Stoicism

Stoicism is a school of Greco-Roman philosophy founded in Athens around the early third century BCE and developed for centuries in Greece and Rome. It asks how to live in accord with reason and nature by cultivating virtue and by distinguishing what is up to us from what is not.

Major Stoic voices include Zeno of Citium, who founded the school; Chrysippus, who systematized much of its logic and physics; Roman writers such as Seneca and Marcus Aurelius; and teachers such as Epictetus, whose classroom notes survived through Arrian. Stoicism influenced Roman law, ethics, and later Christian and Enlightenment thought—sometimes closely, sometimes at a distance.

It is not a religion in the same sense as Christianity or Buddhism, though Stoics spoke of logos—rational order—and of living in agreement with the whole. Its ethics remain its most accessible legacy: character, duty, and inner freedom in the face of what cannot be controlled.