Stoicism
Virtue is the only good, and everything outside your control is not your business.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 479 years
- Known to
- ± 20 years
- Era
- Classical, Holocene
Zeno of Citium begins teaching in the Athenian Stoa around 300 BCE. Stoicism holds that the cosmos is rational, that virtue alone is good, and that distress comes from judgements about events rather than events themselves — so the discipline is to distinguish what is up to us from what is not. It becomes the dominant philosophy of the Roman elite, and its practitioners include a slave, Epictetus, and an emperor, Marcus Aurelius.