Hierocles the Stoic Explained
Updated: Oct 24
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Hierocles the Stoic Explained
Whether you're exploring the lesser-known voices of Stoicism, you've come across the image of humanity arranged in expanding circles of concern and want to know who drew it, or simply curious how philosophers two thousand years ago explained why we care about other people at all, this guide walks through who Hierocles actually was and what he taught, in plain terms. Read it straight through or jump to the section you need. There's no right or wrong way to take it in.
Hierocles in a Nutshell
Hierocles was a Stoic philosopher who lived and taught in the Roman Empire during the second century AD, and he is one of philosophy's quiet figures: no biography survives, no complete book, only fragments and the admiration of later writers who thought him worth copying. Yet those fragments contain one of the most memorable images in all of ancient ethics, a picture of every human life standing at the center of concentric circles of concern, radiating outward from the self through family and neighbors to the whole human race.
His steady question was where our care for other people actually comes from and how far it is meant to reach.
The Life of Hierocles
Almost nothing is known about the man, and it is worth being honest about how thin the record is. No ancient source gives his birthplace, his teachers, or the story of his career. The one personal glimpse comes from Aulus Gellius, a Roman writer of the second century, who quotes him approvingly and describes him as a grave and holy man. From the dates of those who mention him, scholars place his teaching life around 150 AD, in the same broad generation as Epictetus's students and the young Marcus Aurelius, though no surviving source connects them.
His surviving work includes parts of a treatise called Elements of Ethics, a foundations-first account of how human sociability develops, alongside practical writings on duties: how to act toward the gods, one's country, parents, siblings, and spouse.
Oikeiosis: Where Concern Begins
Before the circles can make sense, one concept has to be in place, because it is the engine underneath them. The Stoics called it oikeiosis, a word with no tidy English equivalent, usually rendered as "appropriation" or "familiarization": the process by which a creature comes to regard something as its own and therefore as its concern.
Hierocles argued that this process starts at birth. A newborn animal's very first attachment is to itself; from its first moments it perceives its own body and constitution and acts to preserve them. He backed the claim with patient observation. Animals do not need to learn by trial which parts of themselves are weapons and which are vulnerable: bulls present their horns when threatened, and each creature guards its weak points, which shows a built-in awareness of itself. From that first self-attachment, concern extends outward along natural lines. Parents come to regard their children as, in a sense, parts of themselves, and the circle of what counts as "one's own" keeps widening with reason and maturity. The radical implication is that other-concern and self-concern are not opposites fighting for territory. They are the same instinct at different distances.
The Circles of Concern
Here is the image that made Hierocles permanent. Each of us, he says, stands enclosed in a set of concentric circles, like rings around a bullseye:
The first and tightest circle holds a person's own mind and body.
The second holds parents, siblings, spouse, and children.
The third holds the wider family: grandparents, uncles and aunts, cousins.
Beyond that come more distant relatives, then neighbors, then fellow members of one's local community.
Further out still are fellow citizens, then people of neighboring towns, then one's whole nation or people.
The outermost and largest circle embraces the entire human race.
The picture alone would be a useful map of ordinary affection, which naturally runs warmest at the center and cools with distance. But Hierocles's actual teaching is an instruction, not a description: the task of a person of good character is to contract the circles, to keep pulling the outer rings toward the center. Treat cousins with something closer to the warmth owed siblings; treat strangers with something closer to the warmth owed fellow citizens. He even made it verbal, advising that we call our cousins brothers and our uncles and aunts fathers and mothers, because names carry affection with them and the habit of speech trains the habit of heart.
This is the Stoic idea of cosmopolitanism, citizenship of the world, given a practical mechanism. Hierocles does not ask anyone to love all humanity by sheer willpower, which tends to produce warm words and cold conduct. He starts from the love people already have, the fierce center-ring kind, and asks them to extend its reach one ring at a time. Distance never becomes an excuse, because every human being stands somewhere on the map, inside the outermost circle, never off it.
On Appropriate Acts: The Circles in Daily Life
The Stobaeus fragments show what the map looked like in practice, as a set of duties Hierocles called appropriate acts, each matched to a relationship. Toward the gods, he counsels right belief before ritual: the divine is good and unchangeable, sends no evil, and is honored best by a sane picture of it. Toward one's country he is strikingly strong, ranking it with, even above, one's parents, since the community is the larger body of which each household is a limb. Parents themselves he describes as something like gods on earth, deserving honor second only to heaven, and care in their old age down to practical, unglamorous detail.
His fragment on siblings supplies one of his best images: a brother is like a hand given to help another hand, limbs of one body meant for mutual aid, so that a person who quarrels with a brother is as foolish as a body fighting itself. On marriage he was, by the standards of his era, notably warm: he calls the married household the complete and most beautiful one, and describes husband and wife as full partners who share everything, work, property, children, and life itself, each making the other's burdens lighter. Some of what he says about civic and household roles belongs to a Roman world long gone, and an honest reading keeps that in view, but the through-line is consistent with his circles: every relationship is a ring, and each ring carries its own form of care.
How a Forgotten Stoic Resurfaced
Hierocles's afterlife is a small miracle of luck. For centuries he existed only as scattered quotations, easily confused with other men named Hierocles, including a later Neoplatonist philosopher and a Roman governor who persecuted Christians.
Then the Egyptian papyrus surfaced and was published early in the twentieth century, giving the Stoic his own book back after nearly two thousand years underground, and scholarship could finally join his theory of oikeiosis to the duty fragments preserved in the anthology of Stobaeus as one coherent thinker.
The circles themselves never really left. The image of an expanding ring of moral concern, growing from self to family to nation to humanity, reappears throughout modern moral philosophy and psychology, where ethicists still speak of "the expanding circle" when they ask how far our obligations reach. Most people who use the picture have never heard the name of the quiet second-century teacher who drew it first. This page, in its small way, puts the name back in the center ring.
Want to Learn More About Hierocles?
Everything IFS Academy offers a Free Hierocles Course, written specifically for everyday people, that teaches everything on this page in full depth, one lesson at a time.
Disclaimer: Everything IFS Academy is an independent educational platform and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the IFS Institute or any Stoic school, classical scholar, university, or philosophical organization. This guide is offered for educational and self-reflection purposes only. It does not constitute therapy, mental health treatment, or professional advice. Only a qualified professional who knows your situation can diagnose, treat, or advise you.
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