The Lucan trilogy: 3 — Stoic politics from Zeno to Seneca

[image: Cato Uticensis, by Josef Abel, 1817, Wikimedia]

Should we be politically active or withdraw into our personal and family life? This is a fundamental question that we all face, implicitly or explicitly, throughout our lives. Stoicism is often accused of being a self-centered philosophy, with little regard for social and political activism. Which is somewhat bizarre, given that the Stoics were explicitly cosmopolitans, and given the many…