Toward the Fifth Stoa: the return of virtue ethics, part II
Why Stoicism?
In ancient times, Stoicism went through three phases, known
as the early, middle, and late Stoas. The early period was centered in Athens around figures such as Zeno of Citium, the founder of the sect, his student Cleanthes, and Chrysippus, one of the major logicians of antiquity. The middle period marked the diaspora from Athens and the spread throughout the Hellenistic and Republican Roman worlds, with the major figures being Panaetius and Posidonius (the latter was also Cicero’s teacher). The late period is the one from which we have the most extant documents; it spans the first two centuries of the Roman Empire; and it is characterized by authors like Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius.
After Marcus Aurelius, in the second part of the second century, we do not have a record of other prominent Stoics, though the philosophy influenced Christian writers from Paul of Tarsus to Thomas Aquinas as well as major modern philosophers, including René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Adam Smith. As mentioned above, there was also a brief period during the Renaissance when Justus Lipsius attempted a formal reconciliation of Stoicism and Christianity; his Neo-Stoicism attracted thinkers like Michel de Montaigne.
