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While all of us that were gathered under Messer Folco's roof were habited in our best bravery of velvets and soft stuffs and furs and such gold trinkets and jewels as it were in our power to display, and so looked very frivolous and foppish and at ease, Messer Simone dei Bardi came among us clad as a soldier-citizen of a great Republic should be clad in time of danger to his nation.
Their ethical system rested not only on universal facts of human nature, but also on a particular and transitory social arrangement. When therefore the city State, with its sharp antithesis of classes, began to decline, the ideal of the soldier-citizen declined also. The conditions of its realisation no longer existed, and ethical conceptions passed into a new phase.
On May 28th the Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' Delegates issued a declaration in which it was said: "From now on the soldier-citizen is free from the slavery of saluting, and as an equal, free person will greet whomsoever he chooses.... Discipline in the Revolutionary Army will exist, prompted by popular enthusiasm and the sense of duty toward the free country rather than by a slavish salute."
But an ideal so remote that its realisation is despaired of, is as good as none. And the conception of the Stoics, if it was more comprehensive than that of Aristotle, was also less practical and real. By virtue, nevertheless, of this comprehensiveness, the Stoic ideal is more akin to modern tendencies than that of the soldier-citizen in the city-state.
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