Stoicism is named after a painted porch in the Athens marketplace
Around 300 BCE, Zeno of Citium taught in the open, under a colonnade decorated with battle scenes on the north side of the Athenian Agora. That Painted Porch, the Stoa Poikile, gave the movement its name. The school would last until the 3rd century CE and count a Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius, among its followers.
Zeno's ideas grew from the Cynics, introduced to him by Crates of Thebes; the Cynic founder Antisthenes had studied under Socrates. Zeno deliberately taught in a public place, which set him apart from the Epicureans. The school was at first called Zenonism, a label soon dropped, probably because Stoics refused to treat any founder as perfectly wise and wanted to avoid a personality cult. After Cleanthes, the third head, Chrysippus, did most to shape the system.
Stoics split philosophy into logic, physics and ethics, and claimed to be more thoroughly systematic than any rival school. They believed the universe runs on reason, or logos. Their ethics made virtue the only true good and aimed at eudaimonia, a flourishing life, reached by living in agreement with nature, meaning in line with reason and the rational order of the cosmos. Fear, anxiety and violent passions were treated as errors of judgment to be corrected through steady practice.
Logic mattered more than its dry reputation suggests. For the Stoics it covered language, grammar, rhetoric and the theory of knowledge, and they held that ethics was impossible without it. Chrysippus built a propositional logic that analysed whole statements rather than terms, making it one of the two great logical systems of antiquity alongside Aristotle's.
Historians divide the school into Early, Middle and Late phases. Nothing complete survives from the first two; what remains comes from Romans of the Late Stoa, including Seneca, Epictetus and the emperor Marcus Aurelius. The classicist Gilbert Murray remarked that nearly all of Alexander's successors called themselves Stoics. Once the Roman state adopted Christianity in the 4th century CE the school waned, but it resurfaced as Neostoicism in the Renaissance and helped inspire modern cognitive therapies.
Source: Stoicism
