Most Famous Stoicism Philosophers

Stoicism is a Hellenistic philosophical school founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium in the early third century BC. It teaches that virtue, understood as living in accordance with reason and nature, is the sole human good, and that emotional disturbance arises from false judgments about what lies within our control. Its canonical Roman exponents include Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Stoic ethics, physics, and logic formed an integrated system that profoundly influenced Christian theology and modern moral philosophy. Stoicism has experienced a notable popular revival in recent decades.

Philosophers in this tradition

Marcus Aurelius 121 – 180 · Roman
Marcus Aurelius was Roman emperor from 161 to 180 AD and the last of the so-called Five Good Emperors. He is remembered as much for his philosophical writing as for his rule, wh...
Cicero 106 BC – 43 BC · Roman
Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman statesman, orator, lawyer, and philosopher of the late Roman Republic, who served as consul in 63 BC and was murdered in 43 BC during the prosc...
Epictetus c. 50 – c. 135 · Greek
Epictetus was a Greek Stoic philosopher of the first and early second centuries, born into slavery in Hierapolis in Roman Phrygia and freed in adulthood. He taught Stoic philoso...
Seneca the Younger 4 BC – 65 · Roman
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, commonly known as Seneca the Younger, was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist of the first century. He served as tutor and later adviser t...
Zeno of Citium 334 BC – 262 BC · Greek
Zeno of Citium was a Greek philosopher of Phoenician descent and the founder of Stoicism. After surviving a shipwreck on the voyage to Athens around 312 BC, he became a student ...
Chrysippus 279 BC – 206 BC · Greek
Chrysippus of Soli was a Greek philosopher and the third head of the Stoic school, often regarded as its second founder. He was an extraordinarily prolific writer, credited in a...
Cleanthes 330 BC – 230 BC · Greek
Cleanthes of Assos was a Greek Stoic philosopher who succeeded Zeno of Citium as head of the Stoa around 262 BC. Originally a boxer who arrived in Athens with little money, he s...