摘要：Hellenistic learning commenced in connection with the historic decay of polis and with the founding first of Hellenistic and then of Roman Empire. This connection is manifested in the fact that Middle Stoa gives an ethical justification of the Roman Empire. According to the Stoics, the Roman rule of the world is justified as much as ethically undeveloped peoples submit themselves to ethically superior Romans thus improving themselves in terms of ethics. To the Stoics, the true community is not polis any more but the cosmopolis. The foremost representatives of Middle Stoa Panaitius and Poseidonius hold that Rome's historical mission, through its rule over the world, is to make real the notion of the essential equality among the men and to confirm the worth of an individual as a person. In Rome the Stoics see that historical power which can realize the stoical cosmopolis in the world. So the question of ethical justification of the Roman Empire is being put within the question of the true community as the community of ethically perfected individuals. Although the Stoics reject Aristotle's learning which justifies the slavery, and distinguish those people in the first place by their intelligence, in their justification of the Empire they basically use the same manner of explanation as the Aristotle. In his works De re publica and De officiis, Cicero conveyed basic Hellenistic ideas, and the New Roman Stoa (Seneca, Marcus Aurelius) adopted and further developed stoical learning. Such justification of the Empire is later found at Roman historiographers Livius and Tacitus.
关键词：world history; Hellenism; Roman Empire; law; community; individual; person
