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From, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. I, The early Presocratics and the Pythagoreans, Cambridge University Press, 1962, pp. 1-25.
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Page 25
Not pleasure, but virtue (equated with wisdom) is the highest good. Unity was restored to the soul by Chrysippus, who reduced impulse and desire to judgments ('This is good for me', etc.), thus building a new foundation for the Socratic dictum that virtue is knowledge. Virtue is an absolute, like straightness or truth. Hence the much-criticized Stoic paradox that there are no degrees between absolute goodness or wisdom and absolute folly or vice. The perfect Sage is extremely rare, yet all others are fools, and 'all sins are equal'. This was illustrated by various analogies, for instance that a man is drowned just the same whether his head is one foot or several fathoms below the surface. Yet as with externals, the Stoics generally conceded that there must be an intermediate class of actions, some preferable to others, though none properly good or bad.
The unity of virtue, and the universal human possession of logos, carried for the Stoics the momentous corollary that wisdom was as likely to be found in women or slaves as in free men. Indeed all men were by nature free and equal. Allied to this is the Stoic conception of the human community. To live communally is as much a natural human instinct as self-preservation, and the ideal community is one that embraces the whole human race, the Cosmopolis or world-city, for all men are kinsmen, sons of the one God. The whole idea of the brotherhood of man, even if it originated (as some would claim) in the mind of Alexander himself, owes much of its development and diffusion to Stoic teaching. It should be said, however, that this conception probably did not mature until some time later than Zeno and his followers, and reached its climax with Epictetus in the late first century A.D. Meanwhile a man has a responsibility to the state in which he finds himself, though existing law may differ widely from the natural law of the Cosmopolis. Unlike Epicureanism, Stoicism recommends active participation in the life around one, and tries to restore to the Greek something of the sense of community which had gone with membership of the independent city-state.
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Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-Greece/guthrie-history-intro.asp?pg=25
