Around 300 B.C.E., two short decades after the death of Alexander the Great and the breakup of the vast Alexandrian empire, there emerged in Athens a philosophical school that became the most influential in the Graeco-Roman world. Stoicism, named after the “porch” or Stoa poikile on the Athenian acropolis, where its earliest members convened, was at once a system of logic, a theory of knowledge, a natural philosophy or physics, and an ethics. But most of all it was a way of life, an attempt to confront and deal with the turbulent times and the deep anxiety that arose with the demise of the polis as the fixed parameter of moral and political life, and with the limitless horizons of worldwide diversity, competing cultures, and forms of knowledge.
Moreover, Stoic philosophy and the Stoic way of life are not only ancient phenomena. Chiefly through the works of Cicero, Diogenes Laertius, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, Stoicism permeated the writings of the Church Fathers and the literature of the Middle Ages. It influenced as well Renaissance thought and modern thinkers as diverse as John Calvin, Richard Hooker, Michel de Montaigne, Descartes, Spinoza, and Kant. Often stoicism was revived in situations as riddled with strain and anxiety as those which first gave rise to it, such as the remarkable neo-stoicism initiated by Justus Lipsius at the end of the sixteenth century.
Epictetus (ca. 55–135 C.E.) is one of three moral philosophers who comprise the Stoic movement known as late or Roman Stoicism. The other two representatives of this movement are Lucius Annaeus Seneca, a wealthy Roman orator, statesman, and author of the first century, and Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome from 161 to 180 C.E. Although the earlier stages of Stoicism—developed by its founder, Zeno of Citium, and the major figures, Chrysippus, Panaetius, and Posidonius—involved sophisticated thinking about language, concepts, reasoning, physics, and much else, Roman Stoicism is primarily a moral doctrine and even a set of moral directives. It clearly relies on the philosophical developments of the Stoic tradition, but it was not itself engaged in serious argumentation and critical analysis. As we indicated above, this moral attractiveness is not surprising. There are doubtless social and political reasons why, in periods of crisis, many turned to Stoicism for solace and guidance. In troubled times its eulogy to philosophical rationality and devotion to self-control provided compelling vehicles for personal tranquility and salvation.
It is not true, however, that Stoicism began as a philosophical inquiry into logic, science, and such things, only later to become a moral doctrine. Indeed, from the beginning, in the hands of Zeno and his disciples, the aim of Stoicism was to determine how best to live. All along, the Stoic interest in technical subjects like logic was propaedeutic to this moral goal. Its materialism, its empiricism, its understanding of nature and fate, all these were intended to lead the Stoic to principles about what human agents can and should do in order to control their lives, reduce anxiety, practice virtue, free themselves from passion, and ultimately gain peace for themselves. For the Stoic, natural philosophy is so coherent that it provides the foundation for a life of harmony with nature, which the Stoic conceived as divine. In this way, the Stoic ideal was a life lived in harmony with the divine. This was an old goal, newly interpreted. Seeking the same freedom from anxiety that Epicurus sought, the Stoics found it in virtue and political participation and ultimately in kinship with rather than in rejection of the divine.
Epictetus was a Phrygian slave from Asia Minor. His master, Epaphroditus, who was Nero’s freedman, let Epictetus study with Musonius Rufus, an important Stoic teacher. In 92 the Emperor Domitian banished the philosophers from Rome, and Epictetus settled in Nicopolis, in northwestern Greece, where he taught until his death. He wrote nothing, but one of his students, the future historian Arrian, took notes on his lectures in 115 C.E. and later published them as eight volumes of Discourses. These Discourses, rhetorical and sermonic, give the best sense of Epictetus' style. Of them four are extant, together with the Encheiridion (the Manual), which includes 53 extracts, often modified, from the larger work. It is this manual that was so influential in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and which Frederick the Great, emperor of Prussia in the eighteenth century, carried wherever he went.
Recommended Readings
Annas, Julia. The Morality of Happiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Gerson, L., and B. Inwood (eds. & trans.). Hellenistic Philosophy. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988.
Inwood, B. Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Long, A. A. Hellenistic Philosophy. London: Duckworth, 1974.
Long, A. A. (ed.). Problems of Stoicism. London: The Athlone Press, 1971.
Long, A. A. Stoic Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Long, A. A., and David Sedley (trans, and commentary). The Hellenistic Philosophers. Vols. I and II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Nussbaum, Martha. The Therapy of Desire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Rist, John. Stoic Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
Rist, John (ed.). The Stoics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.
Sandbach, F. H. The Stoics. London: Chatto and Windus, 1975.
Sharpies, R. W. Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics. London: Routledge, 1996.
White, N. (trans.). The Handbook of Epictetus. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983.