Stoicism

Stoicism takes its name from the Stoa Poikile, the “painted porch” in Athens where Zeno of Citium and his successors taught from around 300 BCE. The Stoics divided philosophy into logic, physics and ethics, and held that the universe is a rational whole governed by divine reason. In ethics they taught that only virtue is good, and that externals such as health and wealth make no difference to happiness. The school flourished in Rome, where its writers included Seneca, Epictetus and the emperor Marcus Aurelius.