Comparing Plato And Aristotle's Conception Of Polis In Classical Greece

Classical Greece saw the first wave of stoa, The Greek city-states, were divided into sovereign independently operated governments named polis. The Hellenic Stoics viewed the polis as system of pockets of human being provided a civic identity and such as it was in law.3 Plato and Aristotle both proposed that man identified himself first and foremost as a citizen of a particular polis and that his destiny was tied to his fellow inhabitants and the common good of the city. The first hypothesizing of Cosmopolitanism was iterated in Socrates’ claim that he was not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world,18. Furthermore, the prominent Cynic, Diogenes’ also claimed that he was a ‘citizen of the world.’ Stoics, of all tree wave, emphasized on the cosmos; which they considered as a single living entity of which we are all a part and united to each other by our shared humanity.

Yet, the Stoics go beyond the Cynics' negative evaluation of common cities, in proposing some positive content to the universal city which possesses goodness in virtue. (Republic, Zeno) The basis for these statements is the idea that all humans are part of the same human family, participants in a shared humanity, and interconnected and interdependent for flourishing. Thus, in combining the notions of the cosmos and polis the stoics theorized an important doctrine that would, later, be adopted and implemented in Rome. Cosmopolitanism does not assume that the practical unity of humans is easily achieved, or even desired, in practice; it only suggests that the fact of our shared humanity compels us to attempt to create some type of unified fact ‘on the ground.’ This is the Stoic doctrine of the