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porridge’ and demanded that he carry it through the streets of Athens, but then Crates smashed the bowl with his stick, causing the contents to splatter all over Zeno’s body. ‘The porridge ran all down his legs,’ Laertius tells us, whereupon Zeno ran away in embarrassment. ‘Why do you run away [when] you have done no harm?’, Crates called after him teasingly, mocking Zeno’s belief that he had grounds for feeling ashamed. When Zeno began to teach philosophy himself, he did so under the stoa poikile, the ‘painted porch’ on the north side of the ancient agora of Athens – hence the label ‘Stoic’. The school’s influence subsequently spread to Rome, and it is these later Roman Stoics – above all Epictetus, Seneca the Younger, and Marcus Aurelius – whose works have survived.
    From their earliest days, Stoic teachings emphasised the fundamental importance of reason. Nature had bestowed uniquely upon humans, the Stoics argued, the capacity to reason, and therefore a ‘virtuous’ life – meaning a life proper and fitting to a human – entailed living in accordance with reason. TheRoman Stoics added a psychological twist: living virtuously in accordance with reason, they argued, would lead to inner tranquility –’a state of mind’, writes the scholar of Stoicism William Irvine, ‘marked by the absence of negative emotions, such as grief, anger, and anxiety, and the presence of positive emotions, such as joy.’ And here lies the essential difference between Stoicism and the modern-day ‘cult of optimism’. For the Stoics, the ideal state of mind was tranquility, not the excitable cheer that positive thinkers usually seem to mean when they use the word ‘happiness’. And tranquility was to be achieved not by strenuously chasing after enjoyable experiences, but by cultivating a kind of calm indifference towards one’s circumstances. One way to do this, the Stoics argued, was by turning towards negative emotions and experiences; not shunning them, but examining them closely instead.
    If this focus on negativity seems perverse, it may help to consider the life circumstances of the Stoics themselves. Epictetus was born into slavery in what is now Turkey; though later freed, he died crippled as a result of his masters’ brutal treatment. Seneca, by contrast, was the son of a nobleman, and enjoyed a stellar career as a personal tutor to the Roman Emperor. But that ended abruptly when his employer – who, unfortunately, was the deranged Nero – suspected Seneca of plotting against him, and ordered him to commit suicide. There seems to have been little evidence for Nero’s suspicions, but by that point he had already murdered his mother and step-brother, and gained a reputation for burning Christians in his gardens after dark to provide a source of light, so he can hardly be accused of acting out of character. Seneca, the story goes, tried to do as he was told, by cutting open his veins to bleed himself to death. But he failed to die, and so asked to be fed poison; this, too, failed to kill him. It was only when he took a suffocatinglysteamy bath that he finally expired. Perhaps it is unsurprising that a philosophy emerging from such circumstances as Epictetus’s – or in a context where a fate such as Seneca’s awaited even those of noble birth, if their luck ran out – would not incline towards positive thinking. Where was the merit in trying to convince yourself that things would turn out for the best, when there was so much evidence that they might not?
    Yet it is a curious truth that the Stoics’ approach to happiness through negativity begins with exactly the kind of insight that Norman Vincent Peale might endorse: that when it comes to feeling upbeat or despondent, it’s our beliefs that really matter. Most of us, the Stoics point out, go through life under the delusion