The Stoic Reworking of Virtue as the Sole Good

Stoicism was founded in Athens around 300 BCE by Zeno of Citium (c. 334-262 BCE), who taught in the Stoa Poikile, the "Painted Porch," from which the school took its name; his successors as head of the school, Cleanthes of Assos and then Chrysippus of Soli (c. 279-206 BCE), whose voluminous, now largely lost writings systematized Stoic logic, physics, and ethics into a rigorous whole, are credited by the later biographer Diogenes Laertius (Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book VII) with having given the school its definitive doctrinal shape. Against Aristotle's inclusion of external goods within eudaimonia, the Stoics held a starkly monistic position: virtue alone is good and vice alone is evil, while everything else commonly valued or feared — health, wealth, reputation, even life and death themselves — belongs to the class of "indifferents" (adiaphora), things that contribute nothing to happiness properly understood, though some indifferents, such as health, are nonetheless rationally "preferred" (proegmena) and others, such as sickness, "dispreferred" (apoproegmena).