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. 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 cen...
