DIFFUSION AND DIMINUTION

Of all the ancient philosophies, Stoicism has probably had the most diffused but also the least explicit and adequately acknowledged influence on western thought. No secular books were more widely read during the Renaissance than Cicero's On Duties (De officiis), the Letters and Dialogues of Seneca, and the Manual of Epictetus. Thomas More's Utopians define virtue as 'life in accordance with nature', and this is characteristic of the way slogans and concepts of Stoic ethics were eclectically appropriated from about 1500 to 1750. Neo-Stoicism (capitalized) is a term often used to refer to currents of thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it is quite appropriate to such figures as Lipsius and du Vair. Yet, despite the Stoic traces in Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Rousseau, Grotius, Shaftesbury, Adam Smith, and Kant (traces that modern scholars are increasingly detecting), Neo-Stoicism scarcely had an identifiable life comparable to Medieval Aristotelianism, Renaissance and later Scepticism, seventeenth-century Epicureanism, or Renaissance Platonism and the Cambridge Platonists. It was not determinate enough to mark a whole period or intellectual movement.