Hierocles the Stoic

About Hierocles the Stoic

Picture a set of concentric circles drawn around a single point. The innermost ring is the mind. Around it, the body. Around that, immediate family — parents, siblings, spouse, children. Around that, extended kin — uncles, aunts, grandparents, cousins, nephews. Then fellow demesmen and tribesmen, then fellow citizens, then fellow countrymen (in Hierocles's case, fellow Greeks), and finally the outermost ring: the whole human race. This is the image the Stoic philosopher Hierocles drew in the second century CE, and it has become the single most cited visual in the history of Stoic social ethics. The ethical task, Hierocles taught, is to draw the outer rings inward — to treat the stranger as a fellow citizen, the fellow citizen as kin, the kin as one's own body. The circles stand; the distance between them is what the work dissolves.

Hierocles the Stoic flourished during the reign of the emperor Hadrian, roughly 117 to 138 CE. He is a contemporary of Epictetus, a near-contemporary of the young Marcus Aurelius, and a figure about whom we know almost nothing biographically. His city of origin is not recorded. His teachers are not named. His school affiliation beyond "Stoic" is not specified. The sole ancient personal testimony comes from Aulus Gellius, who in the Attic Nights (IX.5.8) describes him with the phrase "Hieroclis Stoici, viri sancti et gravis" — of Hierocles the Stoic, a holy and serious man — and quotes him in the context of a debate about pleasure. Everything else we know about Hierocles comes from the fragments of his own writing that survived through two channels: a partially legible papyrus dug out of the sands of Hermopolis, and a sixth-century Byzantine anthology that preserved long excerpts of his essays on household and civic duty.

The papyrus is the larger prize. P.Berol. 9780, acquired by the Royal Library in Berlin in 1901, contains roughly eleven columns of a treatise titled "Elements of Ethics" (Ēthikē Stoicheiōsis). The editor Hans von Arnim published the first critical edition in 1906, and the text gave nineteenth and twentieth-century readers something they had almost never had before: a substantial chunk of an Imperial-era Stoic treatise in its original Greek prose, not filtered through a later doxographer. The papyrus treats the concept of oikeiōsis — the Stoic doctrine that living creatures, from birth, perceive themselves as congenial to themselves, find their own constitution appropriate and dear, and extend this "appropriation" outward to the world. Hierocles grounds the doctrine in a careful argument from animal self-perception (synaisthēsis): the newborn animal, he observes, knows where its limbs are, knows how to use them, and knows instinctively what helps and what harms it. This self-perception, not pleasure or pain, is the foundation of ethics. From there Hierocles builds outward to human social behavior, arguing that the same instinct that binds an animal to its own body binds humans to other humans.

The Stobaeus excerpts fill out the picture. John of Stobi, compiling his Anthology in the fifth century, preserved long passages from Hierocles under the titles "On Fitting Acts," "How to Behave Toward Parents," "How to Behave Toward the Gods," "How to Behave Toward One's Country," "How to Behave Toward Siblings," and "On Marriage." These are practical essays, worked examples of Stoic ethics applied to the texture of ordinary Greek life under Rome. In one of them, preserved in Stobaeus 4.671.3–673.18 (Wachsmuth-Hense) = 4.27.23, the concentric circles appear in their famous form. The verb for the inward motion is commonly given as *synagein* (συνάγειν, "to draw together" or "contract"), though Hierocles's prose more often describes the action by paraphrase: to transfer those in the outer circles into the inner ones, to contract the distance between rings without collapsing the order.

A persistent source of confusion surrounds this figure that every reader of Hierocles must know about up front. There are two Hierocleses in ancient philosophy, and they are often conflated. Our subject, Hierocles the Stoic, lived in the second century CE and wrote the Elements of Ethics and the ethical fragments in Stobaeus. A different man, Hierocles of Alexandria, lived in the fifth century CE, was a Neoplatonist, and wrote a Commentary on the Golden Verses of Pythagoras and a treatise On Providence. Medieval manuscripts sometimes conflated the two under a single "Hierocles." Karl Praechter's 1901 study established them as distinct authors, and von Arnim's 1906 papyrus edition placed the Stoic's doctrinal and chronological independence on firm textual ground. Nothing in the Elements of Ethics or the Stobaeus excerpts is Pythagorean, Neoplatonist, or fifth-century. If a passage attributed to "Hierocles" talks about the One, the Demiurge, or the Pythagorean decad, it belongs to the Alexandrian, not to our philosopher.

Contributions

Hierocles's first contribution is the Elements of Ethics itself — Ēthikē Stoicheiōsis — preserved partially on P.Berol. 9780. The treatise opens with an argument that self-perception (synaisthēsis) is the foundation of oikeiōsis. The newborn animal, he observes, is aware of its own body from the moment of birth. It knows where its limbs are. It turns toward what nourishes and away from what harms. This awareness precedes any learning and cannot be reduced to pleasure-seeking, because the animal seeks self-preservation even when that requires enduring pain. Hierocles uses this empirical observation to anchor a claim about the structure of the soul: the first object of appropriation is the self. From this foundation the treatise builds outward, arguing that the same instinct of self-perception extends to perception of others as like oneself, and from there to the social bonds that constitute ethical life.

A second and closely related achievement is the specific structure of the self-perception argument. Earlier Stoics, on the evidence of Cicero and Diogenes Laertius, had grounded oikeiōsis in the animal's awareness of its own constitution, but the argument tended toward the abstract. Hierocles makes it experiential. He enumerates the behaviors that demonstrate self-awareness in newborns — the turtle that rights itself, the calf that seeks the udder without being shown, the human infant that closes its eyes against too-strong light — and builds his case from observable fact. The argument runs from empirical animal behavior to a normative claim about what humans owe each other, and the step between them is that the same self-perception that grounds an animal's care for its own body grounds, in the human case, a care that extends outward.

Most famous of all is the image of the concentric circles, preserved in Stobaeus 4.671.3–673.18 (Wachsmuth-Hense) = 4.27.23. Hierocles draws a series of rings around the mind using a consistent seven-ring enumeration: (1) the mind itself, (2) the body, (3) immediate family — parents, siblings, spouse, children — forming one's own household, (4) extended kin, including uncles, aunts, grandparents, cousins, and nephews, (5) demesmen and tribesmen, (6) all fellow citizens, (7) fellow countrymen — in Hierocles's case, fellow Greeks — with the whole human race standing as the outermost envelope around the seventh ring. Hierocles then gives the ethical instruction: the task is to contract the circles, to draw each outer ring toward the center, so that a stranger comes to be treated like a fellow citizen, a fellow citizen like a cousin, a cousin like a sibling. The verb is commonly given as *synagein* (συνάγειν, "to draw together" or "contract"), though Hierocles's own prose more often frames the action by paraphrase — to transfer those in the outer circles into the inner ones, to close the distance between rings without collapsing the order. The image is inclusive, but the structure is graded — the inner circles retain ethical priority even as the outer circles are drawn nearer.

The fourth contribution is the body of practical-ethics fragments preserved in Stobaeus, which apply Stoic doctrine to the concrete decisions of Greek household life under Rome. The essay on marriage (preserved in Stobaeus 4.502.1–503.18 and surrounding passages) argues that marriage completes oikeiōsis by drawing two households into one and extending kinship networks through children. The essay "How to Behave Toward Parents" treats the duty of gratitude and care as an entailment of one's own existence — one exists because one's parents chose to raise a child, and this gift creates obligations that cannot be fully discharged. The essay "How to Behave Toward the Gods" presents the appropriate attitude as neither anxious placation nor indifference but a recognition of the cosmos as orderly and providential. The essay on siblings emphasizes the rarity and value of the sibling relationship as the closest natural peer one can have. These essays are worked examples of Stoic ethics at the scale of lived life rather than abstract theory.

A fifth contribution is methodological. The Elements of Ethics shows a Stoic philosopher arguing from empirical observation to ethical norm — from what animals in fact do, to what humans ought to do, with the Stoic theory of nature mediating the inference. This pattern of argument, grounding the oughts of ethics in the is of natural constitution, is characteristic of Stoicism, but Hierocles executes it with unusual clarity. The treatise is a case study in how Stoic naturalism functions in practice as an argumentative strategy, not just as a doctrinal slogan.

Works

Elements of Ethics (Ēthikē Stoicheiōsis). The principal surviving work, preserved partially on the Berlin papyrus P.Berol. 9780. Eleven columns of Greek prose survive, treating the foundations of Stoic ethics through the doctrine of oikeiōsis (appropriation) grounded in animal self-perception (synaisthēsis). The treatise argues from observable behavior of newborn animals and humans to a theory of the social instinct and its ethical extensions. Editio princeps by Hans von Arnim in 1906 (Berliner Klassikertexte, Heft 4); revised critical edition by Guido Bastianini and Anthony Long in the Corpus dei Papiri Filosofici Greci e Latini (CPF I.1.2, pp. 268–362, 1992); English critical edition by Ilaria Ramelli and David Konstan (SBL Press / Brill, 2009).

Ethical fragments preserved in Stobaeus. Long excerpts from Hierocles's practical-ethics essays are preserved in the Anthology of John of Stobi, chiefly in books 3 and 4. The preserved essays include On Fitting Acts (Kathēkonta), How to Behave Toward the Gods, How to Behave Toward One's Country, How to Behave Toward Parents, How to Behave Toward Siblings, and On Marriage (with material on household management and the proper treatment of kin, neighbors, and strangers). The concentric-circles passage appears in Stobaeus 4.671.3–673.18 (Wachsmuth-Hense) = 4.27.23. Total extant material runs to roughly thirty pages in the Ramelli-Konstan English critical edition, sitting alongside the papyrus text.

Controversies

The most persistent controversy around Hierocles is not about his thought but about his identity. Two philosophers in the ancient Greek philosophical tradition were named Hierocles. Our subject, Hierocles the Stoic, flourished in the second century CE and wrote the Elements of Ethics and the ethical fragments preserved in Stobaeus. The other, Hierocles of Alexandria, lived in the fifth century CE, was a Neoplatonist associated with the Alexandrian school, and wrote a Commentary on the Golden Verses of Pythagoras and a treatise On Providence (the latter summarized by Photius). Medieval manuscript tradition sometimes conflated the two under a single "Hierocles," and early modern editions occasionally attributed works of one to the other. Karl Praechter's 1901 study established them as distinct authors, and von Arnim's 1906 papyrus edition, with its unmistakably second-century Stoic doctrine, reinforced that separation on textual grounds. Modern scholarship treats the two as entirely distinct authors, but the confusion persists in non-specialist sources and in older reference works.

A second live issue concerns the papyrus itself. P.Berol. 9780 is partially legible. Eleven columns survive, the text is damaged in places, and significant editorial reconstruction was needed to produce a readable treatise. Von Arnim's 1906 edition made restorations that Bastianini and Long, in their 1992 CPF edition, revised in numerous places based on improved paleographic techniques and digital imaging. The scholarly text of the Elements of Ethics available today is therefore a reconstruction with well-marked conjectures, and the treatise was certainly longer than the eleven surviving columns — estimates of the original length vary, but the papyrus preserves probably the opening section of a much larger work.

A third controversy is whether the various Stobaeus excerpts attributed to "Hierocles" are all the work of the same author. Stobaeus cites "Hierocles" in multiple contexts, and some of the excerpted passages differ in tone and emphasis from the Elements of Ethics. Ilaria Ramelli in the 2009 critical edition argues for unified authorship, based on thematic continuity, stylistic markers, and doctrinal consistency across the excerpts. The argument is accepted by most scholars, but a minority position holds that Stobaeus may have conflated material from more than one Stoic writer, and certainty is not available.

The fourth controversy concerns dating. Gellius's testimony in the Attic Nights (written in the later second century CE, probably the 170s) gives a terminus ante quem: Hierocles was known and cited by that date. Internal stylistic and doctrinal features suggest he wrote during the Hadrianic or early Antonine period, placing his floruit around 117–138 CE or slightly later. This dating is a scholarly consensus, but it is not certain. Some possibilities extend his activity into the reign of Antoninus Pius, and there is no hard evidence that excludes an earlier date under Trajan. The conventional dating should be treated as probable rather than established.

A fifth question concerns the originality of the concentric-circles image. The idea that social obligations radiate outward from the self in graded rings is consistent with earlier Stoic doctrine on oikeiōsis, and it is possible that the image itself — or some version of it — goes back to Chrysippus or to Antipater of Tarsus. But no earlier surviving text contains the image in the specific visual form Hierocles gives it. Most scholars credit Hierocles with the specific formulation even if the underlying doctrine is older.

Finally, a sixth matter — one of contemporary reception — is the tendency to read Hierocles as a clean cosmopolitan, as if the concentric circles were an argument for equal moral treatment of all humans, with kinship and citizenship relegated to sentimental attachments. The text does not support this reading. Hierocles describes a structure in which obligations are graded by proximity and in which the inner rings retain ethical priority even as the outer rings are drawn nearer. He is writing for a Greek audience under Rome, and his seventh ring is explicitly "fellow Greeks" before it reaches all humans. Contemporary appropriations in cosmopolitan ethics sometimes flatten this structure. The move to contract the circles is a discipline, not a dissolution of their order.

Notable Quotes

"The first and most essential lesson for a child, once he begins to comprehend, is the knowledge of the gods." — Fragment on how to behave toward the gods, preserved in Stobaeus (Ramelli-Konstan 2009, fr. on gods)

"Each one of us is, as it were, entirely encompassed by many circles, some smaller, others larger, the latter enclosing the former on the basis of their different and unequal dispositions relative to each other." — Elements on Social Ethics, preserved in Stobaeus 4.671.3–673.18 (Wachsmuth-Hense) = 4.27.23 (Ramelli-Konstan 2009, pp. 91–93)

"The right thing to do is to draw the circles together somehow toward the center, constantly making every effort to transfer those from the enclosing circles into the enclosed ones." — Stobaeus 4.671.3–673.18 (Wachsmuth-Hense) = 4.27.23 (Ramelli-Konstan 2009, p. 93)

"The first thing of which any animal is conscious is its own constitution." — Elements of Ethics, P.Berol. 9780, opening of the treatise (Ramelli-Konstan 2009, p. 3)

"He who has intended to marry must care for both his country and the welfare of his house, for through his children his house is filled out, which is a part of the city." — Fragment on marriage, preserved in Stobaeus (Ramelli-Konstan 2009, on marriage)

"Hieroclis Stoici, viri sancti et gravis" — "Of Hierocles the Stoic, a holy and serious man." Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights IX.5.8.

Legacy

Hierocles's legacy runs through a strange arc: near-total obscurity in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, followed by rediscovery in the early twentieth century, followed by a steady rise in philosophical and ethical prominence that continues into the present.

In the medieval period, the Stoic Hierocles was often conflated with Hierocles of Alexandria, the fifth-century Neoplatonist who wrote the Commentary on the Golden Verses of Pythagoras. Byzantine and Latin manuscript traditions sometimes treated the two as a single author, and the Renaissance editions of the Golden Verses commentary circulated under the name "Hierocles" without distinguishing the figures. The Stoic's actual works were either unknown or known only through the Stobaeus excerpts, which were not widely studied as a coherent body of thought.

The turning point came in 1901, in two parallel events. Karl Praechter published his study establishing the two Hierocleses as distinct authors. In the same year, the Berlin papyrus P.Berol. 9780 was acquired by the Royal Library in Berlin from Egypt. Hans von Arnim, who was then working on the Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, published the editio princeps of the Elements of Ethics in 1906. The SVF itself, published between 1903 and 1924, does not include Hierocles — von Arnim's reconstruction of the papyrus postdated the relevant volumes — which means that scholars relying solely on the SVF for Stoic source material miss him entirely.

The twentieth-century recovery was gradual. S.G. Pembroke's 1971 essay "Oikeiōsis" in Problems in Stoicism brought the doctrine of oikeiōsis into Anglophone philosophical discussion, and Hierocles's place in the doctrine's transmission became better known through that work and its successors. Anthony Long's editorial work, culminating in the 1992 Bastianini-Long critical edition in the CPF, established the textual foundation for modern scholarship. Ilaria Ramelli and David Konstan's 2009 edition made the full corpus available in English for the first time, and since then Hierocles has become a standard reference point in studies of Stoic social ethics.

The concentric circles image has had an independent and much broader career. Peter Singer's 1981 book The Expanding Circle explicitly traces the idea of progressive moral inclusion to the Stoic tradition, and Hierocles is one of his key ancient sources. Martha Nussbaum's work on Stoic cosmopolitanism, particularly in For Love of Country and her later essays on global ethics, engages Hierocles extensively as a central ancient authority. Pierre Hadot's work on philosophy as a way of life cites Hierocles among the Imperial-era Stoics whose texts document philosophy as lived practice. The modern Stoic-revival community — writers like Massimo Pigliucci and Donald Robertson — has adopted the concentric circles as one of the signature images of applied Stoicism, alongside Epictetus's dichotomy of control and Marcus's view from above.

Hierocles's influence on contemporary moral psychology runs through the "moral circle expansion" literature. Researchers working in the tradition established by Singer — Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt, Steve Crimston, and others — have used the concentric-circles framework as an empirical tool for measuring how individuals extend moral consideration across kin, community, strangers, and non-human entities. The image has become one of the most cited visualizations in the field, appearing in textbooks, TED talks, and applied ethics seminars.

Significance

Hierocles holds a distinctive place in the history of Stoicism for one structural reason: most Imperial-era Stoic material reaches modern readers through intermediaries. Epictetus was recorded by his student Arrian. Marcus Aurelius wrote a private journal that his contemporaries did not preserve as a finished work. Seneca's letters and dialogues survive, but Seneca is in Latin and represents Stoicism adapted for a Roman senatorial audience. Among the Greek Stoics of the Imperial period, Hierocles is one of only a handful whose original prose — in Greek, under his own name, in the form he wrote it — survives in any substantial quantity. That survival is owed to a single papyrus roll found near Hermopolis in Egypt and a Byzantine anthologist's taste for domestic ethics.

His doctrinal importance centers on oikeiōsis, the Stoic theory of how the social bond arises from a natural self-appropriation that extends outward. Oikeiōsis is not a minor doctrine. It is how Stoicism answers the central question of social ethics: why should I care about anyone other than myself? The Epicurean answer is contractual: we cooperate because cooperation pays. The Stoic answer is developmental: the same instinct by which I recognize my own body as belonging to me extends, by nature's design, to the recognition of other bodies, other minds, other communities as belonging to me in successively weaker but continuous forms. Hierocles gives this doctrine its clearest surviving exposition. The Elements of Ethics begins with infants and animals and argues from observable behavior — the newborn's instinct for its own limbs, the newborn animal's turning from what harms it — up to the adult's ethical duties to parents, neighbors, and strangers. The argument starts with what newborns do and ends with what humans owe each other, and the step between the two is the doctrine of extending self-perception outward.

The concentric-circles image is the second pillar of his importance. The passage preserved by Stobaeus at 4.671.3–673.18 (Wachsmuth-Hense) = 4.27.23 is probably the most anthologized single passage of Stoic social ethics after Epictetus's "some things are up to us and some are not." Hierocles names the rings in order — (1) mind, (2) body, (3) immediate family (parents, siblings, spouse, children), (4) extended kin (uncles, aunts, grandparents, cousins, nephews), (5) demesmen and tribesmen, (6) fellow citizens, (7) fellow countrymen (in Hierocles's case, fellow Greeks), with the whole human race as the outermost envelope — and prescribes that the ethical task is to contract the rings, to treat the outer like the inner. The image is visually precise enough to carry two millennia of application. Peter Singer's expanding-circle argument in modern ethics, Martha Nussbaum's Stoic cosmopolitanism, the moral-circle-expansion literature in contemporary moral psychology — all of these trace their imagery back to this passage.

His third contribution is testimony to living Stoicism under Hadrian. The Antonine period has left extensive evidence of Stoic activity — Epictetus's Discourses, Marcus's future reign, Musonius Rufus in the previous generation — but very little in the way of systematic treatises. Hierocles fills the gap. The Elements of Ethics is not a diatribe or a collection of sayings. It is a carefully structured, sequentially argued philosophical treatise in the technical register of Stoic doctrine. His Stobaeus essays, meanwhile, show Stoicism being applied to the practical decisions of household life — whether to marry, how to treat siblings, what one owes one's country. Together these texts present Stoicism as it was practiced in daily life by Greek-educated readers in the second century, and that picture does not exist anywhere else in comparable detail.

The fourth reason he matters is that his synthesis of self-perception, congeniality, and expanding obligation makes visible the mechanism by which Stoic ethics avoids both egoism and abstract universalism. Obligation is not contractual and not uniform. It flows from a natural fact (self-appropriation) through recognizable channels (family, community, polis, humanity) and asks the agent to work against the gradient of distance. This is neither the Kantian impartial duty nor the particularist ethic of kin-privilege. It is something structurally distinct, and Hierocles is where it is most clearly laid out. Modern readers interested in the Stoic alternative to both duty-based and care-based ethics find their clearest ancient source here.

Connections

Hierocles's most direct ancient connection is Aulus Gellius's testimony in the Attic Nights (IX.5.8), where Gellius refers to him as "Hieroclis Stoici, viri sancti et gravis" — Hierocles the Stoic, a holy and serious man — and cites him on the subject of pleasure in a context that places him alongside other Imperial-era Stoics. Gellius was writing in the later second century CE (probably the 170s), which gives a rough terminus ante quem for Hierocles's activity. No other ancient source names him personally in anecdote form, which is unusual for a philosopher of his evident stature and contributes to the near-total biographical silence around him.

His connection to Marcus Aurelius and to the wider Roman Stoic court is inferential rather than attested. Marcus never names Hierocles in the Meditations. The two were probably active in overlapping decades, but there is no evidence of direct contact or influence in either direction. Modern claims that Hierocles taught Marcus or was part of his Stoic circle exceed the evidence. What can be said is that Hierocles belongs to the same living tradition — a Greek-speaking Stoicism practiced under Roman rule — and that his doctrinal commitments overlap substantially with Marcus's.

His upstream connections to earlier oikeiōsis theorists are doctrinally clear and historically inferred. The concept of oikeiōsis is attributed to the early Stoa, and Chrysippus is credited with its systematic development. Cicero's On Ends (De Finibus) Book III, written in 45 BCE, preserves what is probably the most detailed earlier account of the doctrine. Hierocles's version in the Elements of Ethics extends and refines the Ciceronian account, particularly in its emphasis on self-perception as the psychological foundation for appropriation. Seneca's Epistle 121, on the natural constitution of animals and children, treats the same territory and is often read alongside Hierocles. Epictetus's scattered remarks on oikeiōsis in the Discourses are thematically parallel but much less systematic.

The transmission of Hierocles's work runs through two channels. The first is the Berlin papyrus, P.Berol. 9780, which preserves eleven columns of the Elements of Ethics and which came to the Royal Library in Berlin in 1901 from the Egyptian town of Hermopolis. The papyrus dates paleographically to the late second or early third century CE, which means it was copied not long after Hierocles wrote. Hans von Arnim published the editio princeps in 1906. The second channel is the Anthology of John of Stobi (Stobaeus), compiled in the fifth century, which preserves long excerpts from Hierocles's essays. These excerpts appear chiefly in books 3 and 4 of the Anthology, under headings such as "On Fitting Acts (Kathēkonta)," "How to Behave Toward Parents," "How to Behave Toward the Gods," "How to Behave Toward One's Country," "How to Behave Toward Siblings," and "On Marriage."

Modern critical reception runs through a short but dense bibliography. Karl Praechter's 1901 study established the Stoic Hierocles and the Alexandrian Neoplatonist as distinct authors. Von Arnim's 1906 edition of the papyrus is the textual foundation. Guido Bastianini and Anthony Long published a revised critical edition in 1992 as part of the Corpus dei Papiri Filosofici Greci e Latini, volume I.1.2. Ilaria Ramelli and David Konstan's Hierocles the Stoic: Elements of Ethics, Fragments, and Excerpts (SBL Press / Brill, 2009) is the standard English critical edition, presenting the Greek text, English translation, and commentary for both the papyrus and the Stobaeus excerpts in a single volume. S.G. Pembroke's 1971 essay "Oikeiōsis" in Problems in Stoicism is the landmark English-language treatment of the underlying doctrine. Gretchen Reydams-Schils's The Roman Stoics: Self, Responsibility, and Affection (University of Chicago Press, 2005) places Hierocles in the social and emotional context of Imperial Stoicism.

Further Reading