soul, following a rather Platonic psychological view (Fgm.
150 to 169, Edelstein-Kidd). Unlike Panaetius, Posidonius
also had a genuine interest in theology and religious phe-
nomena.
During the period of Panaetius’s and Posidonius’s lead-
ership, Stoicism became one of the most followed philosoph-
ical trends of late Republican and early Imperial Rome. Rep-
resentative of Roman Stoicism are Vergil’s Aeneid, Seneca’s
moral essays, and the emperor Marcus Aurelius’s Medita-
tions. All these works exhibit a consistently Stoic inspiration,
although it was developed in a personal, nonprofessional
way. Little is known about the internal life of the school in
later times. The Athenian Stoa apparently ceased to function
as a center after the mid-first century BCE, and many anony-
mous private teachers carried Stoic philosophy throughout
the Hellenistic world. Only a few of their names have come
down to us, the most famous being Epictetus of Hierapolis
(Phrygia; c. 50–130 BCE), whose Manual was long admired
as an outstanding outline of the Stoic moral attitude.
In 175 CE Marcus Aurelius established—in Athens, the
cradle of ancient Greek culture—a school for the study of
literature (rhetoric) and the four main philosophical trends,
including Stoicism. Thus, Athens became once again the of-
ficial seat of Stoicism, but no information about the names
and activity of the appointed Stoic teachers has survived.
This imperial school was ordered closed in 527 by the Chris-
tian emperor Justinian, after allegations that it was a haunt
for pagan propaganda.
Both Jewish and Christian thinkers, including Philo,
Clemens and Origen of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Augus-
tine of Hippo, were well acquainted with Stoic philosophy
and appreciated its doctrine of providence and its high ethi-
cal standards. But as a whole, Stoicism was rejected because
of its alleged materialism, and Platonism seemed, for Chris-
tianity, a much better choice. Stoicism is rarely mentioned
in the literature of the Middle Ages, although it should have
been known through Latin sources. Additionally, it was no
longer qualified as a philosophical movement or school.
Only in the Renaissance did the ancient Stoa tradition find
renewed appreciation. Blaise Pascal’s assessment (suggested
by Montaigne) of the Stoic as a person who confidently
trusts in himself rather than God provoked a negative reac-
tion from the Christian point of view. Stoic elements can be
recognized in Barukh Spinoza’s Ethics and in Immanuel
Kant’s moral theory.
MAIN DOCTRINES. The chief concern of ancient Stoic phi-
losophy, as with other Hellenistic schools, was to lead human
beings to happiness (eudaimonia), which for the Stoics con-
sists of moral virtue (aret ̄e)—that is, pursuing on every occa-
sion what is kalon (good, or, originally, well-done) The wise,
well-behaved person (sophos) enjoys perfect happiness, for he
is always coherent, firm, and internally appeased (SVF 3.29–
67; 548–588). However, the sage’s art of good living (eu z ̄en,
SVF 3.16) requires a correct understanding of the nature of
things and of the place of human beings in the world.
The Stoic approach is essentially a dynamic one. Reality,
or nature, is a net of mutual interactions explaining the
“growth” (the original meaning of phusis), change, and decay
of individual things. Every “real” entity must therefore be a
body, because only a bodily being can act on other beings
and be affected by them. The pure logical formulas are not
bodily, as they do not exist anywhere (for instance, an utter-
ance can be logically right, even though its content may
never have taken place); they are simply something “one can
say” (lekton). Yet being “bodily” does not equal being materi-
al: in this sense Stoicism is not a materialistic theory like Epi-
cureanism. The Stoics distinguished two aspects in reality as
a whole: the active and the passive. The former is a producing
principle, the “force” (dunamis) or God—or, as Chrysippus
and Posidonius put it, the “spirit” (pneuma). The second as-
pect is proper matter (hul ̄e); that is, the underlying material
for the spirit’s activity. Both aspects are intrinsically united:
the spirit includes a material component of “fire,” “heat,” or
“ether,” while matter is always pervaded and shaped by spirit
(SVF 2.299 to 313).
As a compound of matter and spirit, the world is repre-
sented by the Stoics as an organic, harmonic, and perfect liv-
ing being (SVF 2.633–641), in which each part has a mutual
“solidarity” with all others (sumpatheia, SVF 2.475, 534,
546). The spiritual principle operating inside reality receives,
in the Stoic system, various names according to its manifold
functions. It is primarily the “reason” (logos) through which
all things of the world are brought about and linked in the
most rational way (SVF 1.85, 160, 493, 2.1051). Each phe-
nomenon takes its own place in a serial connection of causes
and effects, but the particular causal chains, heterogeneous
though they may appear in detail, all hang from one single
principle and deploy themselves in conformity with a world
plan laid down in the Logos at the beginning; thus the inter-
lacing of all causes displayed by reason represents the all-
determining “fate” (heimarmen ̄e, SVF 2.912–938; cf. Posi-
donius, Fgm. 377, Theiler).
Moreover, insofar as the spirit is identical with God, the
Logos is the same as God’s mind, and fate equals divine prov-
idence (pronoia). The Stoics strongly stressed the rationality
of the arrangement of the world and the providential disposi-
tion of all things, aimed ultimately at the wealth of human-
kind; a set of Stoic arguments thereon, recycled by Christian
authors, provided the bulk of what was called theodicy in the
seventeenth century (SVF 2.1106 to 1186). The existing
world is, for the Stoics, neither infinite nor everlasting. The
same spirit that produced it once and led its development
will absorb it again in its original fire in due time, by means
of an all-destroying conflagration (ekpuro ̄sis). Soon after-
wards, another world will be shaped by it, similar to the pre-
ceding one, and so forth cyclically. This is because the spirit’s
Logos, and hence the resulting fate, cannot change (SVF
2.596–632). This theory of “eternal recurrence” is a histori-
cal antecedent to Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas.
Rival schools objected that the Stoic doctrine of fate
would abolish the human freedom of the will, but the StoicsSTOICISM 8741