Hierocles

Hierocles was a Stoic philosopher of the second century AD, roughly contemporary with Marcus Aurelius. Almost nothing about his life is recorded. Aulus Gellius mentioned him in the Attic Nights as a contemporary and called him a grave and holy man. That single line is essentially the entire biographical record, yet his name survives through two textual achievements.

The first is his Elements of Ethics, recovered in 1901 from a papyrus dug up at Hermopolis in Egypt. Around 300 lines survive, advancing the strikingly modern claim that all animals — birds, reptiles, mammals — perceive themselves continuously from birth, and that this self-perception is the most basic faculty of any living being. From this biological foundation he rebuilt Stoic ethics, extending the early Stoic concept of oikeiosis (familiarisation, the impulse toward what belongs to oneself) into a full ethical theory. The recovery reshaped understanding of late Stoicism.

The second is a set of fragments preserved by Stobaeus. The most famous describes Stoic cosmopolitanism through concentric circles. Hierocles draws each person as a series of circles: (1) one's own mind, (2) immediate family, (3) extended family, (4) local community, (5) neighbouring towns, (6) one's country, (7) the entire human race. Ethical maturity, he argued, is the work of pulling these circles inward — synairein, drawing distant others into one's nearer concern. This is the ancient root of Peter Singer's modern argument about the expanding moral circle.

Contemporary Stoics Kai Whiting and Leonidas Konstantakos added an eighth circle for the environment in Being Better (2021), reshaping his model for the climate era. The standard text is the Ramelli-Konstan edition (SBL, 2009). Hierocles was no emperor and no former slave with a dramatic story; he was a working teacher whose careful arguments survive almost by accident — and that survival shows how widely Stoicism reached through Roman society.