Literature and

history come.

Hello and Hello and welcome to literature and history.

Episode 66, Stoicism, Seneca, St. Paul.

For several centuries, Stoicism was the most pervasive philosophical school in the ancient

Mediterranean.

Born in Athens in about 300 B.C.E. Stoicism would, over the next 500 years alone, captivate countless prominent historical

figures.

Among them, Cicero, Virgil, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, St. Ambrose, and quite possibly St. Paul.

This program will introduce you to the roots and the rise of Stoicism in the ancient Mediterranean,

culminating in the Stoic philosophy of Seneca in the years between

65 and 75 CE, one of the most important decades in all literary history for reasons we'll

soon discuss.

Stoicism is a complex subject for many reasons.

In investigating the first two centuries of Stoicism's history, we encounter a web of mostly secondary sources which sometimes include

contradictory accounts of Stoicism's founding fathers.

During the first century CE, as we begin to have more primary sources from the Stoic canon,

we encounter figures with very different intellectual capacities and philosophical interests,

some interested in ethics, some in logic and dialectics, and others still in

stoic physics and theology. But what's most challenging of all to me is that in the

Anglophone world we are still living in a period dominated by

stoic ideas even if we don't know it. Like the Stoics and before them Socrates we try to pursue

...