STOICISM.Odt
Stoicism is a Hellenistic philosophy seeking to make the personal and political lives of men as orderly as the cosmos. In the course of its five-hundred-year history as an organized movement, some of its leaders devoted themselves mainly to understanding the macrocosm, and others emphasized the ethical, political, and religious life of man the microcosm. But all the Stoics believed that the fundamental injunction laid on man is to follow the law of nature, and in the development of Stoicism this injunction acquired a systematic meaning: the belief that the universe is rationally structured, and that we can discover Natural Law through rational thought, and thereby live in harmony with the universe. Zeno of Citium (336 B.C. – 264 B.C.) founded Stoicism in Athens.
Epictetus (50 A.D. – 138 A.D.), a freed slave of a member of Nero’s bodyguard, developed the distinction between things in our power (the power to give or withhold assent and to use external impressions) and things not in our power (external impressions, our body, and the rest of the inexorable world). He believed in innate moral predispositions which could be actualized by education or left to decay.
Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121 A.D. – 180 A.D.) and Senator Cicero (106 B.C. – 46 B.C.) are often thought to be Stoics, although there is reason to doubt this. Seneca (4 B.C. – 65 A.D.) was clearly a Stoic.
The Stoic ethic has as an essential part a broad political theory: the belief that all rational beings, even slaves and foreigners, bore within them a spark of the creative fire. This belief took the form of their doctrine of natural law. The Stoic had more do to than simply seek his own eudaimonia; he must, like all other individuals in nature, be of service to his fellow creatures, to his brothers under the fatherhood of God. Regardless of national conventions or laws, regardless of property, race, rank, or birth, he must always be cognizant of the creative fire each rational being possesses. The complex Stoic concept of duty makes all Stoic virtues far more than a means to individual spiritual wellbeing. The Stoic has as his absolute duty the promotion of a cosmopolis that would be the very image of the rationally ordered physical world.
In practice, Stoicism was part of a Roman society that didn’t hesitate at the killing of infants for convenience, the killing of adults for entertainment, the mass murder of Christians, and suicide as a very acceptable response to life’s difficulties.