The Stoics on Luck

This chapter discusses “luck” as a central topic in Stoicism, from its early beginnings in the 3rd century bce with Zeno of Citium, the founder of the school, to Marcus Aurelius, the last major self-proclaimed Stoic in antiquity. According to the Stoics, from the point of view of the perfectly rational person, luck in its conventional sense is thus but an illusion: any event ordinarily ascribed to luck can in the end be explained in terms of reason. The virtuous disposition is all that counts for happiness or the good life: it makes the sage invulnerable against bad luck and in no need of good luck either. Among the Stoic authors in Imperial times, especially for Seneca, but also for Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, luck is clearly a theme that they were interested in. The doctrine of luck is thus surely one of the central doctrines in Stoic thought, which—despite the disappearance of the school itself—has continued to fascinate.