Stoicism

Abstract

Abstract Stoicism derives its name from the stoa poikilê , a painted colonnade in the Athenian Agora, where Zeno of Citium (333–262 BCE ) began teaching and attracting adherents to what was to become the most influential philosophical movement of the Hellenistic period, if not, perhaps, of all of Greek antiquity ( see Ancient Ethics). For the next half millennium, large numbers of Greeks and Romans from all walks of life identified themselves as followers of Stoic doctrine and professed to live by its strenuous ethical mandates. Although often difficult to pin down, Stoic influence on Christian writers from St. Paul to Abelard has likewise been increasingly documented, while the self‐conscious attempt by Justus Lipsius, the Flemish humanist, to revive and merge Stoicism with Christianity in his hugely popular De Constantia (1583) was just the first of many modern attempts to find in Stoicism a refuge from the travails of everyday personal and political life. The notion that being ‘philosophical’ is to show a ‘stoic’ calm in the face of ill fortune perhaps demonstrates just how deeply ingrained such arguments became in the general imagination.