ABSTRACT
Stoicism, while in origin contemporaneous with Epicureanism, had a longer history and less constancy in doctrine. Stoicism is less Greek than any school of philosophy with which we have been hitherto concerned. The early Stoics were mostly Syrian, the later ones mostly Roman. Zeno was a Phoenician, born at Citium, in Cyprus, at some time during the latter half of the fourth century b.c. It seems probable that his family were engaged in commerce, and that business interests were what first took him to Athens. Virtue was what he thought important, and he only valued physics and metaphysics in so far as they contributed to virtue. He attempted to combat the metaphysical tendencies of the age by means of common sense, which, in Greece, meant materialism. Zeno believed that there is no such thing as chance, and that the course of nature is rigidly determined by natural laws.
