Hellenistic Age: Cynic, Stoic, and Epicurean

Hellenism or Hellenization refers to the promotion of ancient Greek ideals in both the organization of personal life and accomplishments in the civic realm. Hellenistic philosophy is a blanket name covering a variety of philosophical schools that mushroomed during the time of Alexander the Great and the late 2^nd century. This is no doubt because Alexander himself was Hellenized, thanks to his teacher, Aristotle. Alexander had a staunch believe that Hellenization was a desirable policy and used it to expand dominion. Of the many philosophical schools that existed during this time, three schools had a lot of influence. That is, Cynic, Stoic, and Epicurean schools.

The cynics belonged to a school of philosophy founded in 400 B.C by the philosopher Antisthenes. The driving force behind this school was the principle of separation from the material world. their believe was that human could not draw happiness from material possessions but only from the enlightenment of one’s spirit. Diogenes is one of the most famous cynics who spend his life next to a barrel with almost no possessions. One day, a rich king told Diogenes that he’ll provide anything the philosopher wanted but he solemnly asked the king to move out of the way of the sun which was pleasant and warm(World History: People & Nations : Modern World, 2000).

The Stoics’ origin is dated back to 300 B.C, after being founded by Zeno, the philosopher. Of all the other schools, this had the largest number of followers. Their main belief was the idea of universal common sense. Additionally, Stoicism stated that the cosmos is driven by fatalistic laws and our best bet to happiness is to resign our beings to fate.

Epicureans was founded in 341 BC in Athens. They combined the pleasure ethic by Aristippus with the atom theory by Democritus. From the two, they hypothesized that pleasure has to be weighed against its side effects with greater outcomes being put into consideration.

References

World History: People & Nations : Modern World. Austin: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2000. Print.