Founded by Zeno of Citium (334–262 BC), early Stoicism shared many similarities with Epicureanism, including the belief that the world was largely deterministic and that the overall goal of the ethical life consisted in the resigned acceptance of this fact. Unlike the Epicureans however, the Stoics maintained that the evolution of the world was predetermined by the divine will (rather than purely mechanical) and that virtue consists in acting according to this plan (rather than avoiding unnecessary risk). Such a view naturally leads to an indifference toward everyday concerns. Pleasure and pain are irrelevant. Only virtue matters, and the truly wise man who acts according to the divine plan is thus one who is free from his
passions and concerned only with being virtuous. By contrast, such a metaphysical position encourages a degree of epistemological optimism, and the Stoics anticipated later views that reliable knowledge could be either built up from self-evident acts of perception (Empiricism) or would be deduced from indubitable innate principles (Rationalism).
Stoicism became extremely influential in both the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, particularly in the work of Cicero (106–43 BC) and Marcus Aurelius (121–180), but primarily as an ethical doctrine largely stripped of its metaphysical and epistemological elements.
