The thousand-year silence
How Stoicism and Epicureanism nearly vanished—and why we got them back
Shortly after the beginning of my Stoic journey I met a delightful person and an excellent scholar, who immediately had a major impact on my thinking about philosophy as a way of life: Larry Becker, the author of A New Stoicism, still today (in my mind) the most serious attempt to bring back and update Stoic philosophy for modern living.
Larry made an interesting point early on in his book: some philosophies, like Buddhism or Confucianism, have experienced an essentially uninterrupted evolution from their inception until now. As a result, they have slowly adapted to the times, responding to changes in culture and to progress in both philosophy and science. Not so Stoicism and, for that matter, all the other Hellenistic philosophies. They got “interrupted” from about the third century to the Renaissance, when they were rediscovered by the humanists. After that, they experienced ups and downs throughout the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and some of them are now reemerging as forces of counter-culture in the context of an hyper-technological, ultra-consumerist 21st century.
The obvious question is: what happened? I think it’s safe to say that scholars generally agree that the decline of Stoicism, Epicureanism, and other philosophies of life after the second century CE was not a sudden collapse but rather a gradual displacement by competing systems of thought – specifically Neoplatonism and Christianity – against a backdrop of shifting Roman social and political values.
By the end of the second century (Marcus Aurelius died in 180 CE), the golden age of Roman Stoicism began to fade, and Epicureanism, which had already faced centuries of social stigma, largely disappeared from the public record by the fourth century.
The most significant philosophical factor was likely the emergence of Neoplatonism, founded by Plotinus in the third century. Neoplatonism offered a more grand and metaphysical system that effectively swallowed its competitors. While Stoicism and Epicureanism were materialist philosophies, believing that only matter is real, Neoplatonism was idealist. In a period of increasing social instability, people found the Neoplatonic focus on a transcendent, spiritual reality more comforting than the comparatively grim Stoic focus on duty or the Epicurean emphasis on mere avoidance of pain.
That said, Neoplatonists didn’t just argue against Stoicism, they absorbed its ethics. They integrated Stoic ideas of virtue and self-control into their own spiritual framework, making a standalone Stoic school feel somewhat redundant.
Neoplatonists (and later Christians) were also fiercely hostile to Epicureanism because of its “atheism” (really, denial of divine providence) and its pursuit of “pleasure.” This led to a halt in the copying of Epicurean texts, which is why so little of their original writings survives.
Meanwhile, as Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire (with the Edict of Thessalonica, issued by the emperors Theodosius I, Gratian, and Valentinian II in 380 CE), it provided a religious and community-based alternative to the secular salvation offered by philosophy.
Still, many early Christian thinkers, like Tertullian and Augustine of Hippo, admired Stoic ethics. Concepts like the Logos (universal reason) and the focus on internal moral character were easily adapted into Christian theology. Because Christianity offered a similar moral rigor but with the promise of eternal life, it effectively out-competed Stoicism and was gradually adopted by the Roman elite.
By contrast, Christianity and Epicureanism were fundamentally at odds. The Epicurean denial of an afterlife, its rejection of a creator God, and its belief in a universe of random atoms were seen as heretical by Christians. Epicurean communities, which were already insular, eventually withered under the pressure of a Christianized state.
We also have to keep in mind that the Roman world of the third-century experienced a crisis that made it vastly different from the stable world of the early Empire. There was a retreat to the internal world, so to speak. In times of extreme political chaos and plague, the rationalistic, common-sense approach of the Hellenistic schools felt insufficient and people sought salvation and mysticism rather than virtue and tranquility. Moreover, unlike the Academy or the Lyceum, Stoicism and Epicureanism often relied on the patronage of the Roman elite. As that elite class was decimated by civil wars or converted to Christianity, the financial and social structures supporting these schools vanished.
All of the above notwithstanding, thank Zeus a number of Stoic and Epicurean texts survived the Neoplatonist / Christian onslaught. How did that happen? It’s a story of two very different paths: one of partial preservation through selective admiration (Stoicism) and one of near-total erasure followed by a miraculous archaeological recovery (Epicureanism).
Stoicism suffered a massive loss of its foundational early Stoa texts from Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrysippus and others, but its later Roman works (especially Seneca and Epictetus) survived because they were useful to the Christian world.
The early Stoics were prolific – Chrysippus alone wrote over 700 books, we are told by the commentator Diogenes Laertius in his Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. However, possibly because of their heavy focus on logic and physics (which were respectively replaced by Aristotelian logic and Christian cosmology), they stopped being copied. As a result, almost all the early Stoa works are now lost, surviving only as fragments cited by other authors.
