E
Epictetus — a freed slave with a school in Nicopolis.
He taught that the man who owned his body never owned anything that mattered, and charged his students with proving it in ordinary life rather than in argument.
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The shared center — held across the tradition
Some things are up to us; most are not.
Judgement, impulse, desire and refusal are ours. Body, property, reputation and office are not, and treating them as if they were is the whole of what goes wrong.
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Held by most — broad, but not universal
The cosmos is a single rational animal, and you are a part of it.
Providence is not a plan made for you; it is the fact that the whole is ordered. Living well means agreeing with how it is already going.
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Contested within — affirmed by some schools, refused by others
Whether you can keep the ethics after dropping the physics.
Modern practitioners mostly take the exercises without the providential cosmos. Traditional Stoics answer that "live according to nature" is empty if nature is not rational, and the argument runs live in the same conference hall.
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Cosmos & Afterlife
how reality is built, and what follows deathThe nature of reality
One living cosmos, ordered throughout by reason, and nothing outside it
After death
The soul disperses; some Stoics allowed it survives until the next conflagration. Marcus Aurelius keeps writing "gods or atoms" and says it changes nothing.