- Lived:
- c. 135–51 BCE · born in Apamea, Syria; made his life and school on the island of Rhodes
- Tradition:
- Stoicism in its most expansive, scientific phase — antiquity's closest thing to a one-man university
- The Big Idea:
- The universe is a single living organism whose parts are connected by sympathy — so every science, from astronomy to psychology to history, is one investigation, and philosophy is its name.
- In their words:
- "You accomplish nothing, pain! However troublesome you are, I will never admit that you are an evil." — spoken through a flare of gout, mid-lecture, as reported by Cicero
- If you remember one thing:
- He watched the Atlantic tides rise and fall with the moon and saw in that one observation his entire philosophy: everything in the cosmos is connected to everything else — and you can go and look.