← All schools🏛️ c. 300 BC – AD 180
Stoicism
Separate what you control from what you don’t, and answer only for the former — a four-century discipline that traveled from an Athenian porch to a Roman emperor’s desk.
When Zeno began teaching under the painted porch (Stoa) of Athens, Alexander’s empire had just shattered, and the citizen of a polis had become a solitary individual inside an empire — Stoicism answered exactly that condition: the cosmos is threaded by reason (logos), virtue is the only good, and everything else is "indifferent." Its most unusual feature is its social span: Seneca was the richest courtier of the empire, Epictetus a lame ex-slave, Marcus Aurelius the emperor himself — one discipline holding at both poles of power. For centuries it dueled Epicureanism over the right way to settle a human life.