Fragments
Living in accordance with nature and reason, indifferent to external goods like wealth, pleasure, and even health, is the only path to virtue, which alone is sufficient for a good life regardless of circumstance.
- virtue as the sole good
- external goods as morally 'indifferent'
- the logos as rational, material divine principle
- founding of the Stoic school at the Painted Porch
- synthesis of Cynic and Heraclitean influences
Zeno of Citium, a Cypriot merchant who turned to philosophy after a shipwreck destroyed his cargo and settled in Athens to found his own school around 300 BC, taught in the Stoa Poikile (Painted Porch), giving his followers the name Stoics. None of his own writings survive complete; his doctrines are known through later testimony, chiefly Diogenes Laertius, describing a cosmos pervaded by a rational, material divine principle (logos) with which human reason is akin, and an ethics holding that virtue is the sole good, while wealth, health, and pleasure are merely 'indifferent.' Zeno's synthesis drew on Cynic ethical austerity, Heraclitean physics, and Socratic method.
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