Stoicism

Stoicism was founded at Athens around 300 BCE by Zeno of Citium, who taught in the Stoa Poikile, the 'Painted Porch' that gave the school its name. It became the most influential philosophy of the Greco-Roman world, counting among its later adherents the slave Epictetus and the emperor Marcus Aurelius.

The Stoics held that the cosmos is a single rational, living whole pervaded by the divine Logos, identical with providence and fate. The goal of life is to live 'according to nature' — that is, according to reason — so that virtue alone is good, the passions are to be mastered, and the wise are unshaken by the blows of fortune.

Though the Platonists rejected the Stoics' materialism, they absorbed much of their ethics and their reverence for cosmic reason; the corpus preserves the long Stoic-Platonist conversation throughout the works of Plutarch and others.