Zeno of Citium

Zeno built the Stoic school on the claim that virtue alone is good and everything else, including pain and death, is indifferent. Cicero leans toward this position more than any other, yet he keeps testing it, unwilling to accept a system without examining its foundations. Zeno matters because he supplies the ethical framework the Tusculan Disputations keeps circling back to, the stern alternative to Epicurean pleasure and the closest Greek cousin to old Roman severity.