Stoicism Study Portal

TL;DR

Stoicism was founded around 300 BC by Zeno of Kition — Citium, on the south coast of Cyprus, under what is now Larnaca — a merchant of probable Phoenician descent whom ancient sources routinely call "the Phoenician". He was shipwrecked near Piraeus, stayed in Athens, and taught in a public colonnade called the Stoa Poikile, which is where the school got its name. The claim worth making is precise: the founder of the most influential ethical system of the ancient world was a Cypriot by birth, and Stoicism is the only major ancient school Cyprus can claim as its own. The claim not worth making is that Stoicism is Cypriot thought — Zeno did all of his philosophical work in Athens, in Greek, inside an Athenian conversation with Socrates, the Cynics and Heraclitus. Origin, not content. What he built was a system in three inseparable parts — logic, physics, ethics — whose ethical core is that virtue is the only good, everything else is "indifferent" (though some indifferents are rationally preferred), and the good life consists in living in agreement with nature.