ABSTRACT
Stoicism was a philosophical school established at Athens in the third century B.C. It won adherents throughout the Greco-Roman world until about the end of the second century A.D. Although it went through various doctrinal developments, it assumed a fairly definitive form under its third head, Chrysippus (c. 280-207 B.C.). Since its physical theories represented the universe as a structure with an order and a purpose, it proved basically compatible with traditional religious ideas, in contrast with Epicureanism, in which the gods had no influence on the universe. Stoicism, in fact, created the most intimate relationship between science, in the sense of cosmology, and religious thought of any ancient philosophical system, and in later antiquity it inspired memorable responses from writers like Seneca (c. 4 B.C.–A.D. 65), Epictetus (c. A.D. 55-c. 135), and Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121-80).
