Stoicism - Introduction and Epicurean Guide

Why the Stoics Matter to Epicureans

The Stoic school was founded at Athens by Zeno of Citium (334–262 BC), a merchant from Cyprus who came to philosophy after a shipwreck. He taught in the Painted Porch (Stoa Poikilē) on the edge of the Athenian market, and his followers took their name from it. Zeno’s successor Cleanthes (331–232 BC) wrote the hymn to Zeus that the later Stoics loved to quote. The third head of the school, Chrysippus (about 279–206 BC), turned Zeno’s teaching into a system worked out in hundreds of books. Later Stoics such as Panaetius and Posidonius carried the school to Rome, where it became the philosophy of much of the governing class. The three Stoic authors whose works survive complete all wrote under the Roman Empire: Seneca, the adviser of Nero; Epictetus, the former slave; and Marcus Aurelius, the emperor.

Epicurus (341–270 BC) and Zeno were exact contemporaries. Epicurus opened his school in Athens in 307/306 BC, and Zeno began teaching in the Stoa a few years later. For the rest of antiquity the two schools were the great rivals of Hellenistic philosophy, and each defined itself against the other. In Cicero’s dialogues the Epicurean speaks and the Stoic answers. In Epictetus and Seneca, Epicurus is the opponent who must be refuted again and again.

The Stoics matter to Epicureans for three main reasons.

First, the Stoics built the most complete alternative to Epicurus in the ancient world. On every main question they gave the opposite answer. Epicurus taught that the universe is infinite, made of atoms and void, and that the gods take no part in governing it. The Stoics taught that the world is a single living being, ruled by a divine reason that runs through all matter, and that “the world and all the things that it contains were made for the sake of gods and men.” Epicurus taught that some things happen by chance and some by our own choice. The Stoics taught that everything happens by fate, “a certain order and series of causes,” and that the gods reveal the future through divination. Epicurus taught that pleasure is the goal of life and that virtue is the means to it. The Stoics taught that “we should believe Moral Worth to be the only good,” and that pleasure is “simply the good of cattle.”

Second, the Stoics outlived the Epicureans and passed their ideas on. The early Christian writers found much in Stoicism to admire: a providential God, a world made for man, a law of nature written in every heart, a soul that is a fragment of the divine, and contempt for bodily pleasure. Seneca was so highly regarded that a correspondence between him and the apostle Paul was forged in the fourth century and was accepted as genuine for a thousand years. In the sixteenth century Justus Lipsius revived Stoicism as a Christian philosophy of endurance, and today Stoicism is again a popular “philosophy of life” sold in bestsellers and self-help programs. Much of what passes for practical wisdom in our own time comes from Stoic sources.

Third, the Stoics are one of the main sources of the modern misreading of Epicurus. Seneca quoted Epicurus dozens of times, and he praised what he quoted. But he chose the sayings about frugality, endurance and calm, and left out the doctrine that pleasure is the goal. Readers who meet Epicurus first through Seneca’s letters, or through modern books that follow Seneca’s selection, come away with a Stoic Epicurus: a teacher of tranquility and limited desires rather than of pleasure. Epicureans need to know the Stoic system well enough to recognize it when it is passed off as Epicurean.

The rest of this introduction follows the three divisions of Epicurean philosophy: the Canon, or how we know the truth; Physics, or the nature of things; and Ethics, or how to live. Each section states the Stoic position in the words of the Stoics or of Cicero’s Stoic speakers, with links to the passages on this site, and then sets out the Epicurean response. The works themselves follow, each with an Epicurean guide of its own and a linked outline:

Cicero, On Ends, Rackham’s translation: Book III is the fullest surviving statement of Stoic ethics, given by Marcus Cato. Book IV is Cicero’s reply.
Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, Book II: the Stoic Balbus on the gods, providence and the design of the world.
Cicero, Academic Questions: the Stoic theory of knowledge, defended by Lucullus.
Cicero, On Divination, Book I: Quintus Cicero’s Stoic defence of divination and fate.
Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, Books II–V: pain, grief, the emotions and the sufficiency of virtue, argued largely on Stoic lines.
Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius: all 124 letters, with many quotations of Epicurus.
Seneca, Six Dialogues: Of Providence, Of the Firmness of the Wise Man, Of a Happy Life, Of Leisure, Of Peace of Mind and Of the Shortness of Life.
Epictetus, Discourses: the lectures of Epictetus as written down by Arrian, with several direct attacks on Epicurus.
Epictetus, Encheiridion and Fragments: the Stoic handbook.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations: the emperor’s notes to himself, built on the choice “Either Providence or Atoms.”

Stoics and Epicureans: The Historical Record

A Rivalry from the Beginning

The two schools grew up side by side in the same city, and the hostility began early. Diogenes Laertius records that “Diotimus the Stoic, who is ill-disposed to Epicurus, has calumniated him most bitterly by producing fifty lewd letters as Epicurus’ work.” He names “Posidonius the Stoic and his followers” among the slanderers, along with others who claimed that Epicurus took his atoms from Democritus and his pleasure from Aristippus. Diogenes rejects all these stories: “these calumniators are all mad” (DL X.9).

The rivalry was also a contest of books. According to Carneades, Chrysippus tried to match Epicurus in the number of his writings: “Whenever Epicurus wrote anything, Chrysippus felt bound in rivalry to write the equivalent; and this is why he often repeats himself.” Carneades called Chrysippus “the parasite who fed on Epicurus’ books” (DL X.26).

The Epicureans answered in kind. Philodemus, the Epicurean teacher of Cicero’s generation, wrote a book On the Stoics, parts of which survive in the papyri from Herculaneum, attacking the scandalous passages of Zeno’s Republic. In Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods the Epicurean Velleius opens with scorn for “that old hag of a fortune-teller, the Pronoia (which we may render ‘Providence’) of the Stoics,” and for “a world endowed with a mind and senses of its own.” He calls the Stoic doctrine of fate “a belief for old women, and ignorant old women at that.”

The Stoics Answer Epicurus by Name

The Stoic works that survive are full of Epicurus. The Stoic Balbus in On the Nature of the Gods begins by saying that “when the errors of Epicurus have been refuted, my argument is robbed of all occasion for prolixity.” Epictetus devotes whole chapters to Epicurus: “In answer to Epicurus,” “Against Epicureans and Academics,” and the debate with an Epicurean official in III.7. He uses “Epicurean” as a term of abuse: men who quote Zeno while living otherwise are “Epicureans and blackguards.” Marcus Aurelius returns again and again to the choice between “Providence” and “atoms” (IV.3).

Seneca is the special case. He reads Epicurus “not as a deserter, but as a scout,” and through the first part of his letters he ends almost every letter with a saying of Epicurus. But he insists that the sayings he likes “are common property and are emphatically our own,” and on every point of doctrine he takes the Stoic side.

Marcus Aurelius and the Epicurean School

The rivalry was still alive in the second century AD. Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic emperor, endowed salaried chairs of philosophy at Athens for each of the four great schools, the Platonists, the Peripatetics, the Stoics and the Epicureans (Cassius Dio, Roman History, Book LXXII). The Epicurean school was strong enough in his reign to need a professor of its own, and the great Epicurean inscription of Diogenes of Oinoanda in Asia Minor dates from about the same century.

Marcus himself never wrote a treatise against Epicurus. But the Meditations show that the Epicurean view of the world was never far from his mind. Again and again he sets out the choice between a world governed by providence and a world of atoms, and again and again he chooses providence. Twice he quotes Epicurus with respect (VII.64, IX.41). His notebook is the most direct evidence we have of how a convinced Stoic felt when he faced the Epicurean alternative.

Cicero’s Dialogues as a Battlefield

Most of what we know of the early Stoics comes not from their own books, which are lost, but from Cicero, who wrote his philosophical dialogues in 45–44 BC. Cicero was an Academic skeptic, not a Stoic. But he gave the Stoics their own spokesmen, and in several dialogues he set them directly against an Epicurean:

In On Ends, the Epicurean Torquatus states Epicurus’s ethics (Book I), Cicero answers him (Book II), and the Stoic Marcus Cato states the Stoic ethics (Book III).
In On the Nature of the Gods, the Epicurean Velleius states Epicurus’s theology (Book I), and the Stoic Balbus answers him with the Stoic theology of providence (Book II).
In the Academic Questions, Lucullus defends the Stoic theory of knowledge against Cicero’s skepticism, and both sides criticize Epicurus’s view of the senses.

Because the dialogues set the schools side by side, they show more clearly than any other ancient source where the lines of division ran. On each question, the Stoics and Epicurus took opposite sides.

The Canon: How the Stoics Say We Know

The “Comprehensive” Impression

The Stoics, like Epicurus, held that knowledge begins with the senses. But they divided the act of knowing into stages. Cicero’s Varro explains Zeno’s theory. First comes the impression, “which he called phantasia, and which we may term perception.” To this “he adds the assent of the mind, which he considers to be placed in ourselves and voluntary.” Not every impression deserves assent, but only “those which contain some especial character of those things which are seen.” An impression of this kind Zeno called “comprehensible,” and when the mind had accepted it, “then he called it comprehension, resembling those things which are taken up (prehenduntur) in the hand.”

Zeno illustrated the theory with his hand. “When he stretched out his fingers, and showed the palm of his hand, ‘Perception,’ said he, ‘is a thing like this.’” With his fingers a little closed, that was assent. With his fist closed, comprehension. And when he gripped his fist with his other hand, “knowledge, he said, was of that character; and that was what none but a wise man possessed.”

Two points stand out. First, the Stoics did not trust the senses as such. They trusted only a special class of impressions, marked by a quality that the skeptics argued no one could ever identify for certain. Second, real knowledge belonged only to the Stoic wise man, a figure that the Stoics themselves admitted had hardly ever existed. Cicero presses the point: “even those who are themselves wise men do not venture to say so, nor any one who has ever lived and been a wise man.”

Against Epicurus’s Trust in the Senses

Epicurus held that “the tests of truth are the sensations and concepts and the feelings,” and that “nor is there anything which can refute the sensations.” Error lies not in the sensations but in the opinions we add to them. The Stoics thought this naïve. Lucullus says that Epicurus, “who said that it was the duty of a wise man to separate opinion from evident knowledge, did no good at all.” He refuses to answer the skeptics’ examples of the bent oar and the dove’s neck by saying that every appearance is true: “Epicurus may deal with this idea, and with many others.”

Cicero, speaking against Lucullus, states Epicurus’s position fairly: “Epicurus brings the matter down to this point, that if once in a man’s life one of his senses has decided wrongly, none of them is ever to be trusted.” The Epicurean Timagoras, he reports, said that when he twisted his eye he never saw two flames from one candle, “for that the error was one of opinion, and not one of his eyes.” Cicero then shows why the Stoic position is weaker than Epicurus’s. The Stoics agree with the skeptics that some sensations are false, and Epicurus holds that if any sensation is false nothing can be known: “What is Epicurus’s maxim? If anything that appears to the senses be false, then nothing can be perceived.” Put the two together, and the skeptic wins.

Epicurus saw the danger clearly. Once the senses are allowed to deceive, the only remaining judge is reason, and reason itself depends on the senses: “all reason is dependent upon sensations” (DL X.32). The Stoic “comprehensive impression” was an attempt to keep the senses as a starting point while placing the final judgment in the mind. It satisfied neither the skeptics nor Epicurus.

The Good Is Judged by Reason, Not Feeling

The Stoics applied the same principle to ethics. For Epicurus, the feelings of pleasure and pain are part of the Canon: we know what is good and bad by feeling. Seneca states the Stoic objection plainly: “Those who rate pleasure as the supreme ideal hold that the Good is a matter of the senses; but we Stoics maintain that it is a matter of the understanding.” To let the feelings judge is to let “the vilest part” pass sentence on the better.

Logic, Dialectic and the Future

The Stoics were the great logicians of antiquity, and Chrysippus wrote a great many books on logic. Epicurus rejected formal logic. “Logic they reject as misleading,” says Diogenes Laertius, “for they say it is sufficient for physicists to be guided by what things say of themselves.” Seneca reports that the Epicureans “did away with the rational branch” of philosophy, and replaced it with their own canon.

The dispute was not only about method. Chrysippus argued that “every proposition is either true or false,” that this holds for statements about the future, and that therefore everything that will happen is already fixed by fate (Cicero, On Fate 20–21). Epicurus, says Cicero, would not grant that the statement “Hermachus will either be alive tomorrow or he will not” is necessarily true, because he “despises and ridicules the whole science of dialectics.” For the Stoic, logic led to fate. For Epicurus, a logical rule that abolished free choice was a reason to doubt the rule, not to give up the freedom that we experience.

Summary: Two Different Canons

Epicurus: all sensations are true reports of what strikes the senses. Error lies in added opinion. The feelings of pleasure and pain are the standard of good and evil.
The Stoics: some impressions are true and some false, and only a special class can be trusted. The final judgment belongs to reason, perfect knowledge belongs only to the wise man, and the good is judged by the understanding, not by feeling.

Physics: A World Full of God

Everything Is Body, but Body Is Divine

On one point the Stoics agreed with Epicurus against Plato and Aristotle. Zeno “would not allow that that which produced anything, or which was produced by anything, could possibly be anything except body.” Seneca repeats it: “We of the Stoic school believe that the Good is corporeal, because the Good is active, and whatever is active is corporeal.” Even virtue and the soul were bodies.

But the agreement goes no further. The Stoic body is continuous, not made of atoms, and there is no void within the world. Through all matter runs a divine fire and reason, which the Stoics called god, nature, fate and providence. Seneca gives the scheme: “there are two things in the universe which are the source of everything,—namely, cause and matter.” Matter “lies sluggish,” and the cause that moves it “is surely Creative Reason,—in other words, God.” In Velleius’s summary, Chrysippus “calls the world itself a god, and also the all-pervading world-soul,” as well as fire, fate and necessity.

The World Is a Living, Rational God

Zeno argued in short syllogisms that the world itself is alive and wise: “That which has the faculty of reason is superior to that which has not the faculty of reason; but nothing is superior to the world; therefore the world has the faculty of reason.” The nature of the world is “styled by Zeno not merely ‘craftsmanlike’ but actually ‘a craftsman’,” and its foresight “plans out the work to serve its use and purpose in every detail.”

Epicurus denied every step. The world is not a living being but one of countless worlds, formed by the motions of atoms and destined to break up again. The gods are living beings, but they live apart from the worlds and take no part in governing them. Lucretius answers the Stoic claim that the elements and the heavens are divine: “These things therefore are not possessed of divine sense, since they cannot be quickened with the vital feeling.”

Providence and the Argument from Design

The heart of Stoic physics is providence. Balbus announces the theme: “Next I have to show that the world is governed by divine providence. This is of course a vast topic; the doctrine is hotly contested by your school, Cotta.” The Stoic proof rests on the order and beauty of the world. Balbus cannot understand how anyone could believe “that the fortuitous collision of those particles produces this elaborate and beautiful world”: a man who believes it should also believe that letters of the alphabet shaken out on the ground could produce the Annals of Ennius. The Epicureans, he says, “indulge in such random babbling about the world that for my part I cannot think that they have ever looked up at this marvellously beautiful sky.”

The later Stoics repeat the argument in the same form. Seneca’s Of Providence opens with the claim that the order of the heavens shows “that this regularity does not belong to matter moving at random, and that particles brought together by chance could not arrange themselves with such art.” He asks “who gathered together the scattered atoms.” Epictetus argues that “from the very structure of all made objects we are accustomed to prove that the work is certainly the product of some artificer, and has not been constructed at random.” Marcus Aurelius states the choice over and over: “Either a medley and a tangled web and a dispersion abroad, or a unity and a plan and a Providence.”

The Epicurean answer is that the order we see comes from the nature of the atoms themselves, from their sizes, shapes and weights and from the endless time in which they have combined. The things that do not work have perished, and the things that work remain. And the world shows plain signs that it was not made for us. Lucretius: “the nature of the world has by no means been made for us by divine power: so great are the defects with which it stands encumbered.”

Marcus Aurelius: “Either Providence or Atoms”

No Stoic writer states the choice between the Stoic and the Epicurean world more often than Marcus Aurelius. “Recall the alternative: Either Providence or Atoms!” he tells himself. “Either a medley and a tangled web and a dispersion abroad, or a unity and a plan and a Providence.” “Either there is one intelligent source, from which as in one body all after things proceed … or there are atoms, and nothing but a medley and a dispersion.” Even in planning how to deal with difficult men he starts from the same premise: “If not atoms, then an all-controlling Nature.”

His answers to the dilemma are revealing, and they fall into three kinds.

First, he says that without providence life would not be worth living. “But if indeed there are no Gods, or if they do not concern themselves with the affairs of men, what boots it for me to live in a Universe where there are no Gods, where Providence is not?” If the world is a medley of atoms, “why should I even wish to abide in such a random welter and chaos? Why care for anything else than to turn again to the dust at last.” Here Marcus admits something important. The Stoic does not arrive at providence only by argument. He needs it, because without it his ethics loses its purpose. Epicurus held that the gods exist but do not govern the world, the very case Marcus calls unbearable, and he taught that this is the only world in which a man can be free of the fear of the gods. For Epicurus, life in a world of atoms is not a “random welter” but the setting for a life of pleasure among friends.

Second, he tries to make his ethics hold whichever way the question is decided. “Whether there be atoms or a Nature, let it be postulated first, that I am a part of the whole Universe controlled by Nature.” He works through three possibilities: “There must be either a predestined Necessity and inviolable plan, or a gracious Providence, or a chaos without design or director,” and finds a lesson in each. If a chaos, “congratulate thyself that amid such a surging sea thou hast in thyself a guiding Reason.” In another place he shrugs: “if God—all is well; if haphazard—be not thou also haphazard.” These passages concede more than Marcus intends. If the Stoic way of life is right even in a world of atoms, then it does not rest on providence after all, and the question becomes what way of life the atoms themselves would teach. Epicurus’s answer is that a living being in a world without providence has one guide that nature gives it from birth, the feelings of pleasure and pain.

Third, he falls back on the evidence of power and order. Asked how he knows the gods exist, he answers: “from the continual proofs of their power I am assured that Gods also exist and I reverence them.” He tells himself to think “of the Universe as one living Being, possessed of a single Substance and a single Soul,” in which “there is both one Universe, made up of all things, and one God immanent in all things, and one Substance, and one Law.” This is the argument from design in its simplest form, and the Epicurean answer is the same one Lucretius gave to Balbus: the order of the world comes from the nature of its elements, and its defects show that it was not made for us.

One passage shows how close Marcus came to the Epicurean conclusion and why he turned away from it. “If the Gods have taken counsel about me and the things to befall me, doubtless they have taken good counsel.” But if they take counsel about nothing at all, which he calls “an impious belief,” then “let us have no more of sacrifices and prayers and oaths.” For Marcus, gods who do not govern are not worth worshipping. Epicurus held the opposite: the gods are to be honored for their blessedness, not out of fear or in hope of favors, and the man who thinks this way has nothing to fear from them (Letter to Menoeceus, DL X.123–124).

A World Made for Gods and Men

The Stoics held that the world was made for rational beings. Chrysippus argued that just as “a shield-case is made for the sake of a shield and a sheath for the sake of a sword,” so the crops were made for animals and the animals for man, “the horse for riding, the ox for ploughing, the dog for hunting.” Balbus concludes that “the world itself was created for the sake of gods and men, and the things that it contains were provided and contrived for the enjoyment of men.” Cato draws the moral: “Chrysippus well said, that all other things were created for the sake of men and gods,” so that men may use animals “without injustice.”

Lucretius calls the whole idea folly: “To say again that for the sake of men they have willed to set in order the glorious nature of the world … is all sheer folly. For what advantage can our gratitude bestow on immortal and blessed beings, that for our sakes they should take in hand to administer aught?” A blessed and immortal being, says Epicurus, “knows no trouble itself, nor causes trouble to any other” (Principal Doctrine 1).

Fate

Since everything is governed by divine reason, everything happens by fate. Quintus Cicero gives the Stoic definition: “By Fate I mean that which the Greeks call εἱμαρμένη, that is, a certain order and series of causes,” so that “nothing happens which is not predestined to happen.” Seneca translates the prayer of Cleanthes: “the willing soul / Fate leads, but the unwilling drags along.” The same prayer closes the Encheiridion of Epictetus (53).

Epicurus rejected fate more sharply than any other doctrine of the natural philosophers. The wise man “laughs at (destiny), whom some have introduced as the mistress of all things.” Some things happen by necessity, some by chance, and some are within our control, and “that which is in our control is subject to no master.” Then comes one of the strongest sentences Epicurus wrote: “it were better to follow the myths about the gods than to become a slave to the destiny of the natural philosophers: for the former suggests a hope of placating the gods by worship, whereas the latter involves a necessity which knows no placation.” The “natural philosophers” with their destiny are, above all, the Stoics. Cicero reports that Epicurus introduced the swerve of the atoms in order to avoid “the necessity of fate” (On Fate 22–23).

Divination

If the future is fixed and the gods care for men, the gods will reveal the future. This was the Stoic argument for divination, which Cicero calls “the very citadel of the Stoics”: “if there is divination there are gods,” and “if there are gods there is divination.” The Stoics argued it in their usual way: “If there are gods and they do not make clear to man in advance what the future will be, then they do not love man,” and so on through every alternative. Chrysippus collected oracles and dreams in four books. Balbus calls divination “the very strongest proof that man’s welfare is studied by divine providence,” and admits that “nothing provokes the ridicule of Epicurus so much as the art of prophecy.”

For Epicurus divination was useless as well as false. If the gods do not govern the world, they send no signs. And even if the future could be known, knowing it would not help a man to live well.

The Soul and Death

The Stoic soul is a breath of the divine fire. Epictetus tells his pupil, “you are a fragment of God; you have within you a part of Him.” Seneca writes that “God is near you, he is with you, he is within you.” Most Stoics taught that the soul survives the body for a time, though not forever, until the whole world is consumed by fire and begins again. Seneca would not commit himself: “Death either annihilates us or strips us bare.” Marcus wavers in the same way, writing that death returns us either to “the same Seminal Reason of the Universe” or scatters us “into the atoms” (VI.24).

Marcus wonders where the souls of the dead could all be kept, and answers that they last for a time in the air, then “are diffused and become fire, being taken again into the Seminal Reason of the Whole.” He is troubled that good men, who have lived in fellowship with the gods, “should when once dead have no second existence but be wholly extinguished,” and he can only reply that the gods would have arranged it otherwise if it were right. In his shortest notes the Epicurean alternative is always present: “Of Death: Either dispersion if atoms; or, if a single Whole, either extinction or a change of state.” And: “Dread of death is a dread of non-sensation or new sensation. But either thou wilt feel no sensation, and so no sensation of any evil; or a different kind of sensation will be thine.” The first half of that sentence is Epicurus’s own argument, and Marcus could never quite let go of the second.

Epicurus held that the soul is made of atoms and is scattered at death, and that this is why death is nothing to us: “all good and evil consists in sensation, but death is deprivation of sensation.” The Stoic hope of survival, however limited, keeps open the door to fear.

Ethics: Virtue Against Pleasure

The First Impulse: Self-Preservation or Pleasure?

Both schools began their ethics with the newborn animal. Torquatus argues for Epicurus that “every animal, as soon as it is born, seeks for pleasure, and delights in it as the Chief Good” (On Ends I.30). Cato gives the Stoic reply: “immediately upon birth (for that is the proper point to start from) a living creature feels an attachment for itself, and an impulse to preserve itself.” Pleasure, “according to most Stoics, is not to be reckoned among the primary objects of natural impulse.” Cato adds a revealing reason: he agrees “for fear lest many immoral consequences would follow if we held that nature has placed pleasure among the earliest objects of desire.” Diogenes Laertius reports the same doctrine: “as for what some people say, that the first inclination of animals is to pleasure, they say what is false.” Pleasure, “if there be any such thing at all, is an accessory only.”

Seneca makes the same point in his own way. What the newborn child seeks is “not a Good, but the beginning of a Good,” and the Epicureans are “placing the tree-top where the root ought to be.” For Epicurus, the root is exactly where the good is first seen. “We recognize pleasure as the first good innate in us, and from pleasure we begin every act of choice and avoidance, and to pleasure we return again, using the feeling as the standard by which we judge every good.”

Living in Agreement with Nature

From self-preservation the Stoic rises by reason to a different good. “Man’s first attraction is towards the things in accordance with nature,” but once he understands “the order and so to speak harmony that should govern conduct,” he values this harmony “far more highly than all the things for which he originally felt an affection,” and concludes that “in this order resides the Chief Good of man.” The goal is “to live in agreement and harmony with nature,” which for the Stoics means living according to virtue, and that means living according to the divine reason that governs the whole: “the common law … is identical with that right reason which pervades everything, being the same with Jupiter” (Diogenes Laertius VII.88).

The Stoic “nature” is therefore not the nature that Epicurus appealed to. For Epicurus, nature speaks through the feelings of every living thing. For the Stoics, it speaks through reason, and through the will of a god.

Virtue the Only Good

The central Stoic doctrine is that virtue, or moral worth, is the only good and vice the only evil. “We should believe Moral Worth to be the only good.” From this follow the famous Stoic “paradoxes”:

The wise man is always happy, “since reason has proved that moral worth is the sole good, it follows that he must always be happy,” and he alone is truly a king, rich, free and beautiful.
All faults are equal. “Just as a drowning man is no more able to breathe if he be not far from the surface of the water … than if he were actually at the bottom already,” so a man who has made progress toward virtue “is none the less in misery than he that has made no progress at all.” Cicero mocks the doctrine in reply: “You Stoics say that all transgressions are equal.”
Virtue is sufficient for happiness. In the Tusculan Disputations Cicero argues the Stoic case that “virtue is able by herself to make life happy.”

Health, wealth, freedom from pain and life itself are not goods at all. The Stoics called them “preferred” things, which a man may reasonably choose, but whose loss does not make him less happy. Cicero answers in Book IV of On Ends that this is a change of names, not of things: Zeno “set about juggling with words.”

Epicurus held that virtue is valuable because it produces the pleasant life. Prudence “teaches us that it is not possible to live pleasantly without living prudently and honorably and justly” (DL X.132). Seneca states the difference exactly: “Epicurus also decides that one who possesses virtue is happy, but that virtue of itself is not sufficient for the happy life, because the pleasure that results from virtue, and not virtue itself, makes one happy.” Seneca calls this “a futile distinction.” It is the whole difference between the schools.

Pleasure: “The Good of Cattle”

The Stoic contempt for pleasure runs through all their writings. For Seneca, pleasure is “simply the good of cattle,” and it “actually destroys the soul and softens all its vigour.” In Of a Happy Life: “virtue is a lofty quality, sublime, royal, unconquerable, untiring: pleasure is low, slavish, weakly, perishable.” Marcus reduces the matter to a syllogism: “the true good man would never regret having passed a pleasure by. Pleasure therefore is neither a useful thing nor a good.”

The Stoics did allow that the wise man feels a kind of joy, and that pleasure may follow virtue as a by-product. Seneca uses the image of a cornfield: “pleasure is not the reward or the cause of virtue, but comes in addition to it,” as flowers grow among the corn. When the Epicurean replies that virtue rules our choice of pleasures, Seneca sneers that in this school “virtue has the dignified office of preliminary taster of pleasures.”

Epicureans can accept Seneca’s description without his sneer. Virtue does choose among pleasures, and that is its job. “Every pleasure … because of its natural kinship to us is good, yet not every pleasure is to be chosen,” and the wise man measures pleasures and pains against each other to obtain the most pleasant life (DL X.129–130).

Pain Is Not an Evil

If virtue is the only good, pain cannot be an evil. Cicero tells the story of Posidonius, lying ill with gout, who lectured Pompey on the doctrine “That nothing was good but what was honest; and that in his paroxysms he would often say, ‘Pain, it is to no purpose, notwithstanding you are troublesome, I will never acknowledge you an evil.’”

Epicurus held that pain is an evil, and he did not pretend otherwise. His answer was that pain can be borne: “Pain does not last continuously in the flesh,” and severe pain is short, while long illness allows more pleasure than pain (Principal Doctrine 4). Marcus Aurelius takes this advice from Epicurus: “call to thy rescue even Epicurus when he says that a pain is never unbearable or interminable.” And Seneca, like Cicero, tells of Epicurus’s last day, when in spite of the pain of his illness he wrote that “that day was none the less happy.” Epicurus bore pain by remembering pleasure, not by denying that pain hurts.

The Emotions as Diseases

The Stoics held that the emotions, which they divided into four kinds (distress, fear, desire and delight), are not natural but come from false judgments, and that the wise man is free from them. Cato says that these “are not excited by any influence of nature.” Cicero explains in the Tusculans that “the philosophers call all perturbations of the soul diseases,” and argues the Stoic case that “grief is a disorder of the mind; therefore a wise man will be always free from it.” Epictetus teaches that “it is not the things themselves that disturb men, but their judgements about these things.”

Epicurus agreed that false opinions cause much misery, especially the fears of the gods and of death. But he did not hold that the wise man is free of all feeling. “The wise man will feel grief,” says Diogenes Laertius, reporting Epicurean doctrine. And Seneca attacks Metrodorus for saying that “there is a certain pleasure akin to sadness” in remembering a lost friend. The Epicurean does not cut away his feelings. He uses them as the guide to life.

Accepting Whatever Happens

Because everything happens by the will of a good providence, the Stoic must accept whatever happens. “Do not seek to have everything that happens happen as you wish, but wish for everything to happen as it actually does happen, and your life will be serene.” In piety the chief element is to believe that the gods exist and administer the universe “well and justly,” and to “submit to everything that happens.”

Marcus carries the doctrine furthest. “The Universal Nature has prescribed for so and so sickness or maim or loss,” as a physician prescribes cold baths, and each man should accept it “as conducive to his destiny.” He prays to the world itself: “All that is in tune with thee, O Universe, is in tune with me! Nothing that is in due time for thee is too early or too late for me!” The man who rebels against what befalls him is like “a hand cut off or a foot, or a head severed from the trunk.”

Epicurus taught that the wise man faces fortune bravely, but he never asked anyone to will the misfortunes that fortune brings. Chance offers “opportunities for great good and great evil,” and the wise man uses reason to make the best of them.

Suicide

The Stoics taught that suicide is sometimes the right choice, even for a happy man. “It is on occasion appropriate for the Wise Man to quit life although he is happy.” Seneca praises the “open door”: “The best thing which eternal law ever ordained was that it allowed to us one entrance into life, but many exits.” Epicurus took a more cautious line. He blamed those who “run towards death because you are tired of life, when it is your manner of life that has made you run towards death,” and he said that even if the wise man loses his eyesight, “he will not end his whole life.”

The City of Gods and Men

The Stoic theory of society also rests on their theology. “The universe is governed by divine will; it is a city or state of which both men and gods are members, and each one of us is a part of this universe; from which it is a natural consequence that we should prefer the common advantage to our own.” Marcus: “If the intellectual capacity is common to us all, common too is the reason,” and so “the Universe is as it were a state.” Justice, for the Stoics, exists by nature, as part of the law of the universe. Marcus states the consequence in three words: “Injustice is impiety.” The unjust man offends not his neighbor but “the most venerable of Deities,” the Nature of the Universe, which “has fashioned rational creatures for the sake of one another.”

Epicurus taught that “Justice never is anything in itself, but in the dealings of men with one another … it is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed” (Principal Doctrine 33). Seneca quotes Epicurus with approval on the fear that haunts the wrongdoer, but parts company at once: “Let us disagree with Epicurus on the one point, when he declares that there is no natural justice.” Epictetus goes further, and charges that Epicurean doctrines are “subversive of the State, destructive to the family.”

Friendship

Epicurus held that friendship begins in mutual help and becomes a source of the greatest pleasure, and that “of all the things which wisdom acquires to produce the blessedness of the complete life, far the greatest is the possession of friendship” (Principal Doctrine 27). Seneca rejects the Epicurean reason for friendship: the wise man makes friends “not, however, for the purpose mentioned by Epicurus in the letter quoted above: ‘That there may be someone to sit by him when he is ill, to help him when he is in prison or in want’.” The Stoic sage needs nothing from anyone. He makes friends in order to exercise his virtue.

Public Life

Seneca gives the clearest contrast between the schools on politics: “Epicurus says, ‘The wise man will not take part in politics, except upon some special occasion;’ Zeno says, ‘The wise man will take part in politics, unless prevented by some special circumstance’.” The Stoic is a citizen of the world with a duty to serve it. The Epicurean takes part in public affairs only when it serves his own safety and the good of his friends. This difference is often turned into a charge of idleness. But Seneca himself reports that “Epicurus forbids us to doze,” and that “Epicurus, whom you adopt as the patron of your laziness,” was no teacher of sloth.

Where the Stoics Help the Epicurean Case

The Stoics are hostile witnesses, but they are some of the best witnesses we have. A reader who keeps the fundamental disagreement in view can use their works in several ways.

They preserve Epicurus’s words. Many sayings of Epicurus and Metrodorus survive only in Seneca’s letters, and Usener’s collection of Epicurean fragments draws on him heavily. Among them are the motto of the Garden, “Stranger, here you will do well to tarry; here our highest good is pleasure”; the saying “If you live according to nature, you will never be poor; if you live according to opinion, you will never be rich”; and Epicurus’s words on his last day.
They state Epicurean doctrine clearly in order to reject it. Seneca’s account of Epicurus’s view of virtue (85.18), of the senses as the judge of good (124.2) and of politics (Of Leisure 3) are some of the most precise ancient statements of these points.
They testify to Epicurus’s character. Seneca writes that “Epicurus is really a brave man, even though he did wear long sleeves.” He admits, against his own school, that “the teaching of Epicurus was upright and holy, and even, if you examine it narrowly, stern.” Epictetus admits that Epicurus wrote “such big books” because he could not help caring for others (II.20). Marcus records Epicurus’s conduct in his last illness (IX.41).
Their arguments show what Epicurus was answering. Balbus’s argument from design, Chrysippus’s argument from logic to fate, and the Stoic proof of divination are the positions against which Epicurus’s physics was built. Reading them makes clear why Epicurus insisted on the infinite universe, the swerve and the distant gods.

None of this makes the Stoics allies. Every concession serves the Stoic order: providence in place of atoms, fate in place of freedom, virtue in place of pleasure, and the reason of a god in place of the feelings of a living being.

The Stoics’ Long Shadow

Rome and the Early Church

By the first century BC Stoicism had become the philosophy of Roman public life. Its ideals of duty, endurance and service to the state suited the governing class, and men like Cato the Younger became its heroes. The Epicureans were a large and active school in the same period, and Cicero himself complains of how widely their books were read. But the Stoic view of the world proved easier to fit with Roman religion and with Roman power.

When Paul preached at Athens, “certain philosophers of the Epicureans, and of the Stoicks, encountered him” (Acts 17:18, King James Version). The Christian writers who followed treated the two schools very differently. The Stoic providential God, the law of nature, the soul as a divine spark and the contempt for the flesh were all congenial to Christianity, and the forged correspondence of Seneca and Paul made Seneca an honorary Christian. Epicurus, who denied providence and the immortal soul and called pleasure the good, became the type of the unbeliever.

The Revival of Stoicism

When ancient philosophy was recovered in the Renaissance, Stoicism was taken up again as a moral teaching compatible with Christianity. Justus Lipsius’s On Constancy (1584) and his manuals of Stoic philosophy founded what is now called Neostoicism, which shaped the moral outlook of soldiers and statesmen in the age of the religious wars. Epicurus also returned, through Gassendi and the new atomic science, but his ethics remained under suspicion.

In our own time Stoicism has enjoyed another revival. The founders of modern cognitive therapy pointed to Epictetus’s saying that we are disturbed not by things but by our judgments about them. Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus are sold in large numbers as guides to resilience and self-mastery, and Marcus above all has become the model of the calm and dutiful leader. Most modern readers take his advice without his theology. But Marcus himself did not think his ethics could stand without it. He wrote that he would not wish to live in a universe without providence (II.11), and the modern reader who keeps Marcus’s resignation while discarding his gods has kept the Stoic conclusion after giving up the Stoic reason for it.

The Stoic Epicurus

Epicureans should recognize the effect of all this on how Epicurus is read. Seneca chose the sayings of Epicurus that fitted Stoic ethics: live simply, master your desires, face death calmly. He praised Epicurus’s pleasure as “sober and temperate,” and he described the Epicurean goal as “a body free from pain and a soul free from disturbance.” A reader who knows Epicurus only through Seneca will think that Epicurus was a gentler Stoic, whose real goal was calm.

This is the picture of Epicurus that dominates many modern books: the philosopher of tranquility, limited desires and the quiet life. It is the picture the Stoics wanted. The Epicurean texts say something different and bolder. Pleasure, in its full sense, is the goal. The feelings are the standard. Virtue is the means. And the gods neither made the world for us nor require us to accept whatever happens in it.

The Surviving Works

The writings of the early Stoics are lost. Zeno, Cleanthes and Chrysippus survive only in quotations and reports by later writers, collected by Hans von Arnim in Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta (4 vols., Leipzig: Teubner, 1903–1924). The best connected accounts of their teaching are in Cicero and in Diogenes Laertius’s life of Zeno. The later Stoics Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius survive in substantial works of their own.

Author and work	Date	On this site
Early Stoic teaching reported by others
Diogenes Laertius, Lives VII (Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrysippus)	3rd century AD	Yonge translation
Cicero, Academic Questions (Stoic theory of knowledge)	45 BC	Yonge
Cicero, On Ends III (Stoic ethics) and IV (reply)	45 BC	Rackham
Cicero, Tusculan Disputations	45 BC	Yonge
Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods II (Stoic theology)	45 BC	Rackham
Cicero, On Divination I (Stoic defence of divination)	44 BC	Yonge and Falconer
Cicero, On Fate (Chrysippus on fate)	44 BC	Rackham
The Roman Stoics
Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius	about AD 62–65	Gummere
Seneca, Dialogues (six of twelve)	about AD 40–62	Stewart
Epictetus, Discourses (Books I–IV of an original eight)	about AD 108	Oldfather
Epictetus, Encheiridion and Fragments	about AD 108	Oldfather
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations	about AD 170–180	Haines

Seneca’s other works, not on this site, include On Benefits, On Anger, On Clemency, the consolations and the Natural Questions, his study of meteorology and earthquakes. Cicero’s On Duties, written for his son, follows the Stoic Panaetius closely.

The Most Important Passages for Epicureans

The Canon: How We Know

Zeno’s theory of impression, assent and comprehension: Academic Questions I.11.
Zeno’s hand, and knowledge only for the wise man: Academic Questions II.47.
Lucullus against Epicurus on the senses: Academic Questions II.7 and II.14.
Epicurus’s maxim that if one sense is false nothing can be known: Academic Questions II.25 and II.32.
Epicurus refuses the disjunction about Hermarchus: Academic Questions II.30.
Is the good grasped by the senses or by the understanding? Seneca, Letter 124.
The Epicureans abolish logic: Seneca, Letter 89.11.

Nature, Gods and the Soul

Velleius on the Stoic “Pronoia” and fate: On the Nature of the Gods I.18, I.39 and I.55.
Zeno’s syllogisms that the world is rational and alive: On the Nature of the Gods II.21–22.
Chrysippus: everything made for something else, and man made to contemplate the world: II.37.
Providence, and the letters of Ennius: II.73–94.
The world made for gods and men: II.133 and II.154.
Fate as “a certain order and series of causes,” and the Stoic proof of divination: On Divination I.38 and I.55.
Chrysippus on fate, and Epicurus’s swerve: On Fate 20–23.
Cause and matter, God as Creative Reason: Seneca, Letter 65.
“God is within you”: Seneca, Letter 41.
The hymn of Cleanthes: Seneca, Letter 107.11.
Why misfortunes befall good men: Seneca, Of Providence.
Providence and design: Epictetus, Discourses I.6.
“You are a fragment of God”: Epictetus, Discourses II.8.
“Either Providence or Atoms”: Marcus, Meditations IV.3, VI.10, IX.28, IX.39, X.6, XI.18 and XII.14.
Life not worth living without providence: Marcus, Meditations II.11; gods who take no counsel: VI.44.
The universe as one living being with one God and one Law: Marcus, Meditations IV.40 and VII.9; how he knows the gods exist: XII.28.
Death and the soul: Marcus, Meditations IV.21, VII.32, VIII.58 and XII.5.

Ethics

Self-preservation, not pleasure, as the first impulse: On Ends III.16–17.
Agreement with nature, and moral worth the only good: On Ends III.20–26.
The emotions: On Ends III.35; Tusculan Disputations III–IV.
All faults equal: On Ends III.48.
“Preferred” things, and suicide: On Ends III.50–61.
The city of gods and men, and the use of animals: On Ends III.62–68.
The wise man as king: On Ends III.75.
Cicero’s reply: On Ends IV.
Pain not an evil, and Posidonius: Tusculan Disputations II.25.
Virtue sufficient for happiness: Tusculan Disputations V.
Epicurus on the bull of Phalaris: Seneca, Letter 66.18; Tusculan Disputations II.7.
Virtue and pleasure: Seneca, Letter 85.18, 92 and 123; Of a Happy Life VI–XIII.
Natural justice: Seneca, Letter 97.13–16.
Friendship: Seneca, Letter 9.
Politics: Seneca, Of Leisure III.
Epictetus against Epicurus on the good: Discourses I.20 and III.7; on society: I.23 and II.20.
What is under our control, and judgments, not things: Encheiridion 1 and 5.
Pleasure “neither a useful thing nor a good”: Marcus, Meditations VIII.10.
Accepting what Nature prescribes: Marcus, Meditations IV.23, V.8 and VIII.34.
The world-state, and “Injustice is impiety”: Marcus, Meditations IV.4 and IX.1.
Marcus quotes Epicurus on pain: Meditations VII.64 and IX.41.

About These Translations

Cicero, On Ends: H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (1914).
Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods and On Fate: H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library.
Cicero, Academic Questions, Tusculan Disputations and On Divination: C. D. Yonge, Bohn’s Classical Library (mid-nineteenth century), with W. A. Falconer’s Loeb translation of On Divination (1923) alongside.
Diogenes Laertius: C. D. Yonge, Bohn’s Classical Library (1853).
Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius: R. M. Gummere, Loeb Classical Library, 3 vols. (1917, 1920, 1925).
Seneca, Dialogues: Aubrey Stewart, Bohn’s Classical Library (1889).
Epictetus: W. A. Oldfather, Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols. (1925, 1928).
Marcus Aurelius: C. R. Haines, Loeb Classical Library (1916).

Each translation page explains its own system of references, and each links its pages to the scanned volumes at the Internet Archive, so any passage can be checked against the printed book. The texts of Seneca and Epictetus follow the proofread transcriptions made by the volunteers of Wikisource and Project Gutenberg. The other texts were prepared by machine reading of the scanned volumes and corrected by hand. Scattered errors may remain, and readers who need certainty about a passage should consult the scan.

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