Stoicism

Stoicism, a system of thought which originated in Athens during the 3rd cent. bc, flourished in Rome c.100 bc–c. ad 200, and enjoyed a vigorous revival at the time of the Renaissance. The Stoics' prime concern was ethics, but they held that right behaviour must be grounded on a general understanding of the universe, and their theories extended to cover the nature of the physical world, logic, rhetoric, epistemology, and politics. The founders held that virtue consisted in following reason undeterred by pain, pleasure, desire, or fear: the pursuit of health, wealth, success, and pleasure had no real importance. Only fragments of these early founders have survived, and we know of their works through their followers, who include their disciple Cicero. The Stoics whose writings survive are those who lived under the Roman Empire: Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius.

Stoicism had much in common with Christianity, and a compilation of Stoic maxims, the Distichs of Cato, was the most popular of medieval school-books. Petrarch in the 14th cent. expounded a Christian Stoicism in his De Remediis Fortunae, and in the 16th cent. a life of Marcus Aurelius, supposedly ancient but actually by the Spaniard Antonio de Guevara, proved enormously popular. Translated into French and English in the 1530s, it may have served to promote the Stoic revival which came at the end of the century with Montaigne's Essais (1580) and Lipsius' De Constantia (1585). In England the years 1595–1615 saw translations of Lipsius, Montaigne, Epictetus, and Seneca, and the influence of Stoicism can be traced in a great number of writers from Chapman and Sir William Cornwallis (d. ?1631) to Addison.