Stoicism Study Portal

Key takeaways

• Zeno of Kition — Citium, modern Larnaca — founded Stoicism around 300 BC. Born c. 334 BC, of probable Phoenician descent, called "the Phoenician" by ancient sources. The only major ancient school with a Cypriot founder. The claim is about origin, not about a Cypriot school of thought: all his work was done in Athens, in Greek.
• The name comes from the Stoa Poikile, a public colonnade in the Athenian agora — a venue with no door, matching a philosophy of public availability and cosmic citizenship.
• Logic, physics, ethics are one system, not three subjects. The orchard, egg and animal images make the point; drop the physics and "live according to nature" loses its referent.
• Virtue is the only good. The four cardinal virtues are one knowledge applied to four domains, and they stand or fall together.
• Indifferents are the most misread doctrine. Health and wealth are not good, but they are preferred, and the rational agent pursues them. Cynicism says discard them; Stoicism says pursue them without treating them as the good. Drop the qualifier and you get either fatalism or ordinary common sense.
• Oikeiosis is the developmental story that turns self-concern into concern for humanity. The concentric-circles image is Hierocles, second century AD — not Zeno.
• The dichotomy of control is Epictetus' sharpened formulation, four centuries after Zeno, and eph' hēmin means "up to us", with prohairesis — the faculty of assent — as what is actually in our power.
• Passions are false judgements, and the sage keeps the eupatheiai: joy, rational wish, caution. There is no good counterpart to distress. "Stoic" in English means unemotional; the doctrine is about which emotions survive correct judgement.
• Nothing by Zeno, Cleanthes or Chrysippus survives whole. We read the early Stoa through compilers, opponents and anthologists — Diogenes Laertius, Cicero, Plutarch, Sextus, Galen, Stobaeus — collected as the Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta. Say "our sources report" and mean it.
• Modern productivity-Stoicism keeps the coping techniques and discards the physics, the cosmopolitanism and the value theory that justified them. The CBT lineage is genuine; the metaphysics did not transfer.