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I
IT WAS A WIDESPREAD VIEW IN LATE ANTIQUITY that the Stoics maintained theses contrary to common conceptions-absurd, incomprehensible, or simply false. In other words, the Stoics were generally accused of having been guilty of incongruity, self-contradiction, and absurdity.1 Indeed some specific Stoic claims2 must have been particularly baffling for authors coming from the Platonic and Aristotelian tradition, mostly because these sorts of tenets were in disagreement with some basic assumptions of such a tradition. Alexander of Aphrodisias, for example, correctly suggests that the tensional movement, attributed by the Stoics to ..., does not fall into the Aristotelian classification of ....3 No doubt Alexander is right in noting this point because, according to Aristotle's view, ...'s movement would be neither substantial (generation/destruction), quantitative (increase/diminution), qualitative (alteration), nor locative (locomotion). Nonetheless Alexander's attempt to reject the Stoic thesis of tensional movement on this ground is misleading. The fact that the tensional movement is not included in Aristotle's scheme does not show that such a type of movement does not exist or that it is not possible to explain phenomena making use of an explanatory mechanism in which the tensional movement is crucial. It only indicates the impossibility of trying to grasp ... and its properties with criteria which turn out to be useless for the assessment of such an entity that is for the most part described in our sources as moving "simultaneously inwards and outwards" (...).4
I have cited and briefly commented on Alexander's remark against the Stoics because I think that this type of criticism is representative of what we can find in the testimonies for early Stoicism, particularly in those sources hostile to the Stoics, such as Plotinus, Plutarch, Galen, and of course Alexander himself. Plotinus, for example, seems to be attacking the Stoic doctrine of principles when he says that if something is active and involves in some sense the characteristics of a form (or of an energeia), this something cannot be bodily or material. In other words, Plotinus cannot accept the Stoic thesis of the material principles5 for, as he puts it,
god for them [namely for the Stoics] is posterior to matter as well, for it is <conceived of as> a body...