The Stoic philosophers, from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius

The Stoics at a glance

From Zeno teaching in Athens to Marcus Aurelius writing on the Danube frontier is nearly five hundred years. These are the names that matter most, in order of birth.

The first three led the school in Athens, and Panaetius helped bring it to Rome. The last four are the Stoics people read today, because theirs is the writing that survived.

Who founded Stoicism

Zeno came from Citium, a city on Cyprus. He arrived in Athens about 312 BCE and studied there with the Cynic philosopher Crates, among others (Britannica (opens in a new tab)). The traditional story, told centuries later by Diogenes Laertius, is that a shipwreck brought him to Athens. Seneca, writing well before Diogenes, tells it differently: in his version Zeno only hears the news of the wreck.

The Stoa Poikilē, where he began teaching around 300 BCE, was a public colonnade in the Athenian Agora, hung with paintings. His followers took their name from it: the Stoics are, literally, the people of the porch.

Two successors turned Zeno’s teaching into a lasting school. Cleanthes of Assos led it for some thirty years after Zeno’s death, about 263 BCE (Britannica (opens in a new tab)). His student Chrysippus of Soli led it from about 230 to 206 BCE, built Stoicism into a full system of logic, physics and ethics, and is reported to have written more than seven hundred books (IEP (opens in a new tab)). Diogenes Laertius reports a saying that without Chrysippus there would have been no Stoa (Lives 7.183). For what the school taught, see what is Stoicism.

Why the founders’ books are lost

Not one complete work by Zeno, Cleanthes or Chrysippus survives (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)). We know them from quotations and summaries in later writers: Cicero’s Latin dialogues, the Lives of the Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius, the anthology compiled by Stobaeus, and critics such as Plutarch, who quoted the Stoics in order to argue with them. Of Cleanthes, the most important fragment is a poem, his Hymn to Zeus.

The books were still being read in the Roman period. In his own On Benefits, Seneca takes on Chrysippus’s treatise on the same subject, giving and receiving favors, and finds it more clever than useful:

A generation later, Epictetus could take it for granted that his students were reading Chrysippus. In Enchiridion 49 he warns them against being proud that they can explain him.

What happened next went unrecorded. Ancient books were copied by hand, and a book lasted only as long as someone thought it worth copying again. Long technical treatises on logic and physics seem to have lost their readers over the following centuries, while short practical books kept theirs: Epictetus’s Handbook, Marcus’s notebook, Seneca’s essays and letters. One result is that the Stoicism most people know today is the practical, Roman end of a much larger body of work.

From Athens to Rome

In 155 BCE Athens sent the heads of its three main philosophical schools to Rome as ambassadors, among them the Stoic Diogenes of Babylon, and their lectures made a strong impression (IEP (opens in a new tab)). Panaetius, who later led the Stoic school, was a friend of the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus, and Cicero modeled the first two books of his On Duties on Panaetius’s work on appropriate action (Britannica (opens in a new tab)). Panaetius’s student Posidonius carried Stoic teaching into the first century BCE.

By the time of the emperors, Stoicism was a familiar philosophy among educated Romans, and the four Stoics we can still read all lived in that world.

The four Roman Stoics

Three of them left books we can read whole. Musonius survives only in reports of his lectures, and since he is the least known of the four, he gets more room here.

Seneca

c. 4 BCE–65 CE · Statesman, writer, adviser to Nero. Read: On the Shortness of Life, On Anger, the Letters to Lucilius.

Born in Corduba in Spain, Seneca studied in Rome with the Stoic Attalus, among other teachers (IEP (opens in a new tab)). He was exiled to Corsica under Claudius in 41 CE, recalled in 49 to tutor the young Nero, and for years was one of the most powerful advisers in the empire. His influence faded as Nero grew older, and in 65 CE, accused of a part in a conspiracy, he was ordered by Nero to take his own life. He wrote in Latin: essays, tragedies, and 124 letters to his friend Lucilius about daily practice. More on Seneca.

Musonius Rufus

c. 30–100 CE · Teacher of Epictetus. What survives: twenty-one lectures and thirty-two short sayings, recorded by others.

Musonius was a Roman knight, the rank just below senator, and one of the most respected teachers of his day. His independence cost him: Nero exiled him to Gyaros, a barren island in the Aegean, around 65 CE, and Vespasian exiled him again (IEP (opens in a new tab)). Either he wrote nothing or his writing is lost.

The lectures are plain and practical: what to eat, what to wear, whether a philosopher should work with his hands, how to bear old age and exile. In one he argues that women need philosophy as much as men, since reason and the virtues belong to both sexes alike (Lecture 3). The theme he keeps coming back to is that philosophy proves itself in how you live. The standard English translation is not in the public domain everywhere, so we give him in the app’s labeled paraphrase:

He also held that human beings are born with a bent toward virtue, which makes falling short a failure of effort rather than of nature:

Epictetus

c. 50–135 CE · Teacher, formerly enslaved. Read: the Enchiridion, then the Discourses.

Born in Hierapolis in Phrygia, Epictetus spent his youth enslaved in Rome and studied there with Musonius. After he was freed, and after the emperor Domitian banished philosophers from Italy, he opened a school at Nicopolis in northwest Greece (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)). He wrote nothing. His student Arrian, later a historian, wrote down his lectures as the Discourses and condensed their core into the Enchiridion, or Handbook. More on Epictetus.

Marcus Aurelius

121–180 CE · Roman emperor from 161. Read: the Meditations.

Marcus was not a professional philosopher. He studied Stoicism from his youth, ruled for nineteen years, much of it at war on the Danube frontier and through a devastating plague, and kept private notes to himself in Greek that we now call the Meditations. As far as we can tell, he never meant them for anyone else to read. More on Marcus Aurelius.

Who taught whom

Several of these names are linked by teachers and students, and two of them by a book.

• Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrysippus. The first three heads of the school in Athens, each a student of the one before.
• Panaetius and Posidonius. Teacher and student, in the second and first centuries BCE.
• Attalus and Seneca. Attalus was Seneca’s Stoic teacher in Rome. No known teacher-student link connects Seneca to the other three Romans.
• Musonius, Epictetus, Arrian. Epictetus mentions his teacher several times in the Discourses (IEP (opens in a new tab)), which Arrian wrote down.
• Rusticus and Marcus. Junius Rusticus, one of Marcus’s teachers, shared his own copy of Epictetus’s discourses with him.

Marcus records that last link himself, in the first book of the Meditations, where he thanks the people who formed him:

Later in the Meditations Marcus quotes Epictetus by name (4.41, 11.34 and 11.37). Whether the two ever met is a separate question, answered on the Epictetus page.

Which to read first

Start with Epictetus’s Enchiridion, the shortest, then Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life, then Marcus’s Meditations, a few entries a day. Stoicism books explains that order and lists free editions and modern translations. Our guides to the books themselves:

Each philosopher’s best-known lines, checked against the sources: