From a painted porch in Athens to a Roman emperor’s notebook, and the revival that followed. Scroll through, or jump to any moment on the line.
Citium → Athens
Zeno of Citium, from Cyprus, studies in Athens with the Cynic philosopher Crates and others, then begins teaching in the Stoa Poikilê, a painted colonnade on the edge of the marketplace. His followers take their name from it: the Stoics.
Zeno, the chief of our school, when he heard the news of a shipwreck, in which all his property had been lost, remarked, ‘Fortune bids me follow philosophy in lighter marching order.’
Athens
Zeno is succeeded as head of the school by Cleanthes, and Cleanthes by Chrysippus, who leads it from around 230 to 206 BCE. He works Stoic teaching into a system so complete that an ancient saying held: “But for Chrysippus, there had been no Porch.” Almost nothing the founders wrote survives.
Aye, the willing soul Fate leads, but the unwilling drags along.
Athens → Rome
Athens sends the heads of its three major schools of philosophy, the Stoic school among them, to Rome on a diplomatic mission.
The school is led by figures such as Panaetius, in the second half of the 2nd century BCE, and his student Posidonius in the 1st. Both blend Stoic teaching with ideas from other schools.
Athens → Rome
Political upheaval in Athens scatters its philosophers around the Mediterranean, and the centre of Stoicism shifts to Rome for good.
Rome
Cato the Younger, who opposes Julius Caesar, becomes the model of a Stoic in public life. Cicero is not a Stoic, but his books become some of our best sources for what the early Stoics taught. Neither leaves Stoic writings of his own.
No one ever saw Cato change, no matter how often the state changed: he kept himself the same in all circumstances—in the praetorship, in defeat, under accusation, in his province, on the platform, in the army, in death.
Rome
The Stoic philosopher Arius Didymus is appointed to the court of Augustus, the first Roman emperor.
Rome → Corsica
Seneca, a statesman, writer of tragedies and one of the wealthiest men of his day, is exiled to Corsica, accused of adultery with a sister of the emperor Caligula.
Corsica → Rome
Seneca had been tutor to the young Nero. When Nero becomes emperor, Seneca is among his advisers.
Rome
Musonius argues that philosophy is worthless unless it is practised, and, unusually for his time, that women should study it as well as men. He is sent into exile by both Nero and Vespasian. His greatest student is Epictetus.
So likewise Rufus was wont to say, to test me, "Your master is going to do such-and-such a thing to you."
Rome
Charged with complicity in a conspiracy to murder Nero, Seneca is compelled to take his own life. His Letters to Lucilius and his essays survive: the most approachable Stoic writing we have.
We Stoics are not subjects of a despot: each of us lays claim to his own freedom.
Hierapolis → Rome → Nicopolis
Born in Hierapolis and once a slave in Rome, Epictetus has studied under Musonius and gained his freedom. When the emperor Domitian expels philosophers from Rome, he moves to Nicopolis in north-west Greece and teaches there until his death, around 135. His student Arrian records his lectures as the Discourses and condenses them into the Enchiridion.
Some things are under our control, while others are not under our control.
Rome
Marcus Aurelius becomes emperor of Rome in 161 and rules until his death in 180. Introduced to Epictetus’s teaching by his tutor Rusticus, he keeps a private notebook, the Meditations, at least part of it written during his last military campaigns. It is the last great work of ancient Stoicism.
…and I am indebted to him for being acquainted with the discourses of Epictetus, which he communicated to me out of his own collection.
As an organised school, Stoicism has long since faded, though its ideas have not. The Byzantine emperor Justinian I formally closes the ancient schools of philosophy.
The scholar Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) revives Stoic ideas in On Constancy, beginning a movement now called Neostoicism.
Albert Ellis develops rational emotive behaviour therapy, and credits its central principle, that we are affected less by events than by our thinking about them, to the ancient Stoics.
It is not the things themselves that disturb men, but their judgements about these things.
In Cognitive Therapy of Depression, the book that founded cognitive therapy for depression, Aaron Beck and his colleagues trace its philosophical origins back to the Stoics.
Philosophers set out Stoicism for modern readers, among them Lawrence Becker and William Irvine, whose A Guide to the Good Life helped bring it to a wide audience.
The surviving works of Seneca, Musonius Rufus, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius are free to read in full on this site, in several translations.
Dates for the ancient Stoics are often approximate. Quotations are from the translations on this site, and each links to its passage.
