A short history of the Stoics: from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius

Stoicism was not the work of one person. It was a school, taught and argued over for nearly five hundred years, first in Athens and then in Rome. Its surviving books were written by a statesman, a former slave and an emperor. This is the short version of how that happened.

Athens: the founders

Stoicism began around 300 BCE with Zeno of Citium, a town in Cyprus. After studying with the Cynic philosopher Crates and others, he began teaching in the Stoa Poikilê, the “painted porch”, a colonnade on the edge of the Athenian marketplace. His followers became known as the people of the Stoa: the Stoics.¹

Seneca tells a story about how Zeno reacted to losing his fortune at sea:

Zeno was succeeded as head of the school by Cleanthes, and Cleanthes by Chrysippus, who systematised Stoic teaching so thoroughly that an ancient saying held: “But for Chrysippus, there had been no Porch.”¹ Seneca preserves a short hymn by Cleanthes, which he translated into Latin:

The early Stoics divided philosophy into three parts: logic (how to reason), physics (how the world works) and ethics (how to live). They compared it to a garden: logic is the fence, physics the soil, and ethics the fruit.¹

Almost none of what these founders wrote survives. We know their ideas mainly through later writers who quoted and summarised them.

From Athens to Rome

In the second and first centuries BCE, the school was led by figures such as Panaetius and Posidonius, who blended Stoic teaching with ideas from other schools. After political upheaval in Athens in the 80s BCE scattered its philosophers around the Mediterranean, the centre of Stoicism shifted to Rome for good.¹

Two Romans from this period matter especially, though neither left Stoic writings of his own. Cato the Younger, who opposed Julius Caesar, became the model of a Stoic in public life. Cicero was not a Stoic, but his books are among our best sources for what the early Stoics taught.¹

For Seneca, Cato was the proof that Stoicism could be lived:

Rome: the four whose works survive

Seneca (c. 4 BCE–65 CE)

Seneca was a statesman, a writer of tragedies and one of the wealthiest men of his day.² He was exiled to Corsica in 41 CE, later became tutor and then adviser to the emperor Nero, and in 65 CE was accused of joining a conspiracy against Nero and compelled to take his own life.³ His Letters to Lucilius and essays such as On the Shortness of Life and On Anger are the most approachable Stoic writing we have.

Seneca was no blind follower. He quotes rival schools freely and insists on thinking for himself:

Musonius Rufus (1st century CE)

Musonius taught philosophy in Rome and was sent into exile by both Nero and Vespasian.⁴ He argued that philosophy is worthless unless it is practised, and, unusually for his time, that women should study it as well as men. He seems to have written nothing himself; his Lectures and Fragments were preserved by others. His greatest student was Epictetus.

Epictetus (c. 50–135 CE)

Epictetus was born in Hierapolis, in what is now Turkey, and spent part of his life as a slave in Rome, owned by an official at Nero’s court. He studied under Musonius Rufus, gained his freedom and began to teach. When the emperor Domitian banished philosophers from Italy, he moved to Nicopolis in north-west Greece and ran a school there until his death.⁵

He remembered his own teacher’s methods:

Epictetus wrote nothing himself. His student Arrian recorded his teaching in the Discourses and condensed it into a short handbook, the Enchiridion.⁵

Marcus Aurelius (121–180 CE)

Marcus Aurelius became emperor of Rome in 161 CE and ruled until his death in 180.⁶ He was introduced to Epictetus’s teaching by his tutor Rusticus, as he records in the first book of his notebook:

That notebook, the Meditations, was written for his own use, as a way of reminding himself of the principles he wanted to live by. At least part of it was written during his last military campaigns.⁶ It is the last great work of ancient Stoicism.

After the Stoics

As an organised school, Stoicism faded after Marcus Aurelius, but its ideas did not. Early Christian writers had a mixed view of it, rejecting its account of the universe while finding much to admire in its ethics. In the Renaissance, the scholar Justus Lipsius revived it in works such as On Constancy (1584), a movement now called Neostoicism.¹

The most recent revival began in psychology. The founders of cognitive behavioural therapy, Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck, both acknowledged the Stoics as forerunners of the idea that our distress comes from our beliefs about events rather than the events themselves.¹⁷ See Stoicism and modern therapy.

If you are new to Stoicism, start with What is Stoicism?, or go straight to the texts.