It has been nearly 2,000 years since sober men in togas gathered at Rome's central market, coaching each other to put aside worldly wants and walk a straight and moral path. Now -- in a time of presidential hanky-panky, 24-hour entertainment and murky social values -- their ancient creed is being resurrected.
Stoicism is back for a small but growing group of adherents, thanks to the unlikely convergence of America's most biting chronicler of pop culture and one of its most celebrated Vietnam War prisoners.
Boost from book
The renaissance of the classical philosophy got a boost last year when novelist Tom Wolfe made the ancient philosopher Epictetus and his teachings a leitmotif in his best-selling novel "A Man in Full." From the discourses of the former slave, at least two of Wolfe's characters learned to value personal integrity over material gain.
That philosophy has blossomed in scores of small ways -- from the bookstores that now sell Stoic philosophy to businessmen, to the increasing correspondence on the World Wide Web.
"It has been astonishing," says Sharon Lebell, a Marin County, Calif., writer whose book on the Stoics has been revived of late. "Suddenly, interest in Stoicism has been galvanized."
Stoicism was born three centuries before the birth of Jesus, when Zeno of Citium started a school around a covered colonnade, or stoa, at the central market in Athens.
What began as a radical counterpoint to the loose moral temper of the times evolved into a complex doctrine that thrived for at least five centuries and influenced the early Christian patriarchs.
Despite apparent chaos, the Stoics believed that the universe is rational, its events predetermined. They did not believe in an afterlife, but thought men could exercise their internal divinity by behaving rationally and controlling their passions. Men could free themselves from preoccupations such as wealth and status, the Stoics said, by following an inner creed.
Epictetus personified the Stoic ideal. Born about A.D. 55 as a slave in the eastern reaches of the Roman empire, he flourished as one of the philosophy's greatest teachers.
"Things themselves don't hurt or hinder us. Nor do other people," Epictetus said. "It is our attitudes and reactions that give us trouble. We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can choose how we respond to them."
