28: A Citizen Of The World

     My mother-in-law Faye Striftis Kalesperis passed away earlier this month. Faye spent most of the first three decades of her life in and around the city of Corinth, Greece, and used to boast that she immigrated to America "by TWA, honey" (that is, not on a crowded ship with the hoi polloi). She became a naturalized American citizen and, for more than 20 years, taught the Greek language at a parochial elementary school in the southern Chicago suburbs; the last decade of her life was spent in a Grecian-themed nursing home in the northern Chicago suburbs; the fact that many of the staff spoke Greek must have been a great comfort to her in final years.
     Seneca (like all of the Stoics that I have read) believed that every human being was first and foremost a citizen of the world. In the twenty-eighth letter to Lucilius, for example, Seneca reminds his friend -- "We should live with this conviction: 'I was not born in any one spot; my homeland is this entire world.'" More to the point are the following remarks of Epictetus, a former Greek slave who opened his own school of Stoic philosophy several decades after Seneca's death:
          "If what philosophers say about the kinship of God and man is true, then the only logical step is to do as Socrates did, never replying to the question of where he was from with, 'I am Athenian,' or 'I am from Corinth,' but always, 'I am a citizen of the world.' ... But anyone who knows how the whole universe is administered knows that the first, all-inclusive state is the government composed of God and man. ... So why not call ourselves citizens of the world ... ?"
     Faye was proud of the legacy bequeathed to Western civilization by the ancient Greeks, and she was proud to be a naturalized citizen of the United States. In contemporary American politics, unfortunately, immigration has become a controversial and divisive issue. However, we would do well to remember the cosmopolitan teachings of the Stoics.
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     Seneca, Letters on Ethics to Lucilius, Translated with an Introduction and Commentary by Margaret Graver and A.A. Long (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2015), Letter 28, 4, page 97.
     Epictetus, Discourses and Selected Writings, Translated and Edited by Robert Dobbin (Penguin Classics, London, 2008), Discourses, Book I, 9, 1-6, pages 24-25.