2 ms·

I wonder if stoicism was promoted by the ruling class in back in the day in order to prevent uprisings. These people should read Gramsci.

• somenameforme 3y ago
  It wasn't promoted. Philosophy in Ancient Greece was quite a lot different in that people were expected to develop their own sort of philosophy of life. Stoicism was just one among many ideological systems that kind of competed but really just more or less all co-existed - with just a bit of murder here and there, along with people's own personal interpretations on everything. It's only in this context that otherwise inexplicable things like the Pythagorean math cult [1], of Pythagorus, can make more sense. This also applied to the 'ruling class' who would often have wildly divergent beliefs and values. IMO it this extreme diversity and freedom of thought that helped the Ancient Greeks make such incredibly rapid intellectual progress in basically every domain. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoreanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoreanism