Stoics

Stoicism 

The founder of this school was Zeno. He was born in Cyprus, went to Athens as a young

man, about 320 or 315 B.C.E. just after Aristotle’s death, and after studying under the

leading philosophers of the day, founded his own school about 300 B.C.E.. The school

took its name from the place where Zeno taught – a porch (in Greek, stoa, hence the

name Stoic), or open colonnade, famous among the Athenians for its frescoes. Zeno at

first came under the influence of the Cynics (they were called Cynics, not because of

their “cynical” attitude toward human motives, but because cynos is the Greek word for

dog, and they were thought to be doglike in their indifference to the niceties of life.)

but their anarchistic position did not agree with Zeno. The real problem for him was to

reconcile the independence of the Cynic sage with the realities of political and social life

of which Plato had been fully aware. This problem Zeno and the other early Stoics left as

an inheritance to the Roman Stoics.

Instead of rejecting Stoicism, Roman thinkers attempted to purge it of its exaggerations.

It was necessary, if Stoicism was to function useful as a social philosophy in the Roman

Empire, to soft-pedal “apathy.” It became extremely popular with the Roman soldiery as

a philosophy of manly indifference to hardship. The Stoics identify as moral people

those who live in accordance with the dictates of reason, and they portray them as self-

sufficient individuals, capable of disciplining their desires and of remaining supremely

indifferent to life’s vicissitudes. They maintain that the lesson to be drawn from life and

the teachings of Socrates is that human virtue and happiness depend not on material

success but on the formation of character which is true to one’s essential nature, one’s

rationality. Furthermore, the Stoics contend, it is through conduct in conformity with

their rational nature that people are united with each other and the universe.

According to Epictetus, the person who values virtue for its own sake is happy. Virtue,

he tells us is a condition of the will wherein it is governed by reason, with the result that

the virtuous person seeks only those things that are within reach and avoids those things

that are beyond it.