Essay · By Stephen Pasquini
Where did Stoicism actually come from? Why is it named after a porch? Who was the very first Stoic, and where does Seneca fit in a school that was already three hundred years old when he was born? Here’s the whole story, with a timeline of every major Stoic thinker, from a shipwrecked merchant in Athens to the Stoics of today.
Where the word “Stoic” comes from
The word comes from a building. On the north side of the Agora, the main square of ancient Athens, stood a long covered walkway called the Stoa Poikile, the “Painted Porch.” It was a public colonnade decorated with famous paintings, including the Battle of Marathon, and anyone could walk in.
Around 300 BC a teacher named Zeno started holding his classes there, pacing up and down the colonnade as he talked. At first his followers were called “Zenonians.” Soon people simply named them after the place: the Stoics, the people of the Porch. (Plato’s school was named after a park, the Academy, so this was normal in Athens.)
The lowercase word “stoic,” meaning someone who endures pain without complaint, came much later. It shows up in English by the late 1500s, and it’s only half fair to the real Stoics, who cared less about hiding feelings than about not being ruled by them.
Who was the first Stoic?
Zeno of Citium (c. 334–262 BC) founded Stoicism. He came from Citium on Cyprus, and the story the ancient biographers tell is a good one. Zeno was a merchant whose ship, loaded with purple dye, was wrecked near Athens. Stranded in the city, he wandered into a bookshop and heard someone reading from Xenophon’s memoir of Socrates. He asked where he could find men like that. Just then the Cynic philosopher Crates walked past, and the bookseller pointed: “Follow him.” Zeno did. He later joked that he’d made a prosperous voyage when he was shipwrecked.
So Stoicism has two parents. From Socrates came the idea that virtue is the only real good and that philosophy is about how to live. From the Cynics came the toughness: wanting little, ignoring status, living by nature. Zeno studied with other teachers too, and then built something new around them, a full system of ethics, logic and physics.
The Stoic family tree
- The roots (Socrates and the Cynics)
- Early Stoa: Athens
- Middle Stoa: Rhodes and Rome
- Seneca
- Roman Stoics after Seneca
The early Stoa: Athens
After Zeno came Cleanthes, a former boxer who supposedly paid for his lessons by hauling water at night, and then Chrysippus, the school’s great systematizer. Chrysippus is said to have written more than 700 books, and the ancients joked that without Chrysippus there would be no Stoa. Almost every word of these three is lost. We know them mainly through later writers quoting them.
The middle Stoa: Rhodes and Rome
In the second century BC, Panaetius softened the old teaching and carried it to Rome, where he befriended powerful Romans. His student Posidonius ran a school on the island of Rhodes, where the young Cicero came to listen. By the time of Cato the Younger, who chose death rather than live under Julius Caesar, Stoicism had become the philosophy of the Roman upper class, and Cato became its hero. Seneca holds him up as a model again and again.
The Roman Stoa: where Seneca fits
Seneca (c. 4 BC – AD 65) arrived about three hundred years after Zeno. He learned Stoicism as a young man from a teacher named Attalus, and he’s important for a simple reason: he’s the earliest Stoic whose own writing survives in bulk. His letters, essays and plays are the oldest complete Stoic books we have. Everything from Zeno, Cleanthes and Chrysippus comes to us in fragments; Seneca comes to us whole.
Seneca knew he was part of a long line, but he also refused to treat the founders as gods. In Letter 33 he runs through the names, Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrysippus, Panaetius, Posidonius, and then says:
“We Stoics aren’t subjects of a despot; each of us claims his own freedom.”
— Seneca, Letter 33
After Seneca came Musonius Rufus, his younger contemporary; Musonius’s student Epictetus, the former slave (see Who Was Epictetus?); and finally Marcus Aurelius, the emperor who read Epictetus and wrote his own private notebook, the Meditations. Those three Romans, Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus, are the Stoics most people read today, mostly because their books are the ones that survived. (Not sure where to start? See Which Stoic Should You Read First?)
What happened to Stoicism?
After Marcus Aurelius died in AD 180, Stoicism slowly stopped being a school with teachers and students. But it never really disappeared. Its ideas about conscience, duty and the brotherhood of all people were absorbed into early Christian writing, and Seneca was read so warmly in the Middle Ages that a forged set of letters between him and the Apostle Paul circulated for centuries.
Then, starting in the Renaissance, Stoicism got a second life.
- Michel de Montaigne filled his Essays (1580) with Seneca.
- Justus Lipsius, a Flemish scholar, launched “Neostoicism” with On Constancy (1584), written during the wars tearing his country apart.
- Elizabeth Carter published the first complete English Epictetus in 1758, and it was a bestseller.
- Adam Smith wrote at length about the Stoics in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).
- Albert Ellis, who founded one of the first cognitive therapies in the 1950s, credited Epictetus’s idea that we’re upset by our views of things, not the things themselves. Modern cognitive behavioral therapy grows from the same root.
- James Stockdale, a U.S. Navy pilot held as a prisoner of war in Vietnam for more than seven years, said Epictetus helped him survive.
- Pierre Hadot, a French historian, reminded readers that ancient philosophy was a daily practice, not just a theory.
- Ryan Holiday‘s The Obstacle Is the Way (2014) helped turn Stoicism into a modern self-help movement.
The short version
Stoicism started around 300 BC with a shipwrecked merchant teaching on a painted porch in Athens. It grew for three centuries in Greece, moved to Rome, and reached its most readable form in Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Then it went quiet as a school but kept living in books, and it’s still being read on porches, in offices and on phones today.
Frequently asked questions
Where does the word “Stoic” come from?
From the Stoa Poikile, or “Painted Porch,” a public colonnade in Athens where Zeno taught around 300 BC. His followers became known as the people of the Stoa.
Who was the first Stoic philosopher?
Zeno of Citium (c. 334–262 BC), a merchant from Cyprus who studied with the Cynic Crates in Athens and founded the school around 300 BC.
Where does Seneca fit in the history of Stoicism?
Seneca lived about three hundred years after Zeno, in the Roman period. He is the earliest Stoic whose writings survive in large amounts, and he came before Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.
Who were the most important Stoics?
The founders were Zeno, Cleanthes and Chrysippus. The best known today are the three Romans whose books survive: Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.
Is “stoic” the same as “Stoic”?
Not quite. Lowercase “stoic” means enduring pain without showing feeling. The Stoics themselves taught that we shouldn’t be ruled by our emotions, which is not the same as having none.
Go deeper
Pierre Hadot on what the ancient schools were really for: a daily practice.
Discourses and Selected Writings
Epictetus, the former slave who became the bluntest Stoic teacher.
Seneca, the earliest Stoic whose own books survive, in the Penguin Classics edition.
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