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Is Your Moral Circle Expanding?
It seems like many are not
Hermopolis Magna is one of those ancient cities that just… disappeared. It was once a major trading and religious center during the Greek and Roman era in Egypt, sitting near the Nile along the border between Upper and Lower Egypt. But today, it’s just ruins on the outskirts of a town called Mallawi, the site of a small museum and some ruins that are not part of the tourist trail in Egypt. We don’t know all that much about Hermopolis, which was once the home of thousands of people.
Early in the 20th century, archaeologists at Hermopolis discovered a papyrus fragment with a few hundred lines of philosophy. This is the only piece of writing that we have from a man named Hierocles, a Stoic philosopher who lived in the 100s CE.
Hierocles was a well-known thinker at the time, but we don’t know much about him these days. All we have is the fragment — which argues that many kinds of animals have some form of self-consciousness — and some text that another philosopher, Stobaeus, who lived 300 years later, attributes to Hierocles.
Stobaeus — another once-important person about whom we know virtually nothing — collected extracts of Stoicism into an anthology. The section of Hierocles’ writing that appears in his book contains a very powerful idea — the moral circle:
