about Zeno belongs to that polemical survey: the report is compressed, secondhand and unsympathetic, written about 250 years after Zeno. Two later Latin authors, Lactantius and Minucius Felix, transmit the same doctrine, possibly drawing on Cicero himself.

Source notes:Latin text verified against H. von Arnim, SVF I (1903), no. 162, p. 42 (scanned page). The sentence is spoken by Velleius, the Epicurean spokesman in Cicero's dialogue — a critical, even hostile witness. Under the same number von Arnim prints two further Latin witnesses: Lactantius, inst. div. I 5 (“Item Zeno (deum nuncupat) divinam naturalemque legem” — the parenthesis is an editorial clarification) and Minucius Felix, Octav. 19,10 (“Zeno naturalem legem atque divinam ... omnium esse principium”, with von Arnim's ellipsis). The doctrine is multiply attested in the Latin tradition.

What the source actually tells us

This is a later report of Zeno's doctrine in the words of a philosophical opponent, not Zeno's own formulation. What it secures is the thesis: the law of nature is divine, and it commands and forbids — it is normative, not merely descriptive. The claim coheres with the Greek tradition of the Stoic common law as right reason (cf. DL 7.88, which von Arnim cross-references here). How Zeno himself worded the doctrine in Greek cannot be recovered from this Latin summary.

Philosophical meaning

Here begins one of the most influential ideas in the history of law and ethics: there is a law older and higher than any statute — the rational order of nature itself, divine and binding, commanding right action and forbidding wrong. Through Cicero this Stoic conception flowed into Roman jurisprudence and, much later, into the natural-law traditions of medieval and modern thought.

Scholarly uncertainty

The three Latin witnesses agree on the doctrine but are not necessarily independent: Lactantius and Minucius Felix may depend on Cicero's survey. All three are compressed summaries at several removes from Zeno; the polemical setting in Cicero and the apologetic aims of the Christian authors each colour the reporting.

Go deeper

• Law and the good in Stoic Ethics →
• The divine logos in Stoic Physics →