“A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.”
It has been said that the Stoic Philosophy first showed it's real value when it passed from Greece to Rome. The doctrine of Zeno of Citium and his successors were well suited to the gravity and practical good sense of the Romans .
In the wretched times from the death of Augustus to the murder of Domitian, there was nothing but the Stoic philosophy which could console and support the followers of the old religion under imperial tyranny and amidst general corruption.
The two best expounders of the later Stoical philosophy were a Greek freed slave and a Roman emperor. Epictetus, a Phrygian Greek, was brought to Rome, we know not how, but he was a slave and afterwards a freedman of an unworthy master. Epaphroditus by name, himself a freedman and a favourite of Nero.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, the author of "Meditations", Roman emperor from 161 to 180 AD and the last of the Five Good Emperors, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, this term was coined by Machiavelli in 1503 in his Discourses . Even though Antoninus based himself almost entirely in Epictetus, their method is completely different. Epictetus adressed himself to his hearers in a continuous manner. Antoninus wrote down his reflection for his own use only, in short unconnected paragraphs which are often obscure.
“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
The Stoics made three divisions of philosophy, Physic, καθάρσιο, Ethic, ηθική, Logic, λογική. This division, we are told by Diogenes, was made by Zeno of Citium, the founder of the Stoic sect, and by Chrysippus, but these philosophers placed the three divisions in the following order: Logic, Physic, Ethic. It appears however, that this division was made before Zeno's time and acknowledged by Plato, as Cicero remarks. Logic is not synonymous with our term of Logic in the narrower sense of the word.
In the midst of war, pestilence, conspiracy, general corruption and with the height of so unwieldy an empire upon him, we may easily comprehend that Antoninus often had need of all his fortitude to support him. The best and the bravest men have moments of doubt and of weakness, but if they are the best and the bravest, they rise again from their depression by recurring to first principles, as Antoninus does. He constantly recurs to his fundamental principle that the universe is wisely ordered, that every man is a part of it and must conform to that order which he cannot change, that whatever the Deity has done is good, that all mankind are a man's brethren, that he must love and cherish them and try to make them better, even those who would do him harm. This is his conclusion.
"What then is that which is able to conduct a man? One thing and one thing only, Philosophy. But this consists in keeping the divinity within a man free from violence and unharmed, superior to pains and pleasures, doing nothing without a purpose nor yet falsely and with hypocrisy, not feeling the need of another man's doing or not doing anything; and besides, accepting all that happens and all that is allotted as coming from thence, wherever it is, from whence he himself came; and, finally, waiting for death with a cheerful mind as being nothing else than a dissolution of the element of which every living being is compounded. But if there is no harm in the elements themselves in each continually changing into another, why should a man have any apprehension about the change and dissolution of all elements? For it is according to nature, and nothing is evil that is according to nature."
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