Stoic

Stoic symbols and meanings

A school without a sign.

Stoicism never had a symbol. Zeno taught under a painted colonnade in Athens, and the only sign he is recorded making is a gesture with his hand. The school's later readers, Roman, medieval and modern, supplied the pictures: a skull under a builder's level in a Pompeian dining room, Fortune's wheel in a prisoner's consolation, four virtues given objects to hold in a chapel in Padua, and, in our own time, coins and tattoos that borrow from all of these. This cabinet holds six marks. Two are Stoic in the strict sense, a teaching gesture and a teaching diagram, both preserved only in words. Two are Roman commonplaces the Stoics argued with. One is a building. One is a list. Each page says first what the thing is and where it comes from, and only then what the Stoic revival has asked it to mean. The emblems of living organisations, Daily Stoic medallions, the Philadelphia Stoa's torch and sigma, are described on this page and not drawn.

Coins and letterheads came later. They are named below and left undrawn, because a living group still holds them.

6 marks in the lexicon. A symbol can sit in more than one tradition. The page says which use is which.

Start here. Memento mori. It is the picture a reader is most likely to arrive with. The page begins at the Pompeii mosaic.

• Memento moriRemember that you have to die. The oldest complete picture of it is a level, a skull, and a wheel.
• The four virtuesFour names for one good character. Later centuries put an object in each hand.
• Zeno’s handOpen palm, curled fingers, a fist, then a fist held shut. A lesson you can do with one hand.
• The StoaA painted porch in Athens. The school is named after the building, not after a badge.
• Wheel of FortuneA wheel that puts the crowned on the bottom. The Stoics told you not to care. The picture stayed anyway.
• Hierocles’ circlesA person as nested rings, from the mind out to the whole human race. The work is to pull the outer rings in.