Scant Historical Record.

In the six centuries between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.E. and the emperor Constantine (312–337 C.E.) the dominant philosophy that commanded the allegiance of thinking people was Stoicism—named for the Stoa Poikile (Painted Stoa) where Zeno of Citium first taught the philosophy. The early development of this philosophy was not preserved in written texts until about 100 C.E., when a disciple of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, Arrian, wrote a memoir of his master's conversations with his students and published them as Discourses. Arrian was a Roman official and a soldier with literary tastes, and a man of his position may have had a slave trained in shorthand who could take notes while Epictetus and his students conversed. After Epictetus, the Meditations of the emperor Marcus Aurelius is the last expression of Stoic philosophy. The blanks in the...