The Rise Of Stoicism In The Roman Empire

Stoicism in the Roman Empire was a major influence politically and ethically. Zeno from Cyprus was the founder of stoicism; he was also the student of Polemo who is the fourth head of Plato’s Academy (Sharples, 2003). The Stoics believe that the only good things are characteristic excellence or virtues of human beings such as wisdom, justice, courage, moderation and etc. Stoics claim that a good thing must be beneficial to its possessor under all circumstances but this is not true all the time for example if someone has money and he spent it on vices then it does not bring that person any benefit. For the Stoics philosophy is not a past time thing but a way of life (Baltzly, 2014). Zeno of Citium (333-261 BC) was the first Stoic. Zeno’s

The ‘school’ had an ill-defined institutional status and there was a good deal of eclecticism and merging of different philosophies. The dominant theme was ethics, and the main surviving works consist of exercises in practical moralising based on ideas mapped out centuries before. In the later period, Stoicism was replaced as a living philosophy by a revived Platonism and by a form of Christianity that was increasingly more sophisticated and theoretically aware. Although there was no institutional ‘school’ as there was in the Hellenistic Age, there were numerous Stoic teachers, and the distinctive three-part Stoic educational curriculum was maintained, with important work continuing in all three areas (i.e., logic, ethics, and physics).As well as being the dominant philosophical movement in the period, Stoicism was also strongly embedded in Greco-Roman culture and, to some extent, in political life, and the ideal of living a properly Stoic life remained powerful. In the third and fourth centuries A.D. and later, Neoplatonic and Christian writers built on key Stoic ideas and absorbed them into their systems

The instinct for self-preservation is described in terms of the creature’s ‘appropriation’ to itself—its recognition of its body, first of all, as its own. ‘Appropriation’, oikeiôsis, is a term with no very natural English equivalent; its force can perhaps be more easily grasped by contrasting it with its more familiar opposite, ‘alienation’. Significantly, for the Stoics it is usually a matter of us being appropriated to things by nature, rather than appropriating them to ourselves As the infant human being grows and develops, its ‘appropriation’ develops in two ways; it comes to recognise more fully what its own nature involves, and it builds links with other human beings, in its family, its city and so on