Stoics

The Stoic school of philosophy was founded in Athens c.300 BC by Zeno of Citium (in Cyprus), taking its name from the Stoa Poikilē at Athens where Zeno did his teaching. He came to Athens c.311 BC and first attended lectures at the Academy (the Platonic school) but was converted to Cynicism by Cratēs (see CYNIC PHILOSOPHERS). Study of the works of Antisthenēs, a devoted follower of Socrates (and regarded by some as the founder of Cynicism), turned him to Socratic philosophy, out of which he developed his own ‘Stoic’ system, embracing logic, theory of knowledge, physics, and above all ethics. At his death Athens honoured him with a public funeral, as a man who ‘had made his life an example to all, for he followed his own teaching’. Although the school seems to have been less strictly organized than the Academy and the Lyceum (the school of Aristotelian philosophy), it nevertheless had a succession of heads to at least AD 260, and probably for some years after. It gradually faded out, however, and was no longer in existence when the emperor Justinian closed the philosophical schools at Athens in AD 529.

The main Stoic doctrines were the following. Nature (the whole universe, that is) is controlled by reason, logos, which is identified with God and shows itself as fate (also called necessity or providence); whatever happens is in accordance with divine reason. It is thus the aim of the wise man who knows this truth to accept what happens and to live in harmony with nature (or divine reason); this is virtue and the only good. Whatever happens to us cannot be otherwise; the wise man aims to achieve willing acquiescence. Not to do this is to show moral weakness instead of virtue, and this is the only evil. Everything else—pain, poverty, death (even a cold in the head, as the poet Horace ironically observes at the end of his first Epistle)—is indifferent. It is beyond the power of anyone to deprive the wise man of virtue; always knowing the only true good, he is therefore happy. He is also absolutely brave, since he knows that pain and death are not evils, and self-controlled, since he knows that pleasure is not the good.

Matter breaks down into the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water. Fire, the element most closely related to divine reason, periodically consumes the universe, and out of it in time a new universe arises, and so on for ever. Every man possesses a spark of that divine fire. This belief led, importantly, to the Stoic concept of the universal brotherhood of man, without distinction between Greek and barbarian, freeman and slave, and of the consequent duty of universal benevolence and justice. In spite of this, Stoicism was in the main a doctrine of detachment from and independence of the outer world.

The immediate successor of Zeno was Cleanthēs, followed in 232 BC by Chrysippus of Soli (in Cilicia), converted to Stoicism by Cleanthēs, who completed and systematized the Stoic doctrine. Among Zeno's pupils was Sphaerus, who inspired the revolution of Cleomenes III at Sparta (see CLEOMENES (2)). All these philosophers belonged to the Early Stoa. The famous names of the subsequent period, the second and first centuries BC, the so-called Middle Stoa, are those of Panaetius and Posidonius. The former, who spent much time in Rome, was the first to reject the doctrine of periodic universal conflagrations, and also rejected the belief that only the absolutely wise man can be virtuous, teaching that those who merely aspired to virtue were making progress. While at Rome he joined the circle of P. Scipio Aemilianus, and his practical version of Stoic ethics, seemingly adapted for the needs of active statesmen and soldiers, had very great influence on the Scipionic circle. Through his writings Panaetius influenced the Younger Cato, Brutus, Cicero (1), and many others. Posidonius submitted the doctrines of the early Stoics to an even more thoroughgoing revision, and his influence was wide and far-reaching.

During the Roman empire the Late Stoics were almost exclusively concerned with ethical questions. The most important Stoics of the first century AD were Seneca the Younger, Cornutus, Musonius Rufus, and, towards the end of the century, Epictetus. Stoicism provided the philosophical basis for opposition to the one-man rule of the emperors: Paetus Thrasea and his son-in-law Helvidius Priscus, resolute opponents of Nero, were Stoics; the emperors Vespasian and Domitian both banished the philosophers from Italy. But after Epictetus the emperor M. Aurelius was the most famous Stoic in the second century. During the third century the school gradually died out, but it had an important and long-lasting effect on the life and thought of many, influencing Neoplatonism and permeating the Christianity of some of the early Fathers of the Church.