Zeno of Citium, a Hellenistic philosopher from Cyprus, founded Stoicism as a philosophical school of thought in about 300 BCE in Athens, Greece. Zeno was influenced by the philosophers Socrates and Plato, and had studied at the Megarian School, which was critical of Aristotle. When Zeno founded his Stoic school, it focused on physics, logic, and ethics, all of which contained a number of subdisciplines. As Roman thinkers adopted Stoicism, they shifted the philosophy to be more practical, distinguishing it from more academic or abstract types of inquiry popular at the time. Famous Stoics, such as first-century writer and statesman Seneca and second-century philosopher Epictetus, and centered the discipline on identifying “real, actionable answers” (4) to the question of how to live a virtuous and fulfilling life.

Stoicism, like many other philosophies, was not always welcomed by those in power. Roman senator and famous Stoic Cato the Younger opposed Emperor Julius Caesar and died by suicide in 46 BCE rather than support Caesar’s reign. In the following century, Seneca tried to tame the wild Emperor Nero through Stoic virtues, only to be commanded to die by suicide in 65 CE. Just a few years later, in 71 CE, the Roman emperor Vespasian forced all of the philosophers in Rome into exile to remove the threat of their dissent against his government.