August 30, 2026

The Widest Circle

The outermost and largest circle, which encompasses all the rest, is that of the whole human race.

Little survives about Hierocles beyond his role as a Stoic teacher in the second century CE, known mainly through fragments preserved by the anthologist Stobaeus. In this passage he pictures every person's relationships as a series of circles radiating outward from the self, starting with parents and siblings, then kin, then neighbors and countrymen, until the widest circle takes in the entire human race. That image is one of the clearest statements of Sympatheia: the Stoic conviction that all people, however distant, share one nature and belong to one city, bound to treat each other as parts of a single body. Stoics practiced this by consciously widening their circle of concern each day, extending the same care given to family toward strangers and even foreigners. The aim was never to erase the closer circles but to keep pulling the outer ones inward, so fewer people stood outside one's sense of duty.

A principle of Stoicism: Sympatheia →