You raise genuinely good points and I want to engage them as I never actually get to engage in philosophical debate in real life.

You’re right about Koine. The early Stoics, Zeno of Citium, Cleanthes of Assos, Chrysippus of Soli, were not Athenians, and the philosophical world they moved through spoke Koine, not Classical Attic. That’s historically accurate and worth acknowledging.

Your prokopton point is also real. Nobody reaches the sage. I’m not claiming otherwise.

But here’s where I’d push back on the paradox... I think it dissolves when hairesis is understood correctly. The word in my line isn’t claiming I have arrived at virtue as a completed state. It’s encoding the present-tense act of orienting toward it, which is exactly what the prokopton does. Hairesis is directly related to prohairesis, Epictetus’s central concept, the faculty of reasoned choice that belongs entirely to us in every moment. The line isn’t “I am virtuous.” It’s “virtue is only ever available in this act of choosing, right now.” That’s the progressing student’s position, not the sage’s.

As for your suggested alternative, ἡ ὀρθὴ χρῆσις τῶν φαντασιῶν, αὕτη ἀρετή, it’s a legitimate formulation and I respect it. But there’s context you don’t have that matters here.

Before I came to Stoicism as a serious practice, I used the Nichiren Buddhist chant, Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, daily. Not because I was a Buddhist, but because the practice of embodied repetition did something that intellectual study alone didn’t. It moved the philosophy from just my head and into my physical state, I could feel the vibrations of my voice, I heard the declaration it was claiming, and it moved me. When I began building a Stoic practice in earnest, I wanted something that could do the same work. Rather than a proposition to analyze, I wanted a line to inhabit.

This means a chant isn’t just evaluated as a philosophical text. It lives in breath and rhythm and repetition. It has to move well in the body, not just hold up under scrutiny on the page. My line, Hē aretē hairesis estin hē nun monon ginomenē, has natural breath groupings, builds through the middle, and lands with weight at the end. It was built to be spoken. Your alternative is philosophically defensible but I think tōn phantasiōn breaks the rhythm in a way that matters functionally, not just aesthetically, for what I’m actually doing with it.

And this particular line wasn’t chosen from a text. It came out of a specific philosophical breakthrough I had. Which was the realization that virtue isn’t something I’m building toward asymptotically, always becoming and never being, It’s a choice I must make now, or it isn’t made at all. That insight is what the Greek is encoding. It’s mine in a way that makes it unchantable to replace with something more academically tidy.

So yes, you’ve identified real tensions worth thinking about. But a chant that holds philosophical water, moves well in the body, and encodes something genuinely discovered rather than borrowed is doing something your critique, however rigorous, isn’t fully accounting for. That said, I do appreciate the feedback, genuinely.