Hierocles and the Circles We Live In
Hierocles rarely gets mentioned next to Seneca or Marcus Aurelius, yet he left one of Stoicism’s warmest ideas: that we live inside concentric circles of belonging, from ourselves to the whole human race. His advice is simple and practical: begin where you are, and pull the others a little closer.
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| Hierocles, the Stoic philosopher who taught us to draw the circles of care closer. |
Most of us know the big names of Stoicism: Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius. Hierocles rarely gets a mention, and that is a pity. We know almost nothing about his life. He taught in the early second century AD, probably under Hadrian, and for a long time he survived only as scattered quotations in a later anthology by Stobaeus. Then, in 1901, scholars in Berlin published a papyrus fragment from Egypt containing part of his Elements of Ethics. A philosopher who had been little more than a few borrowed paragraphs suddenly had a voice of his own — though a damaged one, with holes where the worms and the centuries had been.
What that papyrus preserves is a surprisingly warm idea. Hierocles asks where our sense of belonging begins, and his answer is that it begins with ourselves. Every living creature, he argues, is aware of itself from the moment it is born. A chick, a lamb, a human baby does not have to be taught to protect its own body. A chick does not need a lecture on claws, and a young animal does not learn what its horns are for. This self-awareness is not a single act of recognition but a continuous presence that stays with us as long as we live.
From this grows what the Stoics called oikeiosis — usually translated as “appropriation” or “familiarization.” We come to feel that certain things are our own, and then we feel that other things are our own too. First comes the body, then the people who feed us, then everyone else.
Hierocles gave this idea its most famous image, and it is the reason anyone still reads him. Picture a set of concentric circles drawn around each of us. The innermost circle is the mind itself. The next holds our parents, siblings, spouse, and children. After that come the wider family, then neighbors and fellow townspeople, then those from nearby towns, then our countrymen, and finally the whole human race. Most people pour their care into the inner rings and treat the outer ones with indifference, or even suspicion. A stranger two countries away barely registers.
A lesser teacher might have scolded us for this. Hierocles takes a quieter route. He says the task of a well‑tempered person is to draw the circles toward the center — to treat those in the outer rings as if they belonged to the inner ones. He suggests small, almost domestic habits. Call your cousins “brothers” and your uncles “fathers,” as though they were closer than they are. Do not insist that the distance between you and a relative is a matter of the family tree. Let the language of closeness do some of the work, and let the feeling follow.
I like this because it is so practical. Hierocles does not ask us to love eight billion people with the same intensity — which would be impossible and a little dishonest. He accepts that we are built with a center and a periphery. What he asks is that we keep moving the boundary. It is a discipline of attention more than a doctrine, the sort of thing a person could try tomorrow morning at the bus stop or on a call with a distant relative.
It also fits with the larger Stoic picture of the world as one city shared by gods and humans. Cosmopolitanism could easily have stayed an abstraction, a lofty phrase about being “citizens of the world.” Hierocles makes it something you do in a series of small steps, ring by ring. You do not leap from your own kitchen to the whole of humanity. You widen the circle a little each time, and the widening is the practice.
His influence has been felt in modern times, though often indirectly. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum brought the circles back into discussion when she wrote about global justice and the limits of national loyalty. Peter Singer’s “expanding circle” of moral concern echoes the same shape, even if the lineage is not always direct. Wherever people argue about how far our obligations should reach, someone eventually draws circles on a whiteboard — and Hierocles is quietly standing behind them.
There is a second reason he deserves more attention. Hierocles wrote about ordinary things: marriage, family duties, how to behave toward parents and siblings. The surviving fragments read less like grand metaphysics and more like advice from a thoughtful teacher who knows that most of life happens at home. In an age that tends to think of Stoicism as a toolkit for personal resilience, he is a useful reminder that the school was also about other people. Being steady and unbothered is part of the Stoic ideal, but so is being a good son, a good neighbor, a good citizen.
A small caution is needed. There was also a later Hierocles of Alexandria, a Neoplatonist of the fifth century, and the two are sometimes confused. The one I mean here is the Stoic of the second century, the author of the circles.
What stays with me is how modest the whole thing is. Hierocles never claims to have solved the problem of human selfishness. He offers a picture and a habit, and trusts us to work out the rest. In a world that often feels as though it is shrinking our circles down to the size of a screen or a tribe, there is something steadying in a teacher who looked at the same problem eighteen centuries ago and simply said: begin where you are, and pull the others a little closer.
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Thank you for reading.
If this piece spoke to you, you may like my other Stoic essays — reflections on courage, calm, and the work of becoming ourselves. You will find them in the archive. You can also join me on YouTube.
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For Your Reflection
Understanding Stoicism
⟶ The Real Stoics: A Journey Through 500 Years of a Philosophy That Was Never One Thing
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