Stoics

Stoics, a sect of philosophers of ancient Greece founded by Zeno of Elea, who taught in the Stoa Poecile, or "Painted Colonnade" of the Agora at Athens. They inculcated the pursuit of active virtue as the snpreme good, with complete repression of all passions and emotions. They explained the universe by a materialistic pantheism, heat or fire being the actuating and divine principle. Though nominally maintaining human freedom, they made it consist only in conscious submission to the universal reign of law in nature, and were in fact strict "determinists." [CHRYSIPPUS, CLEANTHES, ANTONINUS.]