SVF I.195

Original — Latin

Zeno censuit voluptatem esse indifferens, id est neutrum, neque bonum neque malum, quod ipse Graeco vocabulo ἀδιάφορον appellavit.

StoicOs Translation

Zeno judged pleasure to be indifferent — that is, neutral, neither good nor evil — which he himself called by the Greek word adiaphoron.

Context

Gellius, a Roman collector of learned notes in the 2nd century CE, compares Epicurus, the hedonists and the Stoics on pleasure, and records Zeno's position with the technical term preserved in Greek.

Source notes:Text verified against von Arnim, SVF I (1903), no. 195, p. 48 (OCR of the scanned edition). Note the numbering correction against our earlier working inventory: the Gellius testimony is fr. 195, and fr. 196 is Seneca's death syllogism. Gellius surveys the philosophers' verdicts on pleasure and preserves Zeno's Greek term.

What the source actually tells us

A later Latin report, explicitly attributed (“Zeno censuit”) and doubly valuable because it preserves the Greek term adiaphoron as Zeno's own coinage for the class of indifferents.

Philosophical meaning

Against Epicurus, pleasure is not the good; against the ascetics, it is not the evil either. Zeno files it where wealth and health already stand (SVF I.190): among the things that matter for nothing in the reckoning of a good life — a cool verdict more radical than either praise or condemnation.

Go deeper

• Read SVF I.190 — good, bad and indifferent →
• Read SVF I.205 — Zeno's definition of passion →