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How the Stoics Became Citizens of the World

The Dream of Scipio
Scipio looks down upon the Earth from the Milky Way. From this far away, even Rome looks provincial.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

At its height, the Roman Empire brought most of Europe, together with large parts of North Africa and the Near East, into a single political and economic space. Roads and sea lanes connected distant provinces, trade flourished, and the Pax Romana, or ‘Roman Peace’, brought long periods of peace, security, and prosperity to peoples more accustomed to being at one another’s throats.

Unlike the European Union, Rome created its union, in the main, by conquest, rather than by cooperation and the voluntary pooling of sovereignty. That’s two thousand years of progress for you. But the EU and the Roman Empire enlarged the political community beyond the borders of individual peoples, with profound consequences for how people lived—and, in time, for how they thought about themselves.

By the Late Roman Republic, the world had never been more cosmopolitan. Stoics such as Panaetius, who shuttled back and forth from Athens to Rome, Rutilius, who stood up for the inhabitants of Asia against his own countrymen, and the Syrian Posidonius, who moved from Athens to Rhodes to start a school that became the empire’s stopping place, were not Greeks or Romans so much as citizens of the world.

The First Citizens of the World

This broadening of horizons had begun well before Rome. In the fourth century BCE, Alexander the Great built an empire that took in the already multinational Persian Empire and stretched into India. 

As Alexander battled his way to the Hyphasis River, back home in Greece another boundary was being broken, not, this time, from some palace or military tent but from an empty jar. Upon being asked where he came from, Diogenes the Cynic declared, ‘I am a citizen of the world (Greek, cosmopolites)’. This is the first recorded use of the term that became our ‘cosmopolitan’. In many parts of Britain or America, to call yourself a citizen of the world would be asking for trouble. In a Greek world still organised around close-knit city-states, it was a truly radical and dangerous claim.

Diogenes inspired Crates of Thebes, a wealthy man who abandoned his fortune to follow in the Cynic path. Crates in turn taught Zeno of Citium, who went on to found Zenonism—better known as Stoicism. The Cynic ideals of living according to nature, freedom from external goods, and cosmopolitanism thus passed, in modified form, into one of the most influential movements of the ancient world.

‘The eagle,’ said the Stoic teacher Musonius, quoting Euripides, ‘can fly through all the air, and a noble man has all the earth as his fatherland.’ The wise, argued Musonius, can make themselves at home anywhere, so that exile, to them, is not the punishment that it may seem. Indeed, one of several advantages of exile is that we are not dragged into political service by a country that only seems to be ours, or bothered by people who only seem to be our friends, or waylaid by petty relatives. Musonius points out that the Stoic Rutilius flourished so fulsomely in exile that he refused Sulla’s invitation to return to Rome.

Musonius taught Epictetus. When he was young, the future emperor Marcus Aurelius had the greatest men of his age for tutors, but it was a dog-eared copy of Epictetus that made the greatest impression upon him. Still, today, it is difficult to read Marcus’ Meditations without hearing the echo of Epictetus… and, ultimately, Diogenes: ‘My city and state are Rome… But as a human being? The world. So for me, ‘good’ can only mean what’s good for both communities.’

The Philosophical Basis of Cosmopolitanism

Stoic cosmopolitanism is rooted in the belief that all human beings form part of the same organism and that this organism, like each of its parts, is shot through with God. It is true that some people behave like cancers, but even they, if only they knew it, are doing the work of God, or the universe. Just as our eyes, ears, and teeth each have a role to play in our body, so we, too, each have a role to play in society—even if it is only to serve as a warning to others.

‘Kindly remember,’ said Seneca, ‘that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives, and dies.’

To live selfishly is fundamentally self-defeating. To feel alive and happy, we need to have a sense of working with others, for others—because, like ants and bees, that is the kind of creature that we are. If we do not contribute to our community, we will feel disconnected and depressed. In a word, we will feel dead—and, in truth, might as well be.

Whatever good we do, said Marcus Aurelius, we should do it quietly, without expecting anything in return, ‘as simply as a horse runs, or a bee makes honey, or a vine bears grapes season after season without thinking of the grapes it has borne.’ Our reward will be our own, and much greater than any wealth or honour that might or might not be bestowed upon us: to lead and to have led a good life, to do and to have done what we were born to do.

What brings no benefit to the hive brings none to the bee. —Marcus Aurelius

From Rome to Europe

In 212 CE, Rome extended citizenship to almost every free inhabitant of the empire. But for the Stoics, citizenship had no frontier: every human being belonged to the same community. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Europe divided and redivided into kingdoms, empires, and nation-states whose rivalries repeatedly ended in war. During the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), to take an example, the population of the Germanic lands fell from 21 million to 13 million.

After the Second World War, Europeans returned to an ancient problem: how to belong to something larger without ceasing to be themselves. The European Union offered a new answer. It brought together nations that had fought one another for centuries, contributing to an extraordinary period of peace, security, and prosperity. Unlike Rome, it did so not by conquest but by cooperation.

The importance of European unity becomes clearest when it begins to fracture. Brexit removed one of Europe’s largest powers from the Union. Six years after the referendum, Putin invaded Ukraine, apparently calculating, among other things, that a divided West would fail to respond decisively. Whether Brexit entered into that calculation is impossible to know, but the timing is at least worth noticing.

Perhaps the EU’s most interesting achievement is psychological. A Frenchman can be French and European, just as Marcus Aurelius could be Roman and a citizen of the world.

The Stoics would have gone further still, emphasising that, as well as French and European, the Frenchman was also, and above all, a citizen of the world.

The Stoics sometimes arrived at this insight by looking down upon human affairs as though from the heavens. Marcus Aurelius repeatedly adopts this ‘view from above’ in the Meditations. In Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, Scipio looks back upon the Earth from the Milky Way and is struck by how small the Roman Empire appears. From this far away, even Rome looks provincial.

What about the view from below? When we imagine an alien planet, we rarely imagine it to be divided into countries. We do not even stop to think: surely, the aliens would not be so backward.

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The Exiled Stoic Who Taught Epictetus

Musonius teaching
Be prepared to laugh. Musonius could be severe and hilarious in the same breath—a combination that made him one of antiquity’s most admired teachers.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

If Stoicism has a forgotten hero, it is Musonius Rufus.

Today, the names of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius are familiar to millions. But in antiquity, many regarded Musonius as the greatest Stoic teacher of them all. His lectures attracted students from across the Roman world, foremost among them Epictetus.

Unlike Seneca, Musonius wrote no polished essays. His philosophy was not intended for libraries but for life. He taught in public, argued fearlessly, endured repeated exile, and demonstrated by his example that philosophy is not something merely to discuss, but something to live.

For Musonius, philosophy was not an escape from ordinary life but a preparation for it. It taught people how to eat, work, marry, raise children, endure hardship, and come to terms with death. His school, he liked to say, was not some concert hall, where people came to be amused and entertained, but a hospital, where they came, in trepidation, to be treated.

Yet there was nothing gloomy about him. Though uncompromising in his principles, he possessed a wonderfully dry wit. When a man with a long beard claimed to be a philosopher, Musonius replied that he could see the beard—but not the philosopher.

Beginnings

Gaius Musonius Rufus (c. 25–c. 100 CE) was born in Etruria into a family of Roman equestrians.

As a young man, he went about inquiring into the health of people’s souls, suggesting that his sympathies then lay more with the Cynics than with the Stoics.

He later established himself in Rome as one of the most celebrated Stoic teachers of the age.

When, in 60 CE, the paranoid Nero banished Rubellius Plautus, a Stoic and distant cousin of Nero, Musonius followed his friend to Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) and only returned to Rome after Plautus’ death in 62.

Second and Third Exiles

When, in 65, Nero learnt of the Pisonian conspiracy, led by the senator Gaius Calpurnius Piso, to have him overthrown, he condemned nineteen people to death, including Seneca. Though not involved in the plot, Musonius was banished to the barren island of Gyaros, the Alcatraz of the Mediterranean.

Exile, however, seemed to weigh lightly upon him, even on Gyaros, and one of his surviving lectures is entitled, Why Exile Is Not an Evil.

Exile, he says, does not deprive us of water, earth, air, or the sun and stars. Nor does it deprive us of human companionship. But by removing us from luxurious living, it can cure our bodies and souls of many ills.

More significantly, exile does not prevent us from caring for our real needs and acquiring virtue. On the contrary, it provides us with more leisure in which to study and do good deeds.

Resourceful people are resourceful wherever they find themselves. Those who lack resourcefulness have vice, and not exile, to blame for their miseries. Ergo, it is vice, and not exile, that we should fear.

Musonius returned to Rome in 68, in the reign of Galba. In 70, in the reign of Vespasian, he accused and obtained the conviction of Egnatius Celer, who, despite calling himself a Stoic, had colluded with Nero in condemning the Stoic Barea Soranius and his daughter Servilia to death.

When, in 71, Vespasian banished all philosophers from Rome, his reputation rode so high that he was tolerated to remain—before being banished all the same into his third and longest exile, this time in Syria.

He returned to Rome in 79, in the reign of Titus, and died around 100 CE.

The Teacher of Philosophy

Musonius exerted an important influence on his two most famous pupils, Epictetus and the polymath Dio Chrysostom (‘Dio the Golden-Mouthed’).

To separate the wheat from the chaff, he would often turn would-be students away, explaining to the young Epictetus that ‘the more one pushes the intelligent person away from the life he was born for, the more he inclines towards it.’

His school, he insisted, was no place for clever performances. People came not to be entertained but to be cured. Because treatment can sometimes be painful, students might expect to suffer a bit. He measured the success of his lectures not by the applause that they received but by the shock and silence that they provoked.

He quoted Homer after Odysseus had related the length of his labours:

Thus he spoke, and they all stayed softly in silence,
And they were held by a magic spell in the shadowy hall.

Epictetus records Musonius saying:

Am I to sit down and tell you clever slogans and sayings so that you praise me as you leave, even though the shoulder is no better than it was, the head still hurts, and the abscess and fistula remain? Do young men leave home for these reasons and leave behind their parents, friends, kinfolk, and property so that they may yell ‘hooray’ when you utter witticisms? Did Socrates do this, or Zeno, or Cleanthes?

Musonius could be severe. By Epictetus’ own account, he once rebuked him for overlooking the omission in a syllogism (formal logical argument). Epictetus sought to excuse himself, saying, ‘It’s not like I burnt down the Capitol’—to which Musonius replied, ‘Idiot, the omission here is the Capitol.’

Nothing worthwhile, he insisted, is acquired without pain. But if we think that the path of virtue is too arduous, let us consider the alternatives and how much more trouble people put up with for the sake of gain or how many ills they suffer for the sake of fame, even though these things are worthless.

Practical Philosophy

Insofar as we know, Musonius did not work on anything for publication. However, two of his students wrote down his sayings and opinions. The Discourses, collected by a certain Lucius, form the basis of the 21 short lectures preserved in Stobaeus. But a second work, by one Pollio, has been lost except for fragments.

All in all, there remain 31 fragments (preserved in Stobaeus, Epictetus, and Aulus Gellius), as well as the 21 lectures, which altogether fit comfortably within 80 or so pages.

Musonius’ lectures are full of practical, everyday advice aimed at instilling virtue and include a lecture on home furnishings and even a lecture on hair. Men, he advised, ought to grow a beard on the grounds that the beard is the mark of manhood, on a par with a cock’s comb or a lion’s mane.

Besides facial hair, Musonius advocated a vegetarian diet (preferably raw and unprepared), plain clothing, and shelter of a kind that offers little more than the protection afforded by a cave.

He once gave a thousand sesterces to a man claiming to be a philosopher. When his friends protested that the fellow was a charlatan, he let him keep the not-inconsiderable sum, explaining that money was exactly what he deserved.

To do philosophy, said Musonius, is to reason correctly, and to reason correctly is to act correctly. The person who does philosophy thereby takes care of his country, family, and friends—in a word, everybody.

The person who does not do philosophy, even if he be a doctor, lawyer, or some such, is thoughtless, and thoughtlessness is very near to insanity.

Even if one rules only oneself, no one is more kingly than a philosopher or more fit to rule, because one cannot rule others unless one first rules oneself.

Musonius was not merely a teacher of Stoicism. He showed what a Stoic looked like.

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Did Rome’s Richest Man Live Up to His Philosophy?

The Death of Seneca
According to Tacitus, Seneca modelled his death on that of Socrates, discussing philosophy with his friends.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Few philosophers have lived a life as dramatic or conflicted as Seneca’s. The emperor Nero made him the richest man in the Roman Empire before ordering him to commit suicide.

Today, Seneca is our most important primary source on ancient Stoicism, followed by Epictetus, Musonius Rufus, and Marcus Aurelius.

Stoicism has exerted a profound influence on the history of ideas, shaping the thought of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Adam Smith, and J. S. Mill. In mental health, it inspired what has become the world’s most widely practised form of psychotherapy: cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT).

The Teacher’s Pet

Lucius Annaeus Seneca was probably born in 4 BCE, the same year as Jesus, in Corduba (modern-day Córdoba), Hispania.

His father, Seneca the Elder (Lucius Annaeus Seneca Maior), was a Roman equestrian who wrote books on rhetoric and Roman history. His elder brother Novatus, better known as Gallio, became a senator, and his younger brother Mela was the father of the poet Lucan.

Seneca was raised in Rome. His tutors included Attalus the Stoic, Sotion, and Papirius Fabianus. He so admired Attalus that he ‘practically laid siege to his classroom’. He was ‘the first to arrive and the last to leave’ and often left with the desire to be poor.

He suffered from poor health—possibly tuberculosis on a background of asthma—and, from his mid-twenties, spent several years convalescing in Alexandria, where he lived with his mother’s sister and her husband, Gaius Galerius, the governor of Egypt.

The three sailed back to Rome in 32, but Galerius perished in a shipwreck.

These early experiences of illness and uncertainty may help to explain Seneca’s lifelong preoccupation with adversity, mortality, and the best use of life.

Exile on Corsica

A few years after his return, Seneca was elected quaestor, making him a senator.

According to the historian Cassius Dio (d. c. 235 CE), Seneca, ‘who was superior in wisdom to all the Romans of his day and to many others as well,’ spoke so eloquently in the Senate that the emperor Caligula ordered his execution, only to stay the order after being told that he was in any case terminally ill.

In 41, the throne passed to Caligula’s uncle Claudius, and the new empress Messalina, seeking to eliminate a potential rival, accused Caligula’s sister Julia Livilla of adultery with Seneca. The Senate sentenced Seneca to death, but Claudius commuted the sentence to exile on Corsica.

On Corsica, Seneca wrote the Consolation to Polybius, a letter purporting to comfort Polybius, Claudius’ literary secretary, on the death of his brother, but more likely intended to flatter the emperor in the hope of being recalled from exile.

Tutor and Adviser to Nero

In 49, following the downfall of Messalina, Agrippina the Younger, a sister of Caligula and Julia Livilla, married her uncle Claudius, and had Seneca recalled to tutor her twelve-year-old son, Nero.

When the lad acceded to the throne in 54, Seneca became his adviser and, alongside the praetorian prefect Sextus Afranius Burrus, provided good government during the first five, relatively benign, years of his reign, the so-called quinquennium Neronis.

In 58, the senator Publius Suilius Rufus, who had been close to Claudius, began attacking Seneca with a series of accusations centred upon his rapid rise to fabulous wealth. ‘By what kind of wisdom or maxims of philosophy,’ he inveighed, ‘has Seneca within four years of royal favour amassed three hundred million sesterces?’ In response, Seneca prosecuted Suilius, who was banished to the Balearic Islands.

The charge has echoed down the centuries. How could a Stoic philosopher preach simplicity while becoming the richest man in Rome?

In 59, Nero had Agrippina murdered, and Seneca wrote the self-exculpatory speech that he delivered to the Senate, a speech so artful that the senators moved to congratulate the emperor upon his own mother’s murder.

Downfall and Suicide

But now the tide would turn against our man.

After the death of Burrus in 62, Seneca lost whatever remained of his restraining influence over Nero. Having read the runes, he twice petitioned to retire, once in 62 and again in 64, but Nero refused to cut him loose. Still, he contrived to spend almost all his time on his country estates, working, among others, on his Letters to Lucilius.

His prolonged absences from court may have stoked Nero’s suspicions. When, in 65, the Pisonian conspiracy to overthrow Nero came to light, the emperor condemned a first wave of nineteen people to death, among them Seneca and his nephew Lucan.

By the end of the year, Seneca, his two brothers, and the twenty-five-year-old Lucan had all four been made to commit suicide.

According to the historian Tacitus (d. 120 CE), Seneca modelled his death on that of Socrates, discussing philosophy with his friends and chiding them for their outbursts of emotion.

He slit one vein, and then another, and then a few more, but would not bleed enough to die. Now in considerable pain, he took some hemlock, but this too failed to do the deed. At last, to dilate his veins and ease the pain, he immersed himself in a hot bath and finally suffocated to death.

His wife Pompeia Paulina, whom he had married in later life, attempted to share his fate, but Nero ordered that she be rescued and bandaged up.

Legacy

Seneca had seen the writing on the wall, which is why he worked so assiduously in his final years, seeking, through the Letters, to make himself as immortal as any mortal can be.

Even his carefully staged suicide may have been a part of that immortality project. Tacitus hints as much when, having related Seneca’s last words to his friends, he writes, ‘After these and some similar remarks, which might have been meant for a wider audience…’

Upon his death, Seneca’s works were instantly popular and, according to Quintilian, were ‘in the hands of every young man’. Seneca has been read by most everyone since, including the ‘French Seneca’, Michel de Montaigne, who modelled his Essays upon the Letters.

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The Slave Who Inspired an Emperor

Epictetus the slave and Marcus Aurelius the emperor
Epictetus inspired not one but two of Rome’s greatest emperors: Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

A biography of the Roman slave who rose into one of the leading Stoic philosophers, inspired an emperor, and shaped modern psychotherapy.

Stoic philosophy has exerted a profound influence on the history of ideas, inspiring thinkers as diverse as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Adam Smith, and J. S. Mill.

Its influence extends far beyond philosophy. In the field of mental health, Stoicism inspired what has become the most widely practised form of talking treatment, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). Aaron Beck (d. 2021), the father of CBT, wrote that ‘the philosophical origins of cognitive therapy can be traced back to the Stoic philosophers.’

Epictetus, together with Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Musonius Rufus, is one of our principal sources on Stoicism. But whereas Marcus Aurelius ruled the greatest empire on earth, and Seneca rose into the wealthiest man in that empire, Epictetus began as a slave.

Yet his teachings came to shape an emperor, influence Christian and Islamic thought, inspire the founders of modern psychotherapy, and guide millions in the face of hardship and adversity.

So, how did a mere slave achieve all this?

Life as a Slave

Epictetus (c. 50–c. 135 CE) was born into slavery at Hierapolis, in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey). His name, in Greek, means something like ‘Acquired One’.

He spent his youth in Rome as a slave to Epaphroditus, a wealthy freedman and secretary to Nero. In 68, Epaphroditus assisted Nero in committing suicide (since Nero could not bring himself to plunge the dagger), with the deluded emperor lamenting, Qualis artifex pereo [‘What an artist dies in me!’].

In those early years, Epictetus, though a slave, discovered philosophy, and even managed to study under the charismatic Stoic Musonius Rufus. Musonius taught that philosophy is not merely something to be discussed but something to be lived—a lesson that Epictetus never forgot.

It is also around this time that he developed a disability, which may have owed to rheumatoid arthritis, although the Christian theologian Origen claims that it was his master who injured him.

One day, according to a famous anecdote, Epaphroditus lost his temper and grabbed Epictetus by the leg. He twisted it so forcefully that Epictetus warned him that it would break. When it snapped, Epictetus did not wince or cry, but calmly said, ‘Did I not tell you that it would break?’

Some time after Nero’s death, by virtue of his education or the dignity which it conferred upon him, Epictetus gained his civil freedom, having already acquired the far greater freedom of the mind.

Now a freedman, he taught philosophy in Rome.

Exile and the School at Nicopolis

When, in 94, Domitian banished all philosophers from the capital, Epictetus settled in Nicopolis, in Epirus, Greece, where he established a school and remained for the rest of his life.

Students travelled from across the Roman Empire to hear him speak. Among them was the young Arrian of Nicomedia, whose notes would preserve Epictetus’ teachings for posterity.

Like Musonius, Epictetus concentrated on ethics, arguing that physics and logic—the other two branches of ancient philosophy—ought to be in the service of practical action:

What do I care if matter is made up of atoms, indivisibles, or fire and earth? Isn’t it enough to know the nature of good and evil, the limits of desire and aversion, and of choice and refusal…?

The purpose of philosophy, he argued, is not to speculate about the stars but to learn how to live, ‘to practise how to remove from one’s life sighs and sorrow, grief and disappointment, and cries of “Alas!” and “Poor me!”’ This is largely a matter of according our will to the world, ‘so that nothing happens contrary to our wishes, and, conversely, nothing fails to happen that we want to happen.’

Hadrian, the future emperor, held Epictetus in the highest regard, and visited him, a former slave, in Nicopolis.

Epictetus’ Lamp

Epictetus did not marry or have children, despite urging these things upon others.

When he rebuked his friend and student Demonax for not marrying, Demonax sarcastically replied, ‘Very well, then, will you give me one of your daughters for a wife?’

However, in his retirement, Epictetus did, out of necessity, adopt the infant child of a friend, and raised him with the help of a woman.

His own needs remained remarkably modest. One day, the iron lamp by which he wrote was stolen. Reasoning that one can lose only what one has, he replaced it with a lamp of clay—which, after his death, was purchased at a great price by an admirer with no sense of irony.

The Discourses and Encheiridion

Epictetus wrote nothing himself. His teachings were recorded as the Discourses (or Diatribai) by his pupil Arrian of Nicomedia, also known for his account of the campaigns of Alexander the Great, written in a very different style.

In a prefatory note, Arrian writes: ‘Whatever I used to hear him say I wrote down, word for word, as best I could…’

He also claims that the Discourses ‘have somehow, without my knowledge or intention, fallen into the public’s hands.’

Such, in any case, is the public story. It is possible that Epictetus wrote the rather polished Discourses himself, with Arrian’s claimed authorship serving as a literary device to create an impression of spontaneity.

Whatever their precise origin, the Discourses remain unique in ancient philosophy. Rather than polished treatises, they preserve the atmosphere of a living classroom, with Epictetus questioning, teasing, rebuking… and constantly bringing philosophy back to the business of living.

Of the original eight books, only four have come down to us, and we also have the more portable Encheiridion, which is a digest of the Discourses—the word encheiridion [Greek, en+ kheir, literally, ‘in hand’]meaning something like ‘to have at hand’, originally with reference to a dagger or knife.

From Emperors to Modern Psychology

According to Origen, by the third century Epictetus’ renown exceeded that of Plato:

Plato is only found in the hands of those reputed to be philologists. By contrast, Epictetus is admired by ordinary people who have the desire to be benefited and who perceive improvement from his writings.

His influence spread far beyond the pagan world. In the ninth century, al-Kindi, the ‘Father of Arab Philosophy’, wrote a Device for Dispelling Sorrows which appears to have been influenced by Stoicism—for instance, in the contention that sorrow arises from thwarted desire, or that it is more a matter of convention than of nature.

In a striking analogy, which also features in the Encheiridion, al-Kindi compares life to a landfall during a much longer sea voyage back to our homeland, and warns us, as Epictetus did, not to get so caught up by the fruits and flowers as to forget about the ship.

Epictetus also left a lasting mark on modern psychology. In the first major work on rational emotive behaviour therapy (REBT), the forerunner of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), Albert Ellis (d. 2007) framed his project with a line from the Encheiridion: ‘Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them.’

The US fighter pilot James Stockdale (d. 2005) credited Epictetus with helping him survive more than seven years of imprisonment and torture in Vietnam, including four years in solitary confinement in a 3′ by 9′ concrete, windowless cell.

When his A-4 Skyhawk was shot down over North Vietnam, Stockdale remembered thinking to himself as he parachuted towards the jungle: ‘I’m leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus!’

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Two Ancient Paths to the Same Human Truths

The Stoic dog and cart
The Stoic dog and cart: we can run willingly alongside the wheel of fate, or resist and be dragged along anyway.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 14 August 2026.

The Stoic revival has picked up pace in recent years, with people looking for something more substantial than the material hedonism that has come to fill the space vacated by the retreat of organised religion.

Although more expressly rational, Stoicism has been compared to Buddhism, particularly Zen Buddhism, for being based on fluid concepts and flexible principles rather than blind faith and rigid dogma.

But the similarities do not end there.

Although Stoicism and Buddhism emerged at different times and a continent apart, they repeatedly arrive at strikingly similar conclusions about desire, attachment, suffering, and the good life.

Desire and Attachment

According to the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, the cause of all suffering is desire, and the natural way to eliminate this suffering is the Noble Eightfold Path. The first division of the Noble Eightfold Path is ‘right view’, or maintaining perspective on reality.

Similarly, the Stoics taught that we ought at every moment to be rational. Unfortunately, we are too readily waylaid from reason by unwise attachments and the destructive emotions to which they give rise. These attachments dangle the promise of pleasure or happiness but really offer only slavery—whereas, if only we could see it, nothing leads to pleasure and happiness as surely as reason and self-control.

In the words of Marcus Aurelius, which are all the more remarkable for coming from a Roman emperor:

Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone—those that are now, and those to come. Existence flows past us like a river… Nothing is stable, not even what’s right here. The infinity of past and future gapes before us—a chasm whose depths we cannot see. So it would take an idiot to feel self-importance or distress. Or any indignation, either. As if the things that irritate us lasted.

The language differs, but the insight is much the same. We suffer not only because things change, but because we demand that they remain as they are. For both traditions, the path to freedom is not to exert greater control over the world, but to loosen the world’s hold over us.

God and Fate

Stoic physics is indebted to Plato’s Timaeus, in which the philosopher Timaeus claims that God’s creation is itself a god. Human souls, being fashioned from the inferior residue of the world soul, are aligned with the will of God. But once implanted into a body, they are overwhelmed by sensations and affections, which they can only overcome through appropriate nurture and education.

Like Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, Stoicism rejects a separate divine sphere, arguing instead that God is infused in all things, including in us, who therefore share in His nature. We are, as the Stoic Epictetus often reminds us, a part or extension of God:

In conversation, exercise, discourse—do you remember that it is God you are feeding, God you are exercising? You carry God around with you and don’t know it, poor fool.

The Stoics were essentially pantheists, like Baruch Spinoza, who thought of God and creation as one and the same thing. And like that other great seventeenth-century philosopher, GW Leibniz, they believed that the universe is a rationally ordered whole and that everything that happens within it, if only we could see it, happens for the best of possible reasons.

Hence, our fate has already been determined: Instead of rebelling against it, we should be content to play the role that has been assigned to us. We are, said Zeno (the founder of Stoicism), like a dog tethered to a cart: the wise person runs smoothly alongside, whereas the fool struggles and strains but is dragged along anyway.

This is more subtle than simple fatalism. The dog cannot determine where the cart is going, but it can determine how it makes the journey. Its freedom consists in running willingly alongside the wheel of fate, instead of exhausting and injuring itself in futile resistance.

This echoes the Hindu concept of dharma, which can be translated, loosely, as ‘duty’. When Krishna addresses the reluctant warrior Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, he is not persuading him to fight so much as telling him that he is going to have to fight regardless:

Fettered by your own task, which springs from your nature, you will inevitably do what you in your folly do not want to do.

Evil and Liberation

Chrysippus, who succeeded Zeno and Cleanthes at the head of the Stoa, argued that evil is the inevitable consequence of nature’s goodness. For instance, many of the bones in the human skull are light and thin, improving it overall but by the same token leaving it vulnerable to blows. Evil presents us, as it did the hero Hercules, with opportunities to test and hone ourselves—and also a motive, for what would it mean to be good in a world without evil?

In Samkhya-Yoga, the world was created to purify souls and consciousness by providing them with experience and, in time, liberation. To put this more poetically, the world was created to show consciousness to itself. The doctrines of karma and moksha (liberation) could not hold in a world without evil.

Salvation, for the Stoic as for the Hindu, is to embrace life to the point of accepting fate, and so to become as one with the world. In Indian terms, it is to achieve moksha, that is, liberation from maya (illusion), dukkha (suffering), and samsara (the cycle of death and rebirth).

In the Encheiridion, Epictetus compares life to a landfall during a much longer sea voyage back to our homeland, and warns us not to get so caught up by the fruits and flowers as to forget about the ship.

For all their theoretical differences, the traditions keep arriving at the same practical conclusion: do not mistake the stopping place for the final destination.

Cosmopolitanism

Philosophers debate whether karma theory is a firm basis for morality or just an appeal to naked self-interest.

One way around this problem is to broaden the scope of karma to include thoughts as well as actions so that the system becomes impossible to game. Doing the right thing for the wrong reason is not the same, and does not feel the same, as doing it for the right reason. According to the Great Forest Upanishad, the truly virtuous act is the one that is desire-less. Like the Stoic archer, one must concentrate on doing the right thing, to the best of one’s ability, without being attached to the outcome.

For it is from attachment that life and misery arise.

The Buddha had another way around the problem, which is to deny the metaphysical distinction between the self and others—so that helping others is the same as helping oneself. 

The Stoics, too, believed that all human beings form part of a single organism. Just as our eyes, ears, and teeth each have a role to play in our body, so we too each have a role to play in society, even if it is only to serve as a warning to others.

‘Remember,’ says Seneca, ‘that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives, and dies.’

To live selfishly is fundamentally self-defeating. To feel alive and happy, we need to have a sense of working with others, for others—because, like ants and bees, that is the kind of creature that we are. If we do not contribute to our community, we will feel disconnected and depressed. In a word, we will feel dead—and, in truth, might as well be.

Both Buddhism and Stoicism conclude that the good life cannot be lived for oneself alone. Buddhism arrives at this conclusion through the dissolution of the boundary between self and other, Stoicism through the oneness of humanity. Although the working out is different, the conclusion is the same.

Time and again, Buddhists and Stoics begin from different assumptions, yet converge on the same human truths: that everything changes, that attachment enslaves us, that resistance compounds suffering, that the good life cannot be lived for oneself alone, and that the boundaries we draw around ourselves are much more porous than they may seem.

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