The “goal” of life in stoicism, as in Greek philosophy generally, is happiness (“Eudaimonia”). Since the stoics accept many of the same formal conditions of happiness as Plato and Aristotle, it might seem that their ethics should be viewed principally as an attempt to improve on the arguments of these predecessors. That background, however, is insufficient to explain the stoics’ thesis that happiness is constituted solely by ethical virtue. In defending this thesis the stoics looked back to Socrates, as interpreted by the cynics, but neither Socrates nor the cynics can account for the distinctive stoic specification of happiness–a life “in agreement with nature.”
