Stoicism

A Hellenistic school of philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium in Athens around 300 BCE, teaching that the goal of life is virtue, understood as living in agreement with reason and with nature, and that everything else, health, wealth, reputation, even life and death, is an indifferent to be met with equanimity. Stoic physics held that the universe is a single rational, providentially ordered whole, so that accepting one's fate is itself an exercise of reason rather than mere resignation. The school passed through a long development, from Zeno and his successor Chrysippus in Athens to a Roman phase represented by the statesman Seneca, the freed slave turned teacher Epictetus, and the emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose private notebook Meditations remains the school's most widely read text. Stoic ethics, particularly its distinction between what is and is not within one's control, has had a continuous afterlife in later moral philosophy and in modern cognitive behavioral therapy, which draws directly on Epictetus.