Stoicism is not an attitude of resignation in the face of fate, but an active method for cultivating strength of soul, mental clarity, and right action.
The Origins of Stoicism
The Distant Origins of Spiritual and Philosophical Thought
More often than not, we begin any study of Stoicism with Zeno of Citium. But to me, something even more fascinating lies beneath that starting point: imagining Stoicism as the result of an earlier pollination.
Stoicism was born with Zeno. He is its founder, its architect.
And yet, when you have lingered a little too long in second-hand bookshops, you begin to glimpse what came before; you begin to sense that the thought of this man, who walked the lands of a still deeply fragmented civilization some 2,500 years ago, must have been shaped, just as your own thinking is today, by a mind already nourished by unfathomable spiritual and philosophical lineages, themselves rooted in something older still.
So let us begin there.
From the far lands of time.
For long before philosophy was called philosophy, long before the Greeks, human beings, who began to think and organize themselves around 70,000 years ago 1, had already begun, from the earliest days of history, when our ancestor Homo sapiens ventured beyond his cradle in Africa, to wonder about the great questions of the world and of being:
Who are we?
What governs the world?
What happens after death?
What is the right way to live?
These questions are older than Greece itself.
They are
human.
We have no direct traces left of those ages now lost to oblivion. So we must accelerate—at tremendous speed—from the first hominid:
past the Paleolithic, from 2.5 million years ago to 10,000 BCE,
through the Mesolithic, from 10,000 to 8,000 BCE,
through the Neolithic, from 8,000 to 3,000 BCE.
All that time, over those two, nearly three million years, the human brain was taking shape. Slowly. Gradually. And then one day, a man or a woman, fully awake in their human consciousness, asked a question that still echoes—almost unchanged—in the gray matter of your own brain, all this time later.
From the indigenous tribes of the American continent to the peoples of the Far East, those who lifted their eyes to the night sky, pierced by the mystery of the world surrounding them, were asking the very same questions. Questions that stirred restless minds, eager to be awakened and shaped.
If we trace the threads far enough back, we arrive at the Achaeans, a proto-Greek people who, driven out of Asia Minor during the second millennium BCE, settled in the Hellenic peninsula and helped give form and substance to the Greek language and its mythology. 2
And so, long before Zeno,
long before Socrates or Marcus Aurelius, long even before you, the reader, there were men and women living and thinking in the ancient Near East, in what was once called the land between the rivers—the Fertile Crescent: Mesopotamia 3. Three thousand years before Christ, human beings were already beginning to articulate and transmit, within their communities, moral and cosmological systems: the earliest stirrings of structured human thought. Where complex societies were taking shape, where laws became the framework of collective life, the very idea of justice emerged alongside the invention of writing itself; cuneiform in Mesopotamia, hieroglyphics in Egypt.
Words become the standardized vehicle for the transmission of thought.
Oral tradition endures, but something new now enters the scene: preservation.
From preservation comes reflection.
From reflection comes the shaping of what is just, and what is not.
This is where it begins.
Five thousand years ago.
Historians tell us that one of the earliest treatises ever written, one of the first practical and theoretical guides aimed at moral and spiritual elevation, emerged in the Nile Valley, during the Old Kingdom of ancient Egypt. It is known as The Instruction of Ptahhotep, composed around 2000 BCE. In it, a seasoned dignitary seeks to pass on to his son a series of hard-won counsels. Not distant animistic rites inherited from obscure traditions, but something far more intimate and practical: a guide to how to be. How to practice humility. How to respond to aggression. How to moderate one’s desires.
Behind these practical writings stood Ma’at 4, a foundational concept that undergirded everything else, and one that would later echo at the very heart of Stoic doctrine: cosmic alignment. Harmony with nature. The interweaving of destiny with the world.
The acceptance
of what happens to us.
Ma’at is no longer merely a god. It does not need to be personified. Ma’at is truth, justice, uprightness.
A principle of balance.
The distant and illustrious ancestor of the Logos of the Greek philosophers.
And then, around 1000 BCE, another text enters history. Born from the ancient kingdom of Babylon, a fallen city itself heir to distant civilizations that, for most of us, have become little more than abstract names, and yet silently helped shape what we are: the Sumerians 5 and the Akkadians 6. This is the Babylonian Theodicy, a dialogue in which two voices wrestle with the injustice of the world: why do the wicked seem to prosper, while the decent suffer? It is an early attempt to reconcile divine order with lived reality, destiny with the fragile lives of human beings.
The Pre-Socratics — Searching for the First Principle
To live well meant to live in accordance with Ma’at. To lie, to exploit, to disturb the balance was, in itself, to fall out of alignment with the very structure of reality.
Elsewhere in the world, during what a German philosopher 7 once called the Axial Age, a pivotal era in which new modes of thought emerged across distant civilizations, fresh currents of reflection began to unfold:
In China, with Confucius and Laozi, and the birth of Taoism;
in India, with Buddhism and Jainism;
in Persia, with Zarathustra;
in Palestine;
and finally, in the West.
