Zeno of Citium was a Phoenician merchant from Cyprus whose ship went down off Athens with a cargo of purple dye. Stranded, he wandered into a bookshop, heard someone reading Xenophon’s account of Socrates aloud, and asked where men like that could be found. The bookseller pointed at Crates the Cynic walking past. Zeno followed him.
Around 300 BCE he began teaching under the Stoa Poikile, the painted porch on the north side of the Athenian marketplace. Anyone could stop and listen, which was the point; the school took its name from the porch, not the man. Cleanthes, a former boxer who hauled water at night so he could study by day, succeeded him. Chrysippus, from Cilicia, then wrote the whole system down in some 700 books. Almost all of them are lost. What survives is the Roman afterlife.
Virtue is the only good. Health, wealth and reputation are “preferred”, but they are not good, and losing them cannot make a good person worse.
Some things are up to us. The Enchiridion opens with the whole method: our judgments, impulses and desires are ours; our bodies, property and reputations are not. Work on the first list and let the second go.
Passions are judgments. Fear and anger are not weather that happens to us. They are verdicts we have reached, and verdicts can be re-examined.
Live according to nature. Not the woods, but the rational order of the whole. The Stoics were the first to argue that a good life must fit the world as it actually is.
The city has no walls. Zeno’s ideal republic had no borders, and Marcus called himself a citizen of the world. Cosmopolitanism is a Stoic word.
Nothing about the school was Athenian except the porch. Zeno was a Phoenician from Cyprus, Chrysippus came from Cilicia and Posidonius from Syria; Epictetus was born a slave in Phrygia, in what is now Turkey. Its most famous Roman teacher, Musonius Rufus, gave a lecture titled That Women Too Should Study Philosophy, the earliest surviving argument for the idea.
When emperors from Claudius to Domitian purged the Stoic senators, it was their wives who kept the school’s nerve. Arria, whose husband was ordered to die in 42 CE, took the dagger first and handed it back to him with the words “Paetus, it doesn’t hurt.” Her granddaughter Fannia was exiled three times for keeping the family’s memory alive.
The school is Cynicism’s respectable child: Zeno learned from Crates, kept the ethics and dropped the shamelessness, and Epictetus still describes the ideal Cynic with something like envy. Its lifelong rival was the Epicurean Garden, over whether virtue or pleasure is the goal, though both promised freedom from fear. The sceptical Platonist Academy attacked its theory of knowledge for two centuries, and its ethics owes more to the Aristotelian idea of flourishing than either side liked to admit.
Cognitive behavioural therapy descends from the Stoics by name, through Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck. The word “stoic” has shrunk in English to mean unflinching, which misses the point: the aim was never to feel less but to judge better. Admiral James Stockdale credited Epictetus with getting him through seven years in a Hanoi prison, and the Meditations, written for no reader at all, has been in print since the 1550s.